How To Handle AI Anxiety: A Computer Scientist and a Buddhist Teacher On Managing Uncertainty | Cal Newport & Matthew Brensilver

28:47there's just a lot of old-fashioned human logic and elbow grease in these harnesses where a lot of computer programmers spent a lot of time. They know a lot about computer programming. There's a lot of if-then and pattern matching and just building out old-fashioned programs that understand computer programming and prompt LLMs. These are cool tools. And in computer programming, it really is changing the way people computer program. So this is disruptive. This is big. But it's also pretty limited compared to the future they were talking about in 2023, which was these LL limbs will be as smart as a human, so you can ask it to do anything, and it will be able to do it as well as a human.

29:23That seems like that's out of reach. We don't know how to do that. Matthew, I am preparing to move on from the will AIs get out of control and kill us, the so-called alignment question, to the will AI take all of our jobs. But before I make that segue, I just want to touch base with you again. Is there anything more you want to add or ask on the existential tip. Yeah, well, I suppose part of my question is what problems are we solving for in the technological development and who does that serve? And I am ignorant, you know, and don't understand the incentive structures, but I do, I just feel temperamentally a little bit skeptical about the broad application of AI adding to human well-being.

30:21I can see it, as you've emphasized, Cal, in more narrow applications, that the chatbot is not like the pinnacle of the form or something like that. And it's very hard to argue with the scientific value of some of these applications already. Already, every day, hey, I get a kind of nature's top stories. And so often there is something very impressive that has been supported by the technology. Very hard to imagine that regressing, not expanding. But as a consumer, as a civilian, as a practitioner, as somebody who seeks a life of meaning and peace and care, it's not clear to me what the applications are and what the broader societal effects are.

31:14And that's where a lot of my concern really is. And just seeing how social media and smartphones has really capitalized in some sense on the first noble truth, that there is dukkha, that there is some unsatisfactoriness, and that a phone or technological entertainment of one kind or another has capitalized on the sense of this moment could get better. And it's been exploited ruthlessly to the point where our minds are colonized by technology in a way that we don't even fully appreciate. And smartphones capitalize on a certain kind of agitation, boredom. I worry that AI will capitalize on a certain kind of laziness and fear in some way, and that we will continue to try to essentially turn aspects of our life that had in some unseen way provided a certain amount of meaning, even though they might be mundane and repetitive, but that we are essentially extricating those from our lives or outsourcing them.

32:35And I don't know where that stops. And there are certain things in our life where, what is the point of our life? What is the point of it. And I remember Kiran Setia that you had on some years ago made this distinction between telic and atelic activities. And telic, from the Greek telos, it was like, these are things that we do in order to exhaust, meaning to commute home from a day of work, you get home and that is now done. And okay, it's good that it's done. But then there are a-Telic activities where it's like spending time with family or reflecting on one's life. And those do not aim at a terminal state whereby you extricate that from your life.

33:28And I just wonder how much the sense of all of our life becoming Telic activities and the sense that there's less and less protection for what is only done in the present moment and is never finished and what will be be left with and so that that's some of my concern in in the mix here if if we set aside will ai kill us and which i i think for both of us is still an open cal said we're safe there's a money money back guarantee i'm coming to georgetown if uh i get in trouble We'll all be dead anyway, so I'm okay either way. Right, right. So setting aside the will we all be dead question, your question, your related concern, Matthew, if I'm hearing you correctly, is if we look at the history of technology, most recently with social media, that was supposed to connect us all in this blissful Kumbaya way.

34:29but it actually has driven deep wedges and created a lot of anxiety and capitalized on our vulnerabilities as summed up by the Buddha in his first noble truth that is often mistranslated as life is suffering, but more accurately could be translated as life is unsatisfactory if you're constantly chasing things that will not last, given how unremitting impermanence is. And you look at the effect of social media, not so positive by most people's lights, and say, what is AI going to give us? Is this just going to drive us further into anger, anxiety, disconnection, dislocation, et cetera, et cetera.

35:13Decent summation of your concern? Cal, what do you say to that concern? I fiercely agree, right? Right. I mean, I would say one of the big projects in my writing over the last decade is looking at exactly this issue of you introduce a technology for some purpose and it has all of these unintentional side effects. You introduce email to get rid of voicemail and it fragments our attention to the place where work becomes unbearable. You introduce social media so you can keep up with the relationship status of your college boyfriend. and before you know it, it has completely colonized our mind and changed our epistemology to one of engagement over logic and basically broke the country.

35:52So God only knows what the side effects are going to be if we have the widespread adoption of AI. We've already seen a few, right? Like social media, one of the bad negative side effects of social media is that we moved in-person, real value, sacrifice-based relationships and interactions to this low friction, sort of easy digital world of interaction, in what's called social snacking by the social psychologist. And we all got more lonely. Well, social media did us a favor by becoming worse. It followed the TikTok model. And now no one actually socializes with people on social media anymore. So maybe we're going to get a breather.

36:25But then chatbots came along and now people are saying, oh, it's way lower friction to have a conversation with a chatbot than a real person because it really feels like it understands me. And I have a much more enjoyable conversation with it than actually interacting with a real person. So we got a breather from getting away from social interaction, and now it's back to being worse again. Multiply those problems by 100. And that's what we'll have if we approach AI like we did all of the other technologies in the last 20 years, which is to basically say, it's my job as a consumer to figure out why this is useful.

36:57I'm going to try everything. If a company from Silicon Valley says it's a big deal, I need to use it, and it'll cause whatever damage it causes. We have to get rid of that mindset. We have to switch to a digital minimalist mindset of, I'm not going to use your tool until you have an overwhelming, hard-to-ignore case for exactly how it's going to help me. It's not my goal, OpenAI, to figure out how to make ChatGPT useful to me. You come and convince me that there's some part of my life this is going to make better, and then I'll use it. We have to switch our mindset to starting with our values first and only choosing and deploying technologies when they support those values instead of inhibiting them.

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41:27I recently read in The New York Times, Brett Stevens, one of their sort of right of center columnists, he wrote a very strident piece saying you should not use AI in your writing at all, which I think I disagree with, but maybe some of your statements in that last utterance might be pushing me into Brett's corner a little bit. I, when all the noise about ChatGPT started in 2023, I vowed to myself in my, I was in my early 50s at the time, 55 now, that unlike all the past technological revolutions, I was not going to be late on this one. You know, I was late to the internet, late to social media.

42:11So I'm just going to embrace it early. It just felt like the right thing to do. And counterintuitive for an old guy. And I have found it actually pretty useful in my writing, not as something that writes for me. It's a terrible writer. But as, first of all, as like kind of an enhanced Google, like for research, although you have to go back and double check everything it says. And as a decent thought partner at seven in the morning when none of my actual writing partners are at work and I can bore the shit out of ChatGBT until the cows come home and it never gets tired of me. But again, I always need to run any conclusions I land on in my conversations with ChatGBT past actual human editors.

43:02So I'm just laying out how I use it and have found it reasonably useful. But should I be rethinking that? I think what you're talking about there would be in alignment with Brett's article. Like, here's the way I think about Brett's call, which I actually agree with. Here's the way I think about it. There's two things with AI and writing that I worry about. One is I think it is emotional or psychological fraud to try to take writing that was largely produced by a computer and make it seem as if it came from you. So I have a bright line against that because when you are consuming writing that you assumed was written by another person, you're actually simulating that other person's mind within your own.

43:40Writing is like a telepathy. It's magical. It's a way of taking an internal human state, a cognitive state in a human brain, somehow capturing it and squiggles on paper and then having another person recreate your internal cognitive state within their own head. It's an incredibly intimate human thing we do. So I do think there's a level of fraud that would be involved if I have AI write the email that I'm sending to you because I'm simulating your mind, but it wasn't actually your mind. So that's one bright line. The other line I have is writing is how you get smarter. Writing is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do as humans.

44:16I wrote a New Yorker piece about this a couple years ago where I got into the neuroscience of writing. And it's a symphony of connections between many different parts of your brain that would never normally work together. It is incredibly demanding, and it's what makes humans who they are. Go read Walter Ong's, you know, go read Walter Ong, right? And he gets into huge detail about almost anything we think about today as rationality or logic or human rights or anything we value intellectually could not exist until we had writing, and writing allowed us to sort of grapple with and make sense of these.

44:46So it's important that you write. All that being said, I don't see any problem using a chatbot as a better Google. It is a good Google, especially if it's pointing you to sources that you then read. I think it's great for it. I think it's fine to have – I've tried this. Conversations with ChatTPT. I don't think there's anything morally wrong with it. It worries me because it's really addictive because it's very positive and it makes you seem really smart. And I've gotten very wary about it, but I don't think there's anything wrong about that. So actually, I have no issue with what you're saying, but I do have issues with having it right on your behalf or just writing less.

45:20I think both of those things are important. Matthew, are there use cases for chatbots that you think are healthy and adaptive for the average viewer or listener of this show? Yeah, well, I loved what Cal said, that dimension about telepathy, which in Dharma circles, Buddhist language, we describe as something like transmission, that actually the nature of the thread between a teacher and student in the Buddhist world is essentially sharing one's mind and actually conveying with a incredible precision and authenticity like what it's like. At some level, a Dharma talk is narrating one's mind, and to have the output of an LLM, that only adds static to it, even if it sounds good.

46:21And so I'm really concerned, skeptical about, and have never tried to use the technology to augment, you know, Dharma talks that I give or anything like that. That makes me very wary. And it's not to say that there wouldn't be something very compelling that would come up in the output, you know, that I can imagine, like, okay, give me a poignant story about change or something like that. And then, you know, Claude's going to do it, right? Or something like that. But I'm wary. And so, I can imagine, given the limitations of teachers to meet with students one-on-one, I can imagine some individually tailored instructions.

47:11Maybe it's one of the frontier models, whatever. Or maybe it's something that is overtrained on dharma on one teacher or a series of teachers in some way. I don't know the technical kind of applications that are possible, but I could imagine that being giving very good feedback. In fact, I have a friend who in an online retreat was consulting, asking very precise questions that essentially enabled him to deepen the Dhamma-vichaya investigation. And so there was something about the output that was harvesting from all of the world's wisdom, and specifically Theravadan Buddhism, that enabled him to actually hone the meditation techniques in some interesting ways.

48:10But that was dependent on him being intrinsically motivated to practice and using it in a way that was, I would say, balanced and circumscribed rather than getting sidetracked with philosophical inquiries or these kinds of things. It was really in service of phenomenological investigation. And when it's like that, I really can see its value. So you think it would be kosher and maybe even helpful to talk to a chatbot about your meditation practice or find points of the Dharma? It's going to be better than all of us at some level. And that is my sense that it's, I don't know it well enough, but it will at some point the output will be excel that of, you know, our most luminary best teachers.

49:08That's my, that's my guess. But what's interesting to me, and I'm not going to name any names here, but a very prominent Dharma teacher recently released a chatbot based on their, I'm going to use their as the pronoun, not just not to give away the gender of the person on their work. and there was an uproar. And so I read, I actually personally don't, and this may make me unpopular with my own viewers and listeners, but I don't actually see a big problem with releasing a chatbot of your work, especially if it's done with humility and in a sense of experimentation. But the outsized reaction speaks to me to the massive anxiety that people feel and wariness that people feel around this technology.

49:58When is the Dan bot coming, Dan? The thing is, in order to create a bot around somebody, you actually have to know something. And I am not a Buddhist scholar or a highly trained Buddhist teacher. I'm not a computer scientist like Cal. I am an interviewer. And I can speak confidently on a few things, but not in the way you can. So I don't see a bot coming anytime soon. I appreciate the strength of the reaction from people does not surprise me at all. And you can look at polling and some threat to this basic notion of Dharma as warm hand to warm hand, as the Zen tradition says. And to disrupt that at some fundamental level is very destabilizing.

50:49And you could probably see that in classrooms and, you know, education, that there will be risks to the disruption of the warm hand to warm hand. That's why I believe chatbots can be really helpful in the ways you've described. And they're not a replacement for either one-to-one relationships with a Dharma teacher or parasocial relationship through my app or some other app or, you know, going on retreats, et cetera, et cetera. I think I see it as an augmentation, not a replacement. Back to AI anxiety, though, because I have a few questions I want to get to before I let you guys go. I referenced the other common, well, I think there are many other common fears around AI, but I think the most prominent other fear besides will artificial intelligence eliminate us is will it eliminate our jobs?

51:47Cal, how worried should we be about that? In the near future, I wouldn't be very worried because it has struggled to do this, even though year after year we've been told it's about to. Even after we went through a whole season this fall and this winter of what became known as AI washing, where tech companies that were right-sizing after overhiring during the pandemic kept trying to blame layoffs on AI, only for it to be pointed out that these layoffs had nothing to do with AI. It was just a way of making them sound more smart. So right now, we don't see this as being a particular fear. Something I'm reporting on at the moment, which I think is really important, is that even in the world of computer programming, which is the best case scenario for AI, this is where we have the most advanced AI tools.

52:32We have the most impressive adoption. It's the use case with the best data, and it's the use case that the AI engineers understand best. So these coding harnesses that can produce code automatically have swept through computer programming, right? It's ubiquitous now. And now what's the reporting showing? After four or five months of this, a lot of these senior engineers are quietly having to go back to write a lot more code by hand because it's not trustworthy enough. And it's too hard to review the code being produced by a machine. When you write code yourself, this is how you understand how a system works.

53:05And when you understand how a system works, you know how to prevent it from actually crashing. And this doesn't mean that these tools aren't useful in computer programming, but it means that even in this best case scenario for AI to come in and take over jobs. And we were told it was doing this and it had been doing this. We're struggling to actually have it do it because what we do as humans in a lot of these jobs is complicated and it's multifaceted. It's easy to augment work with technology to make it easier. It's really hard to automate work. So I think there was a big moment, maybe like a six-month moment, where this was the conversational topic du jour.

53:38It's going to take all the jobs. It's going to crash the economy. And the Frontier Labs moved off that topic. I think it was right around the time they started talking to East Coast bankers about IPOs and they said, this is not the right talking point to be talking about. And now we moved on to other things like alignment and superintelligence and AI getting out of control. So, no, I don't think right now there's a widespread fear that we have an imminent threat of a widespread job automation that's like about to happen like that. Matthew, how's your blood pressure in response to that? I sit still for a living, Dan.

54:09You know this. I'm like so far out of my zone. But I naively feel like I have seen enough capability to be – it's not hard to imagine wide swaths of jobs being changed fundamentally, given just the capabilities that I've seen in my limited exposure. And that's sobering. And when I think about certain tasks, it's just hard to imagine companies wanting to pay a human for it. Is he right about that, Cal? Yes, but that's normal, right? I mean, this is a normal technological story that you invent a new workplace productivity technology and it automates certain types of work and replaces some types of work and other types adapt.

55:05But we didn't have the same levels of existential dread about it. I think the internet, for example, was massively disruptive. The personal computer was massively disruptive. But we didn't think about it in terms of the economy is going to crash or that like Sam Altman has proposed on multiple occasions, we're going to have to have a sovereign wealth fund based on stock grants from the AI companies from which we can actually give people income so they can survive after most of the economy is automated. We never thought so extremely about past innovations, even though they did change things. We didn't think about it as fundamentally going to destabilize the entire economy.

55:44And, you know, as it stands now, it's hard to use these tools to completely automate even major parts of jobs. I think that the two most useful use cases we have right now are computer programming, right? I think it is true. This is very disruptive. For the most part, computer programmers have letting agents produce the actual code. They'll heavily spec what they want and look at what it writes, but that's a big change. In certain types of mathematics, these mathematics solvers that are built on LLMs along with other tools that are all orchestrated together are changing the way that people in my field do mathematics, that we're using these tools more often.

56:19It doesn't solve mathematics. It can only work with stuff that humans have already proved, but it is disruptive there. And I think that's the normal story. And I think that's what we're going to get with AI. Always with these technological revolutions, it goes slower than you think at first and then has bigger impacts than you assumed in the long term. So I think 20 years from now, we'll look around and say, wow, there's AI one way or the other heavily integrated into almost everything I do in my job in a way that wasn't the case before. Just like today versus 1980, we're like, man, there's computers and networks involved in almost everything I do is my job in a way that would have been inconceivable 40 years ago.

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59:26So for much of this interview, Matthew and I have been peppering you, Cal, with skeptical questions about how much we should be worried about AI. For this section, I want to focus on you, Matthew. And then, Cal, you can weigh in with anything you'd like to add. If people listening retain their anxiety, let's talk from a Buddhist perspective about tools for navigating an uncertain future. What would you suggest? It is striking that the Buddha places uncertainty at the center of all things. That Anicca is usually rendered as impermanence, but sometimes also as uncertainty. And uncertainty mobilizes a sense of urgency in us because there can be more than one outcome, some of which we prefer more than others.

1:00:24And generally speaking for an animal, the default response to uncertainty is something like stress. And stress at some level occurs when we feel something, are surprised by what we're feeling, and we do not know how to mobilize to meet that threat. Because feeling is really sensed as threat. This is why Buddhist teachers are often pointing us back to our body and the somatic cues. Because at some level, if feeling is the kind of alarm. Thinking is the rapid response that we try to marshal in order to manage that sense of the world trembling. And the world is always trembling. And the basic manner in which we try to manage anitsha, uncertainty, is to think and to worry and to generate fearful scenarios and attend to those fearful scenarios, or we're trying to game out all of these contingencies in our life and try to cling our way into more security.

1:01:44And so this is a very deep habit of our mind. And even while we're meditating, we can actually recognize that a lot of the movements of our mind are an attempt to know what the trajectory of our life means for the next moment, what this felt sense of this moment means for my future. And there's a sense of being squashed between the past and the future where the present is essentially only leveraged in order to ensure our security. And information is sometimes described as or defined as the reduction of uncertainty. That's what information is in some sense. And so if we enter a room that's where the lights are out, it's completely dark, and we're sighted, we turn on the lights, there's information, there's less uncertainty, right?

1:02:47When we're sitting there on our meditation cushions or we're lying there in bed late at night trying to go to sleep, we essentially are hungry, desperate for information in order to reduce uncertainty and sense of threat. And the place to which we go, we kind of go to our low-budget Google, namely thinking, and it is about generating and attending to various scenarios and contingencies. And no doubt some of this is adaptive, the notion of just live in the present moment. It's silly. It's silly. Of course, there's a ton of planning and prognostication. In fact, like wisdom at some level is the ability to predict true happiness, to predict what will satiate our hearts and the hearts of others.

1:03:48A lot of this path actually involves the future, but our deeply fraught, anxious relationship with uncertainty is a shadow that that is cast over our present moment in deep ways. Okay, so this is a kind of problem definition, right? And then what is the Buddhist counsel around this? On the one hand, we're asked to generate deep forms of stability, that it's not merely opening to a Nietzsche, but we are actually cultivating stability, and we are opening in this radical way to the ungovernable, unpossessable nature of life. And so it's these two deep tasks that sometimes clank into one another. Tell me to stop, Dan.

1:04:49Should I just keep going? Yeah, I'm loving this. I think what you're saying is that on the remedy side, it's stabilizing the mind, and then with a stable mind, opening up to this uncomfortable reality that we don't know shit. On the stabilizing front, it may be counterintuitive, but I would say the Buddhist tradition begins with something like love and ethical responsibility, that this is part of how we stabilize our life is that we ensconce ourself in a network of care and responsibility and debt and gratitude and love. And we come to find in our dharma life that increasingly, because we have been careful not to trespass on the hearts of others, because we know that there is no such thing as a close-hearted happiness, we live into a network of care and mutual respect, and we feel suspended, supported by that.

1:05:52We develop stability through the practice of equanimity, right? The kind of sense of so much of our anxiety is the sense that I will be run over by phenomena, that there are possibilities for my future that will obliterate my heart, sense of well-being. And the practice of equanimity of actually staying stable amidst intense feeling is essentially an anti-anxiety practice, that the more confidence we have in our heart to be with the various valences and intensities of the future, the less we need to actually attend to fearful scenarios. The sense that, oh yeah, this really may hurt, and that will not harm my heart.

1:06:55That is a kind of security that we start to sense very clearly. and we develop the stability of ease and tranquility, and our whole life looks different from the perspective of tranquility, our whole life, including risk of all kinds. It just looks different. It's not that the problems are resolved, but everything looks different when we come into that deep balance. And then lastly, maybe on the stabilizing front would be something like, if uncertainty is this sense of being this impoverishment of information, we need more information, part of what we are doing in our Dharma practice is distinguishing signal from noise.

1:07:49And meditation at some level is about learning what is actually trustworthy information, what we actually can take to the bank, and is good predictive data for understanding our future happiness. And a lot of times, the state of delusion is one where it's a cacophony of voices, we do not know what to listen to, the noise of greed and hatred, which are not useful sources of information for predicting our well-being. It's just not. Our ego, this is static. That is noise. That's distortion in the system. It will make us choose pathways that are less likely to lead to our happiness. So a lot of meditation is about stabilizing our mind, learning what is trustworthy within us, learning where the distortion and noise is, and living our life on those accords.

1:08:58And then the last piece, and then I'll be quiet, would be this more radical practice of opening to uncertainty and to the ungovernable, endless, relentless nature of this human realm, the sense of opening to the unpossessibility of our life, that our life depends on a million other factors that we do not call our life, that we are supported by that, that we are in this network of fragility, and that it will not last forever. And so this is a reflection on mortality ultimately, And that is why the tradition commends a kind of deep exploration of what that does to one's heart, to live alongside finitude.

1:10:03But even before that final contemplation of death is the sense that I do not own my life. I do not own my life, that it has arisen, it's dependent on many causes and conditions, and that I can exert influence, but the efficacy of that influence creates the illusion of control. And so this kind of deep wisdom of letting go and surrender and the sense of no longer exerting willfulness over that which is ungovernable, there comes great relief with that. And much of the Dharma is only revealed when we relinquish the willfulness and see what lies on the other side of our power. goodness is already there.

1:11:03This is a kind of radical dimension of the Buddhist practice, but an important one as we also cultivate all of this stability. Let me see if I can reflect that back to you and also just add on some of my own two cents. I think what you're saying is in the face of uncertainty, and AI is a huge vector for uncertainty. The Buddhist recommendation, or at least the recommendation from you as a Buddhist is stabilize and open. So stabilize the mind. One way to do that is to just live your life as a kind, connected person. We know from just basic understanding of evolution and also from modern psychological research that living in a generous, connected way is a great way to regulate the nervous system.

1:12:03Another way to stabilize the mind is through meditation, which can help us be less distracted and help us be less fooled by our unwise thoughts and more open to our wise thoughts and impulses. and once we've stabilized the mind in this way we can do this radical thing of opening up to the fact that we don't know and we don't have full control now this can be and this is where the two cents come in mine this can be misinterpreted as a kind of resignation that's not what it is it's it's acceptance not as resignation or passivity but as not being at war with reality so that you can, with your stable, open mind that is now connected to the non-negotiable truth of things, do whatever is within your capacity to do.

1:12:59And so for me, to the extent that I can muster optimism or hope at any point in my life, it really is connected to, huh, if I follow the tools I've learned through Buddhism and psychology, I will be maximally capable of doing whatever I can in whatever situation arises. Nice. Nice. Sounds good, Dan. Cal, you've just been asked to sit through a large dose of the Dharma. I know many technical folks who are very interested in Buddhism because it is so technical. Was all of the foregoing boring or compelling for you? Well, my blood pressure is definitely lower. And what came to mind is a potential synthesis of the way I'm thinking about AI and the way Matthew is.

1:13:47I want to run this by Matthew. And so I'm reflecting it back to see if I'm seeing this in the right way as well. So one of the things that came to my mind is that a trick that AI rhetoric is pulling right now that really is pretty malicious is that it puts people into a cognitive state if there's an acute emergency. but it doesn't actually give them a response they can do, right? So there's an acute emergency. The alarm bells are going, but there is no, let's get our possessions out of the house before the fire gets here. We have to get to the doctor and deal with this. We don't know what to do about it.

1:14:19And I'm assuming for a lot of people who would aspire to what Matthew was talking about, the sort of equanimity, the meditative Buddhist approach, it's very difficult to access when you feel like you're in a state of acute emergency. So maybe one way to synthesize this, what I want your opinion on, Matthew, is that I'm trying to reduce the sense of that we're in an acute emergency. We're not all about to die. Your job isn't about to disappear. That does not get rid of the uncertainty surrounding AI. That does not let us off the hook, but it does put us back into an area that we have been continually for basically all of the 20th century.

1:14:52Before this, there was a pandemic. Before this, there was a financial crisis. Before this, there was terrorism post 9-11. Before that, we were dealing with nuclear threat, right? It puts us back to a level of uncertainty that we've been at before. And now maybe the average person has a hope of actually making progress with exactly the type of approaches that Matthew was talking about. So it's this idea, Matthew, that I'm like the amuse-bouche that hopefully allows the average person into the entree that is a sort of Buddhist approach to uncertainty. Am I finding a way here to synthesize our approaches?

1:15:24I like it. I like it. Yeah, it's like maybe we say we've been overtrained on fear and anxiety. or something like that. And that's actually, there's some evolutionary, whatever, conservation of some mechanisms of fear, but we actually are not going to exercise our wisdom from a place of catastrophic thinking, hyperarousal. And so, the sobriety is a way actually of accessing our collective wisdom. Sounds good? Gentlemen, that's a perfect place to leave it. I am so grateful to both of you. This has been enormously helpful for me personally, and I hope for everybody watching and listening. I also want to thank DJ Kashmir, who produced this episode with an enormous amount of skill.

1:16:14Just in closing, for Cal Newport, you should check out his books. They include Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, but there are many more, and he's been on the show several times. I'll put links in the show notes. He also has his own show, as referenced at the top, called Deep Questions, where he does a lot of debunking of the latest fear-based AI stories, and I'm a regular listener and can heartily recommend it. Matthew is, as I referenced before, constantly teaching in the Dharma world. Matthew, if we want to learn from you directly, take your courses or whatever, is there a website we should go to?

1:16:49Just my name, MatthewBrensilver.org. I'll put a link in the show notes. Gentlemen, I'm, as I said before, incredibly grateful. Thank you both. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris.

1:17:28You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers. add free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers and with one another. There's a free 14 day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.

1:18:01hey i'm dan harris host of the 10 happier podcast with summer winding down now is the perfect time to hit the reset button so many of us get stuck in ruts at work in our relationships in our nervous system we've got a special series where i'm going to be talking to psychologists meditation teachers even some comedians about how to get out of that rut how to reset your life in lots of different super practical ways. 10 % Happier with Dan Harris. Join the party wherever you get your podcasts.