SIO139: Eli Bosnick on Meditation

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 139. I'm your host Thomas Smith. And today I'm going to be speaking with Eli Bosnick. You know him from all the shows. Most famously, Godawful Movies and Scathing Atheist. But Eli's here to talk about something different. He's here to talk about a rough time in his life that led to meditation, which has really helped him in the last year, and it's fascinating. It's an interesting topic. It's something he's kind of gotten me into a little bit. We'll talk about it in let's get over to the interview. I With Eli Bosnick. How's it going Eli Bosnick?

0:01:12 Eli: Hey, Thomas, thanks for having me back.

0:01:14 Thomas: Okay, and then I'm getting, let's see, Skyping in Brian and Dimitri here and yeah

0:01:19 Eli: Good, good, now I'm full crazy, so it's good, it's great. It's like...

0:01:22 Thomas: Little inside It's no, actually Here's the other truth for the little inside humor for people who have been listening for a long time. I was going to joke that I was Skyping in those other two assholes that we did a thing with, but I cannot remember their names and I can't, I I can't find the episode. Like I searched, I literally did some groundwork to set up that joke. I was like, search Eli Bosnick on my old posts and it doesn't come up. So I don't know if I, did I not publish that? I published it, right?

0:01:43 Eli: It's All gone, it on my IMDB page, that's all I know. But see, here's the good thing, if you did, I'm broken now, so, it'd be like if the next Rocky movie was after Apollo was dead, right, and Rocky's just, cause now I am gone, all of my spirit is broken, so now it would just be Rocky being like, like, "Adrian, I'm pretty sure this is illegal." It'd be a lot of fun, just my desiccated corpse lying there, covered in illustrious beard That's

0:02:15 Thomas: Well, this is a fantastic way to introduce what we want to talk about, which is meditation. Being centered and grounded, all the things that you are.

0:02:28 Eli: Right, that I am, exactly, because look, here's the thing, if I'm gonna come on your show and try to convince people to meditate, I should be a beacon of sanity and normalcy.

0:02:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:02:40 Thomas: Maybe we should rethink this. Yeah maybe we should just record you just talking in a monotone the whole time, just like, excellent question.

0:02:40 Eli: Okay We Can auto-tune it well Thomas

0:02:49 Thomas: Yeah oh man um no but but very very seriously. This is actually something we've been going back and forth about for a while. And it's, I mean, this is something Sam Harris used to do before. He used to talk about meditation and, and doing meditation in a way that's not woo in a way. That's not, um, it's not even necessarily Buddhist, although it's I think it's still hangs on to some of that or a lot of that, but, but um, but I think it's interesting interesting because why don't you tell us about the science of it or, or if you'd like to start somewhere else we can, cause I really actually want to hear your, uh, kind of trip into this and what, what spawned it for you too.

0:03:17 Eli: Yeah for me there's sort of two approaches to getting people to meditate. Uh, the first is what I call like the medicine shit, and then the second is what I call like the wooey shit. And some people that works for, and some people it really doesn't. But the medical, the shit is, is pretty simple, it is. I think if I sat most people down who have anxiety and depression and a variety of other mental illnesses, or just wanted to be happier, just wanted to be less stressed, wanted to eat better, and I said, "Okay, you know, there's this new drug, it's Lexapro, slow drip," um, and it's great, medications, it's, it's got all these benefits. Look at all these benefits. And I showed them study after study after study of the benefits. But you got to sit down and close your eyes while you take it. It makes you sensitive to light. You can't move around.

0:04:16 Eli: It is on a slow drip IV. I can't think of many people who are currently treating their mental health that would be like, oh, cannot do it. I'm sorry, Eli. I just I'm not. I have to pull IVs out of my arms. I am not the person. I am not the person. But when I show this exact same data to people with those exact same conditions about meditation, people begin to describe to me their brain being magical in a way that it's not, right? And this, and I'm sure you identify this, you tell someone, you know, "Hey, you should really try meditation," they're like, "Nah, I can't do it, sorry, it's just not not for me." And you're like, "Oh, really? Did you try a lot?" "Nope, I have literally never tried, not not once, ever."

0:04:26 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I can, you know, I'm not going to make the dad joke of, I resemble that remark. But, but no, that, I can relate to that. That's a powerful argument you make there, but

0:05:02 Eli: Yeah I mean the the thing that I always do when it comes to sort of the evidence of this, and we got skeptics listening, is I say, just get on Google Scholar and type in meditation and just read the studies. And after a certain amount of time of reading those studies, you're going to go, okay, I don't not have evidence that this could help me. But to be fair to the people who have resisted trying it, meditation has been the purview and the sale of almost entirely Wu merchants up until I would say the last 20 or 30 years. So the resistance to meditation is not unfounded, right? Most of the people talking about meditation up until I would say the mid 80s or so, unless you really, really looked into it, were Deepak Chopra, right, certainly in the easily absorbable kind, like the book Three Pillars by Philip Kapleau's been around forever, but like, no one was like, Hey, you reading Three Pillars? You're like the Japanese translation or the, no, no it's, no.

0:05:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:17 Eli: It's reading these like first practical tomes on mindfulness. And I think just just now in the past few years as it has become more mainstream, um, and as it become more Westernized, we see that meditation, like yoga, which was once this thing practiced that had very specific religious and cultural connotations, is now a healthy activity that everyone can participate in in a secular way. And that's really what I want to push. Is something easy to do, it is practical, and there are tremendous benefits to it, both tangible and real that you're going to read about on Google Scholar. And I also want to talk about some of the intangible wooey bullshit as well. I mean, that's important and I want to pitch some woo as well

0:07:02 Thomas: Yeah, it occurs to me that the comparison you use in the beginning is definitely valid in some ways, but it's also, I mean, we know a ton of stuff that would make us healthier that we don't do. And like going on a a walk every day would absolutely make us all way healthier. And if someone said here, I've got a pill that you just take, and it's the equivalent of a walk. Like, I feel like we would all do that. Whereas the effort of having to go on a walk everyday, sometimes, you know, maybe it's fine most days, maybe its fine some days, but some days it's like, ah, crap, I just don't have time. Didn't get to do it, whatever. And that's kind of where, sort of more where I am with meditation. It it's, I'm resistant in a way that is not, doesn't make any sense, but, uh, but we'll get to that. I want to know, when did you start doing this? When did you get into it?

0:07:38 Eli: So I've been a meditator really regularly for about four and a half, five years now. But I started a sort of serious and long-term practice, I would say, about a year ago. And that's when I, you know, committed to doing it daily, when I committed to doing it for longer periods of time. And there's a really good metaphor that I like, which is that there's sort of stress ball meditation, which I highly recommend for people starting out. Five minutes, three minutes, a minute, you know, three deep breaths, you know, the sort of very, very basic tenets of mindfulness, which I did for years and years and years. They were just things that I used to cope with. I got pissed off. I focused on my breathing or I was mourning. I was dealing with something really hard in my life.

0:08:38 Eli: I would focus on my breathing, maybe even sit down and like close my eyes. But generally meditation wasn't something I practiced. And then in the last year or so, basically what caused it is I had a really, really, really bad depressive couple of months, to the extent that they got worrisome and I felt less safe than usual. Um, and so I, it was actually just after my wedding anniversary last year with my wife in August, so almost exactly a year ago. Um, and we had the, we sort of did a wedding anniversary stuff and we were sitting there talking and I was like, do you feel, what, what are your goals as a wife next year? Because we always do sort of, what are your goals, as birthdays, we talk about what are your goals for next year, New Year's, what are our goals for the next year, you know, we're big into to goals, me and Anna.

0:09:25 Eli: And she was like, oh, I want to do this, this, and this. And I started to think about myself because she had answered the question. And then I realized that I felt like I had not been a very good husband.

And that really hit me, that my depression and my anxiety and my social media addiction and my politics and news addiction and my desire to fight and sort of wrassle and fight amongst my community had gotten so bad that when I looked at it from the outside, I actually didn't feel like I had done a good job being a husband and being a partner to my wife. And I made some changes right there and then that I have stuck to since.

And one was getting back into exercise, which is super duper important. But the second was to really commit myself to meditation, that it was no longer going to be this occasional thing I did, but that I was actually going to put the time and practice in, that I knew the science worked and that it wasn't me that deserved better, but Anna deserved better. And the changes I saw in the last year because of that have been so monumental that I've become, you know, a little bit of more of a preacher of it, because it's, uh, it's made this year the easiest for my depression and anxiety it's been in years.

Um, I feel like I have a whole new set of toolbox. And again, I can't emphasize this enough, there have, have been some truly revelatory experiences inside meditation that have changed the way I view the world and the people around me and the things I want and the things I do in my life.

0:11:02 Thomas: Wow. So it wasn't necessarily anybody advocating for it or a book you read that set you off. It was, you kind of already knew about it and the potential benefits, but it was just that, that,that feeling that you needed to actually commit harder to it. Is that right?

0:11:17 Eli: Yeah, and I think a lot of people will, will verify that this is true of, you know, their atheism, or it's true of certain beliefs, bad beliefs they had that they woke up from, which is that I had had dribs and drabs of it in my life. And then it all sort of coalesced together. So my aunt is a lay Buddhist priestess. She's actually a Zazen priestess, she runs the Zazen Center in Cleveland, Ohio. And I knew that she and my uncle meditated, I would sort of see their books and meditation stuff around all growing up. But I sort of, it was their religion, right? It was like the way other people's aunts have crucifixes and stuff.

0:11:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:11:52 Eli: My aunt had like, cushions and statues of a smiley guy. And I was like, okay, that's their thing. That's their religion. Then I read Sam's book, Waking Up, which is interesting in some ways. Like a lot of Sam's books, you can sort of take out the first two chapters and then you get into the good stuff, right? Because he's always got to be like, the history of the word meditate. And you're like, ah, too stupid. Move on. And I like that. But then I read Dan Harris's book, 10% Happier, and that was much more plain language and really, really got me interested in sort of establishing a practice. And then this past year, sort of just in perfect coincidence with my own desire to be better and do better, he released his second book, Dan Harris released his 2nd book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, which might as well have been called Meditation Fat Eli. And so I, I read it and started to practice and saw the benefits right away and have sort of been proselytizing ever since.

0:11:53 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:12:51 Thomas: Okay. So, so it was a bit of a, it was the result of, of reading that book partially. I mean, it's a lot of things, but okay. So I, here's, what's hilarious to me. And you can, I invite you to, to give a nice full hearty laugh at, at my expense. Cause we talked about this, I don't know, a month ago, some months back, some sort of conference or something. I don't know, we started talking about it and you gave a good pitch for it. And it's something, now I'm not personally feeling that same incredible dire need that it feels like you were feeling. Like I'm not at that point personally, but it's Something where I was like, yeah, that does sound interesting. So I, but I have not yet quite meditated. I have read both of Dan Harris's books books on your recommendation. I read both of those books, got through all of them.

And so, like, I put that level of effort into that, yet I haven't put the five minutes of effort into sitting in a quiet place and closing my eyes and meditating. I don't know if I can explain it, but that's where I'm

0:12:56 Eli: Yeah. Yeah.

0:13:53 Thomas: Coming from.

0:13:53 Eli: You've read the strategy guides, but you haven't played the game.

0:13:56 Thomas: Exactly. I've tried it here and there. Like, I've done a little little bit of it here and there, but I just, I haven't quite gotten to it, but we can talk about that in a second. I want to, let's go to what will be a really basic question, but I think is vital for anyone who's not familiar with this, which is what is meditation? Because I, you know, it's, it's not just sitting, you know, it is not just sitting and, you know, like daydreaming. It is not sitting and relaxing. I think there is a lot of misconception about it, and I think it is actually really important to define it and talk about what it actually is.

0:14:18 Eli: Right.

0:14:29 Eli: Yeah. So I think before I say what it is, and I will get to that, I'll talk about what it's not. And I think this is a block for a lot of people. So the first thing that it's not, and we should tackle this right out of the gate, it's not Buddhism. Meditation doesn't start with Buddhism. It's not. It's obviously closely associated with Buddhism, but it's actually far more associated with Hinduism. It's part of their mythos. I mean, there's there is a tremendous history of meditation and mindfulness before Buddhism. But the big question that people ask is, do you need to believe in any wooey bullshit in order to meditate? And the answer is no, you don't. It is simply a practice. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit. The same, a practice for your mind, the same way CBT is a practice for your mind.

0:15:17 Eli: The second thing that it's not that a lot of people are confused about is it's, it's not clearing your mind. After you've meditated for a while, you understand where that metaphor comes from, but it's not clearing your brain. To say that it's clearing your head is like saying it's sitting down and waiting for your foot to itch. Like, they both happen a lot in meditation.

You'll sit there and you'll be like, oh, my foot's on fire, but like, and sometimes your mind clears, but they are both, but neither of them is meditation. It's, it's, not clearing your mind, um, and the third thing that I want to talk about that it's not before I talk about sort of what it is, is it's not difficult. Uh, people picture sort of, you know, some yogi twisted into a pretzel in perfect universal alignment, like some super duper cool dude standing on one foot who's one with the universe, has a man bun, and is somehow poly and not gross at the same time. Like, they picture all these impossible things about a person, and that's the guy who can meditate, and I can't meditate because I'm nervous or neurotic, or I have mental illness, or I have physical problems. And and none of that is true. It is very, very easy when you know what it is. So,

0:16:37 Thomas: Yeah, I may push back on a little bit on this, but I guess I'll let you keep going.

0:16:40 Eli: Yeah. So, here is what it, and I think when you realize, when you accept what, what it is, you, you can't do it wrong. So what meditation is, is you sit down and you find an object of focus, somewhere quiet, somewhere where your back can be straight, and you focus on your breath, or you focus on an object. People focus on sounds, the feeling of their butt on the chair, and you just follow that object of focus. And while you're doing that, at some point eventually you will lose that focus and get carried away by thoughts. Right? You'll be sitting there thinking about your breath, in, out, in, and then all of a sudden you're thinking about a Twitter fight you had six months ago and how what I should have said was, if in fact you, sir, are the one who needs to know. Right? And then you realize it, you wake up from that thought, right? That idea of being lost in thought, of practicing mindlessness, right?

0:17:41 Eli: Where all of a sudden you have no control of your mind. And in that moment of waking up, you realize that your thoughts have carried you away. And when you realize that, you just go back to your breath, and that's it. You focus, you get lost, you realize you got lost, you come back. And you do that over and over and over and again. And it's not necessarily fun. It can be very fun, but it can also be very painful and very frustrating. I know that when I first started, it was very painful because I didn't want to mess up. And when I found myself getting lost in thought, I'd be like, fuck! I'm losing the meditation! But then you realize that that's actually the whole point, is to catch yourself getting lost and and bring yourself back into focus.

0:18:31 Eli: And as you come to understand that, two very important things happen. The, the first is, you gain better control over those thoughts because you realize when you're lost in thought and when you're behaving mindlessly more quickly, right? So as you practice it, just like if you practice the violin or the piano or Sudoku, you get better at it. You get better going, "Oh, lost in thought," and then returning to your breath. And, and the second thing, and this is a little bit wooey, is you experience thought as not a subject of thought, but as the one doing the thinking. I know that sounds like wooey woo woo, but the, the example I really liked that Dan Harris uses about meditation is that thinking is like sitting under a waterfall, right?

0:19:19 Eli: And you're sitting there and then all of a sudden you got water just rushing down on you. It's like, I hope they don't cancel Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And there's all the thoughts that are just rushing on top of you. And meditation, that moment of waking up from those thoughts, that movement, where you've realized you've been lost in thought and you come back to your breath, is like stepping behind the waterfall for a moment. The thoughts are still there. The rushing is still happening.

0:19:42 Thomas: Yeah. It's not in the, in the clarification. And I think what it's useful to say is it's not turning off the waterfall.

0:19:49 Eli: Yes. And it's super duper important is that most people think it's turning off the waterfall. It's not. It is just a little bit of distance from it. It is just not being the subject of those thoughts. It is not being at the mercy of those thoughts. And that is, and I am not going to communicate well how that feels. That is an incredibly revelatory feeling. The other metaphor that I really like about it is it's the difference between actors on a stage talking, right? Being an actor on a page talking and being the stage itself. And that feeling of being the page is not only incredibly freeing, but it is also an excellent practice to no longer being subject to your emotions, no longer being, you know, victim to whatever thoughts enter your head.

0:20:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:20:42 Thomas: Let me push back a little bit on some of these things. I Um, read, okay, like I said, I read those books. I love them by the way. I highly recommend them. The first one is more of a biography for Dan Harris, but it's a very fascinating one because he's had a fascinating life. But it's how he got into meditation and stuff. And it's really good. I enjoy it. The second one is way more targeted on meditation itself. But one thing that I found most alarming that was a minor detail in the book, but actually bothered me quite a bit, was Dan Harris. Here's Dan Harris, and again, not Sam Harris, two different people, just that might be confusing, but Dan Harris was a, I think he still is like a news anchor kind of guy, and he's the one who wrote these books we're talking about mostly, and he is a meditation guy.

0:20:43 Eli: Yes.

0:21:30 Thomas: He's been 10% happier, he's been doing all this stuff, sounds great, I'm in, I love it. I don't remember if it's, I think it's in the second book, or I don't remember, one of the books. After a certain point, after I'm already like, I'm right with him, it's great, I should be doing it.

I was thinking what you were saying earlier, which is, hey, I can do this because my biggest, I don't know if fear is the right word, but my biggest barrier has been my mind wildly wanders. It sounds like a lot of people have that issue, but mine has been the few times I've tried meditation. I have a very difficult time. My mind desperately wanders around in ways I can't control. And I listened to the book. I'm like, oh, well, okay.

I just have to, you know, note it. It just sounds like it's made a big difference for him. Who's has been, you know, he's, he had horrible panic attacks and stuff. And then at some point he says, yeah, I, There's been a new, like, MRI type test where they can actually check on how much you're shutting down the part of your brain that is that thing. You know, do you remember this

0:22:28 Thomas: Part? He's like, they put a really talented meditators, really, you know, people who have done it for a long time. And he says and let me know if I got this wrong, because it really bothered me. He He says, yeah, when I went in there, I found out I had been doing it wrong the whole time. And like, he wasn't shutting down that part of his brain. And I was like, wait a minute, you've been writing about this. You're Mr. Meditation. You've said it's had all these benefits and you weren't even doing it right. Like that made me worried about the entire project.

0:22:43 Eli: I do Well, He Yeah.

0:22:55 Eli: I remember exactly the part of the book that you're describing, and he describes that badly. He described it better, he did some videos on it. And what, what he actually did is he got nervous inside the MRI machine and, and did worse than he wanted to. What he meant was like, he was really hoping they would be like, oh my, your brain is dead right now. It is literally, you have never, you went back in time. We saw it right there on the MRI. You did it, Dan.

0:23:07 Thomas: Okay.

0:23:22 Thomas: He actually disappeared for a second.

0:23:24 Eli: Right. And the point of that story is actually really important. And it's important because after you meditate for a little while, you will mess up. You will do something entirely entirely mindless and you'll be like, well, and what's it even for? And I think the point of that story is to understand that no matter what your level of experience is, you're gonna mess up, you're gonna start over and that really just as that's the practice, that is the meta practice as well, right? You're going to forget to meditate for a week, you're to get lazy and not do it one day and just like, as you're sitting there breathing through your nose and you start over because you, you realize you've been thinking for the last 97 minutes about Kanye West and what you would have said to him if he had asked you what he thought about his opinions, right?

You realize you'd been doing that for the least, however long you've been lost in thought, and you start over. You also do that with the practice itself. There is, I will say this, there is, as far as we can tell, almost no way to do mindfulness wrong, wrong. Um, and that, of course, I, I only say almost because there are people who go on silent meditation retreats alone in the woods for the first time when they've done that and they

0:23:46 Thomas: Okay.

0:24:32 Eli: Have schizophrenia and they don't take their medication, so there, there are bad ways to do mindfulness, but the sitting on your couch practicing mindfulness way, there is no way to get it wrong.

0:24:43 Thomas: Well, I can imagine that there's, you know, if we're talking about scientific studies, and I'm sure a lot of my listeners will be more geared toward that evidence. I could imagine that if you're not doing the primary thing, if you are indeed still under the waterfall and you're not quite executing that properly, then it stands to reason that you wouldn't get the benefits that are associated with this.

0:25:05 Eli: I mean, it's, I would, I would compare it to any other practice, right? If you, you practice the violin or the drums or the piano or the guitar wrong, you can form some bad habits. You can not play the violin as well. My wife is a violinist, which you know because you've talked to her about music and stuff, and she grew up with a terrible habit that caused tendinitis for her, and it's a habit she had to unlearn. It didn't mean she didn't learn the violin, and it didn't means that when she's playing and she slips into those habits, she's not playing the violin. It means that there are better and worse ways to play the violin, but it's all violin playing. The worry for people isn't whether or not they're doing it perfectly, it's whether or not they are doing it at all.

0:25:49 Eli: Later on you can get into how well you're doing it.

0:25:48 Thomas: Mm hmm. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So maybe I misunderstood that part in the book, but when I read it, it seemed like he was saying he hadn't been quite actually shutting down that part of his brain well. But if what you're saying, it was more the expectation in that one meditation and he did that, you know, that thing, then I guess that makes more sense.

0:26:12 Eli: Just as a side note, there's also some question about how well the MRI works to actually read meditation. You know, parts of the the brain don't, not everyone's brain responds the same way, and that it's really an experiential thing, so it's hard to say

0:26:17 Thomas: Yeah. So I want to ask you another thing, and I don't know that you'll be able to answer this, but I'm sure you'll be able to give some interesting thoughts, as you are all the time on this kind of thing. Is There's a lot of talk about, okay, 10% happier. There's a lot of about talk about this making you happier. And when I read the book and I hear about it and I hear people talk about it, it's shutting down the chattering part of your brain, or at least it's noting it and being able to control it better. And what I'm wondering is, we may have the scientific data on certain things. I don't know about happiness because happiness is hard to quantify, but I'll even take it for granted that this makes you happier. I wonder why and how it is, because part of what he talks about is, once you get to that point where you're not thinking, you're just being, you know, you can realize, like, there's a line that I kind of remember.

0:26:26 Eli: Yeah

0:27:21 Thomas: It was something like, you're doing that just beingness. You are the stage, to say, to use the metaphor you use, you, you are the stage, and then that's like some sort of happiness. And that's the thing I wonder about. I wonder what your thoughts are, on, why would that be happy necessarily, like, what what, why, what is it about escaping the waterfall, or getting behind the waterfall, or being the stage? Why wouldn't it just be neutral? Why wouldn't it be negative to be the stage? Why, why, what is it about it that is happiness? I'm very curious about.

0:27:37 Eli: Yeah it's Uh, that's actually a great question, and it's a perfect transition into my wooey shit that I love. And the, the very, very long, and by, by very long, I mean the 4,000-year tradition made short version of it, is this. What you learn by stepping behind the waterfall is that the thing you think of as self, the idea you have of who and what you are, truly doesn't exist. Now, it doesn't exists on the practical level, right? And we're kind of aware of that.

Like, it sounds super Deepak Chopra, but we're aware of it, right. We know that, like, I can scoop the part of your brain out that loves your daughter, right, like I can do that. That I can actually go into Thomas's brain and take that thing that I assume you would say is very core to your being, and I could just be like, bloop, bloop, and you'd be like, what's this fucking baby doing here, gross, right?

So, like, we can remove the parts of our brain that we find most core to ourselves. And along with that knowledge comes the idea that consciousness, self, the way you see the world, isn't just an illusion. And again, I know, matrix guy who's stoned at the party who keeps putting his hand in front of your face, but stay with me, I promise. Consciousness isn't just an illusion. It's a trainable illusion.

And that when you meditate and learn to control your thoughts and learn to control your outlook of the world, it is not just blanking your mind and feeling blank in that moment.

It is actually making, as far as your experience of the word goes, goes, the world a better place, when you aren't feeling attacked from all sides because you're able to get more perspective on what people are saying, as far as your experience of the world goes, and your experience with the world is literally all you have

0:29:38 Eli: The world becomes a nicer place when you are no longer sent into a spiral of depression by negative thoughts, because you have more control of them; the world is a less sad place. So on the one hand, you have happiness from that angle, which is that you truly, and I mean this genuinely, it's, it's experiential, but it's also true, you truly train your experience of the world to be better.

The world that you exist in becomes a happier place because of your, and control isn't the right word, but we'll use it here, because of, of your control over it. But, but the second way, and this goes more directly to your question, which is, that sort of, why is that bliss, right?

And when we hear the word nirvana, right, we picture the happy Buddha, or the person totally blissful and, like, smiling, with their arms crossed and their feet crossed on their thighs, and like, why is dat happy and not just nothing and the, the answer I would give is a little bit roundabout, but it's from the other direction. It's this: I don't know if this is true of you, I know it's true of me, the happiest moments of my life have been marred by thought. You know, when I was standing

0:30:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:46 Eli: Across from my wife on our wedding day, and she was, you know, reading her vows to me, I was as happy as I've ever been, and I was also thinking, the fucking caterer said he would be here at 5:30 and it's 5:24, right exactly

0:31:00 Thomas: Yeah, 100%. Well, my, okay, well, my thoughts are more when I'm undergoing the happiest things that I undergo. My thoughts are more, shouldn't I be happy right now? I thought I was supposed to be happy right now. Am I supposed to, am I happy?

0:31:04 Eli: Right I exactly be happy be it, yeah

0:31:16 Thomas: Can I be happy? I'm not, I'm just not happy. That's my thoughts.

0:31:18 Eli: Exactly it is, it is the monkey mind, as Buddhists call it, that just chatters away even in your happiest moments. And when you're able to just be the stage, or be yourself just for a moment, that voice, and, and this is where the idea of clearing your mind comes from, it's, it's not clearing your mind, but that voice disappears, that, that chatter, that fear, that anxiety disappears, and it is truly exquisite. It is not happy, it is just truly itself. It is a moment that is entirely its own and without supposition, without you, predisposition, without any, any baggage on top of it.

0:32:07 Eli: You are just truly your own mind. And if I can really dig into the wooeyness here, and trust me, I know I'm testing the patience of our audience. If I can truly dig into the wooeyiness here, Philip Kaplow talks about the Zazen tradition of unveiling the inner Buddha, which of course is a metaphor for, like, unveiling your truest, happiest self, right? Not, not the actual Buddha that lives inside you.

That is a very real and tangible feeling, is that moment where you are no longer subject to your thoughts, is as close to blissful as I think it's possible to get. Um, know, one of the things that we get asked about a lot, and I promise this is related. One of the things we get asked about a lot as atheists is, you know, what happens when, when we die, um, it's often thought of as a very negative thing that we go into the void because the void seems scary, right?

But people, when they're picturing a void, are actually picturing not a void, they're picturing dark and no sound, and going, ah, I don't want to be in here, I don't want to eat bagels, right? But, but the actual void, when you've experienced it through mindfulness, the actual moment of thoughtlessness is perfect. So in a way, and you can experience it now, but in a way, the atheist viewpoint is that everyone goes to heaven. It's just not the heaven that everyone expects it to be. So, I mean, my answer would be that thoughtlessness is as close to paradise as one can achieve. It is better than happiness because it comes with no baggage.

0:33:45 Eli: It comes with no conditions. It just is unto itself perfectly. And again, to hear about it, people are like, oh, Eli went crazy. That's sad. Oh, I'll send Anna a card. But to experience it universally across cultures over thousands of years, people can verify that that experience is pretty universal. It's universal and achievable and meaningful.

0:34:13 Thomas: Well, that's a good answer. I, I think that it's funny, and it says a lot about humans, that the happiest thing is just getting rid of negative things. Like, that's that's kind of, I think, but I actually think that is true. Like, the way we become happy is by getting out of our own way, in a way, like eliminating negative thoughts. You would think, you know, you might think, oh, the way to be happiest is, you know, go play Connect Four or do, is that what the kids do these days? Pokemon Go. Yeah, but it's interesting that it sounds like for you and for many people, it's just stopping thinking in a a way like that somehow does it. It's interesting. But I will take your word for it that it's an experiential thing that you need to just try. And it's not it doesn't it doesn'T work that well to just describe it. But but I think is that right? I mean, is it just something you kind of have to be there?

0:34:24 Eli: Mm-hmm, yeah, do heroin, yeah.

0:35:08 Eli: Yeah, it's a little bit like Trying to describe an orgasm, right? Like, Miss Yvonne, my health teacher, was like, "It is like a happy sneeze," and then I had one, and I was like, "You're a liar, Miss Yvonne. That was not like a happy I mean, it was like a happy sneeze, but that was way better. And the other thing is, like, if Miss Yvonne had got up in front of my health class and been like, "Let me tell you about orgasm, kids, woo," you would have been like, "Okay, you're fired." Right? So it is, it is definitely experiential, and it's also very hard to explain.

0:35:36 Thomas: So One thing that a lot of people have questions about, that I think you are one of the the best people to ask about, possible, I really mean that, is creativity. Because you are one of the most creative people that I know in the world. And you're incredibly productive. Or are you? That's my question. Maybe since you started meditating, maybe you haven't written a word. No, I don't know. What is it like? I mean, people worry about, okay, if I quiet that voice in my my head, if I, you know, if I do meditation and I become more Zen, I'm not going to be funny. I'm not going have the edge that I need to be creative, that kind of thing. What's your answer to that? And what has your experience been with that?

0:36:22 Eli: Yeah, I mean, I will say that that's a big question. And there's a big worry that held me back for years. Right. It also held me back from medication for years, right? It was the lose your edge, everything turns gray, you're going to this, that, and the other thing. I first time I went on the medication I'm currently on, you know, I felt like a zombie for the first week. And I went to my therapist and I was like, "No, get it off me." And he was like, "Wait a second." And now, you know, it's a life-saving part of my existence. Um, I, I wouldn't put meditation at quite that level, but I would say that fear that, oh no, it's going to dull me, it's going to dull my edge, it is going to make me just sort of want to sit in corners all day and breathe, is a real fear. For me, I would say it has made my creative life better. And the answer of it is simply, it has made me more focused.

0:37:11 Eli: I, as you said very, very nicely, I write a lot. I write, a lot, a, lot, a lot because I have to for for all the shows that I have, but it's also just the nature of how I learned to write.

0:37:23 Thomas: No, you would, you wouldn't anyway, right? I mean, you just, aren't you just that kind OF guy?

0:37:26 Eli: Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I wasn't that kind of guy. And then I went into a very specific writing program in college where I had to, or I would lose where I was staying for the summer, including housing. So I sort of, I went through the John McCain of writing programs, um, which taught me that, but not only has meditation helped me retain my creative edge, but It has also helped my focus focus, and it has helped me get into flow easier. Now, people who have studied creativity will sort of know what I mean by flow, but that feeling of sort of being in the zone, as some people calling it, where things just get feels right easy, and it feels effortless, is definitely improved by meditation simply by the fact that I've been working my concentration muscle, right?

0:38:15 Eli: Right. If I'm in the middle of writing a Bible piece theater or a blog or a sketch or a headline, I am harder to distract with Twitter. I am hard to distract. With Facebook, I don't spend that that moment where you just click over to maybe this is just me, but you just click over tabs for a second.

0:38:33 Thomas: Oh no, I, my, my God, my research process is infinite Chrome tabs that never end. It's, it's definitely counterproductive.

0:38:39 Eli: Right. Exactly. For me, the the Chrome tab that gets me is the Facebook Chrome tab. Right where I'm just It's not even a thoughtful thing. It's a mindless action where I just go, Facebook, right? I hit the F, I hit enter, and then I'm on Facebook. And then 25 minutes later, I'm arguing with someone about their anti-Obama post on Hot Fresh Memes fan page, right, something like that. That. And that time has just vanished. And what meditation allows you to do is it allows you to focus better. You still get distracted. Yes, I still, you know, end up on hot, fresh memes arguing with someone about their Obama meme occasionally, but it does make me better at occasionally catching myself and going up Facebook. I actually, I don't want to check Facebook right now.

0:39:27 Eli: I did that out of habit, right? Just like any other habit. I feel that that habit, I recognize that habit easier, and it allows me to focus on my work more. It allows me to flow or go into the zone, whatever your preferred expression is, more easily and more quickly.

0:39:43 Thomas: Yeah. Interesting. So it hasn't taken away any artistic voice from you at all. Like when you,

0:39:49 Eli: I would say, if anything, it's contributed to it. And the fact that I am happier and less anxious has also cleared the way for a lot of creative avenues. You

0:39:57 Thomas: Well, that's the thing about creativity in general, like even meditation aside that like, if you are depressed, you're not productive. Like it's just not How it works. So if it helps with depression, it's going to help with that. Another question I have. So here's where I want to get to, my challenge that I still have. A, I need to just put in the time, and I haven't, and I don't know why. And I think the reason is I could listen to those audio books while doing other things. Meditating, I can literally only do that. So I need set aside the time.

But that aside, I've tried it a little bit recently. Like, I've just been like, okay, let me just give this, I'm going to start doing it, see how it goes. And the reason, like, uh, uh, two months ago I would have said it's impossible. I would have been one of those assholes you talked about, is like, it's impossible because my brain doesn't work, it's too, I think there's too many stupid thoughts that I can't control in any way. And then I listened to those books, and I listened to you, I thought, oh, I'm, I'm excited, because apparently if you drift off, that's okay, you just have to notice you drift off and note it and and move on, like, and and it's the process of doing that, that is mindfulness, and that is meditation. And so I got excited. I was like, okay, maybe I can do this. And so I started trying to do it.

And then I found something that was so annoying, I don't know if I can describe it. I was having these thoughts that were too fast to even do that. I would be done with it. I was trying to pay attention to my breath. I was try to focus on that. And then I'd have a whole thought experience that was faster than I could note it. And then I'd be like, well, I don't even know what to note because it was barely anything.

0:39:58 Eli: Right? Yes.

0:41:38 Thomas: But it took me out of it, and then it seemingly got so fast that I was still focusing on my breath but also thinking, and I don't know, like, I can't, how do you fix that, what is that, yeah.

0:41:47 Eli: Yes. My, so that's over-noting, and it's a huge issue for me as well. And it's great because what it is, is your brain all of a sudden starts playing whack-a-mole with you, right? You're like, Ian, I wonder what Kanye West thinks. Ouch. I wonder where Kanye West things. And then you go back and you overthink your noting process. You're trying to put a one-word name to it, but it was seven thoughts at once, and it was also kind of a song in the back of your head. So you end up being like, and then all of the sudden you've spent six minutes noting, and you're so mad, you're just, so you're crazy mad at the fact that you can't think of a single word for what it's like to be Kanye West and the Macarena at the same time.

And and the solution to that, the and that's a very, very common problem when you're first starting practice, especially when you're first starting to notice your thoughts, is the first thing is to have a sense of humor about it. And and this is the thing that I still, I failed at it this morning, right, which is that that you find yourself failing and you just go, all right, come on, this is actually pretty funny. It's pretty funny to sit here and like try real hard to think about my breath and just not take it so seriously. That's the first thing.

0:41:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:58 Eli: But then the second thing is all notes become thinking. And that's what I have to do all the time is I find myself noting being like anxiety, but with a touch of depression, also worry planning. And I'm just like, okay, I'm over noting. I'm thinking as noting.

0:43:13 Thomas: And Nutmeg. Yeah.

0:43:14 Eli: So I just go thinking, thinking, and then I go back to the breath, and then whatever comes by, just thinking, thinking, oh, I'm thinking about this thing, thinking. Don't

0:43:24 Thomas: So don't even worry about processing what you were thinking, essentially. Actually.

0:43:28 Eli: Even worry about processing what you're thinking, just, hey, they're thinking, how you greet it like an old friend. Hey, thoughts, how you doing? I'm gonna focus on my breath, good to be here. And then you just go back to your breath. And honestly, if you fake that, and I really do the majority of the time fake thinking it's funny when I quote-unquote "fail" at meditation, right? I am genuinely pissed off that I've gotten distracted, but I fake it.

I go, hey, thoughts about third grade science teacher, how are you doing? I'm going to get back to my breath. You play that game for long enough in your head, you get good at it. And it, they lose their weight. They lose the pain. They lose their, their power over you because they're just thoughts. You know, there's a great meditation that's on the 10% Happier app that Jeff Warren does, who's the co-author of the Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics book, called Welcome to the Party. And he says, at one point he says screw them about your thoughts. He says screw dem. Screw dem in the friendliest way possible. And that's really what it is for me. It's just like, hey, fuck you. And then I just go back to my thoughts. I just go back my breathing. And it's like, oh, okay, fuck fuck you. And I'm back to my breathing, whatever it takes to just build that concentration muscle.

And it does get easier because in my experience, and I'm obviously not a meditation teacher or expert, but in my experienced, as you actually start to do the process of meditation, the first time you notice thoughts, you're like, huh, that's a neat thing. And then like most things with learning, right? Just like guitar, you learn the C chord or the D chord or F chord. And you're you're like, huh, kind of got this. And then it gets fucking hard, right?

0:44:18 Thomas: So,

0:45:05 Eli: You have this moment where you're, like, I suck. What happened? I was learning so fast. I was getting so great. And now I'm so terrible. I think that's very true with meditation as well. As you actually learn to notice thoughts, you see just the sheer volume of boring, repetitive bullshit that's in your brain. And it can be very overwhelming once you've opened that door.

0:45:25 Thomas: How long are you meditating these days?

0:45:27 Eli: So this is the other thing I wanted to to bring up too, because you mentioned time. Uh, a lot of meditation teachers disagree with me on this. I, I don't, uh, Dan Harris says that one minute is enough, uh, and I think one minute enough. The key is to build up a habit. Um, at this point I meditate for somewhere between an hour and an hour a half a day.

I do about 30 minutes, 45 minutes in the morning, and then I do 20 minutes to an hour at night, depending on what my schedule is like. But that's because I'm a podcaster, where the podcaster's schedule, uh, if someone working a 12-hour day, right now is like, yeah, sure, one minute is enough, give yourself the time. You can start with one minute and then set a timer and go up by 30 seconds a week, and then by the end of the year, you know, you'll be up to 30 minutes. You know, there's... there's absolutely no rush, as, as we learn with most things, if you don't rush yourself and take on too much at once, you will tend to do better, your improvements will be longer lasting things.

So start at one minute if you can, do 5, 10, 20 minutes, it's great. If 10 minutes feels easy, go for 20. If 20 minutes feels easily, go for 30. And know that if you stop early, that if you, like, have to stop, you just, I gotta get up, I gotta get up and do my stuff, I can't do it anymore, that, that is just another way of starting over. That, that is just as much starting over as it is catching yourself thinking about whether or not I want, want to buy a Scarlet 2i2 or a Scarlett 2i3 because the sound quality is better, right, just as you catch yourself there.

0:47:03 Eli: It is see

0:47:02 Thomas: I've got the 18i20, just so everybody, it's really good. It's good. What were we talking about?

0:47:05 Eli: Exactly right right exactly Just as you cat yourself thinking, lost in thought, you can catch yourself having to jump up and run around and do a circle for a second, you can always, always start over. The easier you are on yourself, the better the practice is.

0:47:26 Thomas: Yeah, well, I, okay, I'll get my ass in gear. I'm thinking I can try to do 10 minutes, you know, I could try to doing that. It feels like it's going to be agony. Maybe that's why I'm avoiding it. It really does feel like it is going be agony to try to do this because, and not the time I do way more things that are harder for longer.

0:47:44 Thomas: Like I'm like, I'm lifting weights for longer. That sucks. But, but like somehow it feels so intimidating to try and do this. And, and I'm sure this will vary with people. I know a lot of people have a, have a you know, a resistance to it, but I do, I do think I have some sort of attention problem and I, I, we, I worry about how well I'm going to be able to do this, but I want to try it.

And I, the other thing I want to say is it occurred to me, um, I'm in a, in a show right now and I'm, in musical, I do a little bit of, uh, you know, theater for fun with Lydia and all that. And it occurred to me that that's a time where if I could get good at this, I feel like that would really help because I'm I'm do okay at acting, but. I'm thinking way too much the entire time.

Like, I really wonder if, if it, if I would benefit by being able to be in the moment of the character a little little more because that's a time, I don't know if for anyone who's ever done any acting, that's a time where it's like, I want, you want to be in the character.

0:47:44 Eli: Yep Yeah.

0:48:42 Thomas: You're like, okay, be in this moment, be in THIS moment, be IN THIS moment. And then you're thinking, you're THINKING, you'RE THINKIN', it's, like, ah, I feel so fake. I feel like I'm a fraud on stage if really what's going on in my mind is all this other random crap about Eli and, and, uh, what he's recording on and whether, which Scarlet, uh... interface he has and all that. And, uh, I FEEL like that would be a good benefit. So it is something I want to, you know, I want to try to do it for a lot of reasons, but it's going to be a challenge. Maybe I'll try, here's what I'll do. I'm going to do, after we're talking, I'm gonna try to sit and do the 10 minutes, and then I'll tell everybody at the at the end here, after we are done and I record the outro, I'll tell everybody how it went, and we'll see.

0:49:22 Eli: It with the app. Uh, there's a 10% Happier app, I am not associated with it in any way. I mentioned it, uh, recently. And someone was like, you getting any money for this? And I was like, no, you are mad about my recommendation. But, uh, 10% Happier app is really good. There's meditation on there called Concentration 101. Um, it's got short ones and long ones. And stuff like that.

0:49:42 Thomas: So you meditate with like earbuds in or what? Oh, okay. Do

0:49:45 Eli: Yep, I just meditate with earbuds in if I'm in a place where I want to block off the sound. When I'm home, I put it on my phone and I just sit it next to me on the couch. But there's no hassle to it.

0:49:57 Thomas: Do you closed your eyes?

0:49:58 Eli: It depends on your comfort Level. Keith meditates with his eyes open because he learned the Zazen style. I meditate with my eyes closed because I've tried open eye meditation and I'm so busy thinking about my blinking I'm just like, do I blink, I blink now, is the time, three, two, Blink, I'm planning blinks, I've got a blink schedule set up, it gets, it gets crazy. One of the things that I have found, and people will find this is true of posture and all that stuff as well, is that there's a lot of extra stuff that gets in the way early, right? I mean, I will sit on the couch and watch TV for four hours if given the opportunity, but I sit still in a chair for five minutes and I'm like, my neck is going to snap off, right, my leg is asleep, and I am dying, and and I watched, eat something, I haven't eaten for weeks, and the thing is, you just let it go, you just go back to of the breath, it is just another thought. And I will say this, and

0:49:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:50:46 Thomas: I'm starving. Yeah. It's just your mind trying to get you to not do, like, it's, yeah, it's, it really is a battle though, and that's, yeah. Yeah.

0:51:04 Eli: I will say this. This is a very important thing, and I know it sounds crazy. There will be a moment when you're meditating, and all of a sudden your knee or big toe will start to itch like crazy. You will be 1,000% certain that a wolf wasp is crawling across your toe, And you'll return to your breath. You'll notice that thought. You say thinking or or itching, or pressure, or whatever it is, you'll notice that thought, you'll return to your breath, and that itch will disappear. And it is an incredibly revelatory moment when a physical sensation not only turns out to be in your head, but when you defeat it, is really the only word I have for it. It was a truly meaningful moment for me in my meditation practices.

0:51:52 Eli: The first few times you just give it and you're like, like, ah, scratchy, scratch, scratch. But then you just, the first time you go, you know what, I'm just going to focus on my breath and let that go, and it goes away, it lets you know all the other things you could be letting go. If you can let go of an itch, you can let go off anger. You can let off sadness and jealousy and Facebook fights. You do learn to let those things go, and it is truly, truly revelatory. Again, I am never going to describe it. It's a happy sneeze.

0:52:25 Thomas: All right. Well, that's a good note to go out on and I'm going to give it a try and we'll see. If you, if you give it try as well, listener, make sure to let me know. I'll be curious. I'm curious what people go through. Well, thanks so much, Eli, for coming on. It's something we've wanted to talk about for a long time, and I think it is really great to have you, wanted to talk about it, especially because of that creativity element, because you, I mean, you do have to maintain a very high level of creative output, and you are able to do that. And I know a lot of people are worried about, like, that it's still take away their creativity, but it sounds like not an issue.

0:52:39 Eli: Yeah, tweet it at us. Yeah.

0:53:02 Eli: I I can't promise much about my advice on meditation, only that no one is as neurotic and mentally ill as I am. So if it worked for me, like, I'm the guy who Weight Watchers comes in with, like, the photo, look at these pants I used to wear, look at these mental pants, yeah.

0:53:18 Thomas: Look at these mental pants. It was just like this, like seven dimensional, like pair of pants that was in your brain. Yeah. All Eli, thanks again. That was awesome. Hopefully, everyone should know where to find you. But if not, toss out your plugs, as always. Scathing Atheist, Godawful Movies. Citation needed. Let's see. Skeptocrat, did I get him?

0:53:41 Thomas: And your blog. Oh, my favorite thing. Yeah. Your semi-annual blog that you do. Definitely.

0:53:24 Eli: Exactly. Uh, Uh, and my blog, I've got a blog, it's monthly, twice a month, almost, almost.

0:53:50 Thomas: It's my favorite things. It's the favorite thing you do, and I forgot about it because you don't do it anymore, and you need to do it more. You bastard. Okay. Thanks so much, Eli. Eli. And yeah, well, I will let you know how this goes.

0:53:54 Eli: Thanks for having me, Thomas, I appreciate it. All

0:54:27 Thomas: All right. Well, I did indeed meditate very shortly after that. I hopped on the Dan Harris app and it was, you know, okay, so it was interesting. I popped in the 10 minutes on the concentration 101. And all of a sudden, before I knew it, it was saying, alright, open your eyes, and I thought, oh, there must be something wrong with how the timer works, or like, maybe the end of the guide is before the end of the ten minute timer. But no, I, it, I had just, ten minutes had gone by like nothing. And, it was kinda cool, actually. So I, I actually popped in, I just did my own timer for another ten minutes, just to make sure I didn't slip into a time warp, and that I actually did it. Because I didn't believe how fast the first time 10 minutes went. And, you know, I enjoyed it.

0:55:13 Thomas: I have to say, I did enjoy it. I think my... I talked about some of my challenges already, but one challenge I forgot to mention... with Eli was that I absolutely cannot stop the music in my head. I always have songs in my head, I have forever. It's one of the reasons I have always kind of enjoyed doing music is I'm always thinking about music, and I'm always, you know, just I just have a constant, know, iPod shuffle in my brain as I'm sure a lot of people do, and it's really difficult to get it to stop. I would say darn near impossible. The best I could do during the meditation was I could kind of just get it to be quiet for a sec, for a few seconds at a time maybe, and then it would still, but it would continue, the song would continue as though I had just turned it down, like it's not like I could stop it and restart. It was bizarre, but anyway, that's my brain, um, I still, I told Eli all this, and he said that Anna actually has a similar problem, so, uh, it's okay to

0:56:13 Thomas: Just note it and and try to live with it, maybe, uh, maybe one day I'll be able to kind of turn it off if I practice enough, who knows, but that's one of those things, why I don't know that I want to turn that off, I like having music in my head, and while I understand that a lot of our thoughts and our, you know, our negative thoughts, our worries, and all that, those are voices in our heads that I can totally understand the benefit of turning off. But I don't know that the same necessarily applies for the music going on in my brain. I don't know if there's a downside to that. I would have to see some research or something. But nonetheless, I did enjoy it. And of course, it's one of those things, I'm sure, as everything is, is a sample size of one try. So it's like, I need to keep doing it and see if there's any positive effects.

0:56:58 Thomas: I don't know. Still agnostic, but I believe in science, so if science says that there's all of these benefits, then seems like I'd want to try to get a hold of some of those benefits and benefit from them. So that's my story. Let me know if you have any experiences of trying to meditate and how it went and that kind of thing. I'm very curious to hear. As always, thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting on SeriousPod.com slash support or Patreon.com slash SeriousPod. Either one will get you the same stuff. Bonus episodes coming at you very soon. I am, right now I've been prepping for the last few weeks on my talk for the, for NOSHA, that is the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association. So that's why I haven't put out a bonus episode yet this month. But after I do the talk, I believe I'll put out a bonus episode either of the talk or I might rerecord the content.

0:57:52 Thomas: For podcast form. That'll go just to my patrons though, because I think it's gonna be pretty interesting. So that should be one bonus episode for sure, and then of course I'll find something else to talk about for another one. But hey, please, if you're anywhere near New Orleans, that's this Saturday, the 19th, it's coming right up, please, please consider coming by, saying hi, it's totally free, and it'll be a fun talk, I'm really looking forward to it, and I think I've got some insightful things to say, and of course, if you want to just come hang out, meet Phoebe, you know, meet Lydia, meet me, you know, that'll be fun. So, please consider coming, I hope to see you there. I've shared the event page on my Facebook, but also nosha.info has it and I'll pop it in the show notes as well. All right, thank you so much for listening and supporting.

0:58:37 Thomas: Hope to see some of you this weekend. If If not, I'll be in your ear holes whenever next you listen. Oh, and also, by the way, speaking of Eli Bosnick, esteemed guest Eli Bosnick, he was also on Philosophers in Space for a hilarious two-episode special on Westworld. That's currently only out for patrons, so hop onto patreon.com slash zero g if you want to check that out. It was, it was really funny. There were some jokes that I moved to the bonus segment because they were Eli's jokes. Jokes, but no, it was hilarious, but it was also fun. It was philosophy. It was all Everything I love about Eli and podcasting, all in one go. Okay, thank you for listening, check out all that stuff, and I'll see you next week.