Sam Harris ON: How To Break Your Social Media Habits & Ways to Master Your Anxious Thoughts

to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eight Rules of Love dot com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling

with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour Love Rules. Go to jshellytour dot com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. And today's guest is someone that I've been reading his books for

quite a while. We were just discussing beforehand. Probably started reading his work around thirteen years ago or thereabouts, and I just read his latest book, which I'm going to tell you about today, and we'll be discussing some of that work today. And it's amazing to see how someone's deepened, expanded, continued their thought, especially when they write in a very logical but also documentari way. And so I'm talking about Sam Harris and neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New

York Times best sellers. Sam's work covers a wide range of topics neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation, practice, rationality, and Sam focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Some of The books include the End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, which is the first book I read, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast and is the creator of the Waking Up app. Please

welcome to the show, Sam Harris. Sam, thank you for doing this.

Each of us is looking for a path back to the present. We're trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied. Now, my question is what's worth pursuing or what is worthy of pursuit in life, because I guess that's probably a good place to start.

possible to be at peace with the flux? Right? So that's and really finding a mode of being that wherein you you can recognize a type of fulfillment that isn't predicated on the next good thing happening. Right, the story you're telling yourself about the future that may in fact

never arrive. On some level, being isn't enough because they are all the ways in the ways the world might be, right, I mean, there's the possibility space of what we can create, and what we want to create takes effort, and so there's all these things that are not actualized now, even if we're content now. And I think the domain of our becoming, I mean, there's all kinds of healthy ways of unhealthy ways of becoming, but the healthy mode of becoming, at least one part of it is it really subsumes

our ethical lives. Right, It's like, just what is it? What would be good to do? What is positive? What is pro social? How can we make the world a better place? How can we raise our kids to be wise and honest and content? And I mean all of these are projects that take work, and so it's not just a matter of just chilling out perfectly and watching

what happens. We do have to do things. So the tension really is in being at peace in the meditative sense and the contemplative sense and the spiritual sense, even while you make great effort to accomplish things. And I think the piece part comes when you recognize that your happiness is not actually predicated on getting any of those things done. I mean that you have to learn to

love the process. You have to learn to recognize that goals themselves, as valid as they might be to achieve the experience of achieving them is very brief, and it has this mirage like quality where it just it recedes. I mean, you've been thinking about this thing for a year and you finally get to that landmark, and what is it. Well, it's just another moment of being alive. And now you've got your thoughts about the past and the future still, and the question is can you actually

make full contact with the present moment? And so in the quote you read, my main point was most people, if you don't know how to meditate, you're basically trying to arrange the world to give you a good enough reason to recognize that the present moment is enough. Right, And once you actually know how to meditate, you can sink into the present moment regardless of what else you're

struggling to accomplish. And so you can be you can sort of take the goals as the path, right, I mean kind of emotionally and cognitively, you sort of you've already arrived in terms of your own concerns about your own well being. And yet you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved. Right, But you're I mean, we're all going to die, right, It's not there's there's no solution to the the the massive problem of impermanence, right, so we have to find

some mode of being at peace with impermanence. And and that's really that's where the contemplate of life comes in.

How do you define, just for everyone who's listening, because I know you do this a lot in the book and in your work as well, how do you define spirituality and how do you define religion so that people can just make sense of those terms as we use them throughout this yeah conversation.

I think are just not helpful. So my argument is, really, you can have a twenty first century conversation about reality and how to live within it, or you can have a seventh century conversation or a fifth century BC conversation.

You can you can locate yourself at any point in human history, or you can at this moment decide to avail yourself of all of the best ideas and just recognize that we have really a common inheritance of wisdom and insight and can we can use whatever works right, And ultimately we have to be the best judges of what works given the needs of the moment, given technological

changes that could never have been foreseen by our ancestors. Right, So, whether we do this with the US Constitution, or we do it with the Bible, or we do it with with the Polycanon, you know, the Buddhist scripture, it's just you can There's no question that our ancestors have created documents and ways of thinking and methodologies, you know, science being one, the contemplative practice being another, that are incredibly

valuable to us. But we have to recognize that, you know, in this moment in time, all we have is human conversation and human intuition and human insight by which to navigate. And so I just for the religion piece to be dogmatically attached to a specific religion, as though it were the one true way of seeing everything, that just doesn't

make any sense to me at this moment. It's analogous to wanting to say that the physics is a Christian phenomenon, because the Christians, for the most part, were the first people to actually make real breakthroughs in physics. Well, it's just there's no reason to speak of Christian physics or Muslim algebra. And ultimately I think that there will be no reason to speak of Christian or Buddhist or Hindu spirituality.

I think we have a common human project, and whatever is true of the human mind and its possibilities, there has to be a way of talking about that that truly transcends culture. And certainly it isn't sectarian in any usual sense, in the same way that science, when it's

working transcends culture and isn't sectarian. I mean, there's no Japanese science versus American science versus you know, there's just there's just science spirituality for better or worse, is a word that I think we still need to use because I tend to. I also talk about the contemplative life or wisdom traditions and specific practices like meditation, but it names an approach to well being that isn't predicated on

all of the usual seeking to become happy. Right, So it's not about getting wealthier, it's not a it's not about getting healthier and fitter. And those are all worthwhile projects and they're not in conflict with spirituality. But the spiritual piece in spirituality is how is it possible to pay attention in this moment so as to not suffer unnecessarily? Right?

And what are the actual mechanics of our psychological suffering such that we do suffer unnecessarily so much of the time, And when you look closely at all that it really is a matter of being lost in thought almost all of the time, and there's kind of this living, this waking dreamscape of thought where we're talking to ourselves moment to moment, we're not aware of it, and so much

of that conversation is an unhappy one. And meditation is really a way of breaking that spell and waking up from the dream of discressivity and identification with thought such you can recognize that consciousness that by which everything is seen and known and experienced and felt right, just the qualitative character of your own being in this moment. Consciousness has certain qualities that are intrinsically peaceful and gratifying and

not and free of problems, right. And it's really the layer of thought that we fail to recognize all that and feel that our you know, every waking moment is some form of emergency that has to be responded to or reacted to.

have this question because I've often thought about this. You've well documented the pitfalls of organized religion and the challenges that come with that. What do you think of the pitfalls or challenges of spirituality in the fact that we move away from something, as you said earlier, was like, you know, this very defined, structured way of living that we've now come to look at it and gone, okay,

that doesn't make sense all the time. And at the other end, we have a complete kind of open paradigm of spirituality, which can often be confusing, lacking structure, lacking somewhat of a map, Like do you see certain pitfalls as to how we practice and become contemplative about spirituality?

not likely to be true. And and yet the most important spiritual claims traditionally, like the fact that the unconditional love is a possible state of mind, right, or that the self as it's normally felt and conceived is actually illusory right that we're taken in by a powerful illusion of separateness, and that's that feeling of separateness can be inspected and ultimately penetrated and felt through and felt beyond.

Those are really those are the babies in the bathwater of religion and spirituality that I think everyone, if they think about it long enough, wants to conserve. And yet and and those are fully supported by a modern discussion of the human mind, and even a neuroanatomical discussion of

the human mind. And there's no in my as you know, my phgs and neuroscience that I can tell you there's no place in the brain for a a an unchanging ego to be hiding, right, And the sense that we have a self that is unchanging, that's carried through from moment to moment, that is the place from which we appropriate experience that is separate from experience that is just granted, it's a powerful illusion for many people, but it's a it's an illusion that that can be dispelled, and once dispelled,

it actually brings your your experience into closer register with what we have every reason to believe neuroscientifically about just the way the mind should be based on on the way the brain is. If you wander into the spiritual side of a bookstore, if you can even find a physical bookstore these days, it's been it's been a while, so I've been in one, but they're few and far

between at the moments, definitely. But if you so in that section of the bookstore, there's a lot on the shelves that is bogus or semi bogus, or you know, filled with wishful thinking and not so interesting intellectually or ethically, frankly, but there's there's a lot that is truly valid. And I think we just have to become wiser curators of the totality of human conversation in the world's literature to find what is worthy of our credence at this point.

And this is what we do this naturally, and I think we just need to be honest that we are the ones like when you go to an ancient text, when you go to the you take your your favorite spiritual or religious book. In almost all of them, there are passages that are obviously anachronistic and just not suited to a twenty first century view of just how we

should live. Right, So there's a lot about how to sacrifice goats, you know, in the in the Old Testament, and it's just if it was ever useful, it's not not especially useful. Now people effortlessly ignore those passages and

that's fine. So you're you're performing editing on the fly, and then you then you find, you know, a passage in an Ecclesiastes or Jesus you're giving the Sermon on the Mount and you know the Golden Rule, and you say, okay, this is this really encapsulates a lot of wisdom, and

it's very hard to improve on the Golden rule. The Golden rules are fantastic heuristic for just living ethically with people so great there's nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence to use the Golden rule as a as a a great kind of navigation tool ethically. And when you think about ethics and morality, it really is a

question of what to do next. And we're always faced with this this navigation problem essentially, because there's this total space of possible experience individually and collectively, and we're trying to figure out how to navigate in this space given the possible expert is on offer. And the truth is there are horizons here which we can't see beyond. I mean, we don't know how good life could get for us individually and collectively. And there's so many things that are

in play now. I mean, we are living at a time where it's possible for us to change our own genomes ultimately, right, I mean, there's not not many people doing that at the moment, but that is just a few short years away where we're going to be confronted with the question of I mean, do you actually want to modify the genes that are expressed in your body

and brain and even in the germ line. So we're talking about the inheritance of future children, So we can do in a few short moments what evolution has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years in our case, and millions of millions and millions of years before that. So these are choices that we have always had to make, but now we're making them in the presence of increasingly

powerful technology, our engagement with the internet and information. I mean, we we have we're finding it hard to even have a conversation about the most basic facts now at scale because there's so much misinformation, and we much of our conversation is being piped through the social media platforms, which are essentially outrage machines. Right, They're a preferentially amplifying the most agitating and divisive content because that's what spreads faster.

And they're ampling, amplfying misinformation more than the debunking of misinformation. Right. So there's a kind of an asymmetric war of information here. And so we're we're suddenly we've got these functionally, we we have the genes we had you know, with a few tweaks we had that. We have the genes we

have maybe seventy five thousand years ago. Right, So we're we are these ancient primates now armed with nuclear weapons and an internet and increasing and AI technology now and we're faced with continually faced with the conundrum of what to do with all of this, and how do we solve these massive coordination problems where we get now eight billion strangers essentially to cooperate peacefully. The landscape of possibility here is always shifting, and so again we have human

conversation as a means by which to navigate this. And so yeah, I mean to come back this a very long way of getting back to your original question, which is once you recognize that our legacy thought structures are not well suited to this right. So to be a fundamentalist Christian, or a fundamentalist Buddhist or a fundamentalist Hindu in the face of these new opportunities and new challenges

is not the best operating system for your mind. And you're forced to be far more eclectic and non sectarian and not dogmatic, and just open to the best evidence and the best arguments, really perpetually open to the best, to new evidence and better arguments. Where the guardrails right, there's no longer it's no longer simple, right, I can't. I can no longer just consult a single book or a single list of dos and don'ts to guide to

guide me. Ultimately, it's a far more flexible and intelligent way to proceed, because we want me to ask yourself, do you want your next decision or your your decision ten years from now to be Do you want to be available to the best evidence and the best arguments at that moment when making that decision or not? Do you want some belief system that guarantees your unavailability right?

Do you want some kind of cognitive and emotional closure that walls you off from better arguments and better information. I think I think almost no one would sign up for that kind of you know, that's that's ignorance by another name. Right, So I think we want to be persuadable. We want to be open to better arguments and new evidence.

We also want to be skeptical and and conservative in in how we revise our map of the world, because we know that most new you know, published studies have sent a very good chance of not being true or

you know, or not not being replicatable. Even in science, we have a legacy, We have an inheritance of institutions that have proved themselves over generations, and so we shouldn't be eager to tear everything down to the studs and and build again, right, I think we I think there's a there's a reason to be conservative with respect to the institutions and norms. And I mean things that have worked for centuries there tend to be a reason why

they've worked for centuries. And so it's it's there's a sort of a tinkering and and an iterative process here that I think makes sense. But ultimately, yeah, we want a modern wisdom. Wisdom tradition to be the common property of a non sectarian, non parochial, non provincial humanity at this point.

some humans. So if humans have the ability to create something, it will have all the imperfections that we have internally in the creator of it, and so it will inherit all the same manipulative tendencies, exploitative tendencies, the you know, it's hard to free something of that if you inherently

build something with that. And you see that with any sort of media social media technology today, that even if it was built with the best intentions of trying to create good in the world, either it amplifies negative or inherently has some questionable morals and ethics to it as well. And so it comes back to the waking up part of your work, which is this self reflective contemplative idea of you know, who am I becoming? Who do I

want to be? Who am I? I mean at the very deepest level, As you said, one word that I've always loved from my studies was this idea of the word purifying, Like there was all this there was a needing, there was a need for purification of some of these elements. And you talk about this in the beginning of your book when you I believe it's one of the first times you did M D M A and then you had this feeling of like complete love for your friend,

free of envy. And when when I was reading that, I was thinking about how much this word purification is often not talked about, but it's probably my favorite word that I've I've learned through my study of wisdom traditions, because to me, I was thinking, Yeah, what's what's really required, as you said, is that love's already there. It's already there.

It's not like you're finding or discovering something, but there's almost like a detox and a cleansing and letting go of these other things that cloud our ability to be there. Is that part of what you doing, what you feel meditation achieves or no, that's that's a completely different thing as well.

that way, and there's definitely a place for that, But the mature approach to meditation practice is and the one frankly that is just free of the of the stress of seeking, is to recognize that that consciousness as it is to ordinary consciousness, regardless of what its current contents are,

regardless of what you're currently experiencing. You could be feeling a classically negative emotion and you could have just gotten angry, right, and then you remember, oh wait a minute, I'm I'm supposed to be meditating, Okay, what's true now, right, And the physiology of anger hasn't even had time to dissipate yet, right, So that that that'll happen over you know, tens of seconds, right, but still in the in this if if you know how to recognize you know what what I call over

and waking up consciousness without without a center, in that first moment of just just recognizing that you are the condition in which anger and everything else is appearing, there's already no center to that condition. There's already no ego

in the middle of it. And it doesn't actually get emptier of self than that ever, And it's and even if you have a very different experience, I mean you take M D M A and you feel unconditional love, or you go on a long meditation retreat and you get really concentrated and you're having just regularly having experiences of bliss. Say so, it can be very you know, drug like all of the those changes in the contents of consciousness are transitory. I mean, you take a drug

and it's going to wear off. You get very concentrated and you feel bliss. But when you're you know, watching Netflix two weeks later, you're not You're not concentrated in that way, and you're doing you're doing something else with your attention, and presumably you're not going to be bliss out in the same way. So all of those changes

in the contents are temporary. What's not temporary is the availability of this recognition that there's just this open condition which everything is spontaneously appearing thoughts and sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and moods and the energetics of experience is always occurring in a condition that is fundamentally mysterious, really, And it's not because if you engage it prior to concepts, I mean you couldire's a layer at which you can

just think about it and describe it. In psychological terms, there's a lot to understand, you correlating changes in our minds with changes in the brain. Right, So there's a possible neuroscience of contemplative experience, and people are doing that work. But as a matter of your own experience, there's this ever present mystery that anything is any way at all.

I mean, you don't know what you're going to think next until the thought itself arises, right, It's just because you'd have to think it before you thought it in order to know what it is. Right, So it's just on some level you are a witness to everything that's appearing. And in the beginning it feels like the witness has

the structure of a self, of a subject. But as you look into that more and more, that structure goes away, and there's just this condition in which everything is appearing and it doesn't and that doesn't feel like I. It doesn't feel like me. And whatever feels like I or me as yet more appearance. You know, it can be just a pattern of energy on your face or a contraction in the body. So as you keep dropping back and witnessing that it has, you know, the purification model

makes less and less sense, because what is there to purify? Right, There's not like even even even anger is no longer anger. Right in the moment of recognition, it's just this. It's just a feeling of heat on your face, right, It's just a feeling. It's just it's a feeling of tension

in your chest. And there's no one to whom those feelings refer, right, And and so the moment you recognize that you have by definition broken the connection to whatever thoughts were telling you why you were angry and why you should be angry, and why you have every right to be angry, and what you're going to say to that person next time you see them, you've broken that spell of thinking, and so the emotion is dissipating, and so it's anger is no longer anger, but it's in

purification mode. It is still possible to do that dualistically, I mean, in the beginning, when you're practicing what I tend to teach in over waking up is a technique called mindfulness, which most people engage dualistically in the beginning, where they're strategically being aware of sights and sounds and sensations and the breath and thoughts, emotions, and so even even dualistically, you can learn the difference between being lost in thought and identified with an emotion like anger and

just witnessing it from the point that seems to be outside of that thought and that that emotion, And even if it feels like a subject that's paying attention strategically to to the physiology of anger or or the arising and cessation of thought, that's fine. I mean, that's a that's a starting point, that's and a necessary one for virtually everyone, and that does accomplish this deidentification from the

whole process that's given you this negative emotion. So there is a freedom even in the dualistic awareness of of you know, the flow of thought and emotion. But ultimately, and and that very much has this character of purifying the mind. It's like you're like, this is a this is a anger is a classically negative thing to be stuck in and identified with and acting out of. And it's divisive. It's you're going to say the thing you regret,

and that for what you have to apologize for. And it's just you know, you're and the normal person who doesn't know how to be mindful and doesn't it doesn't know the difference between being lost and thought and not

is really the mere hostage of that process. They're going to stay as angry as they're going to stay for as long as they're going to stay that way, and they're going to do all of the things that are life deranging and and reputation harming they might do on the basis of that emotion for as long as they're going to do those things, and then they're gonna have all the reaction to what they did and said. And it's that's the you know, the complication of life born

of that. You know, one moment where you got angry. Even dualistic mindfulness gives you a degree of freedom that most people don't have, and it is a kind of superpower to be able to say, oh, well, I just got angry. How long do I want to stay angry for? For me, an emotion like anger or fear is useful and so far ours it is. It is a salience cue. It's telling you that something just happened that's worth paying

attention to. Right, So, there's somebody just walked into the room who you know doesn't have your your well being at heart, you know at heart, right, I mean they've got some intention that is that is in conflict with with something that you were trying to accomplish, say, or it's it's telling at minimum, is telling you something about yourself and about your own priorities, and about about what you were trying to do in the world. And you know,

for better or worse. So it's worth paying attention to. But it's almost never the state of mind you want to be in. Too. Then solve the problem you that just you just noticed. So I'm not saying that we The goal is to be completely without any capacity for

anger or fear or any any of these emotions. But it's I do think psychological health and just the health of one's relationships and and just the whole project of living wisely in the world is more and more the result of being able to get off to unhook from that negative emotion more and more quickly. I mean, I think you want to stay angry and fearful and even sad for much shorter periods of time, and then you can.

Then there's just more to recognize about the circumstance. It gives you a degree of freedom by which to navigate.

all of these things, just for less and less time. Yeah, And that I don't think I'll ever get to zero Just as you could never run a mile in zero seconds, I will never get to a point where I'm able to deal with it in zero seconds. It's just not going to be possible, right, because it needs to live.

It's not a personal anger, right, but it can. It's just you see something, You see something, some unnecessary harm being created deliberately by you know, deeply unwise people in the world, and you just think, all right, this is this is an emergency, this is worth responding to, right, and and it's and that can feel that the energy of anger can be behind that, and you know, so I would tend to call that outrage rather than anger,

but that I think moral outrage is useful. But it's just the question is when does a tip over into personal psychological suffering that actually diminishes your capacity to do something useful. And that's that's where that's the line I think we want to be more aware of.

the world if you keep looking for them. So let's take the outrage idea, like, how do you what does someone do they feel that outrage, the moral outrage where they feel pain for the suffering of another. Where do you go from there through your process? Like what's step two, three, four?

it's like we're all on the same team. That's that's the mode that you're you're in and so it's not an expression of your own greed and narcissism and and you know, of the self focused and divisive emotion.

if you're going to raise your voice in defense of humanity. Right, Well, you're still raising your voice, right, And so it's just that there's energy behind it, and I think that energy at times is necessary or to take another somewhat adjacent situation but analogous. It's like, you know, if you're in a situation which you have to defend yourself from actual physical violence or defend someone close to you. You know, someone's attacked you and your child, So what should you do?

They're just going to lie down and offer yourself up as a human sacrifice. And no, like I think pacifism is not actually morally the wisest position ethically. So I think the energy that would allow you to violently defend yourself against an aggressor should available, right. But the question is but, and it's you know, it's not necessarily anger, but it could look a lot like anger and feel

a lot like anger. It's certainly not necessarily hatred. And and here I would I would ask you to consider how you would feel like, I mean, defending yourself against a person. You know, you think of somebody who is there some you know, malicious psychopath who's who's broken into your house and is now wanting to harm you in

your family, because that's you know, what he likes to do. Right, that's like the quintessential circumstance where one you'd feel, you feel fear, you'd feel a lot of things, but you'd probably also feel hatred for this person, right, Like like what there's there are few circumstances where hatred feels more apropos than that. But I do view hatred as always been somehow extra even in extremists like that, because imagine

just how you'd feel very a superficially similar situation. You know, you're still you have an attacker in your house, and you have to defend yourself violently. But that attacker now is not a person, it's a it's a wild animal. You know, a grizzly bear has broken into your house, or you know, a mountain lion. Right, how You's still it's still an absolute emergency. Right, You're still going to have to fight for your life. You're still looking for

a weapon to defend yourself with. Right, You're still contemplating killing a living being to defend yourself, right in your kids. But there's an emotional shaving there. Like you as energized as you would be in the presence of a mountain lion or in the presence of a grizzly bear, there's this layer of the layer of hatred doesn't quite fit, you know.

But and if we certainly don't hate hurricanes and in the same way that we could hate another human being, But if we could lock hurricanes in prison, we would, right, I mean, they're immensely destructive. You know, we're still trying to figure out what to do about them, but it never gets that we never take this extra step of actually hating them. And I do think we could have

ethically speaking and psychologically speaking, we can. We can have a similar relationship to even the worst human beings while doing all the things we need to do to defend ourselves against them. We can put people in prison. We can, you know, we can. I'm not in favor of the death penalty for actually these reasons, but because I don't think anyone creates themselves. I think I don't think anyone is truly at bottom responsible responsible for being who they are.

I mean, if you had the same genes and the same life life experience of whoever Jeffrey Dahmer, you'd be Jeffrey Dahmer, right, So like there's no there's no mystery there. But so I think so I think at bottom, when you're when you're looking at these these very stark differences in life outcomes. You're looking at differences in luck, right. I mean there's there's biological luck, there's circumstantial luck, there's all kinds of luck, and there's and there's what we

do with the luck. But your capacity to do good things with even your bad luck is yet more good luck, right, I mean, something is given you. There's some genetic and environmental reason why you were set up to pick yourselves up, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, when somebody else in

the similar situation wasn't right. And so on some level, there's we have an ethical imperative to acknowledge the massive role that luck plays in our lives, and I think we should want to cancel the most egregious differences in

good and bad luck between people. Like so, when we look at a whole society that is suffering from immense bad luck because it didn't have the natural resources that some other society did, or it had those resources, but even those resources created perverse incentives, and so it has got some terrible political outcome based on all the level of corruption that's layered on top of the resources, and there's just terrible disparities in luck there, right, And so

I think we as a as a global civilization, more and more as we grow grow wealthier and wealthier and can take advantage of good luck over here, we should want to engineer a tide that raises upon which most are all boats rise more and more. It's not to say that capitalism is wrong. It's not to say that we're ever going to completely nullify differences in luck. And I think some asymmetries may in fact be the off them a way to encourage people's creativity and innovation. Right.

So it's like I'm not an agnostic as to be on some of the questions of how to organize a society and an economy there, But I do think more and more we need to recognize that so many of us, I mean, certainly anyone has got the free time to listen to this conversation right now, stands a pretty good chance of being in the top ten percent or even

one percent of humanity with respect to luck. You know, all the variables, whether it's respective health and wealth and education, and just just having the free time and attention to listen to this and be interested in this and to be asking the kinds of questions we're trying to address in a conversation like this. We're immensely lucky, and with that comes a certain responsibility, but also opportunity to spread the luck around.

you do with that thought, that idea, that feeling. So you feel pain when someone else is in pain, you feel stressed, you feel outrage. As you said, there may be a petty personal anger to it that triggered us in the first place, but we were able to carve that out and understand that that wasn't the basis of our real outrage, that there was something bigger.

then do that. But yeah, it's it's it's never useful to just be privately seething with outrage that has no outlet, right, so you have to figure out one what, what pragmatically can you do to accomplish anything useful on the basis of this emotion. And if there's nothing to do, it's great to have the tools. By what you can just let go of it, right like? And that's and again that's where meditation comes in. I mean that really is

a kind of superpower. You can just decide, Okay, there's there's nothing to do here with this negative emotion, so now I can just let go of it. And that's and that's true. It's true for public facing emotion like outrage, but it's true for a and inwardly facing one like

just anxiety about something that is coming up in the future. Right, So, like you've got some medical condition, now you need to get an MRI to see if you've got something scary, and you can't get the MRI until next Tuesday, right, So now you've got this time to wait. So the question is, in the intervening days, how captured are you going to be by this feeling of anxiety? Is is there any utility in feeling anxious between now and Tuesday? And if there's not, wouldn't it be great to actually

just let go of it? Right? And most people feel like that's that's pretty hard to do, right, I mean, most people don't have tools apart from just diverting themselves, getting distracting themselves with something else to take their mind off the thing that they're really sort of thinking about in the background that they don't want to think about,

but they're helplessly, you know, perseverating on it. But as far as you know, as far as as far as acting in the world so as to make the world a better place, I think, you know, based on outrage or some other emotion, you know, I'm impressed more and more by how much that's a story of changing in saneives at the system level more than it is a story of improve getting individuals to improve themselves. I think,

I think individuals should want to improve themselves. And I know I want to improve myself, and I you know, ins far as I can share wisdom about how to do that, I do that, you know more or less full time. But there's a there's another level of analysis and another level of discussion that needs to be applied to the to the systems in which we're all functioning. And we need to recognize that in so many places

we have systems of incentives that are aligned. So it's to make it actually hard to be a good person, right, like you need you need to be some kind of moral hero to be truly ethical given how the system

is tuned. And conversely, totally normal people can be lured into behaving more and more like psychopaths in a badly tuned system where the incentives are all wrong, right, And I think more and more we need to be alert to that, and we need to want to design systems where it just becomes easier and easier for ordinary, conflicted, mediocre people, people who are not even thinking about ethics all that much, right, don't want to, They just want what they want. It's easier for them to behave more

and more like saints because the incentives are aligned. That way to take a example that's recently top of mind. So, like we have a problem with the problem of climate change, you will well intentioned people want to do something about it. We don't want to create the most profligate harms for ourselves unnecessarily, right, So it'd be great to have a system of incentives and economic opportunities and technologies that just made it easier and easier to be wise with respect

to carbon or carbon footprint. There are a lot of great ideas in this space, and you know, one of them is a well, let's let's buy electric cars. Right, Let's let's transition from a fossil fuel economy of transportation to an electric one. Well, that sounds wonderful. And I've you know, I just I've had an electric car, and I've i just had to get a new car, and I was poised to buy an electric another electric car. But then I hear on Joe Rogan's podcast from this

guy who's just published a book it's coming out. I've forgive me, I've forgotten his name. I think it's uh Shri Ram Krishnan, but I could have that wrong. But he's put his book coming out called Cobalt Read but it interested to our podcast with Rogan, which was just this litany of horrors that attend what the extraction of cobalt from Congo. Right, it's like two percent of the world's cobalt is in Congo. We use cobalt in all

of our batteries. Basically our supply chain for cobalt is on top of just slave labor and child labor and just you know, kids getting buried alive. I mean, it's just it was just as bad as you could imagine. And so how here we have a system where we all we just we all want to buy the next electric car because this is the good thing, that this was the virtuous thing to do. But now we find

out that the batteries are are soaked in blood. There's no good option, right, And now we have to and we have to pretend that that we didn't hear that podcast or the the and the people you know built designing the batteries, or pretending that they don't know where

the cobalt comes from. And there's like we need to figure out I mean, this is this this itself, it should be a simple problem to solve, and it would just it's probably a few percentage points of profit margin that would make the extraction of cobalt a an ethically defensible practice, right, and that's probably there's probably some cobalt free technology, uh that we could design in the few sure, but it's just to get these things right really matters.

And if you don't get them right, you've got people who are deeply conflicted about what they're doing or not or just not completely unaware of what they're doing and creating these these massive negative externalities that they might not even know about, Like like like I could I literally was. I mean, I was twenty four hours from buying another EV right. So it's like it's not that it's not that my loan purchase or not are or not of a single car it's going to matter that much in

the scheme of things. But it's like I would have had I not heard this particular episode of Joe's podcast, I would have bought that EV thinking I was doing an unimpeachably virtuous thing, right, And now I have a much more conflicted decision to make around, you know, what's the right car to drive in light of my climate change concerns. This is just to say that the individual can't solve the cobalt supply chain problem, right, So like we need we need these solutions to come at the

system level and at the institution level. And and that's and that's where being a good person is sort of beyond the scope of anyone's individual choices, Like like you need to we need to collectively solve a massive coordination problem together where in the act of getting gratifying our desires, we are we are are creating less and less harm and doing more and more good, more or less effortlessly.

And that's and that really is. You can have people who are just not thinking about purifying anything, behaving in really impeccable ways given good incentives. And that's that's more and more I'm thinking about that.

I don't have the context. But someone made that decision and some system never thought to correct that because that was led by some people. So I think, I mean, I agree with you, but I think it's both. It's like, you know, I think even where systems have been made tight, you still see people trying to find a loophole. I mean, that's how the human mind is set up. And so you've got the loophole mindset of like, Okay, well let me find a way to exploit this or manipulate this

towards my benefit anyway, And so you've got both. I think both are important. I think like if you were the decision maker, if you were building EVS, you would be able to make that system a company and you'd set it out, but that would come back to you.

is coming from. So there's that, and then like all of a sudden, people would all right, if if it's costing me money to be polluting, well then I'm going to figure out how to not do that. And uh, that's just going to be our interests are going to be a line there, right, And so there there's probably you know, one hundred or a thousand cases like that. But where I was going was I've been thinking a lot about what has come to be called the effect of altruism movement. I mean, just how to do good

more reliably, more systematically. Many of us have been disillusioned with with how philanthropy has been done traditionally. It's like there's a there's a distinction between This actually comes back to some of what we've been talking about with the difference between being led by one's emotions and actually understanding what the outcomes are in the world that one is accomplishing.

When you're trying to do good in the world, when you're giving to a you know, a children's hospital, say, I mean that just seems an intrinsically good thing to do, But so much we know that so much of our impulse to do good, our impulse toward algruism, or impulse toward effective compassion, is driven by the single compelling story, the single you know, the single identifiable protagonist, you know, the one little girl who's you know, god cancer and

we can help her. Right, And that we sort of go to sleep when we're told statistics, right, So like we we don't we perversely we care more about the one little girl than we care about the tens of thousands of little girls just like her, maybe even the tens of thousands of little girls including her. Right. It's like you can run psychological experiments where you you show people one little girl and you ask them how how much they're inclined to help, and how much money they'd give.

They give the maximum amount, you know, under those conditions. If you show them the same little girl and you lay her on a story of just how many of the other girls there are like her, they're the people's compassionate impulse reliably diminishes.

my podcast. And one change I made in response to one of these conversations with I was just decided that Waking Up as a company would give a minimum of ten percent of its profits to the most effective charities each year, and I personally would give a minimum of ten percent of my pre tax income to charity each year. Now, I was already giving money away to charity, and that felt good. But once I decided, all right, here's the formula. I have to give this minimum amount. This minimum amount

is already allocated to these ends. And what's more, these ends have to be not just charities and causes that I feel really personally engaged by, or just things that I want to support, like you know some you know, I want to give money to a college or a symphony, or it's like something that I or I see somebody's GoFundMe page and it tugs at my heartstrings. I want

to give money to that. No, that's all separate. Here's ten percent that's going to charities that I and sober rational Analysis have decided are going to do the most good, irrespective of how I feel about these things, because there are certain causes that I just don't find especially sexy,

you know that just not like I just can't. I have to continually rethink my my interest in them, you know, but they are objectively if you want to want to save a life, you know, per unit, per per dollar put into the system, this is the best use of your dollars.

are their top ten charities. Whether I find these sexy or not, I know I can outsource the cognitive labor to these people because I've spoken to them enough, I've analyzed what they've done. They're doing enough. This is their full time job, all right, you know, until I hear otherwise, I'm going to take their advice. It doesn't matter how I feel about these charities, right, I'm going to get

my good feels elsewhere. But what's happened is once I decided that I'm going to give this amount of money to charity each year, and it's happening by default, whether I'm thinking about it or not, whether I'm gratified by it or not. A very interesting thing flipped one is when I confront all these other opportunities to give money away that are tugging on my heartstrings, they almost show

up as a as a kind of guilty pleasure. Like I literally have had the feeling of giving money to a children's hospital or giving money to somebody's GoFundMe page, And it's almost leveraging the same greedy circuits in the brain as you'd get if you're like opening a catalog and you want everything on both pages. It's like it's like like it's it is a it's a very visceral

experience of selfishness and selflessness totally merging. And it's like it's like why selfishness is the same thing as selflessness, But it has the energy of like I really I want to do this and because I sort of know I I've rationally allocated to this a certain amount of doing this good kind of automatically sort of even out of side and out of mind. I'm not spending a lot of time thinking about where that money is going.

It's sort of changed my relationship to all these other occasions where I'm having to decide on the basis of my intuitions moment to moment whether I want to give and how much to give. And it's it's really just kind of flipped everything upside down in a way that's interesting. And again it's it's it's all based on having made a sort of system level default change that is a sort of hidden structure in which I'm now moving, right.

It's because again I'm not, until you make a decision like that, you're constantly rethinking what you want to do. It's almost like going on a diet. Like if you decide like I don't need dairy anymore, right, so, once you don't need dairy anymore, I eat a lot of dairy. But if one it didn't eat dairy anymore, you just it's just a bright line. And then you you're not you're not constantly rethinking whether you're going to have ice cream?

And if so, how much? And and so it's it's massively clarifying.

How does someone like you, as a as a meditator for so many years, as someone who's so thoughtful about these topics, as somebody who wants to see change in the systems and institutions as well, how do you interact with the news Because I find that to be such a source of anxiety and stress for so many people who are probably listening to us right now, and so i'd love to hear how you've built a healthier, hopefully systematic, logical relationship with the news.

I see the news in various channels. But I was using Twitter as the first filter on that, and that, for a variety of reasons, became really toxic for me, and and toxic in a way that I was convinced misleading. I mean, that was the thing that got me to finally just kind of rip the band aid off, because I it wasn't just that I was seeing the worst of people and that was having a certain effect. I was convinced that I was seeing people at their worst who are actually not as bad as they were seeming

to me on Twitter. Like what Twitter was calling out of them was just a misleading picture of who they actually are, because in some cases I knew, I knew the people in real life, and I'm seeing them behave in abominable ways on Twitter, and I just think, all right,

this is this isn't all. This is just a fun house mirror that isn't psychological, psychologically healthy, to keep staring into day after day after day, and also just so many of the things that I was It was it was amplifying stories that I was, you know, as a podcaster, I was tempted to react to and I felt like I was getting a misleading signal as to just how salient or representative those stories are of the way the

world is. Right, So like, it's just it was just the phenomenal and being too online ultimately, right, Yeah, So my so ins far as Twitter was news or a simula crom of news, that has really changed for me. I just I just am not seeing it and now I just yeah, I mean, I have a few sources of news that I go to, as you know, more

or less reflexively. But again it's it's more and more I'm asking the question, what do I want my moment to moment life to be like, you know, and who do I want to be at the end of the day when I'm hanging out with my wife and kids, right, and what are the consequences of having spent my attentional budget over the previous hours in one way versus another? And Twitter, for me, honestly was it was a big change because it was like getting out of an unhealthy relationship.

And that was just for all my talk about meditation and being able to unhook from anger and other days. I mean, I could unhook and I could let go of of negative emotion and et cetera. And it's not that the tools don't work, but I was spending a lot of time looking into this very deranging space. And it's not deranging for everybody but for me because because

what's unique about my job. But my approach to my job is that, you know, I criticize the right and left politically, you know, a lot, and you know, with sort of equal ferocity, and so I get so I'm not I'm not tribally aligned with anyone, and I get a lot of pain from both sides. And it's it's a lot of it's it's not honest pain. It's not like it's it's not like honest criticism of views I actually hold. It's like lots of lying about views that

I don't hold. And you know, it's just it's just misrepresentations. And people take, you know, clips out of context, and I mean people people cut together clips of my podcast that where I am seeming to say the opposite of what I in fact said in context, and they release those and the people with big platforms, you know, retweet them.

So it was a pervasive experience for me of seeing myself lied about and then wondering whether there's anything I should do about that, right, And so it was this very sticky invitation to getting sucked in because like, Okay, that's not what I said, that's not what I meant that. Now I'm seeing the evidence of lots of people being

misled by this misrepresentation, and it bothers me. And I'm pretty sure it should bother me because I's like, this is not the outcome I want, right, And it's not why I have a podcast, and it's not why I went on that other person's podcast, And so there's some burden on me to try to clarify the misunderstanding. And I was continually getting sucked into the illusion that clarification was possible, right, So I would try because I really wanted to use Twitter as a channel of communication. It

was the only social media platform I ever used. I'd never used Facebook, or I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but those are just marketing, you know, channels from my team. I'm never on those so I was on Twitter. It really was me, and I was, you know, as much as I could step away from it because it seemed unhealthy for a time, I kept seeing the evidence of

confusion and misrepresentation. I thought, I'm just going to try again to clarify things right, And that was that was such an unrewarding experience that it was just it was it was creating a residue of despair and contempt. I mean, I just I just felt it just felt polluted by I just felt like I had met like all the psychopaths in the world on a daily basis, Like there can't be as many psychopaths in the world as I

was seemed to be meeting online. As much as I could step away from it and just say and put it down, I kept picking it up again, and so I just thought, this is crazy. So I just ripped it off. And that's been an immense change. I mean, it's really it's so sometimes you need to actually do the thing that is you can you can't just keep putting yourself in this dysfunctional situation and then processing your reaction. It's like you have to ask yourself, why are you

doing this? Why are you spending your time and attention this way in the first place, And so for me it was Twitter. I mean I understand other people, you know, depending on what they could just be putting. If they're sharing cat videos on Twitter, they're just getting nothing but love, right, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. But trust me, it's possible to have a truly lousy experience on Twitter.

a healthier way. I'm thinking of all the people who cut things out their lives because they need to feel that distance from it because it's taken a hold of them. But then they know that in reality they might have to go back it work.

with the good parts of it. You know, It's just it was kind of like, you know, just like too many carbs in that part of my information diet. You know. That's what Twitter was. It was all carbs. I mean, if I went back, I would just yeah, I would probably use it much more like I use or don't even use my other social media channels. I would just use it as I would have someone post for me or I would post and without ever looking about what's

coming back and me. And there are people, there are people who get a lot of negative stuff coming back at them and they just never see it because they just never And that's I could have been one of those people. And I was that sort of person for you know, some periods of time. But I just kept getting lured by the technology, by the promise of clarifying confusion, you know, because here the like the person just says something to me and I can say something back, and

why not, you know, and for strangely it did. None of the other social media platforms have ever hooked hooked me in that way. I've never been tempted to get on Facebook or Instagram and use it in that way. And I'm not looking for a substitute for Twitter, I mean, so that that is interesting. There's many people are recommending substitutes where they're you know, building a new platform, you know,

they got off Twitter for whatever reason. But it's not I'm just not tempted to fill that the Twitter shaped hole in my life with anything else. So that's good.

then it's going to it's going to happen. So I'm sure many times again. And I mean it's a fundamentally mysterious thing. I mean, the fact that we drop out the bottom of this place is just it's it's truly imponderable, you know. And yet I know that it's possible to be happy in the absence of everyone, right, I mean,

there's there's some paradoxes here. Like you and I are having this conversation now, basically everyone we love is not here, you know, like you and I just met, you know, so it's like, so we're just we're just getting to know each other. You know. My mom's not here, my wife's not here, my kids are not here. You've got your list of people you love who are not here.

It's okay to not be with the people we love, so we know that, right and to take the other side, or like what it's like to personally die, say, you know, we we go to sleep each night and we were not It's not only is it okay to completely relinquish our hold on this world. I mean we we we we we yearn for it. Like if you're if you got insomnia, if you can't fall asleep, that becomes a problem. You're desperate to lose your your seeing and hearing, smelling

and tasting and touching and thinking. You just want to you want to completely get zeroed out every night. And that's you know, if if if nothing happens after death, I mean, people we can leave aside the possibility that that they're you know that death is in some sense an illusion. But if if you really just get a dial tone after you die, right, if really there's just nothing, it's somewhat analogous to sleep. I mean, it's like the

lights go out right every night. We do that and we do it happily, and it's not as there's no you know, I guess some people have sleep issues where they're afraid to fall asleep, but that's certainly not the common case, right, and so to the contrary, we yearn for it. So it is somewhat paradoxical that these like the worst thing about life, that the thing that that people are terrified to experience themselves, and it's they're terrified to experience in the case of of losing the people

they love. We in the most routine way, we have really analogous experiences that are fine, right, So, like you're fine alone in a room and you're fine to go to sleep, and these are there's a there's a bit of death in both of these things, because you're everyone you love really is absent, and when you fall asleep, you really forget everything about your life in this world, you know, until until you start dreaming, and then you're

completely confused about your life and some other circumstance unless it's elucid dream, which is to say that it's actually it's it's possible to be okay ultimately even with the with the reality of death from both from either side. You know, I'm not I'm I'm certainly expecting to to grieve with the next time someone close to me dies. You know, I'm not expecting the place, but that is a I understand that that as an expression of love. First of all, ask yourself if you'd even want to

be without the experience of grief. I mean, ask yourself, for instance, what you would want to do in the event that we had designed a perfect cure for grief, right, Like, let'll say a pill like like the perfect and it's not an antidepressant, but it's an anti sadness pill, you know, and that's not conceptually incoherent. I mean, we might one

day have that pill. You know, it might be a pill that you would compassionately want to Like, there are people who who are suffering some just intractable, unendurable bereavement that just never lifts and they're just you know, they can't get their life back together. And there you'd want to give that pill to that person. But the question is how soon would you want to take that pill? And would you want to take that pill fifteen minutes

after your closest connection in this life died? You know, it's like that's the body is still warm, and would you be popping this pill? I don't think so. I think I mean this is something like, how care free do you want to feel in the in the immediate aftermath of a person you love dying? You know you want it, You want the gravity of that to land.

You know, you want to feel you want to feel that loss because that's in some sense the only appropriate register of what they meant to you, you know, and just and the life you live together, right, you know you like so if you if you pop the grief bill and then you're just saying, Okay, what's on Netflix, right, that would be a kind of a desecration of all

that you would share it with this person. So, I don't know if it's a very interesting question where you would because I think ultimately you would want to be able to give that pill to someone whose life had become completely derailed by grief. But just where it? Just where's the line? I mean, that's that's an interesting question.

been taping for so long. But I was just saying that the conversation I've had with Sam today has been so different from the one I thought i'd have with him after reading his book, and that to me is the sign of a good conversation because it was true curiosity and mystery and creation in the moment and presence in the moment from both of us. So nice, I love that question Number one, what is the best meditation advice you've ever heard, received or given?

to get fired, and the moment you stop, they cool off. Right, So it's just it's so whatever the sentence is, it's just like meditation is like rubbing two sticks together to get fired. You have to continuously do it, and the moment you break, you're back to zero. Right, You've made no product.

you in any way? So, but even just the identity of feeling like like in my career or in any mode in which I'm showing up in the world, it's less like who I feel I am while doing that is less and less substanti like. I don't. I don't really, it's not really graspable, you know, And so I don't like I you know, I spend a lot of time teaching meditation in on waking Up. But because it's because of the technology, because it's an app, I don't actually feel like a meditation teacher.

never think of myself in that role. So like the role based identity. You know, I'm a writer, I have got a bunch of books, but I you know, I'm not. I don't really think of myself as a writer as much as I used to. I mean, there's just no I just don't feel like there's no anything that I would any way in which I would label what I'm doing. The label really does feel like it's it's it's barely

adhesive to the to the project. You know, it's just it's it's it's there just for the for the the utility of just summarizing, you know, just like what do you put on this form? You know, what's what's your what's your occupation? Right, But it's like it's just doesn't get at what I'm actually doing, and it doesn't get how I see myself. So the identity is something that I mean people think, yes, I'm sure there's some stage in life where you want a healthy identity, like I've

I've got two daughters. I want them to have healthy identities. I want them to have healthy egos. But Ultimately, it's not about being someone in any kind of sense. That feels it's like identity feels like a fist, you know, and I really want an open hand in life. And that's and so it's not that it's not that I never make a fist, but it's like you want to you want to relax that as soon as you notice it.

different levels and it's almost like someone being able. It's the same as what I was saying earlier with the identity from a systematic point of view. It's like some people that's where they are, that that's just where they are, where their identity is what gives their life meaning, and then you see as someone So yeah, it's just it's fascinating to me how at different stages of life identity can mean different things.

a person. Really, you know, it's like, I'm not responsible for any of my gifts, such as they are. It's like I just again it comes back to luck in so many ways and what you do with that luck. But again, even the doing with the luck is more more good luck, you know. So I just feel immensely grateful for everything that has gone well in my life. And I just mean, it's just the gratitude is overwhelmingly my primary positive emotion now. It's just so much to

be grateful for. And pride just pride just does not fit. It's a puzzle piece that you maybe once fit and maybe and you know, granted, if you're if you're a kid, yes, yeah, it's it's it's it's it's again, it's it's a it's a totally appropriate game at a certain stage of life, but later on it's it's a game you just really you have to outgrow.

it's not so much a law. I think if we had lie detection technology that that was we could rely on, which is the various interesting reasons why we we don't have that and may never have that. But if we had that, if lie detection technology was like you know, DNA analysis in a court of law, like you just put someone on the witness stand and you could tell whether they were lying, right, I think that would be the overnight that would be the biggest ethical change we

could ever imagine in society. So I think so anything that that brought the appropriate level of approbrium to lie, right, especially lying when it matters, that would be some version of that law, the the you can't lie when it

matters law, whatever that is, you know. So, but I do think it would be a technological solution if we just more and more, if people knew that they were in a situation where they actually can't get away with lying right, because the technology is such or the information space is such that it's but the the the added piece is that the norm, the norm violation needs to be just more urgent, you know, because people, most people are walking around with the sense everybody lies, all politicians lie.

There's like a normal lie. What do you expect? You know it's and so it's not. But the just the amount of harm and the amount of good that would be accomplished if you just knew people were being honest and you know, you're not going to be unpleasantly surprised by Yeah, so there's a lot of growth, cultural growth in that direction.

It's really been a phenomenal conversation. I hope we have many offline too, And anyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you grab your favorite segments, points, insights that really stood out to you, share them with a friends, start a conversation based on it. Tag me and Sam and let me know what really stood out to you, what resonated with you, maybe some things that are making you question or think differently. I'd love to see what

came out of it for you. This has been a very different type of conversation on On Purpose, and I know you're can to appreciate it. But a big thank you to Sam again for his generous time. Big thank you to every single one of you have been listening and watching, and we'll see you again for another episode

of On Purpose. Thank you guys. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with doctor Gabor Matte on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past.