The Psychology of Truth In a World of Lies | Sam Harris

Summary

Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

Episode: The Psychology of Truth In a World of Lies | Sam Harris

Guest: Sam Harris (Neuroscientist, Philosopher, Author, Podcast Host)
Release Date: March 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dr. Michael Gervais sits down with Sam Harris for a wide-ranging discussion on the nature of truth in an era dominated by misinformation, tribalism, and technological disruption. They explore the fundamental psychological and ethical challenges of our time: how do we form, discern, and remain loyal to what is real—both individually and collectively—when lies are omnipresent? Core themes include radical honesty, the pervasiveness and danger of self-deception, the interplay of science and uncertainty, the fraught relationship between religion and rationality, and the promise and peril of artificial intelligence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Ground Truth of the Mind

[02:43] Sam Harris:

• The mind is “the ground truth of everything we experience,” shaping suffering, happiness, and perception.
• While physical reality matters, our experience is fundamentally mediated by how we frame it cognitively.

"The mind is more or less all we have, moment to moment, and it's the basis of everything that matters." – Sam Harris [03:45]

2. Radical Commitment to Honesty

[04:42] Sam Harris / [05:14] Dr. Michael Gervais:

• Sam advocates for not lying as one of the most important “firmware upgrades” for living well.
• Even so-called white lies are often corrosive, leading to self-deception and toxic relationships.

"Not lying is on a very short list of firmware upgrades to a human mind and a human life that I've discovered." – Sam Harris [04:42]

• Honesty is distinct from blurting out every thought (not “radical honesty” in the Tourette's sense: [05:24]).
• The commitment is to express, as faithfully as possible, what is both true and useful—with civility and compassion.

3. True with a Capital T?

[05:49] Dr. Michael Gervais / [05:52] Sam Harris:

• The pursuit of truth is almost always probabilistic, involving calibration of one’s confidence about what is really true.
• White lies rarely withstand scrutiny; they erode integrity more than they protect kindness.

4. Integrity and Consistency: “No Two Sets of Books”

[09:38] Sam Harris:

• Contextual morality (acting differently depending on who you're with) is a recipe for embarrassment and ethical turmoil.
• The goal: “be a unified person” across contexts.
• Locker room and team metaphors from Dr. Gervais: those who are two-faced are quickly marginalized in high-trust cultures [13:19].

"If you're the kind of person where suddenly you get access to more integrity and more ethical commitment simply by discovering a fact about this person that you didn't know, you might take a moment to reflect: do you actually want to be this person?" – Sam Harris [10:38]

5. Code Switching, Authenticity, and Growth

[13:20] Dr. Michael Gervais / [13:51] Sam Harris:

• Code switching is sometimes necessary for marginalized groups, but is also a potential indicator of a “true self” that is, or could be, discomfiting.
• Radical honesty forces us to inspect—and potentially outgrow—unflattering or limiting aspects of ourselves.

"None of us are condemned, merely condemned to be the person we were yesterday." – Sam Harris [13:59]

6. Honesty as a First Principle

[15:47] Dr. Michael Gervais / [15:49] Sam Harris:

• For Sam, “do not lie” is a foundational rule: "I don't remember who I was before I had this epiphany."
• Honesty reshapes social relationships—people seek your perspective only if they really want the truth.

7. High-Performance Environments and Truth

[18:10] Dr. Michael Gervais]:

• The highest-performing cultures (in sport and elsewhere) are those radically committed to honesty with themselves and each other.

"If you want a true high performing environment, if you want a great life, there needs to be a radical commitment to honesty with self and others." – Dr. Michael Gervais [21:33]

• Athletes' locker rooms tend to be more honest than coaching rooms; honesty strengthens teams, exposes hypocrisy, and expels underperformers.

8. Lying as a Form of Violence

[22:05] Sam Harris:

• Lying is considered the first link on “the continuum of violence.” Most human interactions are not zero-sum; honesty builds trust and lasting collaboration.

9. The Age of Misinformation, Social Media & AI

[25:11] Sam Harris:

• The internet (and now AI) have “shattered” our sense of reality; the proliferation of deepfakes will force a return to trusted gatekeepers (e.g., journalism).
• We may soon “declare epistemic bankruptcy”—not believing anything until verified by a reputable institution ([26:00]; [27:48] for the “grizzly bear”/“cocker spaniel” fake video analogy).

“Ironically, I think we're moving back toward a new moment where the gatekeepers are going to be the only source of ground truth for trust.” – Sam Harris [26:00]

10. AI, Expertise, and Human Value

[31:55] Sam Harris:

• AI is devaluing human expertise (“everything is becoming like chess,” where computers are now indisputably better).
• The future challenge is finding what is uniquely, meaningfully human in an age of superhuman machines.

11. Pathways to Truth in an Untrustworthy World

[39:25] Sam Harris:

• To get closer to the truth, we must recognize—and resist—tribalism and dogmatism, both of which reliably distort reality.
• What we need is a “reality bias”: emotionally, cognitively, and culturally, we must prioritize procedures and habits that track reality.

"Tribalism and dogmatism are some of the worst games in town… this is the most corrupt in software we have." – Sam Harris [40:20]

12. Dogmatism, Gurus, and Religion

[42:47] Dr. Michael Gervais / [51:56] Sam Harris:

• Sam draws a sharp distinction between science (an error-correcting, adversarial process) and religion (where “dogma” is valorized).
• The problem with organized religion: requiring belief in unverifiable, often morally problematic, ancient texts as ground truth ([63:29]).
• The line between cult and religion is blurry—small, recent, charisma-driven cults often become religions over time as their origin stories become less accessible to scrutiny ([76:03]).

"A cult that is 500 years old that's got a million people associated with it… that's a religion." – Sam Harris [76:03]

• Sam values the search for spiritual experiences but insists this quest should be non-sectarian, rational, and open-ended.

13. Consciousness as Ground Truth

[44:22] Sam Harris:

• The only indubitable fact is the existence of consciousness—subjective experience itself, no matter the underlying reality.
• Meditation is a valid, deeply intellectual, and necessary exploration of this ground truth.

14. Emotions, Suffering, and Freedom

[85:29] Dr. Michael Gervais / [85:58] Sam Harris:

• Suffering is perpetuated when we identify with our thoughts and emotions; mindfulness reveals thoughts/emotions as transient, impersonal events.
• The difference between pain and suffering lies in our identification with/resistance to experience ([92:42]).

"Emotions are essentially covert behaviors… you're pinching yourself to stay angry. But in the case of an emotion like anger, you don't even realize you have a hand, much less what it's doing." – Sam Harris [92:42]

• Meditation allows for direct recognition of the “space around” thoughts and feelings, yielding profound freedom—even before physiological change occurs ([97:49]).

15. The Power of Framing & Mindfulness

[106:21] Sam Harris:

• The way we interpret (frame) our experience dramatically alters suffering or enjoyment (e.g., gym pain is relished, but the same sensations at 3am cause panic).
• Mindfulness is even more fundamental than positive reframing—it's about experiencing sensations and thoughts with radical openness, prior to interpretation.

16. Impermanence, Awakening, and the Practice of Wisdom

[111:23] Sam Harris:

• The most deeply transformative insights are continually forgotten and must be rediscovered; awakening is an ongoing, iterative process, not a one-time achievement.
• Non-duality, selflessness, and awareness of impermanence are central to well-being.

"The larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows, still the area of our ignorance… grows with it." – Sam Harris [45:54]
"You're constantly waking up if you're practicing." – Sam Harris [113:35]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamp Highlights

• On the mission of truth:
  • "What we need is a reality bias." – Sam Harris [01:06]
• On the cost of dishonesty:
  • "Lying is among the most corrosive things we do." – Sam Harris [04:42]
• On AI and epistemic bankruptcy:
  • "We just declare epistemic bankruptcy with respect to the Internet." – Sam Harris [26:00]
• On religion and tradition:
  • "[Religious dogma is] the most corrupt in software we have." – Sam Harris [40:20]
• On suffering:
  • "Many of us live our lives as though they were one long emergency. And that is a story of thinking every moment of the day and not knowing that you're thinking." – Sam Harris [88:08]
• On consciousness:
  • "Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion." – Sam Harris [44:59]
• On continual awakening:
  • "You have to convince yourself of the thing, you know, 10,000 times for it to become the operating principle of your life." – Sam Harris [111:31]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening anecdotes on misinformation, fake videos: [00:00]
• Defining the role of mind and truth: [02:43]
• Sam’s 'no lying' principle: [04:42]
• Debate on white lies and integrity: [07:00]–[11:54]
• Code-switching, self-modification, and growth: [13:20]–[15:49]
• Honesty in high performance sports teams: [18:10]–[22:05]
• Lying as a form of violence: [22:05]–[24:00]
• AI, the breakdown of epistemology, gatekeepers: [25:11]–[29:00]
• Devaluation of expertise via AI: [31:55]–[36:28]
• Navigating tribalism, dogmatism, and the search for truth: [39:25]–[42:47]
• Consciousness, meditation, and science: [44:22]–[49:28]
• Dogmatism, religion, and cults: [51:56]–[76:03]
• Pain vs. suffering, room to choose freedom: [85:29]–[110:00]
• Concluding advice—awakening as practice: [111:23]–[113:35]

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Memorable Moments

• The “cocker spaniel and grizzly bear” deepfake analogy ([00:00], [27:48]): Satirical but prescient warning about the collapse of basic epistemic trust in media.
• "Two sets of books" integrity test in professional and personal life ([09:38]): A simple but profound diagnostic for self-examination.
• Comparison of AI to the rise of computers in chess ([31:55]): Demonstrates the stakes for human expertise and uniqueness.
• Sam's personal account of making non-lying a core life change ([15:49]): Honest, practical storytelling.
• Sport as a crucible for honesty ([18:10]–[21:59]): Locker rooms vs. coaching rooms as metaphors for truth-in-action.
• Reframing and mindfulness analogies ([107:15]–[109:20]): Weightlifting and pain as models for understanding and overcoming suffering.
• Nuanced critique of both cults and religions, using Mormonism, Scientology, and L. Ron Hubbard ([76:03]): Illuminates the grey areas between “cult” and “major religion.”
• Final thoughts on impermanence: the last time you’ll pick up your child ([111:31]): Moving, accessible, and universally relatable.

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Conclusion

This episode is a masterclass in the psychology, ethics, and lived practice of seeking truth in our era. Sam Harris and Dr. Michael Gervais chart a path toward greater honesty—not just as a moral stance, but as a transformative practice. They shine light on the personal, interpersonal, and systemic barriers to truth, and offer both caution and hope as we navigate the treacherous landscape of misinformation, technology, and dogma. The message is clear: radical honesty—paired with awareness of our cognitive and cultural blind spots—is essential for individual flourishing, high-performing teams, and a saner society.

Recommended for:
Anyone grappling with confusion, distrust, and polarization in modern life; seekers of truth in a post-truth age; high performers aiming for inner and outer integrity; and anyone interested in the intersections of psychology, philosophy, and technology.

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Listen to this episode for:

• Wisdom on honesty and its transformative power
• Cutting-edge insights on AI’s impact on knowledge
• Sobering reflections on dogmatism, cults, and religion
• Mindfulness-based practices for lessening suffering and deepening freedom

Key Quote to Remember:
"You're constantly waking up if you're practicing." – Sam Harris [113:35]

Transcript

[Sam Harris]

I've seen enough fake videos where the person's cocker spaniel saves them from a grizzly bear because it's just people have made 15,000 of them in the last hour. I'm not even interested in any of that anymore. I mean, as compelling as it can look, I'm going to wait for the New York Times to tell me that really happened.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

In a world full of misinformation, tribalism, and noise, how do you actually know what's true?

[Sam Harris]

The larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows. The area of our ignorance, or at least implied ignorance, grows with it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Welcome back. Or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. A high performance psychologist named Michael Dravet,

[Sam Harris]

who Pete Carroll brought in to work

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

with the Seahawks, famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos project.

[Sam Harris]

Olympic athletes depend on something more than

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

just training and talent.

[Podcast Announcer]

They have to stay mentally tough.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Today's guest is Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, host of the Making Sense podcast and creator of the Waking up app. This conversation is about defining truth, how we form it, how it shapes us, and how dangerous it becomes when we refuse to examine it.

[Sam Harris]

What we need is a reality bias. We should want to be in touch with what is real insofar as that's possible. And we should be alert to those cultural practices and institutions that are reliably corrupting those efforts.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

We explore Sam's first principle, a radical commitment to honesty, what it means to live without lying.

[Sam Harris]

Every room you walk into, whatever happens, whatever gets said, whatever topics come up, it's very powerful to know that you're not gonna lie, not at all.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

As you listen, I wanna encourage you to notice where in your life you feel defensive. That friction is often where growth begins. With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Sam Harris. Sam, and I'm really excited to sit with you. Your body of work and your research on the mind is stunning. And so it's influential, it's clear, it's provocative. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. And also at the same time, maybe slightly nervous because you think differently than I do. And I am really curious about, not the overlap, but I'm more curious about the difference in the way that we see things. And maybe there is more in common than I might think. And so I'm really curious about kind of how this conversation goes. But welcome to Finding Mastery and thank you for being here.

[Sam Harris]

Oh, it's a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for the invitation.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So you've spent much of your life studying the mind, and so let's just start with the obvious. Why?

[Sam Harris]

Well, it's just. It really is the ground truth of everything we experience. Obviously, we have the world to deal with and the body in the world, but the mind represents the cash value of everything that you can notice, everything you can suffer, everything that can make you happy. When you see the contributions of your thinking and your expectations and the way you cognitively frame experience to the quality of your experience, you see that. I mean, it's almost never the case that the world is imposing the valence of experience on you. There are extreme cases, obviously extreme pain. You have a terrible injury, and there's not too many ways to reframe that so as to make it good. But even there, the difference between pain and suffering can be. There can be a lot of daylight between those two phenomena. So, yeah, I mean, the mind is more or less all we have, moment to moment, and it's the basis of everything that matters. So understanding that and understanding the degrees of freedom that are there to be explored within that, I mean, that seems like a pretty central life project.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I don't think there was a word out of place in what you just said. And I recognize the intentionality between or from the words that you're choosing. And so I do want to.

[Sam Harris]

If I could rewind slowly so I have an advantage. I speak people. People listen to me often on 1.5 or 2 or 2x on my. On my podcast. So, yeah, I got more time to put the words in the right places.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

No, that's not the case. That's true. I think when I listen to, like, the show backwards, I'm like, damn, dude, spit it out. Like, I do feel like I speak slowly, but I am looking for some accuracy in the words and the language I'm using. Okay, what are the most foundational ideas that you want our community to understand, to live well in the modern world?

[Sam Harris]

Not lying is on a very short list of firmware upgrades to a human mind and a human life that I've discovered. The Venn diagram. Certainly, the region of greatest interest is in this intersection between what's true and useful, and especially when you're talking about communication. I'm an advocate of honesty and fundamentally of having an ethical commitment to not lying. I think lying is among the most corrosive things we do.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Even though we lie to ourselves, like, 38 times a day on average or

[Sam Harris]

Whatever, I don't know, we can talk about that.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

But you're talking about lying to other people.

[Sam Harris]

I think lying to other people is generally speaking a terrible thing to do. Even so called white lies. I think we want to do very little if any of that. But it's not that you need to just helplessly utter every thought that comes through your head. I mean, it's like you have Tourette syndrome. No, you want to speak in terms of what is true and useful. So it's not just vocalizing everything.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Are you saying true with a capital T or true with a subjective small T?

[Sam Harris]

Well, true is insofar as you can get a handle on it. I mean it's always true in every sense is just, I mean, sometimes it's probabilistic. I mean, you have a sense that you think it's more likely than not. So we're often calibrating our confidence in how we represent what we think is true. But I think, yeah, you want to see you're giving other people a view of the world as you see it, as faithfully as you can. But again, you might be. There's a role for civility here and kindness and compassion. And it doesn't quite have the shape that many people imagine, which is the. I mean, I think most people's default is that there's a lot of room for, and necessary room for just lying to be kind. Right. And I think when you drill down on all of those examples, in my experience, you almost never find one that survives the, you know, any kind of test of integrity that, you know, I would want to stand behind. So I think white lies are, give a lot of scope for deception and self deception and toxic relationships that fundamentally you don't want to have. I took a class freshman year at Stanford. There's this great professor, Ron Howard, who's in the Engineering Economic Systems department, which had absolutely no, I was an English major. It had absolutely no relationship to what I was interested in. But he taught this, this seminar on lying. Basically it was just a, I think it was a graduate seminar, but it was just a single question in every session which is is it ever okay to lie? And then people would just kind of hurl examples at him. And most people came into that seminar more or less assuming that human beings have to lie. It's just something that we necessarily do. We do it some number of times a day and that's perfectly normal and compatible with a healthy life and a good career and a good reputation. Obviously there are egregious examples of lying and you don't want to be that guy, but line's unavoidable. And if your wife asks you, do I look fat in this dress? Well, of course you're going to say no. And what are you, an idiot? And so that default setting, in almost every case, in my experience, it just got recalibrated in that over the course of whatever, eight weeks in this seminar.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So how do you answer that question? Because let me set up the dilemma that I see it as. Do I look fat in this dress? It's a subjective interpretation of what you think fat is. And really that question is not about, do I look fat? That question is, there's a deeper question underneath of it, which is, well, it

[Sam Harris]

might be, do you love me?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I mean, that's right.

[Sam Harris]

Are you attracted to me?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's the deeper question. And it's a ping, right? It's a little bit like a bellwether, you know, like it's looking for a calling back, am I okay in your eyes? So I think that there's a trap. So there's two. There's two things that I want to inspect with you is like, it requires your subjective take on what fat is. And if you are. If you are unbalanced in that. Let's say that if you think somebody that is. I'll just create an image, 5 foot 6 and 98 pounds is fat. That. That's actually a clinical disordered way of thinking about body weight.

[Sam Harris]

Right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Anorexia. And you say to your spouse, actually, yeah, so you told the truth, but you are clinically disordered in your take on what healthy looks like.

[Sam Harris]

You can definitely be wrong and be telling the truth. That's.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, but you think it's useful and you think it's truthful. So this is where I think.

[Sam Harris]

And you can be wrong about that.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You can be wrong.

[Sam Harris]

You can be an asshole. There's no question. I mean, so.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So how do you answer that question? How do you know that your take.

[Sam Harris]

Well, I think one thing you discover when you're committed to not lying, whatever the situation, suddenly you have a mirror thrown up to your mind and life that you didn't have before. If you're the kind of person who has a sort of situational ethics where you've got one set of ethical books you keep for your friends and family and another you keep for strangers and people you meet in business. So in a business context, you're willing to shade the truth and bullshit people and even lie outright, because that's just the way your business is done. But obviously, a classic example would be, imagine you're in the service industry. You're working in a store, and someone comes through the front door and they're shopping in your store, and you are recommending everything because that's how you do your job. After further conversation with this customer, you find out that you actually, you have a friend in common. Like, this is like your friend's sister. Or suddenly you're in a different situation

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

and now you don't want to recommend.

[Sam Harris]

So then if you're the kind of person where all of a sudden a different piece of software comes online, which, okay, now you've got. Now you're actually going to speak honestly to this person because you realize that this is your friend's sister. It's like, oh, actually don't buy that one. That's not as good as. And if you're that person, where suddenly you get access to more integrity and more ethical commitment simply by discovering a fact about this person that you didn't know, you might take a moment to reflect. Do you actually want to be this person? I mean, first of all, if you're that sort of person, you are always vulnerable to being embarrassed, right? Like, I mean, think of what it says about you. If you, in that situation, you recommended something that was, you know, obviously you can't stand behind. And then in your own defense, you say, well, I didn't realize you were so and so's sister. That's the, that's the, the definition of not actually being ethical in this, in this business relationship. So I think, you know, a little reflection could convince you that you actually don't want to keep two sets of books. You just want to be a unified person with respect to this variable of

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

honesty and what we would shorthand, integrity, that you are consistent with your thoughts, words and actions across experiences. Finding Mastery is brought to you by fatty 15. Healthy aging is not about chasing the newest trends and fads. For us at Finding Mastery, it's about taking care of the fundamentals consistently. And one of the most important fundamentals is cellular health. That's why I continue to be excited about Fatty 15. It's a daily supplement that's based on C15. This is the first essential fatty acid discovered in more than 90 years. Fatty 15 co founder, Dr. Stephanie Van Watson. She's a previous guest on the podcast and it's an amazing conversation by the way. She discovered the benefits of C15 while working with the US Navy. Based on over 100 studies, we now know that C15 strengthens our cells and is a foundational healthy aging nutrient. What it does is it helps slow aging at the cellular level. When our cells don't have enough C15, they become fragile and age faster. And when our cells age, our bodies age as well. Fatty 15 is on a mission to optimize your C15 levels to help support your long term health and wellness, especially as you age. You can get an additional 15% off their 90 day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15gilty15.com findingmastery and use the code findingmastery at checkout. What Stephanie and the team at Fatty 15 are doing is something I'm really excited about. I really hope you'll check them out. I love the way that you just framed that. Those people I do not trust.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And those people in locker rooms get pushed out quickly to the fringe and I don't want to be that person to your point. And so this code switching or this dual self is something that some groups that feel marginalized and don't feel as though that they can bring themselves forward because of the the biases or the vitriol that they will experience if they were to bring their more true self, their more quote unquote authentic self forward that they hold back and then they code switch with their friends or whatever.

[Sam Harris]

But maybe there's a reason. So if your true self is the sort of self that you would be embarrassed to bring forward because it's got,

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

that's actually your true self.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, but the true self is modifiable with like again, let's just say you're a jerk, right? Well, like if you have to be honest. If you took a vow of honesty so that you can't actually hide what a jerk you are. Like if someone says do you want to go out on a date with me? And the answer is no. And why is the answer no? Well, you're too short. That's just the ground truth. You're too short. I only like tall guys or tall girls. This is a fact about you that might be of interest to you. How did you become the guy who's got a cut, like a height cutoff with respect to this variable of who you're going to spend time with or who you're going to spend the rest of your life with. Now maybe it's just true and you have to get your mind around that and then there's some way to work with that in the world. But for the most part, none of us are condemned, merely condemned to be the person we were yesterday. We have that by tendency we're kind of doing a great impersonation of who we were yesterday or a moment ago. But there's actually a tremendous amount of freedom to grow with respect to all of the basically anything about yourself that. That you can notice. And one of the things that forces you to notice everything really is just an unwillingness to lie. Right. Like you just, okay, I'm not going to lie. My kid's going to ask me a question. I don't know what they're going to ask, but one thing I do know is that I will never lie to them. That is a very different context for anything that's going to happen in your relationship as a parent. And it's again, you're an open system. It's like every room you walk into, whatever happens, whatever gets said, whatever topics come up, it's very powerful to know that you're not gonna lie. Not at all. You're just not.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So that's a first principle for you.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. And do not lie completely changed my life. I mean, I don't remember who I was before I had this epiphany, but it was forced upon me in this court. So I wrote a book, a very short book called Lying, which gives abundant credit to this professor who first drummed these thoughts into me. But it's.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Is your first principle do not lie, or is your first principle tell the truth that's useful?

[Sam Harris]

Well, again, there's kind of further filter on what some people would consider radical honesty, which is given that you can't say everything and can't know everything, then there's some scope to editing saying what's true and useful. I mean, you don't just have to give the unvarnished. Everything that's happening in the privacy of your mind does not have to be externalized. Help helplessly in the presence of other people who are there to hear it,

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

even if they ask.

[Sam Harris]

Even if they ask. It's not a question of dissembling at that point, but it's often a question of just getting down to what the truth really is. To come back to your wife in the dress. The classic example, the ground truth, is really that you love this person, you're on the same team, you want to sort of meet that moment at all the levels that it really is emerging. So if it really is, what's being communicated is the subtext, which is, do you still love me or are you still attracted to me? Well, then obviously you want to be able to communicate those truths too. But sometimes it's just at the level of the text, which is she's got a bunch of different dresses she could wear. She looks much better in some than in others. And she actually wants to know that. She wants your perspective on whether this dress is flattering. And if the truth is, it's not flattering. And that's your actual thought, well, you're on the same team. She's asking for your view of reality. And I mean, the one thing that happens in your life, once you become the sort of person that will just be honest in those moments, then your social world rearranges itself around you. You find that people just don't actually come to you for advice unless they want the truth. And that's an amazingly clarifying thing to happen in all your relationships.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I did not think you and I were going to be talking about creating a high performance environment. I'll tell you why. People ask me all the time, what are the common threads or common themes of a high performance environment. And while there are many, the ones that I am most attracted to that I feel have an outsourced impact on the results. Meaning high performance is cultures of honesty. And so.

[Sam Harris]

Well, I mean, sports have to be the ultimate example of this because it's the one area where bullshit just is totally useless. Totally useless.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

However, there are people, even in stick and ball sports, which I obviously spent a lot of time celebrating, the Seattle Seahawks as of the recording two days ago, being with that team for the last year again, asterisk, I was with them for nine seasons and then back for this season, is that there's room to hide. Even in traditional stick and ball high performing environments, there is room to hide. But the ones that say we are going to tell the truth and we are going to be great teammates to each other, which means that we're going to have to go through things not around.

[Sam Harris]

How do you hide? And give me an example of how

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

to hide in pro sport. Point the finger, blame other people. Inside of sport, the most honest rooms tend to be locker rooms. The most dishonest tend to be coaching rooms. Okay, so why are the athletes so honest? Well, one, let's have fun with the imagery. They're walking around in towels or sometimes nothing at all. And in those environments, if you're slow, you're going to get pointed out that you're not going to the gym enough, you're not doing enough work, maybe you need to lose some weight or gain some weight. And so there's just a directness and a boldness. And in those cases, literally there's nowhere to hide. But if you're not thoughtful. And you're code switching like we're talking about. You're two different people around two different rooms. Or you're saying you're putting in strain, but. But you're actually not. You say you're about the mission, but you're out late drinking that. Those environments at some point will get called out. So they are more honest than not. But you can still quote, unquote, hide. Case in point. Let me go from football to basketball for a minute. This was a gentleman that I spent time with. He won, I think, four rings in the NBA basketball player. There's only five players on the court. He said, mike, in the third and fourth quarter in a championship game, he hid the entire time on the court. He came off the screens just a little bit slower. So he wasn't open. He was terrified to shoot the ball. He was purposely coming off just. And when he had the ball in his hands, he was reflexively looking to pass. So he looked like he was a good teammate, but he was terrified to shoot. So he was not honest with his experience nor with his teammates. It cost them the championship.

[Sam Harris]

But the thing that could not be ignored is he had whatever number of baskets he had and no more.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right.

[Sam Harris]

So there was no illusions.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right.

[Sam Harris]

The results. I mean, the results are. You can't fudge the results.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

No, but you can fudge a lot of ways. The quote unquote intangibles. Yeah. So this is one thing about sport I think is great, which is everybody's force ranked stacked and force ranked publicly observable data.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And so there is, in that case, nowhere to hide the subjective. You can let me take this and move it to one more piece. Maybe I put an exclamation point next to what I want to say. If you want a true high performing environment, if you want a great life, there needs to be a radical commitment to honesty with self and others. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I am not saying brutal honesty, but that's for jerks.

[Sam Harris]

You're not saying what kind of honesty.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Brutal honesty. Yeah, thoughtful. I'll use your word useful in this.

[Sam Harris]

Well, again, so it's not just a posture or an artifice to be kind versus brutal. I mean, we're talking about situations, even potentially, with all the strangers you meet, barring some moment where they disqualify themselves and become enemies or adversaries. It's true to say that your default is that you're on the same team with everybody.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I love that piece.

[Sam Harris]

So it's like you actually want them to Succeed, you're not in a situation where you're viewing your interaction as zero sum. And so I mean even just in a business situation, what is a good deal in business? A good deal is not where you get everything you want and the other person feels screwed. A good deal, especially when you know that you have a reputation and you want to be able to play repeated games in an open ended way. With happy collaborators, a good deal is one in which they are also happy. The person you were just negotiating with is also happy with the result. So it's just there are very few truly zero sum situations. And when it's truly zero sum, then we're talking about something like self defense. And then I would put lying as sort of the first stop on the continuum of violence where you're talking about, okay, I'm now in the presence of somebody who's not a rational actor or any kind of collaborator and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of the situation, avoid them, nullify the threat they're posing. And maybe a lie is the first thing. If I'm choosing between do I have to punch this person in the face or lie? Well then lying would be the first act of violence I would commit. So I would just put lying in the general case as somewhere on the continuum of violence between people that is usually avoidable, but not always.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And a self defense mechanism.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, it's just then you're talking about self defense or defense of other people.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Very cool. Okay, so take this to the broader context. At the time of recording. I think our state of the, our country is in disarray. And the tension between my truth and your truth, my side of the understanding of how I see politics in your side could be radically violent in thought and, or could be confusing to other people. Meaning that I'm just confused how you think that way. Or I could have great contempt for the way that you're seeing things. So this idea of truth with a capital T is not really what we're working from. We're working from truth with a small T. My subjective truth of the way that I see the best way to that our company should or country should be run. How do you think about helping navigate the betrayal like the Epstein files and the betrayal of how leaders are acting independent of how. If you're on the left or right of the, of the, the political spectrum, how do, how are you using this truth telling principle as a way to maybe help the larger context of the country's health?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I'm very worried about how we're entangled with our information technology. This is a story obviously, of social media, principally now, but really it's even just the Internet itself. It's just what the Internet has done to our sense of what is real. And it has created a kind of shattering of culture which is only intensifying again through social media now with AI. I mean, now it's just. It's not getting better, it's getting worse. I have some hope, perhaps we could talk about it. I have some hope that AI might pull us back from the brink here. But wait a minute, wait a minute.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Optimist, hold on. We got a crack in the pessimistic approach.

[Sam Harris]

It's a pessimistic version of optimism.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I don't think you could have both.

[Sam Harris]

Well, so the short answer there is that I think that the AI sloppification of everything. I mean, the fact that we're now moving into a world where if you look at a piece of video, your first thought is, well, is this even real? I mean, whatever the video is, I mean, it could be Vladimir Putin declaring that he's just launched all his missiles and you're all going to die. It might look perfectly credible. And I think most people's sense at this moment would be to just not even react to it, because there's just a basic assumption that you can't trust anything now on the Internet. So, ironically, I think we're probably moving back toward a new moment where the gatekeepers are going to be the only source of ground truth for trust now. I mean, we are coming from a moment where the institutions have radically discredited themselves. No one trusts the New York Times or the Washington Post, or we just want to get it from the raw feed from X or some other social media platforms, or somebody's uncle can send us a YouTube clip and it's just shot on somebody's phone. They're standing near the protests and they saw the thing that happened, and that's what's real. Don't trust the gatekeepers. Trust the wisdom of the crowd. But now with the deep fakery and the sloppification of everything, I think we're getting to a point where we're not there yet, but I could imagine six months from now, we will be at a point where we just declare epistemic bankruptcy with respect to the Internet. Like, we just decide, okay, I'm not going to react to anything. My bias is going to be, no, this is not a real video of a grizzly bear attacking a woman in her backyard, right? Like, I've seen enough fake videos where the person's cocker spaniel saves them from a grizzly bear. Because it's just people have made 15,000 of them in the last hour, basically. I'm not even interested in any of that anymore. I mean, as compelling as it can look, I mean, it can look perfectly real. Suddenly everything is boring because it stands a chance of being fake. And even the most alarming communication, you know, dozens of people killed on the White House lawn. Okay, I'm going to wait for the New York Times to tell me that really happened. I cannot trust any other source until someone that has a reputation of being that can be damaged says, listen, we did the work, the necessary journalistic work and forensic work to tell you that this video of Vladimir Putin declaring that he's declaring World War III on us is actually real. And so now you can panic, right? So I think that may happen. And so that'll be, I think, a sea change in our relationship to social media and everything else that has been ruling our lives for the last two decades.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. We tend to think about creatine as something for athletes, for power, for muscle, for strength. But what often gets missed here is that our brains rely on creatine, just like our body does. Your brain burns about 20% of your body's total energy, means every thought, every decision, every late night brainstorming. It depends on that same cellular energy system that powers our muscles. And over the last several years, there's been a lot of research around creatine and in particular, its cognitive effects. And a bunch of those studies, they've shown that supplementing with creatine can. Can improve working memory and processing speed, even during periods of sleep loss or high cognitive demand. And I know we all know this, but we do need to fuel our brain. And for me, I trust Momentous. They take the long road here. Years of testing, rigorous research. There's no shortcuts for them. Their new creatine shoes are built to the momentous standard. That means it's clean. It's NSF certified for sport, and scientifically validated. Always talk to your doctor. Always talk to your nutritionist. But for me, creatine is a performance tool. It supports the energy our brain needs to stay sharp under stress, to think clearly, and maybe most importantly, to recover faster from long days and deep work how you care for your brain. It matters. Head to livemomentous.com and use the code finding mastery for 35% off your first subscription. Again, that's livemomentous. L I V E M O M E N T o u s livemomentous.com and then use the code Finding Mastery for those who are in it for the long game. So at the beginning of the year I thought, okay, I don't Finding Mastery. We don't do resolutions, but we do set an intention, you know, like, and for, I don't know, the last four years it was the same for me. It was the year of play. I just knew I needed more play in my life. I'm intense, I'm serious. And I just wanted the Yin yang kind of side of my, my approach in life. And so this year was different. This year was about humanness, the art of humanness. And that's when I'm waking up in the morning through my, my imagery and my meditation is like, what does that really mean to me now? But I do know that I'm not interested in being a quote unquote expert. I am interested in like honest expression. And the humanness piece is like the anti, like I said cult proof earlier. I am. Cult proof is like it's the counter rotation to the AI slop. To your point, like I really appreciate what you're saying because when I'll listen to a thoughtful commentary of even somebody that I do respect their thoughts on social Instagram or whatever, and now I'm like, did they write that? Did AI write that? Is that part?

[Sam Harris]

So that's not even the slot. So you're talking about the other side of the AI product, which is the actual good stuff, the real expertise that can be generated in moments by anyone that is like, I'm calling that slop too. Yeah, but what you've just described is the value of human hard fought expertise on some level has gone way down. When you're thinking of just the information, access to information that is in fact true. The knowledge that literally anyone within five seconds can get a concise answer to almost any question and that answer is actually going to be good. That sort of devalues on some level. What does it actually mean, mean to be an expert, if anyone. I mean obviously there's the follow up conversation that a real expert can have and real experts know how to kind of edit and navigate information. But the better AI gets, the more human expertise gets devalued in the same way that it's like on some level everything is going to become like chess. Right. It's just simply the case that computers are better at chess than people are. And when you add people to the game on some level, even the best grandmasters are just adding noise. There was a case for the longest time where computers were not as good as they were better than novice players, but they were not as good as grandmasters. Then Kasparov lost to Deep Blue and there was this moment where we saw the writing on the wall where computers are going to be better than people. But there was this brief period, or maybe it was a decade, where the human grandmaster pair, the computer person pair, the so called cyborg was better still than any computer alone because a grandmaster like Kasparov could just add the extra intuition that was valuable. But now that's no longer the case and just the best players in the world just add noise to what is in fact the best chess that is possible to play, which is between computers. That's going to be true for again in success for all of human cognition. So you're going to be able to push a button and say, what's the best explanation for the causes of World War I and World War II? I want it in exactly 400 words and bullet pointed into 17 different bullet points. No person can give you that in seconds. Even the best scholar of the period would take an hour and a half to come up with anything close to that kind of precision and probably longer. But AI can do that right now and it can do it depending on the topic. It can do a perfect, a virtually perfect, certainly better than human job of it, or a nearly best in class job of it. And it's only getting better. So what you've just described is a situation where even the things that we admire about ourselves and about other people that we've trained for and we've invested a lot in, that's getting offloaded into the technology. And we're faced with a conundrum around which to how to revalue what it means to be human. What's talent good for? What is expertise good for?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So how are you thinking about. Obviously this is a real concern for many of us, but how are you thinking about getting to the truth in a world where there's so much misinformation? Getting to the truth when we've got AI that is in 400 words, potentially incredibly accurate or presenting as being accurate, but it's hallucinated 40% of its response. So in a world where information is more available but less trustworthy. Well, how do you help?

[Sam Harris]

I mean, I think the hallucination, I mean, we're either going to solve that to, you know, several decimal places beyond the human, or we're not going to be able to rely on the technology. So I mean we're. And I think we've solved it for.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You think we're okay with it right now because of the idea that it's going to get better.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. And it's also, I mean it's very, very good for many, many topics. Yeah. Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So coding, aggregating information. But the emphatic nature, when I ask it something in psychology, I'm like, oh my God, that's like 85%. Right, right. But the 15 is actually quite egregious.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. You know, and so it makes errors that, that human experts wouldn't make. But again, I think it's a very short period of time. We have to wait before it's. Again, it's going to be like chess where once it's superhuman. For any one of these specific areas of cognition we care about, there's no looking back. It's like once driverless, I mean, I think we're probably there with certainly some driverless cars.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

We know that driverless cars are safe.

[Sam Harris]

They're just like, okay, they're better than apes, you know, they're always going to be better than apes and better than humans. Yeah. I mean, we're apes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's Sam, you know, you know,

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

to interrupt your thought.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So Waymo is one of our clients. Yeah. And I'm about it. I am, I was so skeptical. I experienced it myself. I experienced it first. I met with their leadership team, we met with their, some of their engineers and like I'm about it, the data, the direction they're going, I am totally about it. Even more so right now. And I'm subjectively biased because it was probably five weeks ago. 35 year old driver, no median in between us, two lane highway going in both directions. He was 35, doing 70 miles an hour, was distracted by his phone. Head on collision into my car.

[Sam Harris]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Sam Harris]

Wow.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Heavy, heavy, heavy experience. And so you weren't injured? Yeah, there's an interesting thing. So, no, there's three levels of fitness that showed up for me in that moment. Enough physical suppleness and mobileness and strength that when I hit the airbags my body stayed intact properly. So that's like a, call it a physical fitness. There's a psychological, emotional fitness that I see why car crashes can be absolutely traumatic. How fast it happens, how violent it is, how you need to go through that, intersect those types of circumstances again, but do it calmly, you know. And then there was a back of lack of better words, was it like a resource fitness that I'm super grateful my car withstood it. It's totaled.

[Sam Harris]

Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

But it did its job unless I had some rinky dink car that would not have showed up. So super grateful for all that experience, which is also part of as you know, a framing of a traumatic experience. That's helpful. But so anyways, long, long narrative to get to. I am about the driverless technology because the phones in in hands of drivers. Oh my God, I experienced a casualty of it. So anyways, how do we get to truth and how do we get to community that is in this broth of misinformation and let's just say misinformation.

[Sam Harris]

Well, I think we have to recognize the variables that cause us to reliably not get to truth. Right. And unfortunately, there are things we're anchored to that are. Not only are they not recognized as dysfunctional, they're often trumpeted as being some of the most important features of human life. I would put them into two categories. The first is tribalism, and the second is dogmatism. And both reliably are not truth tracking. What we need is a reality bias. We should want to be in touch with what is real insofar as that's possible. Now, there are many things that make it difficult and there are many ways to be skeptical around whether the map is ever going to truly fit the territory. But we want more and more accurate maps. Know cognitively and emotionally, scientifically, journalistically, in every other way. And we should be alert to those habits of attention and habits of thought and cultural practices and institutions that are reliably corrupting those efforts. And tribalism and dogmatism are some of the worst games in town. And unfortunately, when you look at how they map onto things like religion and then when they map onto things like politics and just identity politics. You were talking about people bringing their truth and feeling like they can't, they have to code switch that I can't bring their true self into work or into the rest of their lives. All of that is a story of how tribal identity and dogmatic thinking, the things we believe are true despite the evidence and that we're not willing to revisit because these are our cherished beliefs that we find so consoling or so otherwise important that they're not even on the table to be discussed. If anyone's going to raise them skeptically, we're going to be personally offended because all of this is so colossally dysfunctional and in the limit dangerous and Divisive that this is the most corrupt in software we have, that we have to figure out how to reconsider and rewrite. And much of my work, not so much in my meditation app, but on my podcast, is to criticize bad ideas. And again, so much of what ails us in the idea space is a matter of dogmatism and tribalism.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I love how you answered that question. Yeah. Because as you started, I was like, oh, that's interesting. I've totally thought that you were going to go to. Yeah. Go to the inner world and get grounded on. Make contact with reality that way. Make contact with your thoughts so that you can better make contact with reality outside of you. And you did, in an interesting way, is that. But as a systems thinker, you said, look, we first gotta address tribalism and dogmatism. And so before we go to tribalism, can you talk to. I think you're gonna bridge a gap between dogmatism and gurus, give us a way to understand your point of view on religion, and maybe thread. Gurus and dogmatism. If I'm thinking correctly about your thinking.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. So I have many gurus. Critical things to say about organized religion, which I think religious people will naturally misinterpret or at least imagine that I'm implying things that I'm not. So, for instance, it's totally possible, in my view, that the universe is far stranger than we suppose or that we even can. Suppose science has not evaporated. The last mystery of our appearance here in this cosmos.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Did you say there's aliens in that statement?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I have just. I mean, there are reasons to be doubtful that any aliens are flying around and performing amateur proctology on people in trailer parks and farmers.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It's reason to be doubtful.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's. So I'm not. So I'm not convinced about, you know, the. The recent reports are indication, just not.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You were that funny. That's really good.

[Sam Harris]

Are we alone in the galaxy or in the cosmos? I have no idea. And either way, it would be astonishing. It would be astonishing to recognize that the universe is teeming with complex life, and it would be astonishing to recognize that we're alone. I mean, both answers are astonishing, so I'm open to either. But there are. Clearly, we don't understand reality at its most basic level. We certainly don't understand how consciousness, the experience of what it's like to be us, relates to the physics of things at the most basic level.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And that's your definition of consciousness.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, Consciousness is Just experience. I mean, the fact that something seems to be happening. And that's true whether all of this is a dream or whether this is a simulation on the hard drive of some alien supercomputer, or whether we're actually in touch with the base layer of reality in our physics now, and we're very close to understanding everything. We can be as confused as you might suspect or not, but something seems to be happening, and that seeming is the fact of consciousness. So on my account, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion. I mean, the fact that something seems

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

to be happening again, whether it's accurate or not.

[Sam Harris]

Accurate or not, there's a qualitative feel to this moment from where you sit.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And there's two. Go back to this hinge idea. There's consciousness, or internal of your internal experience and of the external world.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. I mean, both are appearing. What you're calling the world and what you're calling yourself in the world. All of that is appearing in this condition that I'm calling consciousness. And so you can call it experience, but experience is the ground truth of your being. And whatever is true, whatever else is true, and it's the one thing you can't actually doubt again. You can bracket it. You can bracket it with a radical skepticism about everything. You can say, maybe I'm asleep and dreaming right now, and I think I'm having this conversation. Maybe I'm going to wake up and recognize all of this isn't real. That's fine. But still, in this moment, something seems to be happening, and that's the fact of consciousness.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So this is the second first principle of yours.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. So consciousness is a ground truth that cannot be doubted. And. And it's in the context of being conscious that we're encountering other people and a world, or what seems to be other people and a world. And we're trying to understand what's happening here and how to control it. And science is the part of culture where we make our best efforts to do that. And we generate technology that allows us to reach further into areas of reality that we can't otherwise inspect. And, and we draw conclusions based on an experimental interrogation of reality as it appears. And all of that bears enormous fruit. It has enormous consequences. I mean, the fact we have an Internet, we live in cities, and we have cures for diseases that our ancestors didn't even have names for. I mean, all of this is progress, and yet it's still happening in a context where there is radical uncertainty and just A frontier tier of ignorance that keeps getting pushed back. I mean, the larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows still the area of our ignorance, or at least implied ignorance, grows with it. Right. So it's just there's more of reality that we obviously don't know. But all of that's happening in a context where consciousness is clearly the ground truth of everything. And this is why meditation isn't this sort of effete and disreputable kind of side hustle where the science, done with white lab coats and expensive machines, is the real interrogation of reality. What you can do in the darkness of your closed eyes while meditating is just something spooky that has no intellectual credibility. No, actually, once you see that consciousness is the ground truth of everything, whatever its relationship to the physics of things turns out to be. I mean, maybe it's just the product of a certain pattern of information processing in the physical brain, and maybe it'll be instantiated in machines and I mean, that's all a separate conversation. But whatever, however consciousness emerges, consciousness is the one inescapable fact of our appearance here. And to be able to interrogate it directly by learning how to pay attention

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

to the moment, to moment experience is essentially what meditation.

[Sam Harris]

This is a very important. It's not only an important skill in terms of just improving the quality of your life. It is a. It's a totally defensible intellectual exercise in terms of understanding the mind. From the first person side, it doesn't give you everything. It's important to recognize that to really understand the human mind and certainly its relationship to the human brain and to the world at large, you have to triangulate on yourself. You can't just be meditating because from the first person side, you can't even tell that you have a brain, right? Much less what it's doing or what its role is in producing what you can be aware of. So it's not like the first person side is everything, but it is an indispensable part of our interrogation of reality. Even from a scientific side.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Brilliant finding Mastery is brought to you by AG1. Spring is just a natural time to reset. The days are getting longer, at least for the northern hemisphere. And there's just an energy in the air that shifts. Kind of pulled the simplify for me to recalibrate what's working, what isn't. And one area I come back to regularly is my daily routine. It's not about overhauling it, but it is about scrubbing the material of it to really making sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I look at it all and I reexamine it. AG1, it's been one of those foundations for me for over a decade now. I'm still using it. I like what they're doing. What I appreciate most is how much it simplifies the equation. One scoop covers a lot of ground. They've got some multivitamins in there. And more than anything, it's the pre and probiotics that I appreciate that they've done. It's all in one glass of water. So if you're taking a bunch of supplements, you don't have that pill fatigue that so many people talk about. I'm traveling a lot right now for our corporate clients, and that means shifting time zones and schedules. That's when consistency really helps. The AG1 travel packs, they've been a game changer for me. I throw a few in my bag and I don't have to think twice about it. I'm giving my body what it needs to keep showing up for work for the people I care about, for the long game, really. Visit drinkag1.com findingmastery to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 free in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. That's a $72 value for free. Again, that's drinkag1.com/finding mastery I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to switch on my mind to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my morning. That's always in my control. That's always in your control, too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business and the arts are using. And the best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to findingmastery.com morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to findingmastery.commorning to get your morning mindset routine. And so now take that back to your kind of link to dogmatism and maybe gurus and religion.

[Sam Harris]

So when you're talking about the problem of authority, I mean so much. We're living in a moment now where there's a lot of skepticism around expertise and the nature of authority and just what's authority good for? Everyone has assimilated this idea that an argument from Authority is just on its face, illegitimate. You can't say this is true because Einstein said so. I mean, that's not an argument. That's all true. And yet it is also true that expertise is a thing, talent is a thing. Not all opinions are equally valid or likely to be valid. It is the difference between someone who knows more than virtually anyone about this thing and someone who knows nothing about it is enormous. And it's not actually. I mean, despite what I just said about the availability of AI, this disparity between knowledge and ignorance is not going away. And certainly where being in touch with the facts matters, this disparity really matters. And we really should care when people are lying or bullshitting or just faking it. And we really should want institutions that preserve knowledge and create systems of incentives where error correction is happening as efficiently as possible. I mean, there are very few places where we do this well, science is one of those places. We don't do it perfectly. There is such a thing as scientific fraud and scientific self deception and bad incentives and the politicization of science and all of that. But the cure for all of that is more science and better science and real science. It's not some other modality coming in to purify science. I mean, we understand what scientific integrity is and we understand its counterfeits. And crucially, within science, you have a kind of adversarial relationship set up among scientists where scientists can win points for defragging other scientific efforts and spotting scientific errors. And one thing is totally unique in science is that your reputation can improve by spotting your own errors. You win points for proving yourself wrong in science because you're committed to the

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

body of knowledge as opposed to your ego and identity.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, and again, that can be hard. 1 and you can find individual scientists who are holding on to some doom theory long past the point where it's obvious to others. But still, it is a culture of error detection and error correction unlike any other we have. And the antithesis of that is religion, organized religion. I mean, religion is the only part of culture where dogma is actually a good word. I mean, dogma is a Catholic word, but dogma is not a pejorative word in Catholicism. It is just these are the things you believe because the Church says it's true, the Pope says it's true. This is not something you can inspect or reason about or pressure test. This is just true. The dogma of the transubstantiation of the Eucharist at the Mass is true. And if you don't accept it you're not a Catholic

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

and you should accept it because we told you so. And it's based on the practices that were coinciding with the book.

[Sam Harris]

And the fate of your eternal soul and the souls of your children rests on you accepting this. Right? So the stakes are enormously high and the culture is telling you certain things inconveniently. The most important things have to be accepted on faith. And there's no rational argument. People will try to give you rational arguments and they'll try to give you data that support this. But when rational argument breaks down and the data are unavailable, these are the things you have to believe. And the fate of your eternal soul depends on it. And unfortunately, Christianity is not the only game in town. We've got Islam over here and Judaism over here and Hinduism over here and a bunch of other religions that are vying in this competition. Each. This is the quintessence of a zero sum competition where each claims to be perfectly right and all the others are irredeemably wrong. And again, the stakes are enormously high. Right? This is not just for the fate of your life in this world or the fate of the world. We're talking about eternity here when you're talking about most religions. So on September 11, we had people flying planes into our buildings based on what they believed about the divine origin of a specific book and the kind of cosmic moral war they were in with unbelievers, et cetera. So I've spent a lot of my time seeing the downside of religious dogmatism and sectarianism, but none of this is to dispute that there is a there, there, there's a baby in the bathwater we should want to save. Which is more fundamental than these accidents of culture and geography that separate us. There's a possibility of discovering that the depths of human well being and spirituality and ethics and the relationship between those three things, unconditional love, say Christ like love, or Buddha like wisdom. There is something to discover about all of that. But it's deeper than culture, it's deeper than, certainly deeper than Christianity over here versus Buddhism over here in the same way that science is deeper. So it's true to say that the Christians essentially invented physics. Everything we take to be real physics emerged in the west and they were 99 times out of 100 it was a Christian like Isaac Newton doing the work. So you could say, well, the Christians gave us physics.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Wasn't Newton, it wasn't Newton. Was it Galileo who was strung up?

[Sam Harris]

He wasn't strung up. The Inquisition Yeah, he was under house arrest.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I mean, so you have this breakthrough?

[Sam Harris]

No, there was clearly a tension between religious dogmatism and science there at the foundation of science. But you could say just contingently that Christian culture gave rise to what we now call physics. But physics is so obviously different and deeper than Christian culture and has no relationship to it. I mean, for physics to be real, the real physics works the same in Beijing as it does in Paris, as it does in, in Sydney. And for someone to talk about Christian physics or American physics, that's tantamount to just confessing that you don't know what physics is. And so it is with biology or computer science or any other area where we're getting at ground anything like ground truth with respect to facts. And my argument is it's also true with spirituality and ethics and the deepest experiences human beings have.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Really well put. And I'll go back to a story and then I have a follow on question is that just to relate to what you're saying about the shared principles across religions. It was my first entry, intro class to world religions. Again, back to that freshman sophomore year in college, and I had this moment. We'd studied all of them, all 11 world religions at that point. And there is an imaginary line between when a cult becomes a religion that I will want to talk to you about. And so I had this moment. Professor says, you know, great, great semester, da, da, da, you know, let's just spend this last class just talking, raised my hand, I stood up and I said, God, I love this, this is great. I said, you know, these three principles from Buddhism and those, these two principles from whatever and you know, Zoroastrianism, like, I'm a little confused by that one still. But Sikhism, oh, I mean this, this ability to like do no harm and just, you know, and Christianity over here. Like, I go, I think I want them all. Like, I really like, I love, I want them all. And so the professor clapped back, he goes, just to be clear, Mr. Gervais, you think that you are possibly smarter than Buddha, Confucia, Jesus, all combined. And I was like, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. But there's a through line here and I haven't lost that, that sense of wonder and awe about the through line of all of them. And I really appreciate the social practice, social meaning, large groups in this moment, large group practice that religions offer people to be more intentional, to be more connected, to be more aware, to be more Christlike, meaning to have more kindness, empty, more Buddha, like Loving kindness, whatever it might be. I love the intention, but I'm afraid that it's based on fear and control. I'm afraid it's based on manipulation. I'm afraid it's based on convenience of power. I was taught by Jesuits. This is my undergrad taught by Jesuits. And Jesuits are like the academicians of Catholicism. And one professor, this is a different professor, he says to me, Mike is in front of the, in a lecture hall. I am what you would consider an off access thinker. Like I cult proof is another way. Like I like to see it just a little bit differently than what the mainstream is doing, right. And so he picked on me and he goes, what's this thing about eating fish on Fridays during Lent? I said, oh, I think it's about this, you know, this kind of moment of reverence, you know, just the disrupt the pattern, a little bit of daily living to be thoughtful about the sacrifices that came before. He goes, right, how about the bishop that owned the wharf, that owed money to the wharf? And he looked at me like, you stupid little kid. You know, like you don't really know what's up here. You have totally. And I was like, is that real? And he looked at me again. He goes, I don't know. But it's not written anywhere. Like think about how the world works. And I was like, damn. So that sent me down another path which is like to really understand the context of things written. And I really like that idea. And so when I think you'll, you'll maybe remember the book. Have you studied all world religions?

[Sam Harris]

Many, Many, yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So I'll pick on the Old Testament for just a minute. I can pick on a lot of them together. This might be fun to pick the eyes out of some of the language in it, but not to just go after the Old Testament. And some would call the Testament. But I don't know, how do you wrestle with. You're supposed to sell slaves off at six years.

[Sam Harris]

This is just how there's no way around this really. But most Christians and Jews and Muslims don't, don't want to admit this because it is so destructive of their kind of basic life project. The claim is that there are certain books that were not produced by human beings. They were revealed by the creator of the universe. And the reason to believe that on

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

this is inspired by.

[Sam Harris]

Inspired by. Or they're inerrant or they're infallible. They're infallible. There's kind of a spectrum of, of commitment there. I mean some things have to be Interpreted metaphorically or allegorically or some people are completely literal with respect to everything. This changes a little bit. I mean, what it means to be a fundamentalist in a Christian context changes a little bit when you're talking about Islam. Judaism changes the story a little bit. Because Judaism isn't so much about believing anything super committal about what happens after death. And it's even, you know, it's quite possible to run into Jews who are very committed to their Judaism, but they don't even believe in God. And so, I mean, there's kind of, there's some marginalia there that you need. But leaving that aside, the basic claim is that God occasionally writes books, right? He doesn't shoot movies, he doesn't burn CDs, he doesn't write symphonies, but he did somewhere around 1400 years ago if you were Muhammad, or 2000 years ago if you're Jesus, or 3000 years ago if you're Abraham. God was in the business of writing or dictating or otherwise inspiring books. And there's a problem with this one is that it is on its face, a kind of ridiculous notion. But it becomes especially so when, when you look at the contents of the books and compare them to everything else human beings have produced. So when you ask yourself just how good a book could be if it were actually authored by an omniscient being at any moment in human history, and you compare that, the book you have in your mind to the Bible, any part of the Bible, even the best parts of the Bible, what you recognize is that there's no trace in the Bible of omniscience. I mean, there's not a single sentence in the Bible that could not have been written by a person of the period in which that text first appeared. And the first thing you would do if you were an omniscient author who wanted to inspire faith in some portion of humanity that this really was a book unlike any other book. The first thing you would do is you'd put something in there that could not have been written by a goatherd of the period, right? However literate or articulate. So what you find the thing you should find and you don't find. I mean, you and I could write a book or a page of a book in five minutes that if we send it back 2,000 years, would confound the best minds of the period, but they would immediately recognize that this was a supernatural communication. In this case, it would be a communication from the future, but we would just give them some mathematics or some Science that was so useful and made contact with what they knew, but was onward, leading in a way that they couldn't understand, but they knew was interesting. And if God exists and writes books, he could easily have given us a book that even now, having been in the presence of it for. For 2,000 years, we would still be struggling to decode the wealth of information and insight it had. I mean, just again, just imagine what the people, you know, should we not screw everything up and we continue to make progress? The people from 200 years, from our descendants in the future, could tell us about what is real and about what is possible technologically or in any other way. It would be basically indistinguishable from a supernatural communication for us. So there's nothing like that in the books. But what there is in the books are obvious moral errors that embarrass us even now. And you just pointed to one. I mean, on balance, these books recommend slavery. They give you a little. A few niceties about how to keep slaves and don't beat your slaves and don't knock their eyes out, and if you do, here's the recompense and blah, blah, blah. But what they don't do is tell us in any kind of straightforward way the thing they really must tell us to be morally wise in the 21st century, which is slavery is an abomination. You should not own people and treat them like farm equipment. You should not be raping people who you imagine are your property. All of this is awful. And this is something that every culture, in order to be ethical, should put behind it. So that's very clear to everyone now, barring a few people who are trying to live by the literal edicts of these texts. Slavery was just rebooted in Afghanistan, I just read, in the last few weeks. And when the Islamic State got running in Syria and Iraq, they rebooted Islamic chattel slavery. And there were slave markets, and there were people dropping out of medical school in London to go join the Caliphate and take Yazidi women as sex slaves. And they bragged about it on Twitter. And it was just a perfect jewel of awfulness that everyone could inspect. But this is what you couldn't say at that moment is that these people were perverting the true teachings of their religion, because they weren't. I mean, slavery is right there in the source code of the religion, and that's a problem, and it's an embarrassment to every person who would argue that these books are perfect because they're so obviously not perfect. That doesn't mean that there's nothing interesting in the communications of someone like Jesus or Muhammad or anyone else, any other patriarch or matriarch. It doesn't mean that there aren't deeper possibilities in human life that we should be desperately interested in exploring. I think there are and we should. But all we have is human conversation by which to organize our exploration here. And the choice for me is you can either have a 21st century conversation with all the tools available, including the best parts of scripture. I mean, you can take Jesus in half his moods from the New Testament and it's some of the wisest stuff ever said. You can take the Golden Rule, you can take Shakespeare, you can take Socrates, you can take Eastern wisdom. We should be living in the context of a conversation where the best ideas win. What organized religion forces us to do is to say, no, no, you need to be anchored to a conversation that happened in the seventh century. And you need to have that conversation verbatim if you're a Muslim, or in the first century A.D. if you're a Christian, or 700 to 1500 years before that if you're a Jew. And there's no reason to do that.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, I really appreciate that piece. It is confusing because I grew up thinking about it from a formative age, well exposed to the fears if not getting this belief system right.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And then at some point, as a young mind, I was like, wait, hold on. And now as an adult, I'm like, now I love. I think the Trinity is really magical. I think that idea of spirit, the human, that's a. Use my language, just a total badass. The Holy Spirit, meaning this animation of maybe loving kindness or whatever is mystical. And then the idea that there's something bigger, broader. I love that I really now, all the things that you just mentioned caused me great problem. Any organization that hides pedophiles should be disbanded, full stop.

[Sam Harris]

Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And so because of a few of the denominations, Catholicism in particular, that has a long standing practice of that I cannot be down with. And so I know that that's polarizing for people in our community that, you know, have found great value in that faith practice. And I'm happy for that, you know, for you. I just have great trouble with it. So that's the position I'm in right now, especially in light of Epstein and everything else. I'm like really clear about it. That being said, before we go to cult, the imaginary line between cult and religion, can you, can you go to gurus for a minute and just talk about your take on Gurus, because I know you've studied under many and Jesus was a guru at a point, and so was Buddha. And, and yeah, well, I mean, so

[Sam Harris]

the Hindu concept of a guru, the Sanskrit term guru just means teacher. Right? So you can have a guru who's just teaching you how to play the sitar, or you can have a guru who's teaching you meditation and leading you to enlightenment. Or at least that's the claim. It really just means teacher. But in, in the limit, it's a teacher who's imagined to be infallibly wise, at least. Again, here we're talking about what are the implications of acknowledging that expertise is a thing and that authority is a thing, and yet human imperfection is also obvious and also unavoidable. So what does it mean for someone to be enlightened? Let's say there is a there there. Let's just say it's possible to actually complete the project of recognizing the full promise of meditation. You can not merely recognize the illusion of the self, but fully transcend that illusion so that you're never taken in by it again. And be stable, and be stable in that recognition. So there's an image in Tibetan Buddhism in the Dzogchen teachings, talking about the way thoughts appear at different stages of, of enlightenment and at the ultimate stage. This is one of my favorite analogies. It said that thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal, so just imagine what that's like. So the thieves come storming into a house, but there's literally nothing to steal. There's just no implication of their thievery. Nothing's at stake. So just imagine having a mind where whatever thoughts arose, their mind is completely imperturbable because it doesn't matter if it's a thought of shame or the end of the world or what. It's like there's an ocean of tranquility because thoughts can't get a hold of anything. So let's just say that's an intelligible goal and it's achievable and there are people who can achieve it or have achieved it. All right, so then what's rational to believe about such a person? Well, some people, I mean certainly within a Buddhist context would imagine that by dint of that stability in just non dual awareness, that person's going to have all kinds of magic powers. Right. And they'll be able to read minds and they'll be able to predict the future. Yeah, they'll be effectively omniscient. Right. The Buddha is imagined by his devotees to have been omniscient. And in Buddhism, they distinguish different degrees of enlightenment. And there can be Buddhahood which entails something like omniscience, whereas there can be Arhant ship, or various degrees of being a bodhisattva, where you can be fully enlightened with respect to your personal freedom and the sense of self, but you don't have all the magic powers necessarily of a Buddha. Now, I'm open to the evidence of magic powers. Anyone who wants to prove that they've got the power of telepathy or anything else to any degree, I'm open to seeing that experiment run. I would be willing to fund that experiment.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Me too. We should do it together.

[Sam Harris]

And it would be the easiest experiment. So it is a glaring dog that didn't bark the fact that no one has walked into a lab at Harvard or Stanford or MIT and demonstrated their comprehensive powers of psychic ability, because it would be among the easiest things to verify that could ever be tested.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

But There was one 2,000 years ago and 2,500 years ago and maybe others. Yeah.

[Sam Harris]

And also what's interesting is that there are all kinds of gurus who claim these powers and whose devotees think they had these powers.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Currently.

[Sam Harris]

Currently. I mean, it's like. Or very recently, like, Sathya Sai Baba was a very popular guru in India. He had tens of thousands of devotees. Many of them were Western. You can see some of his miracles on YouTube. He's to the eye of anyone looking closely. He was clearly like kind of a decent amateur, but not very good stage magician who was manifesting amulets and trinkets by kind of grabbing them under some object that maybe it's completely shoddy. Anyway, you can see all that on YouTube. But to the true believers, he was reading minds and doing everything. What's interesting is that the people who think that Jesus performed miracles are fundamentally uninterested in the testimony that's testifying to miracles happening just a short plane flight away from where they are right now by some other spiritual teacher whose miracles are far more credible than the miracles of Jesus. Because what we're being asked to believe is, on the one hand, these miracles happening in the year 2015, say, in a modern context where you have lots of people who are to some degree scientifically trained and have a 21st century sense of evidentiary demands on any kind of claim, and yet these claims of miracles are still surviving those sort of basic tests of common sense among Western educated people. You get Germans and, and Brits and Americans by the hundreds and even thousands will say, yeah, he did something there that was interesting. I can't say that wasn't a miracle. That testimony exists now fundamentally uninteresting to virtually any believing Christian. But no, the same claims in a pre scientific context among people who didn't have even the shadow of a scientific education. I mean science just simply did not exist as a discipline 2000 years ago and about which we don't even have contemporary testimony. We're talking about testimony that came at the earliest point 35 years after the death of Jesus. Just imagine, imagine. Now you and I start talking about the miracles of somebody who died 35 years ago. We didn't meet him, but we met someone who met someone who met someone who met him. And now we're talking, now we're sure that these miracles happened, but we're not going to get on an airplane. The miracles of Satya Sai Baba did not even merit an hour on cable television. Just at a glance you can discount the testimony of thousands of people. It's all embarrassing. There's no way it happened. And yet somehow this shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a claim that's generations hence is worth organizing all of our lives around until the end of the world. That should at the very least be suspect to people. And so it is, I mean these head to head comparisons about the things we easily discount in the modern world and yet somehow become credible when you cast them back into deep history. This actually gets to how we differentiate cults from religions. I mean a cult is, I mean there's no hard and fast definition here, but the hallmarks of a cult versus a religion tend to be both in just numbers of adherents, right? Like a smaller group of people and also just the recency of its emergence. Right? So a cult that is 500 years old that's got a million people associated with it or a billion people associated with it, well that's a religion. That's one of the great quote, great world religions. A cult that, a religion that is just a little too recent to not be more embarrassing than normal. I mean I would put Mormonism in this category. Like Mormonism is basically. I mean it's treated as a religion generally speaking in America, but most people who are not Mormon sort of view it as a cult because we just know too much about Joseph Smith. I mean like he's. His obviously human failings are just, we have the contemporaneous testimony, we know what he did on any given day historically. Right. And we know that he's like we know he was making up new prints, like, just because he wanted to sleep with the wives of his followers, he was adding to the canon in real time to justify his misbehavior. And so it's telling that you can. One of the greatest introductions to Mormonism is like the south park episode on Mormonism. It's mortifying if you're a Mormon, but it really does shine a light on the cultic embarrassment of that whole project, as opposed to the grandfathered in religious respectability of it because we just don't know enough about it. But more cultic still is something like Scientology, where it's like, literally you can look at L. Ron Hubbard's driver's license and you can see video of him just obviously confabulating about what's going on in different constellations and star systems. And I mean, he could sit with his. Maybe you've seen Going Clear, the Alice Gibney documentary based on Lawrence Wright's book on Scientology. Absolutely scandalizing. With respect to what his devotees believed in his prep, what he could say that would pass the test of credibility among Western educated, presumably psychologically normal people. I mean, he would sit there with his flock and he would point up at the night sky and he'd say, oh, you see that star there? Okay, that star around that star, there's a galactic overlord named Jivu, and he's working with a. And he would just freestyle. And people believed it. It's just completely incredible. And yet there you can see how a cult is born. And this is a cult that has a lot of subscribers and a lot of resources. And a thousand years from now, maybe it's going to be a religion, but right now it's a cult. And then of course, they're less. Less credible cult still. I'm sure there's a cult started two weeks ago in a neighborhood spinning distance from here. And it's just somebody in his backyard making incredible claims about what he knows and how he knows it. But the difficulty here in sorting all this out is again, there is a very deep well of truth here that we are interested in and are right to be interested in, should want to explore, which is just how possible is it to be free in this life? I mean, just how much suffering can be overcome? And what is there to discover about the nature of the mind in each moment? And what disciplines of attention are useful in that discovery? And what is a rational belief system around these experiences? I mean, just what does it mean if you're sitting in church or looking at the Sunset or at the seashore, wherever you are, and you suddenly feel a fundamental loss of your separate sense of subjectivity and a fusion with all that exists. I mean, it's just like there's no distance between you and the universe and you're overcome by a feeling of love for all sentient beings and the tears stream down your face and all of a sudden, within seconds you recognize this is the most important experience you've ever had. What is how? And then you lose it. Right then it's just you sitting there again, hoping to get back there somehow. What is rational to believe about that right now? If you're a Christian, you'll think, okay, well this was the descent of the Holy Spirit and this was the grace of God, and you'll have some things to pull off the shelf that are again dogmas. But the thing you need to notice if you're being rational is that Christians have that experience and Muslims and Hindus and Jews and atheists like me have that experience. So it can't be a matter of the specific sectarian language that best captures all of that. I mean, this is not a data point in favor of Christianity if you have this experience, because again, a Hindu can have that exact experience and have his way of talking about it. And Hinduism looks nothing like Christianity, even though it subsumes Christianity by calling Jesus an avatar of Vishnu, which is just sort of a clever move that Hindus can always play. They can just always add one more person to their pantheon. But what I'm arguing is that clearly we want a deeper way of talking about all of this that is non sectarian and not politically divisive and that allows us to use the best ideas available.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I like that a lot. You've got two hinge ideas. You tell me which one you want to pick up on. One is the difference between suffering and pain, and the other hinge idea is identifying with thoughts and observing thoughts. Which one would you like to pick up first? Because I think the second one is a little bit more illusory for many. And then the first one is like maybe more appetizing, like what is the difference and how am I better to have less suffering, if you will?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I think the second one explains the first.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right.

[Sam Harris]

If you're going to look at if you're suffering, if you're feeling regret or anxiety or despair or, or anger or whatever the mental state is that is getting flagged as negative, something you want to get rid of.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Did you just hesitate before negative because you didn't want to do the binary bit that there's good and bad, that there's positive and negative?

[Sam Harris]

No, I mean, I don't think so. No, it's just. And we can talk about whether these classically negative emotions are something we really, truly want to get rid of, right? I mean, I think that we can be skeptical about that. But what does seem clear to me is that you don't want to stay in them for very long. So if something makes you angry or impatient or afraid, for me, that's a salient signal that there's something in the environment or in your life or in your body or in a social situation that's worth paying attention to. Now, you might have misunderstood what's happening, but in any case, there's increased salience. And when you look at what you know, the brain structures that begin to get involved in any experiential change of that kind, like the amygdala, it's much more a story of salience than it is of positive versus negative emotion. It's just something that's just gotten your attention and perhaps should. But then the question is, how long do you want to stay angry for, or impatient for, or sad for? How long is that negative state useful? And 99 times out of 100, the answer to that is not long at all. You want to solve whatever the problem is. You want to be in a different frame of mind. You want to be more open and equanimous and balanced in your interaction with another person or in just your efforts to put out a fire of whatever kind in your life. I mean, to be panicked is almost never ideal.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Just sub panic for like 16 hours a day. Yeah, it's not ideal, no.

[Sam Harris]

But many of us live our lives as though they were one long emergency. And that is a story of thinking every moment of the day and not knowing that you're thinking. I mean, you're having a conversation with yourself. You're forming images about the past and the future. You're rehearsing conversations that you've had or that you might have. And our minds have this strange property where we never get bored of the story we've told ourselves a hundred times, even that day, we'll tell it again to ourselves, even if it's a negative story. And if you just imagine what it would be like to have your thoughts broadcast on a speaker so that other people could hear them, other people would hear how you're just perseverating on the same thing again for the hundredth time in that day. And it's the most boring Monologue in the world. And yet somehow we don't. In the privacy of our own minds, we don't even notice how strangely repetitive all this is.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You know, I think there's two parts to that one. I want to tell you a story that I think will lead to the second part is. So I was struggling. It was my freshman year in college, and I was just going through a lot. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back, I was really struggling through about. Of anxiety. But I didn't have words for it. I didn't know what that was.

[Sam Harris]

Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's for those people, not for me. It was definitely something that, you know, I was struggling with. I found a professor in psychology to be very warm. And so we're going to class. And I was just intrigued by how he thought going to class. And I said, hey, doc, you got a minute? He says, yeah. You going to class? I said, yeah. He goes, walk with me. And he noticed that, like, there was. There's a heaviness to me. And he said, what's on your mind? And I said, well. And I started telling him a story about what was bothering me. And I could recount almost word for word that I shared with him. Not because I remember this moment, I remember that moment of it. I remember the next moment in great detail. But it's because I practiced that flipping story so many times. He recognized that I was in kind of mid stride of my story, and it was well rehearsed. And he stopped and he interrupted the conversation, which I didn't realize was a good cognitive behavioral tactic. Okay. So he interrupted me midstream, not allowing me to rehearse it again, creating an interruption. And it was rude. He was very rude when he did it. I had no idea what he was doing, and he just stopped. And he looked at me, said, look, I need you to figure something out. When someone knocks on your door, do you have to answer it?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I was kind of befuddled. And my eyes opened up, like. And he walked away. And I was like, man, these psychology people are weird. And so what he did in that moment is that he radically changed the loop that I was in. And the reason I think I was in the loop, this is the second part of the story, is because I loved the fast. I was fascinated with the drama of the story. It was me being not the victim, but the one that was trying to solve the things. All the things that could go wrong. Right. So I was both victim and hero in my own story. And so, like, wild in My own head. But I. It was so lifelike. When I tell a story, I can see it. Only there's. There is about 5 to 7% of people that cannot see visual images. I don't know if you're aware of

[Sam Harris]

that, but yeah, there's obviously a range of abilities there. I mean, some people have very faint images, and some people can conjure crystal clear images. So it's.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. And some people have zero capability to see. Like, if you. If I say, you know, hold the image of an orange in your. In your mind, and they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, like they literally. It's not a skill. It's that they don't have the ability. And so anyways, it was so vivid in my mind that it was one of the. I don't know, I just love the stories. And so it was super vivid. So I do think that that's one of the loops that we need to solve. I digress a little bit to get to your point about suffering and pain. So I think your narrative here on suffering is that if you're in the throes of something that is, oh, let's call it prickly, there's emotions that are scratchy, if you will. You actually have the ability to navigate through that with speed. You actually also have the ability to mitigate whether you are going to kind of fall into that scratchy experience. Because the way you frame the experience is a capability. And how quickly you move through the scratchy emotion is a capability.

[Sam Harris]

Well, I would say one way I would reframe it for people is that emotions are essentially covert behaviors. I mean, there's something you're doing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You are seeing them as behaviors.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It's a physiological experience.

[Sam Harris]

To be angry requires that you keep doing something. It's almost like you're pinching yourself to stay angry. Yeah. And to worry. I mean, you're pinching yourself, and now you're wondering why you're so uncomfortable, but you're still pinching yourself. But in the case of an emotion like anger, you don't even realize you have a hand, much less what it's doing. Right. Like, you're just. All of this is invisible to you. So on some level, mindfulness or meditation is a way of becoming aware of the mechanics of mental suffering. And the most basic level, the mechanics are you're tending to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And each new thought arises and seems to just become what you are. It feels like you. It's like, so if I'm. If People are listening to us now, and they might think, what is he talking about? Thinking? Without knowing that I'm thinking. I know that I'm thinking. But that's a thought that is arising uninspected. And it just feels like self. That voice in your mind feels like what you are subjectively. But mindfulness is a way of dropping back prior to that and noticing these bits of language and imagery that just arise on their own in this open space of awareness. And to break that connection, to break that spell of just mere identification with each next thought allows you to, in the ultimate case, allows you to just let a thought of whatever its contents. It could just be the most awful thought, just a thought that would otherwise humiliate you. But the moment you just notice it as an appearance in consciousness, it can arise and pass away and have no psychological implication. I mean, it could just be no more so than somebody else's thought. Your speech doesn't modify my sense of myself in the way that my inner speech does. But it's totally possible to just hear your own inner speech as just more noise. And that becomes important when you're trying to. To free yourself from again, I call it a classically negative emotion like anger. The moment you notice the thoughts that are keeping you angry just kind of arise and pass away and become willing to just feel the raw physiology of anger. I mean, how is it that you know that you're angry as opposed to excited or happy? Well, it's got this sort of physiological signature in your body. I mean, you feel a certain way, you feel a certain sense of energy in your face or your chest or somewhere you're feeling something. Feel that. This is side note to resolve some confusion here. Many people worry that meditation or mindfulness is a way of kind of suppressing emotion or just not feeling it or getting away from it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Unbothered is the ability is the state of not caring, which is not the case.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, but to the contrary, in this case, what you're letting yourself do is truly feel like, feel the anger completely. Like, just let yourself be incandescent with anger, but just notice the difference between the raw physiology of it and your thoughts about it. And just notice all of this arise and change and pass away. And if you're willing to do that, what you discover is that an emotion like anger has a very short half life. I mean, it's just impossible to stay angry for more than. I mean, it's on the order of seconds or tens of seconds. It's not minutes, certainly not hours. And it's not days and weeks, which can be somebody's experience when they're not noticing this connection between their thoughts about why they have every right to be angry, why they should be angry, why that person was a total jerk. This is what they should have said, could have said. Break your connection to that automaticity of just thinking and rehearsing and perseverating on. On your life and the situation you think you're in. Let all of that arise and pass away and just come back to the raw emotion. The raw emotion is falling away from you in every present second. You couldn't hold onto it if you wanted to. I mean, the only way to hold onto it, the only way to persist in anger is to suddenly be captured again by that thought about that dumb thing that she said that I can't believe. How the fuck does she think you're that voice? You become that voice, but there's space around that voice. There's this condition of awareness in which that voice and the physiology of anger are both appearing. And if you keep dropping back and just be the kind of the screen on which the movie is being played, there's real freedom in that. And in the most radical sense, the freedom can be enjoyed even before, before the physiology changes. You're not actually.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Before the anger changes.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, before the anything has changed at the level of the contents of awareness. You're just the moment you notice that there's this prior that you are this prior condition. I mean you are just the space in which these thoughts are appearing and these energy changes in the body are appearing. That recognition can be a radical position of freedom Even before the energy changes in your body. I mean even before you could say your body is relaxed. I mean you could make your body as tense as you want it to be. I mean, you could just make yourself as uncomfortable and as uptight as possible. Just find this feeling that your calling I and just squeeze it like a fist, right? Just like make yourself try to be as uptight as possible, but just notice that there's space around that. There's just this openness of awareness in which everything is appearing, including this feeling of being a clenched fist. And that freedom is available even before you unclench anything. Even before you can truly be said to be relaxed. And this applies obviously to every situation in life in which people want to feel a psychological freedom that seems contingent upon changing experience. Like let's say you have to speak in front of a crowd. Public speaking is a very common fear. And it's a fear that I had growing up and it wasn't until I became a writer and just actually had to speak in public that I got over it. But it's a very common fear. And people are very familiar with this sense of you're going to step out on stage in front of a crowd and there's this kind of mismatch between who they are and who they want to be. They want to be relaxed, but they're feeling nothing but anxiety. They want to feel natural, but they're feeling. They're basically broadcasting their sense of their being in the world to the crowd. And they're seeing themselves through the eyes of others, right? And that's enhancing their sense of self consciousness. And there's this sense that the only way to feel free in that condition is to change all of that. Like, okay, your face has to feel different, your body has to feel different. You'll know you've arrived when the physiology is completely transformed. Actually, you can arrive much sooner than that. You can just recognize that there's space around all of that. And when you recognize that space, all of a sudden the physiology of anxiety doesn't have the psychological implication you thought it had in that moment, it becomes indistinguishable from excitement. Cognitive reframing would often acknowledge that excitement and anxiety are so close to one another. And really it's just the cognitive frame we put around them that makes them different. So there's kind of reframing techniques that are recommended there. But even more fundamental than that is that this energy in your body doesn't. It's like a pain in the knee or a feeling of indigestion or itchiness on the skin. None of those things are things that you map back onto yourself as a sense of who you are as a person. I mean, if you had to stand up in front of a crowd and speak and you had a pain in your knee, you wouldn't read from that negatively valenced sensation in the knee any lesson as to what sort of person you are. You wouldn't say, why am I sort of the person who feels a pain in his knee in front of all these people? Like, I don't want to be this guy, right? There's no connection between that unpleasant experience and your sense of the appropriateness of who you are in front of that crowd? And yet with anxiety, this sort of fluttering of energy in the chest and the face, it has a signature that we have used, we've learned to use to sort of deprecate ourself in some global way where it's like, why am I this kind of person? I'm so far from who I want to be in this moment because of this energy. And it's possible to totally break that spell. It has no lesson to teach you, apart from the fact, again, kind of a salience cue, which is in this case, you care. You care about this speech going well. You actually want something from this experience. Well, okay, there are ways to get what you want. And one fundamental way is to just break the spell of your identification with this kind of inner doom scrolling algorithm you've acquired where you're talking to yourself about how inadequate you are.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You know what I really appreciate is that you and I have very different paths in what we've studied and how we've studied. And you are speaking using different words to describe it in the same exact way that I think about people getting free. And so I'm nodding my head to everything. And I just want to kind of maybe point back to another example of this in my own life and other people's lives that I think they can relate first before I do. The example is that the cognitive reframing from anxiety to excitement, I think it's bs. I get it. I don't think it works. I can't fool myself. I know when I'm scared and I know when I'm excited. And if I say, oh, my body's just, I'm just mislabeling it. Like, no, I've actually labeled a lot of it in a way I've been over labeling something that I'm afraid of. My body is switched on as a response to the way I've been thinking. So I like the idea that I can change the way I'm thinking about my experience. I radically appreciate that. And I think that that is a radical act to be able to work with the contents of your thought. Okay, and I think you can also train them back to that in a minute. But then you came back around and you said, wait, you can actually say, oh, this is more descriptive. Oh, my body's switched on, my body's activated. Oh, it's because something important is about to happen. Do I want this level of activation now? I'm putting myself back in control. Do I want this level now? I'm still eating breakfast and I'm not going to go do my public speaking for four hours. Why don't we back it down? So it's more matter of fact than it is in that case than it is reframing it. But it is an alert system to me that I need to do some work on all of the thinking that led to my body switching on. If it really is nervousness, well, there's something that I'm over identifying with in my performance as me, which a performance based identity. Our community here at Fighting Mastery will recognize how problematic a performance based identity is. So I love all of what you just said and the example I wanted to give when you're talking about space is that if we were to watch a world class surfer, and you were also a world class surfer and I am a novice surfer, we would watch the surfer paddle, drop in and then do something at the bottom of the wave and then do this magnificent thing at the top of the wave and big water splashes everywhere. It's amazing. It's a turn. And the novice mind, I go, I have no idea how he or she did that. That's amazing. And then you say, well actually hold on, there's all these little moments before the moment and watch his backhand, watch his front hand, watch how he's up on his three, three toes on his back foot and releasing his big toe at the bottom of the. And you would be describing all the spaces in between. And in sport it looks like bang bang things happen. But when you talk to masters they're like no, no, there's all these frames in between that we're paying attention to that the novice isn't. And I think people that are truly mastery of self, there's all these slight little frames that precede thoughts, that interstitch between thoughts, that understand the intimate relationship between thoughts and the physiological experience, call it the emotion here. And that kind of bang bang experience is actually there's lots of space between it that you can insert and work with and almost be playful with. But for the unconditioned or the untrained mind, if you will, or unexamined mind, it feels very blurry, very messy, very like bang bang, if you will. Like it happens so fast, I'm just out of control. And so I just wanted to use that analogy for sport minded folks and see if you agree with what I just said.

[Sam Harris]

I think I would like to say something about the power of reframing. I get that as a technique it can feel powerless. Especially when you're having a big experience that just seems like you can't get any purchase on it just by changing your inner monologue. But people can recognize the power of framing an expectation that they're just experiencing on a day to day basis. When you think about the experience of working out in a gym, right, you're just like you go to the gym, let's say you're lifting heavy weights. And if you just check in with the physiology, the raw physiology of that experience and just what it is, what it feels like to be experiencing that kind of bodily stress, I think most people can recognize that if they were feeling that stress in some other context that wasn't benign, that hadn't been sought out as being positive.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

There you go.

[Sam Harris]

If you wake up in the middle of the night at 3am and you felt the same sensations you felt when you were putting yourself under £250, you'd call 911. Right. This is a medical emergency. And it might be precisely the same physiological experience. Like the level of stress, the level of just the sheer unpleasantness, raw unpleasantness of it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right.

[Sam Harris]

And so, I mean, one of the nice things about working out hard is that it can sort of inoculate you to a certain type of suffering. Like, it can give you more resilience in harder moments in life because you know what it's like to actually put yourself through stress on a daily basis. There is just the raw power of thought to just fundamentally change our sense of the desirability of an experience. I mean, I go into the gym wanting to feel that stress and loving it when I feel it. And in some other situation in life when it's not wanted, it could be analogous to being tortured. If someone imposed that stress on you and you didn't know what was going to happen next, in fact, what you thought was going to happen next was going to be worse and you're terrified, what you do in the gym is indistinguishable from torture.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I love this for two reasons. Because I actually think you're talking about framing, not reframing in this case, but because if I frame the experience like, oh, I want my heart to pound, I want that sweaty, clammy feeling. I want to have a shakiness in my body because I put my body under pounds of stress and I want to see how far I can actually go. Framing, that is really. It's awesome. But if you are framing that same experience and going to the gym like, oh, man, I don't get it. This is stupid. I don't really see the results. You're also. You're going to create another experience. I think we are saying the same thing in the framing reframing. And I would never argue that reframing is one of the most powerful tools in psychology.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. What I'm just arguing for is that urging People to notice. Is that the role of our conceptual.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's it.

[Sam Harris]

Understanding of what's happening moment to moment is overwhelmingly powerful for good or for ill. Right. And there is a degree of freedom to be discovered there just at that level. But the level that I'm advocating whenever I'm talking about mindfulness or meditation is yet more fundamental than that. It's not a matter of changing your thoughts about your experience. It's just noticing the raw data of experience. Moment to moment prior to thought. And thoughts themselves just become positive or negative thoughts. Good well framed thoughts or poorly framed thoughts, they all become just more phenomenon to notice.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. The hope that you have to be able to live a life more free, unbothered, decreasing suffering, more loving kindness, more empathy. It feels like a warm hug. Like that's exactly what I want more of for myself, for you, for loved ones, for the community is just that. And there are practices, there are principles. And to not be dogmatic, I think is refreshing to hear. Look, I really appreciate your approach when I said earlier at the top that there's some things that we differ on. It's the main thesis of atheism versus me being open to a deity. And I like how you put it, the universe. You're open to things being far stranger than you might imagine. So I've loved this conversation. You do incredible service to people who want to scrub logic and to get underneath and discern. And you're challenging people through your app and your reading or your book to be able to think deeply and to practice through meditation and other contemplative practices. So I just want to say thank you, this was really enjoyable. It's just kind of like a take home question for us. If we knew what, you know, how would we live just a little bit better life than we currently living now?

[Sam Harris]

Well, on some level I can ask that question of myself because I mean, the. When you're talking about the deepest wisdom

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

that

[Sam Harris]

we all can touch through meditation, it is a matter of continually forgetting it and rediscovering it. I mean, on some level you have to convince yourself of the thing, you know, 10,000 times for it to become the operating principle of your life and you're continually again in the limit. Maybe there's a way of stabilizing all of this and you're done. But until that moment arises, you're constantly rediscovering the most important thing. And there are different sides to this beautiful object. And some of it, I mean, some of it can emphasize just the impermanence of life. And the preciousness of it, like, you're never going to get this moment again. You're never going to get this conversation again. You're never going to get this day again. It's like, did you forget to hug your child when they went off to school? Did you miss that moment? Because that not coming back. And there's a last time you're going to pick up your child. At a certain point, there's going to be a person there who you just don't pick up because they're too big and you're not even going to remember the last time you picked them up. There are things that end that you don't even know they end. So impermanence, impermanence on its own is such a deep reflection that just purifies motives and purifies priorities. But there are so many other facets to this thing. Non duality or selflessness is another. But I would just say that even I'm on the receiving end of this answer because I'm continually getting lost in thought and being kind of submerged in the dreamscape of having some fictional priority for this. There's something I think I want that I'm going to be busy wanting it for the next minute and my life and my attention are totally trimmed down by this kind of delusion. And then there's just this moment of recognition of the self sufficiency of the present moment again and the gratitude to be able to have that recognition. So there's just, it's a constant. You're constantly waking up if you're practicing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And that's hence the name of your book, hence the name of your app, which well done on both. Really well done.

[Sam Harris]

Thank you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And your podcast, Making Sense. Really well done. Thank you for a breath of fresh air and I would say a non pessimistic framing.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, you got me there.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's great. All right, Sam, thank you so much for coming.

[Sam Harris]

Great to meet you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. Pleasure.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Podcast Announcer]

Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by four time Olympic gold medalist, nine time world champion and one of the fastest sprinters in history, Michael Johnson. Michael takes us inside the most intense moment in sport, the call room just before the race and shares how he learned to channel nerves, control his environment and prepare his mind to perform when the stakes are highest. He also reflects on how that same mindset helped him recover and rebuild after a more recent life changing stroke. Join us Wednesday, April 1st at 9am Pacific only on Finding Mastery.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

All right, thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community and if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Hunch over to findingmastery.com to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously and the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those [e-mail] sponsors and remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional, so seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode. Be well, think well, keep exploring. Come on.