824 Suffering vs. Satisfaction with Sam Harris, Part 2

This is episode number 824, part two with New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. My friend, thank you for being here. And if you listen to part one, then you are excited about this episode because, man, he went off. Sam went off on a lot of different things, talking about eliminating worry, how people feel like passengers in their own bodies, and how life is not about seeking happiness. He also spoke about when he feels the most loved, sympathetic joy and how that gives us more reasons to be happy. Sam talked about his mother and the lessons he learned from her and how death has influenced how he lives his life today. In this episode, we cover the importance of identifying when you're lost in thought and when you're present. So how do we identify that? The truth of emptiness and how it can free you from your experiences. How recognizing consciousness is the antidote to always seeking satisfaction, real love as the antithesis of envy and how feeling sympathetic joy for others can bring happiness and the benefit of facing death as a reality. I've been talking about this more. Facing your own death can actually bring you more joy. Very excited about this. Again, if this is your first time being here and you don't know who Sam Harris is, he's a New York Times best-selling author, five-time New York Times best-selling author. He's been featured all over the place in topics including neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, and rationality. His work has been published in 20 different languages, been discussed in New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone, all over the world. He's studied and practiced meditation for more than 30 years with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation experts, and he's created the waking up course for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern scientific context.

How do we move on from the story or how do you do it? Do you live with a lot of worry each day or are you so good now at just saying, this doesn't matter, this is in the past or I'm concerned about something that's not going to happen potentially in the future, so let me get back to present? How do you not worry?

Well, so I mean, everything for me sort of at my level of practice, and I've done a lot of meditation practice, but you know, There's apparently much more to do in my case.

Because you still worry.

There's no emotion that I don't experience, right? So I can experience intense anger, intense sadness, depression, worry, all of it. And the difference for me, and this is something that I wouldn't have but for the fact that I've really learned to practice mindfulness, the difference is when my Suffering becomes at all intense, it functions as a kind of mindfulness alarm, right? And so the truly kind of mediocre path for me is to be within the range of sort of normal annoyance and normal desire.

Mid-level suffering.

Yeah, where the alarm's not going off and I'm just a normal jerk, you know, within those bounds, right? Like, you know.

A little anxious here and there.

Yeah, so I go to the, dry cleaner and discover that they destroyed my suit, right? It's like, in the scheme of things, this does not matter at all, right? But you're frustrated, you're annoyed. Yeah, it's like, what do you do? So it's like, attention is captured and when attention is captured by that, I'm the same guy I always was. Right, right.

You're always a jerk?

Yeah, well, just like whatever, it's like, or attention can be captured pleasantly by something that you're like, oh God, this is the best bagel I've ever had, right? So I'm like, I'm just going for the food, and there's no perspective, you know, like I'm not, consciousness is trimmed down to just the pleasure or pain of that experience for that moment, right? And all of those moments for me have the character of being, they really are deeply analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming, right? So the reality is you're in your bed, you know, prone or supine or, you know, you're just, you're in a situation that's completely unlike the situation you think you're in. And you think you're on a beach, you know, talking to somebody or, you know, arguing with somebody, or you showed up at a conference and you didn't have your pants, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, you're relating to people who don't exist. And, I mean, just, I mean, we're psychotic when we're dreaming. We're completely confused, right? Unless it's a lucid dream, right? Which is its own interesting experience. But assuming your dreams are not lucid, you are completely unaware of a larger, the true larger context to your experience. And you're merely hostage to whatever is playing out in that dream. And that most of experience that is mediated by thought, apart from mindfulness, most experience has that character. So for me, once you turn up the dial on the intensity of the.

Experience.

Then something else comes online for me more reliably. And then you can, if you really know how to meditate, you can break the spell decisively in an instant. And in that instant, you have woken up. I mean, you're no longer in bed. asleep, right? So I can do that. I mean, there are sort of two landmarks I would suggest to notice. I mean, if somebody's practicing meditation and they're really getting into it, I would say that there are two points that I would flag as points of real durable progress. The first is just to notice the difference between being lost in thought and clearly paying attention to experience, you know, prior to thought, prior to concepts. that's sort of small-m mindfulness that people learn, you know, once they start a practice. And that has the consequences of if you do that enough, if you keep punctuating your ordinary experience with that just non-judgmental, non-reactive acceptance of what the present moment is, right? So you feel anxiety, you feel irritation, you become mindful, you just become interested in that feeling, in just the neurophysiology of it, the sensation of it, you get out of your thinking about all the reasons why you should feel anxious or you should feel irritated, you just become merely present with the experience. And then you notice this kind of half-life, it just dissipates, right? And there's a certain kind of freedom in that. There's another point which, you know, in my meditation app, I spent a lot of time trying to push people toward, you know, earlier than is conventional. There's another point where you realize that the feeling of self, the feeling that there's a subject in the center of experience, is an illusion. It's actually not there. You can look for it deliberately enough.

That we are an illusion.

Yeah, it's not that your body is an illusion. It's not that people are illusions, but the sense that you have that you are a subject in your head, riding around in the body. You're behind your face. In this moment, like you and I are talking, I'm looking at you, the normal, the default situation is for you to feel implicated by my gaze. Like I'm looking at something. You're on the other side of my gaze. Right.

I mean, my mind is or my consciousness is, or whatever.

Is this you? It's like you're, there's something, you know, if you say something and I get a weird expression on my face, like, I don't believe you or whatever, you can read that back, it falls back to you. It's like it points back to you. Like if I point at you, it feels like I'm pointing at something. I mean, this feels rude. This is normally a rude gesture, right? So it's like you feel like you're over there, you're behind your face, right? You know, that's what we call I. I mean, that's the personal pronoun for most people refers to that the feeling of being in the head, it doesn't refer to the whole body. It doesn't refer to, because people don't feel identical to their whole bodies. They feel like passengers in their bodies. They feel like subjects. They feel like the center of experience. And the real goal of meditation is to recognize that that is an illusory position. That's actually not your position. There really is just experience. There's just consciousness and its contents, and there's no centered to it. So at a certain point, mindfulness can become the experience of just cutting through that illusion. It's not that you're having to be strategically mindful of anxiety or anything else that you may notice that you want to have dissipate. You suddenly recognize that there's just no center to experience. Then your meditation practice becomes recognizing that in each moment. That has the consequence of just, I mean, that's synonymous with not being lost in thought in that moment. It's synonymous with not giving any more energy, therefore, to this reaction you're having. It's synonymous with no resistance to whatever is appearing. So you're actually free even before the physiology of the negative state dissipates. So, I mean, let's say you're angry, you're feeling road rage, you recognize there's no center, your freedom in that moment isn't even contingent upon the anger going away. It's like, because anger at that moment is no longer anger. Anger is just tension. It's just tension in your face. You could have tension in your face because you had some dental procedure, right? It's like, literally it just completely disconnects the sense of your own well-being and expansiveness because, again, the center has dropped out. There's just consciousness and its contents, right? And it doesn't actually-- and so this is, again, this can sound paradoxical, but then from that point of view, you know, the kind of experience I had on MDMA doesn't even improve one situation. Then, because when there's just consciousness without a center, On some level, there's no, I mean, this is the truth here that I'm alluding to, that the jargon in Buddhism is the truth of emptiness, right? There's just, there's nothing, there is no thing, right? Everything is just, to take an analogy that works for me, have you ever gone to a restaurant where you have, there's one wall that is like a kind of perfect and perfectly clean, floor-to-ceiling mirror, and for most of the meal, you've been assuming that the restaurant is twice the size that it actually is. So there's a bunch of people over there that you just thought were people, but at some point in the meal, you recognize, oh, it's just half the size, and that's just glass and there's a wall of light. An illusion.

Yeah.

And so that transition, where you like, if someone just walks up and puts their hand on the glass, and in that moment, All the stuff you thought was happening there, someone could have been having an argument, right? Or someone could physically assault someone there. Now, forget it, this is where the analogy breaks down because you know there's something happening in the real world. But what happens when you touch the mirror and equalize all of that as just a display of light, on some level everything has become equalized. The ugly things are the same as the beautiful things.

Right?

There's just nothing, it's just life, you know? And that's a good analogy for the freedom you can experience when the illusoriness of the self drops out of consciousness. It's like for that moment, and it might only be a moment, I mean, so the course of practice, once you're able to practice in that way, it's really just about punctuating your life with brief moments of that, you know, a hundred moments like that over the course of a day or an hour, right? It's not about, at least not anytime soon for most of us, it's not about spending an hour in that state. But being able to punctuate life with that insight, it really does change the game. Because then in each one of those moments, you realize life isn't about seeking to become happy. It's not like you can only be happy. You can only be free in this moment. It's only ever this moment.

Now.

Now.

Seeking for the future.

What you have is this moment and then your thoughts about the past and the future. That's always been true and that will always be true for as long as you have any experience at all. So it's, you're either looking over the shoulder of this moment for what's coming, worrying about it, or greedily reaching out to the thing you want. So much of life, 99.9% of life for most of us, is seeking certain experiences and getting them and feeling kind of the briefest moment of gratification. We unite with the object of desire for- Barely. Barely a second. Then we're on to the next thing or then we're even, I mean, even the thing we desired if it persisted longer, would become undesirable. I mean, just imagine, like, you're going for the bowl of ice cream, you're getting the peak taste of it. Imagine if that taste never went away, right? That's the pleasure, that's not the pleasure you want. And that would be intolerable. I mean, you'd go to a doctor, it's like, I had a bowl of chocolate ice cream last week, and I can't get this taste of chocolate out of my mouth. I can't get this taste of chocolate out of my mouth, right? I mean, so what happens is that you take a bite of ice cream that you thought you wanted more than anything in that moment, but actually it's a little too much and you reach for a glass of water and you wash it out at a certain point, right? Like it's not-- on some level, all of these things we want are a mirage, right? You get, you know, whatever it's like, you wanted a new watch and you want to be associated with this object and you went shopping for it and you finally got-- it's like, this is exactly how I wanted it to look on my wrist and boy am I happy with this and then like you have these brief moments of interaction with it. But when you actually drill down on what the experience is like, I mean the experience of being satisfied with something in sensory space, it is kind of paradoxical and insubstantial and the thing we actually want is a good enough excuse to totally relax into the present, like to fulfill the desire so that we're no longer feel desire. You want to be free of desire, right? You want to be free of all of your problems. You know, you want your to-do list to be all checked off and then empty. And then those become peak moments, right? So like, but the problem is we associate the experience of completely giving up the war and being completely satisfied in the present, the brief moments we touch that, you know, and you know, in positive psychology many of these states are called flow states. Those brief moments where we're just, we're not worried about anything, right? We associate that with some enormous effort we made to get here, right? And yet that is in fact the way consciousness already is if we can just pay attention to it. And that's why meditation becomes a kind of the ultimate hack of how one can pursue one's well-being because it's just true that consciousness is that way. and yet we're spending all of our time seeking to have a good enough reason to realize that. It's like if I could just win the Nobel Prize, I'd feel good enough about myself that I wouldn't feel like I would have to do anything.

Stop everything else.

There'd be no egocentric grandiosity program that I would need to run because I'd have a Nobel Prize.

But then you'd be like, well, what's next? And how do I stay relevant?

That's exactly what happens. Everyone who wins the Nobel Prize, what happens is-- I get depressed. Someone says, what are you gonna do next?

Right?

And-- and you're like, I just won the Nobel Prize. What else can I do?

And the half-life of those peak experiences is incredibly short. It's a moment. In the best case, it's days, right? But in reality, it's unwinding over the course of minutes.

I remember my whole childhood, I wanted to be an all-American athlete. It was like all I obsessed about. I cared about it deeply. I would sacrifice my life. I never had a sip of alcohol in high school or college because I was like, I'm gonna do whatever it takes to be an All-American athlete.

Right.

That was it. Footballer. Football, yeah. I didn't go partying. I didn't go do anything. I was like, I'm not gonna date girls. Whatever it takes, I will train in the morning, the afternoon, no sugar, anything. Yeah. And I remember I did it in football and decathlon, but. the first time it happened was in the decathlon. And I remember it was down to the last event in the decathlons, two day event, 10 events. I knew exactly who I needed to beat in this 1500 mile, 1500 race to get the eighth place. And eighth place was the cutoff for the Olympics. So I was like, okay, it comes down to this event and I just gotta do something I've never done before to make it happen. All my life comes down to this moment, right? 22 years of existence, dreams, dedication, commitment, everything. And I go out and I run the race of my life. I beat this guy by like a couple of seconds and it was so close to see how many seconds I needed to beat him. And they call my name as the eighth place. So I get the All-American, I get the trophy, I stand up on the thing in front of the whole stadium. and I'm excited for literally maybe seven minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then I was mad the whole dinner. I'm sitting there with my family, my parents are there, my teammates, everyone's celebrating me, and I'm angry. I don't wanna talk to anyone. And I didn't understand why. And I think it was 'cause I was so obsessed of reaching this moment that I was like, I don't feel like it's good enough for me. I only got eighth place all over. I didn't get number one.

What am I gonna do now?

You move the goal post. Yeah, and I was just like, well, what now? I'm done with school. Now what do I do? I've been chasing this thing for so long. What do I do now?

All the drugs and alcohol, everything I.

Gave up for this.

I was like, so how do we.

Stay satisfied in an unsatisfied world?

Well, that's the false premise. This is why, again, I don't consider myself a Buddhist and in my meditation app, I'm not teaching Buddhism, but it's true that Buddhism has such a good handle on this that it's easy to default to Buddhist language. So it's often said that, you know, the Buddha talked about life being suffering, and that's actually a mistranslation of what of the original Pali. The term is dukkha, and the better translation is unsatisfying or unsatisfactory.

So not life is suffering, life is unsatisfactory.

Yeah, yeah. So, and it's unsatisfactory because The core reason is that whatever arises, having arisen will of necessity pass away. Everything that is conditioned, you bring conditions together, mental and physical conditions, and whatever has been born of that assembly is impermanent, right? So to take your experience, you can only stand on that podium for so long.

Right.

You know, at a certain point, everyone who's been clapping will stop clapping and leave the room, right? And the neurophysiology of elation, like, oh, you'll finally, I did it, I did it. Like, it's just to say, I did it. You can only say that to yourself with the voice of your mind so many times, right, before you sound psychotic, right? Everything just dissipates. Experiences like that and every other is literally like trying to scoop up water in your hands.

Right?

You can't hold on to it. So the Buddha was not denying that there are extraordinarily pleasant experiences in life. I mean, that's undeniable. But however pleasant they are, they pass away. And then there are unpleasant experiences that are bound to come, right? It's just like if you sit, no matter how comfortable you make your body, you know, this is a very comfortable chair. I can get, I could, you know, if given 10 minutes, I could get myself in precisely the right position here to be able to sit for as long as possible. But At a certain point, if I just don't move, I will begin to feel excruciating pain. And you can try this. Just try to sit in the most comfortable position you can possibly find for four hours. At a certain point, for most of us, well short of four hours, you will feel pains in your body that are amazing.

Same thing with laying in the most comfortable bed. If you have two days, you're gonna.

Be like, if you just don't move, if you just decide Meditators do this where they vow not to move for some period of time because it's incredibly instructive. What happens is you sit as comfortably as you want and then just don't move. The pain comes or the itching comes and if you're not gonna move and scratch or you're not gonna move and relieve the pain that has just been born like a supernova in your knee, What you'll then experience is, and this is why it's instructive, because you can experience incredibly intense pain that you know conceptually can't be really problematic. You're not getting injured. You're just sitting in a chair. Whatever you can experience there, even if it is the worst pain you've ever felt, you know if you just move, you're going to be fine. so what happens is, I mean, there are people who will sit for 12 hours, right?

And.

You can experience, I mean, it can feel like someone has just driven a nail into your knee or that you just broke a vertebrae, right? Like, I mean, just like awful pain, right? But it becomes an amazing tool of concentration because it's impossible to ignore, right? So the problem with meditation for most people is that for everyone in the beginning, is that you have so little concentration that you're just, you're lost in thought perpetually. You're trying to follow the breath or you're trying to pay attention to sounds and you do that for a second or two and then you start thinking about, I wonder how that interview went or whatever. And then you notice you're thinking and you come back to the object of meditation. When you're feeling excruciating pain, it's very easy for attention to just dive into it and you can become fantastically concentrated. And concentration, it just so happens, is intrinsically pleasurable. I mean, so much of what we like about flow states or even just being lost in our work. I mean, these satisfying moments of not being scattered at all and being totally focused on something, the pleasure component of that is really just the concentration. It doesn't matter what you're focused on. I mean, literally, if you can focus on the breath to the exclusion of everything else for five minutes, that becomes like a drug experience. I mean, and that's, you know, again, that's also a temporary experience. I mean, concentration is another one of these things where, you know, you create the conditions for it, and those conditions are impermanent, and then you're, so the fundamental insight to have is that It's possible to recognize that consciousness itself is free of its contents. And that's really the purpose of meditation. And that's why it's an antidote to the normal ordeal we experience of seeking satisfaction. I mean, you're talking about an experience that lasted minutes that you spent years, even more than even decades, Seeking so many, I mean, so many people are living their lives with that framework acknowledged or not, we're living with this sense of implicit in all of our efforts to become happy is this prospect of finally arriving at something. And you never arrive, right? You can't arrive until you can just drop your search, right? So it's the search for happiness that is making us uncomfortable. It is the practice of being uncomfortable in each moment. Meditation is just the technique, and again, there are many techniques, but at bottom, it's just relinquishing that act of indulging the illusion that you would be happy if only, if only this cup were full of hot coffee, right? Then I would, you know, yeah, then I could relax. All right.

I'm curious, when do you feel the most loved?

When do I feel the most loved? Well, it's interesting because there is a kind of transactional notion of love that most of us grow up with, which again, I've sort of lost really since that first MDMA trip. on some level it's not about being loved, right? Like, I mean, I have, you know, I have, I'm very lucky I'm surrounded by people who in fact love me and they successfully communicate that and that's nice, right? But the real satisfaction is feeling love. Again, that's a state of being, it's not predicated on what the other person's doing, you know? So like, parents, I don't know, do you have kids?

No.

Okay, okay, so this is an experience. Okay, this will, this awaits you. So much of parenting is not about getting the clear signal of love back, shining back at you from your kids. You can't wait for that to feel love for them. So much of the experience of my feeling love for my kids happens when they're not especially happy, or if they're happy, they're certainly not shining it back on me. They might be annoyed at me. And that annoyance is just the most adorable thing in the world, right? It's like, you know, I've got a five-year-old who's like, she can just, whatever is going on with her, I mean, she can be, she's a little tyrant. I mean, sometimes it's like, I'm living in North Korea with Kim Jong Un, right? Like, so, like, you know, if she could have her way, you know, the whole city would burn, but she's so adorable, right? And so it's like, and so that state of being, of just taking delight in her full range of experience, right? That is, on some level, that's possible even with grown-ups who are unpleasant, right? Like you can just see, like, on some level, if you look out at the world, you can see that you are surrounded by people who are suffering, you know? Like, so like, I mean, this is sort of the compassion side of the coin rather than the love, like, so, you know, love is, I view love as having a few different modes. I mean, one is what it's like just to have a fundamental good intention for other people and other sentient beings. And that's the state of love. So what does that feel like in the state of other people's suffering? Well, it feels like compassion. You just wish that they were no longer suffering. You wish there was something you could do to help. And what does it feel like in the state of other people's happiness? the Buddhist term for that is sympathetic joy. It's like you actually, you take joy in their joy. It's like the feeling you feel, like if you see someone win, you know, on American Idol or whatever. Yeah, it's like that feeling, like you can burst into tears of joy for that other person's joy, right? Now, this is a good corrective for where many people are at. I mean, just notice what it's like when someone in your life experiences some great success, right? And it becomes potentially more uncomfortable if they do it in a zone where you are like, well imagine you're trying to become the decathlete, right? And your best friend is also trying to become a decathlete. He comes in first in that race, right? You know, it's like just how good do you feel for him, right? Now, that really is the limit of friendship. If what you feel is envy, rather than joy in his joy, right? You're not a good friend, right? Like that's a boundary that you want to be able to blow past in yourself, right? And love is real love is the ability to do that. I mean, real love is antithesis of envy in that moment. You actually do want your friend to totally succeed.

Even if he's beating you.

Yeah, it's like that's the person you wanna be. like you want to be so stoked that your friend got what he wanted and was dreaming for that you are undiminished by it, even when you guys are in the same lane, right? That's what it would, I mean, and again, that's, you know, given the right or the wrong arrangement there, that could be either harder or easier to do, but that's, I mean, ethically and emotionally, I think that's the goal. to be that kind of person. Where it's like, you want people's dreams to be realized, and when they're realized, that becomes yet more reason for you to be happy. True.

But when do you feel the most loved, personally?

Wrestling with my five-year-old or ten-year-old daughter, I mean, that's just awesome. I mean, that's just, that's the greatest fun, you know, I ever have in any given day. I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and so like, I'm trying to teach them the rudiments of jiu-jitsu, which has the At this point, the routine is kind of like the Peter Sellers movies, where Peter Sellers and Cato are constantly attacking each other, surprise attacks. So that goes down a lot. They're very girly girls, but they can unleash impressive violence on them. It's a great counterpoint to all the princess stuff that's going on. -Yeah, it's just pink, and then it's just like Quentin Tarantino. It's like Kill Bill.

What's the lesson you want to teach your kids the most? If you could teach them one lesson, what would it be?

Well, a lot of what we've been talking about is relevant there. I mean, just what are the real mechanics of suffering and happiness? The power of mindfulness is one. But what gets emphasized even more at this stage, and I think is even kind of the coarser grained corrective that improves people's lives the most is just to value honesty as the most important foundation for ethics and relationships. So when I was 18, I decided it was, the most consequential course I took in college was a course on just, it was really, it was a graduate seminar on whether it was ever ethical to lie. and everyone came into this course assuming that lying was sometimes a problem and obviously if you're lying all the time, you're a sociopath. But I would say everyone comes into that course thinking, well there's certain situations where you have to lie. We all know there are white lies and you want to spare people's feelings. So you've got some amount of lying that's just essential for doing business, right? So the course became just a crucible for kind of pressure testing that assumption. And it was taught by this, I don't know if he still teaches it, but this wonderful professor at Stanford, Ron Howard. And I wrote a book lying a few years ago based on this course. But this course, since the day, since some day when I was 18, I recognized that Basically, I never wanted to lie again under any circumstances. The lying was that occupied some point on the continuum of violence where if I'm in a situation where I have to decide whether to punch someone in the face, well then, okay, then lying is part of that toolkit. But it's really only in emergencies where you would even consider it because it is synonymous with a total breakdown of rational cooperation and collaboration with another person. You're no longer treating somebody like a person who can be reasoned with or related to, you're treating them like some emergency that you need to navigate around, right? And that's true even for white lies. So my book line gets into that and gets into white lies especially.

So since you're 18, do you feel like you've lied at all?

I have in a few cases kind of by accident. Like, like, like, like- We're intentionally trying to lie. Yeah, like you say something and then you realize, okay, that wasn't quite true. Like, you know, sort of got, there was some embellishment that they came online or something just came out and then it just becomes too awkward to actually get to massage the truth, you know, it's like, or it's just too pedantic or too something. Like, I'm only aware of having told my 10-year-old daughter one lie in her life. Right, like, so like- what was that? Are you allowed to share? Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's a completely ridiculous lie, but Santa Claus is real. Yeah, yeah, so that's actually the most common question I get in response to this paradigm. What about Santa Claus?

Santa Fe or whatever.

Yeah.

And the answer there is that Christmas can be, you don't have to lie to your kids to make Christmas fun. Notice no one feels like you have to lie about Halloween to make it fun. No one says, no, these witches are real. You don't have to do that. Fiction is fun enough for kids that you can make Santa Claus fun.

So what did you light her about?

We were looking at a, we had done some kind of Google search. I mean, she was maybe six, right? So she had no, she didn't even understand the lie that I told. But we had done a Google search on something that was producing medieval woodcuts of something about the Middle Ages or knights or something. And a woodcut came up that was just one of these, happily it was a woodcut, not a real image, but it was like one of these, 15th century woodcuts of someone being decapitated during the inquisition. Someone's head is getting sawed off. I swipe by that and she says, Daddy, what was that? And so I pull it back and I said, well, that was a very ancient and impractical form of surgery. She was not prepared for me to say, Listen, you know, -We got killed. -Yeah, there are circumstances where other people cut other people's heads off for bad reasons.

Do you feel bad that you told the lie or do you feel like that's a situation?

Well, I just didn't think on my feet quickly enough.

Got you.

But I mean, there's a role for radical honesty isn't incompatible with withholding certain information. I mean, you don't have to tell kids everything about what's going on. My daughters don't need to know exactly what ISIS was up to and just how horrible all that was. It's like there's a time to tell them what, you know, What's going on in the world. But the honest truth for my kids in those situations is, there's stuff you don't need to know.

We'll tell you later.

Yeah, you'll learn that later.

You know what's interesting about this? For the last six months, I've been thinking about honesty more than ever in my life. I feel like, you know, I cheated almost all my way through school on quizzes and tests. homework out of necessity because I couldn't comprehend the information and no matter how many tutors I had all through school, it was like it was survival for me. Now I'm not saying I'm proud of this. I stole things that I lied about from stores when I was a kid. You know, for two years I had to steal every time I went into a store, mostly candy bars or whatever way be smaller things, but still I stole things for a couple of years.

Right.

Not proud of that and would lie about it. And in relationships, intimate relationships, I remember wanting to tell the truth, but having these negative consequences when I would. And so I would start to have more white lies. And I would never feel good about it, ever. But I felt like it was more of a defense mechanism or a way to survive or whatever it may be. And I just started dating someone at the beginning of this year. And within the first few weeks of us dating, she said, I want you to promise me you'll always tell me the truth. And it was like I had a moment. where I said, okay, my condition from the past is most of my experience is people can't handle the truth in intimate relationships. And there's consequences when you tell the truth, there's reactions, there's all this energy that's, I don't want to feel. But I just said, okay, I'm gonna say everything 100% true that happens from this moment out. And it's the most liberating thing.

Yeah.

To be able to say, okay, I'm telling you the truth about everything, no matter what. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out between us or whatever, or if you're gonna react, but I'm gonna be honest and it just feels more at peace.

Yeah, yeah. And then the growth is in.

It.

Forces growth on you and other people in surprising ways. So for instance, once you decide that you can't lie, then that suddenly becomes a mirror held up to yourself. Then you find out what kind of person you are. Right, here, like, if I'm not going to-- How integrity am I here? Yes, like, so why don't you want to go out with me?

Right?

Like, if I don't have recourse to a lie, right? Well, then I'm forced to both, on some level, articulate who I am to the other person. Like, you know, you're too fat. Am I that kind of person?

Right?

So, like, you're forced to recognize just how deep that runs in yourself if you're not going to lie.

Right?

And then there's growth that happens in all of those areas.

Yeah.

The, I mean, so much of the notion of white lies is a matter of avoiding awkwardness. And it's just not-- Avoiding pain, right? Yeah, yeah. But the thing that happens in relationship when you resolve not to lie is that, and then people know this about you or discover this about you. is that then you become a refuge for people who actually want honest feedback. And they want to know, like, then they know you're not gonna lie to them.

Right?

So, like, so. And then when you tell them that you love something they did, like, if someone hands you their novel and you say you love it, they know you're not bullshitting.

Right.

Right. They really matter. And. And I've had this. I've gone through this with so many people where it's like, They've shown me one thing and I said okay, you want to know what I think about this? And I tell them something they really felt like they didn't want to hear, but they recognized on some level, I mean, you can always frame it as, listen, I mean, this is just my opinion. I'm not omniscient. Yeah, it's like, so this is how your novel strikes me. It may have a different effect on other people, but here's what I feel. very strongly about. And then you give them the download and certain people you'll discover actually didn't want honest feedback. And they'll never give you that honest novel again, which is fantastic. You don't want to hear from them on that point. But the people who do want honest feedback really appreciate it. And then when they give you the other novel they wrote and you love it, they know it's not bullshit. you know, you become incredibly valuable creatively.

To people in that way.

That's good.

What is the question that you wish you had the answer to? That you like, this is a certain fact about this answer.

Well, the deepest one is related to what we were talking about earlier, just exactly how is consciousness integrated with the physics of things? How does consciousness arise? you know, what's the answer to the, you know, what's called in philosophy, the mind-body problem? That would be, you know, if there were one scientific mystery I would want to solve, that would be it.

And we talked about your parents briefly before we started on camera. I'm curious, who was more influential in your life and what was the biggest lesson they taught you? Well, it was definitely my mom.

My mom raised me essentially as a single mom. My dad left when I was two and a half. And I had a relationship with him until he died when I was 17, but it was a long distance one. He moved to New York and so it was, you know, that was interesting. Like I didn't really see the implications of all of that until I became a dad and like, I mean, and just how, you know, aberrant that was to just leave a two, like at a certain point I had a two and a half year old daughter and I thought, what kind of guy would I need to be to leave now and move 3,000 miles away and have the level of involvement my dad had with me? So my child's eye view of him, I didn't really see the problem. On some level, I probably thought I was the problem, right? But it was just, once I had a kid, I realized not only was that unthinkable for me, I don't think, I know people of varying quality in my life. I don't think I know a dad who would do that, right? Like, I mean, it was just very, it was a very strange epiphany to be able to triangulate on him in that way. So it was definitely my mom.

And what was the lesson, the greatest lesson she's taught you?

That's hard to say. I mean, she's, you know, we've been best friends for so much of my life. You know, I think my love of books and my love of writing and like that, all of that got set by her. I mean, she was somebody who was a big reader and just loved, you know, I grew up with, you know, like the television in the living room just had books. It was like a wall of books all around it. It was like a television just set in books. And I remember, you know, from a very early age, you know, from, you know, age five, I remember just like there are books everywhere. And, and she has a great sense of humor. So it's like insofar as finding, finding the funny in things, you know, that, that's a corrective for for almost everything. And that's where she lives.

What's the greatest lesson your dad taught you in his absence? Or maybe that you learned?

I remember he explicitly taught me a lesson. It's funny, this is, I don't know how old I was, but I remember he, I mean, I think I was always somewhat shy, I think. I definitely default to shyness. I'm more of an introvert than an extrovert. At one point, I think he must have noticed this about me and he said, When you meet somebody, I want you to notice whether they go to shake your hand first or you go to shake their hand first. And I realized it wasn't just about that. Like that way of thinking about just being conscious of how I was relating to people was something that had never occurred to me at that point in my life. Like I just, Again, I might have been, you know, ten years old or something, but like it realized like that was like a new piece of software that I, you know, I could have that, you know, I didn't even know was possible. Like, oh, like, oh, you can actually change this sort of thing about yourself. Like, you could this might matter.

So.

So, yeah, I remember him, you know, consciously trying to impart that lesson.

What's the lesson you wish he would have taught you?

Oh, but the truth is, I'm not even sure. so he died when I was 17, so I didn't really have a fully adult relationship with him. And this was strangely, so everything we've been talking about in terms of what I've realized in my life that's of value, you know, it's kind of the wisdom component of life, and really most of my intellectual interests, all of that came online when I was 18. He died when I was 17, so there's an amazing bifurcation in my life. between who I am and have become and who I was when I had a father. And I have no idea what he would have thought about any of this or what he would have been like to interact with about this. I don't know how wise he was or wasn't. It's interesting. It's just like, again, the lesson there that he teaches me My absence in his absence is that, you know, everything's in print. You don't know how long anything's gonna last, right? You don't know when the last, when it will be the last time you are seeing a person, right? And like, so what's the quality of that interaction? What haven't you said to the people you care about?

You know?

I mean, he was a very loving guy. I mean, it was not, there was a circumstance of zero conflict, but it was just, yeah, it's just, it's, it's odd to consider the life choices he made as a father.

Do you think you would be where you are today without his death, as, you know, successful in pursuing the questions and the work and the mission that you have, if he was at home with you when you were a child.

And supporting you the whole time? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, death has been a very important part of my life. My best friend died when we were both 13. Wow. And that was like, as far as an experience of death, like the kind of the rude interruption in one's otherwise carefree life.

It wasn't kind.

Yeah, like that was, like the fact that that was on the menu, you know, that your 13-year-old friend can just die and disappear, that was the biggest shock. with respect to people close to me who have died. Other people have died since. So from when I was 13 on, I was somebody who had kind of big picture philosophical concerns about what does it all mean and what does it mean to die and what happens after death. I mean, when I was 18, I had certain experiences that really answered some of those concerns, but I was thinking about issues of life and death from kind of 13 on, and that has been super-- and then so when my dad died when I was 17, and he had had cancer for the better part of two years before that, so I kind of saw that whole process. And so that was-- yeah, I mean, it's sobering. You realize that it's good to-- get your head straight about things sooner rather than later. And so I've always, you know, it has, I'm always amazed to meet people who don't think about death at all, like, and do their best not to think about death and succeed. Right. So whether it's just like they're just living their lives. It's just the goal is to have as much fun and have as much success and just keep it all positive and. They seem to think that the alternative is to be made morbid by death, right? Or to become a kind of Woody Allen character who's just neurotic and tortured by one's concern about death, right? Whereas there's a third channel to be on, which is it can actually be a primary source of wisdom. It's massively clarifying to realize that you've only got a certain number of days, right? And so, like, how do you want to live in each moment? And how trivial do you want to be? You know, how long do you want to suffer over this thing that you know is not going to matter, but certainly not going to matter on your deathbed, it's not even going to matter two days from now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet now, it's, It's the thing that you're completely buried in.

Obsessed with, yeah. What's the thing you're most proud of that you've done in your life that you wish your dad would have seen or know about?

It's funny, so many of these words don't land on the right shelf. Like proud. Proud doesn't really, so I'd say, I'm very in touch with the fact that, I don't know if you've heard my argument against free will, but like I don't actually feel feel personally responsible for the good things that have happened in my life, that I've done. It's very salient to me that I didn't make myself. I can't take any deep responsibility for the tools I have or don't have, the level of effort I can exert or not, the priorities I have or lose sight of and then find again. All of this, when you become aware of what it's like to be you moment to moment, you see that everything is just happening, right? Including your capacity for effort. The days you set an alarm and wake up early, the days you hit the snooze button once, and the days you hit the snooze button five times. Like, all of that is part of what's just happening in the universe, right? And it's not that you can't make choices, but again, the choices themselves are also just happening. And so when I look at what I've done that strikes me as good, if given a chance, I would have done that again, right? What I see is a lot of good luck. I'm lucky to have had the capacity to do those things or to have developed it. And I'm lucky to be born into a society where I don't have to worry about all the things that someone in Somalia Syria has to worry about right now. I can't take any responsibility for the fact that I wasn't born in Syria, you know, in a civil war. So I just see like, I just see that I have all of these opportunities that I've been able to make much of, but not every, and I can't account for why I haven't been able to make more of them, right? So I don't feel like the flip side of pride is shame or self-reproach or some, you know, that some, a corollary negative state, I don't spend a lot of time on that either. So yeah, I'm very, things are going neutral. Things are going well and I'm very grateful for the opportunities I have to deal with interesting ideas and meet interesting people and add value to people's lives and be surrounded by people who are adding value to my life. That's great.

This is a question I asked everyone at the end. It's called the three truths. So imagine it is your last day, as many years away as you want it to be. You can be 500 years old, 100 years old, whatever it is. It's your last day. You got a guy. It's time to die. You get to have the situation you want it to be. You've got your family surrounding you. It's the good way of dying, I guess, if we want to call it that. And you've accomplished the things you want to accomplish. You've said the things you needed to say, written the books, people admire you, whatever you want, it happened. But for whatever reason, you can only share three final things you know to be true about all of your existence, your life, and everything that you've created has to go with you, hypothetically. So no one has access to your podcast or your app or your books or anything like that. But you get to write down on a piece of paper and share your three final truths, the lessons you would leave behind to humanity. What would you say are your three truths?

Well, we've covered that. We've actually been talking about them more or less this whole time. I mean, the first one is that there is just consciousness and its contents. The implication that all of that has for well-being, kind of an admonition to look more deeply into that fact, right? Because of all the good things that come and all the bad things that stop happening once you do that.

So that's one.

That's one. So that's the kind of the contemplative well-being side of it. Then there's the, I guess I could put it in the form of a question, you know, why would you ever lie? And that's the ethical side of it. You know, that sorts out one's relationships. You know, once you seize hold of that, all the people you shouldn't be spending time with kind of magically disappear, and all the people who want to have an honest relationship with you are there and appreciate your honesty.

That's great.

The third one, I guess the third one should address kind of more, you know, society. How do we organize society in a way that makes sense? Yeah, this isn't poetry, but the-- It's.

Your last truth, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is-- All the.

World knows you by it.

This is an ugly last truth, but it's nonetheless consequential. I think incentives are everything at the level of society. It's like what we want is to organize society in such a way where ordinary, neurotic, selfish people are incentivized to behave better and better toward one another. I mean, that's how we build this thing to really be a kind of utopia. It can't be dependent on everyone becoming a saint or even especially wise. We need to incentivize the things we want to see happen in a way that takes out the friction. And so much of what we see in the world that is creating needless human misery is a matter of incentives being badly aligned. So that you have good people doing horrific things just because they're incentivized to live that way, you know, and they're not incentivized to do the alternative. Yeah.

That's a great truth. I love it. You've got the Making Sense podcast, you've got the Waking Up app, which everyone should get on their phone, App Store. Where else can we connect with you? What else can we do to support you in your mission?

Well, those are the two main places. It's all, samharris.org is my website. So if you want to know more about what I'm doing or like, calendar of live events or anything like that, that's always there. You're touring, you're speaking. Occasionally, there's not much on the calendar at the moment, but I've got an event in LA at the Wiltern on July 11th. I don't know when this is gonna come out, but that's happening then. But yeah, I'm trying to keep the calendar a little clear at the moment, but yeah, everything gets eventually announced on my website or on my podcast in the app.

You're on Instagram, Twitter, everywhere.

For better and worse, I'm on Twitter. I see a lot of your tweets. I like that. Yeah, the tweets can be brutal.

You got great opinions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm less on Twitter, but Twitter is the only one I really engage with personally. I mean, we put stuff out in a funky way, everywhere.

Twitter is where you go on.

That's me on Twitter. It's your opinion, Scott.

I like it. So make sure you guys check out the Making Sense podcast. That's about once a week on average, a couple of times. Waking Up app, I highly recommend it. It's really powerful what you've done there, so congrats on that. I know it's been helping tens of thousands of people who've been using it already, if not more maybe right now. But congrats on that. I wanna acknowledge you for a moment, Sam, for your wisdom and your intellect and your ability to dive into topics that are very controversial for people. who have set beliefs that don't want to look deeper into another option or another way. And you continue to research, dive in, test, analyze ideas, thoughts, and beliefs that can hopefully end suffering for a lot of people or support people in less suffering to live a happier life and bring more peace to their hearts. So I acknowledge you for your gift Even though you say that everything is, you know, you're lucky in situations, but you've decided to continue to make the choices to serve people in this way, and I acknowledge that.

Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you for that.

Of course, of course. The final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

Well, I mean, there's really two. It's, I mean, that, you know, the conventional one of whatever your goal is to be able to meet that most efficiently, right? I mean, so there's greatness in so many areas of our lives, but I mean, beauty is and elegance as variables are, we recognize greatness when those are also maximized, right? So it's like it's sort of how you arrive at something matters as well. It's not just not that you arrive. Real greatness is a matter of meeting worthy goals that has the well-being and ethical component to it as elegantly as possible.

There you go.

Sam Harris.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Pleasure.

Appreciate it, man.

There you have it, my friend. I hope you enjoyed this one. Let me know if you did. Tag me on Instagram. @lewis hows the link for this is lewishouse.com 824 you can share it out for part two and they can listen to part one at lewishouse.com 823 to listen to to part one as well powerful two-part section I wanted to keep going because it was just mind-blowing for me and hopefully I'll get Sam back on in the future but share this with a friend today you can text you can put it in a WhatsApp group chat, you can put it on your social media account, be the hero in someone's life by spreading the message of greatness. Just send it to a few friends or post it on social media. It really means the world to me. And a lot of people ask me, how can I best support you, Louis? The best way you can support me is spreading this message. It's free and it helps so many people transform their life, overcome any struggles or pain or insecurities that they have by getting the right information. information from the best people in the world. So just share with a few friends and that's an amazing way you can support me and also support someone else in your life today. And Mahatma Gandhi said, I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. You know, we have so many thoughts every single day. Don't let a thought that is dirty, that is nasty, that is controversial, that is harmful to walk around in your mind. Eliminate this thought.

Remove it.

Find peace within your own mind. And when you do that, you'll have peace in your body and in your life. It starts with the thoughts in your mind. And Gandhi said, I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. Don't let anyone do that. You are in control of what you think about. You are amazing. You are loved. You are one of a kind. As always, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.