Anyone who has spent dozens of hours listening to Joe's podcast knows to a moral certainty that Joe is not racist. And there really is nothing more that needs to be said on that point. There is simply no workable definition of racism that includes Joe Rogan.

We have to be open to having other people point out errors in our thinking ... We have to be continually open to the possibility that we might be wrong and, in fact, we're very likely to be wrong a lot of the time.

You're far better off being vaccinated and eventually catching COVID as you will than catching it without having been vaccinated. Catching COVID is not a strategy for becoming immune to COVID; it's just catching COVID. And those who survive will have some natural immunity. The jury is no longer out on that score.

Kamala Harris is probably worse ... She still manages to speak in word salad in an apparent effort to talk down to people ... Many of the things she says are completely mystifying. It's like someone trained an AI on woke Twitter and had it talk to itself for the equivalent of 1,000 years, and it went properly insane.

Trump and Trumpism is not just a symptom of a deeper problem. They are that, too, but they are also a cancer that has been actively destroying our politics. You have to cut out the cancer.

It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to actually care about the race of another human being than Joe. So, if Joe Rogan is your version of a racist, you have reached a moral and political dead end.

People seem to prefer the company of murders and rapists to the prospect of being locked in a room with their own minds.

When we’re really just connecting with life in a joyful, creative, beautiful way… When you look out the window and it’s the most beautiful sunset ever, and you are just looking at the sunset—you’re fully connected with its beauty, those are all moments where you've lose this sense of self.

Trump has always been and remains a litmus test. The real Trump derangement syndrome is to not see how abnormal he is as a person and to not see or to not care how abnormal it is that such a person could have ever become the president of the United States.

We're in the middle of a pandemic. There is no compelling reason, at this point, to be worried about these vaccines. There is a compelling reason to be worried about just letting this pandemic burn through the unvaccinated population.

The moment you begin practicing mindfulness, which is just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience... You’re not adding anything to your experience; you’re just noticing what it’s like to be you moment to moment but in a way that’s not reactive. You’re not grasping at what’s pleasant or pushing what’s unpleasant away.

The contraction into self that is so toxic so much of the time, all of our deferring our happiness to some future time where we've met all of these goals that raise our status in comparison with everyone else we're comparing ourselves to, that whole stratum of being a person is a confection of endlessly thinking about ourselves—about our past and our future and even our present. And it's possible to punch through that, whether it's through using psychedelics or practicing meditation or just having you just a collision with the present moment that's engineered by something.

It seems to me that there's a very happy asymmetry in what happens to emotion the more truly mindful you become. The asymmetry is that negative emotion, like hatred or anger, really is predicated on a kind of lack of awareness and lack of understanding of specific things. And the more aware and cognizant you become of those things, the more starkly negative reactions begin to erode, certainly the half-life of them gets cut way down.

Watching this black man [George Floyd] who's already cuffed and immobilized and, therefore, no threat to anyone, watching him asphyxiated by the knee of a sadistic white Derek Chauvin... The whole country, the whole world saw that. Now, I would argue that this is a mass delusion ... I saw the same video and was just as appalled by it as any other morally sane person was, but the video itself offered absolutely no evidence of racism, zero. And I can show you an analogous video where the same thing happens to a white guy.

If we just put a stopwatch on this table, and people could just watch 30 seconds elapse, and set all of our listeners or viewers the task: for the next 30 seconds just pay attention to anything... without getting lost in thought ... If your life depended on it, you wouldn't be able to do it. If the fate of civilization depended on it, none of our listeners would be able to do this.

There's no question that the sadness and the pain are coming. And the time to train to get better at that, to get more equanimous, to be more flexible, is now. It's very hard to get a strong meditation practice in hand when you really need it. The time to do that is when life is great...

This administration is doomed and has been doomed almost since the very beginning. But Biden and Harris saved our democracy by beating Trump. And as odious and incompetent as the Democrats have become, there is simply no comparison between them and what the Republicans have become under Trump.

If you care about your own sanity, and you care about offering effective support to those around you, it’s worth paying attention to the mechanics of your own mental suffering, anxiety, self-concern, and agitation. The alternative is to promulgate your unhappiness to others.

There is no reason to think that Ivermectin is a surrogate for getting vaccinated, and there's no reason to think that people should be terrified of getting these vaccines. And that is the message that Bret [Weinstein] is spreading hour by hour by hour.

Mindfulness... is not a matter of blocking thoughts or hoping to get rid of thoughts; it's breaking the identification with thought, noticing thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness and not feeling that there's a thinker in addition to the next arising thought ... You're not authoring your thoughts; they're just appearing quite on their own.

There's an image in the Tibetan teachings that, in the end, thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house—nothing for them to steal.

Even if anger was totally warranted in the moment, nine times out of ten, it's best to used as a signal of the salience of the situation, ethically or emotionally. But then, it's far better to no longer be angry just to resolve the situation. To continue to speak and act from the impetus of anger is, in almost every case, made less effective in actually solving your problems.

If police are going to be looking to stop the most violent crimes, as they should, they are going to be meeting far many more black people—a disproportionate number of black people—than Asians in attempting to do that ... And if they're effective, they will be stopping the murders of, disproportionately, black people because [they're] the overwhelming number of victims of black crime. White people tend to kill white people; black people tend to kill black people.

When you're going to talk about the personal level—what is the difference between happiness and suffering, personally, in any moment—so much of that is a matter of this difference between being lost in thought and not. And until you learn how to meditate, until you learn how to actually pay attention to the flow of your own thoughts, that's not even a difference you can notice; you are just going to, by default, be lost in thought. You're going to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking.

I think it's a very important question: What's the point of examining the self, much less transcending it? There are several points; the main one is that it is the string upon which all of our suffering is strung.

Losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me: One is it totally undercuts the... psychological basis for hatred. Because when you think about the experience of hating other people, what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions.

About a thousand Americans are killed by cops each year. The vast majority of those people killed by cops were violently resisting arrest, usually with firearms.

I'm reasonably sure that if Elon polled his fans on X asking whether he should kick the Jews off the platform, he would get an impressively positive signal.

Having our beliefs map onto reality, to some degree, is obviously good because if they're not, you're just bumping into hard objects. If your map is completely wrong, you are bound to suffer.

Your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone needs to respect, and it's not even something that you should respect. It is simply an emotional reaction, which doesn't in and of itself have any content.

By learning to play the guitar, you're not going to learn what I'm calling meditation; and you're not going to learn it by, you know, cycling ... But, paradoxically... once you know how to meditate, then you can meditate doing all of those things.

Reinstating Alex Jones on the platform as Elon did this week wasn't a principled stand on anything; it was the quintessence of audience capture. Elon literally put the decision to a vote on X, and he let his dumb fans, most of whom now live in 'conspiristan,' simply tell him what to do.

I honestly don't know what I believe about affirmative action ... At one point, it was absolutely necessary, and it was obviously a lever that could be pulled to right a moral wrong and a social ill. But I think now we're at a point where it's creating its own negative effects. To name only one, it requires obvious racism against Asians at this moment to be enacted.

You really do have a choice of which mind to have. Just as much as you can choose to maintain your physical health, or you can choose what to eat and whether or not to exercise, you can choose what you do with your attention.

Meditation is a way of breaking that spell and actually being vividly aware of the present moment in a way that frees you from this automaticity of just viewing everything through your concepts and your discursiveness.

The freedom that you find in meditation is not a change in experience really; it's the recognition of the context of experience itself. You simply need to drop back and recognize the condition in which everything is already appearing—thoughts and intentions and moods and emotions, sensations, perceptions. Everything is simply appearing. As a matter of experience, there is no you apart from this flow.

I've become a very fickle reader in the sense that I cut my losses very early. The sunk cost fallacy has completely disappeared for me.

Every very experienced meditator who agrees with me about the nature of mind or who's kind of gone through this experience of looking closely enough and then finding that they're not who they thought they were, or that the sense of self is a construct or an illusion that can dissipate the moment it's clearly looked for, every person like that knows exactly what it's like to have not seen that originally.

I've never seen video of white suspects being mistreated by cops, and there are more of them ... There are more white people killed by cops every year than black people.

I don't know what the connection is between successful meditation and sleep, but I believe... there's at least one paper suggesting that it's actually inversely correlated, which is to say that the better you get at meditating, the worse you get at sleeping.

It's in identification with thought that the past and the future exert their weight on the present ... It's because we're processing everything we experience in the present through this scrim of discursive thought that we never actually make satisfying contact with the present, or we rarely do.

So much of our suffering in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it, worrying about it... everything we're doing with our minds but just feeling it.

Until you learn to meditate, you think that the outside world or the circumstances of your life always have to get arranged so that the present moment can become good enough to demand your attention in a way that seems fulfilling.

I don't see anyone arguing that we need more Jews in the 100-meter dash at the Olympics. And there are no Jews alleging anti-Semitism or the fact that Jews are not well represented on the podium at the Olympics.

The failings of our institutions need not lead to a total breakdown of trust in our institutions.

Once you know how to meditate, you discover that real mindfulness is free of effort. It, too, simply appears, like anything else. The clouds part all on their own. And you just notice the next thing you notice.

The normal range of psychological suffering, not clinical depression, but just feeling like life sucks and you’re a failure… That is a story of telling yourself a story.

If you're identified with thought habitually, you are at the mercy of whatever you happen to think about.

Meditation, really... In the end, it's actually not even a practice you're doing. In the end, it's something you're ceasing to do. It's no-distraction; you're ceasing to be distracted.