Sam Harris on Islam, Dropping Acid, Joe Rogan, Vaccine Pseudoscience, the Wonders of Meditation, Collaborating with Ricky Gervais, and the Myth of Free Will

The single decision a person can make in life that clarifies almost everything else and closes the door to the most egregious forms of unnecessary suffering in relationship and one's career and in business, deciding not to lie is just the master decision.

Why not have Bret Weinstein on the podcast to debate all of his wingnuttery around vaccines? It's a waste of time and probably worse. It's a waste of time that is that is liable to confuse a significant percentage of the audience.

This is an objective claim about the nature of the mind: Boredom is just a failure to pay attention. There's nothing that's intrinsically boring.

All of these states of mind, including boredom, can be made the object of meditation. You can take boredom as its own focus, because it's a feeling state, and... paradoxically, you can become interested in boredom, and then it evaporates.

Give yourself the most comfortable chair and a quite beautiful room... but nothing to do. Why is that not a purely pleasant experience? On my account, there's nothing you need to believe ... You can get the entire project of becoming just like the Buddha off the ground by paying close attention. That's my thesis.

A silent meditation retreat is often the necessary crucible for people to be forced long enough and hard enough into the present moment so that they actually have something like a breakthrough, and then they recognize, okay, this is what meditation is.

Psychedelics don't do anything to the brain that the brain is incapable of doing itself—they're mimicking neurotransmitters or they're changing the reuptake rate of neurotransmitters. It's all pharmacology in there.

Meditation is the only thing that human beings have ever devised to seize the reins of attention directly and... decouple its vagaries from all the other happenstance of life.

So much of my intellectual project is to identify and dispense with dogma. I think dogma is really at the root of almost everything that ails us ethically, intellectually, politically...

The one thing that's true of psychedelics that isn't true of meditation is you're guaranteed to have an effect.

Everything gets better when you start being honest, and the stuff that wasn't getting better magically disappears.