The phrase “intrinsically pleasurable” really caught my attention in this episode, and I love the part about meditation being about a state of complete attention to the present.

The Drive Interview with Peter Attia

I think of life as a handful of direction changes that some of them you look back in the past and say wow that was a meaningful insight that came to me. (19:05)

We’re telling ourselves a story all day long, and we’re not aware of it. (19:50)

What you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most in those moments when you are fully captured by experience is the state of complete attention to the present. If you can muster that on your own, if you can actually guide attention irrespective of the object you’re attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object—the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk—can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice. (25:44)

Anything that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else, can suddenly disclose what it’s like to have a very concentrated mind. Concentration is intrinsically pleasurable. You can get addicted to the changes in state that you experience in meditation. (26:45)

Unlike mindfulness where you’re letting go of any agenda you have for what you’re experience should be and you’re just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is […] you’re trying to change you’re experience and that’s different than simply being mindful of it. You’re trying to feel this feeling of love and kindness as intensely as you can feel it and as durably as you can feel it. (1:26:08) #wellwishing #goodvibes

It’s really the caliber quality of thoughts that determine the quality of our life. (1:41:49)

[On honesty.] They know you’re never going to lie to them. They know that you’re being truthful. When you have said that you didn’t like something in a spot where most other people would have told someone a white lie so as not to have to communicate that, then your praise means that much more. (2:21:20)

Nobody wants to suffer. It takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much of our suffering is self-imposed. The power of framing and the power of expectation are important. The mismatch between the negative expectation for how something is going to be and how it was… that time spent suffering was wasted. (2:33:20)

A good question was raised in this episode, “am I living an examined life?”