How Lying To Yourself Can Improve Your Life | Shankar Vedantam

Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT&T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, anybody with a passing familiarity with Buddhism will know that delusion is rarely, if ever, mentioned in a positive way. In fact, the Buddha included delusion, otherwise known as confusion about the way things really are, on his list of the 3 poisons. The whole point of meditation, per the Buddha, is to uproot delusion along with the other 2 poisons, which are greed and hatred. Only then, he argued, can you be enlightened. My guest today, however, is here to valiantly make the case that delusion or self-deception actually has an upside, several upsides. While he concedes that self-deception can of course be massively harmful, he also argues that it can play a vital role in your success and your well-being, and that it can hold together friendships, marriages, even nations. Understanding this, he says, can make you happier, more effective, and crucially, more empathetic with people with whom you disagree. Shankar Vedantam is the host of the incredibly popular and very, very good podcast and radio show Hidden Brain. Shankar's most recent book, which was published in 2021, is called Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. In this conversation, we talk about the many, many ways in which our brains filter and alter our perception of reality, why we evolved for such a robust capacity to lie to ourselves, and how his research on delusion has colored his view of the chaos and confusion of our modern world. We recorded this interview back in 2021 when we were in the thick of the COVID pandemic. You will hear us refer to that, including a discussion of vaccine hesitancy, which is unfortunately an issue that is still very much with us today. Today's episode comes with a custom guided meditation from our teacher of the month, Vinnie Ferraro. It's really cool and quite innovative. The meditation is all about what it feels like in that moment when you wake up from delusion or confusion. It can be liberating, it can be discombobulating, even embarrassing. As always, Vinny has some game-changing guidance for how to handle it. Our custom meditations are only for our paid subscribers over on danharris.com. Paid subscribers also get weekly live video guided meditation and Q&A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. I'm doing the next one solo, but sometimes I do them with our teacher of the month. Speaking of which, our teacher of the month for October is going to be my close friend Sebane Selassie. And if you want to meditate with me and Seb in person, we're going to be doing our annual meditation party retreat at the Omega Institute over the weekend of October 24th. I'll put a link in the show notes. You should sign up. Okay, we'll dive in with Shankar Vedantam right after this. Shankar Vedantam, thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me, Dan. I'm really delighted to be here.

I'm delighted you're here. I'm a fan, and, uh, I think the idea you're exploring in this new book is fascinating. So I think maybe let's start there. I, I'm curious, like, how did you get to this question of whether self-deception, which generally doesn't have the best PR in the world, uh, of whether self-deception can actually be good in some way? How did you get to that question?

Yeah, I have to say, I am probably the most unlikely person in the world to have written the book that I just have written, Dan, because I consider myself to be a deeply rational, logical, scientific person. And I think I've spent most of my life trying to disabuse people of their self-deceptions and to preach the dangers of delusions. And I still believe those things, but I think over the last few years, I've really come to understand that there are elements in our life that, in fact, are well served by certain amounts of self-deception. The subtitle of my book is The Power and the Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. And there is a paradox here. Self-deception can indeed do great harm to us. But it turns out paradoxically that it can sometimes do great good for us. The starting point for my exploration here was a very unusual story involving a con called the Church of Love. And in the course of investigating the con and how it worked, I came to understand that self-deception can sometimes help people, even though we generally think it can't.

Can you tell us that story?

Sure, of course. So the Church of Love was a, a very unusual con that unfolded in the United States in the '70s and '80s. At its heart was a conman named Donald He was a balding, middle-aged guy living in a small Midwestern town. He was also a writer. And in the early '70s, he invented various characters, literary characters, young women, and he called these women angels. And then somehow he hit on the idea of writing love letters in their voices to thousands of men scattered across the United States. Many of the men receiving the letters believed they were corresponding with real women. Some of them fell deeply in love with the people they were hearing from. Many of them sent in huge amounts of money to support the women that they believed they had fallen in love with. And the most remarkable part of the story is that when Don Lowry was finally arrested and brought to trial on charges of mail fraud, several members of his organization, which was called the Church of Love, showed up at the courtroom to defend him. And I found this astonishing. Why is it when the con has been revealed, why would the marks show up to defend the con man? And in some ways, that was the starting point for my exploration of the potential value that self-deception can sometimes play in our lives.

Why did they show up to defend him?

Well, I think for some people, the Church of Love had become so central to their lives, such an important part of who they were. These relationships were so valuable to them. These men believed that they had found their soulmates, they had found an anchor, that giving up those anchors and those soulmates seemed unbearable. A couple of people at Lowry's trial said that the letters from the angels had saved them from alcoholism and drug addiction. 2 people said that they were on the verge of committing suicide, and the letters had pulled them back from the brink. And so in many ways, the story of the Church of Love is how self-deceptions can sometimes aid us in moments of great crisis or great peril. And at those moments, it becomes easy for us to see how self-deception can sometimes play a salutary role in our lives.

You haven't said this yet, but I have the sense that part of what was informing this quest for you was clearly evolution bequeathed us a brain that's pretty good at self-deception. So there must be some— something adaptive about self-deception. Am I, am I onto something with that?

I think you are onto something because in some ways this has been a great mystery for a long time. Over the last 20 or 30 years especially, researchers and social scientists have documented all kinds of ways our behavior departs from rational decision-making. The whole field of behavioral economics, for example, is focused on the ways in which human behavior deviates from rational economic decision-making. And the typical way we explain these deviations is we say, in our ancient evolutionary history, some of the biases that we had held us in good stead in those ancient environments, but we still have the brains that were handed down to us from evolution. And so we continue to have those biases, even though they're no longer functional in the here and now. Now, that is possible, and that is plausible, and certainly that probably does explain of the biases that we have in our minds. But I think part of what I'm trying to explore in my book is, is it possible that sometimes some of these biases and some of these errors are in fact playing a functional role? And if we were to rid our brains of these biases and these errors, we wouldn't come out ahead. We might in fact find ourselves set back.

So again, bias, self-deception, not generally words that people use in a positive way. What are the surprising upsides of deception that you've found?

Well, let me give you a couple of really simple examples to try and start to make the case that self-deception can sometimes be functional. At any given moment, Dan, this is work by a neuroscientist, Donald Hoffman, has found that the human eye takes in about a billion bits of information. Now, if all this information was transmitted to the brain, our minds would quickly become overwhelmed because our brains are doing many different things. They don't just Taking in visual information, they're taking auditory information and information from touch and taste. And we're thinking about things and having conversations with people and planning things. Our brains are doing lots and lots of things. And so the brain basically filters this information. So only about a million bits of information gets to the brain. And then off this million bits of information, the brain takes about 40 bits of this information and actually processes it. So out of the billion that first came into your eyes, you're basically looking at about 40 at any given moment. Now, an engineer might say what has unfolded is a profound self-deception, a delusion, because in fact, what you're seeing bears very little resemblance to what is actually coming in through our eyes, very little resemblance to reality. Now, the reason your brain does all this filtering is not because your brain has a distaste for reality, but it turns out that filtering reality in this way allows us to keep on top of what we actually need to keep on top of. In other words, we can focus our attention on what we need to pay attention to and focus on other things when we need to pay attention to other things. So a great deal of what the filtering that happens in the brain happens in order so that the brain can function efficiently, can function frugally, if you will, and attend to a great many things at the same time. One concentric circle up from that might be, you know, when you think about self-deceptions in our personal relationships, for example. Research has shown that people who have self-deceptions about their loved ones, if you believe you are In a personal romantic relationship with someone who is very handsome or very beautiful or very kind or very generous, even if those things are not completely true, your self-deceptions about your partner, your positive illusions about your partner, will mean that you are likely to be happier in your relationship and you're likely to be in a more stable relationship. And so you can see how sometimes not seeing reality accurately can turn out to be good for us.

I think you say in the book that this is true for parenting too. You— many of us believe we have the most special kid in the world, or most special kids in the world, and that can help you do your evolutionary job of raising your kid, but it may not actually be true.

Exactly. And in some ways, I think the parent-child relationship might in some ways be the almost canonical example of how self-deception can be functional. I know that when my own daughter was born, I had the feeling that this was the most That's right. And that she was the most incredible miracle beyond all miracles, and that she was the most special child in the entire universe. And I think many parents feel this way, especially, I think, when their first child has been born, that they're experiencing something incredible and magical that has never been experienced before in the history of the universe. And of course, this isn't true. It's clearly a self-deception. It's clearly a delusion. But it turns out to be a very useful delusion because, as I learned as soon as I became a parent, parenting is not easy. In fact, it's quite challenging. It's time-consuming. It's difficult. It's frustrating. You're often sleep deprived. And if we were to perform a mere cost-benefit analysis about the value of our children, some of us might conclude that our children are not quite worth it, that in fact our children are more curse than blessing. And so nature has thought fit in some ways to endow us with vast amounts of self-deception when it comes to our offspring, based on the very wise conclusion that if we didn't do so, we wouldn't be good parents. And all of us, everyone who's alive today, everyone who's listening to this show, comes from a very, very long line of survivors. That chain of survivors goes back not just to the first humans who arrived on the planet, but many, many millions of years before that to other species on the planet. And throughout that long, unbroken course of survival, you see this common relationship between parents and children. And again, the self-deceptions that parents have had about their offspring have caused parents to undertake great difficulties to protect their children, to ensure their children are raised securely to adulthood. So the fact that you and I are present on the planet today testifies to the value of self-deception on the part of our parents and our grandparents and our ancestors. And the fact that we have self-deception about our children testifies to why our children are likely to grow up in happy and well-adjusted households.

I have a 6-year-old— I'm laughing because I have a 6-year-old boy and he likes to make fun of me. The other day he was calling me Dummy Lovato, twisting the name of the pop star. And I'm never more proud of him than when he comes up with a good way to make fun of me. There, Is self-deception.

Indeed. I mean, can you imagine someone in your workplace calling you Dummy Lovato, and, and not only do you not get outraged, you're not insulted, but you actually say, my God, what a clever insult? Absolutely self-deception at its finest, Dan.

Going back to intimate relationships, yes, I can see how my carrying the story as I do that my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world is a useful self-deception. But there are lots of useless or pernicious self-deceptions I might carry about. She's always this way when I have X problem, etc., etc., or she never does X when I ask her to do it. So this seems like very much a double-edged sword.

Absolutely. And I think this is where the paradox of self-deception comes about. And more than even the examples that you cited, sort of the everyday frictions that happen in personal relationships, you can see examples of personal relationships that are abusive Where self-deception can play a very harmful role. So the person who gets a black eye from their partner, but rationalizes that behavior to themselves and says, you know, my partner is really a very good man. They just sometimes he loses his temper, or sometimes he's not quite aware of what he's doing. There are ways in which self-deceptions can end up harming us in really profound ways. This is, I think, the great dilemma of self-deception, Dan, because you can simultaneously see examples in the very same domain where self-deception is functional and where self-deception is harmful. You know, I grew up in India, and one of the great Indian epics is the Mahabharata. And it's a story of a kingdom that falls into ruin because a prince is basically leading the kingdom into ruin. He is an evil young man. And part of the premise of the story is that his father, who's the king, is unable to see the evil that his son is doing. And in the story of the Mahabharata, the king is actually literally blind. So his literal blindness is a metaphor for his— the blindness that he has in his love for his child. And I think all of us see this in And in many ways, in our present times as well, you can see how parental love can be so blind that it causes parents to do things that, in fact, are unethical or harmful. We had a scandal some time ago involving parents bribing their way into colleges so that their kids can get admission into top colleges. You can see how parental self-deception and delusion can go off the deep end and cause great harm. But if I were to wave a magic wand and say, would we all be better off if parents did not have any more self-deceptions about their children? Would we all be better off if we didn't have self-deceptions about our partners? I would have to say I don't think that would be a good thing. I think in general and on net, I believe that these self-deceptions in fact are functional.

There's another great line from the Mahabharata, if I'm remembering this correctly, that somebody's asked, what's the most wondrous thing in the world? And the answer is that we can all be surrounded by aging, illness, and death and somehow believe it's not going to happen to us.

That's right. Yeah, I remember that line. It's a marvelous line because it's, you know, the question that's posed to this very wise man is, you know, what is the most surprising or strange things? And he says, exactly as you said, you know, we see death and dying around us all the time, but all of us in our heart of hearts believe that it's not going to come for us or that we will not be the next person to die. And again, you know, when you think about it, human beings, perhaps uniquely on the planet, have a very clear sense that in fact they are mortal creatures, that we know that we're going to die. We know that That our lives could come to an end, could come to an abrupt end. And yet, if we actually had this thought, if we had to carry this thought around with us all the time, this would be a drag. It would be very difficult. You know, we would have, you know, difficulty interacting with people. It would weigh us down. And so what do we do? We come up with ways to distract ourselves from the knowledge of our impending death, our impending doom. We come up with rationalizations and self-deceptions that keep us focused and optimistic and hopeful. Again, you can sort of see ways in which this could be harmful, but clearly I think we can all see ways in which this could be helpful. If we all spend our days agonizing about the fact that we are mortal and we're going to die, clearly we would not lead very good or very functional lives.

To be Buddhist about it, there is a middle path here. If you're wallowing in the morbid, yes, that could be paralytic, but denial of death isn't the only answer. The other answer is actually to get quite close to mortality because it It vivifies the present moment and leads inexorably to gratitude and a sense of healthy urgency. I mean, that shows up in Buddhism, but also in the memento mori notion in Christianity. So there is a way here that actually losing this delusion can be quite useful.

Yes, I think I agree with that. There has been great wisdom passed down to us from numerous spiritual and religious traditions that basically point to the idea that in some ways, A flickering thought of our impending doom can cause us to actually enjoy what we are doing much more. When I tell myself, this might in fact be the last time I'm having a conversation with someone, it might make me more attentive and more mindful to the conversation. If I tell myself when I'm meeting my friend, this might be the last time I'm meeting my friend, and in fact, it could be the last time I'm meeting my friend, I might be more attentive when my friend is speaking to me. I might be more compassionate, more forgiving, more empathetic to my friend. And so I completely agree with you. Sometimes allowing ourselves a fleeting thought about our own mortality could in fact be functional. I might even go a step further than that, Dan, and say that for people who are practitioners, people who are meditators, for example, it might be possible even to contemplate our mortality on a more regular, consistent basis and not feel as overwhelmed with it as a sort of a layperson might feel. So I think there are spiritual and religious traditions that have thought about mortality in very complex ways, but I think it's fair to say that I think for most people on the planet, who have not sort of engaged in these spiritual practices, the self-deceptions, the daily distractions that we come up with, the YouTube videos that we watch, the jokes we tell at happy hour, these in some ways are our defense against our fears of mortality.

Well, this gets to, I think, what for me at least is a really important issue here and something I came into this conversation wanting to talk to you about, which is how can we, at the level of our own minds, Sort between useful delusion and harmful delusion?

Yeah, I've been struggling with this question for a while, Dan, and it's come up repeatedly as people have asked me this. And I have to confess, I'm not sure there is a simple, clean line that demarcates the two things. We talked about intimate relationships, for example, and how it's helpful in some intimate relationships to believe that you are with the right person. If you believe that you are with the right partner, you're likely to be happier in your relationship. Now, is it useful to actually tap the person on the shoulder who has this belief and say, is what you're seeing actually real? Is it actually true? Is it actually helpful? If you and I, Dan, you know, could go on a road trip this coming year, and we stopped by every couple getting married in the United States, and we asked them on their wedding day, what are the odds you're going to get divorced? You know, very few people are going to give you the statistically correct answer, which is the odds of getting divorced are 40% to 60%. Very few people on their wedding day are going to put their odds of getting divorced as 1 in 2, even though those, in fact, are the odds. And I think both of us would agree that anyone on their wedding day who says, my odds of getting divorced are 1 in 2, that person is not— that person is likely not going to have a very happy marriage. They might be statistically accurate, but in some ways, the belief that they have that their marriage is going to last forever might, in fact, be an important ingredient in the marriage lasting for a long time. It might be an important ingredient in the success of their marriage. In many ways, I think we We have to judge the utility or the disutility of delusions by seeing the outcomes they produce in the world. So when we have these delusions that lead us in some ways to be kinder people, to be better people, to be more empathetic people, to be more compassionate to each other, I would call these good delusions and useful delusions and functional delusions. When the deceptions and self-deceptions cause us to exploit one another, to harm one another, to lead one another astray, to take advantage of one another, I think those would be ways in which I would call them dangerous delusions. But I don't know the practitioner himself or herself, whether they can know as they're experiencing the delusion, whether something is useful or not useful. You might actually have to wait to see what the outcomes are.

Do you think it's possible to live a life where you hone the ability to look at your own mind and see, oh yeah, so yeah, I know on some level that my son isn't the cutest 6-year-old walking the planet, but I believe that, and I see no harm in, in that. So I'm not going to try to challenge that view. Whereas I might notice, oh yeah, wow, when I see somebody with a certain pigmentation, I, I— a whole bunch of negative associations might come up in my mind that are totally involuntary. And, and I can see how that would cause harm, especially when scaled up to the level of society. Yeah. So I am gonna actually challenge those thoughts. That seems doable to me, but what's your view?

It is probably doable. I don't think it's easy to do, but I think it is doable. But I will point out that in some ways you are doing what I was suggesting a second ago, which is you're asking yourself, what is the outcome of this self-deception? I think in the case of your 6-year-old child, it is entirely to his benefit and to your benefit for you to believe that he is the cutest 6-year-old child in the world. When it comes to the self-deceptions that cause us to lead one another astray, I think it's absolutely right to say that these self-deceptions can be harmful when it comes to the biases we have about our associations of, you know, when it comes to race or gender or sexual orientation, for example. It's absolutely right to say, what are the consequences of the self-deception of these automatic beliefs? What I liked about what you just said, Dan, is that I think it's possible to be mindful about what we're experiencing and then tell ourselves in some ways, I am gonna allow myself to experience this thing that I'm experiencing because in fact, I can see good coming from it, or I can choose to say, I'm noticing that in fact, I'm having this self-deception and I'm gonna choose not to go down that road. You know, right before we started talking, Dan, I was eating a bite of lunch. And as I was eating my lunch, I was reflecting on the fact that when we taste food, the sense of taste that we have is not in fact in the food. The sense of taste that we have is in the mind. So, you know, by the definition that I'm using about delusion, a delusion is something that is the product of the human mind. The taste of the sandwich that I just ate was a taste that was produced by my own mind. So if I was being very mindful about it, the way I would describe it is I would say, this is a delicious sandwich. The deliciousness, in fact, is produced by my mind as a result of various chemicals on the sandwich hitting the receptors on my tongue and passing signals onto my brain, and my brain interpreting In fact, it's entirely functional for me to believe that this sandwich is delicious, and I'm going to embrace the delusion and enjoy the sandwich that I'm eating. I suppose you could do that. I think it would be taxing to do that all the time, to live your life in that way very mindfully. And I know there are some Buddhist practitioners, I think, who are able to do that on a moment-to-moment basis. I try and do that from time to time, but I find I'm rarely able to do it for more than a few minutes at a stretch. Yeah.

So what is the takeaway of this insight that self-deception can be adaptive and positive? Where have you landed in terms of how this impacts your own life and your own management of your own mind?

I will say it's taught me to be a little bit more compassionate towards myself and a little more compassionate toward other people. I've noticed, for example, Dan, in my own life that when I'm going through difficult times, my mind mind is just as capable as other people's minds for reaching for fantastical beliefs. Let me give you a couple of really simple examples. All of us have been through a very difficult year with the global pandemic. And I remember that throughout the pandemic, starting in March 2020, I told myself a story that liberation was at hand and it was about 4 weeks away. At every stage of the last year, I told myself liberation was 4 weeks away. It was a month away. And in fact, if you ask me now, I would tell you today that liberation is probably a month away. Now, at some level, this is probably a self-deception. I think probably it was a self-deception that I knew was a self-deception. But the notion that we were going through something that did not have an end in sight felt too painful to contemplate. So I came up with the self-deception almost as a way to soothe my own anxieties, to tell myself, all you have to do is hold on for a month, and then liberation is going to be at hand. You see the same advice if you look at groups like Alcoholics Anonymous or addiction recovery groups. Or people who are counseling people who have long prison sentences, the admonition is often, you know, take your life one day at a time. Why should we take our life one day at a time? Why not look at our lives 20 years at a time? And the reason is, if your life in fact is filled with many, many difficulties, is filled with despair, it is in fact helpful to think about all you have to do as getting to tomorrow, as surviving till tomorrow. And then tomorrow you You create another 24-hour deadline. So in some ways, breaking up this monumental challenge into bite-sized portions makes it easier for us to navigate monumental challenges. So I think certainly I have come to be more compassionate about the ways in which my own mind works, but perhaps more importantly, I think I've become more compassionate about the ways other people's minds work. And I think this is really one of the most important insights that the book has and the most important areas where the book might have something to offer to people. All of us come by other people whose views we disagree with, and sometimes those views are so outlandish that we find ourselves bewildered. How is it possible that this person could believe what they believe? And I think when we encounter those things, invariably, we are very judgmental. I know that throughout my life, when I've come by beliefs that I think are flat out wrong, I find myself getting angry with those beliefs. I find myself getting angry with those delusions and say, how is it possible That you can believe what you believe. Now, you know, some years ago, Dan, I was having dinner with a friend of mine whom I hadn't seen for many years, a college friend of mine. And he spent the dinner explaining to me why he thought the United States was behind the 9/11 attacks, why the CIA and FBI had planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks. And I remember getting angry with him, and I got angrier and angrier as the dinner progressed. And then we spent 90 minutes arguing. And at the end of the 90 minutes, of course, I hadn't convinced him.

Right.

that the United States was not behind the 9/11 attacks. All that had happened was that we'd had an argument for 90 minutes, and he left the conversation believing that I was the one who had the delusion. I think if I was to do that conversation over today, after having thought about and written this book, I would approach that conversation differently. I would start with empathy, I would start with compassion, and I would start with questions. Rather than pose argument and provide evidence, I would try and understand why it is my friend believed what he believed, because I think one of the fundamental insights of book is that delusions, when they occur, are often playing a psychologically functional purpose. They might be wrong, they might be inaccurate, they might even be harmful, but they're playing some kind of role that soothes or answers a psychological question that we're experiencing. So if you want to disabuse people of their delusions, it's not merely enough to provide them with the facts that tell them that they're wrong. You actually have to get under the hood of the delusion and ask, What psychological purpose is it playing in this person's life? And is there a way that I can find a way to provide for that person's psychological need some other way, allowing them to give up this delusion? I think that's going to be a more effective way to combat dangerous delusions.

Much more with Shankar Vedantam, specifically on the subject of vaccines. You know that feeling when somebody's got your back before you even have to ask? It's such a relief and it feels like a gift. That is the kind of peace of mind AT&T is offering with the AT&T Guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why in the rare event of a network outage, AT&T will proactively credit you for a full day of service. That is the AT&T Guarantee. So whatever's going on, you know your connection is taken care of. Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more, or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers. Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage Restrictions and exclusions apply. See att.com/guarantee for full details. AT&T connecting changes everything. Today's episode is brought to you by Bumble, the go-to dating app to find love. My wife and I met the old-fashioned way. We went on. a blind date. When we met, there were no dating apps. Actually, there were, there were no apps. That's how old we are. We met back in 2006, pre-iPhone. Anyway, now if you're in the dating game, tech is an enormously powerful tool. My cousin Deb uses Bumble, and I've seen how it's changed her experience. She's built real connections, gone on great dates with people who share similar interests and passions, and most importantly, felt confident along the way. Deb and I are, are super close. We potted up during the pandemic. Our families lived together. Deb's family and my family still live in the same town, so I've been able to watch up close as she's been able to build meaningful connections and go on great dates and ultimately enjoy her dating journey. What I love is that Bumble makes dating feel safer and more intentional. Everybody verifies their photo and phone number when they sign up. You can even add ID verification for extra Peace of mind so you know the person you're meeting is real, their photos are theirs, and their age is too. Bumble also offers in-app dating advice from experts including Jillian Turecki, who's been a guest on this show, and the trusted therapist Kier Gaines, who I follow on social media. Thinking about dating again? Take this as your sign and start your love story on Bumble. Let's take a current example that I know is top of mind for many people, which is anti-vaxxers. How would this— by the way, I love your insight. I think this is very powerful. How would we operationalize this insight if we're talking to somebody in our life who's just refusing to get a vaccine against all the evidence about the safety and efficacy?

Let me give you an example from my own life, Dan. Many years ago, I was a reporter at The Washington Post, and I was covering various controversies about early childhood vaccinations and the mistaken belief that those vaccinations are associated with an increased risk of autism. And I was writing articles about it for the Post and front-page stories about the problems with people who were hesitant or, you know, worried about the vaccines, the lack of evidence connecting the risks of autism to the childhood vaccines. And then my own daughter was born and I had to decide whether I have to get my own daughter vaccinated. And of course, I remembered all of the research that I had reviewed. I thought about it a great deal. I'd spoken to some of the most respected vaccine experts in the world, but when the pediatrician told me, it's time to get your daughter vaccinated, a thought went through my mind. And the thought that went through my mind is, is it possible I'm doing something that harms my daughter? And in some ways, it stems again from what we talked about earlier in the conversation, the deep and irrational love that parents have for their children and the desire that you want to do what is best for your child. No matter what, you want to do what's best for your child. And so So that caused me to have a moment's doubt, a moment's hesitation, a moment's fear. And what I did was I told my daughter's pediatrician, I told him my fear. I said, you know, I know all the research. I know that there's no scientific connection between those 2 things, but I have to confess I'm worried about it. And he did something really valuable. Instead of presenting me with research studies that showed me what I already knew, he said, you know, I've thought about the same question and I have multiple children and I've thought about this question as I have gotten my own children vaccinated and I know that what I'm doing right now is in fact in their best interest. And in some ways what he did was he didn't belittle my fears. He didn't have contempt for my fears. He in fact told me that my fears were justified, that my fears stemmed from my love for my daughter, and that was fundamentally a good thing to do. Let's look at the same idea in the context of vaccine hesitancy right now in the era of COVID And I share your concerns, Dan, that I think you're expressing, that really it's a dangerous thing that 30 to 40% of the United States does not wish to get vaccinated. I think that this is a It's a dangerous idea. It's a mistaken idea. I do believe that we would all be better off if we got ourselves vaccinated. But let's say we encounter someone who is hesitant to get a vaccine. Rather than tell them, you know, the data linking vaccines to blood clots or the data linking vaccine to something else is weak, we should ask people the question, what is it that's worrying you? What is it that's bothering you? Tell me about your fears. Let me understand what it is that's making you afraid.

Mm-hmm.

Now, doing this does not automatically mean that the person is going to say, okay, you've persuaded me, I'm going to get a vaccine. I'm not suggesting that there's a panacea or a silver bullet, but I do believe that if we actually approached people at the level at which they think about their own lives, you know, people are not, they're not idiots, they're not trying to harm themselves, they're trying to do what's best for themselves. If we assume those things and go into it saying, I know that you are trying to do what's best for you. What's best for your family, what's best for your children, and best for your community. You've just come to a different conclusion than I have. Let me understand what your concerns are. Let's have a conversation where I can empathize with you and tell you that I share your love for yourself, for your family, for your children, for your community. Let me explain to you how I might approach this question differently. I think in some ways we would dial down the temperature on the conversations that we have. Very often, I think when it comes to delusions and self-deceptions, we end up having screaming matches with people like I did that dinner with my friend from college. And at the end of the conversation, all that's happened is that we like one another a little less, and no one has persuaded anyone of anything. I know this is a very old idea that goes back all the way to Buddhism and to mindfulness, but the idea of starting with empathy, of starting with compassion, is, I think, a truly powerful way to disabuse people of dangerous self-deception.

Given how dangerous delusions can be, e.g., anti-vax, e.g., the election was rigged, given how dangerous these delusions can be, how far should we go with empathy?

Yeah, great question. And I think, you know, there might be limits to where we want to exercise this empathy because let's say, for example, let me pose a hypothetical to you. Let's say somebody knocks on your door. And has a rifle in their hand, and they're knocking on your door because they believe that you are evil incarnate, and they've come to kill you because that's their belief. Now, this is not a useful time to be exploring the psychological basis of self-deception and delusion. You know, in a situation like that, the appropriate thing to do is not to say, let me sit down and understand where you're coming from, and let's get under the hood of the way that your mind works. The appropriate thing to do at that point is to call 911. When people stormed the US Capitol on January 6th, believing the election was rigged, you can't advance a psychological explanation at that point and basically say, let me try and understand what it is that's motivating your anger. At that point, you have to call the police. You have to call the National Guard to basically protect the Capitol. The point that I think I'm trying to make, Dan, is that if 40 million people believe What the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th believed, you cannot call out the National Guard to disabuse 40 million people of their beliefs. When a belief is shared by large numbers of people, in fact, that is precisely when you have to turn to psychological explanations and psychological interventions. And by the way, some of those psychological interventions can also take advantage of our mind's capacity for self-deception. So let me give you a simple example. So, for example, when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, for example, there are numerous ways in which we can recruit the self-deceiving brain to help us spread the message of vaccinations. So rather than tell people about the number of people who've not been vaccinated, it might be important to tell people about the number of people who have been vaccinated. People discovered this in anti-smoking campaigns, that it was much more effective to tell people that most people around them were nonsmokers than to point to the minority of people who were smokers. And partly what this is getting at is that human beings are norm followers. We follow the social norms, the social scripts of the communities around us. If we believe the community is heading in a certain direction, we ourselves are likely to head in that direction. The more we can communicate that more people are on board with the idea of getting vaccinated, the more we can in some ways recruit the capacity of the self-deceiving brain. Another useful idea is to introduce the idea that there might be some scarcity with vaccines. One of the things that happens when we go to a shop or a store, the store basically So when the store employee says, you know, these are the last 2 items on sale, partly what the store is trying to do is induce a sense of scarcity in your mind to tell you, if I don't act now, I'm going to lose the chance to act going forward. I was in a conversation with the Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler and the social psychologist Robert Cialdini last week. And one of the recommendations that they had is, what if we actually labeled every vaccine dose that we have with someone's name and basically said, This dose is meant for you, Dan Harris, and you can let us know if you want to have this dose or not. But if you decide that you don't wish to have this dose, we're going to give this dose to somebody else. Maybe we're even going to give this dose to somebody in another country. So you have the choice to get this dose, but if you decide not to get it, you're going to lose that choice altogether. And in some ways, by creating some mechanisms of artificial scarcity, we might be able to use the self-deceiving brain to get more people vaccinated.

That's really interesting. Speaking of our tendency to judge people's deceptions and lapse into self-righteousness, can you explain what the phrase naive realism means?

Sure. Naive realism is a principle in psychology that stems from the fact that when we look out at the world, it's impossible for us not to imagine that the world as we see it is in fact the way the world is. And it must be the way that everyone else also sees the world or should see the world. One of the simplest ways to demonstrate naive realism is to cite the comedian George Carlin, who once said, you know, have you ever noticed when you're driving, everyone going faster than you is a maniac and everyone going slower than you is an idiot? And really what Carlin was trying to get at there was that we assume that the way that we drive must in fact be the way everyone else should be driving. So anyone who's driving faster must clearly be a reckless person, must clearly be a bad driver. Anyone who's driving slower must clearly be an idiot because they can't see how in fact they're slowing down traffic. We believe that we are the norm and the way that we see the world is the correct way to see the world. When I first came by the story of the Church of Love that we discussed earlier on, the story of this remarkable con that unfolded in the '70s and '80s, I looked at that story through the lens of naive realism. I asked myself, what would I do? And I told myself, if I received one of those letters, I would probably throw it away after reading maybe the first line. It would hold no interest to me. And therefore, that is the correct way that everyone should be looking at those letters. And so when I saw people who did not read the letters the same way, people who in fact loved the letters, wanted more and more of the letters, believed they were corresponding with real women, fell in love with those women, my initial response informed my naive realism that they were just delusional.

Right.

was that there was something wrong with the members of the Church of Love because clearly they were seeing the world wrong. So naive realism is a really powerful force that causes us to believe that the way we think of reality is, in fact, not just the only way to see reality, but the correct way to see reality. And in some ways, it keeps us from exercising the empathy and compassion of understanding that other people might see the world differently.

The ultimate takeaway of the book, it seems, is that you can be a little easier on yourself and others around self-deception. And along those lines, you make the point— I'd love to hear you say more about it— that for you, in questioning— and this is the term you use— in questioning the temple of rationality, you actually came to see that forgoing self-deception isn't necessarily just about, um, being educated or enlightened. It actually, like, dropping self-deception could also be a sign of privilege. And And that we need to look at the fact that some people are in the throes of self-deception because they really have no other choice.

That's exactly right. You know, there's the old saying, Dan, there are no atheists in the foxhole. And I think this really is one of the core ideas that I have in the book. And it's ironic, in fact, a few months ago, this is well after the book was written, as I was awaiting publication, I had an experience in my own life that showed me exactly how this works. I was several hours away from my home in Washington. And I was unloading a bike from my car, and the handlebar spun around and hit me right below my right eye. And it just felt like a jar, but, you know, I had a little small bruise on my cheek, but nothing else. But over the next 24 hours, I started sort of seeing a shadow fall across my eye. And I have a family history of retina problems, and I understood that what was happening to me was I was experiencing a retina detachment. For your listeners who are not familiar with this, the retina is the film behind the eye. The light falls on the retina, and the retina is basically sending signals up through the optic nerve through the brain. So if the retina unhinges from its moorings, you basically will lose vision in the eye. And once a certain amount of the retina has detached, you're very likely to lose sight in that eye altogether. And I could tell that, you know, the shadow that was falling across my eye was sort of growing, and I could literally, in some ways, see myself going blind in one eye. As I mentioned, I was very far away from my home in Washington. I couldn't get back in time to see the eye doctors whom I have in my And I didn't know how to find an eye doctor. And it was very difficult where I was to basically find somebody who could help. And finally, I managed to locate somebody who was several hours away from me. I drove to the city that I had never been to in my life before. And he very kindly opened his practice for me at 9 o'clock in the night. He diagnosed me with a retina detachment. And he told me that if I didn't get into surgery in the next few minutes, I was going to lose the eye. So we literally went directly from his office to the emergency room at the local hospital. where he performed surgery on me. Now, as it turned out, he was a brilliant doctor. He ended up saving my eye, for which I'm profoundly grateful. But at the moment he diagnosed me and told me, we have to wheel you into surgery in the next few minutes, I think back to my own behavior at that point, because at that point, I did not have time to evaluate what he was telling me. I did not have time to get a second opinion. I did not have time to even look up reviews to see if this was a good doctor or a bad doctor. And so I did what all of us do in situations like this. I put all my trust and faith in this man. Now, let's say for a second that he had not been a brilliant surgeon. Let's say he had been a charlatan. Let's say he had been a con man. Would it have been any less likely for me to put my faith and trust in him? And I would argue the answer to that is no, I would have been just as likely to put my faith in him because my faith in some ways was not driven by him. My faith was driven by what I was going through at that point, the vulnerability that I was experiencing at that point. And so absolutely, I think when we think about the self-deceptions of other people and we respond with judgment, when we respond with anger and contempt, very often what's happening is that we are outside the challenges that that person is experiencing. And so I've come to realize that in some ways, not practicing self-deception, forgoing self-deception, ironically might be a form of privilege. If your own life is going perfectly well, if you have a great job, if you're in great health, if you're in a wonderful relationship with someone and everything's going swimmingly for you, you really have no need to turn to the kind of self-deceptions that we've been talking about. But all of our lives, of course, can take a turn at any moment. And when they do take that turn, I think all of us very quickly realize that our minds prove very fertile ground to the wildest self-deceptions.

So could another name for self-deception be hope?

I think that certainly is one of the most important functions that self-deception has to offer in our minds. And again, if you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. Our time on Earth is not just limited, it's really It's actually a very small amount of time that we spend. It's not just that there's a hard endpoint, but it's actually a very limited amount of time that we get to spend on the planet. Now, step back for a second. If you think about life on the planet as a whole, our individual lives, they are basically almost nothing in the context of the entire planet. Our planet itself is one of, you know, a tiny speck in a solar system. And this solar system is one of millions and millions of solar systems just in our own galaxy. And our galaxy is one of maybe 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe. So our individual lives as human beings, in fact, are completely inconsequential. We are easily forgotten. We are easily erased. And of course, to think about these things, to see completely our own place in the universe, is dispiriting. And I think this is why all over the world, in every culture and every time, human beings have come up with ways to give their lives meaning and purpose. And you can look at some of the ways people do that, the rituals they turn to, the beliefs that they espouse, and you can look at them with contempt and sort of say, Those beliefs are irrational. Those beliefs are illogical. Look at the foolish things that people believe, without sort of asking the deeper question, why is it that people are turning to those beliefs? What role is it serving for them? And I completely agree with you, providing hope is probably one of the most important ways our minds turn to deceiving themselves.

Much more of my conversation with Shankar Vedantam right after this. Imagine you're a business owner who has to rely on a dozen different software programs to run your company, none of which are connected, and each one is more expensive and more complicated than the last. This can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need, and they're all All connected on one simple, easy-to-use platform, giving you the peace of mind that your business is always being taken care of from every angle. Odoo has user-friendly open-source applications for everything. We're talking CRM, accounting, inventory, manufacturing, marketing, HR, and everything in between. Basically, if your business needs it, Odoo's got it. Odoo sounds pretty amazing, right? So stop wasting your time and money on those expensive and disconnected platforms and let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price. It doesn't get much better than that. So what are you waiting for? Discover how Odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Odoo, modern management made simple. You know that feeling when somebody's got your back before you even have to ask? It's such a relief, and it feels like a gift. That is. That's the kind of peace of mind AT&T is offering with the AT&T Guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why in the rare event of a network outage, AT&T will proactively credit you for a full day of service. That is the AT&T Guarantee. So whatever's going on, you know your connection is taken care of. Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more, or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers. Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage. Restrictions and exclusions apply. See att.com/guarantee for full details. AT&T, connecting changes everything. One of the things you've talked about that I think is really interesting is this debate over whether depression, which is such a common psychological phenomenon for so many of us, whether depression is delusional pessimism or seeing things clearly. I'd love to hear you say more about this.

For many, many years, through much of the 20th century, in fact, people looked at patients who had serious mental illness you know, schizophrenia, for example, where you're hallucinating things or you're hearing voices, you know, truly things that are delusional. And people assumed that what this meant was that when you're mentally ill, you are somehow detached from reality, that mental illness involved not seeing the world clearly, and mental health involved seeing the world exactly the way the world is. Over the last 30 or 40 years, I think people have come to challenge that contention, and they've challenged it by looking at a handful of conditions, especially conditions involving depression, and to some extent anxiety as well, which show that patients who have depression, in fact, are able to see the world quite clearly. And in some ways, at least in some experimental settings, they're able to see the world more clearly than people who are, quote unquote, mentally healthy. And this presents a great conundrum, a great paradox here, because if you think about mental illness as being the delusional state, how is it that people who have certain mental illnesses like depression are seeing the world more clearly? One of the most provocative ideas that I've come by as I was reporting and writing this book is the idea that in some ways, part of being mentally healthy might involve not seeing the world clearly, but seeing the world through a delusional sense of optimism, through a delusional hopefulness. And in fact, some of the people who are depressed, some of the people who are experiencing anxiety, their experience might not be functional, but in fact, they are seeing reality exactly for what it is. In some ways, I think it makes the case that I've been trying to make throughout our conversation, Dan, which is that sometimes times, seeing reality for what exactly it is might mean that you're seeing the truth, but this might not be functional. It might not help you wake up in the morning and get to work and be a good parent and be a good partner to your spouse and be a good colleague to your coworkers and a good neighbor to your community. All these things might require, in some ways, a sense of optimism, a sense of delusional optimism. When you think about the COVID pandemic that we've all been through, you know, it's not unreasonable to look at what we've been through, this terrible global pandemic, the enormous cost in terms of lives and livelihoods that we've Yeah. We've experienced not just in the United States, but around the world. And it's not impossible to imagine that we would be shaken by that. We would sort of say, the world is a perilous and dangerous place to be in. Let me retreat from the world. And yet I think all of us, or many of us, have almost the opposite reaction. As the pandemic is sort of winding down, at least in some countries, many of us are looking forward to basically getting out and about, to basically putting it behind us. And it's unclear whether what we are doing, in fact, is merely seeing reality accurately. You could argue that seeing reality accurately might mean that, in fact, we continue to think about the enormous cost the pandemic has exacted in terms of lives and livelihoods. But you could also see how that would be deeply dysfunctional if we didn't go about our daily lives, if we didn't in some ways resume our prior lives, which arguably might have been blind to the risks that were confronting us.

I want to free associate on this for a second. The upside of self-deception is tough for people like me who come out of the Buddhist context, because in Buddhism, there's 3 primordial pernicious, uh, psychological phenomena that we're, we're trying to uproot in our practice: greed, hatred, and delusion, or confusion, uh, or blindness to the reality of the human situation. So maybe it's possible that, that yes, it does make sense to have some delusion, or else you're going to be stuck in, you know, sort of a nihilism or a complete paralytic depression about the fact that we're going to die and everybody else we know is going to die, and everything's changing all the time so rapidly that we don't have that much control. But maybe with the right container, like a meditation practice and a good teacher and the right tradition, seeing things clearly can actually be liberating, because that would be the proposition from the Buddhist side. Does any of that make sense?

It does make sense to me. And in some ways, I think there are some overlaps between the arguments that I'm making and I think many ideas in Buddhism. Certainly, I think the mandate that I've ended up with in my own life, and certainly in my book, is the mandate for empathy and compassion. And I think, to the extent that I understand Buddhist practices, I think empathy and compassion are very closely at the heart of at least how— if you're a good Buddhist, presumably, you're going to experience a certain amount of empathy and compassion for the world. If you're doing it right. Right, you don't end up with more anger and contempt for the world. You end up with more understanding and sympathy and compassion for the world. So I think there's sort of an overlap there. I certainly think when it comes to greed, you can think about the self-deceptions that cause us to have greed. So for example, the insatiable appetite that we have to own more and more things or to acquire more and more money. We can look at those things, and if we look at them clearly, we can sort of say, what is actually driving driving this desire that we have to acquire more and more, this desire for more and more possessions, for wealth, for status? Where is that coming from? And is it possible that in fact, this is leading me astray? And is it possible that in some ways, by seeing this delusion clearly, we can actually step away from greed? And so to that extent, I think I'm absolutely on board with the idea that seeing some of our delusions clearly can in fact produce things that are functional, that in fact can make us happier if we were less driven to basically just mindlessly acquire more and more things. At a very deep level, one of the things that I've been wrestling with in recent months, actually, this is after I wrote the book, I came by this idea from Greek philosophy called the Ship of Theseus. And you're probably familiar with this, but for those of your listeners who are not, Theseus was a great Greek warrior. And according to the myth, when he finished his travels and his exploits and he came back home, his ship was stored in the harbor almost as a museum piece. And over the following And in the following decades and centuries, the planks of the ship rotted and decayed. And when that happened, people replaced the planks with new planks until eventually all the planks and all the components and every part of the Ship of Theseus was in fact made of a new part, a new piece, a new component. And the question that philosophers starting with Plato onwards have asked is, so is this new ship that we have built that's constructed entirely of new materials, is this still the Ship of Theseus? Or is it in fact an altogether new ship? And philosophers after Plato have asked an even deeper and more complex question, which is, if we could find all of the old pieces of the Ship of Theseus, and we could reassemble them into a ship, would that ship in fact be the real Ship of Theseus and not merely a replica made up of other parts? And the reason I've been thinking about this, and the reason this relates to the questions that you're asking about the connection with Buddhism and the themes that I'm writing about Yeah. In the book is that the Ship of Theseus in some ways is a metaphor for our own lives and for our own bodies and for our own minds. You know, at a very material level, all of us are made up of particles that in some ways are turning over all the time. The cells that made up Dan Harris 10 years ago are not the cells that make up Dan Harris today. In fact, at a physical level, you, Dan, are a completely different Dan than you were 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. So the question to ask is, are you still the same Dan? Is this still the same And at a psychological level, at an even deeper level, you know, the level of our minds, our minds also are the product of invention and reinvention and layer upon layer of beliefs and norms and attitudes layered one on top of the other. And in some ways, I think of my life and I think of myself as being one person who's had one history that goes back all the years from when I was a child to who I am today as an adult, to whom I will be one day as an older person.

Yeah.

And yet, I think the question that arises from the Ship of Theseus, and this is a question that I think has been wrestled with by people who are Buddhists and meditators, is, is this actually true? Is it actually the case that there is in fact one figure, one creature, one person, one self that in fact is a consistent presence through all these different stages of life? I'm not sure I fully understand the Buddhist questions about whether the sense of self that we have, is that an illusion? But I think one of the questions that I've been wrestling with is, Is it possible that my own sense of myself as being the— I am the same person that I was when I was a child, and I am the same person I'm going to be when I'm an older person. That sense of self that I have, that I think we all have in our minds, is that also in some ways a self-deception? Profoundly dangerous and disturbing self-deception perhaps, but also very functional. Because in fact, if I was to believe that I was the same person that I was as a child that I am now, and that I am the same person now that I will be years later, I will do things in some ways to serve that future creature because I believe that future creature is me. But in fact, is that true?

I mean, you said you weren't sure you understood the Buddhist case for the illusion of the self, but you— everything you said leading up to it would indicate that you do understand it, and it was really well said. I don't want to represent myself as somebody who's a Buddhist scholar. I'm more of a, like, a sort of Buddhist practitioner who episodically grasps some of these really difficult concepts. And the most difficult of them all, for me at least, is this notion that the self is an illusion. But, you know, really does kind of go back to what I was getting at, which is around the case for and against self-deception. It does seem pretty clear to me after a dozen years of practice that there is no core Dan. If I close my eyes and look for him. I won't find some homunculus of Dan between my ears. It is something we're constructing moment to moment, even though the sense of it is very real, right? So on one level, it is real. Like, I am— my name is Dan. I need to put my pants on. I need to make appointments for myself under the name of Dan. And, um, I need to, you know, get on various Zoom calls because somebody named Dan is expected. And yes, on some level, that is all true. But on some deep level, There is no core Dan. And that self-deception can have enormously negative consequences, you know, because I'm laboring under the delusion that I am real. That's the wellspring of greed. That's the wellspring of hatred, because I need to fend off everybody who isn't Dan who might be coming after my ice cream. Um, and, and, and so yeah, the point of Buddhist practice in some ways is to see through that illusion. And that can be terrifying. You know, there's a phase in practice that's called the rolling up the mats phase, because you start to see that this sense of me, this sense of I, is just an illusion. And that's terrifying. But it does go back to what I said before, which is that if in the right container, seeing the truth of the human situation with the right teachers, with the right tradition, with the right practice, is, yes, it can be terrifying, but in the end, while sure, these self-deceptions might have some day-to-day sort of quotidian value, actually uprooting them is more valuable because that allows you to return to the world to see that, yes, I do have to put a label on this process that is Dan, but it is just a process. And I then let go of the greed and hatred that can flow out of it. And And so, so yeah, it kind of is just a deeper way to think about the pros and cons of self-deception. Does anything I just said make sense to you?

A lot of it makes sense. I will confess that when I think about the self as an illusion, I'm thinking about it more as an abstract idea. I have not personally had the sense that when I look inward, there is no sense that in fact I am I. I feel very much that I am I, although as I think about it, I have to ask myself the question, is that sense that I have, is Or is it in fact an illusion? And I think I've arrived at that question from the point of view of sort of thinking about the science and thinking about how the mind works and thinking about how functional in fact it is to have that sense of self. If you buy the idea that our brains and minds are the product of a process of natural selection, a process of evolution, then you have to ask, why is it that what's in our minds is in our minds? And you can look at the different facets of the mind, you can sort of say, why is it We have a sense of fear, and you can readily see what happens if you don't have a sense of fear. I would wander into the lion's cage and try and pet the lion, and I would come to a sorry end. And you would quickly realize, this is why nature has endowed me with a sense of fear. Why do I have a sense of love? And you would quickly see again, when people who are incapable of experiencing love or wanting love or needing love or being able to show love, you can see how their lives Our lives are affected in all kinds of ways. And so I would draw the conclusion that nature has thought fit in some ways to invent the emotion of love because that invention is useful. It's functional. I believe the same is true of the self as well, that I think natural selection and evolution have in some ways invented the idea of the self in the mind, partly because it is functional. Now, is it possible that human beings have discovered that there is actually a way out, that in fact, the minds that have been produced by natural selection and evolution are now minds that are are not just experiencing the sense of self, are not just capable of, in some ways, transcending the sense of self, but discovering that that transcending is a good thing, which is, I think, the case that you're making. That's possible. I would, I think, as a card-carrying scientist, I would still come down on the side of saying that if 4 billion years of evolution has produced a sense of self in my mind, it's probably there for a reason. And I would be wise, if I'm going to tamper with it, to do so with some Well, I agree with all of that.

I would just sort of add that evolution is an ongoing process. And I think the Buddhist proposition, at least current-day Buddhists who are aware of evolution, is that the next phase of human evolution would be to see— to keep the useful parts of the self and discard the not-so-useful parts of the self. And the Buddhists often talk about it as thinking about reality as having 2 levels. There's conventional reality or shared reality, which is the day-to-day. Yes, you are Shankar, and yeah, I'm Dan, and we've got to operate in the world and show up on Zoom calls, etc., etc. That's conventional reality or relative reality. And then there's the— and this phrase I'm about to utter sounds like something that I might have named my punk band when I was in high school, um, but ultimate reality is sort of the deeper level of reality. And on that level of reality, you You can look, you know, Shankar can say, am I me? Am I I? And you have the sense of, yeah, I'm here. But then if you just add another question, which is, who's asking this question? You can't find—

Exactly.

I defy you to find that person, right? And so it doesn't— you don't have to look too hard to see that this is an illusion, and that can have negative knock-on effects. And so I suspect— and again, I'm biased here, here we go with that word again— I'm biased, given my Buddhist practice, that there's a way to hold the positive aspects of self and discard the negative ones. I'm not going to pretend that I've done that though.

Right. Let me ask you a question if I could. And I'm asking you this as somebody who is, as you are in some ways, a practitioner but not an expert. And I admit that the question might sound like it's overly clever, and I apologize for that in advance, but it's a genuine question, which is that if you buy the idea that the brain If the brain is in some ways designed to come up with self-deceptions of all kinds, it's designed in some ways to produce the sensation of deliciousness when I bite into a sandwich. It's designed to produce the sensation of love when my child is born. It's designed in some ways to produce the illusion of self, to give me a sense that I am I and I am not you. If it's designed to do all these things, if the brain in some ways is a machine of self-deception, but it's also the machine that we have to use to pierce the veil of that self-deception, does that not present a problem to us? Because the very machine that we have to probe the self-deception is itself the machine that is an organ of self-deception.

Yes, it's a huge problem. And welcome to the world of meditation. You got to ride this flawed horse all the way to enlightenment. It's, it's why it's so damn hard. it keeps— the delusion keeps reasserting itself. And, uh, that's why the Buddha describes his teaching as against the stream. You're just fighting against these currents of forgetting and denial. And, and they're not only in your own mind, they're in your culture. So yes, you, you're stuck with this very unwieldy vehicle until— the proposition is until you get to liberation or nibbāna, nirvana, or whatever. I haven't experienced any of those things. All I have experienced is that meditation sucks and it's really hard. But life is way worse without it because you get glimpses of, yeah, what is it like when I'm not owned by ego, by, you know, this faulty sense of I'm the center of the universe?

Yeah, that's fascinating. I have to say, I'm not quite sure I have the courage to go on the journey that you are on as yet, Dan. I am comfortably ensconced in the sense of self that I have. And even when I recognize in passing that it might be an illusion, I think I'm exploring that more as an abstract thought than it's something that I want to probe too deeply. I'm reminded of the— I don't know if this was a— if he meant this as a joke, but I think it was St. Augustine who once was asked, you know, he was praying to God and asking for courage to practice a life of chastity. And I might be completely misremembering this, so I'm just doing this off the top of my head. He said something like, you know, give me chastity, O Lord, only not yet. I love that quote. Whether it's true or not, and whether my memory that it's St. Augustine or not is correct, I think that's very much the way I feel. I'm intrigued by the ideas, but I'm not sure I'm ready to venture into actually exploring that terrain of my own brain.

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm firmly ensconced in my sense of self, just less comfortably than you are. And actually, I've found that that has really salutary effects. Let me just give you one. And I'm stealing this from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's a really great person. And it's kind of a linguistic mystic trick that he's come up with that really takes this abstract and sometimes like sort of headache-producing notion of no self or selflessness or not-self. So when you— next time you experience a very powerful emotion or desire, um, instead of framing it in your mind as I am hungry or I am angry, just to slightly change it to there is anger or there is desire or whatever. And then you start to see that these thoughts and emotions that we think are us are really meteorological phenomena. Or as one great monk has said, you know, to claim anger as yours is a misappropriation of public property. Which I love. And that's liberating. That's where instead of fearing this practice, you can say, oh no, this practice actually helps me moment to moment to be less Yes, absolutely.

And I completely agree with you on everything you just said. And I think I try and practice that through my life. Certainly, I think when it comes to how I'm thinking about my own emotions, I try and regularly remind myself that I am not my emotions and that my emotions are things that are happening to me. They are not who I am. And also reminding myself that these emotions sometimes are transient, that they come and they go, and that being patient with them in some ways is a way to sort of see the truth in those emotions. I think I might draw the line when it comes to probing too deeply the sense of self, but I think there's deep psychological wisdom, Dan, in sort of the idea of, in some ways, standing apart from the experiences that we have. You could argue that in some ways, this is at the heart of all psychotherapy.

Yeah.

You know, when we talk to a psychotherapist, when we express what's happening to us in therapy, one of the things that the psychotherapist will do is eventually help you to listen back to yourself. And in some ways, it's very helpful sometimes to do this if you don't have a psychotherapist, to just record what you're feeling onto a voice recorder, and then just listen back to yourself. And when you hear yourself through a voice recorder, in some ways, you can hear what's happening, but still stand slightly apart from it. In some ways, instead of becoming the experiencer, you become the observer. And sometimes it's possible to be both at the same time, the experiencer and the observer at the same time. As I said, I'm with you 95% of the way. I'm not sure I'm with you when it comes to challenging my sense of self. yourself.

I'll take the 95%. So just last thing I want to do here, Shankar, is to get you to remind everybody of the name of the book and where they can get it and when they can get it. And then also, you've written a previous book called Hidden Brain, which turned into a podcast, a great podcast, and I would love to get you to sort of plug that too, if you're up for it.

Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity, Dan. So the book is called Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving It's co-authored with the science writer Bill Messler. It's available everywhere that books are sold. It's available online and in your local bookstore. And it really is— it's a call to action to understand our minds better and to exercise greater compassion, especially when we come by delusions and self-deceptions that upset us greatly. At a very basic level, I think the book will help you think about your own life differently, and it will allow you to approach difficult conversations differently.

Yeah.

in a new way, and I think in a more effective way than you've been doing before. Useful Delusions in some ways is an outgrowth of my first book, The Hidden Brain, which looks at all the ways in which our unconscious minds affect our daily behavior. The book, The Hidden Brain, has turned into the podcast Hidden Brain and the public radio show Hidden Brain. And in the show, we explore on a weekly basis all the complexities of the things that make us human.

Yeah.

We have explorations of spiritual traditions and philosophical ideas, lots of explorations of psychology and sociology. Many people tell us that as they listen to Hidden Brain, sometimes they stop listening to the show and start thinking about their own lives. And in some ways, I think those are the best Hidden Brain episodes where our episode becomes a vehicle for you to think about your own life differently. Certainly, I know that when I listen to the very best podcast shows, that's the experience that I have. I think back to the relationships that I have, the stories that I have, in some ways it becomes a form of reflection. And if I can use the term cautiously, of course, in this context, it could even become a form of meditation, of meditating on who we are, why we're doing what we're doing, how we come to be here, and in some ways understanding where we are in the world and how we can live more happy and fulfilling lives.

Shankar, great job with this interview. Congratulations on the new book, and it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you.

Thank you, Dan. I'm so grateful you had me on the show.

Thanks again to Shankar. Don't forget to check out his great podcast, Hidden Brain. Also, don't forget that this episode, as all of our Monday and Wednesday episodes do, comes with a custom guided meditation from our teacher of the month. Today's meditation is from Vinnie Ferraro, and it's all about that moment when you wake up from self- self-deception or confusion or delusion, whatever you want to call it. It's only for paid subscribers over on danharris.com. Paid subscribers also get weekly live video guided meditation and Q&A sessions. The next one's tomorrow, September 30th at 4 Eastern. We do them every Tuesday at 4 Eastern, and I'm doing this one by myself. Final thing to plug, if you want to meditate with me IRL, there's a link in the show notes to a weekend-long retreat I'll be hosting or co-hosting October 24th at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. Finally, thank you as always to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Cara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.