Sam Harris, Ph.D.: The transformative power of mindfulness

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everyone, welcome to this week's edition of The Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. Our guest this week is Sam Harris, someone I consider a friend, a mentor, a teacher. I met Sam about four years ago, and I suspect many of you already know about Sam or are familiar with his work, but in case you're not, let me say a few words on that. Sam trained in neuroscience, he has a PhD in neuroscience, but in many ways I consider him a philosopher and frankly just one of the greatest minds that I know. He's an author of some extraordinary books, The End of Faith being his first, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and probably my favorite, which you've also probably heard me talk about, is Waking Up, a book that I've read I think three times now and I'm almost at the point where I understand half of it.
Sam is also the host of arguably, I would say the most important podcast to me, The Waking Up Podcast, and he is also the creator of an app for meditation called, appropriately, Waking Up. I had the privilege of beta testing it for about nine months before it went live and it is now officially live. And for anyone who meditates, I would consider this an essential part of your meditation app routine. You've probably heard me talk a lot about this in the past few months, the importance of distress tolerance, mindfulness, the ability to understand what's going on inside our own heads as a tool to be less unhappy. And that might sound kind of blah, but the reality of it is I've never spent more time thinking about this than I have in probably the last 12 to 18 months. And Sam has been such an important part of helping me think about that. And this podcast is pretty long. It's almost three hours. In that time, we go into a lot of this stuff. I'm pretty open about how much Sam has helped me. And though I think at times it turns into more of a discussion than an interview, I think we always sort of veer back to the place where you as the listener are going to get something out of this. If you're not familiar with Sam, I can't encourage you enough to listen to this podcast. And if it piques your curiosity, dig a little bit deeper into this. Couple of housekeeping items. Obviously we're going to release this today instead of the day before Christmas. So this is kind of coming out a bit early and over the next week or so, we haven't quite figured out the schedule yet, but don't worry, we'll be back to kind of our regular schedule in January. If you haven't already done so and you're interested, please sign up for our weekly email. That's on the site, www.peterattiamd.com, and somewhere on there, there'll be a little place to prompt you to sign up for that. And if you don't like it, just unsubscribe. We also have great show notes, which everybody keeps raving about, and I'm really proud of our team for the work they do. I, to be clear, don't do any of that work, but I like that people are spending time on them, especially when it comes to following up on all of the nuances and details that we go into. Finally, if you're enjoying this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast Reviews and leave a favorable review. And if you are not enjoying it and you feel so inclined to leave a review, please do so, but try to be as constructive as possible because it's a lot easier to course correct if it's constructive than if you just tell me it sucks.
Without anything further to say, here is my guest, Sam Harris.
Well, Sam, thanks so much for making time today.
This is a first for me. I'm coming to someone else's studio to record.

**Sam Harris** (3:57)
Yeah, well, you're getting the game long enough, if this is the way it happens.

**Peter Attia** (4:02)
Well, I really appreciate it.
There's so much I want to talk about today, but I also want to be thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to people I take care of. In many ways, that's sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on podcasts is things that I can then share with my patients and things like that. I don't know if you remember this, but almost a year ago, I called you or I emailed you and said, hey man, do you have time to talk? And you said, yeah. And it was like, actually, I know when it was. It was right after Christmas. It was like the day after Christmas. Yeah, it was the 26th of December.