Sam Harris ON: The MEANING OF LIFE & Finding Wisdom Through MEDITATION | Jay Shetty

Sam Harris 0:00 There really is a tension between being and becoming. On some level, being isn't enough because you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved. And we're all gonna die, right? So we have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence. The bestselling author and host.

Jay Shetty 0:16 The number one health and wellness podcast.

Sam Harris 0:19 On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty 0:22 My question is, what's worth pursuing or what is worthy of pursuit in life?

Sam Harris 0:28 Yeah, well, there, there really is a tension between being and becoming, right? I, I think we, we live with this tension every moment of our lives, and I think I, I think the domain of our spiritual concerns really focuses on the being part, right? Like, it's just a, y- just spirituality, for lack of a better word, is whatever you put in the space provided, it is an answer to the question of how is it possible to be fulfilled in the present moment in the midst of whatever's happening. You know, knowing that experience is always changing, knowing that you can't possibly create an experience that doesn't change, how is it possible to be at peace with the flux, right? So that's, uh, so, and, and really finding a mode of being that w- wherein you, you, you can recognize a, a type of fulfillment that isn't predicated on the next good thing happening, right? The, the story you're telling yourself about the future that may in fact never arrive. On some level, being isn't enough because there are all the ways in the w- uh, ways the world might be, right? I mean, the, there's the possibility space of, of what we can create, and, and what we wanna create takes effort. And so there's all, all these things that are not actualized now, even if we're content now. And I think the domain of our becoming, I mean, there's, uh, all kinds of healthy ways of, uh, unhealthy ways of becoming, but the healthy mode of becoming, at least one part of it is, uh, it really subsumes our ethical lives, right? It's like, just wh- uh, what, what is it, what would be good to do? What is positive? What is pro-social? How can we make the world a better place? How can we raise our kids to be wise and honest and, and content? And I mean, all of these are projects that take work, and so it's not just a matter of, of, of just chilling out perfectly and watching what happens. They... We, we do have to do things. Uh, so the, the tension really is in being at peace in the meditative sense, in the contemplative sense, in the spiritual sense,

Sam Harris 2:34 even while you make great effort to accomplish things. And, uh, I, I think the, the peace part comes when you recognize that your happiness is not actually predicated on getting any of those things done. I mean, that you, you have to learn to love the process. You have to learn to recognize that goals themselves, as valid as they might be to achieve, the experience of achieving them is very brief, and it has this mirage-like quality where it just, it recedes. I mean, you've been thinking about this thing for a year, and you finally get to that landmark, and what is it? Well, it's just another moment of being alive, and now you've got your thoughts about the past and the future still. And the question is, can you actually make full contact with the present moment? And, uh, so in the, in the quote you read, I, uh, my, my main point was most people, w- if you don't know how to meditate, you're, you're basically trying to arrange the world to give you a good enough reason to recognize that the present moment is enough, right? Now, but once you actually know how to meditate, you can sink into the present moment regardless of what else you're struggling to accomplish. And so you, you can be, you can sort of take the goal as, as the path, right? I mean, um, kind of emotionally and cognitively, you sort of, you've already arrived i- in terms of your own w- concerns about your own well-being, and yet you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved, right? But you're... I mean, we're all gonna die, right? It's not, there's, there's, there's, there's no s- solution to the, the, the, the massive problem of impermanence, right? So we ha- we have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence, and that, and that's really, that's where the contemplative life comes in.

Jay Shetty 4:17 So we're talking about pursuing peace. We're talking about pursuing this ability to navigate between, as you were saying, being at peace with where you are now, but at the same time growing and progressing and, and loving the process as well. How do you define, just for everyone who's listening, because I know you do this a lot in the book and in, in your work as well, how do you define spirituality and how do you define religion so that people can just make sense of those terms as we use them throughout this-

Sam Harris 4:44 Yeah

Jay Shetty 4:45 ... conversation?

Sam Harris 4:45 Yeah. Well, I s- so I tend, as you probably know, I tend to be a critic of organized religion because it, it just forget about the, the tribalism that religion, uh, so often engenders and the conflict born of that tribalism. I just think we need a twenty-first century conversation about human wisdom and human happiness and, and, you know, spirituality is a, is a word I use, although I use it somewhat in scare quotes 'cause people have associations with it that I think are, uh, just not helpful. So my argument is really, you can have a twenty-first century conversation about reality and you, and how to live within it, or you can have a seventh century conversation or a fifth century BC conversation. You can, you can, you can locate yourself at any point in human history, or you can, at this moment, decide to avail yourself of all of the best ideas and, and just, uh, recognize that we have really a common inheritance of wisdom and insight, and it's, we can, we can use whatever works, right? And ultimately, we have to be the best judges of what works in, uh, it, given the needs of the moment, given, uh, technological changes that could never have been foreseen by our ancestors, right? So whether we do this with the US Constitution or we do it with the Bible, or we do it with, with the, the Pali Canon, you know, the Buddhist scripture, I mean, it's just, it w- you can There's no question that our ancestors have created documents and ways of thinking and methodologies, you know, science being one, the c-contemplative practice being another, that are incredibly valuable to us, but we, we have to recognize that, you know, i-in this moment in time, all we have is human conversation and human intuition and human insight by which to, to navigate. And so I just, uh, for the religion piece, to be dogmatically attached to a specific religion as though it were the one true way of seeing everything, that just doesn't make any sense to me at this moment. I mean, it's, it'd be, it's analogous to wanting to say that, you know, the physics is a Christian

Sam Harris 6:48 phenomenon because the Christians, for the most part, were the, the first people to actually make real breakthroughs in physics. Well, it's just, there's no reason to speak of, of, of, of Christian physics or Muslim algebra. And, and ultimately, I think there, there'll be no reason to speak of Christian or Buddhist or Hindu spirituality. I, I think we have a common human project. And whatever is true of the human mind and its possibilities, there has to be a, a, a way of talking about that that truly transcends culture and, and certainly isn't sectarian in any usual sense, right? In the same way that science, when it's working, transcends culture and isn't sectarian. I mean, there's no Japanese science versus American science versus, you know, there's just, there's just science. Spirituality, for better or worse, is a word that I, I think we still need to use because, I mean, I tend to, I, I also talk about the contemplative life or, you know, wisdom traditions and, and specific practices like meditation, but it, it names a, an approach to well-being that isn't predicated on all of the usual seeking to become happy, right? So it's not about getting wealthier, it's not a, a, it's not about getting healthier and, and fitter. And those are all worthwhile projects, uh, and they're not in conflict with spirituality. But the, the, the, the spiritual piece in spirituality is what, how is it possible to pay attention in this moment so as to not suffer unnecessarily, right? And, and, and, and what are the actual mechanics of our psychological suffering such that we do suffer unnecessarily so much of the time? And when you look closely at all that, it really is a matter of being lost in thought almost all of the time. And there's kind of this living, this waking dreamscape of thought where we're talking to ourselves moment to moment, we're not aware of it, and so much of that conversation is an unhappy one. And meditation is really a way of breaking that spell and, and waking up from the dream of discursivity and, and identification with thought, such that you can recognize that, that consciousness, that, you know, that by which everything is seen and known and experienced and felt, right? Just the, the, the qualitative character of, of your own being in this moment. Consciousness has certain qualities that are intrinsically peaceful and, and gratifying and not, and, and free of problems, right? And to, and, and, and it's, it's really at the layer of thought that we fail to recognize all that and feel that our, you know, every waking moment is some form of emergency that has to be responded to or reacted to.

Jay Shetty 9:27 Yeah. And I think the way you define spirituality and the way you talk about it, I feel like it's definitely more and more appealing today. I think it's definitely something that, as you said, we need a twenty-first century version of what we're pursuing and how we think about reality, and I think those conversations are happening more often and, and more strongly and in more important circles. I, I have this question because I've, I've often thought about this. You've well documented the pitfalls of organized religion and the challenges that come with that. What do you think are the pitfalls or challenges of spirituality in the fact that we move away from something, as you said earlier, was like, you know, this very defined, structured way of living that we've now come to look at it and gone, "Okay, that doesn't make sense all the time." And at the other end, we have a complete kind of open paradigm of spirituality, which can often be confusing, lacking structure, lap- lacking somewhat of a map. Like, do you see certain pitfalls as to how we practice and, uh, become contemplative about spirituality?

Sam Harris 10:36 Yeah. Well, so I, I should say that much that goes by the name of spirituality is also something that, that is worth being skeptical of, right? There are many beliefs that people form, and many of these are, are, are imported from religion that just can't be squared with a sophisticated scientific view of, of just what reality is like. You know, it's, it's not to say we've figured everything out. I mean, we, we, we certainly haven't. But we just know that, that s-certain superstitious, magical, otherworldly beliefs are, are just not likely to be true. And, and yet the most important spiritual claims traditionally, like the fact that, that, you know, unconditional love is a possible state of mind, right? Uh, uh, or, um, that the self as, as normally felt and conceived is actually illusory, right? That you were taken in by a powerful illusion of separateness, and that s- that feeling of separateness can be inspected and ultimately penetrated and felt through and felt beyond. Um, those are really, uh, th-those are the, the babies in the bathwater of religion and spirituality that I think everyone, if they think about it long enough, wants to conserve. And yet, and tho- and those are, you know, fully supported by a, a modern discussion of, of the human mind and even a, a, a neuroanatomical discussion of the human mind. But there's no, um, and my, as you know, my PhD is in neuroscience, I can tell you there's no place in the brain for a, a, an unchanging ego to be hiding, right? I mean, the, the sense that we have a self That is unchanging, that's carried through from moment to moment, that is the place from which

Sam Harris 12:14 we appropriate experience, that is separate from experience. That is just, granted it's a powerful illusion for many people, but it's, it's an illusion that, that can be dispelled, and once dispelled, you-- it actually brings your, your experience into closer register with what we have every reason to believe neuroscientifically about just the way the mind should be based on w- on the way the brain is. If you wander into the spiritual side of a bookstore, if you can even find a physical bookstore these days, it's been, it's been a while since I've be- I've been in one-

Jay Shetty 12:42 I've been going to quite a few over Christmas, yeah.

Sam Harris 12:44 Um, truth be told, yeah. Uh, but, uh, they're few and far between at the moment.

Jay Shetty 12:47 Yes, definitely.

Sam Harris 12:48 But if you... So in that section of the bookstore, there's a lot on the shelves that is bogus or semi-bogus or, you know, filled with wishful thinking and, and, and not so interesting intellectually or ethically, frankly. But there's, there's a lot that is truly valid, and y- you j-- and I think we just have to become wiser curators of the, the totality of human conversation and the world's literature to find what is worthy of, of our credence a- at this point. And this is what we d- we do this naturally, and I think we just need to be honest that w- we are the ones... Like when, when you go to an ancient text, when you go to, uh, the, um, y- if y- take, take your, your f- your favorite spiritual or religious book, in almost all of them, there are passages that are obviously anachronistic and, and just not suited to a twenty-first century view of, of just how we should live, right? So there's a l- a lot about how to sacrifice goats, you know, in the, in the Old Testament and, and it's just if it was ever useful, it's not, not especially useful now. People effortlessly ignore those passages, and that's fine. So you're, you're per- you're performing editing on the fly, and then you, then you find, you know, a, a passage in E- in Ecclesiastes or Jesus, uh, giving the Sermon on the Mount and, you know, the Golden Rule, and you say, "Okay, this is, this is really encapsulates a lot of wisdom." And it's very hard to improve on the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is a fantastic heuristic for just living ethically with people. So great. There, there's nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence to, to use the Golden Rule as a, as a, f- a, um, a great f- kind of navigation tool ethically. And when you think about ethics and morality, it really is a question of what to do next, and we're always faced with this, this navigation problem, essentially, 'cause there's this total space of a- of possible experience individually and collectively, and we're trying to figure out w- how to navigate in this space given the, the, the possible experiences on offer. And the truth is there are horizons here which we can't see beyond. I mean, we don't know how good life could get for us individually and collectively. I mean, there's so many things that are, that are in play now. I mean, we, we are living in a time where, you know, it's possible for us to change our own genomes ultimately, right? I mean, there's not, not many people doing that at the moment, but that is just a, a, a few short years away where we're going to be confronted with the question of, I mean, do you actually want to modify the, the, the genes that are b- that are expressed in your body and brain, uh, and even i-in the germline, you know, so we're talking about the inheritance of your, your, you know, future children. So we can do in a, in a few short moments what evolution ha- has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years in our case, and millions of, millions and millions of year, years before that. So these are choices that, that, that we have always had to make, but now we're making them i-in the presence of increasingly powerful technology and our engagement with, with the internet and, and information. I mean, we, we ha-- we're finding it hard to even have a conversation about the most basic facts now at scale because there's so much misinformation and we-- much of our conversation is being piped through th- these social media platforms, which are essentially outrage machines, right? They're amp-- preferentially amplifying the, the most agitating and ou- and, um, divisive content because that's what spreads faster, and, uh, they're amplifying, they're amplifying misinformation more than, than the debunking of misinformation, right? So there's a kind of an asymmetric war of information here. And so we're, we're suddenly, we've got these... Functionally, we, we have the genes we had, you know, with a, with a few s- tweaks. We had the, we have the genes we have maybe seventy-five thousand years ago, right? So we are, we are these ancient primates now armed with nuclear weapons and an internet and increasing-- and AI technology now and, and, and so, and we're, w-we're faced with the, continually faced with the conundrum of what to do with all of this and how do we solve these massive coordination problems where we get now eight billion strangers essentially to cooperate peacefully. The landscape of possibility here is always shifting and so again, we have human conversation as a, as a means by which to navigate this. And so, yeah, I mean, to come back, this is a very long way of getting back to your original question, which is once you recognize that our legacy thought structures are not, uh, well-suited to this, right? So to be a fundamentalist Christian or a fundamentalist Buddhist or a fundamentalist Hindu in the face of these new opportunities and new challenges is not the best operating system for your mind. And you're forced to be far more eclectic and non-sectarian and no- non-dogmatic and just open to the best evidence and the best, uh, arguments, really perpetually open to the best and new evidence and, and better arguments. Where are the guardrails, right? There's no longer... It's, it's no longer simple, right? I can't, I can no longer just consult w- a single book or a single list of dos and don'ts, uh, to, to guide, to guide me. Ultimately, it's a far more flexible and intelligent way to proceed because we want... I mean, just ask yourself, do you want your next decision, uh, or your, your decision 10 years from now to be... Do you want to be available to the best evidence and the best arguments at that moment when making that decision or not? Do you, do you want some belief system that guarantees your unavailability, right? Do you want some kind of cognitive and emotional closure that, that, that walls you off from better arguments and better information? I think, uh, I think almost no one would sign up for that kind of, uh, you know... That's, that's ignorance by another name, right?

Jay Shetty 19:03 Mm.

Sam Harris 19:03 Um, so I think we want to be persuadable. We want to be open to better arguments and, and new evidence. We also want to be skeptical and, and conservative in, in how we revise our map of the world because we know that most new, you know, published studies have stand, stand a very good chance of not being true or, you know, or not, not being replicatable, even in science. Um, we have a legacy, we have an inheritance of institutions that have proved themselves over generations, and so we shouldn't be eager to tear everything down to the studs and r- and build again, right? But I think we, I think there's a, there's a reason to be conservative with respect to institutions and norms. And, uh, I mean, th- things that have worked for centuries, th- th- there tend to be a reason why they've worked for centuries. And so it's, it's... There's a sort of a tinkering and an, and an iterative process here that I think makes sense. But ultimately, yeah, we want a modern, uh, wisdom, wisdom tradition to be d- the common property of a non-sectarian, non-parochial, non-provincial humanity at this point.

Jay Shetty 20:16 And that, but that nicely comes back to the waking up part of your work, right? The idea that we can't create something or use something fully aligned with human values because we as humans aren't, uh, fully aligned with human values in the, in the collective sense.

Sam Harris 20:34 Right.

Jay Shetty 20:34 And the idea that I've always felt that the reason why we should be scared of technology is because, I guess, we're scared of some humans. So if humans have the ability to create something, it will have all the imperfections that we have internally in the creator of it, and so it will inherit all the same manipulative tendencies, exploitative tendencies. The, you know, it, it... It's hard to free something of that if you inherently build something with that.

Sam Harris 21:10 Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 21:10 Uh, and you see that with any sort of media, social media technology today that even if it was built with the best intentions of trying to create good in the world, either it amplifies negative or inherently has some questionable morals and ethics to it as well.

Sam Harris 21:27 Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 21:28 And so it comes back to the waking up part of your work, which is this self-reflective, contemplative idea of, you know, who am I becoming? Who do I want to be? Who am I? I mean, at the very deepest level, as you said. One, one word that I've always loved, uh, from my studies was this idea of the word purifying. Like, there was always this... There was a needing f- there was a need for purification of some of these elements, and you, and you talk about this in the beginning of your book when you... I th- I believe it was one of the first times you did MDMA, and then you, you had this feeling of, like, complete love for your friend, free of envy. And wh- when I was reading that, I was thinking about how much this word purification is often not talked about, but it's probably my favorite word that I've, I've learned through my study of the wisdom traditions because to me, I was thinking, yeah, what's, what's really required, as you said, is that love's already there. It's already there. It's not like you're finding or discovering something, but there's almost like a detoxing, a cleansing, a letting go of these other things that cloud-

Sam Harris 22:39 Yeah

Jay Shetty 22:39 ... our ability to be there. Is that part of what you do in, uh, what, what you feel meditation achieves, or no, that's, that's a completely different thing as well?

Sam Harris 22:49 The thing you want to accomplish is already accomplished, right?

Jay Shetty 22:53 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 22:53 And so there, so there are dualistic and non-dual ways of conceiving this whole, the whole path of practice. And the, the dualistic way is very much a purification model, which is that there's something that's, like, current- currently dirty, right?

Jay Shetty 23:06 Yeah.

Sam Harris 23:06 And, and you can clean it, and you can... And it, it's gonna take effort to clean it, right? And so this is... And I would argue that most spiritual traditions are framed in that way.

Jay Shetty 23:15 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 23:16 And there's, there's definitely a place for that, but the mature approach to, uh, meditation practice is, and, and the one frankly that is just free of, of the, of the stress of seeking, is to recognize that, that consciousness as it is, ju- ordinary consciousness, regardless of what its current contents are, I mean, regardless of what you're currently experiencing, you could be feeling a classically negative emotion. I mean, you could have just gotten angry, right? And then you remember, "Oh, wait a minute. I'm, I'm supposed to be meditating. Okay. What, uh, what's, what am... What's true now," right? And the physiology of anger hasn't even had time to dissipate yet, right? So that, that, that'll happen over, you know, tens of seconds, right? But still, in the, in this... If, if you know how to recognize, you know, what I, what I call over in Waking Up, con- you know, consciousness without, without a center, in that first moment of, of just, just recognizing that you are the condition in which anger and everything else is appearing- There's already no center to that condition. There's already no ego in the middle of it, and it doesn't actually get emptier of self than that ever. And it-- and even if you have a very different experience, I mean, you take MDMA and you feel unconditional love, or you go on a long meditation retreat and you get really concentrated and you're having, you know, just regularly having experiences of bliss, say, uh, so it can be very, you know, drug-like. All of the, those changes in the contents of consciousness are transitory. I mean, you take a drug and it's going to wear off. You get very concentrated and you feel bliss. But when you're, you know, watching Netflix two weeks later, you're not, you're not concentrated in that way and you're doing, you're doing something else with your attention,

Sam Harris 24:57 and presumably you're not going to be blissed out in the same way. So all of those changes in the contents are, are temporary. What's not temporary is the availability of this recognition that there's just this open condition in which everything is spontaneously appearing, thoughts and sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and moods. And the energetics of experience is always occurring in a condition that is, is fundamentally mysterious, really. I mean, it's not... Because if, if you engage it prior to concepts, I mean, you could-- there's a layer at which you can just think about it and describe it in psychological terms. There's a lot to understand to, you know, correlating changes in our minds with changes in the brain, right? So the, there's a, there's a, there's a possible neuroscience of, of contemplative experience, and people are doing that work. But as a matter of your own experience, there's this ever-present mystery that anything is any way at all. I mean, like you, you don't know what you're going to think next until the thought itself arises, right? It's just because you'd have to think it before you thought it if, in order to, to know what it is, right? So it's just on some level, you are a witness to everything that's appearing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And in the beginning, it feels like the witness has the structure of a self, of a subject. But as you look into that more and more, that structure goes away and there's just this condition in which everything is appearing. And it doesn't, it, and that doesn't feel like I. It doesn't feel like me. Uh, and whatever feels like I or me is yet more appearance. You know, it's, it can be a, a just a pattern of energy on your face or a contraction in, in the body. So as you keep dropping back and witnessing that, it has, you know, the purification model makes less and less sense because what is there to purify, right? There's not like even, even a, I mean, even anger is no longer anger, right? In the moment of recog- of recognition, it's just this, it's just a feeling of, of heat, uh, on your face, right? It's just a feel, it's just, it's a feeling of tension in your chest, and there's no one to whom those feelings refer, right? And, and so the moment you recognize that, you have by definition broken the connection to whatever thoughts were telling you why you were angry and why you should be angry and why you have every right to be angry and what you're going to say to that person next time you see them. You've broken that spell of thinking. And so the, the emotion is dissipating. Uh, and so it's, um, anger is no longer anger. But it's, in purification mode, it is still possible to do that dualistically. I mean, in, in the beginning when you're practicing, the, the, what I tend to teach in, over at Waking Up is, is a technique called mindfulness, wh- which most people engage dualistically in the beginning, where they're, they're strategically being aware of sights and sounds and sensations and the breath and, and, um, and thoughts and emotions. And so even du- even dualistically, you can learn the difference between being lost in thought and identifying with an emotion like anger and just witnessing it from a, the point that seems to be outside of that thought and that, that emotion. And even if it feels like a subject that's paying attention strategically to, to the physiology of anger or, or the arising and cessation of thought, um, that's fine. I mean, that's a, that's a starting point. That's... And, and a necessary one for virtually everyone. Um, and that does accomplish this de-identification from the whole process that's giving you this negative emotion. So there is a freedom even in the dualistic awareness of, of, you know, the flow of thought and emotion. But ultimately, and, and that very much has this character of purifying the mind. It's like you're, like this is a, this is a, anger is a classically negative thing to be stuck in and identified with and, and acting out of, and it's divisive. It's you're going to say the thing you regret and that for which you have to apologize for, and you, it's just, you know, you're... And the normal person who doesn't know how to be mindful and doesn't know, doesn't know the difference between being lost in thought and, and not is, is really the mere hostage of that process. They, they're going to stay as angry as they're going to stay for as long as they're going to stay that way, and they're going to do all of the things that are life deranging and dis- and, and reputation harming they might do on the basis of that emotion for as long as they're going to do those things, and then they're going to have all the reaction to what they did and said, and it's, that's the, you know, the, the complication of life born of that, you know, one moment where you got angry. Even dualistic mindfulness gives you a degree of freedom that most people don't have, and it is a kind of superpower to be able to say, "Oh, well, I just got angry. How long do I want to stay angry for?" For me, uh, an emotion like anger or fear is useful insofar as it is, it is a salience cue. It's telling you that something just happened that's worth paying attention to, right? Some- there's somebody just walked into the room who, you know, doesn't have your, your well-being, uh, at hear- you know, at heart, right? And they've got some intention that is, that is, um, in, uh, conflict with Uh, was something that you were tr- trying to accomplish, say, or, um, it's, it's telling... At, at minimum, it's telling you something about yourself and about your own priorities and about, uh, about what you were trying to do in the world and, you know, for better or worse. Uh, so it's worth paying attention to, but it's almost never the state of mind you wanna be in to then solve the problem you, that just, you just noticed. Um, so I'm not saying that we w- the goal is to be completely without any capacity for anger or fear or, or any, any of these emotions. But it's... I, I do think psychological health and just the health of one's relationships and, and just the, the whole project of living wisely in the world is more and more the result of being able to get off, to, to unhook from that negative emotion more and more quickly. I mean, I, I think you wanna stay angry and fearful and even sad for mu- you know, much shorter periods of time.

Jay Shetty 31:16 Absolutely. Yeah.

Sam Harris 31:17 And, and then you can, you, you... Then there's, there's just more to recognize about the circumstance. It gives you a degree of freedom by which to navigate.

Jay Shetty 31:25 Yeah, no, I, I fully agree with that. I, I've, I've... Whenever I get asked that question, which I'm sure you get asked a lot, it's like, "Well, don't you ever get angry?" Or, "Don't you ever, you know, get upset or sad?" And, and what you just said has always been my response, that I still feel anger, I still feel sadness, I still feel envy. I, I still and always believe I always will feel all of these things, just for less and less time.

Sam Harris 31:50 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 31:50 And, uh, I don't think I'll ever get to zero, just as you could never run a mile in zero-

Sam Harris 31:56 Right

Jay Shetty 31:56 ... seconds.

Sam Harris 31:57 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 31:57 I won't ever get to a point where I'm able to deal with it in zero seconds. It's just not gonna be possible.

Sam Harris 32:03 Right.

Jay Shetty 32:03 Because it needs to live.

Sam Harris 32:05 I think there are more impersonal and ethically necessary modes for these emotions that, that I don't think we wanna get rid of them. I think, I think outrage, moral outrage has its place, and it is the basis from which we would, we would react to, you know, grave injustice in the world. But it's not, it doesn't have to be... It's not a personal anger.

Jay Shetty 32:31 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 32:32 Right? But it can, it just... You, you see some- you see something, some unnecessary harm being created deliberately by, you know, deeply unwise people in the world and, and you just think, "All right, this is, this is an emergency. This is worth responding to," right? And, and it's, and that can feel, the energy of anger can be behind that. And, you know, so I m- I would tend to call that outrage rather than anger, but the, I think moral outrage is, is useful, but it's just... The, the question is, when does it tip over into personal psychological suffering that actually diminishes your capacity to do something useful? And that's, that's where, that's the, the line-

Jay Shetty 33:13 Yeah

Sam Harris 33:13 ... that I think we wanna be more aware of individually.

Jay Shetty 33:15 Yeah. Let, let's use that as an example and take it through that process, because I think that's, that's exactly it. Like, I was gonna bring that up earlier, the idea that just as the outrage or the emotional experience can stop us from being practical, so too, not to go down this road again, but so too can the skeptical. Like, if, you know, you can be overly skeptical and overly analytical and never practically apply anything-

Sam Harris 33:40 Right

Jay Shetty 33:40 ... because you can constantly find flaws in pretty much most ideas in the world-

Sam Harris 33:44 Yeah

Jay Shetty 33:44 ... if you keep looking for them.

Sam Harris 33:45 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 33:46 So with... Let's take the outrage idea. Like, how do you... What does someone do? They feel that outrage, the moral outrage, where they feel pain for s- the suffering of another. Where do you go from there through your process? Like, what's step two, three, four?

Sam Harris 34:00 Well, I think it's important to be, again, cautious and, and, and skeptical of one's own emotional hijacking, right?

Jay Shetty 34:11 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 34:11 So it's like you, you wanna know, you wanna know that this isn't a personal, petty, you know, egocentric reaction.

Jay Shetty 34:18 Yes. Yes. Yes.

Sam Harris 34:18 And it actually is born of what it purports to be, you know, a compassionate engagement with the world. Like, you actually want the best for other people, perhaps including yourself, but also, I mean, it's, it's like we're all on the same team. That's, that's the, the mode that you're, you're in. And so it's not an expression of your own greed and narcissism and, and, you know, kind of the, a, a self-focused and, and divisive, um, emotion.

Jay Shetty 34:46 But it probably will start at that, right?

Sam Harris 34:48 Well, I, I think it, it ca- it can have something of that character in that it's, it can have the character of contraction. I mean, outrage feels like anger. It's like you, you know, you, it is the same thing that would get you to raise your voice if you were angry, right? It's like, it's like you're gonna raise your voice. If you, if you're gonna raise your voice in defense of humanity, right? Um, well, you're still raising your voice, right?

Jay Shetty 35:12 Yeah.

Sam Harris 35:12 And so it's just that there, there's energy behind it, and I think that energy at times is, is necessary. It's, or to take it another somewhat adjacent situation, but analogous, it's like, you know, if you're in a, a situation in which you have to, to defend yourself from, from actual physical violence or defend someone close to you. You know, someone's attacked you and your child, so what should you do there? Just kind of lie down and, and-

Jay Shetty 35:38 Yeah

Sam Harris 35:39 ... and, um, offer yourself up as a human sacrifice? No. Like I think pacifism is not actually the, morally the, the wisest position, you know, ethically. I, so I think the energy that would allow you to, to violently defend yourself against an aggressor, um, should be available, right? But the que- it's, but it... And it's, you know, it's

Sam Harris 36:02 not necessarily anger, but it could look a lot like anger and feel a lot like anger. It's certainly not necessarily hatred, and I'm, and here I would, I mean, I would ask you to consider how you would feel like... I mean, defending yourself against a person- You know, you think of somebody, you, you, there's some, you know, mali- malicious psychopath who's, who's broken into your house and is now wanting to, to harm you and your family because that's what, you know, what he likes to do, right? That's like the, the quintessential circumstance where one, you'd feel, you'd feel fear, you'd feel a lot of things, but you'd probably also feel hatred for this person, right? I mean, like, like what... There's, there are few circumstances where hatred feels more apropos than that. But I do view hatred as always being somehow extra, even in, in extremis like that. Because i- imagine just how you would feel, very superficially similar si- situation. You know, you're still... You have an attacker in your house, and you have to defend yourself violently, but that attacker now is not a person, it's a, it's a wild animal. You know, a grizzly bear has, has broken into your house or, you know, a mountain lion, right? How... You'd still, it's still a, an absolute emergency, right? You're still gonna have to fight for your life. You're still looking for a, a weapon to defend yourself with, right? You're still contemplating killing a, a living being to defend yourself, right, and your kids. But there's an emotional shading there. Like, you, you as energized as you would be in the presence of a mountain lion or in the presence of a grizzly bear, there, there's this layer of... The, the layer of hatred doesn't quite fit, you know-

Jay Shetty 37:42 Because you feel they have less choice.

Sam Harris 37:44 Yes, of, of, of course, a mountain lion is-

Jay Shetty 37:46 Yeah

Sam Harris 37:46 ... gonna be a mountain lion. You know, it's like, like a mountain lion can't be other than a mountain lion.

Jay Shetty 37:50 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 37:51 On some level, a malicious psychopath can't be other than a malicious psychopath, right? So I, I think it's, I think we do have to view people on some level as, um, equivalent to forces of nature, right? You know, we don't, we don't get angry at hurricanes, but... and we certainly don't hate hurricanes in, in the, in the same way that we could hate another human being. Uh, but if we could lock hurricanes in prison, we would, right? I mean, they're immensely destructive. You know, we're still trying to figure out what to do about them. But it never gets... We never take this extra step of actually hating them. And I, I do think we could have, we, ethically speaking and psychologically speaking, we can, we can have a similar relationship to even the worst human beings while doing all the things we need to do to, to defend ourselves against them. We can put people in prison. We can, you know, we can... I'm not in favor of the death penalty for, for actually these reasons, but, um, 'cause I don't think anyone creates themselves. I think, I don't think anyone is truly at bottom responsible, responsible for being who they are. I mean, if, you know, if you had the same genes and the same life experience of whoever, Jeffrey Dahmer, you'd be Jeffrey Dahmer, right? It's like there's no, there's no mystery there. But, um, so I think s- so I think at, at bottom, when you're, when you're looking at these, these just very stark differences in life outcomes, you're looking at differences in luck, right? I mean, there's, there's biological luck, there's circumstantial luck, there's all kinds of luck, and there's, and there's what we do with the luck, but your capacity to do good things with even your bad luck is yet more good luck, right? I mean, something is giving... There's some genetic and environmental reason why you were set up to pick yourselves up, pick yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody else in a similar situation wasn't, right? Um, and so on some level, there's... We have an ethical imperative to acknowledge the, the massive role that luck plays in our lives, and I think we should want to cancel the, the most egregious differences in good and bad luck between people. Like, so when we look at a, a whole society that is suffering from immense bad luck because it, it didn't have the natural resources that some other society did, or it had those resources, but even those resources created perverse incentives, and so it's got some, a terrible, a terrible political outcome based on the, all the level of corruption that's layered on top of the resources. I mean, there's just terrible lu- disparities in luck there, right? And so I think we, as a, as a global civilization, more and more as we grow, grow wealthier and wealthier and, and, and can take advantage of, of good luck over here, we should want to engineer a tide that raises, th- th- that upon which most or all boats rise, um, more and more. It's not to say that capitalism is wrong. It's not to say that we're ever gonna completely nullify differences in luck. And, and I think some asymmetries may in fact be the optimal way to, to encourage people's creativity and innovation, right? So it's like I... It's, it's, I'm not, I'm agnostic as to, on, on some of the questions of how to organize a, a society and an economy there. But I do think more and more we need to recognize that so many of us, I mean, certainly anyone who has got the free time to, to listen to this conversation right now stands a pretty good chance of being in the top ten percent or even one percent of humanity with respect to luck. You know, all the variables, whether it's with respect to health and wealth and education and just, just having the free time and attention to listen to this and be interested in this and to be, to be asking the kinds of questions we're trying to address in a conversation like this. We're immensely lucky, and with that comes a, a certain responsibility, but also opportunity to, to spread the, the, the luck around.

Jay Shetty 41:52 Yeah. Yeah. To create luck for others.

Sam Harris 41:54 Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:55 Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Sam Harris 41:56 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:57 I, I loved where we were going with that and loved where we went. But going back to the, the outrage piece, the understanding of, you know, almost differentiating our hate from outrage, almost extracting some piece of the ego from it being petty and individualistic, but that it's for a greater cause Then how, yeah, how do you go forward with that? Like, what do you do with that thought, that idea, that feeling? So you, you feel pain when someone else is in pain, you feel stress, you feel outrage, as you said. There may be a petty personal anger to it that triggered us in the first place, but we were able to carve that out and understand that that wasn't the basis of our real outrage, that there was something bigger

Sam Harris 42:43 Yeah. Well, it just, then it really just depends on what the, the problem is and what the, the situation is and whether you can influence it, right? I mean, if you can't do anything about it, well, then it's not useful to be just grinding your gears with outrage. I mean, the, the, your outrage needs some kind of outlet.

Jay Shetty 42:59 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 42:59 You know? So if you have some kind of platform upon which to, to try to make sense on these important topics, well, then do that. But yeah, it's, it's, it's never useful to just be privately seething with, with outrage that has no outlet, right? So you have to figure out, one, what, what pragmatically can you do to accomplish anything useful on the basis of this emotion? Uh, and if there's nothing to do, it's great to have the tools by which you can just let go of it, right? And it's like, uh, and, and that's, um, and again, that's where meditation or... comes in. I mean, that really is a kind of superpower. You can just decide, "Okay, there's, there's nothing to do here with this negative emotion, so now I can just let go of it." And that's, um, and that's tr- it's true for public-facing emotion like outrage, but it's true for a, an inwardly facing one, like just anxiety about something that is coming up in the future, right? So like, let's, you've got some medical condition. Now you need to get an MRI to see if you've got something scary, and you can't get the, the MRI until next Tuesday, right? So now you've got this time to wait. And so the question is, in the interv- intervening days, how captured are you gonna be by this feeling of anxiety? Is, is there any utility in feeling anxious between now and Tuesday? And if there's not, wouldn't it be great to actually just let go of it, right?

Jay Shetty 44:23 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 44:23 And, and most people feel like that's, that's pretty hard to do, right? I mean, it, it... most people don't have tools apart from just diverting themselves, getting... distracting themselves with something else to take their mind off the thing that they're really sort of thinking about in the background, that they don't want to think about, but they're helplessly, you know, perseverating on it. But as far, you know, as far as, as far as acting in the world so as to make the world a better place, I, I, I think, you know, based on outrage or, or some other emotion, you know, I, I'm impressed more and more by how much that's a story of changing incentives

Sam Harris 45:00 at the system level more than it is a story of impro- getting individuals to improve themselves. I think, I think individuals should want to improve themselves, and I, you know, I want to improve myself, and I, you know, I, insofar as I can share wisdom about how to do that, I, I, I do that, uh, you know, more or less full-time. But there's a, there's another level of analysis and, uh, another level of, of discussion that needs to be applied to the, to the systems in which we're all functioning, and we need to recognize that in so many places we have systems of incentives that are aligned so as to make it actually hard to be a good person, right? Like you need, you need to be some kind of moral hero to be truly ethical-

Jay Shetty 45:46 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 45:46 ... given how the system is tuned. And conversely, totally normal people can be lured into behaving more and more like psychopaths-

Jay Shetty 45:56 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 45:56 ... in a badly tuned system where the incentives are all wrong, right? And I think more and more we need to be alert to that, and we need to want to design systems where it just becomes easier and easier for ordinary conflicted, you know, mediocre people, people who are not even thinking a- about ethics all that much, right, don't even, don't want to, they just want what they want. It's easier for them to behave more and more like saints because the incentives-

Jay Shetty 46:26 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 46:26 ... are aligned to-

Jay Shetty 46:27 Yeah

Sam Harris 46:27 ... that way. To take a, um, example that's recently top of mind, so like we have a problem, we have the problem of climate change. You know, we w- well-intentioned people want to do something about it. We don't want to create the most profligate harms for ourselves unnecessarily, right? So it'd be great to have a, a system of incentives and economic opportunities and technologies that just made it easier and easier to be wise with respect to carbon, our carbon footprint. And there are a lot of great ideas in this space, and, you know, one of them is, well, let's, let's buy electric cars, right? Let's, let's transition from a, you know, a fossil fuel economy of transportation to an electric one. Well, that sounds wonderful, and I've, you know, I've just, I've had an electric car, and I've, and I just had to get a new car, and I was poised to buy an electric, another electric car. But then I hear on Joe Rogan's podcast from this guy who's just published a book, it's, it's coming out, um, for- forgive me, I've forgotten his name. I think it's, uh, I think it's Sriram Krishnan, but I could have that wrong. But, uh, he, he's put, he has a book out, coming out called Cobalt Red, but he just did a two-hour, uh, podcast with Rogan, which was just this litany of horrors that attend what it, uh, the, the, the ex- the extraction of cobalt from Congo, right? It's like 70% of the world's cobalt is in Congo. We use cobalt in all of our bat- batteries. Basically, our supply chain for cobalt is on top of just slave labor and, and child labor and just, you know, kids getting buried alive. I mean, it's just, it was just as bad as you could imagine. Uh, and so how... here we have a system where we all, we just, we all want to buy the next electric car because this is a good thing that the, the, this was the virtuous thing to do. But now we find out that the batteries are, are soaked in blood. There's no good option, right? And now we have to, uh, we, uh, we have to pretend That, that we didn't hear that podcast or the, the, the, and the people, you know, buil- designing the batteries or pretending they don't know where the cobalt comes from, and there's like... We, we need to figure out-

Jay Shetty 48:37 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 48:37 I mean, this, this, this itself should be a simple problem to solve, and it would just... It's probably a few percentage points of profit margin that would make the extraction of co- cobalt a, an ethically de- defensible practice, right?

Jay Shetty 48:53 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 48:53 Uh, and there's probably, there's probably some cobalt-free technology, uh, that we could design in the future. But it's just to get these things right really matters, and if you don't get them right, you've got people who are deeply conflicted about what they're doing or not, or just not, completely unaware of what they're doing and creating these, these massive negative externalities that they might not even know about. Like, like, like I could-- I literally was... I mean, I was 24 hours from buying another EV, right? So, uh, it's like, it's not that, it's not that my loan purchase or not, or, or not of a, of a single car is gonna matter that much in the scheme of things, but it's like I would've, had I not heard this particular episode of Joe's podcast, I would have bought that EV thinking I was doing an unimpeachably virtuous thing, right? And now I have a much more conflicted decision to make around, you know, what, what's the right, right car to drive in light of my climate change concerns. This is just to say that the individual can't solve the cobalt supply chain problem, right? So like we need, we need these solutions to come at the system level and at-

Jay Shetty 50:02 Yeah

Sam Harris 50:02 ... the institution level. And, and that's, and that's where being a good person is, is sort of beyond the scope of anyone's individual choices. Like, like you need to, we need to collectively solve a massive co- coordination problem together, where in the act of getting, gratifying our desires, we are, we are, are, um, creating less and less harm and doing more and more good, more or less effortlessly. And that's, and that really is... You can have people who are just not thinking about purifying anything to, behaving in, in really, uh, impeccable ways given good incentives. And that's, and that's, uh, some more and more I'm thinking about that.

Jay Shetty 50:49 Yeah. I, I love that you're thinking about that, and, and I think it's, uh, an idea to put forward though is that it's also that the people that are setting up the institutions and the systems are also individuals. So it's like a vicious cycle.

Sam Harris 51:00 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 51:00 It's like the leaders at the top, the people who've made all these decisions to go out and, you know, take all this cobalt and make sure that it was picked by child slaves or child labor or whatever it may be. I, I haven't listened to podcasts-

Sam Harris 51:15 Yes

Jay Shetty 51:15 ... so I don't have the context. But someone made that decision, and some system never thought to correct that because that was led by some people. So I, I think, I mean, I, I agree with you, but I think it's both. It's like, you know, I think even where systems have been made tight, you still see people trying to find a loophole. I mean, that's-

Sam Harris 51:38 Yeah

Jay Shetty 51:38 ... how the human mind is set up. And so you've got the, the loophole mindset of like, "Okay. Well, let me find a way to exploit this or manipulate this towards my benefit anyway."

Sam Harris 51:49 Right.

Jay Shetty 51:49 And so you've got both. I, I think both are important. I think like you-

Sam Harris 51:53 Yeah

Jay Shetty 51:53 ... if you were the decision maker-

Sam Harris 51:54 Yeah

Jay Shetty 51:54 ... if you were building EVs, you would be able to make that system in your company-

Sam Harris 51:59 Right

Jay Shetty 51:59 ... and you'd set it up, but that would come back to you.

Sam Harris 52:01 Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 52:01 Right?

Sam Harris 52:02 But it could, like if we taxed carbon-

Jay Shetty 52:06 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 52:07 ... instead of taxing income, say-

Jay Shetty 52:09 Yeah, yeah

Sam Harris 52:10 ... I don't know how that works out-

Jay Shetty 52:11 Yeah, yeah

Sam Harris 52:11 ... in terms of the balance sheet, but something like that. So we're, we're, we're dis- you know, we're using a tax to disincentivize something we want to disincentivize-

Jay Shetty 52:18 Yep

Sam Harris 52:18 ... pollution, and we're not penalizing something that's intrinsically good, just, you know, creating value and, and being paid for that value, which is, you know, you know, what income in the best case is coming from. So there's that, and then like all of a sudden people would, "All right. If, if it's costing me money to be polluting, well, then I'm gonna figure out how to not do that."

Jay Shetty 52:38 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 52:39 And, uh, that's just gonna be my-- our interests are gonna be aligned there, right? So-

Jay Shetty 52:43 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Sam Harris 52:44 ... and so there's pr- there's probably, you know, a hundred or a thousand cases like that. But w- where I was going was, um, I've, I've been thinking a lot about, uh, what has come to be called the effective altruism movement, which is how to do good, uh, more reliably, more systematically. You know, many of us have been disillusioned with, with how philanthropy has been done traditionally. It's like the, it... There's a, there's a distinction between... This actually comes back to, um, some of what we've been talking about with the, the difference between being led by one's emotions-

Jay Shetty 53:17 Yeah

Sam Harris 53:18 ... and actually understanding w- what, what the outcomes are in the, in the world that one is accomplishing. When you're trying to do good in the world, when you're, let's say you're giving to a, you know, a, a children's hospital, say, I mean, that just seems an intrinsically good thing to do. But so much, we know that so much of our impulse to do good, our impulse toward altruism, our intel-- impulse toward effective compassion is driven by the c- the com- the single compelling story, the single, you know, the single identifiable protagonist, you know, the one little girl who's, you know, got cancer and we can help her, right? And that we sort of go to sleep when we're told statistics, right? So like we, we don't, we, we... Perversely, we care more about the one little girl than we care about the tens of thousands of little girls just like her, maybe even the tens of thousands of little girls including her, right? It's like we, we, you, you can run psychological experiments where you, you show people one little girl and you ask them how, how much they're incli- inclined to help and how much

Sam Harris 54:19 money they'd give. They give the maximum amount, you know, under those conditions. If you show them the same little girl and you layer on a story of just how many there, other girls there are like her, there, the, people's compassion impulse reliably diminishes, right? So it's a, this is, this is clearly a moral bug Of our, um, operating system. So we know that the, the, the good feels we get from giving are separable from the, from the actual effects of, of our, of our giving in the world. So anyway, I've thought, you know, more a-about this and I've brought on, you know, various m- uh, moral philosophers to, to speak about this, uh, on... b-both on the app and on my podcast. And one change I made in response to one of these conversations was I, I just decided that Waking Up as a company would give a minimum of ten percent of its profits to, to the most effective charities each year. And I personally would give a minimum of, of ten percent of my pre-tax income to charity each year. Now, I was, I was already giving money away to charity, and that felt good. But once I decided, all right, here's the formula, I have to give this minimum amount, this m- this, this minimum amount is already allocated to these ends. And what's more, these ends have to be not just charities and, and causes that I feel really personally engaged by or just things that I wanna support, like, you know, some, you know, I wanna give money to a college or a symphony or you... So it's like something that I... Or, or I, I see somebody's GoFundMe page and it tugs at my heartstrings, I wanna give money to that. No, that's, that's all separate. Here, here's ten percent that's going to charities that I, uh, p- in the kind of sober, rational analysis have decided are gonna do the most good irrespective of how I feel about these things. 'Cause there are certain causes that I just don't find especially sexy. You, you know, they're just not... Like, I, I just can't... I have to continually rethink my, my interest in them.

Jay Shetty 56:16 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 56:17 You know? But they are objectively, if you wanna, wanna save th-a life, you know, per unit, per, per dollar put into the system, this is the best use of the, your, your dollars, right? So one has been, you know, malaria mitigation in sub-Saharan Africa. Just, just bed, malarial bed nets, right? Like, that's... I just can't get too excited about handing out bed nets, right? But that's something that's worth supporting. So I just decided that, okay, the, you know, givewell.org has, has done, run this analysis. They're a great, uh, uh, source of information about effective charities. Here are their top ten charities. Whether I find these sexy or not, I know I can outsource the cognitive labor to these people because I've, I've spoken to them enough, I've analyzed what they've done, they're, they're doing enough. This is their full-time job. All right, you know, until I hear otherwise, I'm going to take their advice. It doesn't matter how I feel about these charities, right? I'm gonna get my good feels el-elsewhere. But what, what's happened is once I decided that I, I'm gonna give this amount of money to charity each year, and it's happening by default whether I'm thinking about it or not, whether I'm gratified by it or not, a very interesting thing flipped. One is, when I confront all these other opportunities to give money away bec- that are, are tugging on my heartstrings, they almost show up as a, as a kind of guilty pleasure. Like, I've, I literally have had the feeling of giving money to a children's hospital or giving money to, to somebody's GoFundMe page, and it's, it's almost leveraging the same greedy circuits in the brain as you'd get if you're, like, opening a catalog, uh, if, and you want everything on, you know, both pages. It's like I, it's like I, like, it, it's, it is a, it's, it's, it's a dir- a very visceral experience of selfishness and selflessness totally merging.

Jay Shetty 58:09 Mm.

Sam Harris 58:10 And it's like a, it's like wise selfishness is the same thing as selflessness. But it has the energy of, like, I, I really, I want to do this, and because I sort of know I'm, I've, I've rationally allocated to this d- a certain amount to doing this good kind of automatically, sort of even out of sight and out of mind, I'm not spending a lot of time thinking about where that money's going. It, it sort of changed my relationship to all these other occasions where I'm having to decide on the basis of my intuitions moment to moment whether I want to give and how much to give. And it's, it's really just kind of flipped everything upside down in a way that's interesting. And again, it's, it's, it's all based on having made a sort of system level default change-

Jay Shetty 58:52 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 58:52 ... that is a sort of hidden structure in which I'm now moving, right? I'm, I, it's, it... 'Cause again, I'm not... Until you make a decision like that, you're constantly rethinking-

Jay Shetty 59:04 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 59:04 ... what you wanna do. It's almost like going on a diet.

Jay Shetty 59:06 Yeah. That's a great example.

Sam Harris 59:06 Like, if you decide, like, oh, like I don't eat dairy anymore, right? So once you don't eat dairy anymore, um, I eat a lot of dairy, but, but-

Jay Shetty 59:12 [laughs]

Sam Harris 59:12 ... you know, if, if, one, didn't eat dairy anymore, you just, it's just a bright line, and then you, you, you're not, you're not constantly rethinking whether-

Jay Shetty 59:20 Yes. Yes. Yes

Sam Harris 59:20 ... you're gonna have ice cream, and if so, how much? And, and so it's, it's massively clarifying in, in those ways, you know?

Jay Shetty 59:25 That's, that's a great example. That really hit true. Yeah, the, the clarity of constraints, right?

Sam Harris 59:30 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 59:30 Having, having borders and boundaries and constraints are allowing you to not waste as much time and energy on, on figuring that out moment by moment.

Sam Harris 59:41 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 59:41 I, I've got, I've got two more questions for you, Sam, that I, uh, that I wanna make sure I ask you today. How does someone like you as a, as a meditator for so many years, as someone who's so thoughtful about these topics, as someone who wants to see change in the systems and institutions as well, how do you interact with the news? Because I find that to be such a source of anxiety and stress for so many people-

Sam Harris 1:00:03 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:00:03 ... who are probably listening to us right now. And so I'd, I'd love to hear how you've built a healthier sy- hopefully systematic, logical relationship with the news.

Sam Harris 1:00:13 Well, uh, it, it changed recently for me because I, uh, deleted my Twitter account, which is, was-

Jay Shetty 1:00:19 Yes

Sam Harris 1:00:19 ... where I was getting a lot of my news. I mean, I was, I was not getting the news from Twitter per se, but I was, I was just seeing, I was following lots of smart people-

Jay Shetty 1:00:26 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 1:00:26 ... and seeing what articles they were recommending, and so I was kind of going through that as a, it was, it was kind of a, like my news feed. Um, so I still, you know, I read The New York Times, I read The Atlantic. There's many things I read, and I, and, uh, so I, I, I I see the news in various channels, but I was using Twitter as the first filter on that, and that, for a variety of reasons, became, um, really toxic for me and, and toxic in a way that I was convinced was misleading. I mean, that, that was the thing that got me to finally just kinda rip the Band-Aid off because I, it wasn't just that I was seeing the worst of people and that was having a, a certain effect. I was convinced that I was seeing people at their worst who are actually not as bad as they were seeming to me on Twitter. Like, what, what Twitter was calling out of them was just a, a misleading picture of who they actually are 'cause in, in some cases I, I would knew, I knew the people in real life, and then I'm seeing them behave i- in, in abominable ways on Twitter, and I just think, "All right, this is, this is an au- this is just a fun house mirror that isn't psycholo- psychologically healthy to keep staring into day after day after day." Um, and also just so many of the things that I was... It was, it was amplifying stories that I was, you know, as a podcaster, I was tempted to react to, and I felt like I was getting a misleading signal as to just how salient or representative those stories, uh, are, uh, of, of the, the way the world is, right? So, like, uh, it's just, th- it was just the phenomenon of being too online ultimately, right? Yeah, so my

Sam Harris 1:02:02 r- so insofar as Twitter was news or, or, or a simulacrum of news, that has really changed for me. I just, I just, uh, am not seeing it. And now I just, um, yeah, I mean, I, I have a few sources of, of news that I, I go to as, uh, you know, more or less reflexively. But again, it's, it's, um, more and more I'm asking the question, you know, what do I want my moment-to-moment life to be like? You know, and who do I wanna be at the end of the day when I'm hanging out with my wife and kids, right? And, and, and what are the consequences of having spent my attentional budget over the previous hours i- you know, in one way versus another? And I mean, Twitter w- for me, honestly, was a, was a big change because it was like getting out of an unhealthy relationship. I mean, I was just-

Jay Shetty 1:02:54 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:02:54 ... you know, for all my talk about meditation and being able to unhook from the anger and other, other states, I mean, I could unhook, and I could let go of, of negative emotion and et cetera. I mean, it's not that the, the tools don't work, but I was spending a lot of time looking into this very deranging space and f- and it's not deranging for everybody, but for me bec- because g- what's unique about my job and about, or my approach to my job is that, you know, I criticize the right and left politically, you know, a lot and, you know, with sort of equal ferocity. And so I get... So I'm not, I'm not tribally aligned with anyone, and I get a lot of pain from both sides, and it's, it's a lot of... It's, it's not honest pain. It's not like it's, it's not like honest criticism of views I actually hold. It's like lots of lying about views that I don't hold and, you know, it's just, it's just misrepresentations and people take, you know, clips out of context, and I mean, people, people cut together clips of my podcast that, where I am seeming to say the opposite of what I in fact said in context, and they release those, and the people with big platforms, you know, retweet them. So it's a, it's a, it, it was a pervasive experience for me of seeing myself lied about and then wondering whether there's anything I should do about that, right? And so it was, it was this very sticky invitation to getting sucked in because like, "Okay, that's not what I said. That's not what I meant." The, uh, now I'm seeing the evidence of lots of people being misled by this misrepresentation, and it bothers me, and I'm pretty sure it should bother me because I, like, this is not the outcome I want, right? And it's not why I have a podcast, and it's not why I went on that other person's podcast. And so there's some burden on me to try to clarify the misunderstanding, and I was continually getting sucked into the illusion that clarification was possible, right? So I would try... 'Cause I really wanted to use Twitter as a channel of communication. It was the only social media platform I ever used. I never used Facebook or, I mean, I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but those are just marketing, you know, channels for my, my team. I'm never on those. Um, so I was on Twitter. It really w- was me, and I was, you know, as much as I could step away from it because it seemed unhealthy for a time, I kept seeing the evidence of confusion and misrepresentation. I thought, "I could just, uh, I'm just gonna try again to, to clarify things," right? And that was, that was such an unrewarding experience that it was just, it was, it was creating a residue of, of, um, despair and contempt. I mean, I just, I just felt, I just felt polluted by... I, I just felt like I had met, like, all the psychopaths in the world on a daily basis. Like, there can't be as many psychopaths i- in the world as I was seemed to be meeting online. As much as I could step away from it and just s- uh, and, and put it down, I kept picking it up again. And so I just thought, "This is crazy." So, so I, I just ripped it off.

Jay Shetty 1:05:52 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:05:53 Um, and that's been an immense change. I mean, it's really, it's, uh... So sometimes you need to actually do the thing that is... You c- you can't just keep-

Jay Shetty 1:06:00 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:06:00 ... putting yourself in this dysfunctional situation and then processing your reaction.

Jay Shetty 1:06:05 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:06:05 It's like you have to ask yourself, "Why are you doing this? Why are you spending your time and attention this way in the first place?"

Jay Shetty 1:06:09 Yep.

Sam Harris 1:06:10 And so for me, it was Twitter. I mean, I understand other people, you know, depending on what they're, they could just be put, they sh- they, if they're sharing cat videos on Twitter, they're just getting nothing but love, right? And they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Jay Shetty 1:06:19 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:06:20 But trust me, it's possible to have a, a truly lousy experience on Twitter.

Jay Shetty 1:06:23 Yeah. What, if anything, would bring you back? Because I, I love what you're saying there that, you know, if, if you're doing the same thing, it's giving you the same result. You've tried a new thing with it, it's giving you the same result. Sometimes you have to cut it off to, to create a healthier balance, to, to reconfigure, to, to do the work you wanna do. What, if anything, would allow you to go back to it? Or how would you see yourself if you were to go back to it in a healthier way? I'm thinking of all the people who cut things out their lives because they need to feel that distance from it because it's taken a hold of them, but then they know that in reality they might have to go back at one point.

Sam Harris 1:06:59 Right. Yeah, well, I'm, I'm not planning to go back.

Jay Shetty 1:07:02 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:07:02 I don't see, I don't really see that. I don't, I don't think, I mean, for marketing, I don't need it necessarily.

Jay Shetty 1:07:06 You don't miss it. You don't, yeah.

Sam Harris 1:07:07 Yeah, it's not... Well, I miss it, I miss the good parts of it.

Jay Shetty 1:07:09 Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Harris 1:07:10 Yeah, 'cause I was following a lot of smart, funny people, and that was entertaining.

Jay Shetty 1:07:14 Yeah. [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:07:14 But the truth is, even the good parts were ultimately diverting in a way that f- uh, in retrospect feels like a bit of a, just a waste of time. You know? It was just like I'm getting, um, I didn't have to spend as much time even with the good parts of it, you know? It was just, it, it was kind of like, uh, you know, just like too many carbs in that part of my information diet, you know?

Jay Shetty 1:07:38 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:07:38 That's what Twitter was. It was all carbs. I mean, if I went back, I would just, yeah, I would probably use it much more like I, I use or don't even use my other social media channels.

Jay Shetty 1:07:48 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:07:48 I would just use it as... I would have someone post for me, or I would post without ever looking about at what's coming back at me. And there are people, there are people who get a lot of negative stuff coming back at them, and they just never see it 'cause they just never look, and that's, um, I could have been one of those people, and I was that sort of person for, you know, some periods of time. But I just kept getting lured by the technol- by the promise of clarifying confusion. You know? 'Cause here the, like, the, the person just says something to me, and I can say something back. You know, why not? You know? And for s- strangely, none of the other social media platforms have ever hooked, hooked me in that way. I've n- I've never been tempted to get on Facebook or Instagram and, and use it in that way, and I, and I'm not looking for a substitute for Twitter. I mean, so that, that w- is interesting. There's many, you know, people are recommending substitutes where they're, you know, building their own, a new platform, you know, they got off Twitter for whatever reason. Um, but it's not, I'm just not tempted to fill that, the Twitter-shaped hole in my life with anything else.

Jay Shetty 1:08:46 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:08:46 So that's good.

Jay Shetty 1:08:47 I love that. All right, and then one last question before we dive into the final five-

Sam Harris 1:08:51 Uh-huh

Jay Shetty 1:08:51 ... uh, is we spoke about this right at the beginning, and you men- mentioned the, you know, the problem, the impermanence problem. Like, h- how do you see yourself thinking about or meditating on or preparing for death or the, the impermanence of life? Like, h- how does that come into your consciousness?

Sam Harris 1:09:14 Well, there are really two sides to it. I mean, there's, there's your own death-

Jay Shetty 1:09:18 And the, yeah

Sam Harris 1:09:18 ... and then, then there's the deaths of everyone you care about, and that's, those are really different problems in a way. And, and it's, um... Yeah, so when I, when I think of the, the experience of having those close to me die, that's, um, I mean, I know, I mean, it's, it's already happened. I, I've gone through that with, in the cases of, of certain people. And, you know, if, if I'm lucky enough to live a long time, well, then it's gonna ha- it's gonna happen, uh, s- I'm sure many times again. And I mean, it's a fundamentally mysterious thing. I mean, the, the, the fact that we drop out the bottom of this place is just, it's, it's truly imponderable, you know? And yet I know that it's possible to be happy in the absence of everyone, right? I mean, there's, there's some paradoxes here. Like, you and I are having this conversation now. Basically, everyone we love is not here.

Jay Shetty 1:10:16 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 1:10:16 You know? Like, you and I just met, you know, so it's like, uh, so we're, we're just, we're just getting to know each other.

Jay Shetty 1:10:21 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 1:10:21 You know? My mom's not here. My wife's not here. My kids are not here. You've got your list of people you love who are not here. It's okay to not be with the people we love, so we know that, right? And to take the other side of, like, what it's like to, to personally die, say, you know, we, we go to sleep each night, and we, we not o- it's not only is it okay to completely relinquish our hold on this world. I mean, we, we, we, we, we yearn for it. Like, if you're, if you've got insomnia, if you can't fall asleep, that becomes a problem. You're desperate to lose your, your seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching and thinking of... You, you just wanna, you wanna completely get zeroed out every night, and that's... You know, if d- if, if, if nothing happens after death, I mean, if we can leave aside the possibility that, that there, you know, there, that death is, in,

Sam Harris 1:11:16 in some sense an illusion, but if death, if you really just get a dial tone after you die, right? If really there's just nothing, it's somewhat analogous to sleep. I mean, it's like your, the lights go out, right? Every night we do that, and we do it happily, and it's not as... There's no, you know, I guess some people have sleep issues where they're afraid to fall asleep, but that's certainly not the common case, right? And so, uh, uh, to the, to the contrary, we yearn for it. So it is somewhat paradoxical that these, like, the, the worst thing about life, the, the, the thing that, you know, that people are terrified to experience themselves, and it's, they're terrified to experience in the case of, of losing the, the people they love. We, in, in the most routine way, we have really analogous experiences that are fine, right? So, like, you know, you're fine alone in a room, and you're fine to go to sleep, and these are, there's a, there's a bit of death in both of these things 'cause you're, everyone you love really is absent, and when you fall asleep, you really forget everything about your life in this world, you know? Until, until you start dreaming, and then you're completely confused about your life and some other circumstance, unless it's a, a lucid dream. Which is to say that it's actually, it's, it's possible to be okay ultimately even with the, with the reality of death from both, from either side, you know? I mean, I'm not, I'm c- I'm certainly expecting to, to grieve w- the next time someone close to me dies, you know? I'm not expecting peace.

Jay Shetty 1:12:46 Of course, yeah. Of course.

Sam Harris 1:12:47 But, but that is a, I understand that that, as an expression of love... First of all- Ask yourself if you'd even wanna be without the experience of grief. I mean, you'd have a... A- ask yourself, for instance, what you would want to do in the event that we had designed a, a perfect cure for grief, right? Like, I'll say a pill, like a, like the perfect... And it's not an antidepressant, but it's an anti-sadness pill, you know. So, and that's not conceptually incoherent. I mean, we, we might one day have that pill, you know. It might be a pill that you would compassionately want it. Like, there are people who, who are suffering some just intractable, unendurable bereavement that just never lifts, and they're just, you know, they can't get their life back together, and they're, you know, they're... You'd wanna give that pill to that person. But the question is, how soon would you wanna take that pill? And would you wanna take that pill 15 minutes after your closest connection in this life died? You know, it's like that's, the body is still warm, and would you be popping this pill? I don't think so. I think, I mean, there's, there's something to, like how carefree do you want to feel in the, in the immediate aftermath of a person you love dying? You know, you want it, you want the gravity of that to land. You know, you want to feel the, you wanna feel that loss because that's, in some sense, the only appropriate register of what they meant to you.

Jay Shetty 1:14:16 Mm.

Sam Harris 1:14:17 You know, and just how, and the life you lived together, right? You know, you just like... So if you, if you pop the grief pill, and then you're just saying, "Okay, what's on Netflix?" Right? That would be a, kind of a desecration of all that you had shared with this person. So I don't know. It, it's a very interesting question-

Jay Shetty 1:14:31 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:14:31 ... where you would, uh, 'cause I, I think ultimately you would want to be able to give that pill to someone whose life had become completely-

Jay Shetty 1:14:39 Of course

Sam Harris 1:14:39 ... derailed by grief. But just where, just where's the line? I mean, that's, that's an interesting question.

Jay Shetty 1:14:45 Yeah. That's a great answer.

Sam Harris 1:14:46 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:14:47 But yeah. Um, all right, so we, we end every episode with a final five-

Sam Harris 1:14:51 Okay

Jay Shetty 1:14:51 ... uh, which have to be answered in one sentence maximum each, each one.

Sam Harris 1:14:56 Okay. It's a challenge for me.

Jay Shetty 1:14:56 So this is a challenge for you, for sure.

Sam Harris 1:14:58 Okay. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:14:58 I'm excited to hear some of your answers. The fifth question, which we've asked to every guest on the show, is perfectly designed for you after today's conversation. So, uh, and I, and I just wanna say on camera, uh, we just cut because the cameras were getting reset because we've been taping for so long. But I was just saying that the conversation I've had with Sam today has been so different from the one I thought I'd have with him after reading his book, and that to me is a sign of a good conversation because it was true curiosity, mystery, and, and, uh, creation in the moment and, and presence in the moment from both of us.

Sam Harris 1:15:29 Yeah. Nice.

Jay Shetty 1:15:29 So I, I love that. Question number one, what is the best meditation advice you've ever heard, received, or given?

Sam Harris 1:15:36 You are not this next thought.

Jay Shetty 1:15:38 Mm. Uh, second question is, what is the worst meditation advice you've ever heard, received, or given?

Sam Harris 1:15:44 Well, I, I practiced for a long time, uh, in a very goal-oriented tradition where it was just, you know, I, I spent months and months on retreats with, with, uh, um, Burmese meditation masters who, who, um, had a very dualistic, goal-oriented seeking kind of model. It's not, it's not to say you couldn't benefit from that, but I, I will get you a sentence this, out of this.

Jay Shetty 1:16:07 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:16:07 But I, this is the setup to the sentence. The, the primary analogy being used was, um, you're kind of rubbing two sticks to get fire, and the moment you stop, they cool off.

Jay Shetty 1:16:20 Mm.

Sam Harris 1:16:20 Right? So it's just, it's... So whatever the sentence is, you're just like, meditation is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. You have to continuously do it, and the moment you break, you've, you're back to zero.

Jay Shetty 1:16:31 Mm.

Sam Harris 1:16:31 Right? You've made no progress.

Jay Shetty 1:16:32 Yeah, yeah.

Sam Harris 1:16:33 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:16:33 Wow. That's-

Sam Harris 1:16:33 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:16:33 ... yeah, that's a painful one. [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:16:35 Yeah, yeah. So you-

Jay Shetty 1:16:35 That's, that's really painful advice.

Sam Harris 1:16:37 Yeah, yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:16:37 Okay. Question number three, uh, what's the biggest lesson you learned in the last 12 months?

Sam Harris 1:16:42 Honestly, it's humbling to, to admit it, but it really was getting off Twitter. Just r- just the recognition that the, the, this whole kind of superset of preoccupation here was not worth it and not healthy.

Jay Shetty 1:16:59 Mm.

Sam Harris 1:16:59 Uh, even the good stu- I mean, just every side of this diabolical

Sam Harris 1:17:04 jewel was sort of ugly when I really looked at it, and yeah. So that was, that was it.

Jay Shetty 1:17:10 Great. Uh, question number four, what's something you think people value highly but you don't value anymore?

Sam Harris 1:17:19 Identity.

Jay Shetty 1:17:20 In what sense?

Sam Harris 1:17:21 I mean, really in every sense. I mean, just, just, uh, tribal identity, you know, your, you know, religious identity, your ethnic identity, your... I don't even think you need to identify with the face you see in the mirror each day, right? So, so how much less should you have to identify with people who just superficially resemble you in, in any way, so... But even just the identity of feeling like, like, just i- in my career or in any mode in which I'm showing up in the world-

Jay Shetty 1:17:51 Mm-hmm

Sam Harris 1:17:51 ... it's less and l- like, who I feel I am while doing that-

Jay Shetty 1:17:57 Mm

Sam Harris 1:17:57 ... is less and less substantial. It's like I don't, I don't really... It's not really graspable, you know? And so I don't... Like I, you know, I spend a lot of time teaching meditation i- in, uh, on Waking Up.

Jay Shetty 1:18:09 Mm-hmm.

Sam Harris 1:18:09 But because it's, because of the technology, because it's an app, I don't actually feel like a meditation teacher.

Jay Shetty 1:18:15 Yeah, yeah.

Sam Harris 1:18:15 You know, I'm not showing up in the world as a meditation teacher. I don't have a... There's no place you can go sit i-wi-with me in a, in a, in a hall, you know? So I don't have students in the ordinary meditation teacher way. But the reality is is that through Waking Up, you know, it, it seems strange to say it, but I, I could be teaching n- non-dual mindfulness to more people than anyone on earth at this moment. I mean, it's just, it's really quite crazy how it has scaled. But yet I don't f-- I never think of myself in that role. So, like, the, the, the role-based identity, you know, I'm a writer. I have got a bunch of books, but I, you know, I'm not, I don't th- really think of myself as a writer as much as I used to. I mean, there's just no... I, I just don't feel like Uh, there's no la- the, anything that I would, any way in which I would label what I'm doing, the label really does feel like it's, it, it, it's barely adhesive to the, to the project, you know? It's just, it's, it's, it's there just for the, for the, um, the utility of just summarizing, you know, just like what do you put on this form, you know? What's, what's your, what's your occupation, right? But it's like it just doesn't get at what I'm actually doing, and it, it doesn't get at how I see myself. So yeah, identity is something that, I mean, people think... Uh, yes, th- I'm sure there's some stage in life where you want a healthy identity. Like I've, I've got two daughters. I want them to have healthy identities. I want them to have healthy egos. But ultimately, um, it's not about being someone in, in any kind of sense-

Jay Shetty 1:19:44 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:19:44 ... that feels... It's like identity feels like a fist, you know, and I really want an open hand in life, and that, and so... It's not that, it's not that I never make a fist, but it's like you wanna, you wanna relax that as, as soon-

Jay Shetty 1:19:56 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:19:56 ... as you notice it.

Jay Shetty 1:19:57 It's, it's really interesting from a personal practice point of view and from a human scale practice point of view because what you just said is the i- the perfection of the idea almost, the way I see it, is like with your daughters, I don't know how old they are, but, you know, I'm, I'm guessing they're young.

Sam Harris 1:20:13 Yeah, not nine and 14. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:20:14 Yeah, right, and so it's like you want them to have a healthy sense of identity because at that stage of life, that's such an important thing.

Sam Harris 1:20:21 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:20:22 And it's almost like the evolution of the idea is like, well, there's a stage of life where that isn't-

Sam Harris 1:20:27 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:20:27 ... you know, the, the directive thing. And I think that's what's so hard because you find everyone who's listening, watching, experiencing life at such different-

Sam Harris 1:20:35 Yeah, yeah

Jay Shetty 1:20:36 ... levels, and it's almost like someone being able... It's the same as what I was saying earlier with the identity from a systematic point of view. It's like some people, that's where they are. That, that's just where they are, where their identity is what gives their life meaning.

Sam Harris 1:20:49 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:20:50 And then you see-

Sam Harris 1:20:50 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:20:50 ... as someone's... So yeah, it's just, it's fascinating to me how at different stages of life, identity can mean different things and-

Sam Harris 1:20:57 Yes, I, it's really-

Jay Shetty 1:20:58 ... it, it very-

Sam Harris 1:20:59 The emotion of pride really crystallizes it for me. It's like I-

Jay Shetty 1:21:01 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:02 ... for my daughters, it's, it's totally appropriate for them to feel pri- I want them to feel pride-

Jay Shetty 1:21:07 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:08 ... i-i-in the right moments, and I feel proud. Like it's some, it's not quite the right framing, but something like pride for them. It's like I-

Jay Shetty 1:21:16 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:16 ... I wanna play that, that healthy pride game with them, but I don't feel pride in my life-

Jay Shetty 1:21:21 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:21 ... at all.

Jay Shetty 1:21:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Harris 1:21:22 Like for pride, just pride just does not map. It doesn't have the right shape to map on-

Jay Shetty 1:21:26 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:26 ... to my sense of what it is to be a person really. You know? It's like I, I'm not responsible for any of my gifts-

Jay Shetty 1:21:32 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:32 ... such as they are, and it's like I just, I, I, I'm... Or again, it comes back to luck in so many ways and what you do with that luck. But again, even the doing with the luck is more, more good luck, you know? So, um, I just feel immensely grateful for everything that has gone well in my life, and I just, I mean, it's just... My gratitude-

Jay Shetty 1:21:50 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:51 ... is, is overwhelmingly kind of my primary positive emotion now. It's just that-

Jay Shetty 1:21:56 Yeah

Sam Harris 1:21:56 ... I have so much to be grateful for, and pride just does, like pride just does not fit. It's a puzzle piece that you maybe once fit and maybe, and, and, you know, uh, granted, if you're, if you're a kid, yes.

Jay Shetty 1:22:08 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:22:09 It's a, it's, it's, it's, it's a ga- it's a, it's a, it's a totally appropriate game at a certain stage of life, but later on, it's, it's a game that you just really, you have to outgrow.

Jay Shetty 1:22:17 Yeah. I ca- I can relate to that completely, and I fully, fully love that. Loved hearing that. Uh, fifth and final question. If you could create one law... This is the one that I said we've asked every guest-

Sam Harris 1:22:27 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:22:28 ... but I feel like it's perfectly designed for you. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Sam Harris 1:22:34 The price we pay for h- for dishonesty into, at every level of society i- is so enormous, and there's so little price paid for lying. I mean, the, like when, when, when a, when a politician is found to be lying, right, or, you know, the person who has g- immense responsibility is found to be lying, you know, but for like specific cases of fraud that are, you know, actionable, like li- like, like lying is just under the purview of free speech really. It's like it's not illegal to lie, right? I, I think, um... I mean, it's not so much a law. I, I think if we had lie detection technology that, that was, that we could rely on, which is, there are various interesting reasons why we, we don't have that and may never have that. But if we had that, if, if, if lie detection technology was like, you know, DNA analysis in a court of law, like you just put someone on the witness stand and you could tell whether they were lying, right? I think that would be the... Overnight, that would be the biggest ethical change that, that we, we could ever imagine in society. So I think, so anything that, that brought the appropriate level of opprobrium to lying, right, es- especially lying when it matters, um, that would be I, some version of that law. The, the you can't lie when it matters law, whatever that-

Jay Shetty 1:23:54 [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:23:55 ... is, you know? So but I do th- It, it would be a technological solution if we just could... More and more if people knew that they were in a situation where they actually can't get away with lying, right, because the, the technology is such or the, the information space is such that it's... But the, the, the added piece is that the norm, the, the, the norm violation needs to be just more urgent, you know?

Jay Shetty 1:24:18 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:24:18 'Cause pe- people, most people are walking around with a sense, "Oh, everybody lies. All politicians lie," so it's like this normal lie. What do you expect, you know? It's like, it's, and so it's not... But the, just the amount of harm and the amount, the amount of good that would be accomplished if you just knew people were being honest, and you know, you're not gonna be unpleasantly surprised by-

Jay Shetty 1:24:37 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:24:37 Um, so there's a lot of growth, cultural growth in that direction, but yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:24:42 Uh, uh, Sam, I hope you, uh, get involved in, uh, changing some systems. [laughs]

Sam Harris 1:24:46 Oh, well.

Jay Shetty 1:24:47 From, from some of the stuff you've said today, I'm like, it would be great if you were influencing the influencers of-

Sam Harris 1:24:53 Well, it's-

Jay Shetty 1:24:54 ... of some of these, these-

Sam Harris 1:24:54 We, we try with our humble podcast.

Jay Shetty 1:24:56 Yeah.

Sam Harris 1:24:56 That's, that's what we do.

Jay Shetty 1:24:57 Well, everyone who's been listening and watching, the podcast is called Making Sense. The app is called Waking Up. Uh, the book is also called by the same title. Uh, we'll put the links in the captions, in the notes, so that you have access to all of Sam's work. Uh, go and make sure you grab a copy of the book. Uh, meditate with him on the Waking Up app, and of course, uh, subscribe to the podcast, Making Sense. Sam, I hope this is the first of many conversations-

Sam Harris 1:25:22 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:25:22 ... we get to have.

Sam Harris 1:25:23 Yeah, really a pleasure.

Jay Shetty 1:25:24 Uh, it... Yeah, it's really, really been, uh, it's, it's really been a phenomenal conversation. I hope we have many offline too.

Sam Harris 1:25:30 Nice.

Jay Shetty 1:25:30 And, uh, anyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you grab your favorite segments, points, insights that really stood out to you. Share them with a friend. Start a conversation based on it. Tag me and, uh, Sam, and let me know what really stood out to you, what resonated with you. Maybe some things that are making you question or think differently. Like I'd love to see what came out of it for you. This has been a very different type of conversation on On Purpose, and I know you're gonna appreciate it. Uh, but a big thank you to Sam again for his generous time. Big thank you to every single one of you who've been listening and watching, uh, and we'll see you again for another episode of On Purpose. Thank you, guys. If you loved this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Maté on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past.