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You are listening to impact Theory impact Theory impact their impact Theory impact baby. Everybody. Welcome to impact Theory our goal with this show. And Company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a neuroscientist philosopher and a five-time New York Times bestselling author his book The End of Faith won the 2005 pain award for nonfiction and spent an astonishing 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He has a degree in Philosophy from Stanford a PhD in neuroscience and he's practice meditation for more than 30 years a combination that gives him a very unique perspective that has made him one of the most sought-after thinkers on the planet. He's given multiple TED talks with millions of views and is written works have been translated into more than 20 different languages. Additionally. He's written for some of the most prestigious Publications around including the New York Times the Los Angeles Times.
Times and the annals of Neurology to name but a few it clear and rational voice almost without peer on some of today's most difficult subjects when he speaks thousands of people show up in real life and millions listen online and his ideas have been discussed by some of the most visible and well-respected outlets in the world including time the New York Times Scientific American nature and countless others. He's also the host of the Webby award-winning podcast making sense, which was named by Apple as one of the iTunes best. So, please help me in welcoming the man who has spent roughly two years in aggregated silent contemplation, one of the four horsemen of the non apocalypse Sam Harris excited to dive into the some of these subjects, which I think you have just such a fascinating.
Being take on and the thing that I've drawn the most wisdom from with you is what and these are very much my words how to live a good life and that's where I want to start and it'd be really interesting to hear your definition of like what kind of life and way of thinking should we be aiming for yeah, it was a hard question because my notion of human well-being is really open-ended. I don't think we understand what the Horizon is. If in fact there is one for kind of ultimate flourishing of conscious Minds. We have a pretty good sense of what we don't want and are right not to want we don't want to be terrorized and depressed and find ourselves constantly in conflict with strangers finding our aims frustrated move so that the generic situation we want to find ourselves in more and more is to effortlessly cooperate with creative and happy strangers writing that way the 7 billion of us.
We need institutions and laws and norms and ways of thinking that take the friction out of pleasurable and non paranoid interaction with strangers and it's not just about having, you know, five or so close friends who's got who have your back right? I mean like clearly we're all on the same team on some basic level and if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree will have the world we currently have until it becomes unsustainable and because it we're in a situation now where
I think it's reasonable to worry that our default state of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible aims of you know, other groups and other people is unsustainable and the presence of more and more destructive technology. I just I think we have to get our act together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't yet and when you think about that coming down to the personal level do you think about people as having a North star or a purpose that they should be pursuing and to contextualize that I'll say because I always found myself wanting to ask people that I ended up answering the question for myself. And so for me the purpose of my life from my perspective is to see how much of my potential I can actuate. So how many skills. Can I acquire that have meaning and utility to me that allow me to serve not only myself but others and so that sense of pushing myself, too.
Is it better to always improve to show up every day and not think about whether I get something cross some Finish Line generate a certain amount of wealth or anything like that, but just do I sincerely approach the idea of bettering myself in a very specific Direction based on what I want to accomplish in my life or not. And if I do that sincerely, then I say that the day or the life has been a victory and if I don't do that then to me I'm pointed in the wrong direction. Do you have any sort of Guiding Light like that that say you would try to pass on to your children or that you yourself have for you? Well, I think that's a good one and I share it but I can imagine other versions of having a name which don't really totally overlap with that amazing. You know, it would be someone could decide for instance that they have a talent that is highly marketable. And what they want to do is make as much money as possible so that they can give a lot of it away to help people. I mean money money is Just Energy write it.
Gia if you are making billions of dollars and you're giving billions of dollars away to good causes well that you know on an effective altruism metric that's that's much better than you go into Africa yourself and handing out food, you know in a famine right? You want to be bankrolling thousands of people to do that, right? And if you have a skill, you know, if you're a great singer or whatever and and it may be some skill that you didn't spend a lot of time to acquire right so you don't have this whole Mastery story that you have and that actually resonates with me so that that would be a good life, you know provided you can extract the psychological satisfaction from it because most of what we experience in philanthropy is when it's telescopic and this way when you just signing a check, you're not necessarily connected to the good you're doing and I can imagine someone doing a men's good in the world by signing very large checks, but not actually internalize.
In the gratification of that on some level we have to be aware of the possibility of rowing and to boat simultaneously there's what the effects are in the world of how we're living. So, you know, we want to have a good impact on others, but we actually want our conscious states of psychological pain and pleasure to be mapped in some rational way to the kinds of effects were having right so you don't want to be a callous person who's just leaving devastated and unhappy people in your wake and taking pleasure in that. I mean that you're a psychopath that that's that's how you're tuned. But you also don't want to be a person who's doing a lot of good in the world but not able to internalize the felt sense of your connectedness to others because you're you know, you're too neurotic or you're too distracted or you're just not you know connecting with others. So it's really interesting and I don't think I've ever heard anybody else talk about that notion of making sure that your mapping what you're doing to sort of be outwardly out.
Realistic to actually map to your own internal state of well-being if you will and hearing the discussions that you've been around Islam and how beliefs and ideas can be really dangerous made me ask a question of how and basically I'll quickly summarize. So you've got people that they have a book and the book has ideas and things that they were meant to believe and then act in accordance with and because of where they grew up or you know, what their parents and the society around them taught them they internalize those beliefs and if we could through communicating our ideas well to them get them to see something that caused more well-being for other people that that would be a better way to move their belief system. So one do you believe that a belief system is malleable in that there's some element of what you could choose this set of ideology or you could choose this and I don't know if you would say that one of those is more true than the other but certainly one
Take us closer to well-being than the other and if you think that belief systems are by their very nature malleable things, what would sort of be the belief system in just like a couple tenants that you could hand to somebody that you think would help them maximize their own well-being as well as serve a greater. Good speaking. Generically, I think
Having our beliefs map onto reality to some degree is obviously good because if they're not you're just bumping into hard objects will get em. It's like if your map is completely wrong you are bound to suffer, right? So we have to be in a situation where radical ignorance can't be Bliss, right? So that's that's one principle. Now, there could be a looseness of fit at there could be situations where being strictly right about what's true. Maybe non-optimal right? There may be it may be useful to have a slightly delusional self-serving bias. Right the think you're coming off better than you are with like it may give you more enthusiasm for your life and your confidence. But anything that's two out of register is just illusion right in other people notice and other people treat you like somebody who's just not tracking in a reality. And so that's one principle. So I think we want our beliefs to be true.
In some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually, right? Because if you're if you close yourself off if you say we'll listen I'm done. I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true then again when more data comes in when something surprising when one of your intuitions troops to be faulty, if you can't are correct again, you're just going to fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world and what with what other people think is true as well. So the really the only mechanism we have to do that is human conversation. We have to be open to having other people point out errors in our thinking and we had in and in the conversation we have with ourselves we have to do likewise. We have to be continually open to the possibility that we might be wrong. And in fact, we're very likely to be wrong a lot of the time and so then, you know, then hence the virtue of getting educated and surrounding yourself with smart.
Our people and reading good books and just exposing yourself to the kinds of lessons that other people have learned over thousands of years and are learning in real time right now and you can live vicariously through you don't have to make all the errors that everyone is made around you so you don't have to like you can look at Lance Armstrong and say, okay. Well, it's probably not a good idea to lie, you know relentlessly about something and then try to punish the people who caught you in your lives and then get caught and have to wind up on Oprah apologizing right? I mean that's you know, you can you can internalize that lesson and understand something about the ethics and reputational costs of line. So given that cot get in the conversation and an openness to the intrusions of other people's thinking is really at the best game in town for understanding what reality is and how to navigate within it then you can see how
Non optimal and you know, ultimately dangerous dogmatism is not a dogmatism is just holding to an idea no matter what else comes into view, right? So there's nothing you can say to challenge this time. So, you know, I'll talk to you about all this stuff but overhear there's something that I care about some proposition some assertion that something is true that I care about so much. I'm so emotionally attached to it that not only is it non-negotiable. If you continue to push over here, I'm going to get angrier and angrier right? I'm going to I'm going to threaten you with violence, right? That is the default state of organized religion, right? He'll historically and admit that, you know certain religions now have kind of relaxed their intolerance to a degree where the violence isn't explicit but that is the not only is that the default a faith-based religion they have a way of thinking about dogs. I'm a dogmatism is a good word in the context of
Eric Christian dogma is not is not a derogatory term. They call it Dogma for a reason right can certainly cat the Catholics do so.
The this there's notion that you can believe something strongly without evidence or certainly without good evidence without evidence that can survive pressure from outside. So the idea that wanting evidence is a perversion of your circumstance, right? So like that, you know, you really if you buy this thing in the bag that you keep that I haven't shown you you are that redounds to your credit, right? It's just it's one is not true because the experiential core of these religions and experiences, like unconditional love say those can be experienced. I mean that it's not that everything in our religious literature is untrue but there's nothing that has to be believed on insufficient evidence to be explored. And so I what I recommend here is that we really adopt a scientific attitude everywhere. We don't partition are thinking about reality where we say. Well the here's the stuff over here. We're super important, but we can't think about it to rigorously right to in fact I think about it to rigorously is to corrupt it and then over here we've got, you know science and technology and
You know Engineers to calculating whether a bridge is going to you know, withstand the weight of the traffic on it and there we can think rigorously so to do you know, don't tell me about rigor with respect to meaning and you know, what was worth living for and what's worth dying for and you know, what what is love and compassion and well-being like that's all that has to be just what we have to be Hostage to a conversation that our ancestors were having two thousand years ago. And we have to imagine that certain of our books were dictated by the creator of the universe to organize all that but over here, let's get let's get it all dialed in because we really care about our smart phones work, right? It makes it makes no sense. It's trying to trying to resolve that tension is something I've spent a lot of time on it's interesting to me that that tension exists and it makes me come back to you. Okay? Why doesn't that tension exists in my own life and the organizing principle that I use and I think a lot about like, what would somebody pass on to their children now? I've decided not to have kids so I will never get
To answer this but I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the organizing principles you've referred to ideas and sort of the operating system of the mind and I that seems very apt to me. So what are the organizing principles that I would give somebody to think in a certain way and one of the things I'm obsessed with and I think I explain this so poorly I don't see it light people's eyes up and I'd love to figure out how to say it. Well, which is this skills have utility now what I mean by that is learning architecture is interesting because it allows you to build a structure that could protect somebody allows you to build a structure that to really make a basic like the one I forget exactly what country it's in but the seed Vault right like you understand architecture well enough and how to ventilate things and all the things that seeds would need to like live for a very long time so that we could re plan if we had two learning those skills had a purpose and that purpose allows for something to happen. And so let's take Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which I know that you do jujitsu.
Everything that you learn in Jiu-Jitsu has a real world implication and that real-world implication is one if you got into a fight you probably be more likely to be able to successfully defend yourself and that in and of itself is so profound as to be worth the time now, there's obviously all kinds of other benefits as well. But once people understand okay, these skills have utility then I need to be fiendish about increasing my skill set because it has this real world application. So the problem that I get into where people are dogmatic about anything whether it's religion or like I wrote this belief system caves the 25 things that I had to do to my mind in order to go from being a good employee which always lovingly refer to as sort of a slave like mentality. I kept my head down did a little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs. That's where I started. That's what my parents taught me to do and to get out of that and to become an entrepreneur there were these very simple right down Ebola things that I had to choose to believe and act in accordance with
And if you came to me and said hey Tom by the way number 14 on your list doesn't make sense and it doesn't make sense for this reason. I think you misunderstood something about your own Journey. I'd be like, that's so rad because now you're giving me something that has more utility than the thing that I've used right thus far one. What why do you think that breaks down? What is it that people value more than that? Is there some internal thing and then what process can people use to become more aware of what's guiding their decision-making because I think a lot of people I don't know if it's just at a feeling level. It's like a limbic thing or what? Well, I think it's a framing problem because most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill rhyme it. Well being is it's a skill not suffering unnecessarily is a skill regulating noticing your emotional life and regulating negative emotion is a skill. I saw, you know, I have a meditation app and you know meditation is a skill. It's a very useful one and
Spend a lot of time teaching what's now referred to as mindfulness meditation and the moment you begin practicing mindfulness, which is just just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience not adding anything to your experience. You're just noticing what it's like to be you moment to moment. But in a way that is not reactive you're not grasping. It was pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away. You're just going to make this concrete and let's say you have a fear of public speaking right? So you better go down and out on stage and you feel anxiety.
The usual the default state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience. It's just trying to figure is 12 in advance worry about that experience. I mean, the anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have to do then once you feel the butterflies you are at war with them, right you can track your mind contracts around it. Your conversation with yourself is is an unhappy one. It's like why the fuck am I this person who just can't like I've see people do this all the time. They're they're relaxed. I'm unhappy, you know, when am I and you're talking to yourself? You're not noticing it because you're the thoughts just come up from behind you as fast as they can and they seem to be you right you're identified with each thought that emerges in Consciousness and most people live their lives as though there's no alternative. We're not given a rule book for how to operate a human mind. Right and there's no place in a normal education. Where were what's even indicated that there's an alternative here. And so we get
It's tumble out into adulthood.
More or less assuming that we have will always have the mines we have and that really there's the only thing we can do to really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content, you know, we can read books we can we can develop interest but there's nothing at the sort of root level of our emotional and cognitive life that can change and so mindfulness is a way of kind of dropping a little bit lower and realizing. So in this case if you're feeling anxiety.
There's actually a place from which you can just feel it right and and be actually indifferent to it or anything else. You could be feeling me just just notice that there's even an unpleasant sensation my first you can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant. I mean, it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology that really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just to the framing that's just the story you're telling yourself, you know, if you felt these these tingles and this, you know slightly adrenaline is response right before you know, you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster you like that experience, right? But the fact that you're feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to you know, walk out onstage that's intolerable. Right? So just dropping back and realizing the power of the framing is again, this is a skill that is fairly esoteric one, but now, you know many people are learning.
It you know the secrets out and it has immense utility because then you can realize that the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short. They one you could you can actually be psychologically free even in their presence, right your freedom and your well-being isn't even predicated on getting rid of the physiology. Right? I like you can still be there but if you're not continually thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious the physiology dissipates very very quickly and that's true for anger is true for anything that is classically negative. And so to come back here question, but you know many of the things that people think they want out of life.
They either think our or many or many of the ways, they're keeping score about how good their lives are aren't they're not seen as these are either, you know, this experience is being delivered to them either based on the skills. They have or the skills. They've never thought to acquire, right? And yeah, so that's that's one thing. I would add to the picture of the usefulness of skills want to talk about the emotional control that you bring up. I think that's super powerful when my wife and I were first married. My problem was I have a very slow fuse or very long views and so it takes a lot to get me angry and that was actually a big complaint of hers should be really annoyed something would happen someone cut in front of us in line and I wouldn't freak out and she wanted me to freak out and she wanted me to like just bask in how unjust it was and she would really lament that and it just seems so strange to me but then when I got mad I would stay mad and there were times I would stay mad.
Eight ten twelve hours and I was working so much of the beginning of our relationship. The only time that we really had together as husband and wife would be for part of a Saturday and I would inevitably she would say something it would upset me. I would get pissed and I would stay pissed the entire time. But then as you said once you stop reinforcing it, which I would do, unfortunately, I'd be reinforcing reinforcing reinforcing it then something would happen. It would change my neurochemistry. I had forget like why was I so mad every single time? I was like, why did I just waste that time being mad? So I end up writing myself this letter and I gave it to my wife and I said read that to me the next time I get pissed off and in the letter I said, hey me, it's me. I have no hidden agenda here as to why I want you to calm down other than the fact that you know that if you end up being pissed for several hours, you're going to regret it every single time and
Right now I want you to laugh out loud and for however long it takes just laugh out loud, you know studies show that you can't laugh out loud and remain pissed and so I gave it to her. I got pissed. She read it. She only had to read it. Once it was so profoundly transformational to see that just by laughing out loud. I couldn't stay angry that it really helped me get control of my emotions so that I knew I can do what all call a state shift. I don't think I've ever heard you use that kind of language. But if I'm angry I'm choosing to stay angry. Yeah. Unfortunately, I hadn't found meditation at that point. So I had to sort of brute force my way to that what can people do to learn to get control of their emotions?
Well, I the first thing to realize is that they already have control they virtually anyone watching this I would expect can do this under certain circumstances. So the one example I would have you recall as I'm sure this happened to almost everyone you're in some State like that. You're angry. You've just gotten triggered by something. But then the phone rings right and the phone it's you're getting called by somebody who this is not someone for you to process your anger with this is like a business call or you have to function right and it actually perfectly interrupts your state. You actually can just reset and have the conversation and the physiology is dissipating very very quickly there. Your attention is on something else and you're just having to function now, of course if somebody if it's a friend or your mother or somebody who you can complain to well, then you'll jump on and you'll amplify the state because you'll have a reason to talk about it so you can interrupt these states and simply put your attention.
Something else and and then, you know, then it dissipates.
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one thing that I'm really curious to know. You seem just freakishly educated on a whole lot of topics. What is your process for learning? How do you go about in taking data? How do you start do you pull threads what thread you pull first if you do like, how do you really begin to educate yourself on any given topic?
I don't really have taken a lot of information and I always have so that's you know, and not in necessarily an efficient or smart way. And I don't have you know life hacks that that optimize me as a consumer of information. So you like, you know, I know there are ways that are recommended to read a book. So as to extract the you know, the actionable information as quickly as possible from it, I have never been an adopter of any of those ways. So like, you know, and I mean, we're still basically read everything at the same speed. So I read everything like a scripture. So if it's you know, you know People magazine in a waiting room at the dentist's office. I'm reading that at the same speed that I'm reading, you know at work a philosophy or neuroscience and the big change of late. I mean, you know, I guess this is probably happened somewhere around 10 years ago. Is that what once I realized that
There's functionally an infinite amount of information to consume is doubling in The Sciences every three to five years and you know, there are literally thousands of good books that I will wish I had read but I will never get around to reading I've become a very fickle reader in the sense that I you know, I cut my losses very early. The sunk cost fallacy has completely disappeared for me the idea that I've you know, spent five hours or five days on this thing. So I better just finish it right that used to be my orientation with respect to reading books. Now, I'll discard a book, you know, just on a whim because I know there's an infinite amount of stuff. I want to read, you know, I don't go into the table of contents and look at the structure of the book and then go to the index and then look at the topics and then I mean, I just start on page one and start reading and then when I get bored, I stopped, you know, and so that's you know, do what do with what do with that life hack what you will
But I do continually, I mean, I'm either listening to audiobooks or podcasts or the news when I'm working out or commuting or you know, I'm just you know constantly taking in information, you know, fairly passively when I'm multitasking. So there's not you know, that mean the one thing that I don't have a lot of in my life is music because I you know, I can't write to music certainly let music with lyrics I can't podcast music obviously and I've decided that there's so much that I'm interested in there's so much. I want to know that basically I just hear music by accident now, I mean, I just like if someone else is playing music or I walk into a store there's music associated with a film it's getting in but otherwise, I'm just you know, I'm just a fire hose of information pointed at my head most of the time I got that so despite the
Perchance, haphazard way that you're reading it does seem at least from the outside that you are striving. I would say pretty truly for excellence help me reconcile. So one of the things I struggled with with meditation was it felt decidedly feminine and in a way that as somebody who I felt I felt that certainly growing up that I was far more on the feminine end up being a guy than anything else and so for me my journey certainly to being an entrepreneur was one of toughening up and so anything that that made me sort of feel that old school sort of gentle way. I would push back on and it's why I didn't meditate for a long time, but I see you you doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you're somebody who obviously cares about martial arts and being able to fight and defend yourself. I've heard you talked very eloquently about violence and clearly in your professional life. You've just even just what you've done in the writing let alone the lecturing you've already achieved such massive success refuse to believe that
There wasn't a just massive amount of energy behind that. So, how do you think about meditation in that context? Is this like going to war with your mind and your I'm going to come out the other side having faced demons and having won some sort of victory that allows me to perform at a higher level or am I totally missing all of this and it needs to be a letting go of a more peaceful relaxed sort of transient experience. Yeah. Well first it's a very common Association and I totally understand it and it's presented in many ways where yeah you under that framing. You can just feel the testosterone leaving your body, you know, so yeah, that's not my orientation. It is a lot like Jiu-Jitsu for the mind and it's and it's a lot like it what's so beautiful about Jiu-Jitsu in particular is that you can have this massive effect in the domain of violence.
While being relaxed it is what Aikido off, you know advertises itself to be but it's a much more, you know, at least in my estimation a much more effective version of that same underlying ethic where you can like you can control someone and use as a little violence as necessary and basically just use a superior knowledge of physics and leverage and position against them. So it's a very it can be incredibly relaxed and yet given what the circumstance is. It can be a very high testosterone experience, you know, it's not so kind of quintessentially masculine thing to be doing but you can internalize the same sort of structure.
And that's largely what meditation is because it basically the default state is one of being attacked and ambushed all the time by your thoughts and by your reactivity and by your being taken in by assumptions and and Illusions and not know you just you just you're in a fog not you personally, but you know one is and you know, even when you learn to meditate your in this fog most of the time answer your kite is so the practice is one of continually breaking the spell you were constantly on the mat constantly finding yourself in a position of some surprising disadvantage, right? Like it's like all of a sudden there's a rear naked choke that's you know, 3/4 applied right and you need an answer for that and not knowing the answer is just synonymous with death, right? It's like you're just getting you know, you're just you'll be as miserable for as long as As.
Dictate in the absence of stuff that's not and I shudder to interrupt this because I found it. So interesting tying it to BJJ, but I need to know why is it or I want it said why is it that the identification with the eye or the these never any thoughts? Why do they create suffering? Well, it's just the ego is
At bottom it is itself a kind of contraction. I mean when you look at what your this feeling of self is, right? So let's just talk about what the the sense of self is. The sense of self for most of us is not a feeling that we're identical with our bodies. Most people don't feel identical with their physical bodies. They feel like their passengers inside their bodies, right? They like my body's down here. Like these are my hands. These are my legs, you know, I obviously care about these things, you know, if you know, I you know this these were my pains and Pleasures are coming from but I'm up here in the head and I'm a kind of Passenger. I'm a witness of this and if you look I mean most people when they try to pay attention, they try to find themselves. They try to you know, they try to meditate they feel that they are a locus of attention in the head behind their face behind their eyes looking out at the world and the world is not self. You know, you are you're over there. I'm looking across space at you. I'm here behind my face.
And my face is a kind of mask. Really. I mean, it's like I'm not identical to my face. I mean, it's it's States matter to me. Like I have some weird expression on my face, you know, like someone said like well, we're going to the can we take a picture of you and you can't figure out how to smile and your you feel uptight like you're reading the state of your face as your emotions are playing on your on your face, right the signature of the emotion you're feeling has a lot to do with what you feel in your face and it feeds back into your mind with you force yourself to smile. You can you actually feel a state of Happiness coming in your in your mind, but people feel like they're behind their face in their head, right? And so that you know kind of homunculus that that person in the head, which we know doesn't make any sense neurologically, there's no place in the brain where they could be a little you know Consciousness. That is one thing that is the stable self that's looking out through the eyes, right? There's a flow of experience and you know, it is invoked.
You know many regions of the brain at all times and there is no you are identical to this flow of experience. The stream of Consciousness is what you are as a matter of subjectivity, right? I'm not I'm not met and I'm not saying that it's not a rise in in the brain or that bodies aren't real or that there's no physical Universe I'm saying as a matter of experience there is just this flow of Consciousness and its contents and yet we seem to put this unchanging Center to it. And that is a what what that is. You know, what the what is giving us that feeling that there is an unchanging Center to this flow.
Is this sort of this contracted identification with thought it is a kind of thought it is just each moment of you know, if I'm saying something and it doesn't make sense or it sounds like bullshit the part of it the part that the experience in you which has on that's not right, right that feels like you right. I mean you're not when you're not witnessing it as an object and Consciousness just arise and pass away. It sort of has come up from behind and it just feel like that's me, right and but that thing is always happening that that's me feeling is always happening. And so you just feel like you're in your head behind your face right rule for two reasons this two sides of this coin so much of our of what we're thinking is making us miserable, right so much of it is unpleasant so much of it is causing anxiety. We got you look at your to do list. You got 50 things on it. You just feel like all my other there's just the day is not long enough, right? This is you know the state and that's a good you know, that's a, you know, a high-class problem to have right?
They're worse problems. This is the state wherein and the obverse of that is when we're really just connecting with life in a joyful creative beautiful way like when you look out the window and it's the most beautiful sunset ever and you are just looking at the sunset, right? You're not like you're fully connected with its beauty. Those are all moments where you're losing this sense of self, but the difference between meditation and those moments is that
You're not really aware of losing the sense of self in those moments you not you're not really aware of what is freeing about those moments and you can't do it in other circumstances. Like you can't like, you know, I need the I need the beautiful sunset. Just looking at your shoe. Isn't it? Good enough for me, right but with meditation I can actually look at your shoe in the same way that I look at the sunset, right? So that's the like what's happening for people most people is that they're waiting for the world to give them a good enough reason to just be present and to be present so fully that they lose their sense of self rather than a no longer behind their face, you know, just waiting for something good to happen right or figuring out how to change the experience enough so that again they can start their no longer at War and they work to a greater or lesser degree.
We're always at War and we're always fighting something. You know, there's always this like, you know, you're always noticing something wrong. You're feeling uncomfortable in your body. You're reacting to something that somebody did or you thought they did you're navigating a social encounter that seems off-kilter. You know, it's awkward and like you're trying to figure out what to say and that would that sounded stupid and he's like you're you're just being blown around and the moments where you really feel good are moments where you can there isn't it a coming to rest right where it's not about the past or future, you know, it's not even about it's not about half a second ago. It's not about half a second from now and the ultimate version of that is to just to entails the dropping of this this sense of self is everything you do about flourishing for you. Unfortunately not. That's it. You know, the wisdom would be
Lee being able to track what is going to matter, you know at the end of the day or at the end of a Life For Me flourishing is a matter of spending your time pleasantly and happily and creatively and having fun but in all the ways which it every moment when someone asks you well, you know that last hour that last day that last week that last year do you feel good about that? Was that a good use of your time that remembering self that retrospective gesture? That's where people worry about things like meaning right? I mean that's like it's like there's two women to use, you know, Danny kahneman's framing here. There's the experiencing self and there's the remembering self.
And the remembering self is the self that you're talking to when you say, you know, are you satisfied with your life? Whether you're asking yourself or someone's asking you and the answer is that are available in that in those moments really determine whether or not somebody has a kind of global life satisfaction whether they have meaning and those are that's the those are the moments where people feel like, you know, I need religion. I need to know I you know, I need to know how the far future is going to be. I need like I need some story to tell myself that is fundamentally consoling but the experiencing self the explicit self. That is just going moment to moment.
Feeling pains and pleasure and just dealing with dealing with this the very short, you know time Horizon. I think that is that's fundamentally our real self. I mean the remembering self is the is a version of that, you know, if you ask me, are you satisfied with your life and I you know spend the next 30 seconds telling you about that that is yet another, you know brief chapter in my experiencing self. Right? And most of life is it is a story is you know is getting a get in summed over this this this Lifeline of the experiencing self and their questions of meaning.
And a kind of global story to tell yourself about what this is all about. Our are far less important than people think I'm a I think you want to be playing both games intelligently. You don't want.
To be absorbed in Pleasures, which every time you think about your life have you feeling I'm just wasting my life. I'm just you know, I'm a superficial guy. You know, I've you know, I got wealthy and now I just, you know, do heroin and play golf right and it's just fun, you know, like whenever you check in with me, I feel pretty good because I have you know, an unlimited supply of heroin and golf but it's you know, I can't really, you know, I'm sort of embarrassed by it every time I have to talk about it right that like that's not the, you know, you you do want so over here you'd still do want
You want your pleasures to be justified it by good relationships and I world that cares about your inputs and outputs. Right? So you're like you want, you know you want what you're paying attention to all day long to matter to someone else and we're so deeply social it's not wrong to want those things. But again,
It's possible to have a purchase on well-being that is deeper than any one of those things so that when you lose one of those things right when you find out that the thing you thought people would love they actually hate it, right, you know, the television show you wrote or the novel you wrote it. What it what you invested all this time. You had a hope for this thing, but your hopes were disappointed. How long do you suffer over that right in the absence of this sort of superpower that where you can actually find an intrinsic well-being to Consciousness. It will be for as long as you know, you're you know bad genes and bad life experiences dictate, right? It's like it's just you're at the mercy of who you were yesterday. And so many, you know, as a skill meditation is fairly unique in that you can actually reset independent of what's going on. But again, it's not a reason to become
Totally immune to your integrated the effects you're having on the world and what the world is telling you because ultimately you are going to spend most of your time asleep and dreaming, you know, this in this state with you know, in conversation with yourself and in conversation with others no matter how much you meditate. I mean, I you know, I think ultimately there are people who get, you know, quote fully enlightened and completely break the spell of being identified with with thoughts. You know, I'm not one of those people there are certainly not yet. And so I experienced this fluctuation, but the the flexure fluctuation is so important for my well being that I am and I can talk about it without you no hesitation. What do you say to people who the Deep fundamental problem in their life is that they're lost. They have no sense of meaning or purpose. They don't know what direction to go into their sliding towards depression because it all seems so pointless.
Unless that's something that I encounter with people a lot. People will stop me randomly and just be like help and I'd love to know knowing that you have a very limited window of time with that person. You know, what would you say in like 60 or 90 seconds? That would hopefully send them on a path. That would actually be useful.
Well, I would just point out the mechanics of it which is what is actually going on is that they're lost in thought they're thinking without knowing that they're thinking.
Basically every moment of their Waking Life, right? And the character of that story in this case is depressing or or you know, certainly productive of unhappiness. Now, there are two three at least three possible antidotes to that and they should try all of them right so that I can fit if we're talking about a clinical depression. It's useful to say that there's a physiology to this that you know can be driven From Below in a way that's not narrowly responsive to their thinking right. So it's you'll tend to produce depressive thoughts and the depressive thoughts will tend to feedback on the state. But you know, I don't think all forms of depression are just a matter of what a person's thinking and we can be really it's best viewed as a kind of disease, you know of physiology and so, you know, I'm not against antidepressants at all. I know many people who've received a lot of help from them and I hope we get better ones in the future and
And pharmacology is definitely a piece of the solution for many people and everything else that is good to do that people sort of lose their commitment to doing at the worst possible time should be done. I mean, you have to sort of get behind yourself and push to exercise and to socialize and to do things that you know, you may not want to do because those are good for you and help, you know, break can break you out of it. But the normal range of psychological suffering, you know, not clinical depression, but just feeling like, you know life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing you know, it's like you're just it's you're stuck that is a story of telling yourself a story you're thinking and you can either become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more.
And or and it should be and you can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story, but you can actually just engineer, you know, you can change the code that you're you're, you know running moment to moment and we just very simple one which I you know, I use actually recently recorded this in a lesson on the app, you know just gratitude just thinking is actually you know, this particular maneuver is I believe comes from stoic philosophy. I didn't actually get it from stoic philosophy. But this this sort of use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you, right? So if you're just, you know, if you're stuck in traffic driving to the job that you don't like and you're you're frustrated,
You can think of all the things that could happen to you right that haven't and if any one of them happened to you, you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment, right? Like you haven't been diagnosed with cancer, right? You've got two young kids say, you know, you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is going to find out you've got two months to live. Right? And you have to then the next two months is spent just unwinding your worldly Affairs, right? You're not that guy right that hasn't happened to you yet. That's just more thinking but it can have a profound effect. You can you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in and they're many techniques like that that are just a matter of invoking useful Concepts skillfully.
Tell these guys where they can find you online. That making sense podcast is something I spent a lot of time doing my meditation app. Is that waking up.com? It's called waking up and otherwise, I'm just my website Sam Harris dot-org. I'm on Twitter is also Sam Harris org, there's no dot. But you just put in Sam Harris and you'll get an eyeful. Yes, very true. What's the impact that you want to have on the world?
y-you know II
what I'm spending my time doing is
trying to engage honestly with
interesting and consequential ideas that so the net that the the Venn diagram I have you know, I don't think about it a lot. But when I think about you know retrospectively what I have been spending a lot of time doing I seem to keep finding the intersection of intellectually interesting ideas. They have to have some connection to science or philosophy or it just has to be the kind of thing that someone would may want to think about anyway because they're just cool ideas. So something like artificial intelligence right very interesting to think about but it's also hugely consequential increasingly. So and if we get it wrong it will you know, we're down to our misery, right if not Extinction, right? So like that is that's the center of the bullseye for me something that's interesting. Something is consequential something that that getting it the difference between getting it right and wrong is enormous. Right? And that's so it's so those are that's the
Where I'm trying to continually Focus my conversations, I love that. All right guys, truly. There are few people on this planet that have influenced my thinking more than this man. I hope that you will dive in his world and let it expand your own Consciousness and and discover new things that you're capable of if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary. Take
care.
Everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to iTunes go to Stitcher rate and review us that helps us build this community and that is what we are all about right now building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible and you guys reading and reviewing really helps with that. Alright guys. Thank you again so much and until next time my friends you legendary. Take care.
