Sam Harris & Dan Harris

00:03three two one and we're live what's up all right how are you man what's going on great Sam Harris ladies and gentlemen got Harris and Harris Dan and Sam no relation obviously no relation brother from another mother kind of thing a sweet actually no we we work this out we are deeply unrelated because your your Harris is the Jewish side of your family right no 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 uh yes your har myir is is uh the goyam side of the family is that funny how many people's names were changed at Ellis Island yeah like where they're like nah not American enough yeah meanwhile schnortz nagger made it right proudly yeah odd so uh anyway thanks for coming you guys thanks for having us this is this a weird time you

00:57know I've been extra weirded out over the last couple months and I just got back from Mexico I was on vacation I didn't do for a week and in not doing anything for a week I really got a chance to sit down and 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 cuz Sam has been telling me about it and I looked into it and it's please explain like what happened to you like where you were and what happened to you okay so it was uh you're talking about the panic attack yeah so 2004 I was on a little show that we do at ABC News called Good Morning America that's a big show it's a big show that's not a little show no it's not a little show uh and I was I was doing the job that I I was filling in as the newsreader that's the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads the

01:47headlines um and uh I just freaked out I just lost it I howow so I was a couple seconds into it and I I started to get really scared and it just uh if you've ever had a p have you ever had a panic attack so it's like anxiety on steroids so you start to worry but then your fighter flight instincts kick in so um your lungs seize up your palm start sweating your mouth dries up your heart is racing your mind is racing you just 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 just I lost the capacity to speak and I had to kind of squeak out uh something about you know back to you back to the main anchors wow yeah it sucked uncontrollably now what what caused it uh do you know I do yeah I definitely know um some dumb behavior in my personal life is what caused it I I had spent a

02:50lot of time as a war reporter at ABC News um I was in Afghanistan Pakistan Israel the West Bank Gaza six six trips to Iraq and I had come home from a long run I I covered uh kind of the pre-invasion invasion and then uh Insurgency in one kind of six-month run and I came home after that and I 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 lowgrade fever all the time and then I did something really smart which is I started to self-medicate with uh cocaine and ecstasy uh uh 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 where they're popping ludes that that wasn't me I was and I wasn't getting high on the air or anything like that but you know I was getting I was

03:43partying in my spare time because it made me feel better uh 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 try to figure out what what 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 uh communicated the following sentiment um okay mystery solved and he just pointed out that you know you raise the level of adrenaline in your brain artificially uh you you make it much more likely to have a panic attack and I at at at Baseline am a jittery little dude so it doesn't doesn't take much to put me in that zone I you just offered me coffee and I said no because that even that will freak me out well it's weird that ecstasy and cocaine was the combination because ecstasy is something

04:33that 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 I don't actually think ecstasy was the problem the coke I think it was the coke yeah that makes sense yeah so 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 would I was off I covered the 2004 presidential campaign and I didn't have a lot of time to be you know snorting coke so um but when I was home and around my friends you know on a good on a busy week you know two three times a week wow that's a lot yeah that'll do you mhm there's uh there's a a comeback right now that uh cocaine is experiencing did it ever go away I don't know never done it was there some sort of cocaine recession that it had to bounce back from I believe there was really this is what

05:22this I'm to talking totally ignorantly I've been out of the game for a long time so yeah yeah I'm I'm kind of boring now uh uh 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 uh hooked on coke and I watched while we were in high school he started selling it and he withered away lost like 30 PBS or something like that and just him and his girlfriend just hide out in the Attic they they live 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 that drug like whatever that Drug's doing like these people it's like it was almost like knowing someone who had gotten bitten by a vampire and become something different was very strange so

06:08my experien is seeing people do that led me to never do it yeah I mean it certainly was not like that for me but you know I I could see it over the horizon you can it's an incredibly addictive drug um so I think you made the right call yeah it seems a little it's got a little too much gravity attached to it yeah I mean you you you can get hooked and will bring you down there are other drugs you can do I'm not recommending drugs but the way my friend Sam my my half brother Sam over there does let me get to it yeah uh there are other D drugs you can do that have vastly lower addictive uh uh character uh charact what's the word I'm looking for here s characteristics yes thank you um so how did you recover I so I wasn't actually doing it that long I actually never done drugs until my early 30s and when I came home from the war zones and um and that's what it started it yeah you just were

07:06freaked out by seeing too much no you know it's actually it wasn't PTSD uh it was I was addicted to the adrenaline I was having I was was not that I was traumatized was that I was enjoying it too much and I would come home and the world would seem gray and boring uh wow yes that was that was the problem did you watch HT Locker I'm sure you did right yeah did you did that resonate with you absolutely it's been it's been a while since I watched it but AB 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 a an unlisted uh man or woman so I don't want to compare my experience to to The Hurt Locker I'm a I'm Observer on the side and I and and I don't even want to compare my experience to more experiened war correspondents out there I'm thinking of like guys like Richard Engel

07:56on NBC Sebastian J absolutely I just actually sat down with with him the other day for he's got a new documentary coming out um 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 missed that was not true for some of my friends um but you so I I had a real sense of the stakes but it is exciting uh it's also thrilling on a on on a idealistic level I mean I believe and the importance of bearing witness to the what 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 uh 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

08:49Woodruff 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 uh trip to Iraq and he got literally got his head nearly blown off when he was in the back when he was on the top of an Iraqi tank uh almost died is an absolute Miracle he alive there are pictures of him on the internet with basically half a head um traumatic brain injury was brought back to life is is to this day a walking Miracle uh that he's alive uh and and after he recovered he then introduced me to the woman I married uh so he's a close friend and I I uh I saw cases like that lost friends both Iraqi friends and journalist friends um my the woman I was dating at the time when I when I was spending a lot of time in Iraq she got hit by a tank shell um she was in in the the hotel Palestine where all the journalists were staying she

09:48was on a balcony and one of her colleagues was on the balcony below her he got a direct hit and died uh he she carried him to the hospital and she basically uh 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 what is it like trying to relay that to people how difficult is it trying to because I think so many people have this almost um dramatic television movie SL view of of War where they don't they don't ever experience it like I I would imagine probably 99% of the people that are in this country will never experience it no and that's good um no it's it's I don't know that you can uh ex uh describe it uh in a way that will really give the full picture of its uh absurdities and

10:53and Horrors and um long stretches of boredom punctuated by Terror um and also this other piece which is taboo to talk about which is the pleasure and excitement that people get fighting Wars I mean this is Sebastian younger's thesis as well I mean just the camaraderie is the most intense camaraderie they ever experienced and so that something they come back to civilian life and are missing it and and it's part of what's so difficult about coming back and that's why you see them a lot of uh risk-taking Behavior among uh vets um because you're looking for another way to get that hit of adrenaline for sure there was a an there's a book and I'm I'm blanking on the name was 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

11:50these 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 uh consequences and so I wouldn't recommend it but I see why people do this so how did you how did you bounce back oh uh 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 it had caused the panic attack uh I agreed he didn't think I needed to go to rehab because it was the it was pretty shortlived it was I was in my early 30s when I started and I'm still in my early 30s when I had the panic attack and so it's only a couple years he said just I want you to come see me once or twice a

12:47week forever uh so forever convient he said basically indefinitely um so I still see him but not not yeah it's a good business model but not that I mean it's been well north of uh it's been about 13 years so I don't see him that often now but for a long time I saw him intensively uh so that you know it wasn't easy it's not easy um 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 right um but it's a it sucks to stop a habit that is giving you pleasure on you know on pretty in pretty um 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 your issues with it but it seems like there's a tremendous amount

13:45of people today that are stimulating themselves um Aderall is a big one I mean it's just uh I know i' I've found out recently like four or five people that I didn't know that were on Aderall it seems like you just sort of start asking 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 half of them are on Aderall like it's it's it's very weird and Aderall is a form of amphetamine and it seems like um it just it's mindboggling how many people are doing this stuff we're dosing ourselves with all sorts of things so it can be stimulate stimulants but it also can be uh benzo you know cousins of Valium um it can be shopping gambling uh it can be uh uh whatever it's a Twitter um and I I think it's just speaking we have a neuroscientist in the room so I'll let him say more

14:44about this and also a guy who's more um experienced practitioner of Buddhism than I am but 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 um 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 been I've done stories about parents who steal it from the kids also just caffeine I mean I'm you know I'm reaching for the coffee here yeah uh having slept poorly last night um but that is and that's just as much of a drug it's just not as it's not as

15:31potent a drug as taking methampetamine or or or Aderall or anything else that's a drug drug but um I mean there's a whole this this had civilizational consequences when 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 used for for hundreds of years people were just drinking ale and wine in the morning uh before before coffee and tea became huge in in in Europe and and colonialism the the engine of colonialism to a significant degree was coffee tea sugar um and you know that things our Behavior changed people that were drinking ale and wine weren't wasn't a big part of it the reason why they drank it with food is because water would get stagnant Yeah well yeah there there's the issue with clean water too yeah yeah but when you just imagine the consequences of you and

16:28and everyone you know getting up in the morning and just starting with beer or wine I know people like that that's that's that's a long day or a very short one yeah so um but yeah it's I mean but the fundamental 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 neuro chemistry of your brain I mean these these molecules either 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 of neurotransmitters or or or neuromodulators so it's not your a drug is never getting your brain to do something your brain is incapable of doing right so and that's the most

17:27extreme thing like DMT or or LSD I the brain the brain is still doing all of that and so it stands to reason that there are potentially other ways of getting the brain to do that whether it's meditation or whether it's you know computer interface ultimately to the brain I people who are interested in in brain computer interface that not only allows a quadriplegic to move a robotic arm or gets a a um a Parkinson's patient to be able to move but you know the to the ultimate degree I mean actually augmenting human function that's uh or opening Landscapes of Mind psychedelic and otherwise that have been unexplored I mean all all of that is um in principle possible because again we're just talking about electrochemical phenomenon happening in our heads which are being which is just there to be modulated now when you were talking about being depressed and Sam you're

18:31talking about reuptake Inhibitors um I want to know what are your what are your thoughts on the massive amount of people that are on ssris now I mean I there's another thing that I know how many people I know that have either are on or have been on some sort of anti-depressants and it seems I mean to the lame to me someone who's never taken them or doesn't have personal experience with it massively overprescribed yeah well I I would anything I say is with a caveat that this is I I'm not a neurologist I don't have no I have zero clinical experience and um this is certainly not my area I'm not up on the the recent literature on the the efficacy of of anti-depressants but there's clearly it's it's like anything there's a spectrum there are people who have been unambiguously helped by anti-depressants and there are people who are on them who shouldn't be on them

19:28you know and there people who are on them who want to get off them and find it surprisingly difficult to get off them and and it's just it's these are blunt instruments by by definition because it's anything that's modulating serotonin in this case is effective everywhere serotonin is effective and it's just it's it's there's no magical property of of uh finding the neurom modulor where where only the symptoms you want to relieve are affected because these these these chemicals do uh a lot of things in a lot of places I me even in your gut right so it's it's not so that hence the side effects you get with almost any medication um and we would have to get it would be in many respects it's a matter of luck to find a pharmacological Target that actually does just what you want it to do because which is to say that those receptors are not elsewhere that are going to produce side effects

20:32for you so um that that's why a different kind of uh intervention something like ultimately some some electrical or magnetic or or um machine-based intervention um could be more targeted because then you're you're not just putting something in the bloodstream that spreads Everywhere by by Machine based you mean something like electrodes that they put on the mind to 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 you put something actually inside your head right so whether that's neurosurgery or um putting something into the bloodstream that somehow gets inside your head what you know an injectable um so for inance Elon Musk just mentioned something called which he called neural

21:35lace 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's got a uh he announced investment in a company called neuro neurolink which is looking on looking at some Advanced brain computer interface uh based on the idea that you could get a with the with these new micro electrodes you can get an injectable mesh like a like a wire mesh that just integrates with the the brain um or very likely uh just the cortex uh and I believe this work has already been done in mice um and the mice are you know have survived and are living with with this mesh in their in their brains and again this is not research I'm close to at all I and he just announced this a couple of weeks ago but um in principle you're talking about having uh whether it's a mesh or whether it's it's Magneto El electric particles

22:36I mean some 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 you just both you know putting your thoughts into the World by you know influencing effectors um robotic arms or cursors on screens or whatever it is uh and also influencing your mind based on whatever inputs you want to put in there from the world whether that's until the Russians hack you and yeah exactly well that op it opens all of those concerns you always the Russians it's always the Russians Chinese are there's gambling I think the Chinese people are responsible for a lot of the propaganda that makes us think about the Russians it's like push it off on them push it off on them um I'm prepared to blame the Russians for a lot at this point blame them all um what a slippery slope though for

23:31humans becoming cyborgs I mean we're we're already like some weird form of symbiot right now carrying our cell phones like it's a baby you know like you leave your cell phone in home like oh my God I forgot the baby I mean it's a 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 seen those things no yeah I didn't know they existed oh they're very strange they are they have little cameras on them and uh yeah you got to go ahead throw them on but he knows how to use them Google Glass just was totally stillborn right I mean yeah didn't work so he's he's he's transmitting or he's making a video right now with that left side see how the left side is spinning yeah that's uh what a Snapchat do like 15 seconds 10 seconds at time that little counter just

24:15flashing was like the last 3 seconds and you can hit it again and go another 20 seconds or you can hold it and do like 30 seconds or something like that yeah step one now is is that spinning just to alert the people you're looking at that you are recording I see it too so it's not alert me to let me know that my recording is done probably a little bit to let you know too but that's probably the only notification you know that I'm recording you and just post no 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 uh I I tried a very early prototype I have a good friend of mine who was a uh 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 uh you know you talk to it and swipe it and I played

24:56with it a couple of times and we used it once put a UFC weighin where I put it on and I broadcast from the weigh-in it's very very odd but it make people 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 or but how long how long do we have where we're still people well long before you you asked that question our sense of privac I I remember what it was like to be neurotic about the sound of your voice on a voicemail or or an answering machine right like re-recording the outgoing message and and just just being worried about your voice showing up in someone else's tape yeah right and now we we're living in this this panopticon surveillance Society where you just assume you're on camera virtually every moment you're in public although I guess

25:52people don't think about it all that much um yeah I mean I think we're the norm 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's it just seems like if you just if you take where we are now and sort of look at all the data points and extrapolate it doesn't look good it just well but it's both it's both bad and good the fake news thing is horrible but the ability to fact check you to be able to pick up your phone and find out what's true uh is has also never been better so it's like we're both vulnerable in a way that we've never been and we're we're empowered in a way that we it's always been true about technological progress yeah it just seems like there's a certain amount of time we have left

26:52before we give birth to some new thing we talking about just integrating ourselves biologically with and and also something that's uh independent of us some artificial intelligence independent of us you want to look for some fear around that you got the right guy right there weed expressed those fears here yet yeah I mean and uh Josh zeps uh freaked me out this morning sent me some uh 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 yeah with with cargo probably nuclear waste or something you know just tooling down the road but 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 Yeah well yeah I mean they're I think they probably are as far as I know

27:45from what I hear from Tesla that that yeah the the a the the man-hours they have of people using the autopilot and the autopilot is not at all perfect obviously two people have died already from from using it badly uh but still they they have something like some millions of man hours of autopilot assisted driving and I think that is 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 is driving him on the highway no no it's kind of fantastic I mean he's just some guy on his way to work just pass out completely mouth open and people are filming them while his car is driving on the road and actually probably the people filming him are doing the the the more dangerous thing you're right yeah well texting and driving drives me crazy see like to be in an Uber now you can

28:38look around you can see how many people are are texting including your driver sometimes yeah yeah that drives me crazy here's a guy oh yeah that dude's out cold his car's creeping along stopping go traffic and he is completely out cold wow well it works the autopilot works yeah no it does work um yeah texting and driving scares the out of me that Pokémon go thing thank God that that died off but stopped yeah I was driving on the highway and there was a woman uh to the left of us and I noticed that she was being 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 on barely paying attention to the road looking at her phone this is the argument for for

29:33robot drivers yeah yeah and also it 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 the the information consumption entertainment options that open up there you'll watch movies you'll me you'll you'll listen to podcast you'll get work done and it'll become a space of we're not we're not going to miss having to pay attention to the road you know I mean you maybe the some people want to drive recreationally for some reason but um it's it will just be a new space where you you 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 like 40,000 that 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

30:2740,000 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 I 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 together by the time artificial intelligence is given birth to well that that all goes to what we build I mean if we build artificial intelligence that is 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 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

31:25conscious it's just it's just it's no more conscious than our current computers which is to say that intelligence and Consciousness may be separable phenomenon that you could 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 of of this the power of this system being misaligned with our interest we could build like something that's Godlike in its power and yet uh we we could essentially be canceling the prospects of the evolution of Consciousness because if this thing wipes us out the you know I think it's um Nick Bostrom the philosopher who wrote a great book on this entitled super intelligence I think he calls this the the Disneyland without children I me basically we could build this this incredibly powerful intelligent landscape uh that continues to refine

32:22itself and and and its own powers uh and who knows what ways what ways perhaps that are that are unimaginable to us and yet the lights aren't on you know there there there's nothing that it's like to be this machine or system of machines in way in the way there there's probably nothing that it's like to be the internet right now you think of all that's going on on the internet you know 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 um I think there's no reason to think it couldn't it's just we we don't understand the 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

33:10desire 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 cuz everything is pointless well no no because but but we would do we would program it it would do whatever we asked it to do initially right we I mean things we program now have goals right your thermostat is trying to regulate the temperature in the room um and when it get 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 just it that's a goal right and um so we would we are everything we build that's automated has goals explicitly programmed into it and when you're talking about a truly intelligent machine it will have it will discover goals that you have never programmed into it that are are intermediate to the

34:04goal that you have programmed so if if the 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 it's you know this probably already true of a of a Roomba right I actually don't have a Roomba but if you if you put something in the way of the room but 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 they're they're formed by by the fact that the thing has a long-term goal and one of the one of the concerns is that we could build something that has a long-term goal that build something that's super powerful

34:57that 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 the the 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 was to cancel spam right no more we don't want we want no more spam get rid of the spam well easy way to get rid of spam is just kill all the people right now that's a crazy thing to think but it's not unless you've built unless you've closed the door to that intermediate goal uh there's no reason to think that a super powerful machine couldn't form such a goal my question would be if this

35:52superp powerful machine has the ability to create new superp powerful machines would it use the same mandate would it 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 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 you think of all the things that we do I mean you you you break it down to what motivates people to get out of bed what motivates people to do good what our sense of community uh the desire to breed uh the social status all these different things that motivate people to do things remove all of those

36:44and 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 and so for instance I had steuart Russell on my podcast he's a computer scientist at at Berkeley who um unlike many computer scientists takes this problem really seriously and has thought a lot about it and in his lab I believe they're working on a a way of thinking about safety that is that is open-ended and flexible without 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 want wants in terms of its goals and wants to stay aligned with whatever it is we want um wants to wants to learn from what we seem to want based on our Behavior but um and so there could be some kind of

37:52clarifying function where where we you know we can get our priorities more aligned in dialogue with this super intelligent machine but the the bottom line is it always wants to it it doesn't think it knows what we want and it continually wants to keep approximating better and better what we want and so from my point of view the most crucial thing is you you always want the door to remain open to the statement wait wait wait that's not what I wanted right like you 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 is uh just not amendable 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 uh po there's dangerous potential in in in

38:54AI I mean I was listening to when you talked to will mccal a few weeks ago was saying you know we it was it was just a few years from starting to think about how to split the atom to actually having a bomb um are they not coming around the idea that that these that technology can progress much faster than we think of yeah oh yeah well it's a whole Spectrum 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 and think that huge changes are remant and so it's it's just the the Spectrum I'm with the ladder yeah no as am I yeah 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

39:47race and then it might go well why why the would I do that like you guys are ridiculous like this is a new life form this is a new we 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 the 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 a 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

40:37like looking at the 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 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 going to be spectacular I mean it really will be just I mean this obviously just talking 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 I mean but and by build you should be thinking more software than Hardware there there's obviously there's anything is possible anything that can be built with intelligence can

41:26be built with IG so you could be talking about armies of robots and nanotechnology and everything else that's that that is the the staple of the the Sci-Fi scare scenario but um 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 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 right you're talking about code that could could be put into financial markets right which could be built to be self modifying right and it's then it's already out in the wild it's not 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 from a you know software designers point

42:27of view I I think at this point but um there's just no question that we're going to get to a place where um I mean it's either this 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 better software which um becomes the basis of general intelligence and then where that gets put and what gets done with that that's that's the the question isn't it a real question of also the race to see who can come up with one first I mean once 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 uh sobering because I may forget the the details I think it was I could could have this backwards I think it was Rutherford there were two famous physicists

43:30involved it was either Rutherford who said we're never going to unlock the the the um I think I think it was Rutherford gave a a talk saying that we're never going to unlock the the energy that we now know to be in the atom and Leo zard the next day produced the the the equations that unlocked it right the next day next and in direct response to this announcement like okay let's just that's and he the next morning woke up and and produced that the produced the math that gave us the the atomic bomb uh so it's it can happen really F and if you want to get those details exactly right listen to what steuart Russell said on my podcast well Oppenheimer in like a really ironic twist wasn't he a Buddhist was he no he was a fan of of um Hinduism technically I mean he was he taught himself Sanskrit apparently in 3 months one never knows how much this is exaggerated

44:32but his end his publicist will tell you that he taught himself Sanskrit in three months to read the babag Gita so which is the the one of the the text of of Hinduism the quote that he gave out as the first bomb was tested yeah I have become death D become death destroyer of worlds yeah what the f and then when you hear him say it it's even more creepy cuz you could see the sort of remorse in his have you seen that no also the photos get the phot I me every photo of Oppenheimer he looks tortured he just looks haunted yeah well he was hanging out it's weird to see him with this General I was watching some documentary on the creation of the Adam Bomb and he was uh you know he's hanging out with these generals as they're probably Curtis lame yeah 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

45:26this 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 it could be dropped on them you know well and that's that's the thing we are 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 and others play it Jamie we knew the world would not be the same two people laughed a 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 and says now I am become DEA the destroyer of worlds I suppose we all thought that one way or another he does not look like a

46:44happy dude what a what a burden yeah but it's actually when you read the history of that that effort the Manhattan Project and The Trinity test it is super sober because there was they move forward in the in a context of real uncertainty about what was going to happen I mean there were they in terms of the yield of the first bomb um there was a a range I think of a a hundredfold difference of opinion of what they were going to get once this thing went off um and there were some people who still placed some Poss ility uh on the prospect of it igniting the atmosphere and just canceling all of life right now they had they had spent a lot of time to I mean they did something like due diligence where they were many of them were confident it it wouldn't but that was not without beyond the realm of possibility for some of the people working on it and um so we we

47:51have 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 the destruct the destructive potential is so obvious because it's all destructive potential I mean we we're building the biggest bombs we possibly can build and so it it's just it's not difficult to think about the danger it's all danger right um and these bombs you know now getting in the hands of the wrong people with AI it's so seductive because if you looked at if it looked at in in in one light it's just all upside I me there's nothing better than intelligence there's nothing more intrinsically desirable than intelligence and so to get more of it is 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

48:53you have to you have to spend a lot of time fighting that that ideological battle with people who just think no this just this is just all upside this is what could be what could go wrong you're just you're just scare mongering you're just you've you've seen too many Terminator movies is that even possible too many see too many no not not with the first the first was good the first was very good first second was good there's one in there that I don't think I've seen all of um there were three or there were four I don't know think I think it was I think I lost touch after the second I've seen two I haven't seen any more than two um I don't know I just I feel like it's be 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 launched probably be

49:47launched without a true understanding of what his potential is that's my fear I'm I'm terrified of it I think about it all the time I I set back sometimes and I look at like the city of Los Angeles look at the skyline all the lights go off and I'm like this this is all new like this has only been here for a few hundred years like this this there was nothing here 1700 there was nothing this is nothing now look at it it's all lit up and there's a gigantic grid you see from the sky like what are we looking at 300 years from now like what what are we looking at with all these things that we're feverishly attempting to build and create yeah well the our dependence on the net is sobering I me just just forget about all of these high futin fears of of Rogue AI just just we don't have a backup for the internet I me the internet goes down what happens in the real world a lot

50:40that is 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 or just just imagine malicious code just destroying the record of of uh money you know just like getting into the banking system right so it's like you you have 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 you know all those bits got scrambled right um and we need some all of this is like just there's so many aspects of this but the fact that you can now credibly fake audio right so someone can listen sample you know five minutes of this podcast and then produce a conversation we've never had inv voices exactly like our own and those edits will no longer be discernible I mean that we're basically there now and we're almost there with

51:36video 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 crazy I mean it's really rudimentary right now but my six-year-old loves it she thinks it's hilarious she constantly uses it all the time like she just like can I play with your phone and she grabs my phone and then she starts doing these little videos like somehow another their little brains like syn up immediately with the technology where if I gave it to my mom she be like I don't even know what this is what do I do that six-year-old can figure it out like that check this out four square seven years ago hilarious I know you have been pooping in your pants today thank you I lost my too if if I show if I showed this to my

52:29daughters you would just never hear from them again it would be like the most captivating thing I mean this is obviously black and white and she's being silly and it's really obvious it's fake but man how far I mean this is six-year-old girl who looks like Abraham Lincoln Ian it's mimicking The Voice you can't like you see her her mouth you can't discern where her mouth ends and Abraham Lincoln's face begins right but here but what's so I 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 but with expert an expert use of Photoshop but now we're talking about being able to produce content where you know you are saying the thing

53:23that completely destroys your reputation but 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 spec 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 that there's like a chain of custody where you see exactly where this came from in a way that's not fak and so if to take you know your podcast an example if someone is producing a clip that purports to be from your podcast where you're saying something insane um it there just has to be a clear fingerprint digitally which shows whether that came from you and Jamie or whether this you know came from some you know Macedonian hacker who just decided to screw with you yeah but there's not yeah no I know but that clearly we need

54:19that we need that like 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 that was the this guy that was South Africa or something like that I believe it was was it I that sounds right but I forget where it was um but but yeah I mean that was amazing because there just so few people read sign language that you know wasn't it around a Mandela thing I don't yeah was it I don't remember the the details but I remember thinking this guy is 3 feet away from the president he was 3 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

55:13completely making things up he has no idea yes he has no idea how to do sign language and that that you know that can happen there was another instance where uh a guy had got in an elevator with Obama yeah security guard yeah with a gun with a gun loaded gun in in an elevator with Obama nobody screened him it's just people aren't really on the ball you know there was a bit from my last comedy special about the uh guy that broke into the White House about there was a a woman guarding the front door by herself and they had shut the alarm off because it kept going off so they had a it just shut it off and then there was a guy who was on the lawn who was supposed to be uh he had canines supposed to be guarding the lawn he took his earpiece out to talk to his girlfriend on the cell phone he had a backup uh walkie talk cuz they have a backup one but he left that in his

56:01locker so it's like all these steps and this guy just hit the perfect sweet spot where he hopped the fence ran the whatever 100 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 5 10 minutes and he had a knife right yeah he had a knife he was basically trying to he was it was basically a suicide by cop situation cuz 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 3 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 X where the White House is and they let him go

56:58they have there has to be a crime there but they weren't even watching that guy like the idea that they're watching but we're not built as as species for perfect vigilance that's so not perfect I mean that's so ridiculous I'm thinking about even the TSA you know we it's just we're just we're just not built for that but Twitter Twitter can confound even the perfect vigilance I mean just what happened at the Oscars I mean that that was just you know their only job is to get those envelopes right you know you got two people with the lock briefcases and one guy starts tweeting and you know produces the wrong envelope I mean it's just is that what happened he was tweeting yeah yeah he was tweeting they've I me this is It's brutal but he took a photo of I forget what actress but clearly he was I mean they have he he then deleted the photo but you people recovered it um yeah he

57:56he took a shot of somebody I don't know Charlie theone or somebody who was walking backstage and put it on his Twitter feed and then that the very next moment was the moment when he had to hand over the right envelope and he just handed over the the the envelope for the best actress but that their only job is to get this straight right and they're just safeguarding the envelopes it's it's all adorable yeah but there's some there's something I really enjoy about the Folly of people that that's one of the main things that I worry about with AI that are the things that we find cute about us being ridiculous like that or like the sign language guy or any of these things but 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 right no but we we can we can program them to to

58:55fill in the gap for our own St we want we what we want to do is automate repetitive behavior and error detection that we know we're not good at right so I mean the moment you have a a TSA screening robot that that doesn't get distracted I mean these machines don't get distracted right they don't they don't get hungry they don't have to take bathroom breaks they don't they're not looking at the person who's looking at them and and getting captivated by some social glitch right so that is all if you have a bomb screening robot that's all it will do and it will be better once it you know whatever whatever the visual signature or of 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 just they will be reliable in a way that people can never be and then we know that about ourselves so that's we want to we want

59:48to Outsource all of that stuff I mean driving is the perfect example you know you don't you don't have self-driving cars that are falling asleep or you know reading Billboards while they're driving at 80 miles an hour and um and so we want that and and but the scary the scary stuff is when it can change itself that that's a principle that would allow it to kind of escape from our control or we just we build something where we haven't anticipated the consequences and and the incentives are wrong the the incentives are not aligned so to make us prudent in the development of that and what 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 the guy next to you is is doing the same and you don't know how you don't know whether he's ahead of you or behind you right and and and it's a winner take all

60:45scenario because the amount of wealth that will go to the winner of this race if things work if if this person doesn't or if this group doesn't destroy the world is unimaginable I mean it's just we're talking about a level of of um kind 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 of the world's ever known and that's going to be directly attributed to those bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki I mean that from there on that's where everything takes off when you look at human history if you you look at us from a thousand years from now it's very likely that they look at

61:38that moment and they go this is the emergence of the American Empire but this is so much bigger than that because because the bombs the power in the bomb was just just the 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 we're talking about the cure for cancer we're talking about the best virtual reality entertainment we're talking about uh the thean everything everything that a human being once you 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 cuz now they're machines and the smartest people who have never lived

62:32right 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 right because now you're talking about because you don't have to feed these people right they're just working for you just like 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 just you flip a switch and that's your company right um that's some version of that's going to happen the question is is it going to happen in a way that where we get this massive dislocation in in wealth inequality where all of a sudden someone's got a company and products and a business model which obv you know 30% of the American

63:28Workforce in over the span of you know 3 months um or you have some some political and and and economic and ethical context in which we start sharing the wealth with everyone and this is this is again this is the best case scenario this is when we don't destroy ourselves inadvertently by by producing something that's that's hostile to our interests Dan you look terrified yeah no this is this is hanging out with Sam D I know just listen we get to a high spot we get to a high spot we get a picture of margaritas and we just watch this whole thing look we're not going to make it anyway no one in 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 yeah well she keeps me grounded yeah she it's actually awesome because when she's there she's like just tooling on him and um he giggles and

64:20stuff like that it's like a completely different Sam than the guy who's under like being an Undertaker here and tell telling you about how we're all going to die from AI yeah she's uh she keeps me honest but um I mean the truth is it's not I mean I'm I'm cautiously hope this is there's no way to stop I mean there's no 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 discover we're continually discovering new problems and the question is what are we going to do there's a you know 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

65:14we either we either have the data and we can't interpret it we have to get that we have to design the experiments to get the data um and it's so it's there's no question of us to in well we've got 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 it's exactly right because there just too much power even if even if we decided that as you know American policy you know we 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 so find a high spot right above Denver big bucket of Margaritas or or or the meditation that that has helped uh both of us yeah well that's that definitely will help you while human beings are a real thing yes although I wonder if you know uh the getting enough people meditating

66:14might 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 uh the people designing these the rather these uh I don't know if products the right word the stuff then somehow the 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 a an employment problem I mean there 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 but we've always had hasn't been such a pressing problem for thousands of years because there's there's always been so much to do just to survive right now we're in the ideal case we'll get to a place where there's actually much less that has to be done because we have

67:11machines that do it and we have we have seen the wisdom of mitigating wealth inequality to some acceptable level where so every so all all boats begin to rise with this tide to some degree uh so whether it's Universal basic income or some so we have some mechanism to spread the wealth around but then there there's the real question of what do you do with your life yeah so what do you think people will do that would that's the easiest one it's not but it's not so easy cuz people well people are confused people those people need to get their together I mean that 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' have ever made in my life I would just pursue

67:58things I would just learn how to speak a language I'd learn how to play an instrument I'd practice archery more I do Jiu-Jitsu more I don't that seems to me so ridic that seems to me that could be solved really easy I feel the exact same way but I think that the I'm not con convinced I feel I could fill endless swaths of 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 uh majority of humans are like that they just need guidance that seems to be the be the easiest thing to solve they just let them know go find something fun to do go start running up hills man go uh take up frisbee golf just this just to do there's a lot of to do my concern is that more and more it will it will take the form of being merely entertained so it just it be we plug

68:54into some VR scene of Wall-E you know I never saw the movie Wall watch you okay guys you should maybe pull this pull this up but the there the in in Wall-E there it says dystopian future where everybody's riding around in those little you know Jazzy um uh uh mobile wheelchairs that people sit sit in now Disneyland yes and they're also they they've got huge buckets of soda and like turkey legs and and draped like kind of hooked over the back of the of their motorized vehicle is a monitor at the front which is entertaining them so just obese and entertained and immobile or mobile but not actually ambulatory it's Disneyland well what's happened I mean in our lifetime the the smartphone has made it virtually impossible to be bored like I boredom used to be a thing like you you'd be sitting in the the waiting room of a doctor right and they they have crappy

69:52magazines and then you're just sitting there so and if you didn't how to meditate you had to confront this sense of I'm bored right now what you disc one thing you discover when you learn how to meditate is boredom is just an inability to pay attention to anything and and 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 I've got I I have at least 10 years worth of reading on my phone right right so it's like if I'm I'm standing in line like I'm constantly pulling this thing out and is that a bad thing well it's it's potentially a bad thing because you

70:46for I mean just to take this example of of you know one interesting Insight you get when you learn to meditate um it's incredible powerful to cut through the illusion of boredom I mean to realize that boredom is is not is not something I you can become interested in the feeling of boredom and the moment you do it you know bites its own tail and disappears I mean it's just like it's there is no such thing as boredom when you're paying close attention to your experience I I think the bad thing about the hyper stimulation that we get through our phone and and all of technology is that we have lost the ability to just sit back and uh for lack of a less cliche term be and we 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

71:44there was a recent study that asked people uh 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 a fundamental problem uh 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 and that you exist right but don't you think those people are idiots I mean you don't want electric shock you don't want I won't take an electric shock you're not going to take an electric shock like we're talking about children this is the dude with the Snapchat glasses might take Jam's on the ball I I don't want those glasses either but you 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

72:28about lowest common denominated people that would take an electric shock you would take an electric shock no I'm just thinking this is a study of of it's they're not just picking idiots I think right but who are they asking and how what how are they phrasing the question but it also doesn't have to be conscious so for instance we we willingly grant our attention to things which retrospectively we can judge produce more or less nothing but pain for us so it's like well like I mean I'm continually thinking about this and rethinking about this with respect to social media like I so when I like what comes to what's the effect on my mind of looking at my Twitter at mentions well I wondered that when you were asking people what kind of questions they should we should ask this podcast yeah some sometimes it's incredibly useful but I was thinking what are you doing

73:16you're opening yourself up to the green frogs Yeah but I I've had both kinds of experience I've I've had people send me articles that I would have never found otherwise fascinating super useful and it's just it's like this is the perfect use of this technology and then again then I then I get this River of green frogs and and weirdness um but the so but the 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 with Twitter and rather often there's just this kind of toxic undercurrent of of you know mental activity that it produces in me that um I mean doesn't make me feel I mean doesn't equip me to do anything better in my life doesn't make me feel any better about myself or other people I mean if if it has any net effect it's it

74:18basically grabbed you know a dozen dials that I can just sort of dimly conceive of in my mind and turn them all a little bit toward 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 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 or writing or thinking productive thoughts or meditating or doing anything that I still do you still do this you I don't understand your Twitter compulsion yeah you um you argue with people I found that fascinating perally periodically no no I I go I go for I go for weeks without arguing with people well but also you argue with people on your podcast well yeah but that's but that's different no no no but I mean it's just on the podcast you'll also be talking

75:03about people you're arguing with on Twitter or uh so the arguing is a part of your well I get trolled a lot on Twitter yeah I get troll I mean you 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 like Abby Abby Martin well she was no she doesn't troll I mean she does she she hates me but she I don't 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 you I'm sure you heard the Josh zeps Paton Oswalt thing or Pat Oswalt don't don't listen to it okay okay he went off the rails Pat went off the rails like like Hannibal style when you thinking of Andy Kindler oh yes I am I'm sorry did I say Pat I'm so sorry Pat so sorry how did yeah Patton's great good well Patton's

75:58very smart and very reasonable as is Andy for the most most of the time but so so this and kind of I I discovered this very late I I did so I kept seeing this guy I didn't know who he was I kept seeing him in my Twitter feed Andy kler Andy kler and then I realize wait a minute he is actually he seems to be he's an established comic he seems to be friends with people who I really respect who I don't know like you know like I mean Sarah Silverman who I I don't know personally I mean we've we've you know communicated a little bit on Twitter but it's like I I I'm just nothing but a pure fan of of Sarah uh Jim gaffan other big comic so I totally respect I don't know how close he is with these people but he basically he has endless energy for vilifying me as a racist and as a bigot right he's just he's a madman and I discover so I did a search of his Twitter feed and he's got hundreds and

76:48hundreds of tweets where he's he's going after me in the most retail way so for instance like I I I tweeted out uh can anyone recommend 500 seat halls in all these cities and I think your friend is 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 right so like he's like this is Andy kindler's just got endless energy for this and then I then I looked at you know 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 Mah but then you've got another guy on this podcast um Hunter mats 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

77:39been 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 is it is it it's Matt's right okay why won't you debate Hunter Matt I went back and looked at what he said here you know half of it frankly didn't make any sense um 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 yeah um it's I mean I think on the Spectrum very very very very smart guy but taking a terrible socially approach to establishing a debate and I I've contacted Brian Ken about this and Brian Callen contacted Hunter about this he like what the are you doing and he continues to do it crazy behavior he he said he wouldn't do it anymore and

78:31then he did more every every time I look I I I I see him somewhere in there but then there's there's this guy Mike cernovich who who's actually has effects on the real world I mean Mike cernovich is again he's a Twitter troll um again one of these other guys who's challenged me to debate him and I you know I mean there's there's no there's absolutely no possibility profitable you need to spend less time on Twitter yeah listen No but but cernovich just was just on 60 Minutes I mean he's like he's in the world and he's affecting people's perception ofp Psy oh yeah well for sure right I yes so to come back it's not yeah it's not it's not the nine times out of 10 looking just makes me think um I mean it's an illusion because if you met most of these people if you if they came up to you at a conference or at a you know book sign and or you know after a gig of yours and you saw you had more

79:24information about about them you saw all of the you know all of the crazy coming out um you would say I don't have to pay any there's no reason to pay attention to what this guy is saying whereas on Twitter everything is has the same stature so whether it's you know a Washington Post columnist who's tweeting at me or some some guy like Hunter who you I don't have no idea who he is but he's telling me I've got something wrong um everything has the same stature and you just there's no signal to noise sense of what you know well first of all you up cuz you talked about them both of them you said Candy Man five times and now you got a problem you talked about him right now on this podcast this this is the first time I've ever mentioned the guy but should have talked to you before this I'm bring I'm bringing it to you because you you but you created it I mean it it was it was

80:13his 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 is actually a fan of yours I think what Hunter is trying to he's got a strange way of showing it I don't think it's a smart way I think what what he's trying to do and he he when I was trying to hold his feet to the fire and get some sort of a a logical definition of what you do wrong he really didn't have anything yeah but he's well 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 the relevant biology was wrong I mean he's just he's not he doesn't have his together but he thinks he does and there's this what there's a there's a level of of arrogance and and incivility and just kind of a lack of

81:04Charity in in interacting with other people's views which is now kind of getting rebranded on the internet as just just American can do hutzpah right and it's like it's it's given us Trump right it's like you've got 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 um aptitude for civil engaging with differences of opinion um and this thing gets you know Amplified to the to the place of greatest prominence now in in in human history everyone's on social media or many people on social media are playing this same game and you know me 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 it's a very engaged following I mean this whole

82:02Trump phenomenon has has has uh shown me that PE that a small percentage of of one's audience can have like a hundred times the energy of the rest of your audience like whenever I went against Trump on my podcast or and this is still the case the the level of of pain it causes in in sort of the feedback space is completely out of proportion to the numbers of people who are who are you know on that side of the argument and it's so it's incredibly energized but it's just this weird style of self-promotion where you all you do is that you brag about yourself you say you're the best you're and and you're you're someone who has absolutely no basis to back up those claims and yet an audience Thrills to that level of of arrogance and and empty both it's it's just bizarre but well there's a there's a big issue I think online where people find like-minded people and then they

83:03develop these communities where they just support each other and they they just have these 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 but don't there's a there's a I think this phenomenon that you're describing is both um has really serious negative consequences but also has some beauty on the Same by the same token you you've got parents uh all over the world who've got children with uh rare disease but they can connect on the internet and bond over that and share tips and doctors and all that stuff so so it is it's actually they're both outgrowths of the same kind of phenomenon but it can be we see the the really difficult uh uh

84:01consequences of this in our politics right now etc etc I think we're talking about two different things though 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 art Tey ice wall yes it but they're different things the groups of people that will find um you know communities where maybe your child is autism and there's some sort of an issue uh 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 that's beautiful you know some of the hashtags that people use that they they find search through it's great but you know that these little communities that you Bond they're not that's those those ideas there's no

84:47confirmation 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 you know 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 team even if it's a stupid team of green frogs and you don't have you don't have to listen to other people's views and you get deeply deeply entrenched I think we're seeing 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 do you not look at your ad mentions or you I do a little bit but you know what man I just like to just go

85:33on about my day yeah I I've found that the negative consequences that you're discussing I mean I RAR I mean it's rare that I go down the rabbit hole and I go for days without looking at ad mentions I mean it's it's more that if I publish something if 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 mean I feel like nothing wrong with I look at my at mentions but um 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'm I agree I stay offline no I was just more worried about again back to your psyche like it feels like you need a a little bit of a middle ground yeah I stay offline after UFC's for the most part that's when I get the most crazy people especially if there's any sort of a controversial decision but

86:22are they criticizing you for something you said mad at my commentary they'll just disagree with who I thought W and then they're so vicious about it I'm just like just yell just yell in your own space you 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 but you're dealing with you know there's a a bit that I had in one of my specials where I was talking about the 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 idiot of course well you're being very charitable right I'm being charitable but if you do that we're talking about 300 million people in the United States plus that's 3 million idiots yeah so if you have three million idiots and all your ad mentions if you look at your

87:06ad mentions and 3 million comments are saying you're a and just 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 up and I know I up I think one of the most important things that I do is I admit that I up and I talk about it and I I apologize and I say look I'm flawed I'm human I'm made a mistake sorry and then just step away like let the 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 like you're letting it in and then you stew on it and you have to bring up you know Hunter and all these other people and that's you're get you're letting them way too deep no I perhaps I gave a a false impression of

88:03of how under my skin this has gotten just the fact you talked about it at all though it's too much well no but I I think it's a huge consequence I think it's given us Trump this way this this way the the the fact that this style of communication is attractive to so many people the fact that you can the bluff and Bluster and empty boast and lies with being caught in lies without consequence right um the fact that that people never admit mistakes I mean the what you just described you do and which I do you know you make a mistake you want to hear about it you want to correct it as quickly as possible right um that is the antithesis of what we're seeing now in the space I mean I mean when has Trump admitted a mistake isn't the difference being that neither you nor I have any desire to control anything like I don't I don't want to be the leader of anything well no but you

88:56want effective you want good ideas to win right 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 and I think that we need a we need a common ethic where lying has real consequences I mean what 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 as a public intellectual I mean to be caught in a whopping lie without will require at minimum some serious atonement and historically it has been absolutely tradition it still is in in many we have slipped those rails just to to a degree that I never thought possible we're going light speed right into the woods yeah yeah yeah I

89:53mean 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 the bo whatever the the nitrous oxide boost in those hacky cars right it's like we we can use this stuff right and the getting the the way you behave when you get caught just which is to say just go yourself just redounds to your credibility in your among your tribe right like this is so powerful he he he he so fully doesn't give a what people think that he can catch him in a lie and just watch how he he gets out of it um and but that's that's what so what I'm when I was bringing up these guys like cernovich I mean this this is um actually I I I trolled CERN I I decided to troll cernovich one day and I I I thought it was hilarious and I it was just nothing but fun so there was nothing toxic about that he's obsessed but but the thing that bothers me is

90:51that this has real political consequences and I you know do you think that this is a 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 there might be some I don't think we should act like dishonesty and Bluff and Bluster to use a phrase you used before is sort of somehow new to the human repertoire I 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 is aided and and embedded by technology and uh the social networks I I agree with your diagnosis on many levels but I you know I was having an interesting conversation with u a guy that you introduced me to Joseph Goldstein who's a eminent meditation teacher has become my meditation teacher old friend of

91:42Sam's and he was 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 not to say that we does that mean meaning that I'm just viewing it from a far I'm widening the lens to look at the broad um scope of human history to see that you know over time we've got these ups and downs uhhuh 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 there there'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 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

92:36moment in history where people were rah rah Nixon and now they look back and go my God Nixon was a liar and a buffoon but I mean take this this is a 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 my claim is that if Trump were oneth is bad he would appear much worse because like everything he does now is is is appearing against a background of so many lies and so much craziness that you can barely even weight its value but I mean just so I just uh this is one of the things I I find useful about Twitter because I I follow some very interesting people and so an applebomb the The Washington Post columnist who's just awesome on Twitter um everyone should follow her she just keeps hammering Trump with with her own points and and other stuff that she finds and um she just pointed out that you did did anyone

93:30notice that Trump trump threatened a war with North Korea two days ago uh it was in the financial times and yet no one can talk about it because no one believes him right like it's like like we have a president whose speech has now become so denuded of Truth value right perceived truth value that he can say you know we're if 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 it just everyone assumes it's an empty Bluff I mean 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 this is like it just comes out of a blizzard of of inanity and craziness that that that that that you know he's he's he's going after Merill stre he's he's lying

94:35about Obama wiretapping him now he's he's threatening war with North Korea and you know nobody knows what to talk about so it's it's like the the 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 so so the the state of mind that everyone's in including the press in listening to him is just is to take potentially the most serious things in the world not seriously and the the least serious things in the world like you know Merill stre what he thinks of her acting uh you know that becomes that dominates a whole new cycle it's it's very upside down it seems to me to be quite new as opposed to I lies are are perennial but I feel like we're in a very different space now with with the consequences of of misinformation we certainly are do you think that they're

95:33connected 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' made people so soft so dependent upon technology we've slotted out these paths these predetermined paths 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 leftwing one with very little room for personal thought at all very 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 well either or the New York Times you know I think you nothing against the New York

96:26Times 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 up where they really up is where they said that they're going to after the election they're they're going to rededicate themselves to reporting the truth and re 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 weren't into the truth well it says they were biased yeah they up I mean like they had an idea the truth is they were bi see I mean you're right the thing is the the enemy is is um was so grotesque in this case that it was impossible to not have been biased seemed an abdication of responsibility I feel it myself it's

97:15like people everything I say against Trump from a trump person sounds like mere partisan bias there's I mean I've got zero connection to the Democratic party or to I mean it's like there's there's no partisan bias I every 100% of what I want to say about Trump does not apply to some other Republican who who uh is just a stands for things that I don't you know policies I might not like um it's completely a completely unique circumstance and um yeah so I mean yes it's true that you to read the New York Times for the longest time it was it was reading like just the entire thing had become the opinion page on the The Huffington Post or something yeah I just feel like at this stage of our our society There's real consequences to the infantilization if that's actually a word of of human beings in our culture we've made it very easy to just go to work and just get

98:17home and watch television and just not pay attention to anything and not read anything and not really think and and then and be manipulated I mean I think it's it's 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 what is involved in foreign policy what is involved in dealing with Russia you what is involved how do you negotiate with North Korea 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 got folks um uh who who slot into just a media diet where they're just hearing things on the left and they're not they're not curious about or uh um I guess just not curious enough to hear

99:10things from a different perspective unless it's just some right-wing paluca who comes on and they beat him up um so I I I I really do think I think it places an in this is going to be a self- serving argument but I do think it it places increasing importance on media Outlets like the one for which I work to be really Vigilant about being seen as Fair Arbiters are fact yeah I mean I think the consequences have never been greater for that I think the the reason that so many people on the right so many Trump supporters fear feel like they're right is because it has been proven that the 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

100:00think yeah there were some polls that were bad but the the poll like the so I remember this because I I I sent out a tweet which said like you know bye-bye Donald or something like I like you know the day of but when I did that I mean that wasn't a prediction the the polls that I was going by the most people were going by at that point was it was like 802 you know or at best 752 that she was going to win now that's not I mean we you roll dice for a few minutes you realize a 20% chance comes up a lot so like guess that's not infinitesimal odds plus Florida yeah but but so but well you should 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 um and U you know we they they give you the exit polling you're not supposed to report it publicly but the exit polling that we were seeing before went on the

100:53air late in the day really made it seem like it was going to be a Clinton Landslide you know you have all these folks who say look at the crest Fallen faces of the journalists because they're so upset that Trump won certainly that was not the case for the folks on our my set it was that it was that we didn't see it coming we weren't prepared for it everything that we were 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 uh about what was going on how did they get it so wrong you know it's I 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 that she's definitely going to win but there's room there for Trump to yeah a

101:45lot of room there for trp comes up all the time it's Russian Roulette yeah yeah that's those are bad if it's Russian Roulette those are bad odds right you're not going to take that you know not going put single bullet inber gun no deer hunter that's really good odds shot I don't think so 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 yeah it just it was it was so shocking that's a hit that's a hit I think that we we can and should take yeah we definitely you know I think we 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 and that I mean it was kind of established back when you really needed a representative

102:36because otherwise you would have to get on a horse and ride into Washington and it would take six months I can see it you can make very powerful arguments that it's a deeply problematic institution I can see those the I can see the power of those Arguments for sure um there are people who argue make similar arguments about the United States Senate yeah um uh there was a there was a piece that ran in uh the New York Times uh uh in their Sunday weekend 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 we that the people who live on the coast are paying more in taxes but they have less representation actually in Washington um again this that's not research that I've done but it's an interesting idea have you ever seen anybody present any sort

103:28of uh 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 because he's got a lot of influence he has an enormous amount of influence but but we're seeing Donald Trump is seeing right now the limits of Presidential Power he couldn't get his uh the the healthare bill that they that didn't even make it wasn't even close to what he promised on the or in 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 uh his Supreme Court nominee uh seated so I I don't know I I think that the the founders designed in many ways a really ingenious

104:22system and we put a lot of attention on the president because it's one person uh who get who's in our 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 when it regards to emissions he's rolled back emission standards I mean there's anything that we should be concerned about it's the air that we breathe and we were moving in a direction we were 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

105:12production is is it's 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 uh um I I'll say as a member of the media an area where I feel I'm just speaking for myself here um really one of our biggest failures um and I don't think history is going to judge us kindly and again I I'll put the I'll put the blame on myself it's become it's a hard story to get people just that interested in um and it's especially for television because it's a lot of sort of graphs and science um and you there's only so many pictures of polar bears you can show M um and so I have I anguish about that because I do think it's it's uh there isn't a debate climate change is real almost certainly caused by humans um I don't think we and for too long we fell for that in the media where we presented

106:10it as a debate when it wasn't uh 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 very it's 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 and 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 I think actually I just walked in U so I might have um 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 like you don't want particulates in your lungs um that you don't need to have there and the idea that we I mean so you could

107:04completely justify a green economy on that basis alone may 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 and you know safe nuclear technology powering the um it would be fantastic from just a pure I mean forget about the health just I mean obviously cancer is is is U lung cancer and and um cardiovascular disease is is a huge issue there but just aesthetically it's it's so desirable I I mean there's no argument against it and that's I feel like people don't make that connection very much well because climate change slow moving you know and it could be way out in the future before but pollution isn't I mean you 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

108:01production of coal yeah it's unbelievable it's it's ridiculous I mean yeah I guess there I have questions about whether it's even going to happen in other words you can roll it back um but uh the coal industry there are many many uh there are many factors to their decision making about for example will if they go and do the mining is is what they uh uh mine going to actually even be consumed so right you know and I I think that even though they're doing some pretty radical making some pretty radical noises at the EPA um I'm not sure how far puit can can take some of this stuff given the uh existing body of law case law that um has formed around Obama's decisions so I you know it it actually gets pretty more complicated the closer you look at it from what I can tell uh and I won't claim to have studied it too too closely but it seems to get more complicated the more you

108:54look at it the headlines may be scarier I guess is my point well what's pretty clear though is emission standards rolling back emission standard sends a very clear message that it's okay to pollute the air I mean it's we we were moving in a direction of going towards electric cars going towards cars that pollute the environment less I mean um 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 you drive it through La the exhaust that comes out is cleaner than the air it sucks in h imagine that so you're driving through it's an air filter yeah literally is 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

109:46that's the the issue in the first place it's not clean you don't want to breathe the exhaust of a Porsche but what they've 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 look what you said is so clear there's there's nothing good about polluting the air I mean 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 well let's not forget there are real human beings in Cole country who you know have generations of uh have done have spent Generations working in this industry take great pride in it and uh we've got

110:39to think about what we do uh but but it's only the numbers here are surprising and and also little reported it's only 75,000 coal jobs we're talking about in the country and the something like 500,000 clean tech jobs just in California alone I mean the numbers are completely out of whack no I I think I think the the clean tech um uh industry offers an enormous amount of promise but 755,000 families is not nothing and when we're talking about but then give them money right they don't want to out know want work this goes to the question of meaning and you know like what are we going to do because we're we're the precipice we're getting to is everyone virtually everyone is going to be in the position of the coal miners when when we when we talking about and that that's a good thing that's the thing I mean that's that's you know why can't they figure out that they just want to learn

111:31new languages and and spend more time with their kids and play Frisbee and and uh have fun we need a new ethic that 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 as an opportunity and it is actually something it does dovetail with this hobby horse that you and I have been on for a while about about um kind of about the power of meditation and what it can do uh 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 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 that when those jobs are gone I think it's millions of people right is it no

112:24and it's I think it is the in the states it's the most uh common job for white men I think I think it's something like like 9 million white men are driving trucks and cars the problem with that is most people like white men yeah tired white men patriarchy this is this is you know Trump's base yeah um no it's these um I think Universal basic income they're 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 you need to just understand the consequences of of any system you would put in place but there's just no question that in the that viewed as an opportunity this is this is the greatest opportunity in human history we're talking about cancelling the need for Dangerous boring repetitive work and and freeing up Humanity to do interesting creative fun things now how could that

113:30be bad well give us a little time and we'll show you how we can make it bad but and it it'll be bad if it leads to just you know extraordinary wealth inequality that we have we don't have the political or ethical will to to fix um and because if we have a culture of people who think I don't want any hand outs and I certainly don't want my neighbor to get any handouts I don't want to pay any taxes so that he get he can be a lazy bum if that's the if we have this you know hangover from 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 that is um much better or a hell of a lot worse depending on on where the technology goes I I think at a certain point the the wealth inequality will be obviously unsustainable I mean

114:28you can't have multiple trillionaires walking around living in compounds with razor wire uh and just moving everywhere with by you know by private jet um and then you know massive levels of unemployment in a society like ours I mean a certain point we're 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 with you their AR-15s or their pitchforks and you know that the society will will not sustain it I mean you can't you there there has to be some level of wealth inequality that is unsustainable that people people will not tolerate um and you you begin to look more and more like a Banana Republic until you become a Banana Republic but now we're talking about you know you know the us or or the the developed world where um all the wealth is uh so redistribution is the endgame

115:32we and that's that 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 spreading it across the board yeah but these are so yeah I mean whatever the solution is for coal mining we should not be host for for the coal miners we should be Hostage to the idea that they need jobs so that whatever job they were doing and 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 we want we don't do that with any we didn't do that with you know the people who are making buggy whips or or anything else slavery yeah or yeah I mean just there's no um 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

116:31talking about uh developing technology that produces energy that doesn't have any of these negative effects um you know whether it's global climate change or just pollution of course we have to move in that direction and the other thing that's that's crazy is that we're not talking honestly about how the dirty Tech is subsidized I mean you have the oil people say well solar is all subsidized right this is you know it's just it's 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 we 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 there are industries that are just intrinsically good and are going to lead to the betterment of of humanity but carbon is massively subsidized we have

117:27we we don't have I mean if we actually had the the the coal producers um and the and the petroleum producers pay for the consequences of of carbon and pollution it would be it would be much more expensive than it is right so it's already subsidized you know we so we should I mean we we we need a carbon tax clearly we need to the tax code incentivize what we want to incentivize 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 and when you find out that corn and corn syrup is responsible for um just huge epidemic of obesity in this country the amount of corn syrup that's in Foods if you if you as a if you as a polluter had to pay the the consequences of of your pollution all the way down the line right right um you had to compensate everyone who got you know

118:25empyema or lung cancer uh because of what you were putting into the air your industry I would be less profitable right and it might not be profitable at all and that's and we don't have um we haven't priced all of that in to to any of these things whether you're talking about you know the chemical industry or or or the cigarette industry I mean we're we're we're addicted to the use of these fossil fuels the same way we're addicted to some people are addicted to the use of cigarettes I mean the health consequences of those things are they're they're almost parallel in a lot of ways yeah well and amazingly is you have the same I mean I think you turned me on to this documentary what was it merchants of doubt the same phds you got like 10 guys who move from in you know just toxic industry to toxic industry defending whether it's big tobacco or the you know

119:17I'm in that document oh you are that's right uh I interviewed a guy named Fred uh who was one of these people uh and uh he's a climate change denier and there's just some I'm it's been a while but it was there were some key moments where I was like listening listing for him all the major scientific organizations that say that climate change is real and that humans are are major cont contributors to it and he basically just refused to accept it well those those shows where you have the three heads you and then the two experts and they yell over we'll be right back and then you go to commercial those 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 it it created the

120:11doubt it created the doubt um and I think that was a very successful it was a very successful strategy um but but that's intent intention with what we just said about the New York Times because if you if you take a position as a journalist if you say okay actually one side of this conversation is full of then you seem like you're not an honest broker of information I think it's different to take a uh a position I don't I don't it's not controversial for me to sit here and say if you smoke cigarettes uh 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

121:03the the the the vast majority of scientists believe this is real and a big big problem so I don't what 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 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 CL just just take the lens as climate change you have one candidate who's denying the reality of climate change or who's who's just claiming that that they climate CH Chinese antitrump well no because because when Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax you have to call him has he really said that yes yeah yeah yeah yeah he said it's a Chinese hoax yes go to China and see those people that are walking around with gas masks on because they can't breathe in Beijing

121:57okay but that's I mean that's 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 right uh but and I think I think something like TW I think something like 25% of the air pollution in California on some days is coming from China there some amazing I could have that slightly wrong Jamie could check that out but please do there's some there's some extraordinary amount of air air pollution that we get from China that's insane I did not know that yeah just makes its way across the ocean yeah oh yeah there there's no wall you know we got to Build That Wall um but no but at a certain point I mean there there there some there's some level of dishonesty and misinformation that's so egregious that if you're a journalist commit at all committed to being an unbiased or disinterested

122:49broker of information and a conversation if you set up a conversation between you know the Sha spicers of the world or or the kellyanne conways who have their alternative facts and someone who's honestly talking about whatever it is climate change um it's very you know 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 uh with the Trump Administration uh that it is imperative for that journalists uh call out uh when things are said that aren't true but that 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 you lead that just leads to further polarization which is exactly what we don't need call well you call him out on all the times that he said things that are just absolutely not

123:46true that feels like you're anti-trump yes it can there's no question there's no question and uh and I think that's a an issue we're dealing with and I but I think this is a time of real soul searching in my industry because I I firmly believe there is a very powerful place in a functioning democracy for a press for a for media that people generally view as Fair well it's also it 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 know it you need unbiased facts and you almost need it not delivered by people you know the problem is when when people are delivering the news like I I when you you talk to

124:42someone you know they're educated in an ivy league university and they're you know they speak a certain way they act a certain way you almost can assume that these intellectual people these well- read people are gonna sort of lean towards one way or another I I think that there there is that issue I I 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 a incredibly difficult environment right now so you don't count Fox as a broadcast network it Fox News is a cable network right but Fox uh but they don't have like Fox Broad 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 is bizar it is it is

125:37well some people you know they put up their rabbit ears and get the signal the does that cord cutters extreme cord cutters J you got one it's 20 bucks it's I get like 30 channels and it's way better and it works there's no lagging there's no buffering I mean so you do that and then you get like Netflix for uh and I have sling but when I want to watch a basketball game like this the NCA basketball tournament last night I had to watch watch through the air it worked School say it work wow interesting what are the num VY uh uh collection to what's the what's the viewers on a um An Evening News broadcast now is it like 5 million on no it's around eight or nine eight or nine so still a really big number is it up I don't you know I don't follow all of the uh ticks um when it comes to the number so I can't answer that accurately but people have been predicting the demise

126:27of network news for decades now every you know I've been at ABC news for 17 years I've been reading obituaries all throughout that time 8 million a night on each of the networks is still that is a gigantic number especially in an age of complete you know of micro uh uh information of Niche broadcasting and uh the Internet it's all that here numb right there NBC so ABC's in the lead ABC is the lead in total viewers uh so ABC and NBC and this is just one week March 27th right around 8 and then CBS is 6.5 million it's a lot of people it SK is super old though look at that demographic absolutely ex SK is very very old well it's all people it's 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 to uh 8 million total viewers NBC 78 7.8 million total viewers 1.7 million 25 to 54 and

127:31then CBS 6.4 million total 1.3 million 25 to 54 it's funny like after 54 you but before 25 you that's what they concentrate on this one it's it is what advertisers want um it's funny people with Vitality you can tell based on the ads I mean the ads the ads you run it's like you know for catheters and and and uh anti get a little different on the morning because in the morning shows where we're also it's more it's closer to four or five million um for ABC and NBC and a little less for CBS uh 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 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 polarization the

128:27polarized media atmosphere you were talking about before I think in this atmosphere the the that having the networks be seen to a certain extent to the extent possible as above the freight actually is important for democracy how many does Alex Jones get what does Alex Jones get claims I think 40 million a week but they include like uh website hits in their big number so it's a skewed number I've spent some time with him me too yeah have you oh yeah I know him very well I went down to Austin and time yeah yeah yeah how long uh basically spent a day uh at hanging around his operation this was in I would say in 2009 oh it was a while ago before was the monolith that it is now it was pretty big back then but not what it is now in 1999 Alex Jones and I put on uh George Bush Senior and Junior masks and we smoked pot out of of a bong and then danced around the

129:23white not the White House the capital building in in Texas for a a standup video that I did yeah I've been friends with that guy since 99 well yeah I listen I listened to your recent podcast with him which which was just interdimensional child molesters that are infiltrating our Airwaves yeah he he went deep we got him high and drunk and he went 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 just screaming and yelling that's me and Sh I broke the mask that's him singing by the wayal Ws spes of the dark lord Vision to make is the god no it's the he made up these lyrics this song is all him I I believe he might have ad lied it too give us give me some volume on this it's the belly of the Beast that was the name of my DVD Belly of the beast from Austin

130:28Texas strap yourselves in it's the belly of the Beast belly of that's 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 so he believe it's it's sincere he believes all the stuff uh he believes a lot of it yeah whether he's correct or not that's a different argument whether or not he believes it I was strucking we had I spent a full day with him and then we had dinner with him afterwards and not recorded and uh I was struck by the difference and demeanor uh off camera and not being recorded yeah there's definitely that I meanes believe it I I don't know I I'm not going to I can't I'm not in 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 the use of agent provocators now what agency

131:30who who hires these people but what they do is they take something like the WTO which was a big embarrassment that people were protesting to 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 come in and break it up cuz 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 line through it well they had created a no protest Zone and they were taking 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 made uh in that use

132:21of agent provocators has been documented this is a real thing and it's a real tactic that again what agency what 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 V one 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 uh arm Cuban friendlies and have them attack Guantanamo Bay they were going to blow up a drone jetliner they're going to

133:06blame it on the Cubans and they were trying to use this as impetus to get us to go to war with Cuba yeah but how do you feel about the things that he's talking about that are well let's talk about that first I mean there are things that are true that's what gets really squirly what gets really Squires like when when you find out that there have been things like the Gul of tonan incident like all 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 I think well I don't know a lot about Gulf of tonen but although I know more about it than than those other examples I think I mean there there are definitely there are cases where it's an additional interpretation to say that the government lied I mean so to take even something that's closer

133:53to hand like weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to 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 like yeah like it was just it was 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 now so that's a spectrum um I'm not claiming to know which one of those is true I think it's Pro probably the last is much closer to the truth um and that explains many of these instances but the the I mean that what's so corrosive about pure examples of lying um is that uh and we may have one case now that's just emerging in the news I don't know if the Maybe the story

134:51has been clarified while we've been talking but this like it now seems that Susan Rice came out at one point she said she knew nothing about the unmasking of of trump Associates in in um this recent surveillance case and now it seems that she it's claimed that she actually asked to have certain names unmasked and and so like this this is being seized upon again just in the last few hours as exam an example of lie right which seems very Sinister um but as though it equalizes the two sides here right let's so let's say worst case scenario Susan Rice lied about having some knowledge of this investigation um 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 the moment the

135:53moment 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 like like like like they're you're no better than than somebody who's just manufacturing fake news on a laptop in his basement um so it's like it's and and the flip side of that is when Alex Jones gets something right it seems to it seems to make him look like a a 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 the their fact straight and then there are malicious just Malicia

136:50malicious propaganda Outlets that are not at all trying to get their facts straight and trying to engineer everyone's credulity and and ignorance into something that is just purely a matter of of uh you know tribal sentiment you know and um 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 or picks up his Twitter she had other problems because she had gone on I believe on uh the Sunday morning talk shows after Benghazi with some outdated talking points yes yeah no Susan Susan looked like she's itching to get caught I mean whether this is a case of she get yeah uh no I I I I think your point is very very important because I think

137:46that when you have um if you have one side that lies all the time it's imperative that the other side don't lie at all yeah yeah lying they say look everybody does it that's why it's it's tense time for people in my line of work because we we we's so much scrutiny and and we get it wrong we really you know we take a lot of heat but when we get it wrong I I think we're pretty quick to say we got it wrong here's the actual here's the truth do you know the Donald Trump Jr said that cernovich should get a Pitzer for exposing Susan Rice really yeah right yeah but that's that's why that's why this drives me a little crazy because it's not cernovich it's the fact that that this is this is bled into the world why'd you lead him down the cernovich thing you just him right back it's it's I mean FR of the kitten yeah we're only now discovering the consequences of this

138:41let's come back in 5 years and see if if uh we're we're talking about anything that makes any sense well it's it's it's all very blurry it it really is very blurry cuz we never had a situation like this where we have a president that people just don't trust to be honest I when someone if someone lied about anything in the past I mean if if Donald Trump got caught having his dick sucked in the white house tomorrow on film you know he' be like look I made a mistake I it would be' be nothing it would be nothing Photoshop fake news do you think just again just slaugh to use Joseph goldstein's phrase before about slotting into geological time and just looking at the the broader scope of History you know we've had really we've had periods of time where we had media the the muck rakers you know where the media Outlets were didn't even pretend at times to to um to not

139:33have an agenda um what times were those in the early uh parts of our Republic where we had uh was it Teddy Roosevelt called the journalists mck rakers where um basically he was saying that their job was to rake mck uh to be work in filth and uh 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 uh untruths and agendas and uh then we have times of relative stability and then sometimes we slide back into more tumultuous times I think I'm maybe the poana here but I think that we the Republic Will Survive and that we will that it 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 seems to open up the door for someone who comes along who is in in many ways bulletproof that is a very eth it's open

140:39a door I mean now anyone you're talking somebody to to run for office yes I I just don't think anybody's bulletproof humans humans I mean with the exception of Joe Rogan 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 present no but what Joe was saying is it opens the door to somebody who's un strong a strong viable alternative like someone who is ethical I think the door is open to anyone I mean who who couldn't be president at this point I mean there's no one that steps forward right now I mean is it doesn't do you think they're waiting I mean like who first of all we'll say you couldn't be president there's never has there's never been an open atheist they would attack your Twitter page first of all yeah yeah good luck um no I mean I think they're you know if you're going to use a conventional

141:25political calculus well then yeah then you know an athe being an atheist having a history of psychedelic drug use having edgy positions that alienate you massive uh constituencies I mean all of that's a deal breaker but I could you would never have predicted that someone this scandalous and inept and dishonest and provably so at every I mean he can't 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 his mouth um it's just it's I think yeah I think I think there's there's no predicting who could be uh president in the future I mean it's it's it's you need we you need wealth and you need Charisma on some level you need you need to be able to to get a tribe behind you um but I don't think you need any of what people thought you needed even a year ago well what he's done by

142:28circumventing the whole system and by being independently wealthy is really kind of but even that was a sham I mean that what's amazing is that he it'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 what you Ian he really only had to pretend to be that wealthy and it was incredible what happened the flip side of is what he achieved with very little campaign funds and um and wits you know I mean you it's like them or not you have to give them credit for an unbelievable victory that very few people saw coming it's a popularity contest isn't that part of the problem is I mean you 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 that's let's put it in context and we're and we was coming off there 8 years of a Dem

143:20president who was controversial in many ways and um 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 when we just to get back to the argument about like are we in apocalyptic times or whatever I guess Ian I don't know anything I I but my instinct is just as a country we've we've seen times of much worse division we had a civil war um yeah but it's telling that you have to go back there for a for a compelling example I I think this is what in the 60s we had people in the streets we had the Weather Underground we had you know it was pretty to we had we had MLK and RFK assassinated pretty divided time yeah I mean I what I'm worried about now is um I mean I I think he's truly unique and I think I think the the way were becoming unmowed from kind of the ordinary truth testing

144:26uh in politics um I think is unique I I mean the fact that we have a president who seem because there's a whole feedback mechanism I mean Trump seems to get some of his information from Infowars and from places like infow Wars it goes on it all the time but you don't think he pays a price for for his for his un I mean his his popularity rating is not high oh yeah well he's he's paying some PR but the question is is it going to be enough and what happens with the next terrorist attack right I mean so so the the real fear is that if we have a rice dog fire kind of moment right you know engineered by him or not I mean I'm not so paranoid as to think he's going to do it but I just think it's inevitable something is going to happen I mean we we've had a we've had what you know 80 Days 100 days whatever it's been of his presidency where basically nothing has happened and it's

145:19been pure cas chaos right and the 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 911 size event or something really goes off the rails with North Korea or China or Russia uh it will be so I mean the pressure one the pressure to normalize him as commanderin-chief will be much greater than it is now and already everyone's feeling that pressure um but too the the the the ability to clamp down on civil liberties and um uh just uh use the power of the presidency in a way that that be very difficult for um our society to recover from I think it's just I mean I think the it's it's a scary moment and I'm I mean I I the the people who are drawing analogies between him and you know the 30s in in um Germany um I mean I think I think those analogies are misleading in ways

146:35but again you just don't know how strange things could get if 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 right I think that is an objective fact that's not a partisan thing to say he is I that's his obvious about him as his hair and to have that much power in the hands of somebody who is that who 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 of of most Republicans who I might disagree with but there's just something to put that much power in the hands of somebody who um is so disconnected from facts and a and reasonable concern for the well-being of of the rest of humanity and the future you know I mean it's just it's it's an incredible moment

147:42and 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 you know I mean Nixon it was you know pathological in other ways but you know Nix 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 how to burnish his his imaginary Grandeur you know um so yeah I mean I I I think we're one huge news story away from finding out how bad a president he could be and I think I think that's you know I think he could surprise he could surprise even the people who are very pessimistic he could also rise to the occasion yeah yeah I mean look objective news B in him see that well no I mean also like to you know I I would be the first to give him or the system credit for that I mean it's like it's like it's not that I if he starts doing something

148:45good like you know let's say a massive infrastructure project right that includes building out good things not coal jobs but you know if if you know fixing Bridges clean infrastructure right if he starts doing that that I have no I mean that's that'd be fantastic right and it's possible he could start doing that for his own his motives wouldn't even matter ultimately uh as long as he was doing the right things but his motives are so reliably uh self-involved that you I what we need is a a system we need to someone needs to be able to play him I me this kind of narcissistic block and Spiel well enough to get him to do the things that would be good for the world but I just don't see just just there's just too much chaos in the system to for that to be a reliable well like you they they try to keep him away from social media yeah yeah well that's working out I mean

149:42that's that's a big thing don't they they they try to pull him away from it yeah but that's been impossible no one can do it yeah it's um remember that crazy press conference that he had like just a few weeks into being president I unbelievable I had I got text messages from friends of are Republicans they were like what the yeah but you know there are it's an interesting um it's an interesting sort of Roar Shack test because there are millions of Americans who watch that press conference and found it delightfully thought they thought that he was pounding on the on the uh liberal media yeah when you read a transcript when you read a transcript of what actually comes out of his mouth it's it is amazing I mean the the the poverty of the passages in terms of information and I mean it's just the fact that we have a president who speaks like this is I could never have foreseen that in

150:42our lifetime this was going to happen it just it's unimaginable to me um yeah I think a lot of people there are just in indisputable find concern did you see Bill Mars thing about Anthony Weiner that he thinks that Anthony weer should run against Trump I see that we need our own crazy man yeah CU Anthony Weiner besides his obvious addictions to sexting with people was a very powerful politician and and a very good speaker and he had a lot of very good quality he was going after Bankers the same as Elliot Spitzer right Elliot Spitzer did a lot of good things he was going after the bankers he was going after corruption and yeah well I so but like that that's an example I that's there's a a flag planted that shows us how far we have gone from the normal I mean Elliot Spitzer destroyed himself with one instance of hypocrisy right right one well it was pretty bad you

151:41know Trump level bad I mean there's just no there like you know I don't know I mean we don't have hypocrisy breaking the law in this way I mean he was he was with a prostitute well that's a stupid law the real problem was that he was going he was going after going joh and going after John 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 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 but I guess the other piece you have to put in play there is that there there are there's 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 isn't part of the problem with that is that it's

152:28illegal I mean it's that's the big argument is that yeah well yes that there is there is that argument and no I agree with you that that it consenting adults should be able to do what they want to do but the but the The crucial variable there is consent right you know and kid agreed agreed yes um I just think that someone is going 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 it's good or maybe what people will be thirsting for after after four years is is actually Bland yeah right maybe right yeah I I would do with Bland right now that would be fantastic Bland Bland and actually super religious would be I mean the my happy for Ted Cruz is not Bland but my enthusiasm for impeachment suggests that I'm happy with Pence right like so like if if I could find the impeachment

153:29button I would not hesitate to press it and Pence given his religious commitments you know a few short years ago would have been among my worst nightmares I mean I would be talking about the the the rise of the Christian right and the the danger of theocracy and I mean his but he's a psychologically he seems like a normal predictable solid American compared to what we have you know it's just isn't the other question like Trump's age he's a 70y 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 me that campaign he does was I can't believe I mean that's ofg and his credit yeah I that's an amazing thing to be able to do how how do you think he does thing in the world I can't even imagine what look like he was having a good time seriously it

154:26did it did and and in that press conference we were talking about that 77 I think it was 77 minute press conference he looked like he was having a blast yeah he gets he gets really energized yeah I mean that's it's got to be the most punishing Beatdown ever if you're if you're not designed for it I me I can't imagine how tiring that campaign I mean you you get exhaust for 30 minutes to look at your at mention ex it's uh no you you you have to be wired differently but you know he clearly is is um 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 that's a rare person or it's not and the problem is that kind of selects s of things that you don't don't actually want in in a president or at least I wouldn't think you would want I mean it's s for a kind of narcissism and a sense that that it really has to be

155:24you right this doesn't doesn't select for the in a normal intellectual space you you're constantly aware aware of the ways in which you're not the best guy or gal to be doing the thing right like you want to defer to experts and and um you know Trump is only I can fix it right and that worked and so you need there there's something of that that Creeps in into the um the heads space of most politicians it seems and and um so scientific humility and um just a kind of a sense of the limits of of any one person's expertise is is not necessarily the right piece of software to have running at when it comes time to to run for president now I want to switch gears a little bit it's not it's not totally related but it is in somewhat in in some ways headspace um 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

156:27about 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 I am as well although I think I'd probably do it differently than you guys do but I'd love to hear how how you do it I use an isolation tank oh really like a sensory deprivation techque yeah yeah I and I do a lot of yoga those are those are two big ones for me you know I think um those alone have uh straightened out my brain in a great way yoga in particular yoga because it's um it's not yoga forces you to do it you know like if you you're either doing it or you're not doing it there's no room for distraction you know you're you're essentially forced to deal with what these poses require of you and I think that in in doing so and having the singular focus of trying to uh maintain your balance and stretch and extend and do all these different things while you're doing then

157:18concentrating almost en irely on your breath which is a big factor in yoga that it's U it has remarkable brain scrubbing attributes yeah I 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 do I use it for a bunch of different in a bunch of different ways I don't use it as much as I should honestly um but I concentrate on sometimes I go in there with a an idea like I'll concentrate on material like that I'm working on or maybe Jiu-Jitsu techniques that I'm having problems with or um some other things that I'm dealing with you know any 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 um there's the amount of magnesium

158:08that's uh 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 uh just less pressure and allows you to relax more puts things in perspective better and it also it gives you this uh environment that's not available anywhere else on the planet this weightless floating disconnected from your body environment where you're you don't hear anything you don't see anything you don't feel anything you feel like you're weightless you you you have this um sensation of flying because you're totally weight weightless in the dark you open your eyes you don't see anything you close your eyes is exactly the same the water is the same temperature as your skin so you don't feel the water and you're floating I'll

158:55say this I don't not sure how this is going to go down I actually don't have any questions about the the the benefits of being in an isolation tank even though I don't know too much about it and I also am a uh I think yoga is great although I don't do much of it myself I I think though that there may actually be a difference between those two activities and meditation M because there's a kind of this is a high futin term metacognition sort of knowing what you know or knowing that you're thinking uh that happens in the kind of mindfulness meditation of of which uh Sam and I are proponents proponents that I think is a different thing um 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 nuts and that actually has a real value systematic collision with the in

159:47your head has a real value because when the 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 like 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 just the you're not thinking about your breath you're just feeling the raw data of the physical sensation 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 launch do an at a haircut where the Geral run wild whatever blah blah blah you're just going to notice oh I'm I'm my mind's going crazy right now

160:35but that noticing is the key moment is in fact the victory it's interesting because this is when most people think they've failed that oh I can't meditate cuz I can't clear my mind this is the the biggest misconception about meditation you do not need to clear your mind that's impossible unless you're enlightened or dead uh the whole goal is just to notice when you've become distracted and start again you return your attention to your breath and you just do that a million times and every time you catch yourself wandering and go back to your breath it's a bicep curl for your brain it changes your brain and um that over time creates the kind of metacognition I was discussing before where you see that you're a homo sapiens sapien in other words you're that's how we're classified as a species the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks and that just that knowing that you have

161:27this voice in your head uh 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 over and over um uh a joke that I I steal from him all the time yeah uh that that is enormously powerful because then you are not held hostage by this voice um a similar thing happens in the tank um I do uh do a form of meditation in the tank sometimes when I go in there with without an idea like if I'm not working on material or anything else where I just concentrating 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 yeah that's meditation it's 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

162:18psychedelic States Wow have you ever combined the tank with psychedelics altered state stuff yeah yeah yeah yeah what LSD or or mushrooms mushrooms but the big one is edible pot edible pot seems to be as strong as anything in there huh like I've I eat enough pot where I'm convinced I'm going to die and then I climb in there right every time I do it I go don't do that again cuz I just get out so terrified what's your motivation when you're eating the pot and climbing into the tank let see what happens okay yeah just be scared be terrified yeah because nothing ever happens you never die but God damn you're just convinced that the universe is imploding around you and that it but so it usually has the the character of fear being a major part part of it so it's also not embracing the fear not letting the fear run rampant and just sort of relaxing and giving in to the

163:09vulnerability your the finite nature of your existence and just breathing and concentrating and letting letting the dance take place cuz there's some there's some sort of a weird that 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 your liver the time course is very different too you can stay stoned for three days yeah you could you could up and eat too many brownies and you'll be gone for a long time oh that sounds miserable it is but it's not because you get something out of it when it's over the the the process is excruciating but when you come out of it you just feel so happy feel so happy it's over is it yeah it's like the joke about the dude who's banging his head up against the wall and somebody says why you doing that he says

163:55because 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 going to hurt yourself this is true uh yeah I don't know I think there seems like there may be easier ways to get to the same wisdom but 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 it's so different that most people when they um eat pot they think they've been dosed like anybody who 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

164:45trying to do when you're just sitting down and concentrating and relaxing as you're try 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 that are there's stimuli that's coming into your your your senses whereas in the tank there's none of that virtually it's almost completely eliminated there's some but you can you can you can phase that stuff out like you could still feel the water a little bit if you think about it you could still you sometimes you bump into the wall and you have to like Center yourself and you have to like relax again and make sure you're not moving so that you don't touch things which can kind of uh dissolve The Experience their experiences meditation where you have that same experience where you lose your

165:30sense of the body but it 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' 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 a 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 enjoys marijuana or whatever but the 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

166:14long 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 the hamsters live like all that let let all that stuff run wild through your Mountain 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 you know quasi spiritual practice and they're not they're they're distinct so I me the the center of the bullseye for me is not suffering unnecessarily right so and so one thing that that mindfulness gives you is I mean so it's potent it's compatible with every experience you can have I me there there is nothing in your experience that isn't an appropriate object of meditation you just most

167:12people 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 you're just your goal is to just be clearly aware of whatever your experience is in each moment so it's emotions arise thoughts arise sounds come in your your attention is wide open to whatever your experience is so it's not like so nothing in principle is a distraction I mean there could you could be meditating right next to a construction site and the sound of of the Hammers is just as good an object of meditation as the breath or anything else so there's nothing everything is included Ed but the the the superpower you're after which you actually can acquire through this practice is to realize that virtually all of your of your psychological suffering and actually arguably virtually all of your your physical suffering I mean that or

168:11the the difference between physical pain and suffering which I mean those two are not quite the same thing um is a matter of being lost in thought it's a matter of thinking without knowing that you're thinking and what 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 I mean the the 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 IM istic 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 your experience moment to moment so like if you're if they're angry thoughts

169:04you'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 you feel you 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 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 I so it's like it's everything coming out of you is born of of this this same process and meditation is a way of recognizing that Consciousness I me what you are subjectively is a this prior condition of just awareness in which everything is showing up sound sensation and thoughts and thoughts can become just other objects of Consciousness and um so I mean to take even even a very basic um uh example of the difference

170:03between pain and suffering you can feel very strong physical pain I mean unpleasant pain and just be aware of it in that like the sense that it's unbearable is virtually always untrue because you in that moment you've already borne it right the feeling that something's unbearable is really the fear of having to experience it in the next moment in the future right because you're always like if if if some if someone drives a nail into your knee right you might well that's that that sounds like it's unbearable but every moment you're feeling it you're bearing it right it's like it's it's what you're what you're thinking about is the last moment and the next moment and you're thinking about how much you know when am I going to get some relief and you know what's what's the cure and how badly is my knee injured and you know like you're you're you're worried about the future

170:54continuously and you're not noticing the automaticity of thought that is that is amplifying the the the the negative negativity of the experience in that moment and we all know that you can have super intense sensation which is either either Pleasant or unpleasant depending on the on the conceptual frame you've put around it so for instance if if you had this you know massive um sense of soreness in your shoulder that 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 um be probably cancer and you're waiting for your you know the the biopsy results and and and uh you know you're worried about this is the thing the thing that's going to kill you um or you're getting raled you know like some deep tissue massage and it hurts like hell but you actually totally understand

171:52the 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 each one of those but the conceptual frame you you have around it totally dictates the level of psychological suffering and or or the 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 abs like what kind of different meditation exercises are there if you're talking about just concentrating on mindfulness and breathing uh as it turns out you can iterate off of that basic exercise in some to to like uh infinity essentially um because you talk about not only well I don't want to get too ahead of myself but basically the the the basic instructions are that we listed before

172:46you're feeling your breath coming in and 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 and that kind of objectifies the thing it's a little bit like put pressing the picture and picture button on your uh remote control where the story that's taken up the whole frame can be seen with some uh perspective uh so that's just one example of the little techniques that you can add onto the basic exercise and you can go for a long time so as we were

173:38discussing Sam's about to start his meditation app which is going to be called what Sam waking up waking up um 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 we have experts coming in like Joseph Goldstein who's again the friend of a friend of both Sam and I um uh and you each teacher has their own emphasis and you then start talking about applied meditation so how do I use it when we're how do I use it in my everyday life how do I use it if really what I want to do right now is um 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 abil your mindfulness your ability to know what's happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it to not overeat notice

174:32oh I'm having this urge right now to eat as I did last night an entire bag of malted uh uh chocolate in my hotel room uh but I don't I can ride that urge and not do the thing that I know is stupid um 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 have apps his isn't even out yet mine's not out yet no I feel uh not yet when his comes out and completely cannibalizes mine um then we'll see how how happy he is for me I actually 10% happier I'll be like negative 500% happier what's what's 10% of zero yeah exactly no I 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'm kind of I don't think it's Uber I don't think the business model is that there's just one huge app that everybody uses and maybe there's some

175:28distant you know second I actually think it's more a little bit more like fast food I think there's going to be a bunch of big players and uh and you may switch back and forth um and so I think it's does one need an app no no you don't but it I mean the thing that's useful and it's really useful at any level of expertise in in meditation at least this kind of meditation is me having someone guide you yeah it's it's like a a mindfulness alarm that's constantly going off or going off you know periodically over the course of 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long you're sitting and because distraction is just continually the problem I mean you're either meditating or you're distracted you're either you either aware of what's happening at that moment or you're lost in thought and that's true throughout your life life I mean you're either hearing what I'm saying

176:20right now or you're thinking about something else and and you don't know it right or you're you're either reading the book you're intending to read or your mind is wandering you're going to have to read that paragraph again so this this failure to concentrate this failure to be able to focus on what you're intending to focus on is it just this this Universal problem of human consciousness and um 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 uh very powerful even if you're even if it's your own voice I mean even in when I'm record listening to a meditation that I recorded just my own voice remember reminding me that I'm that I'm supposed to be meditating um it works like any other voice you know and it's um so it's it's just it's a feedback system that

177:16you can't really provide for yourself although you obviously you can I mean you can meditate without an app and and most people do I mean and I've spent very little time meditating with apps I just think they're they're very useful but you you know both of us started medita you started meditating well before I did but we both started pre the apps weren't around um uh so that you can read you can read a book read a good book and learn how to meditate out of the book um and just basically remember the basic instructions and do it uh but it really is useful to have an app especially for some people because one of the biggest problems in meditation is this persistant fear that you're not doing it right and so to have a voice you trust in your ear just giving you reminding you of the basic instructions which are so simple but very easy to forget it can be very useful I like the the idea of it

178:13being like bicep curls for your mind yeah I mean you see you see it in the brain scans um and now Sam will correct me where I run a fowl of scientific um accuracy here but this Bas this this um simple Act of sitting trying 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 uh the muscles uh the obviously muscles I'm using uh uh light Loosely you're boosting your focus muscle and in many cases well there was a study in 2010 I think was done at Harvard uh that took people who had never meditated before and they scanned their brains and then they had them do eight weeks of uh I think a half hour day of meditation the end of the8 weeks they scanned their brains again what they found was in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness the

179:09gray matter grew and in the area of the brain associated with stress the gray matter shrank that to me is pretty compelling that is beautiful yeah all right gentlemen we just did three hours wow wow flew by yes it did yes you very much thank you my pleasure fun fun as always yeah yeah all right everybody that's it go do something else bye