The lesson of life, as far as I can tell, is that you can't become happy. You can only be happy. We live most of our lives thinking we have to get all the things and all the accolades and all the pieces in place. Something more is required. And that more is finding a way to actually fall into the well of the present moment. You can actually just love people and love your life and recognize how beautiful life is even in its ordinary moments.
Welcome to our PropG Plus live stream. Today we're joined by Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, host of the Making Sense podcast, and five-time New York Times bestselling author, someone I describe as a mentor and a role model despite the fact he's younger than me. Sam, welcome to the live stream.
Thanks, Scott. Great to see you.
I thought of you over the weekend when I saw, and I don't know, well, I'm hoping you saw it or saw clips of it, Dana Bash's interview of RFK Jr. Did you see this?
No. I just heard rumors of it. Unfortunately, I have not watched it, but feel free to fill me in. I can well imagine.
He basically at one point said, 'Dana, you've got to stop listening to,' and he put air quotes up, 'the experts.' And I thought of you and I thought, okay, the notion of expertise and disavowing and believing that the term expert somehow means what you're saying is less truthful, and our inability to establish any sort of, to coagulate or establish consensus around something resembling science and expertise, or that there is a truth. And I thought of you. Any thoughts?
Well, no one can actually disavow expertise. I mean, we all know that knowledge is a thing. I mean, the difference between knowledge and ignorance is real and it often matters. It's just that many people in alternative media and MAGA culture and in the various pockets of weirdness on our information landscape have found other experts. There are people for whom Alex Jones is an expert, right? So it's not compatible with sanity to disavow any difference between knowing what's real and not, right? So you know, and you can see this, and if you watch, you know, Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, he will follow this RFK line of disavowing the so-called experts a lot. I mean, certainly if you get him talking on COVID or, you know, foreign affairs, I mean, many, many topics. But if you put someone in front of him who doesn't know anything about mixed martial arts and pretends to watch that, you've never seen a conversation unravel faster, right? I mean, because Joe is an expert on MMA and he's not going to suffer fools gladly, you know, in front of his own audience. And yet he just doesn't seem to recognize that he's suffering fool after fool in front of that same audience on other topics. And so an RFK Jr. is certainly one of those fools. Unfortunately, we have a politics now where, you know, all you have to be is a charismatic fraud and be incapable of feeling shame no matter how many times you're proven wrong, and, you know, our politics will promote you somewhere near the top of the heap.
And what do you think is the underpinnings of this loss of trust in our institutions? Is it social media that rewards novelty, which is Latin for [__] and conspiracy theory? It's just more interesting to think of what has created this level of distrust and erosion in our institutions.
I think it's that a lot. I mean, obviously conspiracy theories and an appetite for them predates social media and it even predates the internet. But I think there's no question that the internet generally and social media specifically has supercharged all of that. I mean, you can find yourself in an algorithmically defined echo chamber wherein your cherished ideas are never disconfirmed now. And you don't have to meet the weirdos who are producing the best evidence for these fake claims out in the real world anymore. I mean, it used to be that you'd have to go to a conference, you know, on the topic of, you know, government-suppressed secrets about UFOs and then meet all the weirdos, all the, you know, the Roswell cultists and Area 51 maniacs. And you'd see, one presumes, I never went to any of these conferences, but one presumes a certain number of people would bounce off the whole project merely by meeting the people who have devoted their lives to these [__] ideas. But on the internet, all that gets scrubbed. And the first time I noticed this was, you might remember this, but immediately after 9/11 or sometime thereafter, there was a very cheap, you know, fake documentary called Loose Change that was made by, I think, an 18-year-old in his, like the quintessential 18-year-old in his mother's basement. That just was like the first viral product of that moment that engineered the so-called 9/11 truth conspiracy economy. And it was just, you know, it was just a viral video, you know, one of the first. And it took in millions of people. And we got to the point where I think it was true to say, I think this poll was run somewhere around 2011, that 16% of Americans thought that 9/11 had been an inside job, right? So this is, we're living in that world now and it's just worse.
Yeah. I think of, I call it the jet lag effect, and that is, I travel a lot and as you get older, jet lag is a thing. And it's because, and I've done some work on it, that jet transportation, you know, traveling across the surface of the atmosphere at Mach 8 is something we've only been doing really, the majority of us have only been doing for a few decades. It's actually a fairly new phenomenon and our brain just hasn't caught up to the notion that you wake up one morning and the sun is in a different part of the sky and it messes, our brains just haven't caught up to it. And Derek Thompson said something, the writer for The Atlantic, and he has his own Substack now. He had this really interesting take and he said maybe we're not meant for all of us to broadcast, and that is our species hasn't caught up to how to process information and ultimately some semblance of a truth or consensus when all of a sudden everyone can broadcast anything. Have you given any thought to the notion of what it means when all of a sudden the media ecosystem is, and in some ways there's some wonderful stuff. A lot of great stuff bubbles to the top without the gatekeepers of MSNBC or Fox. I think there's some very positives, but do you think we're, what are your thoughts on maybe our species isn't quite ready or hasn't processed or adapted to the notion that we're all broadcasting information now?
Yeah, I think there's something to that. I mean, it's a little bit like what the close-up in cinema, you know, the introduction of that first did to us. I mean, that was, it's such a novel stimulus to be sitting in a room with a face that's, you know, 25 feet tall or whatever it is. And we, you know, we are living with a similar media manipulation of our minds, just in how we're consuming everything in short clips that are algorithmically boosting, you know, for the most part, telegenic people who are really, in many cases, are not qualified for anything other than being, you know, than gaming our attention in precisely that way. And we have political candidates who are thriving in that atmosphere and who many people still can't see the downside to. I mean, look at one of the cities you live in. I mean, it's being run by Mamdani, a DSA product. You were just on Bill Maher's show on Friday and Bill did that fantastic essay taking down the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. We should be really worried about this organization. And what's amazing is that they're making no effort to conceal how crazy their platform actually is. And yet we are electing people who represent that platform. Again, there's no subterfuge here. I mean, Mamdani claims to be a DSA candidate. The real issue is that he's very telegenic. He's very good on camera. He's got a kind of permanent smile plastered to his face. But if you double-click on anything he really cares about and believes or pretends to believe, it's just a raft of sinister [__]. I mean, it's pure communism on the DSA side. They not only want to get rid of the presidency and the Senate and capitalism and debt, but private property itself, right? I mean, there's just no hedging at all in the DSA platform. And they have married themselves to Islamism worldwide and it's become an explicitly anti-Semitic platform. And Mamdani and the other candidates he's signal-boosted are riding on top of all of this with these, you know, wink-wink, knowing smiles which are captivating to people. I mean, it's just people are, and especially the young who aren't, you know, for all their benefits of energy, are not really taking much time to discriminate, you know, what any of these ideas actually mean and what their consequences would be. So it really is, it is a, you know, obviously an analogous thing happened with Trump and MAGA on the right, but we're seeing frauds and grifters and moral lunatics win because of the media environment we've created for them.
Yeah. One of the reasons you're a role model for me is you just are sort of unafraid to, like, call a spade a spade or say, you know, no, there's no both-siding here. And I find that around Mamdani, I find myself saying, well, you know, a lot of creativity and dynamism in the Democratic Party is coming from the DSA. They're very charismatic. They're bringing energy. I think a lot of this is the bed we've made. My generation has convinced young people that capitalism is cronyism. And we haven't done a good job of explaining to them that capitalism, when it redistributes income to the middle class and when it has a strong social safety net, actually works better than any other system. So I feel like we've stuck our chin out. And I try to find, like, reasons to acknowledge why so many people in New York, I mean, Mamdani, quite frankly, is popular amongst a lot of Jews in New York.
Yeah, and like 30% voted for him.
And then I just can't help but look at, okay, he makes a point. There have been, I think, 10 or 11 people convicted by the International Criminal Court and the only one who makes a point of arresting is the Jew. There are four Christians, there are three Muslims, and there's one Jew and he's decided to say, that's the guy I'm going to arrest. And then when the white Christian nationalist commits an act of terror, he goes right to the ideology and that this is, you know, Islamophobia. And then when a Jewish person is stabbed by someone screaming 'Allah Akbar,' it's, oh, it's mental illness. It's not that, it's not the ideology's fault. It does feel. And then the litmus test around if I'm going to endorse you is, well, how... I do think there's real legitimacy to the notion of being, you know, not anti-Semitic, maybe even feeling Israel has a right to exist, but being anti-Netanyahu. I would put myself in that camp. But it always seems it breaches into, okay, the litmus test is how anti-Israel can you be before, are you willing to call it a genocide, which means you failed vocabulary in your English, and oh, are you willing to, oh, you showed up, you showed up on October 8th for an anti-Israel rally. You got my endorsement. I mean, it just feels like it's politely or not impolitely or whatever, however you want to call it, this does feel like it's spilling into just straight-out anti-Semitism. Your thoughts?
Oh, yeah. Well, it's, we're in the end zone of anti-Semitism. There's no question. On the left, also on the right. I mean, I'm happy to both-sides this, but to both-sides this accurately, you have to invoke some fairly ghoulish characters on the right to, you know, kind of balance the level of extremity. I mean, so someone like Hasan [__], you know, who's the darling of progressives at the moment, who's, you know, actually campaigning with people who, you got a call from Obama at this point. I mean, so they're mainstream Democrats who can't figure out how to totally disavow this guy. He got endlessly happy coverage in The New York Times in the last 12 months. He was given an op-ed himself. He was given a profile in the style section. He was put on a podcast where he celebrated the joys of looting against corporations you don't like. He's, you know, he's certainly adjacent to Mamdani in everything. But when you look at characters like Hasan [__], and I would say Mamdani, and certainly Ilhan, who's, you know, been signal-boosted by both, and who may well become a senator, certainly seems likely at this point. On the right, you have to look at people like Nick Fuentes, or weirdos like, you know, now Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, people who are just, you know, lying as freely as they breathe and are explicitly demagogues and anti-Semites and committed to projects that we know are socially toxic. In some sense, in some very perverse way, you know, horseshoe theory is real on this one topic of the Jews, right? I mean, this, you know, horseshoe theory, I think, can be exaggerated. This claim that if you go far enough left and far enough right, you start to meet people whose political convictions become more or less indistinguishable. On the Jews, that is certainly true, right? You know, the Jews run the world secretly. They're wielding unearned power to the disadvantage of everyone we care about, and all the wars were created by them. And you've got Tucker Carlson and, you know, even Joe Rogan promoting Holocaust revisionists who say that, you know, Winston Churchill was the bad guy in World War II and he was misled by Jewish financiers and the Holocaust didn't quite happen. All of that is getting mainstreamed now. And if you go far enough left and far enough right, you're just meeting fabulous conspiracists and weirdos. But the problem for Democrats, especially at this moment, I mean, you know, you and I could talk for three hours about what's wrong with MAGA and what's wrong with Trump and why we want to course-correct in 2028. The problem with Democrats is they seem to be getting ready to commit suicide by not clearly drawing the line, as our friend Bill Maher did in that last essay on Friday night, where pointing to, leave the anti-Semitism aside, leave the marriage to Islamist, you know, theocratic fanaticism aside. It's all too real and awful, but this is a communist organization, right? It's preaching the downfall of basically everything that has produced wealth and social order in our society for, you know, centuries at this point. And communism has failed everywhere it has been tried and failed in the most ghastly possible way. And these people are running as communists and they're not even hiding it. And the Democrats, mainstream Democrats, I mean, people who are, you know, the short list of people we could name who might be plausible in 2028, have not figured out how to Sister Souljah this moment. I guess the exception of Rahm Emanuel, however plausible or implausible you find his candidacy, he's the one guy who said, 'All right, this is clearly [__] and we should want nothing to do with it.' But still, right. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, I love the horseshoe. I think it's worth pointing out that whenever the far left and the far right meet on anything, you know, it's a really bad [__] idea. Anti-Semitism, anti-vaccination, socialism, isolationism, and they actually do come together on a variety of things. People forget that the anti-vaccination conspiracy theory was started in the far left, right? Don't put corporate, don't put corporate chemicals into your body.
Yeah, there were private schools on the west side of Los Angeles that had lower vaccination rates than any country in sub-Saharan Africa.
I mean, it's just... I am sympathetic, however, to the argument that, first off, I never underestimate the Democrats' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I was feeling so good about these elections and I thought, 'Oh shit.' Then I saw Shiovalia. I'm like, 'She is about to become the poster child for Republicans.' And when Mamdani, I don't know if you heard this, he released a list of 950,000 names or addresses that were subject to attacks. I want to be clear that was public information. But when you put it out and imply these people have done something wrong, and you already have their tax, you know, you already have their tax filings and you could just tax them. I'm actually in favor of the pied-à-terre tax. An absentee wealthy owner, in my view, should be subsidizing the property taxes of a nurse working at NYU Langone that has to spend 40% of her income on rent. I'm in favor of the tax. It's going to cost me a lot of money. I get it. But to release addresses, it feels like implying you've done something wrong, that, oh, I'm going to dox that they have done something wrong and I want everyone to know who they are. This feels like just straight-up doxing to me. Do I have this wrong?
Oh, no. It's dangerous. I mean, it's clear you're having CEOs assassinated at dawn on the streets of Manhattan, right? That's the context. It's, this is, I mean, it's just deeply unethical, you know? But again, these people are fanatics and they're not hiding their fanaticism. I mean, Mamdani's smile is doing 90% of the work. He is a fanatic. He's an ideologue. The DSA platform is insane. Wealth is evil, right? The accumulation of wealth is evil. Private property is evil, right? So forget about a pied-à-terre tax. Private property is something they want abolished. It's just, this is not, you know, you can get stoned and not even understand how anyone could entertain these ideas in college. I mean, it's just, this is absolute madness. And again, not concealed. Everyone should go to the, you should drop the DSA website into the show notes, right? So people can just read the platform for themselves. It's, you know, this is analogous to, I mean, it's understandable that some people don't immediately see what's dangerous about doxing or, you know, you and I are semi-public figures who, you know, occasionally receive death threats. And so, you know, doxing is a real issue. And when Mamdani stands in front of Ken Griffin's building and points it out as the, you know, the signature example of everything is wrong in our society at this moment, that a man could own a, I think, a $238 million apartment. Whatever you think about wealth inequality, that is dangerous. And, you know, the stuff that was happening, this goes back all the way to when, forget the name of the group, but when people were, you probably remember this, there was a group that was hitting some prominent people in the face with pies, right? They would have like a pie of, you know, whipped cream and they did it to Bill Gates, I think, and they did it to a few other people. And this, you know, this gets lots of laughs for people who are not thinking about it, but what that does is show how easy it is for anyone to kill someone in public no matter how much security they have, right? So it's a mock assassination, right? It's like, I could touch you. Watch this. And it is for the mayor of New York to be doing this to the richest people in New York. I mean, that is, forget about the morality of it. I mean, just if you just want to safeguard the economic future of the city, why would you do that?
Yeah. I think he's turned actually what I think is good tax policy into a wanted poster, and it's so self-defeating because I'm a believer that you can't continue to have $7 trillion in expenditures on $5 trillion in receipts. And do we need to raise taxes or cut spending? The answer is yes. But what Mamdani has done is just made it more difficult to have more progressive tax policies locally and nationally because the Republicans will frame this as, see, they're not trying to be responsible. They see taxation as persecution. And he's just feeding into their talking points. And what I find generally speaking, and I see this a lot in England, is that people would rather tickle the sensibilities of upper-middle-class educated voters and reduce the tax base such that they can in fact afford the policies that they advocate for. Okay. One of the distinguishing features that I think is a real positive between America and Europe. I think Europe has basically decided with some of their economic policies that we'd rather be worse off as a whole but feel more equal, and the US has always said we're comfortable with a certain level of inequality as long as we're better off as a whole. Now, having said that, I think that's no longer the truth. I think that truth, that compact has been broken, that the massive income inequality is now beginning to come at the cost of the entire economy and the lower-middle-class households. But this feels oddly, I don't know, oddly like short-term, like let's get a sugar high and then reduce the economic growth such that we can't afford to pay for SNAP and the things that we're advocates for. Do you worry though, I am sympathetic to the argument that progressives, that we're spending too much time fighting each other and it's taking away our ammunition and our firepower from the corruption, the weirdness, the anti-science of the left, that as Democrats we're very good, and you said this, I parroted this from you, that, okay, you're my ally, we're in the trenches together, but you're holding the gun wrong, so I'm going to execute you at dawn. Do you worry that we're going to spend so much time doing the Republicans' work, being critical of one another, that we're kind of playing into their hands?
Well, I mean, I worry that framing it that way will cause people to hesitate to disavow the lunatics on the far left. I mean, I just, it should be, we should be able to make very short work of the DSA, right? I just, there's no reason to talk to them, right? They should not be, they should not be in the conversation, right? I mean, that's like, if we can't figure that out, it's just, there's no way we're going to win in 2028. I mean, it could be against JD Vance, it could be against Rubio, that would even be harder, you know, it could be against Don Jr. There's no way this country is going to elect communists, right? Or communist-adjacent people at the national level. And I mean, unfortunately, this is, there are points of contact between the, you know, the radicalism of the DSA and far more mainstream figures, or seemingly mainstream figures, people like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. I mean, they have both said that it's, in so many words, it's impossible to become a billionaire ethically, right? All billionaires have, in some people's minds, committed a crime, right? That they're guilty of fraud, they're guilty of treating people terribly, you know, try to run that analysis on Taylor Swift, right? I mean, how does that work? Yeah. And so it's just, it's just not, it's the wrong center of gravity for a truly ethical and accurate concern around wealth inequality. I mean, I think you and I are both as concerned about wealth inequality as almost anyone. But I think it's a real issue. I think it is the, it's the potentially society-shattering issue once AI gets fully rolled out in all the ways that it seems destined to be. We have to get our arms around wealth inequality. But to demonize wealth, right, and wealth creation, and to not see that if you're adding enough value to people's lives at scale, it is possible in the current economy to get fabulously wealthy, right? In ways that are not unethical, right? You've just, people are just telling you that they love your work and they're going to give you another $5 and all of a sudden you're a billionaire. That person should not be burned as a witch. And that if you go far enough left, and you don't have to go too far left, that people can't figure that out.
I just, I can't help, I feel as if we've made our bed here though, Sam. I feel as if the people of my generation have been practicing not capitalism but cronyism, and young people see all of this prosperity which was supposedly capitalism that they were supposed to participate in. We privatized the gains on the way up. We've socialized the losses on the way down to bailouts. We've spent an incremental $700 billion a year on seniors, an incremental $20 billion on children. Young families are struggling, and yet every day they get vomited on their phone 110 reminders that they're mathematically not shaping up, or relatively speaking, to the other people. And what do you know? Young people are conflating capitalism with cronyism. It feels like we had this coming, and that I'm sympathetic to the fact that this notion of capitalism that people of our generation massively benefited from, they did not. And we haven't outlined a true vision. And the Democrats do. The Democrats have been overrun. You know, taxes went down during Biden. You know, the last 40 years, unprecedented prosperity, but the average 30-year-old is 24% less wealthy. The average 70-year-old is 7... I feel as if we've had this coming. And quite frankly, a lot of this is our own fault because we're clinging to something that just didn't work for them. And now we're trying to dig our way out of a hole that we dug. It's just, I share your concern. But I feel like quite frankly, you know, the chickens have come home to roost. We liked capitalism as long as it was... Go ahead.
Let's be honest about where the biggest chickens are. I mean, now we just learned that you can pay, you know, you or anyone, anyone like you could pay $100,000 a month to Trump to get early access to his Truth Social posts to front-run the market, right? Right. I mean, if that isn't insider trading, I don't know what is, but apparently it's legal or it's legal enough for, you know, Trump to put a cash register on it, at least for this week. I mean, so the level of corruption in Trumpistan is something we have never seen in American history. I mean, there's like, you could, you and I could spend the rest of this hour just listing the things he's done to enrich himself by trading away the policies and institutions and reputation of our country on the world stage. I mean, just the tariff policy that everything, and he's made, you know, he and his family have made now billions of dollars in the last 12 months doing that. It's, yes, yes, there's a both-sides to this story, too. I mean, you, I think Nancy Pelosi is one of the great stock traders of all time. So that's... up 600% versus Buffett at 300% and the S&P at 200%. So the scale, but the scale matters, right? And we have a, we have to keep that in perspective. And we also have to recognize that we, there's, for all the people, for all the wealthy people being asked to pay more taxes, there's an understandable cynicism you meet first, which is, what is the government going to do with the show? What's, show me the success story where giving the government more money has really worked in the way that you're hoping? And if you look at some of the wealthy, I mean, if you look at California and you look at the level of mismanagement here, it is easy to be cynical about the just simply dumping more money into the machine of governance because the governance has been so bad. So we need, you know, that of course, you know, in our brains, that's not an argument against taxation. That's an argument for good governance, right? We need competent people and good policies, and we need to find bad incentives wherever they exist and root them out. And yeah, so if the teachers' union is stifling our ability to ever fire a teacher so as to improve the quality of the schools, well, then that's something that has to be dealt with, right? And you need Democrats who are willing to go against the teachers' union in that case. So we've got this system of incentives, and in particular on the Democratic side, we have this coalitional structure to all our politics that is a real albatross. I mean, it's just not, it makes it very hard to be honest about what's going to work and to cut dead weight. So we have to, you know, we have a lot to sort out, but we are up against the most corrupt and self-dealing bunch of people we have ever seen, and it's, that is worth demonizing and responding to. And we just can't, you know, but it's simply crazy to be demonizing wealth itself, wealth itself, or financial success itself in principle as somehow, and make that a kind of load-bearing plank of Democratic policy.
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I want to talk a little bit about attention because I think of you as someone who focuses a lot on it. And that is where we spend our attention and how it impacts our well-being and our sense of peace. And I take August off and one of the things I try to do is I try to stay off the social media and I try to, I don't want, I call it almost like a 30-day really bad version of meditation. And I'm terrible at meditation. I've never given it much thought. You're obviously a real thought leader around meditation and have a successful app helping people embrace it and use it incorporated in a healthy way into their lives. When I think of meditation, I think of, okay, how do I like be attentive to as little as possible as a means of almost like a disposal or a reset? And I might be thinking about it incorrectly, but how do you think about attention, the importance of a rinse cycle and what's happening now with our attention? I'm addicted to my phone and I constantly want to pick it up and check my stocks or tweets or not tweets, threads or see the latest news or news alerts or who's texted me a story or whatever it is. Talk a little bit about the attention economy. What you see are the threats to our attention and what meditation, you know, where meditation and an attention reset kind of, where the overlap is there.
The first thing to acknowledge is that all we really have is our attention. You know, the quality of our life really is a story of what we're paying attention to and what we can notice, right? The quality of our attention and where it is aimed. I mean, that's even more true than of time. I mean, most people think that time is the one non-renewable resource and, you know, that's true. You just can't get this hour back. But the quality of the hour is dictated by what you're paying attention to. And we see, we all know what it's like to safeguard our time and then to somehow squander it, right? You set aside an hour to just have some, you know, quote, quality time with your kids, but then you [__] it up by being on your phone or saying something petty or something went, you know, off-kilter and it wasn't what you hoped it would be and yet you still spent the time to have that mediocre experience. Attention really is the...
Whole story, and you are paying attention to something every moment of the day, right? The moment you wake up, your attention is seized by something, and you go from moment to moment throughout your life until you struggle to fall asleep again each night. And our attention is being... you know, this is an ancient problem. I mean, so when you talk about meditation, some of the best instruction in meditation came 2,500 years ago from the Buddha in India at 500 BC. And that was obviously a world in which there were no devices, you know, vying for our, you know, in competition with our natural ability to be distracted by the things we want and the things we don't want and the things we're afraid of and the things we regret. And so we're living in a much more highly weaponized environment where this, you know, the smartphone in our pocket has canceled the very possibility of boredom.
Right? It used to be that you could get bored and you could become interested in that fact, right? You're sitting in a waiting room, you know, the doctor's taking an hour to see you and there's no magazines worth reading and you're just left with your thoughts. And you might have noticed in that situation that your mind is not at rest. It's not at ease. You're just actually not comfortable in your own skin. And you're casting about trying to find something worth paying attention to and you're uncomfortable. Very few of us have that experience anymore because we can always relieve boredom by watching something or reading something or listening to something. And I, you know, in some ways that's a good thing. I mean, I'm not really just... I'm not advocating boredom in principle as a good experience, but what it used to allow many of us to discover is that there's something on the other side of boredom, right? And boredom really is an illusion. It's a... I mean, boredom really is just lack of attention.
I mean, when you go on a meditation retreat and do nothing but meditate, you're in silence and you're doing nothing but pay attention to your moment-to-moment experience. You're not reading, you're not writing, you're not watching anything. Obviously, you're not having conversations with people. You just are noticing sights and sounds and sensations moment by moment and then the arising of each subsequent thought. When you just become the witness of your experience in that way, that is meditation. And the moment you can actually do it, the moment you actually build a little bit of concentration in that direction, you discover that boredom is a total illusion. There it was just... boredom is just an inability to pay attention. And if the breath can become, you know, just the feeling of breathing can become absolutely captivating, which it can, you know, given sufficient concentration, then nothing in principle is boring, right? So, but very few of us are ever moved to discover that now. And especially with, you know, short-form video, you can just endlessly scroll your life away and get this dopaminergic relief from your general incapacity to just be comfortable in the privacy of your own mind. And meditation really is the antidote to that, you know.
And it's... I mean, the place to see it really is like when you wake up in the middle of the night, you know, it's 3:00 in the morning and you're now waiting to go back to sleep. I mean, just, you know, who is it who wakes up there, right? How racked are you by unpleasant life thoughts and how do you deal with those thoughts? I mean, a thought of, you know, concern about whether you're a good enough spouse or parent or like just what sort of rabbit holes can you get into at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and just how fully have you made your own mind your friend in those moments? Because I mean, it's really... and or how fully have you failed to do that. I mean, most people's minds are sufficiently out of control that it's really analogous to having some lunatic kick down the front door of your house and, you know, every morning the moment you wake up and just follow you from room to room talking to you and you can never get away from this person, right? You're just thinking, thinking, thinking every moment of the day and telling yourself the same stories over and over again and for some reason, you never get bored. I mean, you can perseverate on the same set of thoughts a hundred times. If you told your best friend those thoughts three times in a row, they would suggest you consult a neurologist because you're repeating yourself. But you'll repeat yourself to yourself endlessly in the privacy of your mind. And people think this is normal, but it's all too normal in the sense that virtually everyone does it, but it's not normal in the sense of being good or compatible with real happiness.
And so meditation is just the simplest way to think about it. It is the ability to notice in each moment what you're actually noticing without being distracted by thought. I mean, you're just actually making clear contact with your life, including thoughts. It's not a matter of getting rid of thoughts, but it's a matter of noticing thoughts once they've arisen in your mind. And that's a very rare situation. For what happens for most people is a thought arises and it sneaks up on us and it just feels like what you are. You know, it's like the voice in your head feels like yourself. Whereas in reality there's a tremendous amount of space around it. It's just a piece of language. It's just a bit of imagery. It's a little bit like a dream. It's like a waking daydream and it's not yourself, right? It's part of the contents of consciousness and you can keep dropping back and just noticing that and that's where the real relief that is often promised in meditation is to be found.
