On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Sam Harris ON: How To Break Your Social Media Habits & Ways to Master Your Anxious Thoughts

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Today, I sit down with Sam Harris to talk about dealing with extreme emotions and pursuing your purpose. We discuss our freedom to pursue beliefs we want to support, how to approach meditation with maturity and incorporate it into our daily life, the crippling effects of spending too much time on social media, and how to turn outrage into manageable situations.  Sam Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. He is known for his writings and lectures on religion, morality, neuroscience, and free will. Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has authored several books, including "The End of Faith," "Letter to a Christian Nation," "Waking Up," and "Free Will." Harris is also the host of the podcast "Making Sense," where he discusses various topics related to science, politics, and philosophy. You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. Open the door to a deeper understanding of yourself—with guided meditations and insights for living a more examined life. Visit https://www.wakingup.com/jayshetty  What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 02:34 What is worthy of pursuit in life? 06:47 The difference between religion and spirituality that truly transcends culture  12:14 Why we need to be wiser in finding what is worthy of our credence  24:57 Sam explains what’s the mature approach of meditation and how this can be achieved 36:02 There are many levels of outrage and it mostly depends on the presented situation 45:00 How do you handle the feeling of outrage or any other strong feeling that may be difficult to deal with 54:19 Sam shares the philanthropic charities he has been investing his time in 01:02:02 Lessening time on social media can help avoid getting exposed to toxic and unhealthy content 01:11:16 How will you deal with the death of a loved one and of your own? 01:17:04 Sam on Final Five  Episode Resources Sam Harris | Website Sam Harris | YouTube Sam Harris | Twitter Sam Harris | Facebook Sam Harris | TikTok Sam Harris | Books Waking Up Making Sense with Sam Harris Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our 20s are often seen as this golden decade. Our time to be carefree, make mistakes, and figure out our lives. But what can psychology teach us about this time? I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of our 20s, from career anxiety, mental health, heartbreak, money, and much more to explore the science behind our experiences. The psychology of your 20s hosted by me, Gemma Speg. Listen now on the iHeart Radio Amp Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart.

I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions. Like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to inner cosmos with David Eagleman on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your reality. Listen to Intercosmos with David Eagleman on the IHART Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The one you feed explores how to build a fulfilling life admits the challenges we face. We share manageable steps to living with more joy and less fear through guidance on emotional resilience, transformational habits and personal growth. I'm your host Eric Eric Zimmer, and I speak with experts ranging from psychologists to spiritual teachers, offering powerful lessons to apply daily. Create the life you want now. Listen to the one you feed on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There really is a tension between being and becoming. On some level, being isn't enough because you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved. We're all going to die, right? So we have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence. The best selling author and host. The number one health and wellness podcast.

On purpose with Jay Shetty. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world, thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier and more healed. I'm so grateful for our incredible community and all the love and support and energy that I've been seeing already at the beginning of this year.

And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eight rules of love.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global

tour. Love rules. Go to jsheddytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. And today's guest is someone that, I've been reading his books for quite a while. We were just discussing beforehand, probably started reading his work around 13 years ago or thereabouts. And I just read his latest book,

which I'm gonna tell you about today, and we'll be discussing some of that work today. And it's amazing to see how someone's deepened, expanded, continued their thought, especially when they write in a very logical but also documentive way. And so I'm talking about Sam Harris and neuroscientist philosopher and author of five New York Times bestsellers. Sam's work covers a wide range of topics, neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation, practice, rationality.

And Sam focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Some of the books include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, which is the first book I read, free will, lying, and waking up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast, and it's the creator of the waking up app. Please welcome to the show, Sam Harris.

Sam, thank you for doing this. Oh, yes, pleasure. Great to meet you. Yeah, it's great to meet you. It's the first time we've never interacted before this. No. No messages, no text. First time in the same room as well. Yeah, absolutely. But it's always, I love diving in with an author

that I've read before. And so, as you said a few brief moments ago, even though we've not met, I hope that I have somewhat of an understanding and insight into your mind, but I always look to extend and expand that today. I want to dive straight in and I want to pick out a quote here from you.

You said, most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present. We're trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. My question is, what's worth pursuing, or what is worthy of pursuing in life?

Because I guess that's probably a good place to start. Yeah, well, there really is a tension between being and becoming, right? I think we live with this tension every moment of our lives. And I think the domain of our spiritual concerns really focuses on the being part. I think it's just a spirituality for lack of a better word is whatever you put in the

space provided, it is an answer to the question of how is it possible to be fulfilled in the present moment in the midst of whatever is happening. Knowing that experience is always changing, knowing that you can't possibly create an experience that doesn't change, how is it possible to be at peace with the flux? So that's, and really finding a mode of being that, wherein you can recognize a type of fulfillment that isn't predicated on the next good thing happening. The story you're telling yourself about the future that may in fact never arrive. On some level, being isn't enough because there are all the ways in the way as the world might be.

There's the possibility space of what we can create and what we want to create takes effort. So all these things are not actualized now, even if we're content now. And I think the domain of our becoming, I mean, there's all kinds of healthy ways, unhealthy ways of becoming, but the healthy mode of becoming, at least one part of it is,

it really subsumes our ethical lives, right? So just what is it, what would be good to do, what is positive, what is pro-social, at least one part of it is, it really subsumes our ethical lives. Right? What is it, what would be good to do, what is positive, what is pro-social? How can we make the world a better place? How can we raise our kids to be wise and honest and content? And all of these are projects that take work. And so it's not just a matter of just chilling out perfectly and watching what happens. We do have to do things. So the tension really is in being at peace in the meditative sense, in the contemplative

sense, in the spiritual sense, even while you make great effort to accomplish things. And I think the peace part comes when you recognize that your happiness is not actually predicated on getting any of those things done. I mean, that you have to learn to love the process, you have to learn to recognize that goals themselves as valid as they might be to achieve. The experience of achieving them is very brief. And it has this mirage-like quality where it just, it recedes. I mean, you've been thinking about this thing for a year and you finally get to that landmark.

And what is it? Well, it's just another moment of being alive. And now you've got your thoughts about the past and the future still. And the question is, can you actually make full contact with the present moment? And so in the quote you read, my main point was, most people, if you don't have to meditate, you're basically trying to arrange the world to give you a good enough reason to recognize that the present moment is enough. Right. Number once you actually know how to meditate, you can sink into the present moment regardless of what else you're

struggling to accomplish. And so you can be, you can sort of take the goal as the path, right? And kind of emotionally and cognitively, you've already arrived in terms of your own concerns about your own well-being. And yet, you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved, right? But you're, we're all going to die. There's no solution to the massive problem of impermanence.

We have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence. That's where the contemplative life comes in. So we're talking about pursuing peace. We're talking about pursuing this ability to navigate between, as you were saying, being at peace with where you are now, but at the same time, growing and progressing and loving the process as well. How do you define, just for everyone who's listening, because I know you do this a lot in the book and in your work as well, how do you define spirituality and how do you define religion so that people can just make sense

of those terms as we use them throughout this conversation. Yeah, well, so I tend to use you probably know I tend to be a critic of organized religion because it just forget about the tribalism that religion so often engenders and the conflict born of that tribalism. I just think we need a 21st century conversation about human wisdom and human happiness. And spirituality is a word I use, although I use it somewhat in scare quotes because people have associations with it that I think are just not helpful.

So my argument is really you can have a 21st century conversation about reality and how to live within it or you can have a seven-century conversation, or a fifth-century BC conversation, you can locate yourself at any point in human history, or you can, at this moment, decide to avail yourself of all of the best ideas and just recognize that we have really a common inheritance of wisdom and insight, and we can use whatever works. And ultimately, we have to be the best judges of what works. Given the needs of the moment, given technological changes

that could never have been foreseen by our ancestors. So whether we do this with the US Constitution or we do it with the Bible, or we do it with the Polycanon, the Buddhist scripture, It's just, you can, there's no question that our ancestors have created documents and ways of thinking and methodologies, science being one, the contemplative practice being another that are incredibly valuable to us, but we have to recognize that, in this moment in time, all we have is human conversation and human intuition and human insight by which to navigate.

So I just, for the religion piece, to be dogmatically attached to a specific religion, as though we're the one true way of seeing everything, that just doesn't make any sense to me at this moment. I mean, it's analogous to wanting to say that physics is a Christian phenomenon because the Christians, for the most part, were the first people to actually make real breakthroughs in physics. Well, it's just, there's no reason to speak of Christian physics or Muslim algebra. And ultimately, I think there'll be no reason to speak of Christian or Buddhist or Hindu spirituality. I think we have a common human project. And whatever is true of the human mind

and its possibilities, there has to be a way of talking about that, the truly transcends culture and certainly isn't sectarian in any usual sense, right? In the same way that science, when it's working, transcends culture and isn't sectarian. There's no Japanese science versus American science, there's just science. Spirituality for better or worse is a word that I think we still need to use because, I'll talk about the contemplative life or wisdom traditions and specific practices like meditation, but it names an approach to well-being that isn't predicated on all of the usual seeking to become happy. So it's not about getting wealthier, it's not about getting healthier and fitter, and those are all worthwhile projects,

and they're not in conflict with spirituality, but the spiritual piece in spirituality is, how is it possible to pay attention in this moment so as to not suffer unnecessarily? And what are the actual mechanics of our psychological suffering, such that we do suffer unnecessarily so much at the time? necessarily. Right? And what are the actual mechanics of our psychological suffering, such that we do suffer unnecessarily so much at the time. And when you look closely at all that,

it really is a matter of being lost and thought almost all of the time. And there's kind of this living, this waking dreamscape of thought, where we're talking to ourselves moment to moment, we're not aware of it. And so much of that conversation isn't unhappy one. And meditation is really a way of breaking that spell and waking up from the dream of discreasivity and identification with thought. Such that you can recognize that consciousness, that by which everything is seen and known and experienced and felt, right, just the qualitative character of your own being in this moment. Consciousness has certain qualities that are intrinsically peaceful and gratifying and free of problems, right?

And it's really the layer of thought that we fail to recognize all that and feel that are, you know, every waking moment is some form of emergency that has to be responded to or reacted to. Yeah, and I think the way you define spirituality and the way you talk about it, I feel like it's definitely more and more appealing today. I think it's definitely something that, as you said, we need a 21st century version of what we're pursuing and how we think about reality. And I think those conversations are happening more often and more strongly and in more important circles. I have this question because I've often thought about this. You've well documented the pitfalls

of organized religion and the challenges that come with that. What do you think of the pitfalls or challenges of spirituality in the fact that we move away from something, as you said earlier, was like, you know, this very defined structured way of living that we've now come to look at it and go, okay, that doesn't make sense all the time. And at the other end, we have a complete kind of open paradigm of spirituality, which can often be confusing, lacking structure, lacking somewhat of a map. Like, do you see certain pitfalls as to how we practice and become contemplative about spirituality? Yeah.

Well, so I should say that much that goes by the name of spirituality is also something that is worth being name of spirituality is also something that is worth being skeptical of, right? Many beliefs that people form and many of these are imported from religion that just can't be squared with a sophisticated scientific view of just what reality is like. It's not to say we've figured everything out, and we certainly haven't. But we just know that figured everything out, and we certainly haven't. But we just know that certain superstitious, magical otherworldly beliefs are just not likely to be true. And yet, the most important spiritual claims traditionally, like the fact that unconditional love is a possible state of mind. love is a possible state of mind, right? Or that the self as it's normally felt and conceived is actually a lucery, right? That you were taken in by a powerful illusion of separateness, and that feeling of separateness can be inspected and ultimately penetrated and felt through and

felt beyond. Those are really, those are the babies in the bathwater of religion and spirituality that I think everyone, if they think about it long enough, wants to conserve. And those are fully supported by a modern discussion of the human mind and even a neuroanatomical discussion of the human mind. There's no, as you know, my PhD is in neuroscience that I can tell you, there's no place in the brain for an unchanging ego to be hiding. The sense that we have a self that is unchanging, that's carried through for a moment to moment, that is the place from which we appropriate experience, that is separate from experience.

That is just granted. It's a powerful illusion for many people, but it's an illusion that can be dispelled. And once dispelled, it actually brings your experience into closer register with what we have every reason to believe neuroscientifically about just the way the mind should be based on the way the brain is. If you wander into the spiritual side of a bookstore, if you can even find a physical bookstore these days, it's been a while, so I've been in one. I've been going to quite a few of the Christmas, yeah.

But there are a few in far between at the moment. Yes, definitely. So in that section of the bookstore, there's a lot on the shelves that is bogus or semi bogus or filled with wishful thinking and not so interesting intellectually or ethically, frankly. But there's a lot that is truly valid. And I think we just have to become or ethically, frankly. But there's a lot that is truly valid.

And I think we just have to become wiser curators of the totality of human conversation and the world's literature to find what is worthy of our credence at this point. And this is what we do this naturally. And I think we just need to be honest that we are the ones, like when you go to an ancient text, when you go to the, maybe we take your favorite spiritual

or religious book, in almost all of them, there are passages that are obviously anachronistic and just not suited to a 21st century view of just how we should live, right? So there's a lot about how to sacrifice goats, you know, in the Old Testament, and then and it's just if it was ever useful, it's not not especially useful now. People effortlessly ignore those passages and that's fine. So you're performing editing on the fly, and then you find a passage in Ecclesiastes, or Jesus giving the sermon on the mount, and the golden rule, and you say,

okay, this is really encapsulates a lot of wisdom. And it's very hard to improve on the golden rule. The golden rule's a fantastic heuristic for just living ethically with people. So great, there's nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence to use the golden rule as a great kind of navigation tool, ethically. And when you think about ethics and morality,

it really is a question of what to do next. And we're always faced with this navigation problem, essentially, because there's this total space of possible experience individually and collectively. And we're trying to figure out how to navigate in this space given that the possible experiences on offer. And the truth is, there are horizons here which we can't see beyond. I mean, we don't know how good life could get for us individually and collectively. There's so many things that are in play now. I mean, we are living at a time where

it was possible for us to change our own genomes ultimately. Right? I mean, there's not not many people doing that at the moment, but that is just a few short years away where we're going to be confronted with the question of, do you actually want to modify the genes that are expressed in your body and brain and even in the germ line, so we're talking about the inheritance of your future children. So we can do in a few short moments what evolution has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, in our case, and millions of millions and millions of years before that. So these are choices that we have always had to make, but now we're making them in the presence of increasingly powerful technology.

I'm our engagement with the internet and information. We're finding it hard to even have a conversation about the most basic facts now at scale, because there's so much misinformation, and much of our conversation is being piped through the social media platforms, which are essentially outrage machines, right? They're preferentially amplifying the most agitating and divisive content, because that's what spreads faster. And they're amplifying misinformation more than the debunking of misinformation, right? So there's an asymmetric war of information here.

And so we're suddenly, we've got these, functionally, we have the genes we had with a few tweaks, we have the genes we have maybe 75,000 years ago, right? So we are these ancient primates now armed with nuclear weapons and an internet and increasing and AI technology now. And so, and we're faced with the—continually faced with the conundrum of what to do with all of this, and how do we solve these massive coordination problems where we get now 8 billion strangers, essentially, to cooperate peacefully. The landscape of possibility here is always shifting, of possibility here is always shifting. And so again, we have human conversation as a means by which to navigate this. And so, yeah, I mean to come back, this is a very long way of getting back to your original question, which is once you recognize that our legacy thought structures are not

well suited to this, right? So to be a fundamentalist Christian or a fundamentalist Buddhist or a fundamentalist Hindu in the face of these new opportunities and new challenges is to the best evidence and the best arguments, really perpetually open to the best to new evidence and better arguments, where are the guardrails, right? There's no longer, it's no longer simple, right? I can no longer just consult a single book or a single list of do's and don'ts to guide me. Ultimately, it's a far more flexible and intelligent way to proceed because we want, let me just ask yourself, do you want your next decision or your decision ten

years from now to be, do you want to be available to the best evidence and the best arguments at that moment when making that decision or not. Do you want some belief system that guarantees your unavailability? Do you want some kind of cognitive and emotional closure that walls you off from better arguments and better information? I think almost no one would sign up for that kind of, you know, that's ignorance by another name, right? up for that kind of, you know, that's ignorance by another name, right? So I think we want to be persuadable. We want to be open to better arguments and new evidence. We also want to be skeptical and conservative in how we revise our map of the world, because we know that most new, you know, published studies have sent a very good chance of not

being true or, you know, not being replicable even in science. We have a legacy, we have an inheritance of institutions that have proved themselves over generations. And so we shouldn't be eager to tear everything down to the studs and build again, right? But I think there's a reason to be conservative with respect to institutions and norms. And I mean, things that have worked for centuries, they tend to be a reason why they've worked for centuries.

And so there's a sort of a tinkering and an iterative process here that I think makes sense. But ultimately, yeah, we want a modern wisdom tradition to be the common property of a non-sectarian, non-perocule, non-provincial humanity at this point. Our twenties are seen as this golden decade. Our time to be carefree, full in love, make mistakes, and decide what we want from our life. But what can psychology really teach us about this decade? I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the Psychology of Your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of our 20s, from career anxiety, mental health, heartbreak, money, friendships, and much more,

to explore the science and the psychology behind our experiences, incredible guests, fascinating topics, important science, and a bit of my own personal experience. Audrey, I honestly have no idea what's going on with my life. Join me as we explore what our 20s are really all about. From the good, the bad, and the ugly, and listen along as we uncover how everything is psychology, including our 20s. The psychology of your 20s hosted by me, Gemma Speg. Now streaming on the iHotRadio app, Apple podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts.

I'm Dr. Romani and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior in words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was loved bomb by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor

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I'm Maite Gomes-Rajon. We're so excited to introduce you to our new podcast, Hungry For History. On every episode, we're exploring some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, beverages, from our Mexican culture. We'll share personal memories and family stories, decode culinary customs, and even provide a recipe or two for you to try at home. Corner flower. Both.

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of Latinx culinary history and traditions. I mean, these are these legends, right? Apparently, this guy Juan Mendes, he was making these tacos wrapped in these huge tortillas to keep it warm, and he was transporting them in a burro, hence the name, the burritos. Listen to Hungary for history with Ivalangoria and Maita Gomez Rejón, as part of the Micoltura Podcast Network available on the I Heartart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But that nicely comes back to the waking up part of your work, right? The idea that we can't create something or use something fully aligned with human values

because we as humans aren't fully aligned with human values in the collective sense and the idea that I've always felt that the reason why we should be scared of technology is because I guess we're scared of some humans. So if humans have the ability to create something, it will have all the imperfections that we have internally in the creator of it. And so it will inherit all the same manipulative tendencies, exploitative tendencies. It's hard to free something of that if you inherently build something with that.

And you see that with any sort of media, social media technology today that even if it was built with the best intentions of trying to create good in the world, either it amplifies negative or inherently has some questionable morals and ethics to as well. And so it comes back to the waking up part of your work, which is this self-reflective, contemplative idea of, you know, who am I becoming, who do I want to be, who am I? I mean, at the very deepest level, as you said. One word that I've always loved from my studies was this idea of the word purifying. Like there was all this, there was a needing, there was a need for purification

of some of these elements. And you talk about this in the beginning of your book, when you, I believe it was one of the first times you did MDMA and then you had this feeling of like complete love for your friend, free of envy. And when I was reading that, I was thinking about how much this word purification is often not talked about, but it's probably my favorite word that I've learned through my study of wisdom traditions, because to me, I was thinking, yeah, what's really required, as you said, is that love's already there. It's already there. It's not like you're finding or discovering something, but there's almost like a detoxing, a cleansing, a letting go of these other things that cloud our ability to be there. Is that part of what you do in what you feel

meditation achieves? Or no, that's a completely different thing as well. The thing you want to accomplish is already accomplished, right? And so there's there's dualistic and non-dual ways of conceiving this whole the whole path of practice. And that the dualistic way is very much a purification model, which is there's something that's like currently, currently dirty, right? And you can clean it. And you can, and it's going to take effort to clean it, right? And so this is, and I would argue the most spiritual traditions are framed in that way. And there's definitely a place for that, but the mature approach to meditation practice is,

and then the one, frankly, that is just free of the stress of seeking is to recognize that consciousness, as it is, ordinary consciousness, regardless of what its current contents are, regardless of what you're currently experiencing, you could be feeling a classically negative emotion. I mean, you could have just gotten angry, right?

And then you remember, oh, wait a minute, I'm supposed to be meditating. Okay, what's true now, right? And the physiology of anger hasn't even had time to dissipate yet, right? So that'll happen over tens of now, right? And the physiology of anger hasn't even had time to dissipate yet, right? So that'll happen over, you know, tens of seconds, right? But still in this, if you know how to recognize, you know, what I call over and waking up consciousness without a center, in that first moment of just recognizing that you are the condition in which anger and

everything else is appearing, there's already no center to that condition. There's already no ego in the middle of it. And it doesn't actually get emptier of self than that ever. And even if you have a very different experience, I mean, you take MDMA and you feel unconditional love, or you go on a long meditation retreat and you get really concentrated and you're having you're just regularly having experiences of bliss say So you can be very, you know drug-like all of the those changes in the contents of consciousness are transitory I mean, you take a drug and it's gonna wear off you get very concentrated and you feel bliss

But when you're you know watching Netflix two weeks later, you're not concentrated in that way and you're doing something else with your attention and presumably you're not gonna be blissed out in the same way. So all of those changes in the contents are temporary. What's not temporary is the availability of this recognition that there's just this open condition which everything is spontaneously appearing,

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

But as a matter of your own experience, there's this ever present mystery that anything is anyway at all. I mean, you don't know what you're going to think next until the thought itself arises. Right? It's just because you'd have to think it before you thought it in order to know what it is. Right? So on some level, you are a witness to everything that's appearing.

And in the beginning, it feels like the witness has the structure of a self, of a subject. But as you look into that more and more, that structure goes away, and there's just this condition in which everything is apparent. And that doesn't feel like I, it doesn't feel like me. And whatever feels like I or me is yet more appearance, it can be a pattern of energy on your face

or a contraction in the body. So as you keep dropping back and witnessing that, it has, you know, the purification model makes less and less sense because what is there to purify, right? There's not like even, even, I mean, even anger is no longer anger, right? In the moment of recognition, it's just this, it's just a feeling of, of heat on your face, right? It's just a feeling of tension in your chest. And there's no

one to whom those feelings refer, right? And, and so the moment you recognize that, you have, by definition, broken the connection to whatever thoughts we're telling you why you were angry and why you should be angry and why you have every right to be angry and what you're going to say to that person next time you see them, you've broken that spell of thinking. And so the emotion is dissipating. And so it's anger is no longer anger, but in purification mode, it is still possible to do that dualistically. I mean, in the beginning, when you're practicing, what I tend to teach in over-awaking up is a technique called mindfulness, which most people engage dualistically in the beginning, where there's strategically being aware of sites and sounds and sensations and the breath and thoughts and emotions.

And so even dualistically, you can learn the difference between being lost and thought and identified with an emotional eye-ganger and just witnessing it from a point that seems to be outside of that thought and that emotion. And even if it feels like a subject that's paying attention strategically to the physiology of anger or the arising and cessation of thought, that's fine. I mean, that's a starting point. That's a necessary one for virtually everyone. And that does accomplish this de-identification from the whole process that's giving you

this negative emotion. So there is a freedom even in the dualistic awareness of the flow of thought and emotion. But ultimately, and that very much has this character of purifying the mind. It's like, this is a anger is a classically negative thing to be stuck in and identified with and acting out of and it's divisive. It's you're going to say the thing you regret and that for which you have to apologize for and you're just, you know, you're, and the normal person who doesn't know how to be mindful and doesn't know, doesn't know how to be mindful

and doesn't know, doesn't know the difference between being lost and thought and not, is really the mere hostage of that process. They're gonna stay, as angry as they're gonna stay for as long as they're gonna stay that way and they're gonna do all of the things that are life-terranging and reputation-harming. They might do on the basis of that emotion for as long as they're going to do those things, and then they're going to have all the reaction to what they did and said, and that's the complication of life born of that one moment where you got angry.

Even dualistic mindfulness gives you a degree of freedom that most people don't have, and it is a kind of superpower to be able to say, oh, well, I just got angry. How long do I want to stay angry for? For me, an emotion like anger or fear is useful in so far as it is a salience cue. It's telling you that something just happened that's worth paying attention to, right? Somebody just walked into the room who, you know, doesn't have your, your well-being at heart, right? And they've got some intention that is in conflict with something that you were trying to accomplish, say. Or at minimum, it's telling you something about yourself and about your own priorities and about what you were trying to do in the world, and for better or worse. So it's worth paying attention to, but it's

almost never the state of mind you want to be into then solve the problem you just noticed. So I'm not saying that the goal is to be completely without any capacity for anger, fear, or any of these emotions, but I do think psychological health and just the health of one's relationships and just the whole project of living wisely in the world is more and more the result of being able to get off, to unhook from that negative emotion, more and more quickly.

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

time. And I don't think I'll ever get to zero, just as you could never run a mile in zero seconds. I will never get to a point where I'm able to deal with it in zero seconds. It's just not going to be possible, because it needs to live. I think there are more impersonal and ethically necessary

modes for these emotions that I don't think we want to get rid of them. I think outrage, moral outrage has its place, and it is the basis from which we would react to grave injustice in the world. But it doesn't have to be, it's not a personal anger, right? But you see something, some unnecessary harm being created deliberately by deeply unwise people in the world and you just think, all right, this is an emergency, this is worth responding to, right? And that can feel that the energy of anger can be behind that. And you know, so I would tend to call that outrage rather than anger, but I think moral outrage

is useful. But it's just the question is, when does it tip over into personal psychological suffering that actually diminishes your capacity to do something useful? And that's where that's the line that I think we want capacity to do something useful. And that's where that's the line that I think we want to be more aware of. Yeah, let's use that as an example and take it through that process because I think that's exactly it. Like I was going to bring that up earlier, the idea that just as the outrage or the emotional experience can stop us from being practical, so to not to go down this road again, but so too can the skeptical, like, you know, you can be overly skeptical and overly analytical and never practically

apply anything because you can constantly find flaws in pretty much most ideas in the world if you keep looking for them. So, let's take the outrage idea, like, how do you, what does someone do? They feel that outrage, the moral outrage, with a feel pain for the suffering of another. Where do you go from there through your process? Like, what's step two, three, four? Well, I think it's important to be, again, cautious and skeptical of one's own emotional hijacking. Right. So it's like, you want to know that this isn't a personal petty, egocentric reaction.

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

But it probably will start at that, right? Well, I think you can have something of that character in that it can have the character of contraction. I mean, outrage feels like anger. It's like, you know, you, you, you, it is the same thing that would get you to raise your voice if you were angry, right? It's like, it's like, you're going to raise your voice.

If you're going to raise your voice in defense of humanity, right? Well, you're still raising your voice, right? And so it's just that there's energy behind it. And I think that energy at times is necessary. Or to take it another somewhat adjacent situation, but analogous, it's like, you know, if you're in a situation in which you have to defend yourself from actual physical violence or defend someone close to you. You know, someone's attacked you and your child. So what should you do?

They're just gonna lie down and offer yourself up as a human sacrifice? No, I think pacifism is not actually morally the wisest position ethically. So I think the energy that would allow you to violently defend yourself against an aggressor should be available, right? But the quite is, but it's, you know, it's not necessarily anger, but it could look a lot like anger and feel a lot like anger.

It's certainly not necessarily hatred. And here I would ask you to consider how you would feel, defending yourself against a person, you think of some malicious psychopath who's broken into your house and is now wanting to harm you and your family because that's what he likes to do. That's like the quintessential circumstance where one you'd feel, you'd feel fear, you'd feel a lot of things, but you'd probably also feel hatred for this person, right? Like, what, there's a few circumstances where hatred feels more apropos than that, but I do view hatred as always being somehow extra, even in extremists like that. Imagine just how you'd feel very superficially similar situation. You're still you have an attacker in your house and you have to defend

yourself violently, but that attacker now is not a person. It's a wild animal, you know, a grizzly bear has broken into your house or a mountain line. You still have an absolute emergency. You're still going to have to fight for your life. You're still looking for a weapon to defend yourself with. You're still contemplating killing a living being to defend yourself and your kids. But there's an emotional shading. As energized as you would be in the presence of a mountain lion or in the presence of a grizzly bear There's this layer of the layer of hatred doesn't quite fit

You know, if you'll have less choice. Yes. I've of course a mountain lion is gonna be a mountain lion You know, it's like a mountain lion can't be other than a mountain lion on Some level a malicious psychopath can't be other than a mountain lion. On some level a malicious psychopath can't be other than a malicious psychopath, right? So I think it's, I think we do have to view people on some level as equivalent to forces of nature, right? You know, we don't, we don't get angry at hurricanes, but, and we certainly don't hate hurricanes in the, in the same way that we could hate another human being. But if we could lock hurricanes in prison same way that we could hate another human being. But if we could lock hurricanes in prison, we would, right?

I mean, they're immensely destructive. We're still trying to figure out what to do about them. But it never gets, we never take this extra step of actually hating them. And I do think we could have, ethically speaking and psychologically speaking, we can have a similar relationship to even the worst human beings while doing all the things we need to do to defend ourselves against them. We can put people in prison.

We can, you know, we can, I'm not in favor of the death penalty for, for actually these reasons, but I don't think anyone creates themselves. I think I don't think anyone is truly at bottom responsible, responsible for being who they are. I mean, if you had the same genes and the same life experience of whoever, Jeffrey Dahmer, you'd be Jeffrey Dahmer, right?

So there's no mystery there. But so I think at bottom, when you're looking at these, these very stark differences in life outcomes, you're looking at differences in luck. There's biological luck, there's circumstantial luck, there's all kinds of luck, and there's what we do with the luck, but your capacity to do good things with even your bad luck

is yet more good luck. Something is giving you, there's some genetic and environmental reason why you were set up to pick yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody else in the similar situation wasn't, right? And so on some level, there's, we have an ethical imperative to acknowledge the massive role that luck plays in our lives. And I think we should want to cancel the most egregious differences in good and bad luck

between people. So when we look at a whole society that is suffering from immense bad luck because it didn't have the natural resources that some other society did or it had those resources, but even those resources created perverse incentives. So it has got some terrible political outcome based on all the level of corruption that's layered on top of the resources. I mean, there's just terrible disparities in luck there, right? And so I think we, as a global civilization, more and more, as we grow wealthier and wealthier and can take

advantage of good luck over here, we should want to engineer a tide that raises upon which most or all boats rise. More and more, it's not to say the capitalism is wrong, it's not to say that we're ever going to completely nullify differences in luck and I think some asymmetries may in fact be the optimal way to to encourage people's creativity and innovation, right? So it's like I'm not I'm agnostic as to be on some of the questions of how to organize a society and an economy there, but I do think more and more we need to recognize that so many of us, and certainly anyone has got the free time to listen to this conversation right now, stands a pretty good chance of being in the top 10% or even 1% of humanity with respect to luck, all the variables, whether it's with respect to health and wealth and education, and just having the free time and attention to listen to this and be interested in this,

and to be asking the kinds of questions we're trying to address in a conversation like this, we're immensely lucky, and with that comes a certain responsibility, but also opportunity to spread the luck around. Yeah, to create luck for others. Yeah, yeah, to create love for others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of Family Secrets. It's hard to believe we're entering our eighth season. And yet, we're constantly discovering new secrets. The depths of them, the variety of them continues to be astonishing. I can't wait to share ten incredible stories with you, stories of tenacity, resilience, and the profoundly necessary excavation of long-held family

secrets. When I realized this is not just happening to me, this is who and what I am. I needed her to help me. Something was gnawing at me that I couldn't put my finger on, that I just felt somehow that there was a piece missing. Why not restart? Look at all the things that were going wrong. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to season eight of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts This is what it sounds like inside the box car

I'm journalist and I'm Morton in my podcast city of the rails I plunge into the dark world of America's railroads searching for my daughter Ruby who ran off to hop train Ruby who ran off to hop train. I'm just like stuck on this train, not where I'm going to end up, and I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society, off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with the lifestyle and the freedom, this community. No one understands who we truly are. The rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history, and the thing we

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Or, cityoftherails.com. A good way to learn about a place is to talk to the people that live there. There's just this sexy vibe and Montreal, this pulse, this energy. What has been seen is a very snotty city, people call it BOSANGELIS. New Orleans is a town that never forgets its pay. A great way to get to know a place is to get invited to a dinner party. Hi, I'm Brendan Francis Newton and not lost as my new travel podcast where a friend and I go places, see the sights, and try to finagle our way into a dinner party.

Where kind of trying to get invited to a dinner party. It doesn't always work out. I would love that, but I have like a Cholala who is aggressive towards strangers. I love the dogs. We learn about the places we're visiting, yes, but we also learn about ourselves. I don't spend as much time thinking about how I'm going to die alone when I'm traveling, but I get to travel with someone I love.

Oh, see, I love you too. And also, we get to eat as much... I love you too. My life's a lot of therapy goes behind that. You're so white, I love it. Listen to not last on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I loved where we were going with that

and loved where we went, but going back to the outrage piece, the understanding of almost differentiating our hate from outrage, almost extracting some piece of the ego from it being petty and individualistic, but that it's for a greater cause. Then, yeah, how do you go forward with that? Like, what do you do with that thought,

that idea, that feeling? So you feel pain when someone else is in pain, you feel stress, you feel outrages, you said, there may be a petty personal anger to it that triggered us in the first place, but we were able to carve that out and understand that that wasn't the basis of our real outraged, that there was something bigger.

Yeah, well, then it really just depends on what the the problem is and what the situation is and whether you can influence it, right? I mean, if you can't do anything about it, well, then it's not useful to be just grinding your gears without rage. I mean, that your outrage needs some kind of outlet, you know, so if you have some kind of platform upon which to try to make sense on these important topics, we'll then do that. But yeah, it's never useful to just be privately

seething with a without rage that has no outlet. So you have to figure out, one, what pragmatically can you do to accomplish anything useful on the basis of this emotion? And if there's nothing to do, it's great to have the tools by what you can just let go of it. And that's where meditation comes in. I mean, that really is a kind of superpower. You can just decide, okay, there's nothing to do here with this negative emotion. So now I can just let go of it.

And that's true for public facing emotion and that's and that's true for public facing emotion like outrage, but it's true for a an inwardly facing one like just anxiety about something that is coming up in the future, right? So like you've got some medical condition Now you need to get an MRI to see if you've got something scary and you can't get the MRI until next Tuesday, right? So now you've got this time to wait. So the question is, in the intervening days, how captured are you going to be by this feeling of anxiety? Is there any utility in feeling anxious between now and Tuesday? And if there's not, wouldn't be great to actually just let go of it, right? And most people feel like that's pretty hard to do.

Most people don't have tools apart from just diverting themselves, distracting themselves with something else to take their mind off the thing, that they're really thinking about in the background, that they don't want to think about, but they're helplessly perseverating on it. But as far as acting in the world, so as to make the world a better place, I think, you know, based on outrage or some other emotion, you know, I'm impressed more and more by how much that's a story of changing incentives at the system level more than it is a story of getting individuals to improve themselves. I think individuals should want to improve themselves and I want to improve myself.

So far as I can share wisdom about how to do that, I do that more or less full time. But there's another level of analysis and another level of discussion that needs to be applied to the systems in which we're all functioning. And we need to recognize that in so many places we have systems of incentives that are aligned so as to make it actually hard to be a good person, right? Like you need to be some kind of moral hero to be truly ethical given how the system is tuned and conversely Totally normal people can be lured into behaving more and more like psychopaths

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

because the incentives are aligned to that way. To take an example that's recently top of mind. So we have a problem with the problem of climate change. Well intentioned people want to do something about it. We don't want to create the most people want to do something about it, we don't want to create the most profligate harms for ourselves unnecessarily. So it'd be great to have a system of incentives and economic opportunities and technologies that just made it easier and easier to be wise with respect to carbon, our carbon footprint. And there are a lot of great ideas in this space, and one of them is let's buy electric cars. Let's transition from a fossil fuel economy of transportation to an electric one.

Well, that sounds wonderful. I've had an electric car, and I just had to get a new car, and I was poised to buy another electric car. But then I hear on Joe Rogan's podcast from this guy who's just published a book, it's coming out, forgive me, I forgot in his name, I think it's a, I think a Sri Ram Krishnan, but I could have that wrong. But he's put his book coming out called Cobalt Red, but he had just said to our podcast with Rogan, which was just this litany of horrors that attend Rogan, which was just this litany of horrors that attend the extraction of cobalt from Congo, right? Like 72% of the world's cobalt is in Congo.

We use cobalt in all of our batteries. Basically, our supply chain for cobalt is on top of just slave labor and child labor and just kids getting buried alive. I mean, it's just, it was just as bad as you could imagine. And so here we have a system where we all, we just, we all want to buy the next electric car because it's the good thing that this was the virtuous thing to do. But now we find out that the batteries are soaked in blood, there's no good option, right? And now we have to pretend that we didn't hear that podcast and the people designing the batteries are pretending that I don't know where the cobalt comes from. And there's like, we need to figure out, I mean,

this, this, this itself, it should be a simple problem to solve. And it would just, it's probably itself, it should be a simple problem to solve. It's probably a few percentage points of profit margin that would make the extraction of cobalt an ethically defensible practice. And then it's probably there's probably some cobalt free technology that we could design in the future. But it's just to get these things right really matters. And if you don't get them right, you've got people who are deeply conflicted about what they're doing or just not completely unaware of what they're doing and creating these massive negative externalities that they might not even know about. Like I could I literally was, I was 24 hours from buying another EV, right? So it's not that my loan purchase or not,

or not of a single car, it's gonna matter that much in the schema things, but it's like I would have had I not heard this particular episode of Joe's podcast, I would have bought that EV thinking I was doing an unimpeachably virtuous thing, right? And now I have a much more conflicted decision to make around, you know, what's the right car to drive in light of my climate change concerns.

This is just to say that the individual can't solve the cobalt supply chain problem, right? So like we need, we need these solutions to come at the system level and at the institution level. That's where being a good person is beyond the scope of anyone's individual choices. We need to collectively solve a massive coordination problem together, a massive coordination problem together where in the act of gratifying our desires, we are creating less and less harm and doing more and more good, more or less effortlessly. And that really is, you can have people who are just not thinking about purifying anything, behaving in really impeccable ways, given good incentives. And that's more and more I'm thinking about that. Yeah, I love that you think about that. And I think it's an idea to perform, though, is that it's also that the people that are setting

up the institutions and the systems are all too individual. So it's like a vicious cycle. It's like the leaders at the top, the people have made all these decisions to go out and, you know, take all this cobalt and make sure that it was picked by child slaves or child labor or whatever it may be. I haven't listened to podcasts. I don't have the context. But someone made that decision and some system never thought to correct that because that was led by some people. So I think, I mean, I agree with you, but I think it's both. It's like, you know, I think even where systems have been made tight, you still see people trying to find a loophole. I mean, that's how the human mind is set up. And so you've got the loophole mindset of like,

okay, well, let me find a way to exploit this or manipulate this towards my benefit anyway. Right. And so you've got both. I think both are important. I think, like, if you were the decision maker, if you were building EVs, you would be able to make that system

in your company and you'd set it up, but that would come back to you. Yeah, yeah. But it could, like But if we taxed carbon instead of taxing income, say, I don't know how that works out in terms of the balance sheet, but something like that. We're using a tax to disincentivize something we want to disincentivize, pollution, and we're not penalizing something that's intrinsically good, just creating value and being paid for that value, which is what income in the best case is coming from.

So there's that and all of a sudden people would, all right, if it's costing me money to be polluting, well then I'm going to figure out how to not do that. And that's just going to be, my interests are going to be aligned there. So there's probably a hundred or a thousand cases like that. But what I was going was I've been thinking a lot about what has come to be called the effective altruism movement. It's just how to do good, more reliably, more systematically. Many of us have been disillusioned

with how philanthropy has been done traditionally. It's like, there's a distinction between, this actually comes back to some of what we've been talking about with the difference between being led by one's emotions and actually understanding what the outcomes are in the world that one is accomplishing. When you're trying to do good in the world, when you're, let's say, you're giving to a children's hospital, say, I mean, that just seems an intrinsically good thing to do.

But so much, we know that so much of our impulse to do good, our impulse toward altruism, our impulse toward effective compassion, is driven by the single compelling story, the single identifiable protagonist, the one little girl who's got cancer and we can help her. And that we sort of go to sleep when we're told statistics. So we don't, perversely, we care more about the one little girl than we care about the tens of thousands of little girls just like her.

Maybe even the tens of thousands of little girls, including her, right? It's like we, you, you, you can run psychological experiments where you, you show people one little girl and you ask them how, how much they're inclined to help and how much money they'd give, they give them maximum amount, you know, under those conditions. If you show them the same little girl and you layer on a story of just how many other girls there are like her, the people's compassionate impulse reliably diminishes, right?

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

And I personally would give a minimum of 10% of my pre-tax income to charity each year. Now, I was already giving money away to charity. And that felt good. But once I decided, all right, here's the formula. I have to give this minimum amount. This minimum amount is already allocated to these ends. And what's more, these ends have to be not just charities and causes that I feel really personally engaged by, or just things that I want to support like, you know, some,

you know, I want to give money to college or symphony or something like something that I, or I see somebody's go fund me page and it tugs at my heart strings, I want to give money to that. No, that's all separate. Here, here's 10% that's going to charities that I, in the kind of sober, rational analysis have decided are gonna do the most good, irrespective of how I feel about these things, because there are certain causes that I just don't find especially sexy, you know, that just, like I just can't,

I have to continually rethink my interest in them, you know, but they are objectively, if you wanna say if the life per unit, per dollar put into the system, this is the best use of your dollars. Right? So one has been, you know, malaria mitigation in sub-Saharan Africa, just just bed, a malaria bed nets, right? Like that's, I just can't get too excited about handing out bed nets, right?

But that's something that's worth supporting. So I just decided that, okay, givewell.org is done, run this analysis. They're a great source of information about effective charities. Here are their top 10 charities. Whether I find these sexier or not, I know I can outsource the cognitive labor to these people because I've spoken to them enough. I've analyzed what they've done. They're doing enough. This is their full-time job All right, you know until I hear otherwise I'm going to take their advice It doesn't matter how I feel about these charities where I'm gonna get my good feels elsewhere

but what's happened is once I decided that I'm gonna give this amount of money to charity each year and it's happening by default whether I'm thinking about it or not, whether I'm gratified by it or not. A very interesting thing flipped. One is when I confront all these other opportunities to give money away that are are tugging on my heartstrings, they almost show up as a kind of guilty pleasure. I literally have had the feeling of giving money to a children's hospital or giving money to somebody's go fund me page and it's it's almost leveraging the same greedy circuits in the brain as you'd get if you're like opening a catalog and You want everything on you know both pages. It's like I like it's it is a it's it's a very visceral experience of selfishness and selflessness

totally merging. And it's like, it's like, why is selfishness is the same thing as selflessness? But it has the energy of like, I really want to do this. And because I sort of know, I've rationally allocated to this certain amount of doing this good automatically, sort of even out of sight and out of mind. I'm not spending a lot of time thinking about where that money is going. It sort of changed my relationship to all these other occasions where I'm having to decide on the basis of my intuition's moment to moment, whether I want to give and how much to give. And it's really just kind of flipped everything upside down

in a way that's interesting. And again, it's all based on having made a sort of system level default change that is a sort of hidden structure in which I'm now moving. Right? Because again, I'm not, until you make a decision like that, you're constantly rethinking what you want to do.

It's almost like going on a diet. Like you decide, like, I don't need dairy anymore, right? So once you don't need dairy anymore, I eat a lot of dairy, but if one, it didn't need dairy anymore. You just, it's just a bright line, and then you're not constantly rethinking whether you're gonna have ice cream and if so, how much. And so it's massively clarifying.

That's a great example. That really hit true. Yeah, the clarity of constraints, right? Having borders and boundaries and constraints, allowing you to not waste as much time and energy on figuring that out moment by moment. Yeah. I've got two more questions for you, so I want to make sure I ask you today.

How does someone like you as a mediter of for so many years, as someone who's so thoughtful about these topics, as someone who wants to see change in the systems and institutions as well? How do you interact with the news? Because I find that to be such a source of anxiety and stress for so many people who are probably listening to us right now. And so I'd love to hear how you've built a healthier, hopefully systematic logical relationship with the news.

Well, it changed recently for me because I deleted my Twitter account, which was where I was getting a lot of my news. I was not getting the news from Twitter per se, but I was just seeing, I was following lots of smart people and seeing what articles they were recommending and so I was just going through that as it was kind of like my news feed. So I still, I read The New York Times, I read The Atlantic, there's a many things I read,

and I see the news in various channels, but I was using Twitter as the first filter on that. And that for a variety of reasons became really toxic for me. And toxic in a way that I was convinced was misleading. I mean, that was the thing that got me to finally just when ripped the bandaid off because it wasn't just that I was seeing the worst of people and that was having a certain effect.

I was convinced I was seeing people at their worst who are actually not as bad as they were seeming to me on Twitter. Like what, what, what Twitter was calling out of them was just a misleading picture of who they actually are because in some cases I, in some cases, I knew the people in real life. And then I'm seeing them behave in abominable ways on Twitter. And I just think, this is just a fun house mirror that isn't psychologically healthy to keep staring into day after day after day.

And also just so many of the things that I was, it was amplifying stories that I was, you know, as a podcaster, I was tempted to react to, and I felt like I was getting a misleading signal as to just how salient or representative those stories are of the way the world is, right? So it was just the phenomenon of being too online, ultimately, right?

Yeah, so in so far as Twitter was news or a simulacrum of news, that has really changed for me. I just, I just, I'm not seeing it. And now I just, yeah, I mean, I have a few sources of news that I go to as, you know, more or less reflexively. But again, it's it's more and more, I'm asking the question, what do I want my moment to moment life to be like? You know, and who do I want to be at the end of the day when I'm hanging out with my wife and kids, right? And what are the consequences of having spent my attentional budget over the previous hours in one way versus another? And Twitter, for me, honestly, was a big change because it was like getting out of an unhealthy relationship. For all my talk about meditation and being able to unhook from anger in other states, I mean, I could unhook and I could let go of negative emotion and etc.

I mean, it's not that the tools don't work, but I was spending a lot of time looking into this very deranging space. And it's not deranging for everybody, but for me, because what's unique about my job and my approach to my job is that, you is that I criticize the right and left politically a lot with sort of equal ferocity. And so I'm not tribally aligned with anyone and I get a lot of pain from both sides. And it's not honest pain. It's not like honest criticism of views I actually hold. It's like

lots of line about views that I don't hold. It's just misrepresentations and people take clips out of context. People cut together clips of my podcast where I'm seeming to say the opposite of what I in fact said in context and they release those and people with big platforms, you to retweet them. So it was a pervasive experience for me, I've seen myself lied about and then wondering whether there's anything I should do about that. And so it was very sticky invitation to getting sucked in because like, okay, that's not what I said, that's not what I meant. Now I'm seeing the evidence of lots of people being misled by this misrepresentation, and it bothers me. And I'm pretty sure it should bother me

because this is not the outcome I want, right? And this is not why I have a podcast, and it's not why I went on that other person's podcast. And so there's some burden on me to try to clarify the misunderstanding, and I was continually getting sucked into the illusion that clarification was possible. Right? I would try.

Because I really wanted to use Twitter as a channel of communication was the only social media platform I ever used. I never used Facebook or I may have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but those are just marketing channels for my team. I'm never on those. So I was on Twitter. It really was me. And I was, you know, as much as I could step away from it because it seemed unhealthy

for a time, I kept seeing the evidence of confusion and misrepresentation. I thought, I was going to try again to clarify things, right? And that was such an unrewarding experience that it was just, it was creating a residue of despair and contempt. I just felt, I just felt polluted by, I just felt like I had met all the psychopaths in the world on a daily basis. Like, there can't be as many psychopaths in the world as I was seemed to be meeting online.

As much as I could step away from it and put it down, I kept picking it up again. And so I just thought, this is crazy. So I just ripped it off. And that's been an immense change. I mean, it's really, so sometimes you need to actually do the thing that is, you can't just keep putting yourself in this dysfunctional situation and then processing your reaction. It's like, you have to ask yourself, why are you doing this?

Why are you spending your time and attention this way in the first place? And so for me, it was Twitter. I mean, I understand other people, depending on what they're just be putting it. If they're sharing cat videos on Twitter, they're just getting nothing but love, right? And they have no idea what I'm talking about.

But trust me, it's possible to have a truly lousy experience on Twitter. How's that New Year's resolution coming along? You know, the one you made about paying off your pesky credit card debt and finally starting to save your retirement? Well, you're not alone if you haven't made progress yet, roughly four and five New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or two. But that doesn't have to be the case for you and your goals. Our podcast, How to Money, can help. That's right. We're two best buds who've been at it for more than five years now, and

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Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress listen to how to money money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The therapy for Black Girls podcast is the destination for all things mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Here, we have the conversations that help black women dig a little deeper into the most impactful relationships in our lives, those with our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, and most importantly, ourselves. We chat about things like what to do with a friendship ends, how to know when it's time to break up with your therapist, and how to end the cycle of perfectionism.

I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Take good care. Hey, it's Debbie Brown, and my podcast deeply well is a soft place to land on your wellness journey. I hold conscious conversations with leaders and radical healers and wellness and mental health around topics that are meant to expand and support you on your journey. From guided meditations to deep conversations with some of the world's most gifted experts in self-care, trauma, psychology, spirituality, astrology, and even intimacy.

Here is where you'll pick up the tools to live as your highest self. Make better choices. Heal and have more joy. My work is rooted in advanced meditation, metaphysics, spiritual psychology, energy healing, and trauma-informed practices. I believe that the more we heal and grow within ourselves, the more we are able to bring our creativity to life and live our purpose, which leads to community impact and higher consciousness for all beings. Deeply well with Debbie Brown is your soft place to land,

to work on yourself without judgment, to heal, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well is available now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Big love, namaste. What if anything would bring you back?

Because I love what you're saying there, that if you're doing the same thing, it's giving you the same result, Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. go back to it or how would you see yourself if you were to go back to it in a healthier way. I'm thinking of all the people who cut things out their lives because they need to feel that distance from it because it's taken a hold of them, but then they know that in reality they might have to go back at one point. Yeah, well, I'm not planning to go back. I don't say I don't really see that.

I don't think I'm a for marketing, I don't need it. You don't miss it. Yeah, you're not. Well, I miss the good parts of it. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. I was following a lot of smart, funny people and entertaining. But the truth is, even the good parts were ultimately diverting in a way that in retrospect feels like a bit of a waste of time. It's just like I'm getting, I didn't have to spend as much time even with the good parts of it. You know, it was kind of like, you know, just like too many carbs in that part

of my information diet, you know, that's what Twitter was, it was all carbs. I mean, if I went back, I would just, yeah, I would probably use it much more like I use or don't even use my other social media channels I would just use it as I would have someone post for me or I would post without ever looking about it was coming back I mean there are people there are people who get a lot of negative stuff coming back at them And they just never see it because they just never look and that's I

Could have been one of those people and I was that sort of person for you know some periods of time, but I just kept getting Because that sort of person for, you know, some periods of time, but I just kept getting lured by the techn...by the promise of clarifying confusion, you know, because here the person just says something to me and I can say something back and a why not, you know. And strangely, none of the other social media platforms have ever hooked me in that way. I've never been tempted to get on Facebook or Instagram and use me in that way. I've never been tempted to get on Facebook or Instagram and use it in that way. And I'm not looking for a substitute for Twitter. I mean, so that is interesting. There's many people are recommending substitutes where they're building their new platform. They got off Twitter for whatever reason. But it's not, I'm just not tempted to fill

that the Twitter-shaped hole in my life with anything else. So that's good. I love that. All right. And then one last question before we dive into the final five is we spoke about this right at the beginning and you mentioned the, you know, the problem, the impermanence problem. Like how do you see yourself thinking about or meditating on or preparing for death or the impermanence of life. Like how does that come into your consciousness?

Well, there are really two sides to it. I mean, there's your own death. And then there's the deaths of everyone you care about. And that's, those are really different problems in a way. And it's, yeah, so when I think of the experience of having those close to me die, that's, I mean, I know, it's already happened. I've gone through that with, in the cases of certain people. And, you know, if I'm lucky enough to live a long time, well, then it's going gonna happen. I'm sure many times again. And I mean, it's a fundamentally mysterious thing. I mean, the fact that we drop out the bottom of this place

is just, it's truly imponderable. And yet I know that it's possible to be happy in the absence of everyone. There's some paradoxes here. Like you and I are having this conversation now, basically everyone we love is not here. You and I just met, so we're just getting to know each other. My mom's not here, my wife's not here,

my kids are not here, you've got your list of people you love who are not here, it's okay to not be my kids are not here, you've got your list of people you love who are not here. It's okay to not be with the people we love. So we know that, right? And to take the other side, like what it's like to personally die, say, we go to sleep each night and we, it's not only is it okay to completely relinquish our hold on this world. I mean, we yearn for it.

Like if you've got insomnia, if you can't fall asleep, that becomes a problem. You're desperate to lose your scene and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching and thinking. You just want to completely get zeroed out every night. And that's, you know, if, if, if, if nothing happens after death, I mean, we can leave aside the possibility that they're, you know, they're the death is in some sense an illusion. But if death, if you really just get a dial tone after you die, right,

if really there's just nothing, it's somewhat analogous to sleep. I mean, it's like your, the lights go out. Every night we do that and we do it happily and it's not as, there's no, I guess some people have sleep issues where they're afraid to fall asleep. But that's certainly not the common case, right? And so, to the contrary, we yearn for it. So, it is somewhat paradoxical that these, like the worst thing about life, the thing that people are terrified to experience themselves and they're terrified to experience

in the case of losing the people they love, we, in the most routine way, we have really analogous experiences that are fine, right? So like, you're fine alone in a room and you're fine to go to sleep. And there's a bit of death in both of these things because everyone you love really is absent. And when you fall asleep, you really forget everything about your life in this world, until you start dreaming and then you're completely confused about your life and some other circumstance, unless it's a lucid dream,

which is to say that it's actually, it's possible to be okay, ultimately even with the reality of death from both from either side. I'm certainly expecting to grieve with the next time someone close to me dies, You know, I'm not expecting that. But yeah, but that is a, I understand that that as an expression of love, first of all, ask yourself if you'd even want to be without the experience of grief. I mean, ask yourself, for instance, what you would want to do in the event that we had designed a perfect cure for grief, right? Like I'll say a pill, like, like the perfect, it's not an antidepressant, but it's an anti-sadness pill, you know, and that's not conceptually incoherent.

I mean, we might one day have that pill, you know, it might be a pill that you would compassionately want to lay there. People who are suffering some just intractable, unendurable bereavement that just never lifts and they can't get their life back together and you'd want to give that pill to that person. But the question is, how soon would you want to take that pill?

And would you want to take that pill 15 minutes after your closest connection in this life died? It's like the body is still warm and would you be popping this pill. I don't think so. I think I mean, there's something like how carefree do you want to feel in the immediate aftermath of a person you love dying? You know, you want it, you want the gravity of that to land, you know, you want to feel, you want to feel that loss because that's in some sense the only appropriate register of

What they meant to you, you know, and just had and the life you live together, right? You know, you like it so if you if you pop the grief bill and then you're just thinking, okay, what's on Netflix? Right that would be a kind of a you're just thinking, okay, what's on Netflix? That would be a kind of a desecration of all that you would share it with this person. So I don't know if it's a very interesting question where you would, because I think ultimately you would want to be able to give that pill to someone whose life

had become completely derailed by grief, but just where is the line? I mean, that's an interesting question. Yeah, that's a great answer. No. Yeah. All right, so we end every episode with a final five, which have to be answered in one sentence, maximum each one. OK, so this is a challenge for me.

So this is a challenge for you. For sure. I'm excited to hear some of your answers. The fifth question, which we've asked to every guest on the show, is perfectly designed for you after today's conversation. And I just want to say on camera, we just caught because the cameras were getting reset because we've been taping for so long, but I was just saying that the conversation

I've had with Sam today has been so different from the one I thought I'd have with him after reading his book, and that to me is a sign of a good conversation because it was true curiosity, mystery, and creation in the moment, and presence in the moment from both of us. Yeah, nice. I love that. Question number one, what is the best meditation advice you've ever heard received or given? You are not this next thought.

Second question is, what is the worst meditation advice you've ever heard received or given? Well, I practiced for a long time in a very goal-oriented tradition where it was just, you know, spent months and months on retreats with Burmese meditation masters who had a very dualistic goal-oriented seeking kind of model. It's not so you couldn't benefit from that, but I will get you a sentence out of this. But I got it set up to the sentence. The primary analogy being used was you're

going to rub in two sticks to get fire and the moment you stop, they cool off. Right. So it's just so whatever the sentence is, it's just like meditation is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. You have to continuously do it. And the moment you break, you're back to zero. You've made no problems. Yeah. Wow. That's, yeah, that's a painful one. That's it. It's really painful. Yeah. Okay. Question number three, what's the biggest lesson you learned in the last 12 months? Honestly, it's humbling to admit it, but it really was getting off Twitter. Just with the recognition that the whole superset of preoccupation here was not worth it

and not healthy. Even the good stuff, I mean, just every side of this diabolical jewel was sort of ugly when I really looked at it. And yeah, so that was it. Great question number four. What's something you think people value highly, but you don't value anymore? Identity. In what sense?

I mean, it really in every sense. I mean, just just tribal identity, you know, your religious identity, your ethnic identity, your, I don't even think you need to identify with the face you see in the mirror each day. So I said, how much less should you have to identify with people who just superficially resemble you in any way? So, but even just the identity of feeling like, like in my career or in any mode in which I'm showing up in the world, it's less in like who I feel I am while doing that, is less and less substantial.

It's like I don't, I don't really, it's not really graspable, you know? And so I don't, like I, you know, I spend a lot of time teaching meditation in on waking up, but because of the technology, because it's an app, I don't actually feel like a meditation teacher. I'm not showing up in the world as a meditation teacher.

I don't have, there's no place you can go sit with me in a hall, so I don't have students in the ordinary meditation teacher way. But the reality is that through waking up, it seems strange to say it, but I could be teaching non-dual mindfulness to more people than anyone on Earth at this moment. It's really quite crazy how it has scaled. But yet, I never think of myself in that role. So, like the role-based identity,

you know, I'm a writer, I've got a bunch of books, but I don't really think of myself as a writer as much as I used to. I mean, I just don't feel like, there's no, anything that I would, any way in which I would label what I'm doing, the label really does feel like it's barely adhesive to the project.

It's just, they are just for the utility of just summarizing, what do you put on this form? What's your occupation? It just doesn't get at what I'm actually doing, and it doesn't get at how I see myself. Identity is something that I mean, people think, I mean, yes, I'm sure there's some stage in life where you want a healthy identity. Like I've got two daughters.

I want them to have healthy identities. I want them to have healthy egos. But ultimately, it's not about being someone in any kind of sense that feels it. It's like identity feels like a fist, you know, and I really want an open hand in life. And so it's not that it's not that I never make a fist, but it's like you want to you want to relax that as soon as you notice it. It's really interesting from a personal practice point of view and from a

human scale practice point of view because what you just said is the the perfection of the idea almost the way I see it is like with your daughters, I don't know how old they are, but you know, I'm guessing that you're not nine and fourteen. Yeah, right. And so it's like you want them to have a healthy sense of identity because at that stage of life, that's such an important thing. And it's almost like the evolution of the idea is like, well, there's a stage of life where that isn't, you know, the, the's a stage of life where that isn't, you know, the directive thing.

And I think that's what's so hard because you find everyone who's listening, watching, experiencing life, it's such different levels. And it's almost like someone being able, it's the same as what I was saying earlier with the identity from a systematic point of view. It's like, some people, that's where they are,

that's just where they are, where their identity is, what gives their life meaning. And then you see as someone's, so yeah, it's just, it's fascinating to me how a different stage of life identity can mean different things. And it's really, the emotion of pride really crystallizes it for me. It's like, for my daughter is, it's totally appropriate for them to feel pride, I want them to feel pride in the right moments. And I feel proud. It's not quite the right framing, but something like pride for them.

I want to play that healthy pride game with them, but I don't feel pride in my life at all. Just pride just does not map. I just have the right shape to map on to my sense of what it is to be a person. Really, it's like I'm not responsible for any of my gifts such as they are. It's like I just, I'm, I'm, again, it comes back to luck in so many ways and what you do with that luck. But again, even the doing with the luck is more, more good luck, you know. So I just feel immensely grateful for everything that has gone well in my life.

And I just, I mean, it's just the gratitude is is overwhelmingly my primary positive emotion. Now it's just so much to be grateful for and pride just as pride just does not fit. It's a puzzle piece that you maybe once fit and maybe and you know, granted if you're a if you're a kid, yes. Yeah. It's a, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a totally appropriate game at a certain stage of life. But later on, it's a game that you just really, you have to outgrow. Yeah. I can relate to that completely and fully, fully loved that, loved hearing that. Fifth and final question.

If you could create one law, this is the one that I said we've asked to every guest, but I feel like it's perfectly designed for you. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? The price we pay for dishonesty at every level of society is so enormous and they're so little price paid for lying. I mean, when a politician is found to be lying, or a person who has immense responsibility, is found to be lying, but for specific cases of fraud that are actionable. Like lying is just under the purview of free speech, really.

It's not illegal to lie. I think, it's not so much a law, I think if we had lie detection technology that was, that we could rely on, which is, they're various interesting reasons why we, we don't have that and may never have that, but if we had that, if a lie detection technology was like, you know, DNA analysis in a court of law,

like you just put someone on the witness stand and you could tell whether they were lying, right? I think that would be the overnight that would be the biggest ethical change that we could ever imagine in society. So I think, so anything that brought the appropriate level of a program to lying, right? So especially lying when it matters,

that would be some version of that law, the, the, you can't lie when it matters, law, whatever that is, you know, so, but I do, it would be a technological solution. If we could, more and more, if people knew that they were in a situation where they actually can't get away with line, right? Because the technology is such or the information space is such that it's, but the added piece is that the norm violation needs to be just more urgent, you know, because most people are walking around with a sense, everybody lies, all politicians lies, it's like there's normal lie, what do you expect? You know, it's like, and so it's not, but the amount of harm,

and the amount of good that would be accomplished if you just knew people were being honest, and you're not going to be unpleasantly surprised by, so there's a lot of growth, cultural growth in that direction. But yeah. I hope you get involved in changing some systems. I hope you get involved in changing some systems. From the stuff you've said today, I'd like it would be great if you were influencing the influences of... Well, that's something that we try with our humble podcasts. That's what we do. Everyone has been listening and watching the podcast is called Making Sense.

The app is called Waking Up. The book is also called by the same title. We'll put the links in the captions and the notes that you have access to. All of Sam's work, go and make sure you grab a copy of the book, meditate with him on the waking up app, and of course, subscribe to the podcast, making sense. Sam, I hope this is the first of many conversations

we get to have. Yeah, really a pleasure. Yeah, it's really, really been a phenomenal conversation. I hope we have many offline too. Nice. And anyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you grab your favorite segments, points insights that really stood out to you, share them with a friend, start a conversation based on it.

Tag me and Sam, and let me know what really stood out to you, what resonated with you. Maybe some things that are making you question or think differently. Like I'd love to see what came out of it for you. This has been a very different type of conversation on on purpose and I know you're gonna appreciate it. But a big thank you to Sam again for his generous time. Big thank you to every single one of you who've been listening and watching.

We'll see you again for another episode of on purpose. Thank you guys. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabel Mateh on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past. The world of chocolate has been turned upside down. A very unusual situation. You saw this tax-appassion in our office. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree and recently, variety of cacao, thought to have been lost centuries ago, were rediscovered in the Amazon.

There is no chocolate on Earth like this. Now some chocolate makers are racing deep into the jungle to find the next game-changing chocolate, and I'm coming along. Okay, that was a very large crack it up. Listen to the obsessions of wild chocolate on the the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When my daughter ran off to hop trains, I was terrified I'd never see her again, so I followed her into the train yard.

This is what it sounds like inside the box-top. And into the city of the rails. There I found a surprising world, so brutal and beautiful, that it changed me. But the rails do that to everyone. There is another world out there. And if you want to play with the devil, you're going to find them there in the rail yard.

I'm Denon Morton. Come with me to find out what waits for us and the city of the rails. Listen to city of the rails on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Or cityoftherails.com. Hi, I'm Brendan Francis Nunehm. I'm a journalist, a wanderer,

and a bit of a bon vivant, but mostly a human just trying to figure out what it's all about. And not lost is my new podcast about all those things. It's a travel show where each week I go with a friend to a new place and to really understand it, try to get invited to a local's house for dinner where kind of trying to get invited to a dinner party,

it doesn't always work out. Ooh, I have to get back to you. Listen to not lost on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts.