← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
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- [00:01]
Tom Bilyeu
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Yes.
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- [01:01]
Tom Bilyeu
You are listening to Impact Theory.
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Sam Harris
Impact Theory. Impact Theory.
- [01:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Impact Theory.
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Sam Harris
Impact baby. Hey everybody.
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Tom Bilyeu
Welcome to Impact Theory.
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Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a neuroscientist philosopher and a five time New York Times best selling authority. His book the End of faith won the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction and spent an astonishing 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He has a degree in philosophy From Stanford, a PhD in neuroscience, and he's practiced meditation for more than 30 years, a combination that gives him a very unique perspective that has made him one of the most sought after thinkers on the planet. He's given multiple TED Talks with millions
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of views and his written works have
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been translated into more than 20 different languages. And additionally, he's written for some of the most prestigious publications around, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Annals of Neurology, to name but a few. A clear and rational voice almost without peer on some of today's most difficult subjects. When he speaks, thousands of people show up in real life and millions listen online. And his ideas have been discussed by some of the most visible and well respected outlets in the world, including Time, the New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, and countless others. He's also the host of the Webby Award winning podcast Making Sense which was named by Apple as one of the itunes best. So please help me in welcoming the man who has spent roughly two years in aggregated silent contemplation, one of the four horsemen of the non Apocalypse. Sam Harris.
- [02:47]
Sam Harris
What's up man?
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Tom Bilyeu
How are you doing? Welcome.
- [02:50]
Sam Harris
Thank you.
- [02:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Absolute pleasure to have you.
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Sam Harris
Yeah, pleasure to be here.
- [02:54]
Tom Bilyeu
I am really excited to dive into some of these subjects which I think you have just such a fascinating take on. And the thing that I've drawn the most wisdom from with you is what, and these are very much my words, how to live a good life. And that's where I want to start. And it'd be really interesting to hear your definition of like what kind of life and way of thinking should we be aiming for?
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Sam Harris
Yeah, well, it's a hard question because my notion of human well being is really open ended. I don't think we understand what the horizon is, if in fact there is one for kind of ultimate flourishing of conscious minds. We have a pretty good sense of what we don't want and are right not to want. We don't want to be terrorized and depressed and finding ourselves constantly in conflict with strangers, finding our aims frustrated. The generic situation we want to find ourselves in more and more is to effortlessly cooperate with creative and happy strangers, right? I mean, there's 7 billion of us. We need institutions and laws and norms and ways of thinking that take the friction out of pleasurable and non paranoid interaction with strangers. I mean, it's not just about having five or so close friends who have your back, right? I mean, clearly we're all on the same team on some basic level. And if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree, we'll have the world we currently have until it becomes unsustainable. Because we're in a situation now where I think it's reasonable to worry that our default state of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible aims of other groups and other people is unsustainable in the presence of more and more destructive technology. I think we have to get our act together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't yet.
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Tom Bilyeu
And when you think about that coming down to the personal level, do you think about people as having a North Star or a purpose that they should be pursuing? And to contextualize that that I'll say, because I always found myself wanting to ask people that. I ended up answering the question for myself. And so for me, the purpose of my life from my perspective is to see how much of my potential I can actuate. So how many skills can I acquire that have meaning and utility to me, that allow me to serve not only myself but others? And so that sense of pushing myself to always get better, to always improve, to show up every day and not think about whether I get something, cross some finish line, generate a certain amount of wealth or anything like that. But just do I sincerely approach the idea of bettering myself in a very specific direction based on what I want to accomplish in my life or not? And if I do that sincerely, then I say that the day or the life has been a victory. And if I don't do that, then to me, I'm pointed in the wrong direction. Do you have any sort of guiding light like that that, say, you would try to pass on to your children or that you yourself have for you?
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Sam Harris
Well, I think that's a good one, and I share it. But I can imagine other versions of having an aim which don't really totally overlap with that. Someone could decide, for instance, that they have a talent that is highly marketable, and what they want to do is make as much money as possible so that they can give a lot of it away to help people. I mean, money is just energy, right? If you are making billions of dollars and you're giving billions of dollars away to good causes, well, that on an effective altruism metric, that's much better than you going to Africa yourself and handing out food in a famine, right? You want to be bankrolling thousands of people to do that. And if you have a skill, if you're a great singer or whatever, and it may be a skill that you didn't spend a lot of time to acquire, so you don't have this whole mastery story that you have. And that actually resonates with me. So that would be a good life, provided you can extract the psychological satisfaction from it. Because most of what we experience in philanthropy is when it's telescopic in this way. When you're just signing a check, you're not necessarily connected to the good you're doing. And I can imagine someone doing immense good in the world by signing very large checks, but not actually internalizing the gratification of that. On some level, we have to be aware of the possibility of rowing in two boats simultaneously. There's what the effects are in the world of how we're living. So we want to have a good impact on others, but we actually want our conscious states of psychological pain and pleasure to be mapped in some rational way to the kinds of effects we're having. So you don't want to be a callous person who's just leaving devastated and unhappy people in your wake and taking pleasure in that. I Mean you're a psychopath if that's how you're tuned. But you also don't want to be a person who's doing a lot of good in the world, but not able to internalize the felt sense of your connectedness to others because you're too neurotic or you're too distracted or you're just not connecting with others.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting and I don't think I've ever heard anybody else talk about that notion of making sure that you're mapping what you're doing to be outwardly altruistic, to actually map to your own internal state of well being, if you will. And hearing the discussions that you've been around Islam and how beliefs and ideas can be really dangerous made me ask a question of how and basically I'll quickly summarize. So you've got people that they have a book and the book has ideas and things that they are meant to believe and then act in accordance with. And because of where they grew up or what their parents and the society around them taught them, they internalize those beliefs. And if we could through communicating our ideas well to them, get them to see something that caused more well being for other people that that would be a better way to move their belief system. So one do you believe that a belief system is malleable in that there's some element of, well you could choose this set of ideology or you could choose this. And I don't know if you would say that one of those is more true than the other. But certainly one may take us closer to well being than the other. And if you that belief systems are by their very nature malleable things, what would sort of be the belief system in just like a couple tenants that you could hand to somebody that you think would help them maximize their own well being as well as serve a greater good.
- [09:57]
Sam Harris
Speaking generically, I think having our beliefs map onto reality to some degree is obviously good because if they're not, you're just bumping into hard objects. If your map is completely wrong, you are bound to suffer. So we have to be in a situation where radical ignorance can't be bliss. So that's one principle. Now there could be a looseness of fit. There could be situations where being strictly right about what's true may be non optimal. It may be useful to have a slightly delusional self serving bias, right? They think you're coming off better than you are. It may give you more enthusiasm for your life, more confidence. But anything that's Too out of register is just delusion, right? And other people notice and other people treat you like somebody who's just not tracking in a reality. And so that's one principle. So I think we want our beliefs to be true in some basic sense, and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually, right? Because if you close yourself off, if you say, well, listen, I'm done, I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true, then again, when more data comes in, when something's surprising, when one of your intuitions proves to be faulty, if you can't error correct again, you're just going to fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world and what other people think is true as well. So really the only mechanism we have to do that is human conversation. We have to be open to having other people point out errors in our thinking and in the conversation we have with ourselves. We have to do likewise. We have to be continually open to the possibility that we might be wrong. And in fact, we're very likely to be wrong a lot of the time. And so then hence the virtue of getting educated and surrounding yourself with smart people and reading good books and just exposing yourself to the kinds of lessons that other people have learned over thousands of years and are learning in real time right now. And you can live vicariously through. You don't have to make all the errors that everyone has made around you, so you don't have to. It's like you can look at Lance Armstrong and say, okay, well, it's probably not a good idea to lie relentlessly about something and then try to punish the people who caught you in your lies and then get caught and have to wind up on Oprah apologizing, right? I mean, that's, you know, you can internalize that lesson and understand something about the ethics and reputational costs of lying. So given that conversation and an openness to the intrusions of other people's thinking is really the best game in town for understanding what reality is and how to navigate within it, then you can see how non optimal and ultimately dangerous dogmatism is. Dogmatism is just holding to an idea no matter what else comes into view. So there's nothing you can say to challenge. I'll talk to you about all this stuff. But over here, there's something that I care about, some proposition, some assertion that something is true that I care about so much, I'm so emotionally attached to it that not only is it non negotiable if you continue to push over here, I'm going to get angrier and angrier. I'm going to threaten you with violence. That is the default state of organized religion historically. And certain religions now have kind of relaxed their intolerance to a degree where the violence isn't explicit. But that is the. Not only is that the default of faith based religion, they have a way of thinking about dogmatism. I mean dogmatism is a good word in the context of religion. I mean, Christian dogma is not a derogatory term. They call it dogma for a reason, Right? Certainly the Catholics do. So this notion that you can believe something strongly without evidence, or certainly without good evidence or without evidence, that can survive pressure from outside. So the idea that wanting evidence is a perversion of your circumstance, right? So like, you know, you really, if you, if you buy this thing in the bag that you, that I haven't shown you, you are that, that redounds to your credit, right? It's just, it's one, it's not true because the experiential core of these religions, experiences like unconditional love, say those can be experienced. I mean it's not that everything in our religious literature is untrue, but there's nothing that has to be believed on insufficient evidence to be explored. And so what I recommend here is that we really adopt a scientific attitude everywhere. We don't partition our thinking about reality where we say, well here's the stuff over here where super important, but we can't think about it too rigorously. In fact, to think about it too rigorously is to corrupt it. And then over here we've got science and technology and engineers calculating whether a bridge is going to withstand the weight of the traffic on it. And there we can think rigorously. Don't tell me about rigor with respect to meaning and what's worth living for and what's worth dying for and what is love and compassion and well being, that has to be just. We have to be hostage to a conversation that our ancestors were having 2,000 years ago. And we have to imagine that certain of our books were dictated by the creator of the universe to organize all that. But over here, let's get it all dialed in because we really care about how our smartphones work, right? It makes no sense. It's trying to, trying to resolve that tension is something I've spent a lot of time on.
- [15:53]
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- [16:23]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting to me that that tension exists. And it makes me come back to, okay, why doesn't that tension exist in my own life? And the organizing principle that I use and I think a lot about, like, what would somebody pass on to their children? Now, I've decided not to have kids, so I will never get to answer this, but I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the organizing principles? You've referred to ideas as sort of the operating system of the mind. And that seems very apt to me. So what are the organizing principles that I would give somebody to think in a certain way? And one of the things I'm obsessed with, and I think I explained this so poorly, I don't see it light people's eyes up, and I'd love to figure out how to say it well, which is this. Skills have utility. Now, what I mean by that is learning architecture is interesting because it allows you to build a structure that could protect somebody. Allows you to build a structure that to really make it basic, like the one. I forget exactly what country it's in. But the seed vault, right? Like, you understand architecture well enough and how to ventilate things and all the things that seeds would need to, like, live for a very long time so that we could replant if we had to. Learning those skills had a purpose. And that purpose allows for something to happen. And so let's take Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which I know that you do Jiu jitsu, everything that you learn in Jiu Jitsu has a real world implication. And that real world implication is one, if you got into a fight, you'd probably be more likely to be able to successfully defend yourself. And that in and of itself is so profound as to be worth the time. Now, there's obviously all kinds of other benefits as well, but once people understand, okay, these skills have utility, then I need to be fiendish about increasing my skillset because it has this real world application. So the problem that I get into, where people are dogmatic about anything, whether it's religion or like I wrote this belief system, okay, it was the 25 things that I had to do to my mind in order to go from Being a good employee, which I always lovingly refer to as sort of a slave like mentality, I kept my head down, did as little work as possible, and avoided punishment at all costs. That's where I started. That's what my parents taught me to do and to get out of that and to become an entrepreneur. There were these very simple write downable things that I had to choose to believe and act in accordance with. And if you came to me and said, hey Tom, by the way, number 14 on your list doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make sense for this reason. I think you misunderstood something about your own journey. I'd be like, that's so rad. Because now you're giving me something that has more utility than the thing that I've used thus far. 1 why do you think that breaks down? What is it that people value more than that? Is there some internal thing? And then what process can people use to become more aware of, of what's guiding their decision making? Because I think a lot of people, I don't know if it's just at a feeling level, it's like a limbic thing or what.
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Sam Harris
Well, I think it's a framing problem because most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill. Well, being is a skill. Not suffering unnecessarily is a skill. Regulating noticing your emotional life and regulating negative emotion is a skill. So I have a meditation app and meditation is a skill. It's a very useful one. And I'm spending a lot of time teaching what's now referred to as mindfulness meditation. And the moment you begin practicing mindfulness, which is just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience, you're not adding anything to your experience. You're just noticing what it's like to be you moment to moment, but in a way that is not reactive. You're not grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away. You're just to make this concrete, let's say you have a fear of public speaking, right? So you're about to go out on stage and you feel anxiety. The usual. The default state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience is you're trying to figure is one to in advance worry about that experience. I mean, the anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have to do. Then once you feel the butterflies, you are at war with them, right? Your mind contracts around it. Your conversation with yourself is an unhappy one. It's like, why the fuck am I this person who just can't. Like, I see people do this all the time. They're relaxed, I'm unhappy, and you're talking to yourself. You're not noticing it because the thoughts just come up from behind you as fast as they can and they seem to be you. Right? You're identified with each thought that emerges in consciousness. And most people live their lives as though there's no alternative. We're not given a rule book for how to operate a human mind. Right. And there's no place in a normal education where it's even indicated that there's an alternative here. And so we kind of stumble out into adulthood more or less assuming that we have, we'll always have the minds we have and that really there's. The only thing we can do to really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content. We can read books, we can develop interests, but there's nothing at the sort of root level of our emotional and cognitive life that can change. And so mindfulness is a way of kind of dropping a little bit lower and realizing. So in this case, if you're feeling anxiety, there's actually a place from which you can just feel it, right? And be actually indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling. I mean, just notice that there's even an unpleasant sensation at first. You can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant. I mean, it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology that really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just the framing, it's just the story you're telling yourself. You know, if you felt these, these tingles and this slightly adrenalized response right before you're about to go on a roller coaster, that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster. You like that experience. But the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to walk out on stage, that's intolerable. So just dropping back and realizing the power of the framing. Again, this is a skill that is a fairly esoteric one. But now many people are learning it, the secret's out. And it has immense utility because then you can realize that the half life of negative emotions is incredibly short. I mean, one, you can actually be psychologically free even in their presence, right? Your freedom and your well being isn't even predicated on getting rid of the physiology. Right? It can still be there. But, but if you're not continually thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious, the Physiology dissipates very, very quickly. And that's true for anger. It's true for anything that is classically negative. And so to come back to your question, many of the things that people think they want out of life, they either think are, or many of the. The ways they're keeping score about how good their lives are or aren't, they're not seen as these are. Either this experience is being delivered to them either based on the skills they have or the skills they've never thought to acquire. Right. And, yeah, so that's one thing I would add to the picture of the usefulness of skills.
- [23:55]
Tom Bilyeu
I want to talk about the emotional control that you bring up. I think that's super powerful. When my wife and I were first married, my problem was I have a very slow fuse or a very long fuse. And so it takes a lot to get me angry. And that was actually a big complaint of hers. She'd be really annoyed. Something would happen. Someone would cut in front of us in line, and I wouldn't freak out. And she wanted me to freak out, and she wanted me to, like, just bask in how unjust it was. And she would really lament that. And it just seemed so strange to me. But then when I got mad, I would stay mad. And there were times I would stay mad. 8, 10, 12 hours, and I was working so much. At the beginning of our relationship, the only time that we really had together as husband and wife would be for part of a Saturday. And I would. Inevitably, she would say something, it would upset me, I would get pissed, and I would stay pissed the entire time. But then, as you said, once you stopped reinforcing it, which I would do, unfortunately, I'd be reinforcing, reinforcing it, reinforcing it. Then something would happen. It would change my neurochemistry. I'd forget, like, why was I so mad? And every single time I was like, why did I just waste that time being mad? So I end up writing myself this letter, and I gave it to my wife, and I said, read that to me the next time I get pissed off. And in the letter, I said, hey, me, it's me. I have no hidden agenda here as to why I want you to calm down, other than the fact that you know that if you end up being pissed for several hours, you're going to regret it every single time. And right now, I want you to laugh out loud. And for however long it takes, just laugh out loud. You know, studies show that you can't laugh out loud. And Remain pissed. And so I gave it to her. I got pissed. She read it. She only had to read it once. It was so profoundly transformational to see that just by laughing out loud, I couldn't stay angry. That it really helped me get control of my emotions so that I knew I can do what I'll call a state shift. I don't think I've ever heard you use that kind of language. But if I'm angry, I'm choosing to stay angry. Unfortunately, I hadn't found meditation at that point, so I had to sort of brute force my way to that. What can people do to learn to get control of their emotions?
- [26:02]
Sam Harris
Well, the first thing to realize is that they already have control. Virtually anyone watching this, I would expect, can do this under certain circumstances. So the one example I would have you recall, I'm sure this has happened to almost everyone. You're in some state like that. You're angry, you've just gotten triggered by something. But then the phone rings, right? And you're getting called by somebody who. This is not someone for you to process your anger with. This is like a business call or like you have to function right, and it actually perfectly interrupts your state. You actually can just reset and have the conversation and the physiology is dissipating very, very quickly there. Your attention is on something else and you're just having to function. Now, of course, if somebody, if it's a friend or your mother or somebody who you can complain to, well, then you'll jump on and you'll amplify this state because you'll have a reason to talk about it. So you can interrupt these states and simply put your attention on something else and then it dissipates.
- [27:06]
Tom Bilyeu
One thing that I'm really curious to know, you seem just freakishly educated on a whole lot of topics. What is your process for learning? How do you go about in taking data? How do you start? Do you pull threads? What thread do you pull first? If you do like, how do you really begin to educate yourself on any given topic?
- [27:26]
Sam Harris
Well, I don't really have. I mean, I take in a lot of information and I always have. So that's, you know, and not in necessarily an efficient or smart way. I mean, so I don't have, you know, life hacks that optimize me as a, a consumer of information. So you're like, you know, I know there are ways that are recommended to read a book so as to extract the actionable information as quickly as possible from it. I have never been an adopter. Of any of those ways. So, like, you know, and I mean, we're still. I basically read everything at the same speed. So, like, I read everything like a scripture. So if it's, you know, People magazine in a waiting room of a dentist's office, I'm reading that at the same speed that I'm reading, you know, a work of philosophy or neuroscience. And the big change of late, I mean, I guess this probably happened somewhere around 10 years ago, is that once I realized that there's functionally an infinite amount of information to consume, it's doubling in the sciences every three to five years. And there are literally thousands of good books that I will wish I had read, but I will never get around to reading. I've become a very fickle reader in the sense that I cut my losses very early. The sunk cost fallacy has completely disappeared for me. The idea that I've spent five hours or five days on this thing, so I better just finish it. That used to be my orientation with respect to reading books. Now I'll discard a book just on a whim because I know there's an infinite amount of stuff I want to read. I don't go into the table of contents and look at the structure of the book and then go to the index and then look at the topics, and then, I mean, I just start on page one and start reading. And then when I get bored, I stop, you know, and so that's, you know, do it. Do with what? Do with that life. Hack what you will. But I do continually. I mean, I'm either listening to audiobooks or podcasts or the news when I'm working out or commuting, or I'm just constantly taking in information fairly passively when I'm multitasking. So there's not. The one thing that I don't have a lot of in my life is music, because I can't write to music, certainly not music with lyrics. I can't podcast to music, obviously. And I've decided that there's so much that I'm interested in, there's so much that I want to know that basically I just hear music by accident now. I mean, I just like, if someone else is playing music or if I walk into a store, there's music associated with the film, it's getting in. But otherwise I'm just, you know, it's just a fire hose of information pointed at my head most of the time.
- [30:14]
Tom Bilyeu
I get that. So despite the perchance, haphazard way that you're reading, it does seem at least from the outside, that you are striving, I would say, pretty truly for excellence. Help me reconcile. So one of the things I struggled with, with meditation was it felt decidedly feminine. And in a way that, as somebody who I felt, I felt that certainly growing up, that I was far more on the feminine end of being a guy than anything else. And so for me, my journey certainly to being an entrepreneur was one of toughening up. And so anything that made me sort of feel that old school, sort of gentle way, I would push back on. And it's why I didn't meditate for a long time. But I see you doing Brazilian Jiu jitsu. You're somebody who obviously cares about martial arts and being able to fight and defend yourself. I've heard you talk very eloquently about violence. And clearly in your professional life, even just what you've done in the writing, let alone the lecturing, you've already achieved such massive success. Refuse to believe that there wasn't a just massive amount of energy behind that. So how do you think about meditation in that context? Is this like going to war with your mind and I'm going to come out the other side having faced demons and having won some sort of victory that allows me to perform at a higher level? Or am I totally missing all of this and it needs to be a letting go, a more peaceful, relaxed, sort of transient experience?
- [31:42]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, first, that's a very common association. I totally understand it. And it's presented in many ways where, yeah, under that framing, you can just feel the testosterone leaving your body. So, yeah, that's not my orientation. It is a lot like jiu jitsu for the mind. And it's a lot like. What's so beautiful about jiu jitsu in particular is that you can have this massive effect in the domain of violence while being relaxed. It is what Aikido advertises itself to be. But it's a much more, at least in my estimation, a much more effective version of that same underlying ethic where you can control someone and use as little violence as necessary and basically just use a superior knowledge of physics and leverage and position against them. So it's a very. It can be incredibly relaxed. And yet, given what the circumstance is, it can be a very high testosterone experience. It's not kind of quintessentially masculine thing to be doing, but you can internalize the same sort of structure. And that's largely what meditation is, because basically the default state is one of being attacked and ambushed all the time by your thoughts and by your reactivity and by you are being taken in by assumptions and illusions and not knowing you're in a fog. Not you personally, but one is. And even when you learn to meditate, you're in this fog most of the time. So the practice is one of continually breaking the spell. You were constantly on the mat, constantly finding yourself in a position of some surprising disadvantage, right? Like it's like all of a sudden there's a rear naked choke that's 3/4 applied, right? And you need an answer for that. And not knowing the answer is just synonymous with death, right? It's like you're just getting, you know, you're just. You'll be as miserable for as long as circumstances dictate in the absence of death.
- [34:07]
Tom Bilyeu
And I shudder to interrupt this because I found it so interesting tying it to bj. I need to know why is it. Or I want it said, why is it that the identification with the I or these never ending thoughts, why do they create suffering day or night?
- [34:26]
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- [34:54]
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- [35:25]
Sam Harris
Well, it's just the ego is
- [35:29]
Tom Bilyeu
at
- [35:29]
Sam Harris
bottom, it is itself a kind of contraction. I mean, when you look at what this feeling of self is, let's just talk about what the sense of self is. The sense of self for most of us is not a feeling that we're identical with our bodies. Most people don't feel identical with their physical bodies. They feel like they're passengers inside their body. My body's down here. These are my hands, these are my legs. I obviously care about these things. These are where my pains and pleasures are coming from. But I'm up here in the head and I'm a kind of passenger. I'm a witness of this and if you look. I mean, most people, when they try to pay attention, they try to find themselves. They try to meditate. They feel that they're a locus of attention in the head, behind their face, behind their eyes, looking out at the world. And the world is not self. You're over there. I'm looking across space at you. I'm here behind my face. And my face is a kind of mask, really. I mean, it's like I'm not identical to my face. I mean, it states matter to me, like if I have some weird expression on my face, you know? Or like someone said, like, can we take a picture of you? And you can't figure out how to smile. And you feel uptight, like you're reading the state of your face as your emotions are playing on your face, right? The signature of the emotion you're feeling has a lot to do with what you feel in your face. And it feeds back into your mind. If you force yourself to smile, you actually feel a state of happiness coming in your mind. But people feel like they're behind their face, in their head, right? And so that kind of homunculus, that person in the head, which we know doesn't make any sense neurologically, there's no place in the brain where there could be a little consciousness. That is one thing, that is this stable self that's looking out through the eyes, right? There's a flow of experience. And, you know, it is invoking, you know, many regions of the brain at all times. And there is no. You are identical to this flow of experience. This stream of consciousness is what you are as a matter of subjectivity, right? I'm not saying that it's not arising in the brain or that bodies aren't real or that there's no physical universe. I'm saying, as a matter of experience, there is just this flow of consciousness and its contents. And yet we seem to put this unchanging center to it. And that is a what. That is what is giving us that feeling that there is an unchanging center to this flow is this sort of this contracted identification with thought. It is a kind of thought. It is just each moment of if I'm saying something and it doesn't make sense or it sounds like bullshit, the experience in you which says, oh, that's not right. That feels like you, right? I mean, you're not witnessing it as an object in consciousness just arise and pass away. It sort of has come up from behind, and it just feels like, that's me, right? But that thing is Always happening. That that's me feeling is always happening. And so you just feel like you're in your head, behind your face, right? Well, for two reasons. There's two sides of this coin. So much of what we're thinking is making us miserable. So much of it is unpleasant. So much of it is causing anxiety. You look at your to do list, you got 50 things on it. You just feel like, oh my, the day is not long enough. This is the state. And that's a high class problem to have. There are worse problems. This is the state we're in. And the obverse of that is when we're really just connecting with life in a joyful, creative, beautiful way. Like when you look out the window and it's the most beautiful sunset ever. And you are just looking at the sunset, right? You're not like you're fully connected with its beauty. Those are all moments where you're losing this sense of. Of self. But the difference between meditation and those moments is that you're not really aware of losing the sense of self in those moments. You're not really aware of what is freeing about those moments. And you can't do it in other circumstances. I need the beautiful sunset. Just looking at your shoe isn't good enough for me. But with meditation, I can actually look at your shoe in the same way that I look at the sunset. So that's the. Like. What's happening for people, most people, is that they're waiting for the world to give them a good enough reason to just be present and to be present so fully that they lose their sense of self. Right? They're no longer behind their face, just waiting for something good to happen or figuring out how to change the experience enough so that again, they're no longer at war. To a greater or lesser degree, we're always at war. I mean, we're always fighting something. There's always this, like, you're always noticing something wrong, you're feeling uncomfortable in your body, you're reacting to something that somebody did or you thought they did. You're navigating a social encounter that seems off kilter. It's awkward, and you're trying to figure out what to say, and that sounded stupid. You're. You're just being blown around. And the moments where you really feel good are moments where there is a coming to rest, where it's not about the past or future. It's not about half a second ago, it's not about half a second from now. And the ultimate version of that entails the Dropping of this sense of self
- [41:30]
Tom Bilyeu
is everything you do about flourishing for you?
- [41:33]
Sam Harris
Unfortunately, not. Wisdom would be really being able to track what is going to matter at the end of the day or at the end of a life. For me, flourishing is a matter of spending your time pleasantly and happily and creatively and having fun. But in all the ways which at every moment, when someone asks you, well, that last hour, that last day, that last week, that last year, do you feel good about that? Was that a good use of your time? That remembering self, that retrospective gesture, that's where people worry about things like meaning, right? I mean, that's like. So it's like there's two. I mean, to use Danny Kahneman's framing here, there's the experiencing self and there's the remembering self. And the remembering self is the self that you're talking to when you say, are you satisfied with your life? Whether you're asking yourself or someone's asking you. And the answers that are available in those moments really determine whether or not somebody has a kind of global life satisfaction, whether they have meaning. And those are. That's the. Those are the moments where people feel like, you know, I need religion. I need to know. I, you know, I need to know how the far future is going to be. I need, like, I need some story to tell myself that is fundamentally consoling. But the experiencing self, the self that is just going moment to moment, feeling pains and pleasure and just dealing with. Dealing with this very short, you know, time horizon, I think that's fundamentally our real self. I mean, the remembering self is a version of that. If you ask me, are you satisfied with your life? And I spend the next 30 seconds telling you about that. That is yet another brief chapter in my experiencing self, right? And most of life is a story is getting summed over this lifeline of the experiencing self and their questions of meaning and a kind of global story to tell yourself about what this is all about are far less important than people think. I think you want to be playing both games intelligently. You don't want to be absorbed in pleasures which every time you think about your life, have you feeling, God, I'm just wasting my life. I'm just. I'm a superficial guy, you know, I got wealthy and now I just, you know, do heroin and play golf, right? And it's just fun, you know, like, whenever you check in with me, I feel pretty good because I have, you know, an unlimited supply of heroin and golf. But it's, you know, I can't really, you know, I'm sort of embarrassed by it every time I have to talk about it. Right. That's not the, you know, you do want. So over here you still do want. You want your pleasures to be justified by good relationships and a world that cares about your inputs and outputs. You want what you're paying attention to all day long to matter to someone else. And we're so deeply social, it's not wrong to want those things. But again, it's possible to have a purchase on well being that is deeper than any one of those things. So that when you lose one of those things, when you find out that the thing you thought people would love, they actually hated the television show you wrote or the novel you wrote or whatever you invested all this time, you had a hope for this thing, but your hopes were disappointed. How long do you suffer over that? In the absence of this sort of superpower where you can actually find an intrinsic well being to consciousness, it will be for as long as your bad genes and bad life experiences dictate. Right. It's like, it's just you're at the mercy of who you were yesterday. And so as a skill, meditation is fairly unique in that you can actually reset independent of what's going on. But again, it's not a reason to become totally immune to the effects you're having on the world and what the world is telling you. Because ultimately you are going to spend most of your time asleep and dreaming in this state, in conversation with yourself and in conversation with others, no matter how much you meditate. I think ultimately there are people who get fully enlightened and completely break the spell of being identified with thoughts. I'm not one of those people, certainly not yet. And so I experience this fluctuation, but the fluctuation is so important for my well being that I can talk about it without hesitation.
- [46:45]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you say to people who the deep fundamental problem in their life is that they're lost, they have no sense of meaning or purpose, they don't know what direction to go into, they're sliding towards depression because it all seems so pointless. That's something that I encounter with people a lot. People will stop me randomly and just be like, help. And I'd love to know. Knowing that you have a very limited window of time with that person, what would you say in like 60 or 90 seconds that would hopefully send them on a path that would actually be useful?
- [47:20]
Sam Harris
Well, I would just point out the mechanics of it, which is what is actually going on is that they're lost in thought they're thinking without knowing that they're thinking basically every moment of their waking life. Right. And the character of that story in this case is depressing or certainly productive of unhappiness. Now, there are three, at least three possible antidotes to that, and they should try all of them. Right? So if we're talking about a clinical depression, it's useful to say that there's a physiology to this that can be driven from below in a way that's not narrowly responsive to their thinking. So it'll tend to produce depressive thoughts, and the depressive thoughts will tend to feed back on the state. But. But I don't think all forms of depression are just a matter of what a person's thinking. I mean, it can be really. It's best viewed as a kind of disease of physiology. And so I'm not against antidepressants at all. I know many people who have received a lot of help from them, and I hope we get better ones in the future. And pharmacology is definitely a piece of the solution for many people and everything else that is good to do that people sort of lose their commitment to doing at the worst possible time should be done. I mean, you have to sort of get behind yourself and push to exercise and to socialize and to do things that you may not want to do, because those are good for you and help can break you out of it. But the normal range of psychological suffering, you know, not clinical depression, but just feeling like, you know, life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing. You know, it's like you're just. It's. You're stuck. That is a story of telling yourself a story. You're thinking, and you can either become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more and. Or. And it should be. And you can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story. You can actually just engineer. You can change the code that you're running moment to moment. Just a very simple one, which I use, and I actually recently recorded this in a lesson on the app. Just gratitude, Just thinking. This is actually. This particular maneuver, I believe comes from stoic philosophy. I didn't actually get it from stoic philosophy, but this sort of use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you. So if you're just stuck in traffic, driving to the job that you don't like, and you're frustrated, you can think of all the things that could happen to you that haven't. And if any one of them happened to you, you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment. You haven't been diagnosed with cancer. You've got two young kids. Say you want to live to see them grow up, and you could be the guy who today is going to find out. You've got two months to live, and you have to. Then the next two months is spent just unwinding your worldly affairs. You're not that guy. That hasn't happened to you yet. That's just more thinking. But it can have a profound effect. You can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance. And it can let the light in. And there are many techniques like that that are just a matter of invoking useful concepts skillfully.
- [51:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Tell these guys where they can find you online.
- [51:16]
Sam Harris
The Making Sense podcast is something I spend a lot of time doing. My meditation app is@WakingUp.com it's called Waking Up. And otherwise I'm just. My website, SamHarris.org I'm on Twitter is also SamHarrisOrg. There's no dot, but you just put in Sam Harris and you'll get an eyeful.
- [51:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, very true. What's the impact that you want to have on the world?
- [51:44]
Sam Harris
Well, what I'm spending my time doing is trying to engage honestly with interesting and consequential ideas. The Venn diagram I have, I don't think about it a lot, but when I think about retrospectively what I have been spending a lot of time doing, I seem to keep finding the intersection of intellectually interesting ideas. They have to have some connection to science or philosophy or it has to be the kind of thing that someone may want to think about anyway because they're just cool ideas. So something like artificial intelligence, very interesting to think about, but it's. But it's also hugely consequential, increasingly so. And if we get it wrong, it will redound to our misery, if not extinction. Right. So that's the center of the bull's eye for me. Something that's interesting, something that's consequential, something that getting it. The difference between getting it right and wrong is enormous. Right. And so that's sort of the landscape where I'm trying to continually focus my conversations. I love that.
- [53:01]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, guys. Truly, there are a few people on this planet that have influenced my thinking more than this man. I hope that you will dive into his world and let it expand your own consciousness and discover new things that you're capable of. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [53:22]
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