How Lying To Yourself (A Little) Can Improve Your Relationships and Make the World Feel Less Insane | Shankar Vedantam

Summary

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Podcast Summary: 10% Happier with Dan Harris

Episode: How Lying To Yourself (A Little) Can Improve Your Relationships and Make the World Feel Less Insane
Guest: Shankar Vedantam
Date: September 29, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Dan Harris sits down with Shankar Vedantam, host of the “Hidden Brain” podcast and author of Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. They explore a surprising thesis: that self-deception—which Buddhism and science often treat as a poison or a malfunction—actually has surprising evolutionary, psychological, and social benefits. From relationships to national narratives, Vedantam argues that a little self-deception can make individuals and societies happier, more resilient, and even more compassionate. The conversation explores when self-deception is useful versus dangerous, how to manage our own delusions, and ways to have more empathetic conversations across deep divides—including timely examples around vaccine hesitancy and political polarization.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Is Self-Deception So Common?

Evolutionary roots and personal journey

• Shankar discusses his initial skepticism, considering himself “deeply rational, logical, scientific” ([06:22]).
• He describes investigating a bizarre mail fraud scam, The Church of Love, and realizing how powerful, and sometimes beneficial, self-deception can be ([07:24]).
• On evolution: “Clearly evolution bequeathed us a brain that’s pretty good at self-deception. So there must be something adaptive about self-deception” – Dan Harris ([09:29]).
• Vedantam: “It’s been a great mystery…is it possible that some of these biases…and errors are in fact playing a functional role? ...if we were to rid our brains of these biases...we might in fact find ourselves set back.” ([09:49])

2. The Church of Love: Real-World Illustration

• Story of a con man (Don Lowry) who created fake love-letter-writing “angels,” sparking real emotional investment—even after the fraud was exposed.
• “When Don Lowry was finally arrested and brought to trial on charges of mail fraud, several members...showed up at the courtroom to defend him… These relationships were so valuable…giving up those anchors and those soulmates seemed unbearable.” – Shankar Vedantam ([08:41])
• Some recipients credited these false relationships with saving them from addiction and suicide, highlighting the profound psychological utility of certain delusions.

3. The Paradox of Self-Deception: Upsides & Downsides

How does self-deception serve us—and when is it risky?

• The brain dramatically filters reality: “At any given moment…the human eye takes in about a billion bits of information...the brain takes about 40 bits…and actually processes it.” ([11:09])
• Even our deepest bonds benefit from positive illusions:
  • “If you believe you are in a personal romantic relationship with someone who is very handsome... or very kind or generous, even if those things are not completely true, your self-deceptions...mean you’re likely to be happier in your relationship.” ([12:21])
• Parenting as a nearly universal delusion: “When my own daughter was born, I had the feeling that this was the most incredible miracle beyond all miracles … of course, this isn’t true. But it turns out to be a very useful delusion.” ([13:44])
  • “If we were to perform a mere cost-benefit analysis…some of us might conclude our children are not quite worth it.” ([14:24])
• Memorable parenting moment:
  • “I have a six year old boy…he was calling me Dummy Lovato, twisting the name of the pop star, and I’m never more proud than when he comes up with a good way to make fun of me. There is self-deception indeed.” – Dan Harris ([15:47])
• Dangers of delusion:
  • Vedantam references abusive relationships or harmful parental blindness (with reference to the Mahabharata) as examples where self-deception can lead to moral or personal disaster ([16:44]).
  • “You can simultaneously see examples…where self-deception is functional and …harmful.” ([16:44])

4. Navigating the Line: Useful vs. Harmful Delusion

How can we tell when self-deception is healthy—and when it isn’t?

• There’s no simple, universal rule: “I have to confess I’m not sure there is a simple, clean line that demarcates the two” – Vedantam ([22:26])
  • The best test is outcome-based: judge the utility or disutility “by seeing the outcomes they produce in the world.” ([23:39])
• Mindfulness as a tool: Harris suggests we can train ourselves to see and challenge delusions—choosing to keep ones that are harmless (e.g., “my son is the cutest 6-year-old walking the planet”) and confront those that may do harm (e.g., “racial biases,” [24:31]).
  • “I think it would be taxing to do that all the time, to live your life in that way very mindfully.” – Vedantam ([26:35])

5. Delusion, Empathy, and the Modern World

How self-deception feeds empathy—if managed right

• Vedantam describes how understanding delusion has made him more compassionate: “All of us have been through a very difficult year with the global pandemic. … I told myself liberation was at hand and it was about four weeks away…At some level, this is probably a self-deception…almost as a way to soothe my own anxieties.” ([27:49])
• Empathy over argument: Citing a heated dinner where a friend was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist—“We spent 90 minutes arguing…Of course, I hadn’t convinced him... He left believing that I was the one who had the delusion. … If I was to do that conversation over … I would approach that conversation differently. I would start with empathy, I would start with compassion, and I would start with questions.” ([29:29])

6. Case Study: Vaccine Hesitancy

How to talk to those gripped by dangerous delusions

• Vedantam shares a personal story debating vaccines when deciding to vaccinate his own daughter ([34:58]).
• His pediatrician met his anxiety “empathetically”: “He didn’t have contempt for my fears…he 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.” ([35:42])
• On persuading anti-vaxxers: “Rather than tell them…let’s ask people the question, what is it that’s worrying you? What is it that’s bothering you? Tell me about your fears. … Doing this does not automatically mean [they’ll agree with you], but I do believe … we would dial down the temperature.” ([36:41])
• On limits to empathy: “Let’s say somebody knocks on your door with a rifle in their hand because they believe you are evil incarnate… This is not a useful time to be exploring the psychological basis… You have to call 911.” – Vedantam ([39:13])
• When delusions scale up, collective psychological interventions—not policing—are needed.
  • Example: using the brain’s “herding” tendencies (“the social norm is vaccination”) can also harness self-deception for good ([41:25]).

7. Naive Realism and Judgment

Why we think our view is the truth—and how that divides us

• “Naive realism causes us to believe that the way we think of reality is not just the only way…but the correct way.” ([42:51])
• Memorable quote: “George Carlin once said, 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?” ([43:12])
• Naive realism impedes empathy and fuels polarization.

8. Privilege, Hope, and Self-Deception

Why some need delusions more than others

• “Foregoing self-deception, ironically, might be a form of privilege... If your own life is going perfectly well...you really have no need to turn to the kind of self-deceptions that we’ve been talking about.” ([45:29])
• Story of medical crisis: trust was inspired not by rationality, but by vulnerability—context shapes openness to self-deception ([45:29])
• “So could another name for self-deception be hope?” – Dan Harris ([49:00])
  • Vedantam: “Providing hope is probably one of the most important ways our minds turn to deceiving themselves.” ([49:03])

9. Depression: Seeing Clearly vs. Delusional Pessimism

Is depression “more realistic” than optimism?

• “Some people with depression…are able to see the world more clearly than people who are, quote unquote, mentally healthy…. part of being mentally healthy might involve not seeing the world clearly, but seeing the world through a delusional sense of optimism.” ([53:29])
• This challenges the assumption that mental illness always means delusion or detachment from reality.

10. Buddhism, the Self, and the Ultimate Delusion

Is the “self” itself a functional (or dangerous) delusion?

• Harris unpacks Buddhist teaching: “There is no core Dan…it's something we're constructing moment to moment, even though the sense of it is very real. So on one level, it is real…on some deep level, there is no core Dan. And that self-deception can have enormously negative consequences...” ([62:30])
• Vedantam: “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 …to do so with some caution.” ([65:10])
• Harris: “Evolution is an ongoing process…Buddhists often talk about reality as having two levels: conventional reality…and then there’s ultimate reality…if you just add another question, which is who’s asking this question? You can’t find…that person.” ([67:24])
• Vedantam likens probing the illusion of self to the St. Augustine quote about chastity: “Give me chastity, O Lord, only not yet” ([70:53])
• Harris’s “Joseph Goldstein trick”: “Instead of ‘I am angry,’ just say ‘there is anger’…these thoughts and emotions we think are us are really meteorological phenomena...to claim anger is yours is a misappropriation of public property, which I love. And that's liberating.” ([73:02])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Self deception can indeed do great harm to us, but it turns out, paradoxically, that it can sometimes do great good for us.” – Shankar Vedantam ([06:22])
• “Nature has thought fit to endow us with vast amounts of self deception when it comes to our offspring...if we didn’t do so, we wouldn’t be good parents.” – Shankar Vedantam ([14:13])
• “You can simultaneously see examples…where self-deception is functional and …harmful.” – Shankar Vedantam ([16:44])
• “If you want to disabuse people of their delusions, it's not merely enough to provide them with the facts…you have to get under the hood…find a way to provide for that person's psychological need some other way.” – Shankar Vedantam ([31:28])
• “Foregoing self-deception…might be a form of privilege.” – Shankar Vedantam ([45:29])
• “Providing hope is probably one of the most important ways our minds turn to deceiving themselves.” – Shankar Vedantam ([49:03])
• “Sometimes, seeing reality for what exactly it is might mean that you're seeing the truth—but this might not be functional.” – Shankar Vedantam ([53:29])
• "To claim anger is yours is a misappropriation of public property." – Joseph Goldstein, via Dan Harris ([73:02])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 05:53 – Beginning of main conversation with Shankar Vedantam
• 07:24 – Story of “The Church of Love”
• 11:09 – How brains filter and distort reality
• 13:44 – Illusions in parenting
• 16:44 – Functional vs. dangerous delusions (relationships and Mahabharata)
• 22:07 – Sorting useful from harmful delusions
• 27:49 – Pandemic, delusion, and compassion
• 34:58 – Vaccine hesitancy: a personal story
• 39:13 – Limits to empathy; when delusions are dangerous
• 42:51 – Naive realism
• 45:29 – Privilege and vulnerability in self-deception
• 53:29 – Depression and clear seeing
• 62:30 – Buddhism and the illusion of self
• 73:02 – Joseph Goldstein’s “not mine” exercise

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Takeaways

1. Self-deception is ubiquitous and complex: It's built into the brain—sometimes for good reason.
2. Delusions can be adaptive: They help us endure hardship, bond with others, and even inspire hope.
3. But beware the costs: Self-deception can blind us to abuses, injustice, or systemic harm.
4. Empathy is crucial: Understanding the psychological roots of others’ beliefs opens doors to dialogue.
5. Mindfulness helps us choose: We can learn to see and, sometimes, consciously opt for or against certain useful delusions.
6. The illusion of self: Even the “self” is a construct, and deeply examining (or loosening) this can reduce suffering—but it’s a scary and advanced project.

Final message:
Understanding and harnessing the paradoxes of self-deception can make us kinder, more effective, and (yes) a little happier—both in our own mind and in a world full of clashing realities.

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Books & Projects Mentioned:

• Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler
• Hidden Brain (book, podcast, and public radio show)

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Transcript

[Dan Harris]

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It's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

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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 three poisons. The whole point of meditation, per the Buddha, is to uproot delusion along with the other two 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 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, Vinnie 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 and 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 Seben A. 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. We're planning a trip soon, my family and another family. 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Shankar Vedantam thanks for coming on.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Dan Harris]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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.

[Dan Harris]

Can you tell us that story?

[Shankar Vedantam]

Sure, of course. So the Church of Love was a very unusual con that unfolded in the United states in the 70s and 80s. At its heart was a con man named Donald Lowry. 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 remark, the 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 is being revealed, why would the Marx 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.

[Dan Harris]

Why did they show up to defend them?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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. Two people sat 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.

[Dan Harris]

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 onto something with that?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 economic 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 expl 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.

[Dan Harris]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 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 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.

[Dan Harris]

I think you say in the book that this is true for parenting. Too 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Exactly. And in some ways, I think the parent child relationship might in some ways be the almost a 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 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 cursed 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 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.

[Dan Harris]

I have a six year old, I'm laughing because I have a six 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

I mean, can you imagine someone in your workplace calling you Dummy Lovato 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 Harris]

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, et cetera, et cetera, or she never does X when I ask her to do it. So this seems like very much a double edged sword.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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, 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, my partner is really a very good man, 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 parental blindness is a metaphor for the blindness that he has in his love for his child. And I think all of us see this 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 on general and on net, I believe that these self deceptions in fact are functional.

[Dan Harris]

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 gonna happen to us.

[Shankar Vedantam]

That's right. Yeah, I remember that line. And 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 gonna 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 gonna die, we know 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. We would have 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 decept 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 gonna die, clearly we would not lead very good or very functional lives.

[Dan Harris]

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's. 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 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.

[Dan Harris]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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, could go on a road trip this coming year, and we stop by every couple getting married in the United States and we ask them on their wedding day, what are the odds you're going to get divorced? 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 one in two, even though those in fact, are the odds. And I think. I think both of us would agree that anyone on their wedding day who says my odds of getting divorced are one in two, 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 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.

[Dan Harris]

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, 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. 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?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 six year old child, it is entirely to his benefit and to your benefit for you to believe that he is the cutest six 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 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 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. Interpreting the sandwich as being delicious. 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. 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.

[Dan Harris]

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?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 is just as capable as other people's minds for reaching for. Fantastic. 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 four weeks away. @ every stage of the last year, I told myself liberation was four 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 gonna be at hand. You see the same advice if you look at groups like Alcoholics Anonymous or Addiction Recovery Group, 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 have 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, 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, believe what you believe? 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 911 attacks, why the CIA and FBI had planned and carried out the 911 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 that the United States was not behind the 911 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 my book is that delusions, when they occur, are often playing a psychologically functionality. 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 way allowing them to give up this delusion? I think that's going to be a more effective way to combat dangerous delusions.

[Dan Harris]

Much more with Shankar Vedantam specifically on the subject of vaccines, Depending on where you live, the cooler temperatures are rolling in and if it's not happening right now, it's going to happen soon. It always does. And quince is where I'm turning for fall staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots. The quality holds up and the price still blows me away. Quince has the kind of fall staples you will wear non stop. Like super soft 100 Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just 60 bucks. I've got like four of those. I'm gonna bring those out of the back of the closet to start wearing again now that fall is here. Their denim is durable and fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean, classic edge without the elevated price tag. What makes quints different? They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen so you get the top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. I was at a party last night. I was wearing my quince pants which fit really well. They look good, not too tight, just the kind of thing a man of my age craves. Waves. I've got many, many Quince go to's. Aside from the aforementioned cashmere sweaters, I also wear Quince sweatpants on the regular often while I'm doing interviews for this podcast. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince go to quince.com happier for free shipping on your order and 365 days returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com happier free shipping and three 365 day returns quince.com happier. You know those moments when someone just takes care of something for you? That's what ATT is doing with the AT&T guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on or they will proactively make it right. That's the at, AT and T guarantee. Because staying connected isn't optional, it's essential. And AT and T wants you to.

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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?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 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. 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 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 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 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. Now, doing this does not automatically mean that the person is gonna say, okay, you've persuaded me, I'm gonna get a vaccine. I'm not suggesting that there's a panacea or a silver bu. But I do believe that if we actually approached people at the level at which they think about their own lives, 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, the idea of starting with empathy, of starting with compassion, is I think a truly powerful way to disabuse people of dangerous self deceptions.

[Dan Harris]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 91 1. When people storm 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, believe what the people who stormed The Capitol on January 6 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. 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 based these are the last two 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 gonna 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 if you want to have this dose or not, but if you decide that you don't wish to have this dose, we're gonna give this dose to somebody else. Maybe we're even gonna 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 gonna 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.

[Dan Harris]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 world. One of the simplest ways to demonstrate naive realism is to cite the comedian George Carlin who once said, 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 if I were to receive one of those letters? 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, 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 kill keeps us from exercising the empathy and compassion of understanding that other people might see the world differently.

[Dan Harris]

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 rationale, you actually came to see that foregoing self deception isn't necessarily just about being educated or enlightened. Actually, like dropping self deception can also be a sign of privilege. 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 just felt like a jar. But 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 in 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 shape 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 hometown. 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 gonna 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 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, 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, foregoing self deception, ironically, might be a form of privilege. If your own life is going perfectly well, if you have 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.

[Dan Harris]

So could another name for self deception be hope?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 perspect, this makes perfect sense. Our time on Earth is not just limited, it's really 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. You know, 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, 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.

[Dan Harris]

Much more of my conversation with Shankar Vedantam right after this.

Depending on where you live, the cooler temperatures are rolling in and if it's not happening right now, it's going to happen soon. It always does. And Quint is where I Turning for fall staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots. The quality holds up and the price still blows me away. Quint's has the kind of fall staples you will wear non stop. Like super soft 100 Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just 60 bucks. I've got like four of those. I'm gonna bring those out of the back of the closet to start wearing again now that fall is here. Their denim is durable and fits right in there. Real leather jackets bring that clean, classic edge without the elevated price tag. What makes Quints different? They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen so you get the top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. I was at a party last night. I was wearing my Quint's pants which fit really well. They look good, not too tight, just the kind of thing a man of my age craves. I've got many, many quintessential go to. Aside from the aforementioned cashmere sweaters, I also wear Quince sweatpants on the regular often while I'm doing interviews for this podcast. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.com happier for free shipping on your order and 365 days returns. That's quincee.com/happier free shipping and 365 day returns. Quinn stock. You know those moments when someone just.

Takes care of something for you?

That's what ATT is doing with the.

AT and T guarantee.

Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Because staff staying connected isn't optional, it's essential.

And AT&T wants you to feel that.

Somebody'S got your back.

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One of the things you've talked about that I think is really interesting is, 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

For many, many years, through much of the 20th century, in fact, people looked at patients who had serious mental illnesses, you know, schizophrenia, for example, where you're hallucinating things or you're hearing voices, you know, truly things that are delus. 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 associated 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, sometimes 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, 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, that 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.

[Dan Harris]

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 three primordial, pernicious psychological phenomena that we're trying to uproot in our practice. Greed, hatred, and delusion, or confusion or blindness to the reality of the human situation. So maybe it's possible that, yes, it does make sense to have some delusion, or else you're going to be stuck in sort of a nihilism or a. A complete paralytic depression about the fact that we're going to die and everybody else we know it's 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. Does that make sense to you?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 gonna experience a certain amount of empathy and compassion for the world. If you're doing it 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 this desire that we have to acquire more and more, this desire for more and more possessions, for wealth, for is 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 recognizing 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 you 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 decades and centuries, the planks of the ship rotted and decayed. And when that happened, people replaced the planks with the 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 in the book is that the ship of Thesis, in some ways is a metaphor for our own lives and for our own bodies and for our own minds. At a very material level, all of us are made up of particles that in some ways are turning over, 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 ship of Theseus? And at a psychological level, at an even deeper level, the level of our minds, our minds also are the product of invention and reinvention and layer upon layer of beliefs and norms and attitud, 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. 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 is being the I am the same person that I was when I was a child, and I am the same person I'm gonna be when I'm an older person? That sense of self that I have that I think we all have in our minds 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?

[Dan Harris]

I mean, you said you weren't sure you understood the Buddhist case for the illusion of the self, but you. 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 I need to, you know, get on various zoom calls, 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. 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, the sense of I is just an illusion. And that's terrifying. But it does go back to what I said before, 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 practices, 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 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?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 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? 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 love 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 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 gonna tamper with it, to do so with, with some caution.

[Dan Harris]

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, the Buddhists often talk about it as thinking about reality as having to levels there's conventional reality or shared reality which is the day to day. Yes, you are shunker and yeah, I'm Dan and we 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. But ultimate reality is sort of the deeper level of reality and on that level of reality 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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Right.

[Dan Harris]

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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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. The brain is in some ways designed to come up with self deceptions of all kind. You know, 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. 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.

[Dan Harris]

Yes, it's a huge problem. And welcome to the world of meditation. You gotta ride this flawed horse all the way to enlightenment. It's why it's so damn hard, because it keeps. The delusion keeps reasserting itself. And 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 Nibbana, Nirvana or whatever. I haven't experienced any of those things. All I have experienced is that meditation sucks and, 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 this faulty sense of I'm the center of the universe?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 as something that I want to probe to 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. And 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.

[Dan Harris]

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 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, 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 is there. 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 is 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 of a jerk to myself.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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 the way to sort of see the truth. And 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 is 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. 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 your action. 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.

[Dan Harris]

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.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity, Dan. So the book is called Useful Delusions, the Power and Paradox of the Self Declaration Deceiving Brain. It's co authored with the science writer Bill Mesler. 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 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. 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, 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.

[Dan Harris]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Dan Harris]

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 Vinny Ferraro and it's all about that moment when you wake up from 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 and 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 worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. 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 team this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

[Chris Gethard]

Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call. Talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's going to happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings. Crazy, funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh. Somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today.

[Dan Harris]

Beautiful.

[Chris Gethard]

Anonymous.