NEUROSCIENTIST Shares 6 Pieces Of Advice That Will CHANGE YOUR LIFE | Sam Harris & Lewis Howes

The deeper version is really to understand the mechanics of your own mental suffering and put yourself in a position to cease to suffer unnecessarily. You know, you've only got a certain number of days. How do you want to live in each moment?

Understanding how our beliefs and thoughts affect our mind play a crucial role in life. And in this video, neuroscientist Sam Harris shares with you how to master and understand your mind to improve your life. You've been really known for meditation over the last few years more and more. From what I've heard from you, it's more about meditation. You've got this incredible app, the Waking Up app. And your voice is so soothing that it's very relaxing.

Yeah. Or soporific, depending on how you use it. Exactly.

When did you get into meditation and why did you feel like it was necessary for your life?

I was 18 and I had a drug experience with MDMA and this is before MDMA was the-- oh, cool. Yeah. I knew no one in my generation who had tried it or had even heard of it. I mean, I'm sure someone had, but this was '86, I think. '85, '86. And so, Rena Raves, as far as I know, hadn't been invented. And this was kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community that had been using it for quite some time. And so it was given to me explicitly as a tool to explore the nature of consciousness and to realize something fundamental about, especially relationships and my own emotional life. And I really didn't know what to expect, again, because I'd only known one person who had taken it. And so I sat down with my best friend and we tried this drug and it was really amounted to a total firmware upgrade of my brain. And it was just, you know, it's not, and again, I don't want to sound like a booster for psychedelics entirely. I mean, there are downsides to all these drugs, you know, I think MDMA in particular, stands a chance of being somewhat neurotoxic. The data, at least, is ambiguous on that. People can have bad experiences, certainly on LSD and psilocybin, and I've had those experiences. And so it's a mixed message. And I have a chapter in my book, Waking Up, titled Drugs and the Meaning of Life. And there's actually an audio version of that on my podcast. It might even be the first podcast. So if people want the full story there, they can get it. The reality for me was that this, and this is true for many people, MDMA showed me a landscape of mind and a way of being that I didn't realize was possible. I was an 18-year-old who was very ego-centric and my ego was well-defended and I had no, the notion of experiencing unconditional love had not occurred to me and There are just many things that I just was not, if you had asked me, what was someone like Jesus talking about? What was the core of all of the religions that people take so seriously, the experiential core of it? I think I had just an empty file on that. I just had no sense of what people had been doing for the last 2,000 years to transform their experience. So I had this experience of unconditional love is not too strong a word.

So during this experience you felt unconditional love?

Yeah.

I mean, what I felt was layers of self-concern there that I didn't even know existed get stripped away and what was left was a state of being that was just wide open and and had as its ethical core just unlimited good intention toward other people, whether they're friends or strangers. And I realized that I loved strangers in the same way that I loved friends and family at the most basic level because I just wanted everyone to be happy. And that desire was so, it was just turned up to 11, right? Right, so it was just like, so you realize that's, if you're, if the real ballast for you emotionally and ethically is that you want other people to be happy, you want them to have beautiful lives, you want them to be, to realize their dreams, you want their, I mean, you basically, you realize that there's, the sense that there's a zero sum contest between your wellbeing and your happiness and others, is an illusion, right? I mean, you want all boats to rise with some tide. Win-win experience with everyone, yeah. So you want positive some interactions with people. That was, I mean, that just bowled over every other wrinkle in my mind for the period of four hours, right? So there was no limit to that. It's not transactional. You realize that that is actually a state of being. That's the way that could be the default state of your own consciousness if you could only locate it. And then coming down from an experience like that, the drug wears off and then you're returned to who you used to be with the memory of what it was like a few hours before. And so then there was an imperative to figure out what was possible in terms of techniques like meditation or new understandings of how the mind works. There's clearly a path, there must be a path by which one can have that experience more and more of the time. And so then my notion of just what the goal of meditation was, I mean that has actually changed a bit. It's not about producing this state of unconditional love all the time. I think that's not actually the center of the bull's eye, but that was the first experience I had, which which gave me a sense that there's a path and there's something to do.

Did you ever feel like you had a sense of unconditional love before that moment?

Oh, no. No, I mean, I had no reference point for it. No reference. I mean, I had love for, you know, I love my mom, right? Like, you know, there's no, love was a noun that I could use, honestly. But no, there was no.

I mean.

There hadn't been a glimmer of that experience, really. I mean, it was actually the first moment in my life that I felt sane. And I hadn't realized- I was 18. Yeah, and it was only by comparison to all previous states. I mean, like I had this experience and I realized, okay, this is sanity, right?

That's how it should be.

Yeah, yeah. And the return to one's normal waking, narcissistic neurotic consciousness was one of not being restored to, because everyone's concern here is that, so drugs, one problem is we have this word drug that is the word we use to cover this vast class of compounds that are psychoactive, and some drugs are awful and not worth taking and just intrinsically bad for you both in terms of what they do to you neurophysiologically and the kinds of states of consciousness that people experience there. And other drugs, I would argue, have immense therapeutic value and are worth taking under the right conditions. And MDMA is certainly one of those drugs and it's being used as a remedy for PTSD now and a lot of research to great effect. But people think, oh, you've taken a drug, so this by definition this is artificial. So whatever you experience there is less like the real you than whatever returns when the drug wears off. But that wasn't the experience and that's certainly not the experience as you get deeper into things like meditation that don't entail drugs. You can actually discover that the way you're tending to be, the way you've been conditioned to be by life and biology, frankly, we're not Evolution has not designed us to maximize our well-being. Evolution has designed us to be fairly paranoid to try to stay safe, right? Yeah, we're apes, right? This is not about our happiness. From the gene's eye view of what we're doing here is not maximizing human happiness and building a global civilization that will endure for a million years, right? That's just not what our genes care about.

They care about being safe or-- well.

They care about-- I mean, all we've evolved to do is maximize the likelihood that we will successfully spawn and stay around long enough to see that our progeny survive and spawn, right? So it's like you're-- once you're 40 years old, evolution doesn't care about you for the most part. I mean, I guess there's some argument that grandparents are a value or even great-grandparents are a value, but it's just-- It can't see so much of what we need to be happy. It's like we're deeply conditioned for tribal violence. Tribal violence is something that we obviously have to outgrow, globally speaking. We're deeply conditioned to perceive ourselves in at least potentially hostile relationships with all other apes like ourselves. And yet the self, the feeling of self, and this is actually getting closer to what I think the goal of meditation is, the sense of self is an illusion. This is a construct that can be felt through and discovered to actually be false. and there's an immense amount of good that comes with that discovery, but it's not something that has paid adaptive dividends in the past, and it's something that, you know, it might actually be hostile to what would keep an ape, you know, safe for the millions of years we and our ancestors have evolved, right? So there are many things, there are many good things, and I would argue most good things, that we want to be able to pay attention to in the year 2019, and that we want to have the free attention to explore would be counterproductive if you were returned to the savannah and just in a contest of all against all. So everything from, I mean, you know, conversations like this. We're going to talk about almost nothing that apes like ourselves have needed to focus on for 500,000 years.

When did we start to focus on the desire to be happy? Like what year or years or decades was this where we really said, okay, we've got our needs met or basic needs met. Let's focus on being happy and feeling unconditional love more.

Well, it depends. who you're talking about, because most of humanity even at this moment doesn't have the free attention to really think seriously about what it means to be happy.

You.

Just look at the economic comparatives of most people in most situations. It's not about really having the free attention to do whatever you want or what you would think at the end of the day would be most satisfying.

Survival, more basic needs.

Yeah, yeah. Or just you're living in a situation of stark political insecurity, right? You're just worried about what sort of violence may happen in the street later today, or what you may or may not say that could get you jailed, right? It's not. So much of human history has been just figuring out how to get strangers to cooperate reliably enough so that they have the free attention to explore the things we want to explore so that, yeah, we can figure out why we're dying from diseases and then cancel them. So just to be able to do science is a luxury. And this is where, as you probably know, I've spent a lot of time criticizing organized religion, Because historically and even currently, so much of it is hostile to, I mean, so much of it is putting in place of real curiosity and a real search for answers, Iron Age fictions that just got codified in books that can't be edited. So in my view, the main tool we have to navigate now, and this has always been the case, but It's just more and more imperative that we realize this. The main tool is human conversation. And what every religion is, is an insistence by a certain group of people that we anchor ourselves to a conversation that was held hundreds or thousands of years ago. Right? So it's like either you want to have the best ideas actionable and interpretable now or you want to be hostage to what your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and grandmother thought was true about the nature of reality. And if you go back far enough, you're talking to people who knew absolutely nothing that a sixth grader knows today. I mean, literally, if you could build a time machine and send a sixth grader back a thousand years, that boy or girl would be the smartest and wisest person on earth on so many topics. Just to know that electricity exists, you're a savant, or the DNA has something to do with biological inheritance, or the germ theory of disease. Imagine being the lone person on earth who understood that you should wash your hands before you deliver babies.

Save the world.

Yeah, exactly.

Save humanity from that.

So it's insane that we, are captive to doctrines that just we're never in contact with the knowledge base that we have currently.

Why do so many people believe so strongly in their religion? And I'm not here to say someone's right or wrong, but why do they believe so strongly?

That's why I'm here.

You can do what you want to say. Why do so many people, I mean, there's billions of people that still believe in religion that have a religion. and that believes so firmly in the beliefs of the books from their religion, and yet they can't prove any of those things from those books. Is that right? Is that fair to say?

Yeah.

You can't prove those things.

It certainly can't prove those things.

Certain things actually happened in certain books, except for just that someone wrote a story about them.

Yeah, I mean some imagine that they have proof, but it's often...

There's no actual physical proof today that these things... No.

I mean, it's worse still. The books themselves say that they're inerrant, right? I mean, the Quran says that it's inerrant, and the Bible says that it's inerrant in various places. And that is taken as evidence of its inerrancy. Well, I mean, the Lord of the Rings could have put a line in there which said, this is perfectly true, and any doubt otherwise would get you consigned to hell. And that wouldn't prove that the book is true. So it's just, you know, it doesn't And the amazing thing is that every Christian looks at the Quran and looks at the whole discourse around it within Islam and finds it completely unpersuasive. And every Muslim returns the favor with respect to Christianity. So it's not, if you stand outside of one of these traditions, you can see that the language game that they're playing within it to justify everything is illegitimate. But in defense of religious people, it's true that there are these core needs in life emotionally and socially that secular culture has been very slow to meet and in certain cases has almost nothing to say. So especially with respect to the kinds of experiences we started this conversation on. It's just the experience of self-transcendence or the experience of unconditional love. If you have that experience, if you wake up tomorrow morning feeling unconditional love for all sentient beings, right? Traditionally, there has been no language with which to greet that epiphany, but religious language. I mean, so if you go into a church and say, listen, I've just had this experience, they have a lot to tell you about Jesus and His grace and the power of prayer and It links up with 2,000 years of seeking experiences of that kind in a contemplative context, monks and nuns. And if you go too far, then they begin to worry that you're too heterodox. And in the 14th century, if you went too far, they would burn you at the stake because you're claiming to be God yourself or you're claiming to be the equivalent of Jesus. there's a hierarchy there that you have to respect. The same is true for Islam.

But.

Yeah, so there is a baby in the bathwater that religious people are right to worry is being disregarded or being thrown out when you criticize faith and criticize these doctrines. And then the other reason that religion endures, and it's really the main one, is that we all die and the people we love die and that is intolerable and it's true that if you can believe a sufficiently consoling story about what death means or what it doesn't mean, a lot of the stress of life goes away.

Gives you more peace.

Yeah, I mean, in certain cases, Total peace. I mean, in certain cases, if you believe the sufficient doctrines, it's a good thing. I mean, you can literally get yourself into a situation, as it often happens under Islam, where a mother can legitimately celebrate the suicide bombing perpetrated by her jihadist son. She knows she'll see him in paradise.

Wow.

As a martyr. And he got the whole family in there too. This is like, you know, the ultimate sacrifice. Yeah, and it's all good. I mean, if you really believe it, it's all good. Nothing has gone wrong there. And so that's the power of belief, and that's what, you know, it's the insidious power of belief because it's the thing that, I mean, something like suicide bombing should be impossible. It should be impossible to convince somebody to do that, right? It should be synonymous with severe depression and inability to find any goodness in life. That's not the kind of person who becomes a jihadist and becomes a suicide bomber. These are not the depressed people who would otherwise be medicated in a mental hospital because their depression is so severe. No, these are people who have a lot to live for for the most part. They're disproportionately well educated. These are people who come out of engineering programs and colleges. They can get jobs. There's economic opportunity. They have sincere beliefs in this case, martyrdom and the reality of paradise. So, yeah, so I've spent a lot of time worrying out loud about the consequences of those kinds of ideas because For me, the most concerning thing about our world is not that there are a lot of bad people doing bad things. It's a lot of good people doing bad things under the sway of unfounded and dangerous and divisive beliefs. Ideas are way more powerful than the 1% of us or the half of 1% of us who just happen to be psychopaths. Right. Right.

If you put a belief in, it's like inception. It's like you planted an idea so deeply in someone's mind that this is going to happen. They believe it so much that they're willing to do whatever it takes to make it reality. If you could wave a magic wand or set the parameters for how you wanted to think each day, the thoughts that you actually came in your mind, you can control it. I'm assuming you control them in a lot of your own ways with your own strategies and techniques and awareness. But if you can just say, I'm sick of trying to control it or reframing things when they come up, and you can just say, I want to think these thoughts every day. What would you want to think? What type of thoughts would you want to think? And what would you want to eliminate?

Yeah.

Well, so First, more fundamentally, I'd want to recognize that the mind has no shame. It just thinks. It just thinks. So thoughts just keep coming and the goal from a meditative point of view, and this is an analogy that's used in Tibetan Buddhism, is to get into a position where thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. So there's just no possible problem.

Can't steal anything.

Yeah, there's just nothing to steal.

That's interesting.

So to truly be indifferent between a good thought and a bad thought, that's the real superpower.

That is cool.

So that's the more fundamental level of addressing the problem. But it's also true that you can skillfully curate the contents of your your thinking and think better thoughts deliberately. And you can think more creative thoughts, you can think more compassionate thoughts, ethical thoughts. And yeah, I mean, so I'm interested in many, many things. I want to know more about many, many things. I want to be right more often than I'm wrong. I mean, so all of that's happening at the level of the conversation you're having with yourself. and other people and we end with good books. And so, yeah, I think, I mean, their philosophy is like, you know, the Western philosophy of stoicism, you know, like the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. There are so many good thoughts, you know, that if you were looking for a script that would generate a.

A.

Reliable baseline of psychological well-being and ethical conduct, that's certainly part of the script. I mean, to be able to think, and again, it comes back down to reframing a lot. So, like, if, you know, again, to make it trivial, you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off, right? The natural state, sort of the road rage state, is to be irate, you know, and, to essentially hate that person, the person whose face you can't even see. You can't even tell whether the person's 90 years old or 20 years old, right? And that should matter to you, right? You should have a different feeling about a 90 year old than a 20 year old in that moment, given the implications. But so, a stoical kind of reframing of that would be, is to recognize you don't know what is going on in this person's life. And nine times out of ten, if you could know it, you would feel compassion for what's going on there. And you'd feel gratitude that you're not suffering the same problem. The one reframing I use all the time now is that whenever something bad is happening or something, quote, bad, something that is causing me stress is happening, I think of all of the worst things that are not happening. And I just think of how much I would pay, literally pay, to get back to the situation, precisely the circumstance I'm now in that I'm now stressing about.

If you have worse conditions.

Yeah, yeah. Right. So just to explain.

You had no legs.

Exactly. You find out, I did not find out today that I have a brain tumor. Right? So whatever I was stressing about today, if I got the call that I have a brain tumor, right, how much would I pay to get back into precisely the situation where I was just stressing about whatever it was on my schedule or some hassle? It's just, everything is a non-issue until it's a real issue. And then so when you take something that's a real issue, like a brain tumor, Then you have, then the question is how much of the day are you going to spend having a brain tumor? Being busy having a brain tumor. Suffering about the brain tumor. Exactly. And suffering about your uncertainty about the future. There's a time course to all of this. At each point, this is where worry is almost always pointless because each moment, There's either something you can do to solve a problem or there isn't. Now, if there is something to do, well then just do that thing, solve the problem. If there isn't, there's actually nothing to worry about. The worry adds nothing to that situation. So, if you have a brain tumor, yes, you need to go from one doctor to probably to a second doctor for a second opinion and you find the surgeon, you want it. There's a whole process. You're going to get an MRI, You know, all of it, you're having to deal with a lot of, yes, objectively stressful things. But, I mean, big picture, we're all in this situation. I mean, life itself is a brain tumor. We're all going to die. We're all going to go on this. We're going to get the full tour. Now, for some of us, you know, some of us will be very lucky and it will be very orderly and free of pain and we'll be surrounded by everyone we love.

We're 100 years old.

Yeah, it's just going to go perfectly. and for some people it'll be chaotic and terrifying and short or long. I mean, so like it's every permutation and I'm not denying that it's rational to have preferences there, right? I mean, like, you know, you do want the orderly, loving, you know, you know, and not untimely unraveling of it all. rather than the opposite. But it's whatever is happening, you have this moment, and then you're thinking. And you're thinking about the future, and you're thinking about the past. Is the mechanism by which you will truly suffer in each moment. Because it is, in fact, true to say that even physical pain is something around which you can develop an impressive ability to be a quantomist, right? And we also have, you know, we have, you know, for extreme pain, we have painkillers. I mean, like, happily we're living, we're not living in, you know, 1700 where, you know, someone is just kind of sawing off your limb, you know, you know, after the leeches didn't work.

So.

You know, 99% of our suffering around everything even objectively horrible things like brain tumors, is our thought about past and future, is the regret. And it's the story we're telling ourselves.

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

-Because you still worry.

-Yeah, well, no, so I can... 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 have really learned to practice mindfulness, the difference is when my suffering becomes at all intense, it functions as a kind of mindfulness alarm. And so the truly 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. going off, and I'm just, you know, kind of a normal jerk, you know, within that, within those bounds, right? Like, you know, a little anxious here and there. Yeah.

Yes.

I go to the dry cleaner and, and discover that they, you know, destroyed my suit. Right? It's like this. It's like this, in the scheme of things, it does not matter at all.

Right.

But, but, you're frustrated. You're, yeah, it's like, okay, what are you, what do you do? You know, so it's like, attention is captured, and when attention is captured by that, I'm the same guy I always was.

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. So I'm just going for the food and there's no perspective. Consciousness is trimmed down to just the pleasure or pain of that experience for that moment. 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. So the reality is you're in your bed prone or supine or you're in a situation that's completely unlike the situation you think you're in. And you think you're on a beach talking to somebody or arguing with somebody, you showed up at a conference and you didn't have your pants, whatever it is. And you're relating to people who don't exist, right? And 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, you know, if you really know how to meditate, you can break the spell decisively in an instant. Yeah. And in that instant, you have woken up. I mean, you're no longer in bed asleep, right? And so I can do that. I mean, there's sort of two, I guess there are 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. And so that's sort of small-m mindfulness that people learn 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. 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 in my meditation app I spent a lot of time trying to push people toward 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 or a subject in your head, rocking around in the body. You're behind your face in this moment. You and I are talking, I'm looking at you, the default situation is for you to feel implicated by my gaze. I'm looking at something. You're on the other side of my gaze.

I mean my mind is or my.

Consciousness is, or whatever it is. It's you. It's like you're, there's something, 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 into it sort of, 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, like, you're over there, you're behind your face, right? And that's what we call I. I mean, that's the personal pronoun, pronoun for most people refers to that 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 center to it. And so at a certain point, mindfulness can become the experience of just cutting through that illusion, right? So you're not, 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. And then your meditation practice becomes recognizing that in each moment.

And.

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, right? 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 know, like you could have tension in your face because of you had some dental procedure, right? It's like it literally 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, 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? Sure. 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 into a restaurant where there's one wall that is like a 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, right? So there's a bunch of people over there. that you just thought were people, but at some point in the meal you recognize it's just half the size, right? And that's just glass and it's a wall of light, right? 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. It's just light. 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, the course of practice once you're able to practice in that way is 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 in each one of those moments you realize life isn't about seeking to become happy.

Right?

It's not like you can only be happy. You can only be free in this moment. There's only ever this moment.

Now.

Now, I'm 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, 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 the briefest moment of gratification. We unite with the object of desire and for barely a second. Barely a second. And 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, 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, like that wouldn't, that's the pleasure, you know, 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 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, you know, on some level, all of these, these things we want are a mirage, right? You know, you get, you know, whatever it's like, like you, you wanted a new watch and you want, 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 know, you have these brief moments of interaction with it, and. But when you actually drill down on what the experience is like, I mean, the experience of being satisfied with, with. some 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 get rid, 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 want your to-do list to be all checked off and then empty. And those become peak moments. 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, you know, do anything. I could stop everything else. Yeah, just, you know, there would be no-- But then you say-- Ego-centric, you know, 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 a Nobel Prize, what happens is-- I get depressed. Someone says, what are you going to do next?

Right.

And-- I mean, like, I just won the Nobel Prize. What else can I do?

And the half-life of those peak experiences is incredibly short. You know, it's-- It's a moment. In the best case, it's days, right? But in reality, it's, you know, 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. Football? 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.

And I remember I did it in football and the 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. And I had to beat. 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 all-mar. 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 because 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 it.

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. 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 the Buddha talked about life being suffering, and that's actually a mistranslation of the original Pali. The term is dukkha, and the better translation is unsatisfying or unsatisfactory.

So not life is suffering, life is unsatisfactory.

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. I mean, to take your experience, you can only stand on that podium for so long. Right. At a certain point, everyone who's been clapping will stop clapping and leave the room.

Right.

And the neurophysiology of elation, like, oh, 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 before you sound psychotic.

Right.

So everything has a, everything just dissipates. So you can't, I mean, 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. And so, so the Buddha was not denying that there are extraordinarily pleasant experiences in life. I mean, that's, that's undeniable. But however pleasant they are, they pass away, and then There are unpleasant experiences that are bound to come. It's just like if you sit, no matter how comfortable you make your body, this is a very comfortable chair, I can get, I could, given 10 minutes, I can 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, right? At a certain point, for most of us, well short of four hours, you will feel pains in your body that are amazing.

So, you think of laying in the most comfortable bed for two days.

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 you know, sit as comfortably as you want and then just don't move. The pain comes or the itch, you know, the itching comes. And if you're not going to move and scratch or you're not going to move and relieve the pain that has just, you know, been born like a, you know, a supernova in your knee, you, 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. What happens is, there are people who will sit for 12 hours. 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. 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, or 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, you know, how that interview went or whatever. And then you notice your 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. And so much of what we like about flow states and or even just being lost in our work, 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. You're talking about an experience that lasted minutes, that you spent years, even more than even decades seeking.

And.

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. You can't arrive until you can just drop your search. It's the search for happiness that is making us uncomfortable. It is the practice of being uncomfortable in each moment. And we have to, meditation is just a technique and again, there are many techniques but at bottom, just relinquishing that act of indulging the illusion that you would be happy if only this cup were full of hot coffee, then I would, you know, you have it. Then I could relax.

I've got a few more questions I want to ask you. Are we still okay on time? I just want to make sure I respect your time. This is fascinating. 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. I mean, 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 is doing. So, like, parents I don't know, do you have kids? No. Okay, so this is an experience. Okay, 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. And so much of the experience of my feeling love for my kids happens when they're not especially happy, right? Or if they're happy, they're certainly not shining it back on me. I mean, 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's a little tyrant. I mean, sometimes it's like, I'm living in North Korea with Kim Jong Un, right? So, like, you know, if she could have her way, you know, the whole cities would would burn, but she's so adorable. And so it's like, and so that state of being of just taking delight in her full range of experience. On some level, that's possible even with grown-ups who are unpleasant. You can just see it, 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? And that's the Buddhist term for that is sympathetic joy. It's like you actually take joy in their joy. It's like the feeling you feel, if you see someone win, on American Idol or whatever. Yeah, it's like that feeling. You can burst into tears of joy for that other person's joy. Now, this is a good corrective for where many people are at. Just notice what it's like when someone in your life experiences some great success and it becomes potentially more uncomfortable if they do it in a zone where you are like, 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? Just how good do you feel for him? 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? So, 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. Forget what he wants.

-Succeeding you.

-Yeah. It's like that's the person you want to be. Like you want to be so 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. That's what it would, and again, given the right or the wrong arrangement there, that could be harder or easier to do.

But.

Ethically and emotionally, I think that's the goal. to be that kind of person, where it's like, you know, you want people's dreams to be realized, and when they're realized, that becomes yet more reason for you to be happy.

I'm curious, what do you believe happens when we die?

I don't know. I just, I don't know. I mean, that would require that we understand exactly how consciousness arises, and we don't understand that yet. I mean, there's certainly good reason to doubt that you, as you experience yourself most of the time, as the English-speaking person or subject who has the episodic memories you have of your life. that that entity floats off the brain and goes elsewhere. And that's the expectation that most people have who believe in souls. And when you hear people use so-called near-death experiences to justify a belief in an afterlife, it's that kind of arithmetic that's being done. They say, well, I saw myself in a tunnel of light, or I rose up off the table that they were performing surgery on me. I could see myself but then I realized I was not connected to my body and then there's some story about how they met entities or even met members of their own family who had died. So if you can recognize your grandma and still understand English and then still have a memory of the life you're leaving, all of those are modes of cognition that we know a fair amount about. at the level of the brain now, and we know they can be disrupted piecemeal in life. We know that if you get a stroke or if you go into the lab and they do TMS on you, transcranial magnetic stimulation, they can interrupt certain functions which really are no longer there anymore just because that neural real estate has been perturbed. So the proposition here is that if you interrupt one part of neuronal function, you lose, let's say, your capacity to understand English. But if you destroy the brain at death, everything about yourself that's familiar persists. That doesn't make a lot of sense. We know a lot about mind being dependent on the brain. Any function you could point to in yourself?

Mind versus brain, what's the difference?

Well, I mean, the mind on some basic level is what the brain is doing. And if the brain stops doing that, it's reasonable to expect that the functions of mind will stop. But consciousness is the fact that it's like something to be associated with that information processing. And that is still fundamentally mysterious. I mean, there's a lot that our brain is doing that seems unconscious, right? And seems unavailable to consciousness in principle. And so, and so, and it's these unconscious processes are delivering the contents of consciousness in each moment, right? So you and I are having a conversation. I can see you, I can hear you. I can, you know, there are things that are stable that I can inspect because they are among the contents of consciousness. but how all of this stuff is showing up is being unconsciously mediated and really can't be inspected. So the example I always use is because I'm always talking when I have to use an example, but to some degree, however imperfectly, I am managing to follow the rules of English grammar without knowing how I do that. And you're able to effortlessly interpret.

I understand.

Yes, and in fact, you don't even have a choice. If I say the word pigeon, right, you can understand it. I mean, provided you're a native English speaker and that's in your vocabulary, you can't help but understand it. You can't, it's like you can't say, well, whatever that next word is going to be, I'm just going to block the semantics of it. No, the semantics just come in, right? And so you're doing all of this, your brain is doing all of this unconsciously, and you can't get to a place where you are standing upstream of the parsing of the sounds I'm making. I'm just making a bunch of small mouth noises, right? And you know the difference when you're in the presence of someone who's speaking a language of which you know not a single word, right? Whatever that is, Thai, say. It just sounds like pure gibberish. And the surprising thing there is that it's very hard to even imagine that anyone can decode those sounds and extract meaning at all. It just sounds like, well, it's amazing that that's a language, right? And yet, once you know the language, you can't help but decode it. So all of that's unconscious and yet, the fundamental mystery of our being and the most important thing in the universe, really, I would argue the only important thing in the universe, is the fact that the lights are on as in and as what we are here subjectively, which is consciousness. If the lights were off, if it was all just, if there was no distinction between biological systems and this table, if there was nothing that it was like to be you, and there could never become something that it was like to be you or any other physical system, well then, There is no important distinction between the wet stuff we have in our heads and rocks and the water and the ocean. It's all just stuff that can have no interests. It can't suffer, it can't experience happiness, it can't be deprived of happiness, it can't be creative. So the good thing about this universe is consciousness. And the thing we can care about, your life is as your consciousness is in each moment. All you have is your experience and your possible experiences.

And.

That'S the core of our morality too. We are We are in a position with one another where we can affect each other's states of well-being and our opportunities to experience further well-being in the future. And that matters. And our conversation around that is our conversation around morality and ethics and politics and so... How do we unlock our.

Consciousness or expand it in a positive way? Well, it's meditation obviously, but how can we think differently so we can unlock this consciousness for ourselves?

Yeah, well there are many levels at which to do that. There are many different kinds of meditation, but the kind that interests me most and which I most recommend is it often goes by the name of mindfulness now. I mean, mindfulness is very widespread, but there's There's a sort of trivial versions of mindfulness and there's the deeper version. And the deeper version is really to understand the mechanics of your own mental suffering and put yourself in a position to cease to suffer unnecessarily. So you notice that you're lost in thought almost every moment of your life and much of your thinking has this mediocre character of of causing you to worry about the future and, and regret the past and, and just feel a, a baseline disease with life, right? Whether, whether it is just, you know, what it was like for me to drive here in traffic and, like, oh, am I going to be late? You know, I'm supposed to be here at 10 o'clock. And, like, so all, like, like so much of our life is the steady hum of that kind of thinking, right? And not to mention the bigger concerns about disease and whether your child is sick. And we're thinking, we're plunged into thought in each moment and we don't notice it. And until you learn to be mindful, you can't notice it. You might have this abstract idea that, yeah, of course I'm thinking a lot of the time, but so what? Or what's the alternative? There is no alternative. each thought will arise and completely capture your attention and then you are hostage to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of that thought. And it's necessary to some degree to be that way because we need thought. Thought is the way we organize our lives and form plans and understand what's happening. Almost everything that makes us human is born of our capacity for abstract thought and planning and goal formation and all the rest. But it's possible to recognize thought as a stream of appearances in consciousness and to recognize that consciousness is the prior condition of their arising. And when you can do that, you can actually break the link between thought and psychological suffering. So the thought is an anxiety-producing thought. You can notice this whole process where a thought arises and you feel anxious and that feeling of anxiety in your body once uninspected begins to generate the motive for further thoughts along those lines. So you're thinking about the thing that makes you anxious and because you're anxious, you're finding the anxiety intolerable, you've got resistance to feeling this feeling and you're thinking about like, how can I get out of this? And like, clearly I've got a lot, I've got to change here. Let me get it, you know, I'm gonna start writing some things down on a checklist, you know, and you're thinking without knowing that you're thinking and you're feeling the motive force of this emotion. But if you, once you can become mindful, which is to just be aware of what's arising in consciousness without judgment, without reaction, without resistance. So to be able to notice anxiety as a pattern of sensation in the body. And then when you can do that, you can see that, first of all, it's not that bad. In fact, you- I'm dying. Yeah, no. And under a different framing, it's a sensation that is often pleasant, right? Like the excitement you feel, or even the anxiety you feel before you get on a roller coaster, right, if that's your thing, is something you're willing to pay to do. Exactly. Yeah, you want this thing. That's part of the experience.

Skydiving.

Yeah, whatever it is. Like that's, you know, the, being able to, the thrill is a thrill because you felt some of that, right? So, and that's why I say there are other levels at which you can work with the contents of consciousness so as to cease to be unhappy. And one is to change the frame around an experience like that. So, to recognize that anxiety, the anxiety you might feel before going out on stage in front of a thousand people, just the raw sensation in your torso and in your face, I mean just the physiology of it. Tension, yeah. That is importantly similar to something that can have a positive frame which you seek out like excitement. I mean, a much more extreme case of this is like when you think of what the physical sensations are when you're working out, you know, and you're working out as hard as you can work out and in the most satisfying way, precisely the workout you'll feel good for having done, the actual sensations can be extremely unpleasant. And if they just came upon you in a different context, you would call 911 and you'd be absolutely terrified, right?

Like it just- I'm sweating profusely and my muscles are ripping.

Yeah. Yeah, so it's just, so the frame, the conceptual frame around experience does a tremendous amount. But mindfulness is a more basic ability to notice this mechanism of becoming identified with thought and resisting certain emotions and mood states and being able to just unlock from all of that and recognize that consciousness itself, that which is simply aware of experience, is not actually changed by its contents. So like that which is aware of joy is the same thing as that which is aware of sadness. Right. And on some level, it's not diminished by sadness or improved by joy. And you keep dropping back into that state and paradoxically and happily, that state begins to have its own kind of qualitative character, which is more toward the good side of things. I mean, it's more joyful and compassionate and loving and positive. And because Because the antithesis of all those states is what is happening, is being kindled by our entanglement with thought and reactivity. It's like it's the resistance to, you know, I feel the sensations of anxiety, say, because I was lost in thought about how afraid of failure I am a moment ago. I can break that spell, with mindfulness and then notice that the physiology, which still may take a few seconds to dissipate, is fine. It's fine to feel that way. It has no more meaning in that moment than a pain in the knee or indigestion or something which you completely can contextualize and it has no implication for who you are as a person. You don't feel pain in the knee and abstract from those unpleasant sensations back upon yourself and think, I'm such a schmuck, right? Like, who am I? How did I become this person? But people with anxiety, if you've got stage fright, you're going out on stage and you feel nerves, the potential for self-judgment, the potential to read into that mere peripheral display of sensation that you're this person who is, you know, didn't work out, right, you know, in the end. You know, people fall into that hole again and again, right, and it's completely, it's not just sort of unnecessary, it's completely unnecessary, and, you know, mindfulness is a tool that would allow you to discover that.

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? So the power of mindfulness is one. But I mean, what gets emphasized even more at this stage, and I think is even It's 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. I mean, 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 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 and you've got some amount of lying that's just essential for doing business.

Right.

And 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, you know, a few years ago based on, 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 it's like if I'm gonna, 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, you know, 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, Lying, 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 intentionally trying to lie. Yeah, like you say something and then you realize, okay, that wasn't quite true. I sort of got, there was some embellishment that came online or something just came out and then it just becomes too awkward to actually massage the truth, you know? It's like, or it's just too pedantic or too sensational. But I'm only aware of having told my 10-year-old daughter one lie in her life. Right, so what was that?

Are you allowed to share?

Yeah, yeah, no, 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, like what about Santa Claus?

A fairy 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. And 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 lie to her about?

We were looking at a Well, he'd done like some kind of Google search. I mean, she was maybe six, right? So she had no understanding, she didn't even understand the lie that I told. But we had done a Google search on something that was producing like medieval woodcuts of like something about the Middle Ages or knights or something. And a woodcut came up that was just one of these, you know, 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. So I've swiped 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. I'm not even sure, but she was not prepared for me to say, Listen, you got killed. 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 that's-- well, I just didn't think on my feet quickly enough. Got it. But I mean, there's a role for, so radical honesty doesn't entail, 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 what's going on in the world. But the honest truth for my kids in those situations is the 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 and homework out of necessity because I couldn't comprehend the information and no matter how many tutors I had all through school, 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. For two years, I had to steal every time I went to a store. Mostly candy bars or whatever way be smaller things but still I stole things for couple years. 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.

Yeah.

And I would never feel good about it.

Yeah.

Ever.

Yeah.

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 experiences, people can't handle the truth in intimate relationships. And there's consequences when you tell the truth. There's reactions. There's, you know, 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.

Yeah.

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. The growth is in. I mean, it forces growth on you and other people in surprising ways. I mean, so, for instance, once you decide that you can't lie, then you find, then that suddenly becomes a mirror held up to yourself. Then you find out what kind of person you are, right? If I'm not going to, How integrity am I? Yes, so why don't you want to go out with me? If I don't have recourse to a lie, 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, right? Am I that kind of person?

Right?

So like, like that, you're forced to recognize just how deep that runs in yourself if, if you're not gonna lie, right? And then, then you can, you know, 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, and.

It'S just not avoiding pain, right?

Yeah, but the thing that happens in relationship when you resolve not to lie, 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, then they know you can't lie. You're not going to lie to them, right? 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. They really matter. 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. you can always frame it as, listen, 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 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. And that's, you know, you become incredibly valuable creatively.

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

Well, the deepest one is related to what we were talking about earlier, exactly how is consciousness integrated with the physics of things? How does consciousness arise? What's the answer to what's called in philosophy the mind-body problem? That would be, 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 It's interesting. I didn't really see the implications of all of that until I became a dad and just how aberrant that was to just leave a two-year-old. 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? you know, through my child's eye view of him, I didn't really see the problem. I kind of just on some level I probably thought I was the problem, right? But like it was just, it was not, you know, once I had a kid I realized not only was that unthinkable for me, like I don't think, I mean 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.

She has a great sense of humor. So it's like insofar as finding the funny in things, you know, that's a corrective 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, you know, I was always somewhat shy, I think. I mean, 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 like that was, it wasn't just about that. He was like, like that, like that way of thinking about just, 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, 10 years old or something, but, like, it realized, like, that was like a, a new piece of software that I could have that I didn't even know was possible. Like, oh, you can actually change this sort of thing about yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This might matter. So, yeah, I remember him consciously trying to impart that lesson.

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

Well, it's really just, 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, 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. an amazing bifurcation in my life between, you know, who I am and have become and who I was when, you know, when I had a father. So I. And I have no idea how what he would have thought about any of this or what he would have been like to interact with, you know, about this. So, like, I don't know how wise he was or wasn't, you know, it's very. It's interesting. It's just like. Again, the lesson there that he teaches me in his absence is that everything's in part, you don't know how long anything's gonna last, right? You don't know when it will be the last time you're seeing a person, right? And what's the quality of that interaction? What haven't you said to the people you care about? So, 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. The mission that you have if. he was at home with you when you were a child and supporting you at the time.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, death has been a very important part of my life. I mean, like, my best friend died when I was, when we were both 13. Wow. So. And that was like, as far as an experience of death, like kind of the, the kind of the rude, you know, 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. You know, other people have died since.

But.

And that, you know, so from when I was 13 on, I was somebody who had kind of big picture philosophical concerns. about, you know, what does it all mean and, you know, what's, you know, what is, what does it mean to die and what happens after death and so that, like, I was.

I mean.

When I was 18, I had, you know, certain experiences that really answered some of those concerns. But the, you know, I was thinking about issues of life and death from kind of 13 on and that that's been super. And then, so when my dad died when, when I was 17, and, you know, he had had cancer for, you know, the better part of two years before that. So I kind of saw that whole process. And so that was, yeah, I mean, it was, it's sobering, you know, like, you realize that it's, it's good to get your head straight about things sooner rather than later. And so I've always It's, you know, 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 because they seem to think that the alternative is to be made morbid by death, right? Or to become a kind of, you know, 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 the primary source of wisdom. It's massively clarifying to realize that, you know, you've only got a certain number of days, Right, and so how do you want to live in each moment? And just how trivial do you want to be? 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. And yet now it's the thing that you're completely buried in.

Obessed with.

Yeah.

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, like, like, like proud. Proud doesn't. So, 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, I don't actually feel personally responsible for the good things that happen in my life that I've done. I just, I'm very, it's very salient to me that I didn't make myself, right? I can't take any deep responsibility for the tools I have or don't have, that the level of effort I can exert or not, the priorities I have or lose sight of and then find again. I mean, 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, including your capacity for effort, including 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. All of that is part of what's just happening in the universe. 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, what I see is a lot of good luck. I'm lucky to have had the, the capacity to do those things, you know, to end 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, you know, someone in Syria has to worry about right now. You know, I can't take any responsibility for the fact that I wasn't born in Syria, you know, in a civil war. And 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, you know, not every, and I can, I can't account for why I haven't been able to make more of them.

Right.

So, like, so I I don't feel like, I mean, the flip side of pride is shame or self-reproach or some corollary negative state. I don't spend a lot of time on that either. So yeah, things are going critical. 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 valued.

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 gun. 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.

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, you know, 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 Right. 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. The core is the first one is.

That.

There is just consciousness and its contents. And the implication that all of that has for well-being, like this is just an admonition to look more deeply into that fact, because of all the good things that come and all the bad things that stop happening once you do that.

That's one.

That's one. So that's the contemplative well-being side of it. Then there's the I guess I could put it in the form of a question. Why would you ever lie? And that's the ethical side of it. That sorts out one's relationships. 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 a more society, like 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.

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 built this thing to really be a kind of utopia. Where 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 and 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 a calendar of live events or anything like that, that's always there.

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 going to 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, yeah, the tweets can be brutal.

You got great opinions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm less on Twitter, but Twitter's the only one I really engage with personally. I mean, we put stuff out in a perfunctory way everywhere else. Twitter is where you go on. That's me on Twitter.

That's your opinion. For better and worse. 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 want to 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 more, 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 and 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 very much. Of course.

The final question is what's your definition of greatness?

Definition of greatness. Well, I mean, there's really two. It's, I mean, the conventional one of, you know, 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. So, but I mean, beauty is an 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 as not just not that you arrive.

So.

Yeah, I think, you know, real greatness is It's a matter of meeting worthy goals and 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. And if you want to learn more about how to master your mind, check out this next video right here.

The most memorable thing somebody ever said to me is I was in fourth grade but I'd skipped third, so I was probably seven or eight years old, and she said, Don't let potential be written on your tombstone.