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has all the freshest ingredients to embrace

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all your holiday traditions. Kroger. You're

0:31

listening to Impact Theory. Impact

0:34

Theory. Impact Theory. Impact Theory.

0:36

Impact, baby! Hey, everybody. Welcome

0:39

to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and

0:41

company is to introduce you to the people and

0:43

ideas that will help you actually execute on your

0:45

dreams. All right, today's

0:47

guest is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and

0:49

a five-time New York Times

0:51

bestselling author. His book, The End

0:54

of Faith, won the 2005 Penn

0:56

Award for nonfiction and spent

0:58

an astonishing 33

1:00

weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He

1:03

has a degree in philosophy from Stanford,

1:05

a PhD in neuroscience, and he's

1:07

practiced meditation for more than 30 years,

1:09

a combination that gives him a very

1:11

unique perspective that has made him one

1:14

of the most sought-after thinkers on the

1:16

planet. He's given multiple TED Talks

1:18

with millions of views, and his written works have

1:20

been translated into more than 20 different

1:23

languages. Additionally, he's written for

1:25

some of the most prestigious publications around,

1:27

including the New York Times, the Los

1:29

Angeles Times, and the Annals of Neurology,

1:31

to name but a few. A

1:34

clear and rational voice, almost without peer

1:36

on some of today's most difficult subjects,

1:39

when he speaks, thousands

1:41

of people show up in real life and

1:43

millions listen online. His

1:45

ideas have been discussed by some

1:47

of the most visible and well-respected

1:50

outlets in the world, including Time,

1:52

the New York Times, Scientific American,

1:54

Nature, and countless others. He's

1:56

also the host of the Webby

1:58

Award-winning podcast, Making Sense. Sense, which

2:00

was named by Apple as one of the

2:02

iTunes best. So please help

2:05

me in welcoming the man who

2:07

has spent roughly two years in

2:09

aggregated silent contemplation, one of

2:11

the four horsemen of the non-apocalypse, Sam

2:14

Harris. Okay, man. How you

2:17

doing? Welcome. Thank

2:19

you. Absolute pleasure to

2:22

have you. Yeah, pleasure to

2:24

be here. I'm really excited to dive into some

2:26

of these subjects, which I think you have just

2:28

such a fascinating take on.

2:30

And the thing that I've drawn the

2:32

most wisdom from with you is what,

2:35

and these are very much my words, how

2:38

to live a good life. And

2:40

that's where I want to start. And it'd

2:42

be really interesting to hear your definition of

2:44

like, what kind of life and way of

2:46

thinking should we be aiming for? Yeah,

2:49

it was a hard question because my notion

2:52

of human well-being is

2:54

really open-ended. I don't think we

2:56

understand what the horizon is. In

2:59

fact, there is one for kind of ultimate

3:01

flourishing of conscious minds. We

3:04

have a pretty good sense of what we don't

3:06

want and are right not to want. We don't

3:08

want to be terrorized and depressed

3:11

and finding ourselves

3:13

constantly in conflict with strangers,

3:16

finding our aims frustrated.

3:18

So the generic situation

3:21

we want to find ourselves in more and

3:23

more is to effortlessly cooperate

3:25

with creative and

3:27

happy strangers. There's seven billion of

3:29

us. We need institutions and laws

3:31

and norms and

3:34

ways of thinking that take

3:36

the friction out of pleasurable

3:38

and non-paranoid interaction with strangers.

3:40

It's not just about having

3:43

five or so close friends

3:46

who have your back. We're

3:50

all on the same team on some basic level. And if

3:52

we can't figure out how to build a civilization

3:55

where everyone thrives

3:57

to some degree, we'll have

4:00

the world we currently have until

4:02

it becomes unsustainable. Because we're in

4:04

a situation now where I think

4:09

it's reasonable to worry that

4:11

our default state of

4:13

partisanship and tribalism and

4:18

rational fear of the incompatible aims

4:20

of other groups and other people

4:24

is unsustainable in the presence of more and more

4:26

destructive technology. I think we have to get our

4:28

act together psychologically and socially in a way that

4:31

we haven't yet. When you

4:33

think about that coming down to the

4:35

personal level, do you think about people

4:37

as having a North Star or a

4:40

purpose that they should be pursuing? To

4:42

contextualize that, I'll say because

4:44

I always found myself wanting to ask people that,

4:47

I ended up answering the question for

4:49

myself. For me, the purpose of my

4:51

life from my perspective is to see

4:55

how much of my potential I can actuate.

4:57

How many skills can I acquire that have

5:00

meaning and utility to me that allow me

5:02

to serve not only myself but others? That

5:05

sense of pushing myself to always get better, to always

5:07

improve, to show up every day and not

5:10

think about whether I get

5:12

something, cross some finish line, generate a certain amount

5:14

of wealth or anything like that. Do

5:18

I sincerely approach the idea of bettering myself

5:20

in a very specific direction based on what

5:22

I want to accomplish in my life or

5:24

not? If I do that sincerely, then I

5:27

say that the day or the life has

5:29

been a victory. If I don't

5:31

do that, then to me, I'm pointed in the

5:33

wrong direction. Do you have any guiding light like

5:35

that that say you would try to pass on

5:37

to your children or that you yourself have for

5:39

you? I think that's

5:41

a good one and I share it, but I can

5:44

imagine other

5:46

versions of having a

5:48

name which don't really totally overlap

5:50

with that. One

5:53

could decide, for instance, that they have a

5:55

talent that is highly marketable

5:58

and what they want to do is make it work. as much money

6:00

as possible so that they can

6:03

give a lot of it away to help

6:05

people. I mean, money is just energy, right?

6:07

If you are making billions of dollars and

6:09

you're giving billions of dollars away to good

6:11

causes, well, that, on

6:14

an effective altruism metric, that's much

6:16

better than you going

6:18

to Africa yourself and handing out food in

6:21

a famine, right? You want to be bankrolling

6:24

thousands of people to do that, right? And

6:27

if you have a skill, you know, if

6:29

you're a great singer or whatever, and it

6:32

may be a skill that you didn't spend a lot

6:34

of time to acquire, right? So you don't have this

6:37

whole mastery story that you have

6:39

and that actually resonates with me. So

6:43

that would be a good life,

6:45

you know, provided you can extract the

6:47

psychological satisfaction from it because most of

6:49

what we experience in philanthropy is, when

6:53

it's telescopic in this way, when you're just signing

6:55

a check, you're not necessarily connected to the good

6:57

you're doing. And I can imagine someone

7:01

doing immense good in the

7:03

world by signing very large checks, but

7:05

not actually internalizing the gratification of that.

7:07

On some level, we have to be

7:09

aware of the possibility of rowing in

7:11

two boats simultaneously. There's what the

7:14

effects are in the world

7:16

of how we're living. So, you know, we want

7:18

to have a good impact on others,

7:21

but we actually want our

7:24

conscious states of psychological pain

7:27

and pleasure to be mapped in

7:30

some rational way to the kinds of effects we're having,

7:32

right? So you don't want to be a callous person

7:34

who's just leaving devastated and

7:36

unhappy people in your wake and

7:39

taking pleasure in that. I mean, you're a

7:41

psychopath, that's how you're tuned. But you also

7:43

don't want to be a person

7:46

who's doing a lot of

7:48

good in the world, but not able to

7:50

internalize the felt sense of you're connected this

7:52

to others because you're, you know, you're too

7:54

neurotic or you're too distracted or you're

7:56

just not, you know, connecting with others. So

7:59

it's really interesting and I don't think

8:01

I've ever heard anybody else talk about that

8:03

notion of making sure that you're mapping what

8:05

you're doing to sort of be outwardly altruistic

8:07

to actually map to your own internal

8:10

state of well-being, if you will. And

8:13

hearing the discussions that you've been

8:15

around Islam and how beliefs and

8:17

ideas can be really

8:19

dangerous made me ask a question

8:21

of how, and

8:25

basically I'll quickly summarize. So you've got people

8:27

that they have a book and the book

8:29

has ideas and things that they are meant

8:31

to believe and then act in accordance with.

8:33

And because of where they grew up or

8:35

what their parents and the society around them

8:37

taught them, they internalized those beliefs. And if

8:40

we could, through communicating our

8:42

ideas well to them, get them

8:44

to see something that caused more

8:47

well-being for other people, that that would be a

8:49

better way to move their belief system. So

8:52

one, do you believe that a belief

8:54

system is malleable in that there's some

8:56

element of where you could choose this

8:58

set of ideology or you could choose

9:01

this? And

9:03

I don't know if you would say that one of those

9:05

is more true than the other, but certainly one may take

9:07

us closer to well-being than the other. And

9:10

if you think that belief systems are,

9:12

by their very nature, malleable things, what

9:15

would sort of be the belief system

9:17

in just like a couple penance that

9:19

you could hand to somebody that you

9:21

think would help them maximize their own

9:23

well-being as well as serve a

9:25

greater good? Speaking

9:28

generically, I think having

9:31

our beliefs map onto reality to

9:34

some degree is obviously good because

9:36

if they're not, you're

9:39

just bumping into hard objects. Like

9:41

if your map is completely wrong,

9:44

you are bound to suffer, right? But we

9:46

have to be in a situation where radical

9:49

ignorance can't be bliss, right? So that's

9:51

one principle. Now there could be a

9:53

looseness of fit. There could be situations

9:55

where being

9:57

strictly right. about

10:00

what's true may be

10:03

non-optimal. It may be useful

10:05

to have a slightly delusional

10:08

self-serving bias, to think you're coming off better

10:10

than you are. It may give you more

10:13

enthusiasm for your life and more confidence. But

10:16

anything that's too out of register is

10:18

just delusion, and other people notice, and

10:20

other people treat you like somebody who's

10:22

just not tracking in a reality. And

10:25

so that's one principle. So

10:27

I think we want our beliefs to

10:30

be true in some basic

10:32

sense. And therefore,

10:35

we want to be open to new

10:37

evidence and better arguments perpetually, right? Because

10:39

if you close yourself off, if you

10:41

say, well, listen, I'm done, I'm done

10:44

thinking about reality, and

10:46

I know what's true, then

10:48

again, when more data comes in, when

10:51

something's surprising, when one of your

10:53

intuitions proves to be faulty, if

10:55

you can't error correct, again, you're just going to

10:57

fall out of alignment with what's going on in

10:59

the world and what other people think is true

11:02

as well. So really, the

11:04

only mechanism we have to do that

11:07

is human conversation. We have to

11:09

be open to having

11:11

other people point out errors in our

11:13

thinking. And in the conversation we have

11:16

with ourselves, we have to do like what? We

11:18

have to be continually open to the possibility that

11:20

we might be wrong. And in fact, we're very

11:22

likely to be wrong a lot of the

11:25

time. And so then, hence

11:28

the virtue of getting educated and surrounding

11:30

yourself with smart people and reading good

11:32

books and just exposing yourself to the

11:34

kinds of lessons that other

11:37

people have learned over

11:39

thousands of years and are learning in real

11:41

time right now. And you can live

11:44

vicariously through, you don't have to make all the

11:47

errors that everyone has made around you. So you

11:49

don't have to, it's like you can look at

11:51

Lance Armstrong and say, okay, well, it's probably not

11:53

a good idea to lie relentlessly about something and

11:56

then try to punish the people who caught you

11:58

in your lives and then get you. caught

12:00

and have to wind up on Oprah apologizing, right? I mean, that's,

12:03

you know, you can internalize that lesson

12:05

and understand something about the ethics and

12:08

reputational costs of lying. So

12:13

given that conversation and an

12:15

openness to the intrusions of

12:18

other people's thinking is really

12:20

the best game in town for understanding

12:24

what reality is and how to

12:26

navigate within it, then

12:28

you can see how non-optimal

12:33

and ultimately dangerous dogmatism

12:35

is. Dogmatism is just

12:38

holding to an idea no matter what else

12:40

comes into view, right? So there's nothing you

12:43

can say to challenge. I'll

12:46

talk to you about all this stuff, but over

12:48

here, there's something that I care about, some proposition,

12:51

some assertion that something is true that I

12:53

care about so much. I'm so

12:55

emotionally attached to it that not

12:58

only is it non-negotiable, if

13:00

you continue to push over here, I'm going

13:02

to get angrier and angrier, right? I'm going

13:04

to threaten you with violence, right? That is

13:07

the default state of

13:09

organized religion, right? Historically,

13:11

and certain religions

13:13

now have kind of relaxed their

13:16

intolerance to a degree where the

13:18

violence isn't explicit, but

13:22

not only is that the default of

13:25

faith-based religion, they have a way

13:27

of thinking about dogmatism. Dogmatism is a good

13:29

word in the context of religion. I mean,

13:31

Christian dogma is not a derogatory

13:33

term. They call it dogma for a

13:35

reason, right? Certainly

13:38

the Catholics do.

13:40

So this notion that

13:43

you can believe something strongly without evidence,

13:45

or certainly without good evidence, without evidence

13:47

that can survive pressure from outside. So

13:50

the idea that wanting evidence is a

13:52

perversion of your circumstance, right? So like,

13:54

you know, you really, if you buy

13:57

this thing in the bag that I

13:59

haven't shown you, you are

14:01

that redounds to your credit, right? It's

14:04

just, it's one, it's not

14:06

true because the experiential core of these

14:08

religions and the experiences like unconditional love

14:11

say those can be experienced. I mean,

14:13

it's not that everything in our religious

14:15

literature is untrue, but there's

14:17

nothing that has to be believed on insufficient evidence

14:19

to be explored. And so what I recommend here

14:21

is that we really adopt the

14:24

scientific attitude everywhere. We don't

14:26

partition our thinking about reality where we say, well,

14:28

here's the stuff over here where super

14:31

important, but we can't think about

14:33

it too rigorously, right? In fact, I think about

14:35

it too rigorously is to corrupt it.

14:37

And then over here we've got, you know, science

14:40

and technology and, you know, engineers

14:42

calculating whether a bridge is going to, you

14:44

know, withstand the weight of the traffic on

14:46

it. And there we can think rigorously. So,

14:48

you know, don't tell me about rigor

14:50

with respect to meaning and, you know, what we're,

14:53

what's worth living for and what's worth dying for

14:55

and, you know, what

14:57

is love and compassion and well-being. Like, that's

14:59

all, that has to be just,

15:03

we have to be hostage to a conversation that

15:05

our ancestors were having 2,000 years

15:07

ago. And we have to imagine that certain of

15:09

our books were dictated by the creator of the

15:11

universe to organize all that. But over here, let's

15:13

get it all dialed in because we really care

15:15

about how our smartphones work, right? It makes no

15:17

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18:11

It's interesting to me that that tension exists

18:13

and it makes me come back to, okay,

18:15

why doesn't that tension exist in my own

18:18

life? And the organizing principle that

18:20

I use, and I think a

18:22

lot about like what would somebody

18:24

pass on to their children? Now I've decided not to

18:27

have kids, so I will never get to answer this,

18:29

but I spend a lot of time thinking about what

18:31

are the organizing principles you've referred to ideas as sort

18:33

of the operating system of the mind. That

18:36

seems very apt to me. So what

18:38

are the organizing principles that I would give somebody to

18:40

think in a certain way? And

18:43

one of the things I'm obsessed with, and I think I explained this

18:45

so poorly, I don't see it light people's eyes up. And

18:47

I'd love to figure out how to say it

18:49

well, which is this, skills have

18:52

utility. And what I

18:54

mean by that is learning architecture is interesting

18:56

because it allows you to build a structure

18:58

that could protect somebody, allows you to build

19:00

a structure that to really make it basic,

19:03

like the one, I forget exactly what country

19:05

it's in, but the seed vault, right? Like

19:08

you understand architecture well enough and how to

19:10

ventilate things and all the things that seeds

19:12

would need to like live for a very

19:14

long time so that we could replant if

19:16

we had to. Learning

19:18

those skills had a

19:21

purpose and that purpose allows for something to

19:23

happen. And so let's take Brazilian Jiu Jitsu,

19:25

which I know that you do Jiu Jitsu.

19:29

Everything that you learn in Jiu Jitsu has

19:31

a real world implication. And that real world

19:33

implication is one, if you got into a

19:35

fight, you'd probably be more likely to be

19:37

able to successfully defend yourself. And that in

19:39

and of itself is so profound as to

19:41

be worth the time. Now there's obviously all

19:43

kinds of other benefits as well. But

19:47

once people understand, okay, these skills have utility,

19:49

then I need to be fiendish about increasing

19:51

my skill set because it has this real

19:53

world application. So the problem that I get

19:55

into where people are dogmatic about anything, whether

19:58

it's religion or like. I

20:00

wrote this belief system. It was the 25 things

20:02

that I had to do to my mind in

20:04

order to go from being a good

20:06

employee, which I always lovingly refer to as sort

20:08

of a slave-like mentality. I kept my head down,

20:10

did as little work as possible, and avoided punishment

20:13

at all costs. That's where I started. That's what

20:15

my parents taught me to do. And

20:17

to get out of that and to become an entrepreneur,

20:19

there were these very simple, right-downable

20:21

things that I had to choose to

20:23

believe and act in accordance with. And

20:26

if you came to me and said, hey, Tom,

20:28

by the way, number 14 on your list doesn't

20:30

make sense and it doesn't make sense for this

20:33

reason, I think you misunderstood something about your own

20:35

journey. I'd be like, that's so rad, because now

20:37

you're giving me something that has more utility than

20:39

the thing that I've used thus far.

20:43

One, why do you think that breaks

20:45

down? What is it that people value

20:47

more than that? Is there some internal

20:49

thing? And then what process can people

20:51

use to become more aware of

20:54

what's guiding their decision-making? Because I think a lot of

20:56

people, I don't know if it's just at a feeling

20:58

level, it's like a limbic thing or what? Well,

21:02

I think it's a framing problem because

21:05

most of what people care about

21:07

can be thought of as a

21:10

skill, right? I mean, well-being is

21:12

a skill. Not suffering unnecessarily is

21:14

a skill. Regulating, noticing

21:17

your emotional life and regulating negative emotion

21:19

is a skill. And so,

21:21

I have a meditation app and meditation is a

21:23

skill, it's a very useful one. And

21:26

I'm spending a lot of time teaching what's

21:29

now referred to as mindfulness meditation. And

21:32

the moment you

21:34

begin practicing mindfulness, which is

21:36

just learning to pay close attention

21:39

to the nature of your experience, you're not adding

21:41

anything to your experience, you're just noticing what

21:43

it's like to be you moment to moment, but

21:45

in a way that is not

21:47

reactive. You're not grasping at what's pleasant or pushing

21:50

what's unpleasant away. You're just, I mean, to make

21:52

this concrete. And let's say you have a fear

21:54

of public speaking, right? You're about to go out

21:57

on stage and you feel anxiety. The

22:01

usual the default state of someone who doesn't

22:03

wanna have that experience is trying to figure

22:05

is one to be in advance worry about

22:07

that experience and anxieties kindle just by the

22:10

mere thought of what you have to do

22:12

then. Once

22:14

you feel the butterflies you. Are

22:18

you working with them right you contract your

22:20

mind contracts around your conversation with yourself is

22:22

not happy when is like why the fuck

22:24

am i this person who just can i

22:26

see people do this all the time there

22:28

there relax i'm unhappy. You know when am

22:30

i and you're talking to yourself not noticing

22:32

it because you're the thoughts just come up

22:34

from behind you as fast as as they

22:36

can and. They seem

22:38

to be you write identified with each

22:41

thought that emerges in consciousness and

22:43

most people live their lives as though there's

22:45

no alternative. What given a

22:48

rule book for how to operate a human

22:50

mind right and there's no place in a

22:52

normal education where where where. Where

22:56

even indicated that there's no alternative here

22:58

and so we get we kinda

23:00

stumble out into adulthood. More

23:03

or less assuming that we have will always have

23:05

the minds we have and really there's you know

23:07

we the only thing we can do to really

23:09

upgrade our firmware is to. Just

23:11

add new content you know we can read books

23:13

we can we can develop interest

23:16

but there's nothing. Add

23:19

to sort of root level of our emotional

23:21

and cognitive life that can change and so

23:23

mindfulness is a way of dropping a little

23:25

bit lower and realizing so in this case.

23:28

If you're feeling anxiety. There's

23:32

actually a place from which you

23:34

can just feel right and and

23:36

be. Actually in

23:38

different to it or anything else you could

23:41

be feeling me just just notice that there's

23:43

even an unpleasant sensation. First

23:45

you can know that anxiety isn't even that

23:47

unpleasant it's so close to excitement in its

23:50

actual physiology that really the difference

23:52

between excitement and anxiety is more.

23:56

Or less just that the framing is just the story

23:58

you're telling yourself you know if you. felt

24:00

these tingles and

24:03

this slightly adrenalized response right

24:06

before you're about to go on a roller

24:08

coaster, that's part of why you're going

24:10

on the roller coaster. You like that experience, right?

24:12

But the fact that you feel that way when

24:14

you're about to have an interview or you're about

24:16

to walk out on stage, that's intolerable,

24:19

right? So just dropping back and

24:22

realizing the power of the framing

24:24

is, again, this is a

24:26

skill that is a fairly esoteric

24:28

one, but now many people are learning

24:30

it, the secret's out. And

24:33

it has immense utility because

24:36

then you can realize that the half-life

24:39

of negative emotions is incredibly short.

24:41

I mean, one, you can actually

24:43

be psychologically free even

24:45

in their presence, right? Your freedom

24:47

and your well-being isn't even predicated

24:49

on getting rid of the

24:51

physiology, right? You can still be there. But

24:54

if you're not continually

24:56

thinking about all the reasons why you should

24:58

be anxious, the physiology dissipates

25:01

very, very quickly. And that's true for

25:03

anger. It's true for anything that is

25:06

classically negative. And

25:11

so to come back to your question, many of

25:13

the things that people think they want out

25:15

of life, they

25:17

either think are, or many

25:19

of the ways they're

25:22

keeping score about how good their lives are

25:24

or aren't, they're not seen

25:26

as these are either, this

25:29

experience is being delivered to them

25:31

either based on the skills they have

25:33

or the skills they've never thought to

25:36

acquire, right? And yeah, so

25:38

that's one thing I would add to the picture of the

25:41

usefulness of skills. I want to talk about the

25:43

emotional control that you bring up. I think that's

25:45

super powerful. When my wife and I were first

25:48

married, my problem was I have a very slow

25:50

fuse or a very long fuse. And so it

25:52

takes a lot to get me angry. And that

25:54

was actually a big complaint of hers should be

25:56

really annoyed, something would happen, someone cut in front of

25:58

us in line and I wouldn't. freak out and she

26:00

wanted me to freak out and she

26:02

wanted me to like just bask

26:05

in how unjust it was and

26:08

she would really lament that and it just seemed so

26:11

strange to me. But then when I

26:13

got mad, I would stay mad and

26:15

there were times I would stay mad eight,

26:18

10, 12 hours and I was working so

26:21

much at the beginning of our relationship. The only

26:23

time that we really had together as husband and

26:25

wife would be for part of a Saturday and

26:28

I would inevitably, she would say something, it would upset

26:31

me, I would get pissed and I would stay pissed

26:33

the entire time but then as you said, once

26:35

you stop reinforcing it, which I would do

26:38

unfortunately, I'd be reinforcing, reinforcing, reinforcing it, then

26:40

something would happen, it would change my neurochemistry,

26:42

I'd forget like why was I so mad?

26:45

Every single time I was like why

26:48

did I just waste that time being mad? So

26:50

I end up writing myself this letter and I

26:52

gave it to my wife and I said read that to me the next time

26:54

I get pissed off. And in

26:56

the letter I said hey me, it's me, I have

26:58

no hidden agenda here as to why I want you

27:00

to calm down other than the fact that you know

27:03

that if you end up being pissed for several

27:05

hours, you're going to regret it every single time.

27:09

And right now I

27:11

want you to laugh out loud and

27:13

for however long it takes, just laugh out loud, you

27:15

know studies show that you can't laugh out loud and

27:17

remain pissed. And so I gave

27:19

it to her, I got pissed, she read it, she

27:21

only had to read it once. It was so profoundly

27:23

transformational to see that just by laughing out loud I

27:26

couldn't stay angry, that it really

27:28

helped me get control of my emotions

27:30

so that I knew I can do

27:32

what I'll call a state

27:34

shift, I don't think I've ever heard you use that

27:36

kind of language, but if I'm angry I'm choosing to

27:38

stay angry. Unfortunately, I hadn't

27:40

found meditation at that point so I had to sort

27:43

of brute force my way to that. What

27:45

can people do to learn

27:47

to get control of their emotions? Well

27:50

the first thing to realize is that they

27:52

already have control. Virtually

27:54

anyone watching this I would expect can

27:56

do this under certain circumstances. So

27:59

the one... example I would have

28:02

you recall is I'm sure this has

28:04

happened to almost everyone. You're in some

28:06

state like that. You're angry. You've just

28:08

gotten triggered by something. But

28:10

then the phone rings. You're

28:13

getting called by somebody who this is not someone for

28:15

you to process your anger with. This is like a

28:17

business call or you have to function. It actually

28:21

perfectly interrupts your state. You

28:23

actually can just reset and

28:27

have the conversation and the physiology is dissipating

28:30

very, very quickly there. Your attention is on

28:32

something else and you're just having

28:34

to function. Now of course if somebody, if

28:36

it's a friend or your mother or somebody who you

28:38

can complain to, well then you'll jump on and you'll

28:40

amplify the state because you'll have a reason to talk

28:42

about it. So you

28:45

can interrupt these states and

28:48

simply put your attention on something

28:50

else and then it

28:52

dissipates. One thing that I'm

28:54

really curious to know, you seem just

28:57

freakishly educated on a whole lot of

29:00

topics. What is your process for learning?

29:02

How do you go about in

29:05

taking data? How do you start? Do you pull

29:07

threads? What thread do you pull first if you

29:09

do? How do you really begin to educate yourself

29:12

on any given topic? Well

29:14

I don't really have, I mean

29:16

I've taken a lot of information

29:18

and I always have. So that's

29:20

not necessarily an efficient or smart

29:23

way. I don't have life hacks that

29:28

optimize me as a

29:30

consumer of information. So I

29:33

know there are ways that are recommended to

29:35

read a book so as to extract

29:37

the actionable information as quickly as possible

29:39

from it. I have

29:41

never been an

29:44

adopter of any of those ways. And worse

29:46

still, I basically read everything

29:48

at the same speed. So I read everything like

29:51

a scripture. So if it's People magazine in a

29:53

waiting room of a dentist's office, I'm reading that

29:55

at the same speed that I'm reading a work

29:58

of philosophy or neuroscience. And

30:00

the big change of late, I

30:02

guess this probably happened somewhere around 10 years ago,

30:04

is that once I realized that there's

30:07

functionally an infinite amount of information to

30:09

consume, it was doubling in the sciences

30:11

every three to five years, and there

30:14

are literally thousands of

30:16

good books that I will wish I had read,

30:18

but I will never get around to reading, I've

30:21

become a very fickle reader

30:23

in the sense that

30:26

I cut my losses very early. The sunk

30:28

cost fallacy has completely disappeared from me. The

30:30

idea that I've spent five

30:32

hours or five days on this

30:34

thing, so I better just finish

30:36

it, right? That used to be my orientation with respect

30:38

to reading books. Now I'll discard

30:41

a book just

30:43

on a whim, because I know there's an infinite

30:45

amount of stuff I want to read, I don't

30:48

go into the table of contents and look at the

30:50

structure of the book, and then go to the index,

30:52

and then look at the topics, and then, I mean,

30:54

I just start on page one and start reading, and

30:56

then, when I get bored, I stop. So

31:01

that's, do with that life hack

31:03

what you will. But

31:08

I do continually,

31:10

I mean, I'm either listening to

31:13

audio books or podcasts or the news when

31:15

I'm working out or

31:17

commuting, or I'm just constantly taking

31:20

in information fairly

31:23

passively when I'm multitasking. So there's not, I mean,

31:25

the one thing that I don't have a lot

31:27

of in my life is music, because I can't

31:29

write to music, certainly not music with

31:31

lyrics, I can't

31:33

podcast to music, obviously, and I've

31:36

decided that there's so much that I'm

31:38

interested in, there's so much that

31:40

I want to know, that basically, I just hear music

31:42

by accident now. I

31:45

mean, if someone else is playing music, or if I

31:47

walk into a store, there's music associated with the film, I'm like,

31:49

oh, I'm gonna do that. There's music associated

31:51

with the film, it's getting in, but otherwise,

31:54

I'm just, you know, it's just a fire

31:57

hose of information pointed at my head most

31:59

of the time. time. Oh,

32:01

I got that. So despite

32:04

the that perchance haphazard

32:06

way that you're reading, it does seem at

32:08

least from the outside that you are striving

32:10

I would say pretty truly for excellence. Help

32:13

me reconcile. So one

32:16

of the things I struggled with with

32:18

meditation was it felt decidedly feminine

32:20

and in a way that

32:23

as somebody who I felt I felt that certainly

32:25

growing up that I was far more on the

32:27

feminine end of being a guy than anything else

32:29

and so for me my journey certainly to being

32:32

an entrepreneur was one of toughening up and

32:35

so anything that that made me

32:37

sort of feel that old-school sort

32:39

of gentle way I would push

32:42

back on and it's why I didn't meditate for a

32:44

long time but I see you

32:46

you're doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu you're somebody who obviously cares

32:49

about martial arts and being able to fight and

32:51

defend yourself I've heard you talk very eloquently about

32:54

violence and clearly in your

32:56

professional life you just

32:59

even just what you've done in the writing

33:01

let alone the lecturing you've already achieved such

33:03

a massive success refused to believe that there

33:05

wasn't a just massive amount of

33:07

energy behind that so how

33:09

do you think about meditation in that context

33:11

is this like going to war with your

33:13

mind and you're I'm going to come out

33:16

the other side having faced demons and

33:18

having won some sort of victory that allows me to

33:20

perform at a higher level or am I totally missing

33:22

all of this and it needs to be a letting

33:25

go a more peaceful relaxed

33:28

sort of transient experience yeah well

33:30

at first it's a very common

33:32

association I totally understand it and

33:34

it's presented in many ways

33:37

where yeah you under that framing you

33:39

can just feel the testosterone leaving your

33:42

body you know so

33:44

yeah that's not

33:46

my orientation it is a lot like jiu-jitsu

33:49

for the mind and it's a lot

33:51

like it what's so

33:53

beautiful about jiu-jitsu in particular

33:55

is that you can

33:57

have this massive effect in the domain

34:00

of violence while

34:02

being relaxed. It is what

34:04

Akito often, you know, advertises itself to

34:07

be, but it's a much more, you

34:09

know, at least in my estimation, a

34:11

much more effective version of that same

34:14

underlying ethic where you can, like, you can control

34:17

someone and use as a

34:21

little violence as necessary

34:25

and basically just use a

34:27

superior knowledge of physics and leverage and

34:29

position against them. So it's a very,

34:32

it can be incredibly relaxed and yet

34:36

given what the circumstance is, it can be a very

34:40

high testosterone experience. You know,

34:42

it's not kind of a quintessentially masculine

34:46

thing to be doing, but you

34:49

can internalize the same sort

34:52

of structure and that's

34:54

largely what meditation is because basically

34:57

the default state is one of

34:59

being attacked and ambushed all

35:01

the time by your thoughts

35:03

and by your reactivity and by, you are

35:07

being taken in by

35:09

assumptions and illusions and not,

35:11

you're in a fog, not

35:14

you personally, but you know, one is and, you

35:18

know, even when you learn

35:20

to meditate, you're in this fog most of the time.

35:23

So the practice is

35:25

one of continually breaking the spell. You

35:27

were constantly on the mat, constantly

35:30

finding yourself in a position

35:33

of some surprising disadvantage, right? Like it's like

35:35

all of a sudden there's a rear naked

35:37

choke that's, you know, three quarters applied, right?

35:40

And you need an answer for that

35:42

and not knowing the answer is

35:44

just synonymous with death, right? Like you're, you're

35:47

just getting, you know, you're just,

35:49

you'll be as miserable for as long as,

35:51

as circumstances dictate in the absence

35:54

of, and I shudder to interrupt this

35:56

because I found it so interesting tying

35:58

it to BJJ, but. I

36:00

need to know why is it, or I want

36:03

it said, why is it that

36:05

the identification with the I or

36:07

these never-ending thoughts, why do they

36:09

create suffering? You

36:12

guys know when it comes to something

36:14

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36:16

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36:18

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36:20

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37:34

Well, it's just the ego is, at

37:38

bottom, it is itself a kind of contraction.

37:40

I mean, when you look at what this

37:42

feeling of self is, so let's just talk

37:44

about what the sense of self is. The

37:47

sense of self, for most of us, is

37:49

not a feeling that we're

37:51

identical with our bodies. Most people don't feel

37:54

identical with their physical bodies. They

37:56

feel like they're passengers inside their bodies.

37:58

Right, they're like, my body's down. here, like these

38:00

are my hands, these are my legs, you know,

38:02

I obviously care about these things, you know, if,

38:04

you know, I, you know, this is where my

38:06

pains and pleasures are coming from. But

38:09

I'm up here in the head. And

38:12

I'm a kind of passenger, I'm a witness

38:15

of this. And

38:17

if you look, I mean, most people when they try

38:19

to pay attention, they try to find themselves, they try

38:21

to, you know, they, they try to meditate,

38:23

they feel that they're a

38:25

locus of attention in the head, behind

38:28

their face, behind their eyes, you're

38:30

looking out at the world and the world is not

38:32

self, you know, you're, you're over there, I'm looking across

38:34

space at you, I'm here behind

38:37

my face. And my face is

38:39

a kind of mask, really. I mean, it's like, I'm

38:41

not, I'm not identical to my face. I mean, it's,

38:44

it's states matter to me, like, if I have some

38:46

weird expression on my face, you know, like someone said,

38:49

like, well, can we take a picture of you and

38:51

you can't figure out how to smile and you're, you

38:53

feel uptight, like you're reading the state

38:55

of your face as your emotions are playing

38:57

on your on your face, right? The

39:00

signature of the emotion you're feeling, it has a lot to

39:02

do with what you feel in your face. And

39:05

it feeds back into your mind, or if you

39:07

force yourself to smile, you can you actually feel

39:09

a state of happiness coming in your, in your

39:11

mind. But

39:14

people feel like they're behind their face in their head,

39:16

right? And so that, you know,

39:18

kind of homunculus that that person in the

39:20

head, which we know doesn't

39:22

make any sense neurologically, there's no place in

39:24

the brain where there could be a little,

39:26

you know, consciousness, that is one thing that

39:29

is this stable self that's looking out through

39:31

the eyes, right? There's

39:34

a flow of experience. And you know, it's

39:36

it is invoking, you know,

39:39

many regions of the brain at all times. And

39:42

there is no you, you are

39:44

identical to this flow

39:46

of experience. This the stream of consciousness

39:49

is what you are as a matter of subjectivity,

39:51

right? I'm not I'm not saying that it's not

39:53

arising in the brain, or that bodies aren't real,

39:56

or that there's no physical universe. I'm saying as

39:58

a matter of experience. there

40:00

is just this flow of consciousness

40:02

and its contents. And yet

40:05

we seem to put this unchanging center

40:07

to it. And that

40:09

is a... What

40:12

that is, what

40:14

is giving us that feeling, that there is an

40:16

unchanging center to this flow, is

40:19

this sort of, this contracted

40:21

identification with thought. It is a

40:23

kind of thought. It is just

40:26

each moment of, if I'm

40:28

saying something and it doesn't make

40:30

sense, or it sounds like bullshit, the

40:33

part, the experience in you

40:35

which is, oh, that's not right, right? That

40:38

feels like you, right? I mean,

40:40

you're not witnessing it as

40:43

an object and consciousness just arise and pass

40:45

away. It sort of has come up from

40:47

behind and it just feels like that's me, right? And, but

40:50

that thing is always happening, that that's

40:52

me feeling is always happening. And so

40:55

you just feel like you're in your head behind your face, right?

40:58

For two reasons, there's two sides of this coin. So

41:01

much of what we're thinking is making

41:04

us miserable, right? So much of it is unpleasant. So

41:06

much of it is causing anxiety. We've got, you look

41:08

at your to-do list, you got 50 things on it.

41:10

You just feel like, oh my, the day

41:13

is not long enough, right? This is, and that's a high

41:15

class problem to have, right? There

41:18

are worse problems. This

41:21

is the state we're in. And

41:23

the obverse of that is, when we're

41:26

really just, connecting

41:28

with life in a joyful, creative, beautiful

41:30

way, like when you look out the

41:32

window and it's the most beautiful sunset

41:34

ever, and you are just

41:36

looking at the sunset, right? You're not, like

41:38

you're fully connected with its beauty. Those

41:43

are all moments where you're losing

41:45

this sense of self.

41:48

But the difference between meditation and those

41:50

moments is that you're

41:52

not really aware of losing the sense

41:54

of self in those moments. You're not

41:57

really aware of what is freeing about

41:59

those moments. And you can't do it in

42:02

other circumstances. Like you can't like, you know,

42:05

I need the beautiful sunset, just looking at

42:07

your shoe isn't good enough for me, right?

42:09

But with meditation, I can actually look at

42:11

your shoe in the same way that I

42:14

look at the sunset. So that's the, like

42:16

what's happening for people, most

42:19

people, is that they're waiting for the

42:21

world to give them a good enough reason

42:23

to just be present, and

42:25

to be present so fully that

42:28

they lose their sense of self, right?

42:30

That they're no longer behind their face,

42:33

you know, just waiting

42:35

for something good to happen, right? Or

42:37

figuring out how to change the experience

42:39

enough so that, again,

42:41

they can start, they're no longer at war. I

42:43

mean, to a greater or lesser

42:45

degree, we're always

42:47

at war. I

42:50

mean, we're always fighting something. You know,

42:52

there's always this like, you know, you're

42:54

always noticing something wrong, you're feeling uncomfortable

42:56

in your body, you're reacting to

42:58

something that somebody did, or you thought they

43:01

did, you're navigating a social encounter

43:03

that seems off-kilter, you know, it's awkward, and

43:05

like you're trying to figure out what to

43:07

say, and that sounds

43:09

stupid, and you're just

43:12

being blown around. And

43:14

the moments where you really feel

43:16

good are moments where you can, there

43:20

isn't a coming to rest, right?

43:22

Where it's not about the past or

43:24

future, you know, it's not about

43:26

half a second ago, it's not about half

43:28

a second from now. And the

43:31

ultimate version of that is to

43:35

entails the dropping of this sense

43:37

of self. Is everything you

43:40

do about flourishing for you? Unfortunately not. I

43:42

mean, wisdom would be really being able to

43:44

track what

43:49

is gonna matter, you know, at the end of the day

43:51

or at the end of a life. For me, flourishing is

43:54

a matter of spending your

43:57

time pleasantly at the

43:59

end of the day. and happily and creatively

44:01

and having

44:04

fun, but in all the

44:06

ways which every

44:10

moment when someone asks you, well, you know, that

44:12

last hour, that last day, that last week, that

44:14

last year, do you feel good

44:16

about that? Was that a good use of your time? That

44:19

remembering self, that retrospective gesture,

44:23

that's where people worry about things

44:25

like meaning, right? I mean, that's like this

44:27

too, I mean, to use, you know, Danny Kahneman's framing

44:30

here, there's the experiencing self and

44:32

there's the remembering self. And

44:35

the remembering self is the self that

44:39

you're talking to when you say, you know, are

44:41

you satisfied with your life, whether you're asking yourself

44:43

or someone's asking you. And

44:46

the answers that are available in

44:49

those moments really determine whether

44:51

or not somebody has a kind of

44:54

global life satisfaction, whether they have meaning.

44:56

And those are the

44:58

moments where people feel like, you know,

45:00

I need religion, I need to know

45:02

how the far future is going

45:04

to be, I need some story to tell

45:07

myself that is fundamentally consoling. But

45:10

the experiencing self, the self that is

45:12

just going moment to moment, feeling

45:15

pain and pleasure and just

45:19

dealing with this very

45:21

short, you know, time horizon,

45:23

I think that is,

45:27

that's fundamentally our real self. I mean,

45:29

the remembering self is a version

45:32

of that. You know, if you ask me, are you

45:34

satisfied with your life and I, you know, spend the

45:36

next 30 seconds telling you about that, that

45:38

is yet another, you know, brief

45:41

chapter in my experiencing self, right?

45:45

And most of life is

45:47

getting summed over this

45:49

lifeline of the experiencing self and their

45:59

questions of meaning. and

46:01

a kind of global story to tell yourself

46:04

about what this is all about are

46:07

far less important than people think. I think

46:09

you want to be playing both games intelligently.

46:11

You don't want to

46:14

be absorbed in pleasures, which

46:17

every time you think about your life, have

46:20

you feeling, I'm just wasting my life.

46:22

I'm just, you know, I'm a superficial guy, you

46:24

know, I've, you know, I got wealthy and now

46:26

I just, you know, do heroin and play golf,

46:28

right? And it's just fun, you know, like whenever

46:30

you check in with me, I feel pretty good

46:32

because I have, you know, an unlimited supply

46:34

of heroin and golf. But

46:37

it's, you know, I can't

46:39

really, you know, I'm sort of embarrassed by

46:42

every time I have to talk about it.

46:44

That's not the, you know, you do want

46:46

so over here, you still want, you

46:51

want your pleasures to be justified

46:54

by good relationships and a

46:56

world that cares about

46:59

your inputs and outputs, right? So you're

47:01

like you want, you know, you

47:04

want what you're paying attention to all day

47:06

long to matter to someone else. And we're

47:08

so deeply social. It's not wrong to want

47:10

those things. But

47:13

again, it's possible to

47:15

have a purchase

47:17

on well-being that is deeper than any one of those

47:19

things so that when you lose one of those things,

47:21

right, when you find out that the thing

47:24

you thought people would love, they

47:26

actually hate it, right? You know, the television

47:28

show you wrote or the novel you wrote

47:30

or whatever, you invested all this time, you

47:32

had a hope for this thing, but

47:34

your hopes were disappointed. How long

47:36

do you suffer over that, right? In the

47:38

absence of this

47:41

sort of superpower where you can actually

47:44

find an intrinsic well-being to consciousness, it

47:47

will be for as long as, you know,

47:49

your, you know, bad genes and bad life

47:51

experiences dictate, right? It's like it's just, you're

47:53

at the mercy of who you were yesterday.

47:55

And so as a skill, meditation is fairly

47:57

unique in that you can actually

48:00

reset independent of what's going on.

48:02

But again, it's not a reason

48:04

to become totally

48:08

immune to the effects you're

48:10

having on the world and what the world

48:12

is telling you because ultimately

48:14

you are going to spend most

48:17

of your time asleep and dreaming

48:19

in this state

48:22

in conversation with

48:24

yourself and in conversation with others no matter how

48:26

much you meditate. I think ultimately

48:28

there are people who get, quote,

48:31

fully enlightened and completely break the

48:33

spell of being identified with thoughts.

48:37

I'm not one of those people, or certainly not

48:39

yet. And so I

48:41

experience this fluctuation, but

48:44

the fluctuation is so important

48:47

for my well-being that

48:49

I can talk about it without

48:52

hesitation. What

48:54

do you say to people who the deep

48:56

fundamental problem in their life is that they're

48:58

lost. They have no sense of meaning or

49:01

purpose. They don't know what direction to go

49:03

into. They're sliding towards depression because it

49:05

all seems so pointless. That's

49:08

something that I encounter with people a

49:10

lot. People will stop me randomly and

49:12

just be like, help. And

49:15

I'd love to know, knowing

49:17

that you have a very limited window of time

49:19

with that person, what would

49:21

you say in like 60 or 90 seconds

49:24

that would hopefully send them on a path that

49:26

would actually be useful? Well,

49:29

I would just point out the mechanics of

49:31

it, which is what is actually going on

49:33

is that they're lost in thought. They're thinking

49:35

without knowing that they're thinking basically

49:39

every moment of their waking life. And

49:42

the character of that story in this

49:44

case is depressing or certainly

49:49

productive of unhappiness. Now,

49:52

there are

49:54

at least three possible antidotes to

49:56

that, and they should try all

49:58

of them. So if we're talking about a clinical

50:00

depression, it's useful to say that

50:04

there's a physiology to this that can

50:06

be driven from below in a

50:08

way that's not narrowly responsive

50:10

to their thinking. So it'll

50:12

tend to produce depressive

50:14

thoughts, and the depressive thoughts will tend to

50:16

feed back on the state. But I

50:19

don't think all forms of depression

50:21

are just a matter of what

50:23

a person's thinking. It can be really, it's best

50:25

viewed as a kind of disease,

50:28

you know, of physiology. And

50:30

so, you know, I'm not against antidepressants at all.

50:32

I know many people who've received a lot of

50:34

help from them, and I hope we get better

50:36

ones in the future. And pharmacology

50:39

is definitely a piece of

50:41

the solution for many people.

50:44

And everything else that is good to

50:47

do that people sort of lose their

50:49

commitment to doing at the

50:51

worst possible time should

50:53

be done. I mean, you have to sort of

50:55

get behind yourself and push to exercise and to

50:57

socialize and to do things that, you know, you

50:59

may not want to do because those are good

51:02

for you and help, you know, can

51:04

break you out of it. But

51:06

the normal range

51:09

of psychological suffering, you know,

51:11

not clinical depression, but just feeling like, you

51:13

know, life sucks and you're a failure and

51:15

there's nothing, you know, it's like you're

51:19

just, you're stuck.

51:22

That is a story of telling

51:25

yourself a story, you're thinking. And you

51:28

can either become more

51:30

and more mindful of that and interrupt

51:32

that more and more. And

51:35

or, and it should be and, you

51:38

can reframe this continually

51:41

and tell yourself a better story. But

51:43

you can actually just engineer,

51:45

you know, you can

51:47

change the code that you're, you know, running

51:52

moment to moment. And

51:55

I mean, just a very simple one, which

51:57

I, you know, I use, actually, recorded

52:00

this in a lesson on the app,

52:02

you know, just gratitude, just thinking

52:04

this actually, you know, this

52:06

particular maneuver is, I believe,

52:09

comes from Stoic philosophy. I didn't actually get

52:11

it from Stoic philosophy, but this sort

52:13

of use of negative imagination

52:15

where you think of all

52:18

of the bad things that haven't happened to you, right?

52:20

So if you're just, you know, if you're stuck in

52:22

traffic, driving to the job that you don't like, and

52:26

you're frustrated, you can

52:29

think of all the things that

52:32

could happen to you, right, that haven't, and

52:35

if any one of them happened to you, you would

52:38

consider your prayers answered if you could just

52:40

be returned to this moment, right? Like you

52:42

haven't been diagnosed with cancer, right? You've got

52:45

two young kids, say, you know,

52:47

you want to live to see them grow up, and

52:49

you could be the guy who today is going to

52:51

find out you've got two months to live, right? And

52:53

you have to, then the next two months is spent

52:56

just unwinding your worldly

52:58

affairs, right? You're not that

53:00

guy, right? That hasn't happened to you yet. That's

53:03

just more thinking, but

53:05

it can have a profound effect. You

53:07

can reframe your experience in a way

53:09

that doesn't actually change anything material about your

53:12

circumstance, and it can let the light

53:14

in. And there are many techniques like that that are

53:16

just a matter of invoking

53:18

useful concepts skillfully.

53:23

Tell these guys where they can find you online. The

53:25

Making Sense podcast is something I spend a lot of

53:28

time doing. My

53:30

meditation app is at wakingup.com. It's

53:32

called Waking Up, and

53:35

otherwise, I'm just my website,

53:37

samharris.org. I'm on Twitter is

53:39

also samharris.org. There's no dot,

53:42

but you just put in Sam Harris and you'll

53:44

get an eyeful. Yes,

53:46

very true. What's

53:49

the impact that you want to have on the world? Well,

53:54

you know, what

53:56

I'm spending my time doing is... Trying

54:01

to engage honestly

54:03

with. Interesting

54:06

and consequential ideas so the

54:08

net that the the then diagram i have

54:10

you know i don't think about a lot of

54:12

when i. Think about you know

54:14

retrospectively what i have been spending a lot of time doing

54:16

i seem to keep

54:19

finding the intersection of. Intellectually

54:22

interesting ideas that have some con connection

54:24

to science or philosophy or it just

54:26

has to be the kind of thing

54:29

that someone would may want to think

54:31

about anyway because they're just cool ideas

54:33

of something like artificial intelligence right. Very

54:36

interesting to think about but

54:39

it's also hugely consequential increasingly

54:41

so and if we get

54:43

it wrong. It

54:45

will you know redound our misery

54:47

right if not extinction right so

54:49

like that is that's. The

54:52

center of the bullseye for me something that's

54:54

interesting something consequential something

54:56

that that getting at the

54:58

difference between getting it right and wrong is enormous

55:01

right and that's so those are that's.

55:04

So the landscape where i'm trying

55:06

to continually focus my conversations i

55:09

love that. All right

55:11

guys truly there are few people on

55:13

this planet that have influenced my thinking

55:15

more than this man i hope that

55:17

you will dive in his world and

55:19

let it expand your own consciousness and

55:21

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55:24

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55:26

until next time my friends be legendary

55:28

take care. What's

55:31

up my impact theory family it's Tom bill you and

55:33

i want to take a moment to express my heart

55:35

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55:40

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57:01

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