The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Navigating the Metacrisis: Finding Calm in the Storm through Awareness and Meditation with Sam Harris

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Between global crises and personal problems, modern life is overflowing with things to worry about, including many issues that feel too big to even address. Yet, our ability to influence these problems and how much we worry about them are not equal to each other – and in fact, getting lost in thoughts of anxiety can reduce our ability to act. Given the direct line between individual inner states and civilizational dysfunction, what global change might be possible if we train ourselves to observe thought, rather than be unconsciously consumed and paralyzed by it? In this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris to explore how cultivating inner awareness could help us – both as individuals and a society – navigate civilizational crises. Sam argues that virtually all human suffering flows from one source: the mind's incessant, largely unnoticed identification with thought. Sam makes the case that, at scale, these distracted minds cumulate into people who are helplessly identified with their own inner worlds, their tribes, and their identity rather than able to hold a broader view. He offers a deep dive on the foundations of meditation, mindfulness, and awareness techniques as a way to help navigate our thoughts and remain grounded in the present. Ultimately, he suggests that in order to steer toward better futures, we might need to invest in cultivating both saner individuals and wiser systems in parallel. Whether the threat is a cancer diagnosis or civilizational overshoot, the question is the same: how much suffering do you have to carry between now and the future? What if the inner work of moving through grief toward equanimity is actually a precondition for effective action? And if the most consequential decisions in human history are being made by people who have never once examined the nature of their own minds, how will their own mental states reflect onto the reality of our shared outcomes? (Conversation recorded on February 18th, 2026)   About Sam Harris: Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics – neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality – but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the "iTunes Best" and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category. Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

Most people would think of meditation at this point as a remedy to dampen down this feeling of fear and anxiety. That's not actual mindfulness. You're still at war with your experience. So mindfulness requires that you become willing to simply feel the raw feeling of anxiety in this case. And to simply notice the thought arise and pass away. And perhaps to have a few experiences where that cramp is relieved to one or another degree, which indicates to you that it's actually possible to be much. happier and more at ease in your own skin than you tend to be.

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification.

Today I'm joined by neuroscientists, and philosopher Sam Harris for an introduction into the powerful tools of mindfulness and meditation and how these practices could foster more grounded, stable, and open-minded humans. As we approach the great simplification, Sam is the author of five New York Times bestsellers as well as the host of a top 10 podcast Making Sense,

where he explores some of the most important questions about the human mind, society, and current events. Sam has practiced meditation for more than 30 years, including studying under Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western teachers. This all led him to create the popular app, Waking Up, which I am a subscriber to, which teaches the theory of mindfulness and includes the best of ancient wisdom while also being pressure tested by modern science. Waking Up strives to alleviate human suffering, but generally focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world might change our sense of the ways we should live. As someone who is new to these ideas of

meditation, awareness, and non-duality, I asked all the questions I was curious about in this episode. We cover some of the basics of what it actually feels like to be in these states and how engaging in these practices might help us navigate difficult moments of all shapes and sizes throughout our lives. Most importantly, Sam and I dig into the possibilities of how more people attempting even the basics of awareness and mindfulness might have ripple effects in their broader communities and even in our larger human system. Before we begin, if you're enjoying the Great Simplification podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substact newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament. You can find the link to subscribe in the show

description. With that, please welcome Sam Harris. Sam Harris, welcome to the program. Thank you. Great to meet you, Nate. Great to meet you too. I have your books on various bookshelves throughout the house over the years. You have spent literally decades publicly exploring consciousness and awareness, both through your neuroscience background and personal contemplative practice, ultimately creating the waking up app to make these insights more widely accessible. This topic is very interesting to me, increasingly central to how I'm viewing the future, Because I believe having grounded humans who are able to see the big picture both will be key for navigating a future with lower material throughput and high levels of distrust and polarization and all the things.

So before getting into the details of mindfulness and awareness and such, I want to understand why an average individual would be interested in practicing these things at all. And maybe we start, if you could tell us why you got involved with these topics and maybe how your life has changed since starting to practice these ways of living your life. Well, I think there are really two roots into this. I mean, one is just suffering, you know, just noticing your own capacity for suffering and often suffering quite needlessly, right? I mean, suffering in context where you have ever reason to be happy or you think you should be happy. or happiness is clearly available to others, for whatever reason, you are, you're cursed to have the baseline level of unhappiness that you might have. And to just wonder about the mechanics of all that,

and just to feel the cramp of all that moment to moment, and perhaps to have a few experiences where that cramp is relieved to one or another degree, which indicates to you that it's actually possible to be much happier. and more at ease in your own skin than you tend to be. So that's the first door. I think that's the most common one. It's really on that basis that certainly Buddhism is framed in those terms. The Buddha framed everything he taught in terms of suffering and the end of suffering.

But I also think that there's another door in which is just intellectual curiosity, right? Just wanting to understand your mind from the first person side, from the side of your own experience directly and seeing that introspection in some form is at minimum a necessary component of that effort to understand the mind and purely understanding it in third-person terms, in neuroscientific or psychological terms, as though it could be understood from the outside entirely.

That has certainly in recent decades has been, begun to break down as an intellectual, empirical, scientific enterprise. It's more and more people understand that all we're ever doing in psychological science or cognoscience or neuroscience or neuroscience is, in the best case, correlating states of the brain and intersubjective observations with first-person accounts of what it's like to be us. You can never really get off the gold standard of first-person report, right? So it matters from the first-person side, what it's like to be depressed or what it's like to be ecstatic. And the only clue to have it, those states exist, really, are the first-person accounts of conscious beings who complain about the one or celebrate the other.

So, yeah, so, you know, really from both sides, I became interested in the nature of the human mind and the nature of consciousness. and the further reaches of human well-being, and we might call those spiritual or contemplative. And so, yeah, I started to explore those things, both from the scientific side, but also from the side of meditation and psychedelics. And I mean, this is now going back many years into my late teens and early 20s when this started.

And do you remember 10, 20, 30 years ago and how you live your life today versus then and your routines and mental state? Yeah, yeah, no, I have a pretty clear sense of who I was and who I am now and how I got there. Yeah, I've been it's definitely an evolution. But on some of the most important points, there's just becoming more familiar with the thing

that was realized some decades ago about the nature of awareness. So is it not so much striving towards something and building, but it's taking away of the veil and things that were there that were blocking that space? Yeah. I mean, if we're going to talk about the most fundamental insight that is available through mindfulness or meditation practice, generally, it is, it's not something you're creating or cultivating or producing. You're really, you're recognizing something that's intrinsic to the nature of consciousness that is being overlooked actively in each moment

being distracted by thought. So whatever practice of meditation you're doing, distraction is its antithesis. And the question is, what are you aware of when you're not distracted? You know, what are you actually paying attention to? And there the different techniques of meditation differ to some significant degree. But I think the most interesting ones, the deepest ones, the ones that are the real wisdom practices are noticing the same thing. and it is an intrinsic quality of consciousness that is its openness, its centerlessness,

it's selflessness, ultimately, and that's like the prior condition of what we're taking ourselves to be in each moment. And so it's, when you're talking about the possibility of self transcendence or insight into the illusoryness of the self, it's really, that's another name for an insight into the way consciousness or, or, or, awareness, I tend to use those terms as synonyms, is prior to, you know, clinging to thought and to an identification with there being a kind of thinker of thought in each moment or a subject to experience. So a central phrase that I often hear when discussing awareness, and you mentioned it

already, is the relief from psychological suffering. What exactly is that and how do most people today experience that? And do you think because of technology and AI and all the things that the average human today has more psychological suffering than a thousand, 10,000 years ago? Or what's that all about? Well, most of our suffering is clearly the result of thought, right, and what we're paying attention to each moment. and what we're paying attention to tends not to be our immediate experience in our sensory world, right? It's not the thing you're seeing or hearing or smelling or tasting or touching mostly in each moment. There's some of that, but even when you're directly aware of your sensory experience,

it tends to be through this scrim of discursive thought. You're judging it, you're comparing it, you're trying to improve it, you're regretting it. I mean, there's this, you're talking to yourself about, yourself and about your experience moment to moment. And this activity, this mental activity is so incessant that most people don't even know that it's going on. I mean, they just, they take their, this automaticity of thinking to be just the kind of the baseline state of being a mind in a world, right?

That there's just no alternative, but to be thinking every moment of the day. and grasping every aspect of experience conceptually and naming everything and judging everything and reacting to what is pleasant or unpleasant and trying to get more of the former and less of the latter. And that becomes the struggle. I mean, that is the kind of the ground truth of our being in the world just to be continually trying to improve experience

or maintain experience that seems good enough for the time being, right? You know, just shore it up against entropy moment to moment. And most of our thought about our lives and ourselves is about the past and the future, right? It's not in the present, there tends to mean not that much to really chew over mentally. It's really just this,

what's going to happen next, what's going to happen tomorrow with the next week, next month, what happened a week ago that I'm still unhappy about or disappointed in or trying to, you know, react to or, you know, what fires have to be put out

as, you know, reputationally or in some other way. And we're thinking about ourselves. We're thinking about, even the, even the, what purports to be the present, but really is just kind of the recent past and the near future, or as we can conceive of them. And this takes a tremendous amount of effort. And for most of us, I mean, there's some outliers here. Some people tend to think very happy thoughts, and they're

basically satisfied with their lives, and they're just, they're filled with gratitude moment to moment, and they love the people around them. And they're just, if you could, if you could experience sample from their mind stream, you know, every hour on the hour, you would find a, you know, a very high level of baseline happiness. And that's still not enlightenment, but that's still, you know, that's better than many of the alternatives. Because, you know, certainly most of the alternatives, for most of us, most of the time, is far less satisfied than that, right? There's just this kind of mediocrity to experience and frustration and disappointment and regret and struggle. And then there, you, you know, all of that gets punctuated by these kind of peak experiences that are very positive that we want to get back to, right?

The most they come and then they go and then we're left trying to rearrange our lives such as to have that experience more and more to get on vacation, you know, more and more to better places or for longer amounts of time, to get, you know, to fix the wrinkles in our relationship, to get back into the, you know, to get into a new relationship, to change jobs, whatever it is to spend less. less time on social media, to behave differently on social media. It's all, it's, it's a perpetual effort to try to be happy. And what meditation promises is a recognition that is prior to all of that, that really, that reveals a kind of tranquility and equanimity and, and well-being that is, that is really, again, intrinsic to the nature of mind and is available. in each moment, whatever else you may be trying to change about your lives. I mean, this is not suggesting that the punchline is, don't do anything or don't, you know,

don't be ambitious, don't change anything about yourself, your body, or your health, or your relationships, or the world. It doesn't lead to a kind of political quietism or an apathy. But the question is, how unhappy do you have to be as you take the steps to improve the or your life within the world. And the answer to that is really not unhappy at all, if you can just recognize what awareness is like in this moment. I have something bubbling up in my awareness right now that's a bit surreal.

I interviewed Robert Sapolsky, and now when I read his books, I can't help but hear his voice in my ears, plus I've used his lectures in my class and stuff. In your case, this is the first time we've ever spoken. but I've heard your voice on the waking up app, so I'm actually talking to you, and it's like this weird feedback, because the only time I've heard this voice is on

when I'm, like, doing the meditation app. So it's a little weird. But getting to what you just said, so historically, peak experiences, like in medieval times or pre-agricultural Revolution times, those peak experiences were correlated to status and job, in quotes, or bagging an antelope or things that correlated to survival and reproduction. But today it's porn and gambling and, you know, social media likes and all those things,

things that don't actually correlate to our long-term well-being. Yeah, I think you could, I mean, there are obviously dopaminergic experiences that people seek and are, you know, relieved of stress for a time by it, but they wouldn't necessarily count those as normative or ennobling or good when viewed from all sides. You just named a few. I think people have peak experiences that are intrinsically positive, but they're also intrinsically unstable

because they're, you know, all experience is, is unstable. Whatever comes eventually goes, right? There's just the phenomenon of impermanence here. So, but an experience like just, you know, falling in love or recognizing how much you love the one you've been in love with for many years, right? I mean, you can take your spouse for granted all day long and then notice, you know, how beautiful he or she looks and how grateful you are to, to,

be in this moment in the sun with them. You know, both of you are relatively healthy and happy and nothing terrible. The roof hasn't caved in, right? You're not responding to some immediate emergency and you can just enjoy each other's company. And notice that you're enjoying it in a way that you tend to fail to do. I mean, that you're not always available to really be at peace with the one you love. Even though you live under the same roof, right? technically you have something like 24 hours in every day to enjoy each other's company

or you know you subtract to whatever the eight or 10 hours that you're away for work or but you're having meals together you're raising kids together and you're still kind of taking each other for granted and missing one another much of the time but you can have a sudden recognition that you know oh my god this is it's so good to be together right you know let's say it happens on vacation or in the extreme case it had you guys take a drug together You take MDMA and suddenly you feel, oh my God, this is a potential state of consciousness that we have never tapped together, right? So why is that? And what's blocking this level of well-being?

And so meditation is a response to those moments of epiphany where you recognize, okay, something's blocking me in most of my moments. And what is that? And what that is is thought. I mean, it's the identification with thought. That's just the perpetual dreamscape of your own discursivity in the waking state that is less than truly at ease, less than truly in love, less than truly filled with gratitude. And, you know, meditation suddenly becomes interesting when you recognize that you're missing the depth of your life most of the time. So I don't want to make this about waking up and your app and your book and your work. I'm more interested in the general concept of awareness or consciousness.

Sure. But why did you, other than intellectually, or you have a podcast and all that, why do you think this is so important for society to be able to tap into this? And do you have any, I mean, your book is over a decade old now. I don't know how long you've had your waking up app out there, but do you have any demographic progress or success that you could share of what you've observed? Well, as far as the importance of all this, it really is, personally speaking, it is just the most important thing I've ever learned, right?

I mean, just like the thing that is going to get me to my deathbed without regret is this thing that we're talking about here. here. What is the difference between wisdom and ignorance on this front, on the front of just how to be happy in this world, how to be a truly ethical person, how to be really, you know, actually in love with the people in your life and not just neurotic and, you know, self-contracted and elsewhere with your attention? It's fundamental. As just as an exit, an answer to our existential concerns, this really is the best one I've got. And I talk about it, both in my book, waking up, but also in the app, which is now, is going to be seven and a half years old. So I launched it after the book. I created the app just because an app is much better than a

book as a delivery system for this kind of content. Audio is really perfect for meditation instruction. and it's certainly better than reading text, although many people still find the book useful, but the app is really allows for just kind of the ongoing development of a platform, which contains this kind of guidance. And it's also outgrowing me. I mean, there are many, many teachers on the app, so it's just a, it's now has probably thousands of hours of content.

But as far as the, but as far as the, the world is concerned when you look at virtually all of the sources of human suffering and conflicts and failures of cooperation in the face of the real imperative for us to cooperate, it's all a matter of people's minds being out of control on some level, people just being lost in thought, you know, anchored to identities. that are fictitious and becoming increasingly polarized politically on the basis of all that. It's a big shift in my thinking in the last 18 months or so. Like, just to use your work in mind as an example,

would I rather have a cadre of human beings that are fully versed into 1,000 hours of content on Waking App that do nothing about climate debt, resource, depletion, biodiversity, loss, boundaries, peak oil and all the things, or what I rather have truly systems literate generalists that understood all the biophysical and ecological backdrops of our more than human predicament. And I think the answer is the former. I think the real answer is both, which is one reason I invited you on the program. But I actually think to quiet the mind and come from that place of equanimity instead of psychosis and anger and blame and polarization is a primary foundational first step. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just before you know anything about this,

and again, I think for someone who's truly a novice to this topic, we have not yet said enough so as to clarify it. But before you can observe the difference between being lost, and thought and seeing thoughts simply just appear as objects in consciousness, you're just helplessly identified with every thought that comes through your head, right? So if someone's wondering what I'm talking about here, so you might be listening to this conversation and notice that your ability to pay attention to it is competing with a voice in your head, very likely, and a stream of images in your head, right? So you're listening to me and you might be thinking things like, well, what's he talking about?

Or is this Buddhism? Or is he going to talk about yoga or doesn't, isn't there some, where does science? So there's a voice in your head that's sort of narrating your reaction to the conversation you're hearing and leading you down different tangents. And this is a voice in your head that can be very obvious to you when you're reading, for instance, because you might read a book and get to the bottom. of the page and realize you have no idea was you read on that page because you were you're busy talking to yourself you were thinking about other things you were thinking about oh that that thing you had to do in a couple hours and are you even going to be able to finish this chapter and and all the while your eyes are scanning the page but you're you're talking to yourself and you're not you're not absorbing

anything you know semantically uh we go through our lives that way and that sense of there being a thinker of thoughts that you're you're simply the one authoring this next thought this feeling of eye, which is not the name you give to your body. I mean, most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're subjects interior to the body, very likely in the head. And they have a relationship to their body. I mean, they have a relationship to the world, which is obviously not what they are.

But in some sense, their body is yet another object in the world that they're a passenger in. and if you have a pain in your knee, well, you're kind of up in your head as the subject noticing the pain in your knee and feeling at odds with it and waiting for it to go away and now worrying about it and maybe you should see a doctor.

And yet most people feel that they're the, if they're going to drill down on what they are as a self, they're not coterminous with their physical body. They feel in some sense, in some sense, they're in a condition of dualism where they're a self in the head, a subject in the head that's aware of experience.

It's not identical to experience. It's busy having experience. It's on the edge of experience or in the center of experience. And that is the primary illusion that gets deconstructed in meditation. And it is the kind of knot that is tied in the center of experience that really is kind of limiting your sense of well-being in the world. So I'm going to get back to something you said about non-doerone. but first I have a comment and then and then a question this is all very real to me. Last night I was reading, rereading one of my favorite fiction books and I read an entire page

and at the bottom of the page. I was like, what the hell did I, I didn't understand a single word because of my mind was elsewhere. So on this topic, I am quite a novice. And what you're describing is exactly how I go through because I have tons of thoughts and emails and my current day-to-day is whack-a-mole on all the things in the world. So let me ask you this. Does that voice in your mind, Sam, still exist, or how has that changed in the last 10 or 20 years?

Yeah, it does. And to be clear, this approach to meditation is not about getting rid of thought, right? There are some techniques of meditation where the explicit goal is to quiet the mind. such that thoughts are no longer arising for the period of meditation. And that becomes a, those are what are called concentration practices. And that's a kind of contemplative athletics, right? You can get better and better at concentration. And you need a modicum of concentration to practice any style of meditation.

But ultimately, mindfulness or the kind of non-dual awareness practice I'm recommending here, it's not a matter of getting rid of thoughts. It's a matter of recognizing thoughts as they arise. because you ultimately can't get rid of thoughts and nor would you want to. I mean, thought is so useful to us. It's so central to what makes us human. Virtually everything complex that we are capable of

as a matter of first being able to think about that thing and plan for that thing and communicate about it, et cetera. So it's not about getting rid of thoughts, but it's about recognizing thought and about recognizing what the mind is like prior to thought as just the condition in which thought arises. And that's the experiential change.

And it's not only recognizing the thought, but not chasing the thought down to another one-minute story about that thought. Right. So let's just say something's happened in your life or in your mind, you just thought about something, and suddenly you're angry, right? Now, I view even classically negative emotions like anger or fear or anxiety or impatience or, you know, shame or regret.

as salience signals, right? So it's not that we would want to be without them, although, you know, some spiritual paths imagine a time where you actually can get beyond them so that you never feel those things ever again. But, you know, leaving that goal aside, in the meantime, they're salient cues, right? They're giving you information about the world

or your place in the world, or they might be giving you false information. But in any case, they're a kind of, an alarm that goes off that demands that you pay closer attention to what's happening. And then the question is, how long do you want to stay in that state so as to respond to this thing that may or may not be happening, right? So how useful is anger, you know, how useful is contempt or, you know, whatever state of mind. You pick from the menu of awful things. the answer, you know, 999 times out of 1,000 is not very useful, right?

I mean, you want to release it in this next moment so that you can simply be in a more balanced frame of mind and then just decide how you should respond to this change in your environment or in your life. And meditation, mindfulness, just being just any kind of basic awareness practice allows you to do that. So you mentioned non-duality before, which is a word I increasingly hear and I just still don't understand it. So my understanding is there's generally two major camps when it comes to awareness practice, dual and non-dual. And that's about all I understand. What is the distinction between these ways of being and how might a person who practices each move through or experience the world? Well, so

virtually everyone starts off with what's called dualistic practice. So I mean, in my lexicon, I tend to just talk about dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness. I mean, this is, there are other words for these kind of phase transitions in the literature and in Buddhism and elsewhere, but I think this is sort of useful and a good secular framing. So dualistic practice is where everyone starts because everyone feels, you know, virtually everyone feels like a self, right? They feel like there's a subject in the middle of experience and they are that, right? You feel like you're aware of seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching and thinking and feeling, right? So you have your five senses and you have appearances in the mind,

thoughts and emotions, moods, kind of a background state of Vicka is kind of cognitively and emotionally coloring, you know, everything else you can notice, you know, if you're feeling depressed or you're feeling sad or you're feeling excited or et cetera. But there's just not that many things to be aware of. There's just mental objects and then the five senses and then other senses that we don't tend to class as senses like, you know, things like proprioception and et cetera. So there's this state of energy of the mind and body that we can be aware of. And yet there feels, for most people, it feels like there's this unchanging subject on the edge of all this or in the middle of all this, right? And that is what we call I.

That is the sense of self. It's the sense of kind of the center of narrative gravity that moves through from one moment to the next. And it does feel stable for most people. It feels like it's the thread upon which all of our states of consciousness are strung, right? And it's the thing to which every experience refers, right? And when you are angry, you know, and you ask yourself, well, who's angry? Well, it's me. It's me in the center here.

It's not my hands. It's not my knees. It's not my shoulders. It's not even my face. But there's something behind my face. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, who wants to be gratified and doesn't want to be frustrated and gets annoyed and is impatient and, and, um, has preferences and, and is, it's the place from which I can decide seemingly of my own free will to do something. I can decide to move my left hand or move my right hand or, um, I can direct my attention to any object arbitrarily. So I can see my visual field as a totality, but then I can focus attention within the visual field.

You know, now at the laptop on my desk, I can be focusing on, you know, one key on the keyboard, and I can notice things in the periphery that are less clear, but the key is really in focus, because that's where my foveal vision is aimed. And I'm the one doing this, right? And then I can, then if you tell me to meditate, so then, so this is the kind of,

this is the starting point for any practice of meditation, you tell someone, okay, well, now meditation is something you might be interested in here. We're going to examine this self you claim to have, and we're going to see how it seems once you start paying focused attention. So close your eyes and become aware of the breath, say, right? And so it's from this place of feeling like a self that someone's going to begin to pay attention to the feeling of breathing. And then they're going to notice that when they're distracted by thought and they're going to come back to the breath. And then that's the place from which they begin this practice of mindfulness,

where they're paying attention to the breath as kind of a starting object of concentration, but then it opens up and they hear sounds and they can pay attention to other sensations. And ultimately, even to thoughts themselves, they might notice, oh, yeah, there's just an image arising or a sound of this kind of the voice of my own mind arising. But again, in every moment, it feels like there's a place from which all of that's being noticed. There's a center to experience. And that is the me. That's the subject.

That's now the meditator, right? There's the thinker of thoughts. It's the intender of intentions. And now it's the meditator who's now struggling to pay attention in the midst of this, this, this, tumult. of thought. Now I'm trying to get concentrated. Now thought is kind of an adversary, right, because it keeps arising and distracting me, taking away from the project. You know, I thought I was meditating, but now I wake up. I've been thinking about this project I'm working on for the last three minutes. I completely forgot I was supposed to be meditating. And okay, now I'm going to come back

to the breath. And so that is that, and that's that alternation between being distracted and then remembering to pay attention that becomes the practice in the beginning, but still it is defined by this sense of subject-object awareness. That's the dualistic state, which non-duality promises to overcome, but that is the starting point for everybody. You know, it's funny, at least five people in the last few years have gifted me a subscription to your waking-up app. And I remember, I think it was five years ago, a good friend of mine sent it to me, and I listened to the first 10, they're like a minute or three minutes long. And she asked me, how's it going? I said, I'm failing. I'm not doing so well. I'm just, I'm failing. And she laughed because there is no

real such thing as failing. Now five years on, at least I understand that. Well, so, yeah, the sense of failure is unavoidable, but it is, in fact, something that just needs to be overcome. I mean, so to give people sense of what that's like. So the practice in the beginning is very, very simple. I mean, it's always very, very simple. It doesn't mean it's easy to do, but the instructions are incredibly simple. Just pay attention to the breath. And every time you notice you're lost in thought, just come back to the sensation of breathing, either the rising and falling of your chest or abdomen or the feeling of your breath coming in out of your nostrils. And once you have even the slightest handle on that, you can begin to open up awareness to everything. So there's

nothing in experience that can't be incorporated into the field of meditation. So there's no, you don't have to be in a quiet environment because sounds are just as good as objects of meditation as the breath and also sensations in your body and anything you can notice. Ultimately, even thoughts themselves can be objects of awareness. My thoughts distracted me yet down a different rabbit hole and what came to mind right now is I'm just curious if this is a uniquely human thing or if other animals are constantly fully aware and don't get distracted by thoughts the way that we do. Well, I don't think they have linguistic thoughts the way we do. I think they have thoughts. They have drives. They have expectations. I mean, I think it depends how far down the phylogenetic

tree you want to go. But, you know, if you're talking about, you know, other mammals, you know, like dogs, right? Clearly they have complex states of mind. You know, they understand a lot about the world. They understand a lot about us, right? They're very sensitive to changes in our behavior and even our states of attention, right? So there's a lot going on in a dog's mind, and I would imagine much of that is conscious, but it's almost certainly not linguistic in any sense that we would recognize, right?

But that doesn't mean they don't have expectations or, you know, internal models of the world and future states at the world. If you, you know, grab a leash and your dog gets excited, it's presumably getting excited because it has some forward-looking model of what, you know, you're holding a leash portends, which is almost certainly you guys are going to be going out of the house immediately and into the world. and that's a very novel experience for your dog. But as far as the, just the torrents of discursivity and image formation and the degree to which we have habituated to all of that and are perpetually having conversations in our minds with people who aren't there and reacting

as though they were there, right? It'd be like you're having an argument with somebody who may even be dead, right? but your mental state and your physiology is being modified by this, this conversation, this imagined conversation. This is all very much like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming, right? I mean, we do this. Everyone, you know, whether you remember it or not, virtually everyone falls asleep at

night and spend some considerable period hallucinating relationships and various entanglements in the world and doing so little reality testing that they don't. even notice how strange all this is, right? Like you were, the last, last thing you should have remembered was you were in your bed safely under the covers, getting ready to sleep. And now all of a sudden, you're at a conference where you forgot, you know, your laptop isn't working, and the audience is waiting for you to deliver your talk, and you can't get your notes up. And now you're having this sort of mortifying experience of public embarrassment. And you're panicking. And you're so unaware of your real circumstance, which is that you're safely in your bed

asleep, that you don't, you haven't even done enough reality testing to notice that it is in fact strange and impossible even that you immediately transition from your bed into a conference hall where you're now given a talk that you've never had any memory of ever having to prepare. And so you're identified with this circumstance that is a total hallucination, right? And you're in fact psychotic. I mean, in the state of dreaming everyone is basically a psychotic unless they're having a lucid dream. But there is a version of that

that's happening more or less every waking moment when you're lost in thought and unaware of that. For most of humanity. Yeah. These are kind of microdreams that are basically a kind of psychosis light experience and the real boundary

condition between psychosis and our normal waking distraction is that the normals like ourselves, have the good sense not to open our mouths and talk out loud in front of other people, at least most of the time. And occasionally you'll find yourself even talking to yourself out loud and you will be properly psychotic, hopefully in the privacy of your room.

But it's the person who's walking down the sidewalk talking out loud to people who aren't there that we recognize, okay, that guy's got a problem. But we all have a very similar problem most of the time. And meditation is really the only technique of radical. that allows you to radically break that spell. So in real time, listening to you, Sam, I also have thoughts that are emerging and then I have to get back to paying attention to you. That's normal too, right?

I'm long-winded, so I give people ample opportunity to get lost. But I will share this. Well, first of all, do you have a dog, just out of curiosity? No, I've had dogs. I've had many dogs, but now I'm a cat person. Okay. I have dogs and cats. And I have to say that I didn't realize this until you were talking and I thought about it.

My animals are sometimes a vector for me to not officially meditate, but to get into the state that you were describing of the non-duality because I'll look in their eyes or I'll just observe them. And the reason it's salient is you texted me earlier and said you would be 10 minutes late. So rather than check emails and stuff, I went and sat by it snowing here. And I sat and watched the squirrels in my bird feeder for five minutes. And I just sat and looked at them. And for me, I don't think of, oh, yeah, I got my meditation in for the day.

I don't even consider that as meditation. But I actually think it is because of, well, I don't know. What do you think about that? It quiets all the thoughts down and I'm just kind of lost in observing their behavior and reflecting. I mean, there's two answers to this question. I mean, from the side of one who knows how to meditate,

everything is potentially meditation. I mean, there really is no boundary between meditation and the rest of life. So if you're going to ask me to look at the squirrels eating from your bird feeder or do anything else, that use of attention is totally compatible with what I'm calling meditation. I can be meditating while looking at the squirrels. I can be meditating while even checking my own. my email, right, although, you know, obviously some circumstances are more conducive to it than others.

You couldn't be meditating by having this conversation. Oh, yeah, no, of course, I could. Yeah, I mean, there's no, there's no barrier to recognizing what consciousness is like and noticing that there's no, I mean, so now we'll start talking about the kind of the non-dual side of this, noticing that there's no center to it, noticing that you're not on the edge of it, noticing that There's just this open field of experience, and you're identical to that. There's never any real barrier to that recognition. And to so-called, to quote, meditate is really ultimately not a practice you're adding to your life. I mean, once you really know how to do it, you're doing less of something rather than more of something.

It's a recognition of any experience from a place of not being distracted. almost nothing other than explicit instruction in meditation is liable to get you there. So you'll hear people say, well, I don't meditate, but my meditation is jogging or playing the guitar or playing with my pets or surfing. So lots of things they like to do that make them feel good. The way I think about that is if you know how to meditate, well, then all of those things are compatible with meditation. If you actually, if you don't know how to meditate, you're unlikely to to discover how to do it by virtue of playing with your dogs or surfing or having sex or anything else you like to do.

In shorthand is meditation or awareness the opposite of, just purely the opposite of being distracted? It is, except there are different versions of not being distracted, right? So what you're paying attention to when you're not distracted is the measure of what your meditation practice or any other, you know, attentional focus is, right? So, as I said earlier, there are practices, there are meditation practices that are pure concentration practices where you're trying to become so one-pointed on an object, whether it's a breath, you're the breath or a visualization or a mantra, or it could be any arbitrary object. You can stare at a candle flame or just a colored disc or anything. You're trying to become so one-pointed on. You're trying to become so one-pointed

that that you notice nothing else and you and at a certain level of concentration thoughts actually cease to arise. It's a kind of a spiritual attainment, right? I mean, people become spiritual athletes of a sort when they train in these disciplines and meditation there can be very, very drug-like, right? Because concentration is intrinsically pleasant. And much of the pleasure we get in peak experiences in life, you know, like athletic experiences or sex or encounters with nature or anything that goes by the name of, you know, quote, peak experience tends to have this feature of intense concentration in the moment where you're no longer thinking about the past or anticipating the future. You're just fully committed to a direct

sensory engagement with whatever's happening. And then people tend to mistake the significance of what's happening, as opposed to recognizing that really it's the quality of attention that was so important. And meditation is the only game in town where you really, you recognize that attention is the real currency of profundity and flow and the peak, the peakiness of any peak experience. It's not the contents of consciousness. how fully you're paying attention to the context of consciousness.

And presumably the lack of attention or the increase in our distractiveness, one could speculate that as a percentage of the alive at one time human population and as a percentage of the average waking life of a human, we've probably never been as distracted as now because of our technology and social structures, et cetera, Is that a fair statement? I would say generally speaking, technology, the way most of us are using, especially our smartphone technology, a couple to social media,

we are using these information tools to fragment our lives in ways that are truly novel and tending in the direction you suspect, which is it's becoming harder to sustain attention on anything. even classically rewarding things for what used to be considered normal amount of time. So it's getting harder to sit down and read a book, even if it's a book you really want to read. Yeah, reading is going to be the new gym. Yeah. No, it's like just a, I mean, you know, even your audience, I would expect it's a, you know,

more than the usual percentage of committed readers. But I would imagine that many people in your audience are still finding it much, harder to sit down and read a book for an hour than they did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And even watching a movie, right? I mean, talk about something that really was always effortless, right? Just sit down and watch a good movie for two hours, right? You want to watch this movie. You've got the television you want.

You've got the couch you want. You've set aside the time to watch it. Still, many people are picking up their smartphones in the middle of that experience because they're seeking this dopaminergic interruption from the very experience they is just like a classically pleasurable

low effort experience that they would otherwise find effortless they're finding it hard to resist interrupting themselves having that experience and what you just said is absolutely true now but AI and what's coming

is going to make that crack cocaine and steroids I fear. Oh yeah. Well, when you look at what, I mean, leaving AI aside, I mean, AI is just going to weaponize and, and exacerbate everything we're talking about. But just look at just engagement with short form video, like TikTok or shorts on YouTube, that cadence of, of, um, attentional reward, right? I mean, these just kind of micro treadmills we get on. and off and on and off and on and off and and and are intolerance of something going for too long, right?

Like we want, there are many people for whom even a 15 minute video, that's just too much of a commitment, right? Like, no, that 15 minutes is not the thing you want to, people want the 30-second version. If you can boil it down to 15 minutes, you know, I want the 30-second version that has these jump cuts where all the fat is has been taken off of the, off of the, you know, the sugar. And that, so we're training ourselves to have this, this utterly piecemeal engagement with a continually shifting information landscape, where we are attention just alights from, you know, one object to the next,

and barely settles there and just that the search for novelty never ends, right? We never sink into anything for long enough to notice that there's depth or variation

and it has its own dynamics of reward and, I mean, boredom has been genuinely canceled. I mean, it used to be that the human mind had to confront boredom, right? You're sitting in the waiting room of a, you know, the doctor's office, and you've got 45 minutes to wait, and your doctor has whatever crappy magazines he has, but this is,

and now obviously I'm talking about the days before the smartphone, you just had a dumb phone that could do nothing but, but make phone calls, and you were condemned to sit in on that couch for a good long while alone with your thoughts. And then you felt the pain of not being able to sink your attention into something that is satisfying. And what boredom is, you mean, you recognize this certainly when you go on a silent meditation retreat. Bordom is nothing other than just lack of attention. It's this state of mind where your attention is searching for an object that is satisfying enough and all you've got are your thoughts

about the past and thoughts about the future and your restlessness and nothing is sailing it enough to command your attention and your quote bored. But the smartphone has completely obviated that state of mind, I think now until the end of the world,

you can always see this next thing that is lured enough or interesting enough or frightening enough that it's never true of you to say that you're now bored. A large part of the distribution, the probability distribution of the future does have a long period between the end of the smartphone and the end of the world, in my opinion.

But let me ask you this. If someone is able to consistently practice and live in these states of awareness in their day-to-day lives, what have you observed on how that changes that person's relationship with their own emotions. Well, much of your psychological suffering becomes optional at that point, which is to say you can get off the ride more or less at any arbitrary point when you decide, okay, it's not worth suffering over this thing now.

I mean, so like you take the, here's a classic case, you know, something bad or scary happens. I mean, let's say you get some scary diagnosis from your doctor, Right? And you know, you're not quite sure what this is, but, you know, you've got something, you've got a growth on your, on your lung, and now everybody's worried about it, and you have to get an MRI, but we can't get you an MRI until Tuesday, right? It's Thursday, it's Thursday, and you got to wait, you know, five days. You've got a whole, got a long weekend before we can get you more information about this thing. So now you're in this state of uncertainty, and you have a day at an hour on the calendar where you know this, you, you know, the, There's nothing you can do between now and then, right? You know what the next step is. You've got to get an MRI on Tuesday. How, what are you going to do with your mind between now and Tuesday, right?

How much time are you going to be going to spend in the torture chamber? You are now preparing for yourself worrying about whether you have lung cancer and whether you're going to live to see your children grow up and et cetera, et cetera, right? So the truth is 99% of what you're going to think about between now and Tuesday is unnecessary. If there's something that you have to think about, well, by all means think about that thing, right? Let's say you recognize that your estate plan isn't an order and you should, you know, it would be only rational to have a will that is fully executed and, you know, let's do that. Okay, so now you have an appointment with your lawyer next Friday. All right, so that's on the calendar.

Now what do you have to think about, right? The truth is 99% of what we think about is completely unnecessary, and it makes us miserable. So when you can meditate, when you can really just notice thought and release it, it's not to say that the scary thought won't keep coming back, but you can keep noticing it and letting go of it. and really letting go of it. And the letting go of it really is freedom.

Most people would think of meditation at this point as a remedy to dampen down this feeling of fear and anxiety. So you're going to pay attention to thought. You're going to pay attention to anxiety. And you're going to pay attention to them in such a way so as to make them go away. Right. And it's the two things to notice about that. One is that's not actual mindfulness. I mean, to have the ulterior motive of trying to make the anxiety go away

and to get rid of a certain species of thought, that's not actually, that's not certainly not non-dual mindfulness. It's not even dualistic mindfulness. That's just more fear and craving to feel differently, right? And it's just you're still at war with your experience. So mindfulness, even beginners level, you know, dualistic mindfulness, requires that you become willing to simply feel the raw feeling of anxiety in this case and to simply notice the thought arise and pass away.

But your unwillingness to feel anxiety, the resistance, the aversion to anxiety, is itself something that you need to notice and release, right? You need to get into a posture of real openness and balance and and non-judgmentalism and just a willingness to feel, just that you can feel it, just this next moment. So become aware that you can fully make contact with this moment of what you're calling anxiety and just become interested in it and an investigative with respect to it. Just become curious to feel it more deeply. and it's not a way of avoiding it. It's a way of actually being willing to feel it fully in each moment. And so mindfulness is really a fundamental overcoming of resistance in that moment.

But if you can do that, you begin to drop into this state of being wherein you recognize, okay, all of this thought and all of this reactivity to the thought. thought is unnecessary. I mean, you're basically suffer twice. You suffer whatever you're going to suffer on Tuesday. Let's say you get bad news on Tuesday. Well, you'll be there on Tuesday to react to that bad news. But between now and Tuesday, how unhappy do you have to be? The answer is, you don't have to be unhappy if you can just be moment to moment. So this is at the core of why I invited you on the program. Have you ever heard of the framing of pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic. No, but I think I can intuit the gist, but no, I haven't heard that. Yeah, it's pre-tragic

as you're not aware of all the things you're just going through your life. And tragic is you discover climate change and polarization and addiction and resource depletion and all the things and you're stressed and anxious all the time. And post-tragic is a little bit rhyming with non-dual, but it's you've passed through the grief and you acknowledge and recognize and recognize, and but you can still work on it. And this kind of harkens to what you're just saying because the diagnosis

and you use the spot on your lungs scan, many of the listeners of this show, the diagnosis is the diagnosis of civilization and society's future. And once you learn deeply about how all the things are interconnected,

it's very much like the example you just said. So many of the shows listeners are aware and think a lot about the future, specifically the many converging crisis that humanity is going to face in the coming decade, in addition to the ones we're facing right now. So how might mindfulness and awareness practices offer a different perspective or a way to engage slash cope and maybe even be more effective on working on these issues? Well, whatever we do to ensure that the future is better than the past, or at least not worse. I say better than the default, because I don't know that it's going to be better than the past, but keep going. Right. But let's say in the best case, you know, we solve all of our problems, all of these looming existential risks and catastrophic risks. I mean, just we just, you know, every coordination problem that can be solved, we solve it, all the benign technologies that can be

scaled, we scale them. We just act as sanely as we could imagine acting and leverage technology in all the ways to allow us to do that. Short of cracking the immortality code, we all need to be post-tragic with respect to our personal fate, which is governed by impermanence. I mean, we're all going to die. We're all going to lose everything. Our engagement with this place is only for a time, right? Everything is rented. You know, whatever you think you have, you're eventually going to lose it, right? And then in those final days or final hours, you'll have the memory of all the time you spent acquiring it, right?

I mean, we just, we acquired all these things and relationships and all of it's going to be dissipated again, ultimately. It's all going to be cast on the wind. And if we have kids, we're going to have to say goodbye. to those kids. And if you live long enough, if you're the lucky one who's got perfect genes and perfect health and it just, you just, you hit the,

you won the lottery with respect to your, you know, your survivability in this place, well then you're going to be the one who hears about the death of everyone you care about, right? You know, the smartphone's going to ring or the implant in your brain is going to ring depending on how far in the future

we are and you're just going to hear about the last friend you had. disappearing, right? So we have to, so the real conundrum for us is how can we be happy and in love and filled with gratitude in this place, right, in the world as it is, right? Even the, even the best possible version of the world as it is, is a situation where things are fundamentally precarious, right? I mean, you just, we know that entropy wins ultimately. And the question is, is there a place of spiritual depth, of contemplative depth, of real engagement with the mystery of our being moment to moment that is deeply satisfying and not perpetually at odds with the truth of impermanence? And I think that this discovery awaits everyone, but I think there is.

I think consciousness, as it is in each moment, is not worried about. about the next moment. It's not worried about the past. It's not filled with worry or regret or anxiety or any other. I mean, it's just it is the place in which any of those states will appear, but they'll appear based on your overlooking the nature of mind in this moment and getting entangled, again, with this sort of dreamscape of thinking about the past or the future. there really is just being in the present

and you can bring all of your intelligence to that project and still be available to be a collaborator in any complex situation, right? I mean, it's not to say you can't think about AI and existential risk and all of that and also recognize the pure mystery of consciousness in each moment. You can do both of those things, but the latter really answers to this existential concern of just how can we be happy knowing that everything is ultimately going over the falls. So then I think it's also largely a story of improving our ethics and, you know, personally, but also at kind of the systems level so as to allow for saner incentives and more reliable solutions to coordination, problems and just how is it that we can cooperate more and more effortlessly together as just

social primates at civilizational scale. And there it's much more story. It's not in my mind a story about many, many more people having personal epiphanies that transform their lives so that they become more like saints. I think that, I mean, that's a good thing and we should have that happen as much as possible. But I think what we want are systems and systems of incentives and institutions that enshrine those incentives that make it easier and easier for ordinary neurotic people to behave more like really good people. And so it's like we want to outsource our wisdom to our institutions and our norms

and our politics, right? So that's like even mediocre people and even frankly awful people can be incentivizing. to behave like good people much of the time or all of the time. Whereas we seem to be in a situation where you often have to be a moral hero to behave halfway decently given how these incentives are tuned. And that's what's bad. I totally agree with you. And so let's move to the beyond the level of the individual.

One of the major things I've come to believe, especially in the last year or so, is that community and social capital are going to be at the center of, the better responses to our upcoming and existing predicament. So how do these awareness practices shape or change our ability to create strong and resilient communities? Is there any additive force with a group of people who come from this strong base of awareness and how does this scale or does it scale? Well, it does in that it just transforms your sense of who you are,

in each moment in relationship to other people, right? So you're not, if you're not clinging to your sense of self as resolutely as you used to, you know, and as most people are, it gives you a degree of flexibility and resilience that, like, like, just take the variable of, of taking things personally or not, right? Being, like, just how offend, how offendable are you?

Like, how petty, are you? How how disposed are you to hold a grudge? I'm describing patterns of friction in social relationships and things that derange social relationships and make cooperation harder. So if you're working on these issues and you meet locally in a group of 10 people, for instance, if one person doesn't have all those grudges and thinks this way, it's not going to make a huge difference in the discussion.

five people do or if 10 people do, they get to actionable solutions and real incentives and institutional change much faster. Right. That's the, that would be the idea. Well, there's that, but even one person can, can demonstrate a different way of being in a group. And that can become noticeable, right? And, and even valued. Even, even, even though other people aren't necessarily up to the, up to it themselves, they might value this very quality in that person. And that person might achieve a leadership role in a group just because they're obviously the person who has their priorities straight, right, who's not in it, who's not merely being selfish and transactional, say, who's not, whose ego isn't in the way

of, in this negotiation or in this, you know, like you, you notice somebody who's, I mean, just, I, to come, to come back to, um, a, an emotion that I named earlier that people might not, might not have been familiar with the, with the name I gave it. I, I spoke about sympathetic joy as opposed to envy, right? I mean, just take this one, one aspect of, of experience. I mean, just, everyone knows what this is like. Like, you have a friend, um, let's say something really good has happened in your life, right? Like, you, you, you've had, you've had some real breakthrough. You just, you know, you got a job, a really desirable job, right? And now, now your whole financial situation has changed, right? Now, they're the friend, and you share that,

that intrinsically good news with all your friends, right? And you might notice that some of your friends have genuine smiles on their face and are really just happy for you. And you might notice that other friends can't quite muster that, right? Right? Whether they, in their own minds, they have a kind of zero-sum calculus going on in the background where they feel somehow diminished by this good thing that happened to you. And put yourself on the other side of it. I mean, just because this will be a familiar experience to many people.

I mean, just to notice something great happens with your friend, things aren't, you know, not that much has been going well for you, but you've got this, friend who's just killing it. And you find out, you know, you see yet more evidence of their success. And you notice this sort of poverty of attitude in yourself where, I mean, you claim to love this person. You know, presumably you would wish all these good things upon them if you could. And yet there's this kind of miserliness in you emotionally where you are feeling envy. You're feeling like you're feeling diminished by this good thing, by the slice of the pie you saw them get, right that's a very um i mean that is the antithesis of real friendship really i mean that's that's

that's the absence of love you know what love feels like in that circumstance is you are just happy for the other person without residue right that's real love yeah yeah so how do you uh going down that pathway how do you think the world would change if many most everyone actively practiced awareness and mindful technique mindfulness techniques And if not everyone, have you speculated on what percentage of people would it take for there to be a meaningful, positive effect on society? Well, I think every little bit matters. But again, I do think there are two levels to solving these problems. And the most important level would be at the systems level. How do we converge with something like 8 billion strangers to solve problems that only a, a, that can only be solved at the global level, right? Well, then you're talking about systems and laws and governance and incentives.

You're not talking about what each of us can do in the privacy of our lives by redirecting our attention. So I think we just have to work on both levels. I think we want saner people who are better people individually who have their own private ethical codes more dialed in and all of that. that, but I think we also want sane or system level influences and demands. And that's, you know, that's a

situation. Another way to answer your question is there's probably 10,000 people on Earth who, if they had their head screwed on straight, could usher in a very different future for us. I mean, they're not that many decision makers, right? So it's not that everyone has to become

wise or even slightly wiser for there to be a sea chain in human governance and aspiration. I mean, it really is, I mean, 10,000 people might even be an exaggeration. No, it is an exaggeration, but the challenge is we have to have the average person somewhat change how they perceive these things

to get those other people elected and into positions of power. So there's that. So other than the mention of the dogs and cats and squirrels, this conversation has been centered on the idea of human consciousness, but there's a lot of deep ecologists and people that deeply care about the 10 million species we share this planet with our nieces, nephews, and cousins in nature. I'm wondering what your beliefs are about the consciousness of the rest of the living world. And if you agree with me that other living things have consciousness, how do you think we should change the way that we interact with them and behave within the world? world more broadly. Well, I do think there's no reason to withhold consciousness to just humans,

obviously, or just primates, or even just the mammals we tend to care about because they're, you know, charismatic and to withhold it from, you know, other things that we care less about because, you know, they're not cute. So how far down to push it is still an open, question. I mean, there are many people who think consciousness might go all the way down or at least far enough down so that we're not even talking about animals anymore. We could be talking about single cells or, or, you know, very, you know, basic systems. But, you know, I would attribute consciousness to more or less every animal we tend to think about and interact in, you know, some level of consciousness. And therefore, these animals have, they almost certainly experience.

pain and some kind of pleasure, right? And if, you know, but I do think our, we have some serviceable intuitions here around there being a hierarchy of suffering and well-being that were right to be motivated by. So, I mean, this is something I think of in terms of like the windshield test, right? You're driving home and a bug hits your windshield. right and and that's something that you might notice and feel almost nothing about and you're certainly not going to it's not it's not it's not the first thing you're going to tell your wife when you walk through the front door you won't believe what happened today i was driving home and some bug i don't know what it was maybe a moth maybe a fly maybe a bee just died because i killed it because i was driving so fast and it it's splattered on my windshield um that's just not interesting and it's not interesting for a reason. Well, if we lived

our lives that way, we would be so slow in our daily activities we would do nothing. Right. But if you hit a squirrel, you feel a certain way. You definitely feel more. There's a drama. There's kind of a life drama there that you feel implicated in.

There might have been another squirrel on the side of the road that had a relationship with that squirrel and you saw that squirrel. It can make you feel awful because there's an empathy you have for squirrel consciousness, which I think is, again, to a first approximation, somewhat realistic. I mean, these are social animals. I think they have all kinds of social rewards that were right to intuit and care about. If you run over a dog, you are very likely going to feel terrible and, you know, there's just a wider set of implications.

I mean, one, that dog was probably loved by a person, right? So you're going to think about the kid whose dog you just killed, right? But even that aside, you know, you, you understand the richness of a life of a dog. And I think you're, I think we're right to, I mean, there are some contingent facts here that are, that are, that are not probably defensible. I mean, I think probably you could say that pigs are, are just as smart as dogs or even smarter, right? And yet we eat pigs and we don't eat dogs. And so, you know, there are things that that's exactly the reason I stopped eating pigs 15 years ago, just the sentence you just said. Okay, so there are people who kind of try to align their ethics along all these lines or not,

but, and there's some potential contradictions here, but generally speaking, I think we have intuitions that were right to want to defend, which is if you run over somebody's child, right, there's a reason why that's like the worst day of your life. and it's the kind of thing. It's the one day of your life. If you could go back in time, you would change. Before you change anything else about your life, you'd change that day, right?

And you wouldn't necessarily say that about a dog, and he certainly wouldn't say it about a squirrel, and you're not going to say it about a moth, right? So I want to be respectful of your time, and I expect you're going to have some zingers to share on the closing questions that I ask all my guests. But before I get there, are there any misconceptions about awareness and mindfulness that you would like to highlight and clear up for listeners before I move to my usual closing questions?

It's a big topic. Well, I think the basic misconception, which I've already touched upon briefly, is that meditation is something you're doing or adding to your life, that it's a practice, right? analogous to playing tennis or playing golf or playing piano. It's like it's a, it's something you have to learn and you can do it or not do it. Now, half of that's true. In the beginning, it certainly seems to be a skill that you have to learn and you can be good at it or not and there's, there's effort involved and all of that. All of that seems true. But once you actually learn it, none of that's true. I mean, it really is just the, it's doing less rather than more. It's When you're really meditating, you're ceasing to do something.

You're not doing something. You're ceasing to be distracted. You're noticing something that's already there, something that's already in the very nature of your conscious experience of the world. That makes a lot of sense. So I don't know how much you know about my work and the metacrisis, the polycrisis. But just taking off your neuroscience philosopher meditation expert hat, what do you recommend people watching, listening to this show can do to help address some of the things in our world? Or is it all up to politicians and leaders?

This is a coordination problem that I don't know how we can all solve, but it seems to me that we all have, I mean, the change that has to be. to happen more or less everywhere all at once is we all have to become less and less patient with tribalism and dogmatism. So wherever you see tribalism holding sway in our politics, and it's almost everywhere, whenever you see people who are just, who are betraying their stated principles because they just want their team to win, right? Like they're reacting to the bad thing that the other guy did, but when their side does it, they don't care. You know, so the the political hypocrisy we see everywhere, all of that has to become more and more sickening to us, right? It's just, and, you know, identity politics falls into this bin. I think almost every mention of race in our politics.

Just take one example is politically toxic and counterproductive. I just don't think we, I think we know where we want to be as a society with respect to the variable of race, which is we want to not care about it. We want to recognize that the color of a person's skin has exactly no moral or political significance. And we really just want to cease to care about superficial differences between people, right? So continuing to care about it for the purpose of social activism, which is what identity politics is, is a failure mode because continuing to care about race simply isn't a way of ceasing to care about it. Right. We just can't. And yet, you know, if to talk about the left side of our politics, actually both on the left and right, if you go far enough in either direction, you meet people who just insists that we must keep caring about superficial differences between people, you know, race to take one example. So I think tribalism, we have to get beyond tribalism. We have to get beyond dogmatism, too. I mean, so dogmatism is just this failure mode of thinking when people are believing things strongly without evidence or despite very compelling counter-everage. evidence because these are dogmas that can't be re-inspected. You said we have to have less and less patience for tribalism and dogmatism. Isn't being less patient, like, lead us to tribalism and dogmatism?

Well, no, because, I mean, it depends why you're impatient, right? Why you're rejecting the thing, right? So, it's, I mean, one way to say, I mean, well, becoming less patient is a, It's kind of a harsher way of saying it. We have to be less enticed by, you know, addicted to, lured by these things, which people find so captivating, right? People really are captivated by tribalism and dogmatism. I mean, dogmatism is, it takes a lot of the friction out of anything you're doing because, like, you don't have to re-inspect your prior assumptions at all. Your assumptions are good for all time.

These are good. These assumptions are good for the until the end of the world, right? So if you were in a group of 10 people and if a listener of this show is in a group of 10 people and they wholeheartedly agree with you on tribalism and dogmatism, what would be some steps that they could take to alleviate that in the group that they're in, for example? So if you're in a group where if there's any kind of political project happening, you will continually be confronted by people. reasoning from the pseudo ethical reasoning from their identity. Something is true or good because they're the person they are, they belong to the group that they belong to, right? You know, as a Jew, as a black man, as a man, as a gay woman.

So like, let me tell you. So it's fine to talk about, I'm not saying that a person's, quote, lived experience is always irrelevant. But it's only relevant when you're talking about the character of somebody's experience, right? It doesn't, it doesn't, it's not universalizable. It's not, real ethics can be generalized to everyone. Real ethics don't depend on you being who you are. They're precisely what's true when, regardless of who you are, right? They're like, like, they're, they're true of the situation where, where you may not know who you're going to be in that situation. Right. Like if we're all going to try to figure out a fair game to play, and this is, this is, you know, the thought experiment that the philosopher John Rawls gave us. You know, I don't agree with everything that Rawls said. But, you know, when he was coming up with a theory of justice and asking, you know, how to arrange a fair society, the exercise he recommended was to put everyone in what he called the original position where behind a veil of ignorance, you know, we can come up with how to order society. if each of us recognizes that we have to make these decisions without knowing who we're going to be in the society. So you don't know whether you're tall or short.

You don't know whether you're healthy or unhealthy. You don't know whether you're black or white, rich or poor. Then we can begin to converge on what would be fair, right? But if we're going to do our politics based on, listen, as a Christian, this is what's important. Well, no, as a Christian, you've just disqualified yourself from, with your assay clause, disqualifies you from saying anything especially important to ethics. I understand. You know, so you find people doing that all the time.

99% of people. Yeah, we basically, we have to call bullshit on that always and forever because it's leading us nowhere worth going. Would you alter that recommendations for young people? listening to this show or your show. What advice do you have for young humans in their teens and 20s who are becoming aware of our economic and environmental constraints to the future? I actually wouldn't alter it for young people. I mean, I think they're fighting from this same trench, right? They're just, if anything, especially, you know, left of center, the primacy of identity and identity politics has really been imbibed by them in the water for as long as they've

been alive, right? I mean, this is just, you know, young people tend to be even more confused about this than people in our cohort. We have to, your idea, you know, my basic argument is, is identity is, is, identity if it's entertained at all, needs to be. taken very lightly. I mean, identity is just for fun, right? Identity is just like being a sports fan, right? Like you have an identity as a Yankees fan, say, well, okay, okay, great. Well, just how deep do you want that to reach, right? Do you want to kill someone over it? Do you want to be, do you want to

fly into a rage when your team loses such that, you know, your, you're, you're, you're, your bad company for everyone in your life, right? Do you want to be made neurotic and oppressed by the the ups and downs of your favorite team? No, we recognize that sports fandom taken that far is fanaticism, right? It's just awful. It's like, it's not, it's no longer fun. Okay, so if you care about your identity as a Jew or as a Christian or as a black man or a white woman or what, care about it just at the level of this is just kind of the fun part.

These are just beautiful differences that are, you know, it's just, it's just decoration, right? There's nothing profound about it, right? What is profound is what is deeply common where we can all touch something fundamental about our circumstance here. And it's certainly deeper than the color of our skin or the accident of our birth or the, you know, even the religion that you got drummed into you at mother's knee. There's something transcultural and non-sectarian and true and beautiful about our circumstance, and that's where we should be anchored. Thank you. What do you care most about in the world, Sam?

Well, it really is these things and in aligning my life moment to moment more and more with what I know my deepest priorities are. Right? I mean, the tragedy is that you can have, you know, fundamental insights about all these things, and you really have to have them 10,000 times before they really begin to stick. And, you know, we're all in the game of struggling to take our own advice on some level. I mean, it's very easy to give great advice. And we all know that we all know the great advice to give. And if your friend needs some advice, you can, you can give your friend life-changing advice. That's incredibly wise. There's no, no problem. doing that. I mean, you just, you know, we all have wisdom on tap. But on some level, wisdom is really nothing other than the ability to take your own advice. And is the barrier between those two being distracted? Yeah. It's being distracted by, I mean, on some level,

it's wanting other things and being distracted by those wants, right? Caring about other things and being distracted, you know, for greater intervals by those things. Now, I'm not saying, I mean, I still experience a life where I want all kinds of things and get distracted by all kinds of things. And I have, you know, priorities and I have disappointments and I have, you know, et cetera, and things that are pleasant and unpleasant. But the degree of departure from my deepest priorities has become less and less, right? and the half-life of that departure gets shortened. And when it really, when something really happens to destabilize me, you know, where like I suddenly I'm really not the person I want to be, you know, that goes off.

There's kind of like a mindfulness alarm that goes off, you know, and it rings loudly and it becomes unignorable. And if you surround yourself with like-minded people who are also seeing their life in the world this way and your life in the world this way, then you also have good company that can remind you. It's like, you know, it's like I married the right person, right? I have a wife who will, you know, look across the table of me and say, like, why do you even care about this? Right. And it'll short circuit the thing that was, you know, tying me in knots unnecessarily. On some level, your life becomes a mirror increasingly, an increasingly clear mirror by which you can keep catching yourself falling short.

of your own priorities, your real priorities. And that you can, it's not in the, the way to keep score there is not a matter of just never getting confused again, never getting distracted again, never falling and having to pick yourself up again. No, it's really in the half-life and the time it takes and the struggle it takes and the kind of lightness and kind of humor with which those, the return. turn can happen and you begin to have a sense of humor about all of this and it's um and a need not take long to suddenly be back uh being precisely the person you want to be i mean like really like just

you the thing that i'm i'll give you an example i was um driving and i got i got stuck behind uh living on a street where there's a lot of construction and i sometimes i'll get stuck behind construction and it'll delay me like 10 minutes getting out of my house because there's so much construction on the street. But I was here. I was really late for something, and in my head it mattered, and I was very annoyed to find myself stuck behind a truck.

And, you know, I got out of my car, and I'm like, you know, talking to the construction guy, like, this is totally unacceptable. You guys are blocking the street. And I'm actually pissed off and expressing that and just caught, right? And just, and then, but also I'm noticing that I'm showing up. The way I'm showing up with these guys who I've never met is like now I'm the jerk who's pissed off, who's making their job harder and all of that.

Right. And so like there's like I'm sort of, even though I'm pissed off and I'm late and I don't want to be late and I actually, I'm feeling the consequences of being late, I'm also seeing myself in the eyes of these guys and I'm thinking, this is not who I want to be, right? Like this is, this is, this is, I'm part of the problem, right? Even though I'm right, you know, like on some level I'm right and they shouldn't be blocking the street. This is not who I want to be, right? And so like that, but so the question is how long do you get caught for and how and what, what, what comes online in the next moment and what, and how available are you to be free in the next moment and forgiving in the next moment. And so like in the next moment, like, so the guy moves his truck and I pass him and I, and I, and I, and I, and. And I could have just like blown past him and realized, okay, I'm late now.

I just got to drive faster to get to where I'm going. But I realized, like, the toxicity of this moment was such that I just stopped my car. And I got out and I just, I said, actually, no, I didn't get out. I just had to roll down my window. And he rolled down his window. And I just said, listen, man, I'm really sorry for how I spoke to you. And it's not who I want to be. And it wasn't your fault.

And it just, I've just, you know, my day has gotten off on the wrong foot. And I just want you to know that, that I've just. I feel bad about it and you know you didn't deserve it right and just and honestly it was almost like the effect on him was such that it was almost better that the whole thing had happened that way rather than it not have happened in the first place like it's like like like being an asshole and successfully apologizing for it was almost better than not having been an asshole in the first place because because I could see that it gave this guy faith in humanity that he didn't have, he might not have had, had it just been a benign encounter

where I just waited and he got out of the way and I drove past, that would have been one thing. There would have been nothing salient about it, but I am absolutely sure that like I disconfirmed everything this guy thought about me when I apologized and the way I apologized. It felt like there was something redeeming about all of it. So I'm not recommending as a practice that you just, you know, you be an asshole and then you apologize for it, then you be an asshole again and you apologize for it. But there's an availability to those moments where you can just drop yourself and your story. And success in life, in my view, is more and more story of that where you just keep dropping the problem. It's not that you never have,

it's not that you never pick it up again, but you drop it faster and faster and faster. That rings true to me, and I can see how important that is as a microcosm of society waking up. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve the future? Again, it's going to echo some of the thoughts I've expressed here. I would wave away dogmatism or tribalism or both in some significant measure. I mean, so like one shorthand version of this is I would wave away religious sectarianism, right? I'd get rid of what people think of as organized religion. To a first approximate, I mean, it's not, it doesn't solve all of our political problems, obviously,

But as far as low-hanging fruit, that's the kind of thing I would disappear. So thank you for your time and continued passion and eloquence on these topics. Do you have any – well, let me ask you one final thing. If you were to come back 12, 18 months from now, is there any research question that is very alive for you now relevant to human futures that you would be interested? in taking a deep dive on that we didn't cover today. Well, I will be very, you know, 18 months from now, I'll be very interested to see how we're doing with respect to some of these variables around, I mean, I guess AI is at the nexus of a lot of it,

but, you know, I'm very concerned about, I mean, leave alignment aside, leave existential risk aside. I'm worried about the way social media and AI are going to supercharge our political hyper-polarization and the fragmentation of our society. So we're just not even talking about the same reality when we're talking to one another. So if I could just pull out a crystal ball and look ahead 18 months, I think the first thing I would look at is what is happening in that frame of the movie. Yeah, fully agree.

Any closing comments for people watching, listening, who understand or are curious about and agree with what you've laid out here today? Well, if they want any more of this, they can find me over at the Waking Up app or on the Making Sense podcast. I tend to show up on both of those platforms more than most. And also that my book, Waking Up, does cover much. of what we were talking about today. Sam Harris, thank you so much to be continued.

Yeah, thank you so much, Nate. Great to meet you. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani.

Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.