Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Psychology of Truth In a World of Lies | Sam Harris

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

There's a version of honesty most of us have never tried. Not brutal honesty. Not radical honesty. Something quieter and more demanding than either: a genuine commitment to saying what is true and useful, and nothing else.That is where this conversation begins.Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up app, joins Dr. Michael Gervais for a conversation that moves across truth, consciousness, AI, religion, and the inner mechanics of the mind. What starts as a discussion about lying becomes something much larger: an examination of the hidden forces that shape what we believe, who we trust, and how free we actually are.Sam and Dr. Mike explore what it costs us to keep two sets of books — one for people we care about, one for everyone else. They dig into why high-performing environments depend on truth-telling, how tribalism and dogmatism reliably pull us away from reality, and what it might mean to find solid ground in an era of increasing chaos.And then the conversation turns inward. To thoughts, awareness, and the gap between pain and suffering. To what meditation actually is and what it can do. To the possibility that the freedom most of us are chasing doesn't require changing our circumstances at all.If you are trying to get more honest with yourself and the people around you, this conversation will give you a lot to work with.In this conversation, you'll learn:Why a commitment to not lying is one of the most clarifying decisions a person can makeHow tribalism and dogmatism corrupt our access to truth and keep us dividedWhat AI and deep fakes may actually do to our relationship with institutions and shared realityThe difference between pain and suffering, and why that gap mattersWhy you are not your thoughts, and what opens up when you more fully understand thatWe’re excited for you to listen. __________________________________Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I've seen enough fake videos where the person's Cocker Spaniel saves them from a grizzly bear because it's just people have made 15,000 of them in the last hour. I'm not even interested in any of that anymore. I mean, as compelling as it can look, I'm going to wait for the New York Times to tell me that really happened. In a world full of misinformation, tribalism, and noise, how do you actually know what's true? The larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows, the area of our ignorance, or at least implied ignorance, grows with it.

Welcome back. or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jervais. A high-performance psychologist named Michael Jerva. Who Pete Carroll brought into work with the Seahawks. Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project. Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent.

They have to stay mentally tough. Today's guest is Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the waking-up app. This conversation is about defining truth. How we form it, how it shapes us, and how dangerous it becomes when we refuse to examine it. What we need is a reality bias.

We should want to be in touch with what is real in so far as that's possible. And we should be alert to those cultural practices and institutions that are reliably corrupting those efforts. We explore Sam's first principle, a radical commitment to honesty, what it means to live without line. Every room you walk into, whatever happens, whatever it gets said, whatever topics come up, it's very powerful to know that you're not going to lie. Not at all. As you listen, I want to encourage you to notice where in your life you feel defensive. That friction is often where growth begins. With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Sam Harris.

Sam, I'm really excited to sit with you. Your body of work and your research on the the mind is stunning. And so it's influential. It's clear. It's provocative. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. And also at the same time, maybe slightly nervous because you think differently than I do. And I'm I'm really curious about not the overlap, but I'm more curious about the difference in the way that we see things. And maybe there is more in common than I might think and so I'm really curious about kind of how this conversation goes but welcome to finding master and thank you for being here oh it's a pleasure yeah thanks for the invitation yeah so you spent much of your life studying the mind and so let's just start with the obvious why

well it's just it really is the ground truth of everything we experience I mean you're you're obviously we have the world to deal with and the body in the world but the mind is is represents the cash value of everything that you can notice, everything you can suffer, everything that can make you happy. When you see the contributions of your thinking and your expectations and the way you cognitively frame experience to the quality of your experience, you see that, I mean, it's almost never the case that the world is imposing the valence of experience on you. I mean, there are extreme cases, obviously, you know, extreme pain, right?

you have a terrible injury and there's not too many ways to reframe that so as to make it good, right? But even there, the difference between pain and suffering can be, there can be a lot of daylight between those two phenomena. So, yeah, I mean, the mind is more or less all we have moment to moment, and it's the basis of everything that matters. So, you know, understanding that and understanding the degrees of freedom that are there to be explored within that, I mean, that seems like a pretty central life project.

I don't think there was a word out of place in what you just said. And I recognize the intentionality between or from the words that you're choosing. And so I do want to, if I could rewind. I speak slowly. So I have an advantage. I speak. People listen to me often on 1.5 or 2x on my podcast. So yeah, I got more time to put the words in the right places.

No, that's not the case. That's true. I think when I listen to like the show backwards, I'm like, damn, dude, spit it out. I do feel like I speak slowly, but I am looking for some accuracy in the words and the language I'm using. Okay. What are the most foundational ideas that you want our community to understand to live well in the modern world? Not lying is on a very short list of firmware upgrades to a human mind and a human life that I've discussed. The Venn diagram, certainly the region of greatest interest, is in this intersection between

what's true and useful. And especially when you're talking about communication, I'm an advocate of honesty and fundamentally of having an ethical commitment to not lying. I think lying is among the most corrosive things we do. Even though we lie to ourselves like 38 times a day on average or whatever, I don't know what we can talk about that. But you're talking about I think lying to other people. I think lying to other people is generally speaking a terrible thing to do. Even so-called white lies, I think we want to do very little, if any, of that. But it's not that you need to just helplessly utter every thought that comes through your head. I mean, it's like you have Tourette syndrome. No, you want to speak in terms of what is true and useful.

So it's not just vocalizing everything. Are you saying true with the capital T or true with a subjective SME? multi. Well, true is insofar as you can get a handle on it. I mean, it's always true in every sense is just, I mean, sometimes it's probabilistic. I mean, you have a sense that you think it's more likely than not, but so we're often calibrating our confidence in how we represent what we think is true. But I think, yeah, you want you want to see, you're giving other people a view of the world as you see it as faithfully as you can. But again, you might be, I mean, there's a role for civility here and kindness and compassion and it doesn't quite have the shape that many people

imagine which is the I mean I think most people's default is that there's a lot of room for and necessary room for just lying to be kind right and I think I think when you drill down on all of those examples in my experience you almost never find one that survives the you know any kind of test of integrity that that you know I would want to stand behind so I think white lies are give a lot of scope for deception and self-deception and toxic relationships that fundamentally you don't want to have. I took a class freshman year at Stanford. This is great professor Ron Howard who's in the Engineering Economic Systems Department, which had absolutely no – I was an English major.

It had absolutely no relationship to what I was interested in, but he taught this seminar online. Basically it was just a – I think it was a graduate seminar, but it was just a single question in every session, which is, is it ever okay to lie? And then people would just kind of hurl examples at him. And most people came into that seminar, more or less assuming that human beings have to lie. It's just something that we necessarily do. We do it some number of times a day, and that's perfectly normal and compatible with a healthy life

and a good career and a good reputation. And, you know, obviously there are egregious examples of, of lying and you don't want to be that guy, but lines unavoidable. And if your wife asks you, do I look fat in this dress? Well, of course you're gonna say no. And what are you an idiot? And so like this is that default setting,

in almost every case, in my experience, we just got recalibrated in that over the course of whatever eight weeks in this seminar. So how do you answer that question? Because let me set up the dilemma that I see as, do I look fat in this dress? It's a subjective interpretation of what you think think fat is. And really that question is not about do I look fat. That question is, there's a deeper

question underneath of it, which is, well, it might be do you love me? I mean, that's right. Are you attracted to me? That's, that's, that's, yeah, that's the deeper question and it's a ping, right? It's a little bit like a bellwether, you know, like it's looking for a calling back. Am I okay in your eyes? So I think that there's a trap. So there's two, there's two things that I want to inspect with you is like it requires your subjective take on what fat is and if you are If you are unbalanced in that let's say that if you think somebody that is I'll just create an image Five foot six and ninety eight pounds is fat that that's actually a clinical disordered way of thinking about body weight Right.

And you say to your spouse actually. Yeah. So you told the truth. but you are clinically disordered in your take on what healthy looks like. You can definitely be wrong and be telling the truth. Yeah, but you think it's useful and you think it's truthful. So this is where I think... And you can be wrong about that. And you can be wrong. You can be an asshole.

There's no question. I mean, so... So how do you answer that question? How do you know that your take... Well, I think, well, I mean, one thing you discover, when you're committed to not lying, whatever the situation, it suddenly you have a mirror thrown up to your mind in life that you didn't have before. I mean, like, if you're the kind of person who has a sort of situational ethics where you've got,

like, one set of ethical books you keep for your friends and family, and another you keep for strangers and people you meet in business, and so in a business context, you're willing to shade the truth and bullshit people and even lie outright because that's just the way your business is done. But in your, obviously, like a classic example would be, you know, imagine you're in the service industry, you're working in a store and someone comes to the front door and they're shopping in your store and you're recommending everything because you're, you know, that's how you do your job. After further conversation with this customer, you find out that you actually, you have a friend in common. Like this is like your friend's sister or suddenly you're in a different situation.

And now you don't want to recommend. And then you, so then if you're the kind of person where all of a sudden a different piece of software comes online, which, okay, now you've got. now you're actually going to speak honestly to this person because you realize that this is your friend's sister. It's like, oh, actually, don't buy that one. That's not that's good. And if you're that person where suddenly you get access to more integrity and more ethical commitment simply by discovering a fact about this person that you didn't know, you might take a moment to reflect, do you actually want to be this person. First of all, if you're that sort of person, you were always vulnerable to being embarrassed. Right. Like, I mean, think of what it says about you if you, in that situation,

you recommended something that was, you know, obviously you can't stand behind. And then in your own defense, you say, well, I didn't realize you were so-and-so sister. That's the definition of not actually being ethical in this business relationship. So I think a little reflection could convince you that you actually don't want to keep two sets of books. You just want to be a unified person with respect to this variable of honesty. And what we would shorthand integrity,

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

But maybe there's a reason. So if your true self is the sort of self that you would be embarrassed to bring forward because it's going to- That's actually your true self. Yeah. But the true self is modifiable with like, like, again, let's just say you're a jerk, right? Well, like, you're, if you have to be honest, if you took a vow of honesty,

so that you can't actually hide what a jerk you are. Like if someone says, do you want to go out on a date with me and the answer is no, and why is the answer, no? Well, you're too short. That's just the ground truth. Like, you're too short. I only like tall guys, right, or tall girls. This is a fact about you that might be of interest to you.

Like, how did you become the guy who's got a cut, like a height cutoff, you know, with respect to this variable of who you're going to spend time with who you're going to spend the rest of your life with. Now, maybe it's just, maybe it's just true, and you have to get, you have to get your mind around that, and then there's some way to work with that in the world. But for the most part, none of us are condemned, merely condemned, to be the person we were yesterday. We have that by tendency, we're kind of doing a great impersonation of who we were yesterday or a moment ago, but there's actually a tremendous amount of freedom to grow, with respect to all of the, you know, basically anything about

yourself that you can notice. And one of the things that forces you to notice everything, really, is just an unwillingness to lie, right? Like, you just, okay, I'm not going to lie. My kid's going to ask me a question. I don't know what they're going to ask. But one thing I do know is that I will never lie to them, right? That is a very different context for anything that's going to happen in your relationship as a parent. And, it's again, you're an open system. It's like every room you walk into, whatever happens, whatever it gets said, whatever topics come up, it's very powerful to know that you're not going to lie. Right. Like, not at all. Like you're just not, yeah, like that's just... So that's the first

principle for you. Yeah, yeah. And it's... Do not lie? It completely changed my life. I mean, I don't remember who I was before. I had this epiphany, but it was forced upon me in this court. So I wrote a book, a very short book called Lying, which gives abundant. credit to this professor who first drummed these thoughts into me. But it's, um, is the, is your first principle do not lie or is your first principle tell the truth that's useful? Well, again, there's a kind of further filter on what some people would consider a kind of radical honesty, which is, given that you can't say everything and can't know everything, then

there's, there's some scope to editing, like, like, saying was true and useful. I mean, you don't, you don't just have to give the unvarnished, like, everything that's happening in the privacy of your mind does not have to be externalized helplessly in the presence of other people who were there to hear it. Even if they ask. It's not a question of dissembling at that point, but it's often a question of just getting down to what the truth really is. So, I mean, to come back to your wife and the dress, the classic example, I mean, the ground truth is really that you love this person, you're on the same team. you want to sort of meet that moment at all the levels that it really is emerging.

So if it really is what's being communicated is the subtext, which is, you know, do you still love me or are you still attracted to me? Well, then obviously you want to be able to communicate those truths too. But sometimes it's just at the level of the text, which is she's got a bunch of different dresses she could wear. she looks much better in some than in others, and she actually wants to know that. She wants your perspective on whether this dress is flattering. And if the truth is it's not flattering,

and that's your actual thought, well, you're on the same team, right? Like she's asking for your view of reality. And I mean, you know, the one thing that happens in your life once you become the sort of person that will just be honest in those moments, then your social world rearrange

It changes itself around you, you find that people just don't actually come to you for advice unless they want the truth. And that's an amazingly clarifying thing to happen in all your relationships. I did not think you and I were going to be talking about creating a high performance environment. I'll tell you why. People ask me all the time, like, what are the common threads or common themes of a high performance environment? And while there are many, right, the ones that I am most attracted to that I feel have an outsourced impact on the results, meaning high performance, is cultures of honesty. And so...

Well, I mean, sports have to be the ultimate example of this because it's the one area where bullshit just is totally useless. Totally useless. However, there are people, even in stick-in ball sports, which obviously spent a lot of time celebrating with the Seattle Seahawks as of the recording two days ago being with that team for the last year again. asterisk, I was with them for nine seasons and then back for this season, is that there's room to hide. Even in traditional stick and ball, high performing environments, there is room to hide.

But the ones that say, we are going to tell the truth and we are going to be great teammates to each other, which means that we're going to have to go through things, not around. How do you hide and give me an example of how to hide in pro sport, point the finger, blame other people inside of sport the most honest rooms tend to be locker rooms the most dishonest tend to be coaching rooms okay so why are the athletes so honest well one let's have fun with the imagery they're walking around in towels or sometimes nothing at all and in those environments if you're slow you're going to get pointed out that you're not going to the gym enough you're not doing enough work maybe you need to lose some weight or gain some weight and so there's just a directness and a

boldness. And in those cases, literally, there's nowhere to hide. But if you're not thoughtful and you're code switching like we're talking about, you're two different people around two different rooms, or you're saying you're putting in strain, but you're actually not. You say you're about the mission, but you're out late drinking, that those environments at some point will get called out. So they are more honest than not, but you can still, quote, unquote, hide. Case and point. Let me go from football to basketball for a minute. This was a gentleman that I spent time with. He won, I think, four rings in the NBA.

Basketball player, there's only five players on the court. He said, Mike, in the third and fourth quarter, in a championship game, he hid the entire time on the court. He came off the screens just a little bit slower. So he wasn't open. He was terrified to shoot the ball. Right, right. He was purposely coming off just. And when he had the ball in his hands, he was reflexively looking to.

pass so he looked like he was a good teammate right he was terrified to shoot so he was not honest with his experience nor with his teammates it cost them the championship but but but the thing that could not be ignored is he had whatever number of baskets he had and no more right so no there was no no the that's right the objective the results and the results are you can't fudge the results no but you can you can fudge a lot of ways the quote unquote intangibles right yeah so this is one thing about sport, I think, is great, which is everybody's force ranked, stacked and force ranked publicly observable data. And so there is, in that case, nowhere to hide.

The subjective you can. Let me take this and move it to one more piece. Maybe I'd put an exclamation point next to what I want to say. If you want a true high-performing environment, if you want a great life, there needs to be a radical commitment to honesty with self and others. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I am not saying brutal honesty. That's for jerks.

They're not saying what kind of honesty? Brutal, honesty. Yeah, thoughtful. I'll use your word useful in this. Well, again, so it's not just a posture or an artifice to be kind versus brutal. It's, I mean, we're talking about situations, even potentially with all the strangers you meet, you know, barring some moment where they disqualify.

themselves and become enemies or adversaries. It's true to say that your default is that you're on the same team with everybody. I love that piece. So it's like you actually want them to succeed. You're not in a situation where you're viewing your interaction as zero sum. And so I mean, even just in a business situation, it's like you, what is a good deal in business? A good deal is not where you get everything you want and the other person feels screwed, a good deal, especially especially when you know that you have a reputation and you want to be able to play repeated games in an open-ended way with happy collaborators, a good deal is one in which they are also happy. The person you were just negotiating with is also happy with the result. So it's just,

there are very few truly zero-sum situations. And when it's truly zero-sum, then we're talking about something like self-defense. And then I would put lying as sort of the first stop on the continuum of violence where you're talking about, okay, I'm now in the presence of somebody who's not a rational actor or any kind of collaborator, and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of the situation, avoid them, nullify the threat they're opposing, and maybe a lie is the first thing. If I'm choosing between, do I have to punch this person in the face or lie, well, then lying would be the first act of violence I would commit. So I would just put lying in the general case as somewhere on the continuum of violence between people that is usually avoidable,

but not always. And a self-defense mechanism. Yeah, it's just, I mean, then you're talking about self-defense or defense of other people. Very cool. Okay. So take this to the broader context. At the time of recording, I think our state of the country is in disarray.

And the tension between my truth and your truth, my side of the understanding of how I see politics and your side could be. radically violent in thought and or could be confusing to other people, meaning that I'm just confused how you think that way, or I could have great contempt, you know, for the way that you're seeing things. So this idea of truth with the capital T is not really what we're working from, we're working from truth with a small T, my subjective truth of the way that I see the best way to that our country should be run. How do you think about helping navigate the betrayal like the Epstein files and the betrayal of how leaders are acting, independent of how, if you're on the

left or right, of the political spectrum, how are you using this truth-telling principle as a way to maybe help the larger context of the country's health? Well, I'm very worried about how we're entangled with our information technology. I mean, this is a story, obviously, of social media principally now, but it really, it's even just the internet itself. It's just what the internet has done to our sense of what is real. And it has created a kind of shattering of culture, which is only intensifying, again, through social media and now with AI. I mean, it's just, it's not getting better, it's getting worse. I have some hope, perhaps we could talk about it, I have some hope that AI might pull us back from the brink here.

but... Wait a minute, wait a minute. Optimist? Wait, hold on. We got a crack in the pessimistic approach here. It's a pessimistic version of optimism. I don't think you could have both. Well, I mean, so the short answer there is that I think that the AI sloppification of everything,

I mean, the fact that we're now moving into a world where if you look at a piece of video, your first thought is, well, is this even real? I mean, whatever the video is, I mean, it could be, you know, Vladimir Putin, declaring that he's just launched all his missiles and you're all going to die, right? It might look perfectly credible. And I think most people's sense at this moment would be to just not even react to it because there's just a basic assumption that you can't trust anything now on the internet. And so ironically, I think we're probably moving back toward a new moment where the gatekeepers are going to be the only source of ground truth for trust now.

I mean, we're coming from a moment where the institutions have radically discredited themselves. No one trusts the New York Times or the Washington Post or anything. We just want to get it from the kind of the raw feed from X or some other social media platforms. So somebody's uncle can send us a YouTube clip and it's just shot on somebody's phone. They're standing near the protests. saw the thing that happened and that's what's real. You know, don't trust the gatekeepers, trust, you know, the wisdom of the crowd.

But now with a, with the deep fakery and the, and the sloppification of everything, I think we're getting to a point where, you know, we're not there yet, but I could imagine six months from now, we'll be at a point where we just declare epistemic bankruptcy with respect to the internet. Like we just decide, okay, I'm not going to react to anything. I'm not going to, my bias is going to be,

no, this is not a real video of a grizzly bear attacking a woman in her backyard. Like I've seen enough fake videos where the person's, you know, Cocker Spaniel saves them from a grizzly bear because it's just, people have made, you know, 15,000 of them in the last hour. I'm not even interested in any of that anymore. I mean, as compelling as it can look, I mean, it can look perfectly real. Suddenly everything is boring because it stands a chance of being fake. and even the most alarming communication, right?

Like dozens of people killed on the White House lawn, okay, I'm going to wait for the New York Times to tell me that really happened. I cannot trust any other source until someone that has a reputation that can be damaged. Yeah. Says, listen, we did the work,

the necessary journalistic work and forensic work to tell you that this video of Vladimir Putin declaring that he's, you know, declaring World War III on us, is actually real, right? And so now you can panic, right? So I think that may happen. And so that will be, I think, a sea change

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resolutions, but we do set in intention, you know, like, and for, I don't know, the last four years it was the same for me. It was the year of play. I just knew I needed more play in my life. I'm intense. I'm serious. And I just wanted the yin-yang kind of side of my approach in life. And so this year was different.

This year was about humanness. the art of humanness. And that's when I'm waking up in the morning through my imagery and my meditation is like, what does that really mean to me now? But I do know that I'm not interested in being a quote unquote expert. I am interested in like honest expression. And the humanist piece is like the anti, like I said,

cult proof earlier, I am cult proof, is like it's the counter rotation to the AI slop. to your point, like I really appreciate what you're saying because when I'll listen to a thoughtful commentary of even somebody that I do respect their thoughts on social, Instagram or whatever, and now I'm like, did they write that? Did AI write that?

Is that from the heart? So that's not even the slot. So you're talking about the other side of the AI product, which is the actual good stuff, the real expertise that can be generated in moments by, anyone that is... I'm calling that slop, too.

Yeah, but what you've just described is the value of human, you know, hard-fought expertise on some level has gone way down when you're thinking of just the information, access to information that is in fact true.

So it's like if the knowledge that literally anyone within five seconds can get a concise answer to almost any question and that answer is actually going to be good, right? That sort of devalues, I mean, on some level, what does it actually mean to be an expert if anyone?

I mean, obviously there's a, there's the follow-up conversation that a real expert can have, and real experts know how to kind of edit and navigate information. But the better AI gets, the more human expertise gets devalues. valued in the same way that it's like, on some of it, everything is going to become like chess, right? Like, it's just simply the case that computers are better at chess than people are.

And when you add people to the game, on some level, even the best grandmasters are just adding noise, right? So, like, there was the case for the longest time where computers were not as good as, they were better than novice players, but they were not as good as grandmasters, then, you know, Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, and there was this moment where we saw the right eye on the wall where computers are going to be better than people. But there was this brief period, or maybe it was a decade, where the human grandmaster pair, the computer person pair, the so-called cyborg, was better still than any computer alone, because a grandmaster like

Kasparov could just add the extra intuition that was valuable. But now that's no longer the case and just that the best players in the world just add noise to what is in fact the best chess that is possible to play, which is between computers. That's going to be true for, again, in success, for all of human cognition, right? So you're going to be able to push a button and say, what's the best explanation for the causes of World War I and World War II? I want it in exactly, you know, 400 words and, you know, bullet pointed into, you know, 17 different bullet points. person can give you that in seconds. Even the best scholar of the period would take an hour and a half to come up with anything close to that kind of precision and probably longer. But AI can do that

right now, and it can do it, you know, depending on the topic, it can do a perfectly perfect, a virtually perfect, you know, certainly better than human job of it, or, you know, a nearly, you know, best-in-class job of it. And it's only getting better. Right. So, what you've just described is a situation where even the things that we admire about ourselves and about other people that we've trained for and we've invested a lot in, that's getting offloaded into the technology. And we're faced with a conundrum around which to how to revalue what it means to be human. What is what's talent good for? What is expertise good for? Yeah, so how are you thinking about, obviously this is a real concern for many of us, but how are you thinking about getting to the truth in a world where there's so much misinformation, getting to the truth when we've got AI that is in 400 words potentially incredibly accurate or presenting as being accurate, but it's hallucinated 40% of its response.

So in a world where information is more available, less trustworthy. How are you helping? I mean, I think the hallucinate, I mean, we're either going to solve that to, you know, several decimal places beyond the human or we're not going to be able to rely on the technology. So it's, I mean, we're, and I think we've solved it for. You think we're okay with it right now because of the idea that it's going to get better.

Yeah, and it's also, I mean, it's very, very good for many, many topics. Yeah, coding, aggregating information. But the emphatic nature, when I ask it something in psychology, I'm like, oh, my God, that's like 85% right. Right. But the 15% is actually quite egregious. Yeah. You know, and so it makes errors that human experts wouldn't make. But again, I think it's a very short period of time we have to wait before.

Again, it's going to be like chess where once it's superhuman for any one of these specific, you know, areas of cognition we care about, there's no looking back. It's like once driverless, I mean, I think we're probably there with certainly some driverless cars. know that drivers cars are safe they're just like okay they're they're better than apes you know they're always going to be better than apes and better than humans yeah i mean we're we're apes yeah okay so it's sam you know you know to interrupt your thought yeah so waymo is one of our clients uh yeah and i'm about it i'm told i was so skeptical i experienced it myself i experienced it first i met with their leadership team we met with their some of their engineers and like i'm about it the data the direction they're going, I am totally about it, even more so right now.

And I'm subjectively biased because it was probably five weeks ago, 35-year-old driver, no median in between us, Tulane Highway going in both directions. He was 35 doing 70 miles an hour, was distracted by his phone, head on collision into my car. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. Heavy, heavy, heavy experience. And so both cars told.

You weren't injured? Yeah, there's an interesting thing. So, no. There's three levels of fitness that showed up for me in that moment. Enough physical suppleness and mobleness and strength that when I hit the airbags, my body stayed intact probably. So that's like a call it a physical fitness. There's a psychological emotional fitness that I see why car crashes can be absolutely traumatic. How fast it happens, how violent it is, how you need to go through that.

intersect those types of circumstances again but do it calmly you know and then there was a back a lack of better words was like a resource fitness that i'm super grateful my car withstood it it's totaled right but it did its job unless i had some rinky dink car that would not have showed up so super grateful for all that experience which is also part of as you know the a framing of a traumatic experience that's helpful but so anyways long long narrative to get to, I am about the driverless technology because the phones in hands of drivers. Oh my God. I experienced a casualty of it.

So anyways, how do we get to truth and how do we get to community that is in this broth of misinformation and let's just say misinformation? Well, I think we have to recognize the variables that cause us to. to reliably not get to truth, right? And unfortunately, there are things we're anchored to that are, not only are they not recognized as dysfunctional, they're often trumpeted as being some of the most important features of human life. I would put them into two categories.

The first is tribalism, and the second is dogmatism, right? And both reliably are not truth tracking. What we need is a reality bias, right? We should want to be in touch with what what is real and so far as that's possible. Now, there are many things that make it difficult, and there are many ways to be skeptical around whether the map is ever going to truly fit the territory, but we want more and more accurate maps, you know, cognitively and emotionally, scientifically, scientifically, and every other way. And we should be alert to those habits of attention

and habits of thought and cultural practices and institutions that are reliably corrupting those efforts and tribalism and dogmatism are some of the worst games in town. And unfortunately, when you look at how they map on to things like religion and then when they map on to things like politics and just identity politics, me, you were talking about people bringing their truth and feeling like they can't, you know, they have the code switch that I can't bring their true self into work or into the rest of their lives, all of that is a story of how tribal identity and dogmatic thinking. And the things we believe are true despite the evidence

and that we're not willing to revisit because these are our cherished beliefs that we find so consoling or so otherwise important that they're not even on the table to be discussed. If anyone's going to raise them skeptically, we're going to be personally offended, right? All of this is so colossally dysfunctional, and in the limit dangerous and divisive,

that this is the most corrupting software we have, that we have to figure out how to reconsider and rewrite. And much of my work, not so much in my meditation app, but on my podcast, is to criticize bad ideas. And again, so much of what ails us in the idea space

is a matter of dogmatism and tribalism. I love how you answered that question. All right. Yeah. Because as you started, I was like, oh, that's interesting. I've totally thought that you were going to go to, yeah, go to the inner world and get grounded on, make contact with reality that way. Make contact with your thoughts, so that you can better make contact with reality outside of you. And you did in an interesting way is that, but as a systems thinker,

you said, look, we first got to address tribalism and dogmatism. And so before we go to tribalism, can you talk to, I think you're going to bridge a gap between dogmatism and gurus. Give us a way to understand your point of view on religion and maybe thread gurus and dogmatism if I'm thinking correctly about your thinking. Yeah, so I have many critical things to say about organized religion, which I think religious people will naturally misinterpret or at least

imagine that I'm implying things that I'm not. So for instance, it's totally possible in my view that the universe is far stranger than we suppose or that we even can suppose, right? Like this science has not

evaporated the last mystery of our appearance here in this cosmos. Did you say that? there's aliens in that statement? Well, I have just, I mean, there are reasons to be doubtful that any aliens are flying around and performing, you know, amateur proctology on, on people in trailer parks and farmers. It's reasons to be doubtful. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not, I'm not so, I'm not convinced about, you know, the recent reports are, are, um, indication. I just not know you were that funny. That's really good. But, um, but, you know, are we alone in the galaxy or in the cosmos? I have no idea, and either way it would be astonishing. It would be astonishing to recognize that the universe is teeming with complex life,

and it would be astonishing to recognize that we're alone. I mean, both answers are astonishing. So, you know, I'm open to either. But, I mean, there's clearly we don't understand reality at its most basic level. We certainly don't understand how consciousness, the experience of what it's like to be us relates to the physics things at the most basic level. And that's your definition of consciousness. Yeah, conscious is just experience.

I mean, just the fact that there's something, something seems to be happening. And that's true whether all of this is a dream or whether this is a simulation on the hard drive of some alien supercomputer, or whether we're actually in touch with the base layer of reality in our physics now and we're very close to understanding everything.

We can be as confused as you might suspect or not, but something seems to be happening, and that seeming is the fact of consciousness. So on my account, consciousness is, the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion. I mean, the fact that something seems to be happening, right, again, whether it's accurate or not. Accurate or not, there's a qualitative feel to this moment from where you sit. And there's two, go back to this hinge idea, there's consciousness or internal of your internal experience and of your, the external world. Yeah, I mean,

both are appearing what you're calling the world and what you're calling yourself in the world. all of that is appearing in this condition that I'm calling consciousness. And so you can call it experience, but experience is the ground truth of your being, you know, and whatever is true, whatever else is true. And it's the one thing you can't actually doubt. Again, you can bracket it, you can bracket it with a radical skepticism about everything. You can say, maybe I'm asleep and dreaming right now,

and I'm just, I think I'm having this conversation. Maybe I'm going to wake up and recognize all of this isn't real. That's fine, but still, in this moment, something seems to be happening, and that's the fact of consciousness. So this is the second first principle of yours. Yeah. So consciousness is a ground truth that cannot be doubted, and it's in the context of being conscious that we're encountering other people and a world, or what seems to be other people and a world, and we're trying to understand what's happening here and how to control it. And science is the part of culture where we make our best efforts to do that,

and we generate technology that allows us to reach further into areas of reality that we can't otherwise inspect, and we draw conclusions based on kind of an experimental interrogation of reality as it appears. And all of that bears enormous fruit. It has enormous consequences. I mean, the fact we have an Internet, we live in cities, and we have cures for diseases that, you know, our ancestors didn't even have names for.

I mean, all of this is progress, and yet it's still happening in a context where there is radical uncertainty and just a frontier of ignorance that keeps getting pushed back. I mean, the larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows, still the area of our ignorance, or at least implied ignorance, grows with it, right? So it's just there's more of reality that we obviously don't. know, but all of that's happening in a context where consciousness is clearly the ground truth of everything. And this is why meditation isn't this sort of a feat and disreputable kind of side hustle where

the science done with white lab coats and expensive machines is the real interrogation of reality. What you can do in the darkness of your closed eyes, why? meditating is just something spooky that has no intellectual credibility. No, actually, once you see that consciousness is the ground truth of everything, right, whatever it's in relationship to the physics of things turns out to be, I mean, maybe it's just the product of certain, a certain pattern of information processing in the physical brain, and maybe it'll be instantiated in machines, and I mean, that's all a separate conversation. But whatever,

However consciousness emerges, consciousness is the one inescapable fact of our appearance here. And to be able to interrogate it directly by learning how to pay attention to the moment-to-moment experience. This is essentially what meditation is. This is a very important, it's not only an important skill in terms of just improving the quality of your life. it is a totally defensible intellectual exercise

in terms of understanding the mind from the first person side. It's not doesn't give you everything. I mean it's important to recognize that to really understand the human mind and certainly his relationship to the human brain

and to the world at large, you have to triangulate on yourself. I mean, you can't just be meditating because from the first person side you can't even tell that you have a brain, right? Like much less what is doing or what its role is in producing what you can be aware of.

So it's not like the first person side is everything, but it is an indispensable part of our interrogation of reality and even from a scientific side. Brilliant. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. If you followed our work here at Finding Mastery for a while, you know the phrase that I love from Momentus, performance for life.

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Again, that's Live, L-I-V-E-M Momentus.com slash Finding Mastery. and use the code finding mastery for up to 35% off. And so now take that back to your kind of link to dogmatism, and maybe gurus and religion. So when you're talking about the problem of authority, I mean, so much, I mean, we're living in a moment now where there's a lot of skepticism around expertise and the nature of authority and just what, you know,

what's authority good for? everyone has assimilated this idea that an argument from authority is just on its face illegitimate. You can't say this is true because Einstein said so, right? I mean, that's not an argument. That's all true, and yet it is also true that expertise is a thing, talent is a thing, not all opinions are equally valid or likely to be valid. It is the difference between someone who knows more than virtually anyone about this thing and someone who knows nothing about it is enormous.

And it's not actually, I mean, despite what I just said about the availability of AI, this disparity between knowledge and ignorance is not going away. And certainly where being in touch with the facts matters, this disparity really matters. And we really should care when people are lying or bullshitting or just faking it. And we really should want institutions that preserve knowledge and create systems of incentives where error correction is happening as efficiently as possible.

I mean, there are very few places where we do this well. Science is one of those places. We don't do it perfectly. There is such a thing as scientific fraud and scientific self-deception and bad incentives and the politicization of science and all of that. But the cure for all of that is more science and better science and real science. It's not some other modality coming in to purify science. I mean, we understand what scientific integrity is, and we understand its counterfeits. And crucially,

within science, you have a kind of adversarial relationship set up among scientists, where scientists can win points for defragging, you know, other scientific efforts and spotting scientific errors. And, you know, one thing that's totally unique in science is that you can, your reputation can improve by spotting your own errors, right? Like, you win points for proving yourself wrong in science. Because you're committed to the body of knowledge as opposed to your ego and identity. Yeah. And again, that can be hard one, and you can find individual scientists who are holding on to some doom theory long past the point where it's obvious to others. But still, it is a culture of error detection and error correction unlike any other we have.

And the antithesis of that is religion, organized religion. I mean, religion is the only part of culture where dogma is actually a good word. I mean, dogma is a Catholic word, but dogma is not a pejorative word in Catholicism. It is just, these are the things you believe because they're, because we, the church says it's true. The Pope says it's true. This is not something you can inspect or reason about or, or pressure test. This is just true. You know, the dogma of the transubstantiation of the Eucharist at the mass is true.

And if you don't accept it, you're not a Catholic, right? You're like, so. And you should, and you should accept it because we told you so. And it's based on the practices that were coinciding with the, the, book, called the Bible. And the fate of your eternal soul and the souls of your children rests on you accepting this, right? So the stakes are enormously high, and the culture is telling you certain things, you know, inconveniently the most important things have to be accepted on faith, and there's no rational argument. People will try to give you rational arguments, and they'll try to give you

data that support this. But when rational argument breaks down and the data are unavailable, these are the things you have to believe, and the fate of your eternal soul depends on it. And unfortunately, Christianity is not the only game in town. We've got Islam over here and Judaism over here and Hinduism over here and a bunch of other religions that are vying in this competition. Each, this is the quintessence of a zero-sum competition,

where each claims to be perfectly right and all the others are irredeemably wrong. And again, the stakes are enormously high, This is not just for the fate of your life in this world or the fate of the world. We're talking about eternity here for when you're talking about most religions. So, you know, on September 11th, we had people flying planes into our buildings based on what they believed about the divine origin of a specific book and the kind of cosmic moral war they were in with unbelievers, et cetera.

So I spent a lot of my time seeing the downside of religious dogmatism and sectarianism. but none of this is to dispute that there is a there is a there's a baby in the bathwater we should want to save, which is more fundamental than these accidents of culture and geography that separate us. There's a possibility of discovering the depths of human well-being and spirituality and ethics and the relationship between those three things. Unconditional love, say, you know, Christ-like love or Buddha-like wisdom. There is something to discover about all of that, but it's deeper than culture. It's deeper than, certainly deeper than Christianity over here versus Buddhism over here, in the same way that science is deeper. I mean, so it's true to say

that the Christians essentially invented physics, right? Everything we take to be real physics emerged in the West and they were, you know, 99 times out of 100, it was a Christian, like Isaac Newton doing the work. So you could say, well, you know, the Christians gave us physics. But wasn't, wasn't Newton? It wasn't Newton. It wasn't it, Gellel. Who was strung up for? He wasn't strung up, but the, the inquisition, yeah, he was under house arrest. Yeah, I mean, so you have this breakthrough. No, there was, there was clearly a tension between religious dogmatism and science there at the, at the foundation of science. But, you could say just contingently that Christian culture gave rise to what we now call physics,

but physics is so obviously different and deeper than Christian culture and has no relationship to it. I mean, for physics to be real, the real physics works the same in Beijing as it does in Paris, as it does in Sydney. And for someone to talk about Christian physics or American physics, that's tantamount to just confessing that you don't know what physics is. And so it is with biology or computer science or any other area where we're getting at anything like ground truth with respect to facts. And my argument is it's also true with spirituality and ethics and the deepest experiences human beings have. Really well put. And I'll go back to a story and then I have a fallon question.

is that just to relate to what you're saying about the shared principles across religions. It was my first entry intro class to world religions, again, back to that freshman sophomore year in college. And I had this moment. We'd studied all of them, all 11-word religions at that point. And there is an imaginary line between what's when a cult becomes a religion that I will want to talk to you about. And so I had this moment.

professor says, you know, great, great semester, da-da-da-da. You know, let's just spend this last class just talking. Raise my hand. I stood up and I said, God, I love this. This is great. I said, you know, these three principles from Buddhism and those, these two principles from whatever and, you know, Zoroastronism, like, I'm a little confused by that one still, but Sikhism, oh, I mean, this ability to, like, do no harm and just, you know, in Christianity

over here, like, I go, I think I want them all. I really like I love I want them all and so the professor clapped back he goes just to be clear mr. Jerva you think that you are possibly smarter than Buddha Confucius all combined and I was like no no that's not what I'm saying but there's a through line here and I haven't lost that that that that sense of wonder and awe about the through line of all of them and I really appreciate the social practice social meaning large groups in this moment large group practice that religions offer people to be more intentional, to be more connected, to be more aware, to be more quote unquote Christ-like, meaning to have more kindness,

empty, more Buddha-like, loving kindness, whatever it might be. I love the intention, but I'm afraid that it's based on fear and control. I'm afraid it's based on manipulation. I'm afraid it's based on convenience of power. I was taught by Jesuits. This is my undergrad taught by Jesuits. and Jesuits are like the academicians of Catholicism. And one professor, this is a different professor, he says to me,

Mike is in front of the intellectual hall. I am what you would consider an off-access thinker. Like, cult proof is another way. Like I like to see it just a little bit differently than what the mainstream is doing, right? And so he picked on me and he goes, what's this thing about eating fish on Fridays during Lent? I said, oh, I think it's about this, you know, this kind of moment of reverence, you know, just to disrupt the pattern a little bit of daily living to be thoughtful about the sacrifices

that came before. And he goes, right, how about the bishop that owned the wharf that owed money to the, you know, the wharf, like, and he looked at me, like, you stupid little kid, you know, like, you don't really know what's up here. You have totally, and I was like, is that real? And he looked at me again. And he goes, I don't know, but it's not written anywhere. Like, think about how the world works.

And I was like, damn. So that set me down another path, which is like to really understand the context of things written. And I really like that idea. And so when I think you'll maybe remember the book, have you studied all world religions? Many. Many. So I'll pick on the Old Testament for just a middle. I can pick on a lot of them together.

This might be fun to pick the eyes out of some of the language in it, but not to just go after the Old Testament, and some would call the Testament. But I don't know, how do you wrestle with like, you're supposed to sell slaves off at six years? I mean, this is an act. I mean, this is just, I mean, there's no way around this, really,

but most Christians and Jews and Muslims don't want, to admit this because it is so destructive of their kind of basic life project, the claim is that there are certain books that were not produced by human beings. They were revealed by the creator of the universe. And the reason to believe that on this account... Inspired by. Or, you know, I mean, they're inerrant or they're... Infallible. Yeah, they're infallible. There's some, there's, there's kind of a spectrum of commitment there. I mean, some things have to be interpreted metaphorically or allegorically. or some people are completely literal with respect to everything. This changes a little bit of me, what it means to be a fundamentalist in a Christian context,

changes a little bit when you're talking about Islam. Judaism changes the story a little bit because Judaism isn't so much about believing anything super-committal about what happens after death, and it's even quite possible to run into Jews who are very committed to their Judaism, but they don't even believe in God. And so, I mean, there's kind of, there's some, marginalia there that you need. But leaving that aside, the basic claim is that God occasionally writes books, right? He doesn't shoot movies, he doesn't burn CDs, he doesn't write symphonies,

but he did, you know, somewhere around, you know, 1,400 years ago if you're, if you were Muhammad or, you know, 2,000 years ago if you're Jesus or 3,000 years ago if you're Abraham, God was in the business of writing or dictating or otherwise inspiring books, and there's a problem with this. One is that it is on its face a kind of ridiculous notion, but it becomes especially so when you look at the contents of the books and compare them to everything else human beings have produced. So when you ask yourself just how good a book could be

if it were actually authored by an omniscient being, at any moment in human history. And you compare that, the book you have in your mind, to the Bible, any part of the Bible, even the best parts of the Bible. What you recognize is that, I mean, there's just, there's no trace in the Bible of omniscience. I mean, there's not a single sentence in the Bible

that could not have been written by a person of the period in which that text first appeared. And the first thing you would do, if you were an omniscient author who wanted to inspire faith, in some portion of humanity, that this really was a book unlike any other book, the first thing you would do is you put something in there that could not have been written by a goat herd of the period, right? However literate or articulate.

So what you find, the thing you don't find, the thing you should find and you don't find, I mean, you and I could write a book or a page of a book in five minutes that if we send it back 2,000 years would confound the best minds of the period, and they would immediately recognize that this was a supernatural communication. I mean, in this case, it would be a communication from the future. But we would just give them some mathematics or some science that was so useful and made contact with what they knew, right, but was onward leading in a way that they couldn't understand, but they knew was interesting, right?

And if God exists and writes books, he could easily have given us a book that even now, you know, having been in the presence of it for 2,000 years, we would still be struggling to decode the wealth of information and insight it had. I mean, just again, to imagine what the people, you know, should we not screw everything up and we continue to make progress, the people from 200 years from, you know, our descendants in the future could tell us about what is real and about what is, what is, you know, possible technologically or in any other way, you know, it would be basically indistinguishable from, you know, a supernatural communication for us. So there's nothing like that in the books.

But what there is in the books are obvious moral errors that embarrass us even now. And you just pointed to one. I mean, on balance, these books recommend slavery, right? They don't, they give you a little, a few niceties about how to keep slaves and don't beat your slaves and don't knock their eyes out. And if you do, here's what, here's the recompense and blah, blah, blah. But what they don't do is tell us in any kind of straightforward way, the thing they really must tell us to be morally wise in the 21st century, which is slavery is an abomination. You should not own people and treat them like farm equipment. You should not be raping people who you imagine are your property. All of this is awful, and this is something that every culture in order to be ethical should put behind it.

So that's very clear to everyone now, barring a few people who are trying to live by the literal edicts of these texts. You know, slavery was just rebooted in Afghanistan. I just read, you know, in the last few weeks, right? So like, so, and, you know, when the Islamic State got running in Syria and Iraq, they rebooted Islamic chattel slavery, and there were slavery. slave markets, and there are people dropping out of medical school in London to go join the caliphate and take Yazidi women as sex slaves, and they bragged about it on Twitter. I mean, it was just a perfect jewel of awfulness that everyone could inspect, but this is what you couldn't say at that moment is that these people were perverting the true

teachings of their religion, because they weren't. I mean, slavery is right there in the source code of the religion, and that's a problem. And it should, and it's an embarrassment. to every person who would argue that these books are perfect, because they're not, they're so obviously not perfect. Yeah. That doesn't mean that there's nothing interesting in the communications of someone like Jesus or Muhammad or anyone else,

any other patriarch or matriarch. It doesn't mean that there aren't deeper possibilities in human life that we should be desperately interested in exploring. I think there are, and we should. But all we have is human conversation by which to organize our exploration here. And the choice for me is you can either have a 21st century conversation with all the tools available, including the best parts of Scripture.

I mean, you can take Jesus and half his moods from the New Testament, and it's some of the wisest stuff ever said. You can take the Golden Rule. You can take Shakespeare. You can take, you know, Socrates, you can take Eastern wisdom. We should be living in the, context of a conversation where the best ideas win, what organized religion forces us to do is to say, no, no, you now, you need to be anchored to a conversation that happened in the

7th century, and you need to have that conversation verbatim if you're a Muslim, or in the first century AD, if you're a Christian, or, you know, 700 to 1,500 years before that if you're a Jew. And I just, there's no reason to do that. Yeah. I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to switch on my mind, to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my morning.

That's always in my control. That's always in your control, too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. The best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to finding mastery.com slash morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to finding mastery.com slash morning to get your morning mindset routine. I really appreciate that piece.

It is confusing because I grew up thinking about it from a formative age, well exposed to the fears if not getting this belief system right. Yeah. And then at some point as a young mind, I was like, wait, hold on. And now as an adult, I'm like, hmm. Now, I love, I think the Trinity is really magical. I think that idea of spirit, the human that's a, I mean, use my language, just a total badass.

The Holy Spirit, meaning this animation of maybe loving kindness or whatever is mystical. And then the idea that there is something bigger, broader. I love that. I really, now, all the things that you just mentioned caused me great problem. any organization that hides pedophiles should be disband, full stop. Right. And so because of a few of the denominations, Catholicism in particular, that it has a longstanding practice of that, I cannot be down with.

And so I know that that's polarizing for people in our community that, you know, have found great value in that faith practice. And I'm happy for that, you know, for you. I just have great trouble with it. So that's the position I'm in right now, especially in light of Epstein and everything else. I'm like really clear about it. That being said, before we go to cult,

the imaginary line between cult and religion, can you go to gurus for a minute and just talk about your take on gurus? Because I know you've studied under many, and Jesus was a guru at a point. And so was Buddha and and and. Yeah. Well, I mean, so the Hindu concept of a guru,

I mean, the Sanskrit term guru just means teacher, right? So you can have a guru who's just teaching you how to play the sitar, or you can have a guru who's teaching you meditation and leading you to enlightenment, or at least that's the claim. It really just means teacher, but in the limit, it's a teacher who's imagined to be infallible, infallibly wise at least. And so, again, here we're talking about

what are the implications of acknowledging that expertise is a thing and that authority is a thing, and yet human imperfection is also obvious and also unavoidable. So what does it mean for someone to be enlightened? Like, let's say there is there there. It's possible to actually complete the project of recognizing the full promise of meditation. You can not really recognize the illusion of the self, but fully transcend that illusion so that you're never taken in by it again. and be stable. And be stable in that recognition.

So there's an image in Tibetan Buddhism in the Zokshan teachings, talking about the way thoughts appear at different stages of enlightenment. And at the ultimate stage, this is one of my favorite analogies, it said that thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal. So just imagine what that's like. So the thieves come storming into a house, but there's literally nothing to steal. There's just no implication of their thievery, like nothing's at stake, right?

Nothing's at stake, right? So just imagine having a mind where whatever thoughts arose, your, their mind is completely imperturbable because it doesn't matter if it's a thought of shame or the end of the world or what. It's like your mind is just an ocean of tranquility because thoughts can't get a hold of anything, right? So let's just say that's an intelligible goal and it's achievable and there are people who can achieve it or have achieved it. All right. So then what's rational to believe about such a person? Well, some people, I mean, certainly within a Buddhist context, would imagine that by dint of that stability in just non-dual awareness, that person's going to have all kinds of magic powers, right?

And they'll be able to read minds and they'll be able to predict the future. Yeah, they'll be effectively omniscient, right? And the Buddha, you know, the Buddha is imagined by his devotees to have been onmash. And in Buddhism, they distinguish different degrees of enlightenment, and there can be there can be Buddhahood, which entails something like omniscience, whereas there can be, you know, Arhant ship, or various degrees of being a bodhisattva, where you can be fully enlightened with respect to your personal freedom and the sense of self, but you don't have all the magic powers necessarily of a Buddha. Now, I'm open to the evidence of magic powers, anyone who wants to

to prove that they've got the power of telepathy or anything else to any degree. I'm open to seeing that experiment run. I would be willing to fund that experiment. Me too. And it's- We should do it together. And it would be the easiest experiment.

So it is a glaring, you know, dog that didn't bark the fact that no one has walked into a lab at Harvard or Stanford or MIT and demonstrated their comprehensive powers of, you know, psychic ability, because it would be among the easiest things to verify that could ever be tested. But there was one 2,000 years ago and 2,500 years ago and maybe others.

Yeah, and also, but what was interesting is that there are all kinds of gurus who claim these powers and whose devotees think they had these powers. Currently. Currently, I mean, it's like, or very recently, like, you know, Sotia Sibamba was a very popular guru in India. He had tens of thousands of devotees, many of them were Western. There's, you can see some of his miracles on YouTube. He's, you know, to the, of anyone looking closely, he was clearly like a kind of a decent amateur but not very good stage magician who was manifesting amulets and trinkets, you know, by kind of grabbing them under some object.

I mean, it's completely shoddy. Anyway, you can see all that on YouTube, but to the true believers, he was reading minds and doing everything. What's interesting is that the people who think that Jesus performed miracles are fundamentally uninterested in the testimony that's testifying to miracles happening

just a short plane flight away from where they are right now by some other spiritual teacher whose miracles are far more credible than the miracles of Jesus because what we're being asked to believe is, on the one hand, these miracles happening in the year 2015,

say, in a modern context where you have lots of people who are to some degree scientifically trained and have like a 21st century sense of, you know, kind of evidentiary demands on, you know, any kind of claim. And yet those, these claims of miracles are still surviving those sort of basic tests of, you know, common sense among Western educated people. Like, you know, Germans and, and Brits and Americans by the hundreds and even thousands, they'll say, yeah, you know, this, he did, he did something there. That was interesting. I can't say that wasn't a miracle, right? That testimony exists now fundamentally uninteresting to virtually any believing Christian, but no, the same

claims in a pre-scientific context among people who didn't have even the shadow of a scientific education. I mean, the science just simply did not exist as a discipline. Two thousand years ago. Right? And about which we don't even have contemporary testimony. We're talking about testimony that came at the earliest point, 35 years after the death of Jesus. Just imagine now you and I start talking about the miracles of somebody who died 35 years ago. We didn't meet him, but we met someone who met someone who met him, and now we're sure these miracles happened. But we're not going to get on an airplane.

Like the miracles of Satya Sa'i-Baba did not even merit an hour on cable television. right. I mean, it's like just at a glance, you can discount the testimony of thousands of people. It's all embarrassing. There's no way it happened. And yet, somehow, this shadow of a shadow of a claim that this generations hence is worth organizing, you know, all of our lives around until the end of the world, that should at the very least be suspect to people. And so it is, I mean, these head-to-head comparisons about the things we easily discount in the modern world and yet somehow become credible when you cast them back into deep history,

this actually gets to how we differentiate cults from religion. A cult is, I mean, there's no hard and fast definition here, but the hallmarks of a cult versus a religion tend to be both in just numbers of adherence, right, like a smaller group of people, and also just the recency of its emergence. So a cult that is 500 years old that's got a million people associated with it, or a billion people associated with it, well, that's a religion.

That's one of the, quote, great world religions. A cult that a religion is just a little too recent to not be more embarrassing than normal. I mean, I would put Mormonism in this category. Mormonism is basically, I mean, it's treated as a religion, generally speaking in America, but most people who are not Mormon sort of view it as a cult because we just know too much about Joseph Smith. I mean, like, his obviously human failings are just, but we just, we have the, we have the contemporaneous testimony. We know what he did on any given day historically, right? And we know that he's like, we know he was making up new print, like, just because he wanted to sleep with the wives of his followers, he was kind of, he was adding to,

to the canon in real time to justify his misbehavior. And so it's telling that you can, you can, one of the greatest introductions to Mormonism is like the South Park episode on Mormonism. It's mortifying if you're a Mormon, but it's really does shine a light on the cultic embarrassment of that whole project as opposed to the grandfathered-in religious,

respectability of it, because we just don't know enough about it. But more cultic still is something like Scientology, where it's like literally you can look at Elron Hubbard's driver's license and you can see video of him, just obviously confabulating about what's going on in different constellations and star systems. And, I mean, he could sit with his,

maybe you've seen going clear, the Alice Gibney documentary based on Lawrence Wright's book on Scientology, absolutely scandalizing. with respect to what his devotees believed in his... Like, what he could say that would pass the test of credibility among Western-educated, presumably psychologically normal people. I mean, he would sit there with his flock, and he would point up at the night sky, and he'd say,

oh, you see that star there? Okay, that star, around that star, there's a galactic overlord named Jivu, and he's got, he's working with a student, and he would just freestyle, you know, and people believed it, right? I mean, you know, it's just completely incredible, and yet there you can see how a cult is born, and this is a cult that has a lot of subscribers and a lot of resources, and a thousand years from now, maybe it's going to be a religion, but right now it's a cult. And then, of course, they're less, um, um, um, less credible cult still. I'm sure there's a cult starting, you know, started two weeks ago

in a neighborhood, you know, the spitting distance from here, and it's just somebody in his backyard, you know, making incredible claims about, you know, what he knows and how he knows it. But the difficulty here in sorting all this out is, again, there is a very deep well of truth here that we are interested in and are right to be interested in should want to explore, which is just how possible is it to be free in this life? I mean, just how much suffering can be overcome and what is there to discover about the nature of the mind in each moment? And what disciplines of attention are useful in that discovery? And what is a rational belief system around these experiences. I mean, just what does it mean, if you're sitting in, you know, in church or,

you know, looking at the sunset, you know, or you at the seashore, wherever you are, and you suddenly feel like a fundamental loss of your separate sense of subjectivity and a fusion with all that exists. I mean, it's just like there's no distance between you and the universe. and you're overcome by a feeling of love for all sentient beings, and the tears streamed down your face, and within seconds, you recognize, this is the most important experience you've ever had. What is how, and then it, then you lose it, right?

Then it's just you sitting there again, hoping to get back there somehow. What is rational to believe about that? Now, if you're a Christian, you'll think, okay, well, this was the descent of the Holy Spirit, and this was the grace of God, and you'll have some things to pull off the shelf that are, again, dogmas. But the thing you need to notice, if you're being rational, is that Christians have that experience, and Muslims and Hindus and Jews, and atheists like me, have that experience. So it can't be a matter of the specific sectarian language that best captures all of that. I mean, this is not a data point in favor of Christianity, if you have this

experience, because, again, a Hindu can have that exact experience and have his way of talking about it. And Hinduism looks nothing like Christianity, even though it subsumes Christianity by calling Jesus an avatar of Vishnu, which is just sort of a clever move that Hindus can always play. They can just always add one more person to their pantheon. But what I'm arguing is that clearly we want a deeper way of talking about all of this that is non-sectarian and not politically divisive and that allows us to use the best ideas available. I like that a lot. You've got two hinge ideas. You tell me which one you want to pick up on. One is the difference between suffering and pain.

And the other hinge idea is identifying with thoughts and observing thoughts. Which one would you like to pick up first? Because I think the second one is a little bit more illusory for many. And then the first one is like maybe more appetizing. Like what is the difference? And how am I better to have less suffering, if you will? Well, I think the second one explains the first. That's right.

If you're going to look at, if you're suffering, if you're feeling regret or anxiety or despair or anger or whatever the mental state is that is getting flagged as as negative, there's something you want to get rid of. Did you just hesitate before negative because you didn't want to do the binary bit, you know, that there's good and bad, that there's positive and negative? No, I mean, I don't think so. No, it's just, and we can talk about whether these classically negative emotions are something we really, truly want to get rid of, right? I mean, I think that we can be skeptical about that. But what does seem clear to me is that you don't want to stay in them for very long, right? So if something makes you angry or impatient or afraid, for me, that's a salient signal that there's something in the environment or in your life or in your body or in a social situation that's worth paying. attention to, right now. You might have misunderstood what's happening, but in any case, there's increased salience, and when you look at what, you know, the brain structures that begin to get involved in any experiential change of that kind, like the amygdala, it's much more a story of salience than it is of positive versus negative emotion. It's just something has just gotten your attention and perhaps should. But then the question is, how long do you want to stay

angry for or impatient for or sad for? How long? How long? is that negative state useful and 99 times out of 100 the answer to that is not long at all right I mean you you want to solve whatever the problem is you want to be in a different frame of mind you want to be more open and and equanimous and balanced in your just in your interaction with another person or in just your efforts to put out a fire and you know of whatever kind in your life. I mean, to be panicked is almost never ideal. Just sub-panic for like 16 hours a day.

Yeah, that's not a deal, no. And many of us live our lives as though they were one long emergency. And that is a story of thinking every moment of the day and not knowing that you're thinking. I mean, you're having a conversation with yourself. You're forming images about the past and the future. You're rehearsing conversations that you've had

that you might have. And we had, our minds have this strange property where, where we, we never get bored of the story we've told ourselves a hundred times, even that day. We'll tell it again to ourselves, even if it's a negative story. And if you just imagine what it would be like to, to have your thoughts broadcast on a speaker so that other people could hear them, other people would hear how you're just perseverating on the same thing, again, for the, again, for the hundredth time in that day. and it's the most boring monologue in the world, and yet somehow we don't, in the privacy of our own minds, we don't even notice how strangely repetitive all this is.

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

I didn't know what that was. that's for those people, not for me. It was definitely something that I was struggling with. I found a professor in psychology to be very warm. And so we're going to class. I was just intrigued by how he thought. Going to class. And I said, hey, Doc, you got a minute?

He says, yeah. You go into class? He says, yeah. He goes, walk with me. And he noticed that there was a heaviness to me. And he said, what's on your mind? And I said, well, and I started. started telling him a story about what was bothering me.

And I could recount almost word for word that I shared with him, not because I remember this moment, I remember that moment of it. I remember the next moment, a great detail. But it's because I practiced that flipping story so many times. He recognized that I was in kind of mid-stride of my story, and it was well rehearsed.

And he stopped and he interrupted the conversation, which I didn't realize was a good cognitive behavioral, tactic, okay? So he interrupted me midstream, not allowing me to rehearse it again, creating an interruption. And it was rude. He was very rude when he did it. I had no idea what he was doing. And he just stopped and he looked at me. He said, look, I need you to figure something out. When someone knocks on your door, do you have to answer it? Yeah. I was kind of fuddled and my eyes opened up like, uh, and he walked away. And I was like, man, these psychology people are weird. And so what he did in that moment is that he,

radically changed the loop that I was in. And the reason I think I was in the loop, this is the second part of the story, is because I loved the fast, I was fascinated with the drama of the story. It was me being, oh, not the victim, but the one that was trying to solve the things, all the things that could go wrong, right? So I was both victim and hero in my own story. And so, like, wild in my own head. But it was so lifelike. When I tell us, story. I can see it. Only there's there is about five to seven percent of people that cannot see visual images. I don't know if you're aware of that but yeah. Yeah. And there's obviously a range of abilities there. Some people have very faint images and some people can conjure crystal clear images.

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

also have the ability to mitigate whether you are going to kind of fall into that scratchy experience because the way you frame the experience is a capability and how quickly you move through the scratchy emotion is a capability. Well, I would say one way I would reframe it for people is that emotions are essentially covert behaviors. I mean, there's something you're doing. You are seeing them as behaviors. Yeah. So it's like your, physiological experience.

It's like to be angry requires that you keep doing something, right? It's almost like you're pinching yourself. To stay angry. Yeah. And to worry, I mean, you're pinching yourself and now you're wondering why you're so uncomfortable. But you're still pinching yourself. But in the case of an emotion like anger, you don't even realize you have a hand,

much less what it's doing, right? Like you're just, all of this is invisible to you. So on some level, mindfulness, is a, or meditation is a way of becoming aware of the mechanics of mental suffering. And the most basic level of the mechanics are, you're tending to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And each new thought arises and seems to just become what you are. It just feels like you.

It's like so, you know, if I'm, you know, people are listening to us now and they might think, well, what is he, what is he talking about thinking without knowing that I'm thinking? I know that I'm thinking. But that's a thought that is arising, uninspected, and it just feels like self. Like that voice in your mind feels like what you are subjectively. But mindfulness is a way of dropping back to prior to that and noticing these bits of language and imagery that just arise on their own in this open space of awareness. And to break that connection, to break that spell of just mere identification with each next

thought allows you to, in the ultimate case, allows you to just let a thought of whatever its contents. It could just be the most awful thought, you know, just a thought of just, that would otherwise humiliate you. But the moment you just notice it as an appearance in consciousness, it can arise and pass away and have no psychological implication. I mean, it could just be no more so than somebody else's thought. I mean, your speech doesn't modify my sense of myself in the way that my inner speech does, but it's totally possible to just hear your own inner speech as just more noise. And that becomes important when you're trying to free yourself from the, again, I call it a classically negative emotion like anger, you can,

the moment you notice the thoughts that are keeping you angry just to kind of arise and pass away and become willing to just feel the raw physiology of anger. I mean, how is it that you know that you're angry as opposed to excited or happy? Well, it's got this sort of physiological signature in your body. I mean, you feel a certain way, feel a certain sense of energy in your face or your chest or somewhere. You're feeling something.

Feel that, this is side note to resolve some confusion here. Many people worry that meditation or mindfulness is a way of suppressing emotion or just not feeling it or getting away from it. Like unbothered is the state of not caring, which is not the case. Yeah, yeah, but to the contrary, in this case, what you're letting yourself do is truly feel, like feel the anger completely. Like, you just let yourself be incandescent with anger, but just notice the difference

between the raw physiology of it and your thoughts about it and just notice all of this arise and change and pass away. And if you're willing to do that, what you discover is that an emotion like anger has a very short half-life. I mean, it's just impossible to stay angry for more than some seconds. I mean, it's on the order of seconds or tens of seconds. It's not minutes, certainly not hours, and it's not days and weeks, which can be somebody's experience when they're not noticing this connection between their thoughts about why they have every right to be angry, why they should be angry, why that person was a total jerk.

this is what they should have said, could have said, break your connection to that automaticity of just thinking and rehearsing and perseverating on your life and the situation you think you're in. Let all of that arise and pass away and just come back to the raw emotion. The raw emotion is falling away from you in every present second.

I mean, you couldn't hold on to it if you wanted to. I mean, the only way to hold on to it, the only way to persist in anger is to suddenly be captured again by that thought about that dumb thing that she said, that I can't believe why, how the fuck does she think? And you're that, you're that voice. You become that voice.

But there's space around that voice. There's this condition of awareness in which that voice and the physiology of anger are both appearing. And if you keep dropping back and just be the kind of the screen on which the movie is being played, there's real freedom in that.

And in the most radical sense, the freedom can be enjoyed even before the physiology changes. Right? Like you're not actually... Before the anger changes. Yeah, before anything has changed at the level of the contents of awareness. You're just... The moment you notice that you are this prior condition,

I mean, you are just the space in which these thoughts are appearing and these energy changes in the body are appearing. That recognition can be a radical... position of freedom even before the energy changes in your body. I mean, even before you could say your body is relaxed. I mean, you could make your body as tense as you wanted to be. I mean, you could just make yourself as uncomfortable and as uptight as possible, right? Just find this feeling that you you're calling eye and just squeeze it like a fist, right? Just like make yourself, just the most, try to be as uptight as possible. But just notice that there's space around that. There's just this

openness of awareness in which everything is appearing, including this feeling of being a clenched fist. And that freedom is available even before you unclench anything, even before you can truly be said to be relaxed. And this applies obviously to every situation in life in which people want to feel a psychological freedom that seems contingent upon changing experience. Like let's say you have to speak in front of a crowd, public speaking is a very common fear. And It's a fear that I had growing up, and it wasn't until I became a writer and it just actually had to speak in public that I got over it. But it's a very common fear.

And people are very familiar with this sense of you're going to step out on stage in front of a crowd. And there's this kind of mismatch between who they are and who they want to be. They want to be relaxed, but they're feeling nothing but anxiety. They want to feel natural, but they're feeling they're basically broadcasting their sense of their being in the world to the crowd, and they're seeing themselves through the eyes of others, right? And that's enhancing their sense of self-consciousness.

And there's this sense that the only way to feel free in that condition is to change all of that. Like, okay, your face has to feel different, your body has to feel different. You'll know you've arrived when the physiology is completely transformed. Actually, you can arrive much sooner than that. can just recognize that there's space around all of that, right? And when you recognize that space, all of a sudden the physiology of anxiety doesn't have the psychological implication you thought

it had. It's, it, in that moment, it becomes indistinguishable from excitement. I mean, so, you know, cognitive reframing would often, you know, acknowledge that, you know, excitement and anxiety are so close to one another and really it's just the cognitive frame we put around them that makes them different. So there's kind of reframing techniques that are, you know, that are, you know, recommended there. But even more fundamental than that is that this energy in your body doesn't, it's like, you know, a pain in the knee or a feeling of indigestion or itchiness on the skin. None of those things are things that you map back onto yourself as a sense of who you are as a person. I mean, you don't, if you had to stand up in front of a crowd and speak and you had a pain

in your knee, you wouldn't read from that, you know, negatively valenced sensation in the knee, any lesson as to what sort of person you are. He wouldn't say, why am I sort of the person who feels a pain in his knee in front of all these people? Like, like, I don't want to be this guy, right? There's no, there's no connection between that unpleasant experience and your sense of the appropriateness of who you are in front of that crowd. And yet with anxiety, this kind of fluttering of energy in the chest and the face, it has a signature that we have used. We've been, And we've learned to use to sort of deprecate ourselves in some global way, where it's like, why am I this kind of person?

I'm so far from who I want to be in this moment because of this energy. And it's possible to totally break that spell. And it has no lesson to teach you, apart from the fact, again, a kind of a salience cue, which is, in this case, you actually care. You care about this speech going well. Right? You actually want to, you know, you want something from this experience. Well, okay, there's, there are ways to get what you want. And one fundamental way is to just break the spell of your identification with this kind of

inner doom scrolling algorithm you've acquired where you're talking to yourself about how inadequate you are. You know what I really appreciate is that you and I have very different paths in what we've studied and how we've studied. and you are speaking, using different words to describe it, in the same exact way that I think about people getting free. And so I'm nodding my head to everything. And I just want to kind of maybe point back to another example of this in my own life

and other people's lives that I think they can relate. First, before I do the example is that the cognitive reframing from anxiety to excitement, I think it's a BS. I get it. I don't think it works. I can't fool myself. I know when I'm scared and I know when I'm excited. And if I say, oh, my body's just, I'm just mislabeling it.

Like, no, I've actually labeled a lot of it in a way. I've been over labeling something that I'm afraid of. My body is switched on as a response to the way I've been thinking. So I like the idea that I can change the way I'm thinking about my experience. I radically appreciate that. And I think that that is a radical act to be. able to work with the contents of your thought. Okay. And I think you can also train them. Back to that in a minute. But then you came back around and you said, wait, you can actually say,

oh, this is more descriptive. Oh, my body's switched on. My body's activated. Oh, it's because something important is about to happen. Do I want this level of activation? Now I put myself back in control. Do I want this level? No, I'm still eating breakfast. And I'm not going to go do my public speaking for four hours. Why don't we back it down? So it's more matter of fact than it is in that case than it is reframing it. But it is an alert system to me that I need to do some work on all of the thinking that led to my body switching on.

If it really is nervousness, well, there's something that I'm over identifying with in my performance as me, which is a performance-based identity. Our community here at Bodymastery will recognize how problematic a performance-based identity is. So I love all of what you just said. And there's the example I wanted to give when you're talking about space is that if we were to watch a world class surfer and you are the world, you are also a world class surfer and I am a novice surfer. We would watch the surfer paddle drop in and then do something at the bottom of the wave and then do this magnificent thing at the top of the wave. Big water splashes everywhere. It's amazing.

It's a turn. And the novice mind, I go, I have no idea how he or she did that. That's amazing. And then you say, well, actually, hold on, there's all these little moments before the moment. And watch his backhand. Watch his front hand. Watch how he's up on his three toes on his back foot and releasing his big toe at the bottom of the, and you would be describing all the spaces in between. And in sport, it looks like bang, bang, things happen. But when you talk to Masters, they're like, No, no, there's all these frames in between that we're paying attention to that the novice isn't. And I think people that are truly mastery of self, there's all these slight little frames that precede thoughts, that interstitch between thoughts, that understand the intimate relationship between thoughts and the physiological experience, call it the emotion here. And that kind of bang, bang experience is actually, there's lots of space between it that you can insert and work with and almost be playful.

with. But for the unconditioned or the untrained mind, if you will, or unexamined mind, it feels very blurry, very messy, very like bang, bang, if you will, like it happens so fast, I'm just out of control. And so I just wanted to use that analogy for a sport-minded folks and see if you agree with what I just said. I think I would like to say something about the power of reframing. I get that that, that, you know, that. as a technique, it can feel powerless, especially when you're having a big experience that just seems like you can't get any purchase on it,

but just by changing your inner monologue. But people can recognize the power of framing and expectation that they're just experiencing on a day-to-day basis when you think about the experience of working out in a gym, right? You know, you're just like, you go to the gym, let's say you're lifting heavy weights, and if you just check in with the physiology,

the raw physiology of that experience, just what it feels like to be experiencing that kind of bodily stress, I think most people can recognize that if they were feeling that stress in some other context that wasn't benign, that hadn't been sought out as being positive. There you go.

If you wake up in the middle of night at 3 a.m., and you felt the same sensations you felt when you're getting under a squat. You'd call 9-1-1, right? This is a medical emergency. And it might be precisely the same physiological experience. Like the level of stress, a level of just the sheer unpleasantness, like it.

I like it. That's great. And so, I mean, one of the nice things about working out hard is that it can get, it can sort of inoculate you to a certain type of suffering. Like it can give you more resilience in harder moments in life because you know what it's like to actually put yourself through stress on a daily basis. There is just the, that's just the power of, the raw power of thought to just fundamentally change our sense of the desirability of an experience.

I mean, I go into the gym wanting to feel that stress and loving it when I feel it. And in some other situation in life, when it's not wanted, it could be analogous to being tortured. If someone imposed that stress on you and you didn't know what was going to happen next, in fact, in fact, what you thought was going to happen next was going to be worse and you're terrified, it's this is what you do in the gym is indistinguishable from torture i love this for two reasons because i i actually think you're talking about framing not reframing in this case but because if i frame the experience like oh i want my heart to pound i want that sweaty clammy feeling i want to have a shakiness in my body because i'm i put my body under under pounds of of stress and i want to see how

far i can actually go framing that is really it's awesome but if you are framing that same experience and going in the gym like, oh man, I don't get it. I'm not, this is stupid. I don't really see the results. You're also going to create another experience. I think we are saying the same thing in the framing and reframing, and I would never argue that reframing is, it's one of the most powerful tools in psychology.

Yeah. What I'm just arguing for is that, and I'm urging people to notice is that the role of our conceptual understanding of what's happening moment to moment is overwhelming powerful for good or for ill, right? And there is a degree of freedom to be discovered there just at that level. But the level that I'm advocating whenever I'm talking about mindfulness or meditation is yet more fundamental than that. It's not necessarily, it's not a matter of changing your thoughts about your experience. It's just noticing the raw data of experience

moment to moment prior to thought and thoughts themselves just become, you know, positive or negative thoughts, good, you know, well-framed thoughts or poorly framed thoughts, they all become just more phenomenon to notice. Yeah. The hope that you have to be able to live a life more free, unbothered, decreasing suffering, more love and kindness, more empathy. It feels like a warm hug. Like that's exactly what I want more of for myself, for you, for loved ones, for the community is just that. And there are practices. There are practices. there are principles and to not be dogmatic I think is refreshing to hear look I really appreciate your approach when I said earlier at the top that there's some things that we differ on

it's the main thesis of atheism versus me being open to a deity and I like how you put it the universe you're open to things being far stranger than you might imagine so I've loved this conversation you do incredible service to people who want to scrub logic and to get underneath and discern and you're challenging people through your app and your reading or your book to be able to think deeply and to practice through meditation and other contemplate practices. So I just want to say thank you. This was really enjoyable. It's just got like a take home question for us. If we knew what you know, how would we live just a little bit better life than we currently living now. Well, on some level, I can ask that question of myself

because when you're talking about the deepest wisdom that we all can touch through meditation, it is a matter of continually forgetting it and rediscovering it. I mean, on some level, you have to convince yourself of the thing you know 10,000 times for it to become the operating principle of your life and you're continually again in the limit maybe there's a way of stabilizing all of this and and and you're done but until that moment arises you're constantly rediscovering the most important thing you know and and there are different sides to this beautiful object and some of it I mean some of it can emphasize just the impermanence of life and the preciousness of it like like you're never going to get this moment again you're never going to get this

conversation again you're never going to get this day again it's like it's like it's Did you forget to hug your child when they went off to school? I mean, like, did you miss that moment? Because that's not coming back, right? So, like, and there's a last time you're going to pick up your child, right? At a certain point, there's going to be a person there who you just don't pick up because they're too big, and you're not even going to remember the last time you pick them up, right?

Like, the things that end that you don't even know they end, right? So impermanence, just impermanence on its own is such a deep reflection that just purifies motives and purifies priorities. But there's so many other facets to this thing, non-duality or selflessness as another. But I would just say that even I'm on the receiving end of that, of this answer, because I'm continually getting lost in thought

and being kind of submerged in the dreamscape of having some fictional priority for this. There's something I think I want that I'm going to be busy wanting it for the next. minute and my life and my attention are totally trimmed down by this kind of delusion. And then there's just this moment of recognition of the self-sufficiency of the present moment, again, and the gratitude to be able to have that recognition. So there's just, it's a constant, you're constantly waking up if you're practicing.

And that's, hence the name of your book. Hence the name of your app, which I've been well done on both. Really well done. And your podcast, making sense. really well done. Thank you for a breath of fresh air and I would say a non-pessimistic framing. Yeah, you got me there.

Yes, that's great. All right, Sam, thank you so much for coming through. Great to meet you. Yeah, pleasure. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by four-time Olympic goal medalist, nine-time world champion and one of the fastest sprinters in history, Michael Johnson.

Michael takes us inside the most intense moment in sport, the call room just before the race, and shares how he learned to channel nerves, control his environment, and prepare his mind to perform when the stakes are highest. He also reflects on how that same mindset helped him recover and rebuild

after a more recent life-changing stroke. Join us Wednesday, April 1st at 9 a.m. Pacific only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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