Sam Harris ON: How To Break Your Social Media Habits & Ways to Master Your Anxious Thoughts

29:24If you've been waiting for the right moment, this is it. Head to waldenu.edu and take that first step. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by CHEV. Sometimes what we need most is a pause, A moment of clarity that helps us breathe a little deeper, listen a little closer, and feel a little lighter. On TikTok, those moments are actually happening every day. Creators share daily habits that people find helpful, personal insights that help them understand their own journeys, and reflections that have brought them perspective when life feels overwhelming. You'll also find people opening up with honesty, about healing, about growth, about finding balance in their lives.

30:07And in that honesty, we're reminded we're not alone. Because one story of resilience can ripple into thousands of others. One reminder to be present can shift an entire day. And one spark of wisdom can keep us moving forward with more compassion for ourselves and each other. On TikTok, support can show up in the simplest ways. It's a community for reflection and connection. And where small moments can make a meaningful difference. 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 fully aligned with human values in the in the collective sense 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's hard to free something of that if you inherently build something with that yeah 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.

31:48And so it comes back to the waking up part of your work, which is this self-reflective, contemplative idea of who am I becoming? Who do I want to be? Who am I? I mean, at the very deepest level, as you said. One word that I've always loved from my studies was this idea of the word purifying. Like there was all this, there was a need for purification of some of these elements. And you talk about this in the beginning of your book when you, I believe it was one of the first times you did MDMA and then you had this feeling of like complete love for your friend free of envy. And 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 learned through my study of the wisdom traditions because to me, I was thinking, yeah, what's really required, as you said, is that love's already there.

32:51It'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 our ability to be that. Is that part of what you feel meditation achieves? Or no, that's a completely different thing as well. The thing you want to accomplish is already accomplished. There are dualistic and non-dual ways of conceiving the whole path of practice. And the dualistic way is very much a purification model, which is there's something that's currently dirty, right? And you can clean it. And it's going to take effort to clean it, right?

33:31And I would argue that most spiritual traditions are framed in that way. And there's definitely a place for that, but the mature approach to meditation practice is, and the one, frankly, that is just free of the stress of seeking, is to recognize that consciousness as it is, ordinary consciousness, regardless of what its current contents are, 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 supposed to be meditating. Okay. What's true now, right? And the physiology of anger hasn't even had time to dissipate yet, right?

34:14So that'll happen over, you know, tens of seconds, right? But still in this, if you know how to recognize, you know, what I call over in waking up, you know, consciousness without a center, in that first moment of 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 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 just regularly having experiences of bliss, say.

34:59So it can be very drug-like. All of 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 watching Netflix two weeks later, you're not concentrated in that way and you're doing something else with your attention and presumably you're not going to be blissed out in the same way. So all of those changes in the contents 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.

35:32Thoughts and sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and moods and the energetics of experience is always occurring in a condition that is fundamentally mysterious, really. I mean, it's not, because if you engage it prior to concepts, I mean, there's a layer at which you can just think about it and describe it in psychological terms. There's a lot to understand, you know, correlating changes in our minds with changes in the brain, right? So there's a possible neuroscience 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.

36:14I mean, 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 in order to know what it is, right? So it's just, on some level, you are a witness to everything that's appearing. 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 that doesn't feel like I. It doesn't feel like me. And whatever feels like I or me is yet more appearance.

36:53It can be just a pattern of energy on your face or a contraction in the body. So as you keep dropping back and witnessing that, the purification model makes less and less sense because what is there to purify? right there's not like even even even anger is no longer anger right in the moment of a record of recognition it's just this it's just a feeling of heat 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.

37:46And so the emotion is dissipating. And so it's anger is no longer anger, but it's in purification mode. It is still possible to do that dualistically. I mean, And in the beginning when you're practicing, what I tend to teach over at Waking Up is a technique called mindfulness, which most people engage dualistically in the beginning. They're strategically being aware of sights and sounds and sensations and the breath and thoughts and emotions. And so even dualistically, you can learn the difference between being lost in thought and identified with an emotion like anger and just witnessing it from the point that seems to be outside of that thought and that emotion.

38:36and 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 that's fine i mean that's a that's a starting point that's and a necessary one for virtually everyone 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 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 acting out of.

39:24And it's divisive. It's, you're going to say the thing you regret and that for what you have to apologize for. And it's just, you know, you're, and the normal person who doesn't know how to be mindful and doesn't know the difference between being lost and thought and not is really the mere hostage of that process. 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 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.

39:58And it's the complication of life born of that that 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, an emotion like anger or fear is useful insofar as it is a salience cue. It's telling you that something just happened that's worth paying attention to. There's somebody just walked into the room who doesn't have your well-being at heart. They've got some intention that is in conflict with something that you were trying to accomplish, say.

40:41Or at minimum, it's telling you something about yourself and about your own priorities and about what you were trying to do in the world, for better or worse. So it's worth paying attention to, but it's almost never the state of mind you want to be in to then solve the problem you that just you just noticed um so i'm not saying that we the goal is to be completely without any capacity for anger or fear or any any of these emotions but it's i do think psychological health and just the health of one's relationships and and just the whole project of living wisely in the world is more and more the result of being able to get off, to unhook from that negative emotion more and more quickly.

41:30I mean, I think you want to stay angry and fearful and even sad for much shorter periods of time. And then you can, then there's just more to recognize about the circumstance that gives you a degree of freedom by which to navigate. Yeah, no, I fully agree with that. Whenever I get asked that question, which I'm sure you get asked a lot, is like, well, don't you ever get angry or don't you ever, you know, get upset or sad? And what you just said has always been my response that I still feel anger, I still feel sadness, I still feel envy. I still and always believe I always will feel all of these things just for less and less time.

42:10Yeah. And I don't think I'll ever get to zero just as you could never run a mile in zero seconds. I won't ever get to a point where I'm able to deal with it in zero seconds. It's just not going to be possible because it needs to live. I think there are more impersonal and ethically necessary modes for these emotions that I don't think we want to get rid of. I think outrage, moral outrage has its place, and it is the basis from which we would react to grave injustice in the world. But it doesn't have to be, it's not a personal anger, right? But you see something, some unnecessary harm being created deliberately by deeply unwise people in the world.

43:03And you just think, all right, this is an emergency. This is worth responding to, right? And that can feel, the energy of anger can be behind that. And so I would tend to call that outrage rather than anger, but I think moral outrage is useful. But it's just, the question is, when does it tip over into personal psychological suffering that actually diminishes your capacity to do something useful? And that's where, that's the line that I think we want to be more aware of. Yeah, let's use that as an example and take it through that process, because I think that's exactly it. I was going to 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.

43:54You can be overly skeptical and overly analytical and never practically apply anything because you can constantly find flaws in pretty much most ideas in the world if you keep looking for them. So let's take the outrage idea. What does someone do? They feel the outrage, the moral outrage, where they feel pain, the suffering of another. Where do you go from there through your process? Like what's step two, three, four? Well, I think it's important to be, again, cautious and skeptical of one's own emotional hijacking, right? So it's like you want to know that this isn't a personal, petty, egocentric reaction.

44:38And 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 like we're all on the same team. That's the mode that you're in. And so it's not an expression of your own greed and narcissism and, you know, a self-focused and divisive emotion. but it probably will start at that right well i think 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 going to raise your voice if you're going to raise your voice in defense of humanity, right?

45:30Well, you're still raising your voice. And so it's just that there's energy behind it. And I think that energy at times is necessary. Or to take another somewhat adjacent situation, but analogous, it's like, you know, if you're in a situation in which you have to defend yourself from actual physical violence or defend someone close to you, you know, someone's attacked you and your child. So what should you do? They're just looking to lie down and offer yourself up as a human sacrifice? No, I think pacifism is not actually morally the wisest position ethically. So I think the energy that would allow you to violently defend yourself against an aggressor should be available, right?

46:20But it's not necessarily anger But it could look a lot like anger and feel a lot like anger. It's certainly not necessarily hatred. And here I would ask you to consider how you would feel like, I mean, defending yourself against a person, you know, you think of some malicious psychopath who's broken into your house and is now wanting to harm you and your family because that's what he likes to do, right? that's like the quintessential circumstance where one you'd feel you feel fear you'd feel a lot of things but you'd probably also feel hatred for this person right 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 extremis like that because imagine just how you'd feel very superficially similar situation.

47:18You 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 going to have to fight for your life. You're still looking for a weapon to defend yourself with, right? You're still contemplating killing a living being to defend yourself, right, and your kids. But there's an emotional shading there. Like, as energized as you would be, in the presence of a mountain lion or in the presence of a grizzly bear, there's this layer of, the layer of hatred doesn't quite fit.

48:02Because you feel they have less choice. Yes, of course a mountain lion is going to be a mountain lion. It's like a mountain lion can't be other than a mountain lion. On some level, a malicious psychopath can't be other than a malicious psychopath, right? So I think we do have to view people on some level as equivalent to forces of nature, right? You know, we don't get angry at hurricanes, and we certainly don't hate hurricanes in the same way that we could hate another human being. But if we could lock hurricanes in prison, we would, right? I mean, they're immensely destructive. of, 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.

48:47And I do think we could have, ethically speaking and psychologically speaking, we can have a similar relationship to even the worst human beings while doing all the things we need to do 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 actually these reasons, because I don't think anyone creates themselves. I don't think anyone is truly, at bottom, responsible for being who they are. If you had the same genes and the same life experience of whoever, Jeffrey Dahmer, you'd be Jeffrey Dahmer. There's no mystery there.

49:28So I think at bottom, when you're looking at these 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 you, there's some genetic and environmental reason why you were set up to pick yourself up, pick yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody else in a similar situation wasn't, right? And so on some level, we have an ethical imperative to acknowledge the massive role that luck plays in our lives.

50:15And I think we should want to cancel the most egregious differences in good and bad luck between people. So when we look at a whole society that is suffering from immense bad luck because 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 a terrible political outcome based on all the level of corruption that's layered on top of the resources. I mean, there's just terrible disparities in luck there, right? And so I think we, as a global civilization, more and more, as we grow wealthier and wealthier and can take advantage of good luck over here, we should want to engineer a tide upon which most or all boats rise more and more.

51:10It's not to say that capitalism is wrong. It's not to say that we're ever going to completely nullify differences in luck. And I think some asymmetries may, in fact, be the optimal way to encourage people's creativity and innovation, right? So it's like I'm agnostic on some of the questions of how to organize 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 listen to this conversation right now, stands a pretty good chance of being in the top 10 % or even 1 % of humanity with respect to luck.

51:49You know, all the variables, whether it's with respect to health and wealth and education and just having the free time and attention to listen to this and be interested in this and 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 certain responsibility, but also opportunity to spread the luck around. Yeah, yeah. To create luck for others. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Support for this podcast is brought to you by Walden University. If you're listening right now and feeling that pull to grow in your career or make a bigger impact, Walden is designed exactly for that.

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53:13If you've been waiting for the right moment This is it. Head to waldenu.edu and take that first step. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by CHEV. We all want to live with more purpose, more connection and more joy. Sometimes that starts with a small piece of wisdom, a perspective shift, a grounding practice or a story that makes you feel less alone. On TikTok, those moments are being shared every single day. Millions are finding people who show meditation techniques, discuss the science of the mind, or share daily habits that many find helpful. Others are opening up about their own journeys, talking about well-being, resilience, and healing in ways that can make you feel seen.

54:03And what stands out is the way it's shared. Ideas spread quickly and support can grow from a single post. and it all happens in a welcoming and supportive space. TikTok stimulates your mind in more ways than one. It's a place for learning, for mindfulness, for tools that support healthier habits and reflections. If you're searching for growth and connection that resonates with your own unique journey, you'll find it on TikTok. I loved where we were going with that and loved where we went. But going back to 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 yeah, how do you go forward with that?

54:56Like, what do you do with that thought, that idea, that feeling? So 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 yeah well then it really just depends on what the the problem is and what 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.

55:30I mean, your outrage needs some kind of outlet, you know? So if you have some kind of platform upon which to try to make sense on these important topics, well then do that. But yeah, it's never useful to just be privately seething with outrage that has no outlet, right? So you have to figure out one, what pragmatically can you do to accomplish anything useful on the basis of this emotion? And if there's nothing to do, it's great to have the tools by which you can just let go of it. And again, that's where meditation comes in. I mean, that really is a kind of superpower. You can just decide, okay, there's nothing to do here with this negative emotion.

56:11So now I can just let go of it. And that's true for public-facing emotion like outrage, but it's true for an inwardly facing one like just anxiety about something that is coming up in the future, right? So like 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 MRI until next Tuesday, right? So now you've got this time to wait. So the question is in the intervening days, how captured are you going to be by this feeling of anxiety? 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?

56:56And most people feel like that's pretty hard to do, right? I mean, most people don't have tools apart from just diverting themselves, 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 perseverating on it. But as far as acting in the world so as to make the world a better place, I think, you know, based on outrage or some other emotion, you know, I'm impressed more and more by how much that's a story of changing incentives at the system level more than it is a story of getting individuals to improve themselves.

57:40I 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 do that, you know, more or less full time. But there's another level of analysis and another level of discussion that needs to be applied 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. You need to be some kind of moral hero to be truly ethical, given how the system is tuned. And conversely, totally normal people can be lured into behaving more and more like psychopaths in a badly tuned system where the incentives are all wrong.

58:33And 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, mediocre people, people who are not even thinking about ethics all that much, 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 are aligned to it that way. To take an example that's recently top of mind, so we have the problem of climate change. Well-intentioned people want to do something about it. We don't want to create the most profligate harms for ourselves unnecessarily.

59:19So it'd be great to have 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 one of them is, well, let's buy electric cars, right? Let's transition from a fossil fuel economy of transportation to an electric one. Well, that sounds wonderful. And I've had an electric car and I just had to get a new car and I was poised to buy another electric car. But then I hear on Joe Rogan's podcast from this guy who's just published a book, it's coming out, forgive me, I've forgotten his name.

1:00:01I think it's Sriram Krishnan, but I could have that wrong. But he has a book coming out called Cobalt Red, but he had just did a two-hour podcast with Rogan, which was just this litany of horrors that attend the extraction of cobalt from Congo. It's like 72 % of the world's cobalt is in Congo. We use cobalt in all of our batteries. Basically, our supply chain for cobalt is on top of just slave labor and child labor and kids getting buried alive. I mean, it was just as bad as you could imagine. And so here we have a system where we all want to buy the next electric car because this was the virtuous thing to do, but now we find out that the batteries are soaked in blood, there's no good option, right?

1:00:56And now we have to pretend that we didn't hear that podcast and the people designing the batteries are pretending they don't know where the cobalt comes from. We need to figure out... I mean, this itself should be a simple problem to solve. It's probably a few percentage points of profit margin that would make the extraction of cobalt an ethically defensible practice, right? And there's probably some cobalt-free technology 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 just completely unaware of what they're doing and creating these massive negative externalities that they might not even know about.

1:01:51I literally was 24 hours from buying another EV, right? So it's not that my loan purchase or not of a single car is going to matter that much in the scheme of things. But it's like, I would have, 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's the 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? We need these solutions to come at the system level and the institution level.

1:02:37And that's where being a good person is sort of beyond the scope of anyone's individual choices. We need to collectively solve a massive coordination problem together where in the act of gratifying our desires, we are creating less and less harm and doing more and more good, more or less effortlessly. And that really is, you can have people who are just not thinking about purifying anything, behaving in really impeccable ways, given good incentives. And that's more and more I'm thinking about that. Yeah, I love that you're thinking about that. And I think it's 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.

1:03:32So it's like a vicious cycle. It's like the leaders at the top, the people who've made all these decisions to go out and take all this COBOL and make sure that it was picked by child slaves or child labor or whatever it may be. I haven't listened to the podcast, 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 think, I mean, 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 how the human mind is set up.

1:04:14And so you've got the loophole mindset of like, okay, well, let me find a way to exploit this or manipulate this towards my benefit anyway. And so you've got both. I think both are important. And I think if you were the decision maker, if you were building EVs, you would be able to make that system in your company and you'd set it up. But that would come back to you. Yeah. But if we taxed carbon instead of taxing incomes, I don't know how that works out in terms of the balance sheet, but something like that. So we're using a tax to disincentivize something we want to disincentivize, pollution.

1:04:53and we're not penalizing something that's intrinsically good, just creating value and being paid for that value, which is what income in the best case is coming from. So there's that. And then all of a sudden people would, all right, if it's costing me money to be polluting, well, then I'm going to figure out how to not do that. And that's just going to be, our interests are going to be aligned there, right? And so there's probably 100 or 1 ,000 cases like that. But where I was going was I've been thinking a lot about what has come to be called the effect of altruism movement, which is how to do good more reliably, more systematically.

1:05:35Many of us have been disillusioned with how philanthropy has been done traditionally. It's like there's a distinction between, this actually comes back to some of what we've been talking about, with the difference between being led by one's emotions and actually understanding what the outcomes are in the world that one is accomplishing. When you're trying to do good in the world, let's say you're giving to a children's hospital, that just seems an intrinsically good thing to do. But we know that so much of our impulse to do good, our impulse toward altruism, our impulse toward effective compassion is driven by the single compelling story, the single identifiable protagonist, the one little girl who's got cancer and we can help her, right?

1:06:28And that we sort of go to sleep when we're told statistics, right? So like we don't, 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? You can run psychological experiments where you show people one little girl and you ask them how much they're inclined to help and how much money they'd give. They give the maximum amount under those conditions. If you show them the same little girl and you layer on a story of just how many other girls there are like her, people's compassionate impulse reliably diminishes.

1:07:06So this is clearly a moral bug of our operating system. So we know that the good feels we get from giving are separable from the actual effects of our giving in the world. So anyway, I've thought more about this, and I've brought on various moral philosophers to speak about this, but both on the app and on my podcast. And one change I made in response to one of these conversations was I just decided that waking up as a company would give a minimum of 10 % of its profits to the most effective charities each year. And I personally would give a minimum of 10 % of my pre-tax income to charity each year.

1:07:51Now, 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 minimum amount is already allocated to these ends. And what's more, these ends have to be not just charities and causes that I feel really personally engaged by, or just things that I want to support, like I want to give money to a college or a symphony, or I see somebody's GoFundMe page, and it tugs at my heartstrings, I want to give money to that. No, that's all separate. here's 10 % that's going to charities that I, in the kind of sober rational analysis, have decided are going to do the most good, irrespective of how I feel about these things.

1:08:39Because there are certain causes that I just don't find especially sexy. I have to continually rethink my interest in them, but they are objectively, if you want to save a life per unit, per dollar put into the system, this is the best use of your dollars. One has been malaria mitigation in sub-Saharan Africa, just malarial bed nets. I just can't get too excited about handing out bed nets, but that's something that's worth supporting. So I just decided that, okay, givewell.org has run this analysis. They're a great source of information about effective charities. Here are their top 10 charities.

1:09:26Whether I find these sexy or not, I know I can outsource the cognitive labor to these people because I've spoken to them enough. I've analyzed what they've done. They're doing enough. This is their full-time job. All right, until I hear otherwise, I'm going to take their advice. It doesn't matter how I feel about these charities. I'm going to get my good feels elsewhere. But what's happened is once I decided that I'm going to 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.

1:10:00One is when I confront all these other opportunities to give money away that are tugging on my heartstrings, they almost show up as a kind of guilty pleasure. I literally have had the feeling of giving money to a children's hospital or giving money to somebody's GoFundMe page. And it's almost leveraging the same greedy circuits in the brain as you'd get if you're opening a catalog and you want everything on both pages. It's a very visceral experience of selfishness and selflessness totally merging. and it's like wise selfishness is the same thing as selflessness but it has the energy of like I really want to do this and because I sort of know I've rationally allocated to this 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 is going it sort of changed my relationship to all these other occasions where I'm having to decide on the basis of my intuition moment to moment, whether I want to give and how much to give.

1:11:15And it's really just kind of flipped everything upside down in a way that's interesting. And again, it's all based on having made a sort of system level default change that is a sort of hidden structure in which I'm now moving. Because again, I'm not, until you make a decision like that, you're constantly rethinking what you want to do. It's almost like going on a diet. Like if you decide, like, I don't eat dairy anymore, right? So once you don't eat dairy anymore, I eat a lot of dairy, but if one didn't eat dairy anymore, it's just a bright line. And then you're not constantly rethinking whether you're going to have ice cream and if so, how much.

1:11:56And so it's massively clarifying. That's a great example. That really hit true. Yeah, the clarity of constraints, right? Having borders and boundaries and constraints that are allowing you to not waste as much time and energy on figuring that out moment by moment. I've got two more questions for you, Sam, that I want to make sure I ask you today. How does someone like you 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 who are probably listening to us right now.

1:12:38And so I'd love to hear how you've built a healthier, hopefully systematic, logical relationship with the news. Well, it changed recently for me because I deleted my Twitter account, which was where I was getting a lot of my news. I was not getting the news from Twitter per se, but I was just seeing, I was following lots of smart people and seeing what articles they were recommending. And so I was just going through that as a, it was kind of like my newsfeed. so I still you know I read the New York Times I read the Atlantic there's so many things I read and I and so 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 really toxic for me and and toxic in a way that I was convinced was misleading I mean that was the thing that got me to finally just kind of ripped the band-aid off because I, it wasn't just that I was seeing the worst of people and that was having a certain effect.

1:13:42I 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 Twitter was calling out of them was just a misleading picture of who they actually are. Because in some cases, I knew the people in real life and then I'm seeing them behave in abominable ways on Twitter. and I just think, all right, this is just a funhouse mirror that isn't psychologically healthy to keep staring into day after day after day. And also just so many of the things that I was, it was amplifying stories that I was, 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 are of the way the world is, right?

1:14:30It was just the phenomenon of being too online, ultimately. Yeah, so insofar as Twitter was news or a simulacrum of news, that has really changed for me. I just am not seeing it. And now I just, yeah, I mean, I have a few sources of news that I go to more or less reflexively. but again it's more and more I'm asking the question what do I want my moment to moment life to be like and who do I want to be at the end of the day when I'm hanging out with my wife and kids and what are the consequences of having spent my attentional budget over the previous hours in one way versus another and Twitter for me honestly was a big change because it was like getting out of an unhealthy relationship for all my talk about meditation and being able to unhook from anger and other states I could unhook and I could let go of negative emotion it's not that the tools don't work but I was spending a lot of time looking into this very deranging space and it's not deranging for everybody But for me, because what's unique about my job 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.

1:16:02And 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 misrepresentations. And people take, you know, clips out of context. And I mean, people cut together clips of my podcast where I am seeming to say the opposite of what I in fact said in context. And they release those. And people with big platforms, you know, retweet them. So it was a pervasive experience for me of seeing myself lied about and then wondering whether there's anything I should do about that.

1:16:47And so 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. 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 this is not the outcome I want. And it's not why I have a podcast. 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. Because I really wanted to use Twitter as a channel of communication.

1:17:25It was the only social media platform I ever used. I never used Facebook. I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but those are just marketing channels for my team. I'm never on those. So I was on Twitter. It really was me. And 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'm just going to try again to clarify things, right? And that was such an unrewarding experience that it was creating a residue of despair and contempt. I mean, I just felt polluted by, I just felt like I had met all the psychopaths in the world on a daily basis.

1:18:08Like, there can't be as many psychopaths in the world as I seemed to be meeting online, as much as I could step away from it and put it down, I kept picking it up again. And so I just thought, this is crazy. So I just ripped it off. And that's been an immense change. Sometimes you need to actually do the thing that you can't just keep putting yourself in this dysfunctional situation and then processing your reaction. You have to ask yourself, why are you doing this? Why are you spending your time and attention this way in the first place? And so for me, it was Twitter. I mean, I understand other people, depending on what they're, if they're sharing cat videos on Twitter, they're just getting nothing but love, right?

1:18:52And they have no idea what I'm talking about. But trust me, it's possible to have a truly lousy experience on Twitter. What, if anything, would bring you back? Because I love what you're saying there, that 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 create a healthier balance, to reconfigure to do the work you want to 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.

1:19:29But then they know that in reality they might have to go back at one point. Yeah, well, I'm not planning to go back. I don't really see that. I don't think, I mean, for marketing, I don't need it. You don't miss it. You don't. Well, I miss it. I miss the good parts of it. Yeah, that's what I mean. Because I was following a lot of smart, funny people, and that was entertaining. But the truth is, even the good parts were ultimately diverting in a way that, in retrospect, feels like a bit of a waste of time. It's just like I'm getting—I didn't have to spend as much time even with the good parts of it.

1:20:04You know, it was just, it was kind of like, you know, just like too many carbs in that part of my information diet. You know, 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 use or don't even use my other social media channels. I would just use it as I would have someone post for me or I would post without ever looking at what's coming back at me. And there are people who get a lot of negative stuff coming back at them and they just never see it because they just never look. and I could have been one of those people and I was that sort of person for some periods of time.

1:20:39But I just kept getting lured by the promise of clarifying confusion. The person just says something to me and I can say something back, why not? And strangely, none of the other social media platforms have ever hooked me in that way. I've never been tempted to get on Facebook or Instagram and use it in that way. And I'm not looking for a substitute for Twitter. So that is interesting. There's many people who are recommending substitutes where they're building a new platform. They got off Twitter for whatever reason. But I'm just not tempted to fill the Twitter-shaped hole in my life with anything else.

1:21:20So that's good. I love that. All right, and then one last question before we dive into the final five. We spoke about this right at the beginning and you mentioned the problem, the impermanence problem, like how do you see yourself thinking about or meditating on or preparing for death or the, the impermanence of life? Like how does that come into your consciousness? Well, there are really two sides to it. I mean, there's, there's your own death and 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, yeah, so when I think of the experience of having those close to me die, that's, I mean, I know it's already happened.

1:22:09I've gone through that in the cases of certain people. And, you know, if I'm lucky enough to live a long time, well, then it's going to happen, I'm sure, many times again. And, I mean, it's a fundamentally mysterious thing. thing. I mean, the fact that we drop out the bottom of this place is just, 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 some paradoxes here. It's like, you and I are having this conversation now. Basically, everyone we love is not here, you know? Like, you and I just met, you know, so it's like, So we're just getting to know each other.

1:22:55My 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, like what it's like to personally die, say, we go to sleep each night and it's not only is it okay to completely relinquish our hold on this world. I mean, we yearn for it. Like if you've got insomnia, if you can't fall asleep, that becomes a problem. You're desperate to lose your seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching and thinking. You just want to completely get zeroed out every night.

1:23:39And that's, you know, if nothing happens after death, I mean, we can leave aside the possibility that death is in some sense an illusion. But if you really just get a dial tone after you die, right, really there's just nothing. It's somewhat analogous to sleep. I mean, it's like 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 to the contrary, we yearn for it. So it is somewhat paradoxical that the worst thing about life, the thing that people are terrified to experience themselves and they're terrified to experience in the case of losing the people they love, in the most routine way, we have really analogous experiences that are fine.

1:24:38right so like 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 because 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 you start dreaming and then you're completely confused about your life and some other circumstance unless it's 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'm not i'm i'm certainly expecting to to grieve with the next time someone close to me dies you know i'm not expecting of course yeah but that is a i understand that that as an expression of love first of all ask yourself if you'd even want to be without the experience of grief i mean Ask yourself, for instance, what you would want to do in the event that we had designed a perfect cure for grief.

1:25:40Like I'll say a pill. It's not an antidepressant, but it's an anti-sadness pill. And that's not conceptually incoherent. I mean, we might one day have that pill. It might be a pill that you would compassionately want to... There are people 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 you'd want to give that pill to that person. But the question is, how soon would you want to take that pill? And would you want to take that pill 15 minutes after your closest connection in this life died?

1:26:17You know, it's like the body is still warm. And would you be popping this pill? I don't think so. I think, I mean, there's something like how carefree do you want to feel in the immediate aftermath of a person you love dying? You know, you want the gravity of that to land. You know, you want to feel that loss because that's, in some sense, the only appropriate register of what they meant to you, you know, and the life you live together. right you know you're like so if you if you pop the grief bill and then you're saying okay what's on netflix right that would be a kind of a desecration of all that you would share it with this person so i don't know it's a very interesting question where you would because i think ultimately you would want to be able to give that pill to someone whose life had become completely derailed by grief but just where it just where's the line i mean that's that's an interesting question yeah Yeah, that's a great answer.

1:27:21All right, so we end every episode with a final five, which have to be answered in one sentence maximum each one. It's a challenge for me. So this is a challenge for you, for sure. 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. And I just want to say on camera, 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.

1:27:52And that to me is a sign of a good conversation because it was true curiosity, mystery, and creation in the moment and presence in the moment from both of us. So I love that. Question number one, what is the best meditation advice you've ever heard, received, or given? You are not this next thought. Second question is, what is the worst meditation advice you've ever heard, received, or given? Well, I practiced for a long time in a very goal-oriented tradition where it was just, you know, I spent months and months on retreats with Burmese meditation masters who had a very dualistic, goal-oriented, seeking kind of model.

1:28:35It's not to say you couldn't benefit from that, but I will get you a sentence out of this, but the setup to the sentence, the primary analogy being used was you're kind of rubbing two sticks to get fire, and the moment you stop, they cool off. So whatever the sentence is, it's just like meditation is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. You have to continuously do it, and the moment you break, you're back to zero. You've made no progress. Wow, that's a painful one. That's really painful advice. Okay, question number three. What's the biggest lesson you learned in the last 12 months? Honestly, it's humbling to admit it, but it really was getting off Twitter.

1:29:21Just the recognition that the whole superset of preoccupation here was not worth it and not healthy. even the good stuff i mean just every side of this diabolical jewel was sort of ugly when i really looked at it and yeah so that was that was it great uh question number four what's something you think people value highly but you don't value anymore identity in what sense i mean it really in every sense. I mean, just, just a tribal identity, you know, your 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?

1:30:08So I said, how much less should you have to identify with people who just superficially resemble you in any way? So, but even just the identity of feeling like, in my career or in any mode in which I'm showing up in the world, it's less and like who I feel I am while doing that is less and less substantial. It's not really graspable. And so I don't, like I spend a lot of time teaching meditation on waking up, but because of the technology, because it's an app, I don't actually feel like a meditation teacher. I'm not showing up in the world as a meditation teacher. There's no place you can go sit with me in a hall.

1:30:56So I don't have students in the ordinary meditation teacher way. But the reality is that through waking up, it seems strange to say it, but I could be teaching non-dual mindfulness to more people than anyone on earth at this moment. I mean, it's really quite crazy how it is scaled. but yet I never think of myself in that role. So the role-based identity, I'm a writer, I've got a bunch of books, but I don't really think of myself as a writer as much as I used to. I just don't feel like, there's no, anything that I would, any way in which I would label what I'm doing, the label really does feel like it's barely adhesive to the project.

1:31:41You know, it's just, it's, 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's just doesn't get at what I'm actually doing. And it, it doesn't get at how I see myself. So the identity is something that, I mean, people think, yes, 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 it's not about being someone in any kind of sense 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 want to you want to relax that as soon as you notice it 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, 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 guessing they're young.

1:32:47Not nine and 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. And it's almost like the evolution of the idea is like, well, there's a stage of life where that isn't, you know, the directive thing. And I think that's what's so hard because you find everyone who's listening watching experiencing life it's such different yeah levels and it's almost like someone being able to 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 yeah and then you see as someone's so yeah it's just it's fascinating to me how at different stages of life identity can mean different things.

1:33:30Yes, it's really, the emotion of pride really crystallizes it for me. It's like, for my daughters, it's totally appropriate for them to feel pride. I want them to feel pride in the right moments. And I feel proud. It's not quite the right framing, but something like pride for them. It's like, I want to play that healthy pride game with them, but I don't feel pride in my life at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pride just does not map. I just have the right shape to map on to my sense of what it is to be a person, really. It's like I'm not responsible for any of my gifts such as they are. It's like, again, it comes back to luck in so many ways and what you do with that luck.

1:34:12But again, even the doing with the luck is more good luck. So I just feel immensely grateful for everything that has gone well in my life. And I just, I mean, it's just, my gratitude is overwhelmingly my primary positive emotion now. It's just, I have so much to be grateful for. And pride just does not fit. It's a puzzle piece that you maybe once fit and maybe, and granted, if you're a kid, yes. Yeah. It's a totally appropriate game at a certain stage of life. But later on, it's a game that you just really, you have to outgrow. Yeah. I can relate to that completely and I fully, fully love that.

1:34:55I loved hearing that. Fifth and final question. If you could create one law, this is the one that I said, we've asked every guest, 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? The price we pay for dishonesty at every level of society is so enormous. And there's so little price paid for lying. I mean, when a politician is found to be lying, right, or a person who has immense responsibility is found to be lying, you know, but for like specific cases of fraud that are actionable, like lying is just under the purview of free speech, really.

1:35:37It's like it's not illegal to lie, right? I think, I mean, it's not so much a law. I think if we had lie detection technology that we could rely on, which is there are various interesting reasons why we don't have that and may never have that. But if we had that, if lie detection technology was like 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 we could ever imagine in society. So anything that brought the appropriate level of opprobrium to lying, especially lying when it matters, that would be some version of that law.

1:36:25You can't lie when it matters law, whatever that is. But it would be a technological solution. More and more if people knew that they were in a situation where they actually can't get away with lying, right? Because the technology is such or the information space is such that it's... But the added piece is that the norm violation needs to be just more urgent, you know? Because most people are walking around with the sense, oh, everybody lies. All politicians lie. So it's like this normal lie. What do you expect? And so it's not, but just the amount of harm and the amount of good that would be accomplished if you just knew people were being honest and you're not going to be unpleasantly surprised.

1:37:10Yeah. So there's a lot of growth, cultural growth in that direction. Sam, I hope you get involved in changing some systems. From some of the stuff you've said today, I'm like, it would be great if you were influencing the influences. of some of these instances. We try with our humble podcasts. That's what we do. Everyone who's been listening and watching, the podcast is called Making Sense. The app is called Waking Up. The book is also called by the same title. We'll put the links in the captions, in the notes, so that you have access to all of Sam's work. Go and make sure you grab a copy of the book.

1:37:48Meditate with him on the Waking Up app. And of course, subscribe to the podcast, Making Sense. Sam, I hope this is the first of many conversations we get to have. Yeah, really a pleasure. Yeah, it's really, really been a phenomenal conversation. I hope we have many offline too. Nice. And 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 in, 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.

1:38:22Like, 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 going to appreciate it. 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. And we'll see you again for another episode of On Purpose. Thank you, guys. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past. This episode of On Purpose is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve.

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