The Mindset Mentor - Neuroscientist REVEALS The Steps To Completely CHANGE YOUR LIFE Today! | Sam Harris | Expert Series

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Rob dial has an informative discussion with Sam Harris! -- Thank you to our sponsors: AthleticGreens: Visit athleticgreens.com/DIAL and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today! NetGear: Visit NetGear.com/BestWiFi and use promo code: DIAL to save 10% on America's #1 choice for WiFi!! FelixGray: Go to FelixGrayGlasses.com/DIAL for the BEST blue-light glasses on the market! BetterHelp: Visit BetterHelp.com/DIAL to join the over 1,000,000 people who have taken charge of their mental health!! -- Rob Dial @robdialjr Sam Harris @samharrisorg Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Hey, let me tell you about my favorite drink that I take first thing in the morning. It's called Athletic Greens. Here's how I start my day every day. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, and then I drink Athletic Greens. And within just 30 seconds, in one scoop, I get 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients. And it has everything that a multivitamin has, plus greens, prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes, immunity formula, adaptogens, and so much more.

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best Wi-Fi possible. So bring your Wi-Fi up to speed with Orbi Wi-Fi from Netgear. If you're ready for the best Wi-Fi ever, you can save 10% on America's number one choice for Wi-Fi at netgear.com slash dial, or you can use a promo code dial. So once again, if you're ready for the best Wi-Fi ever, go to netgear.com code dial. Welcome everybody to the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial, and I'm very excited to have my guest, Sam Harris, with me today. If you guys don't know who Sam Harris is, I would say, Sam, the best way of me explaining from what I've seen and read and listened to you is you're kind of the bridge for me of science and a lot of the Eastern philosophies that exist. And for the analytical Western mind like me makes it more palatable to go, oh yeah, this meditation thing does make sense. And it does show how this actually

does have benefit as well. Do you kind of feel like that's the way it is? And that's what you hear from other people as well, that you're kind of the bridge between the Western analytical mind and then also the Eastern philosophies and religions and practices as well. Yeah. Well, that, those are definitely two domains. I've been conscious of trying to bridge. So I'm happy that it's working for you. I guess I I'm building a few other bridges as well, but that is probably my main focus at the moment. And as you know,

I have a podcast where I talk about all manner of thing and much of it can be political and unrelated to what we're going to talk about. But I spend a lot of time in another wheelhouse, which is really mostly focused on my app, Waking Up at the moment. And that's where I talk about meditation and related brain science and find points of contact with Western philosophy. But the truth is there hasn't been that many points of contact with Western philosophy of late because it's been a couple of thousand years since Western philosophy was explicitly trying to answer the question of what it means to live a good life.

How do we live a life without regret? So much of philosophy has been totally divorced from that project and devoted to a bunch of interesting, but ultimately not all that consequential linguistic games and um so yeah i you know i am not i don't think of myself as a as you know consciously focused on the east per se but there there isn't a symmetry here which is that and then this is an analogy that that um may shock some people but it, but with respect to wisdom, specifically the wisdom born of contemplation, meditation, introspection, there's this asymmetry where in the East,

it's a little bit like the asymmetry between Western and Eastern medicine, right? I mean, like real medicine, medicine that makes serious contact with a biological understanding of, you know, what we are as organisms, that is Western medicine. It's not to say that nothing in Eastern medicine has ever worked, but for the most part, if it works, it has to conform to our understanding of biology as it has been born in the West. There really is a similarly extreme and invidious asymmetry between the West and the East with

respect to contemplative wisdom. And we might talk about that, but it's, so I just, by its very nature, I have, I have drawn a lot of insight from, from Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and methodologies. Yeah. And I know, I know you got your degree in philosophy and then also you got your PhD in neuroscience and you've been meditating for 30 years. What, what's, I guess the first question is, how did you get into it? What was like the, the beginning of it,

the genesis of deciding that, hey, I want to meditate? And then what have you noticed over the past 30 years as far as, I'm really curious as far as the past 30 years of you meditating, the difference in yourself, but also if you've noticed that I guess that our society is starting to go a little bit more towards mindful. It seems like there's at least a little bit of an awakening to this mindfulness and to actually try to be a little bit more present and try to meditate a little bit more. Have you noticed that as well? Yeah. Well, mindfulness is, is certainly in vogue and, you know, for, for good reasons it's, you know, there, there's a superficiality to much of it.

So, which is, you know, you know, we're worth at least being aware of and and if not criticizing but um i think you know even a little bit of mindfulness is is better than none and uh it's it's increasingly popular now because there is so much competition for our attention and it's it's so obviously dysfunctional you know the human mind was painfully distracted 2 000 years ago right so you know at the time of the buddha the problem you know the the explicit problem he was addressing were the consequences of having our minds be by default out of control but there's no question our situation has gotten

worse. We've got the most powerful companies on earth right now doing everything possible to pry our attention away from what matters most to us. Or what should matter most to us. And people, I think, are becoming more alert to the consequences of that, both personally and collectively. It's personally, we are living lives that feel more and more fragmented because, in fact, they are. And societally, we're witnessing just the utterly divisive and deranging consequences of being siloed into these bespoke information bubbles and being gamed differentially by algorithms, you know, whether it's YouTube or just the consequences of a Google search or what comes into our timeline on Facebook or Twitter. I mean, it's just, we've all been enrolled in a mass psychological experiment to which no one consented and the consequences of which have not really been thought through. And it's pretty clear that many of the consequences are bad.

and it's pretty clear that many of the consequences are bad so yeah many many millions of people now are seeing the need to reclaim their attention and you know i would argue that our attention really is the true source of our wealth in each moment and you know in therefore each day and over the course of our lives, even more than time. We all know what it's like to protect our time, but then to squander it because our attention is elsewhere. You decide to carve out some quality time with your kids and then you find yourself checking your phone and perhaps having to respond to some pseudo-emergency

born of your entanglement with it. And so we really have to seize more than time to be making contact with our lives. We need to be able to pay attention in each moment to what actually repays our attention. And meditation is really the art of discovering that and training that. Hey, let me tell you about my favorite drink that I take a couple times a day. It's called Athletic Greens.

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I love that phrase, attention is our true source of wealth. And as I've researched and watched some of your stuff and gone through and done the research for this episode, one of the things that you said is it's kind of just happiness boils down to our present. Our level of happiness boils down to our present moment and how present we can be. And the reality of your life is always now. That's what it is. But one thing that I say is that if somebody wants to be really good at basketball, if they were to wake up, they've never played basketball before their entire lives. And they just decide, I want to be really good at basketball. I'm going to wake up and I'm going to, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to

bed, 16 hours, play basketball every single day. In six months, you're going to be pretty damn good at basketball. And even if you're not going to go pro, but you'd be pretty good. What people don't realize, and I feel like in the world that we live in right now, is that we wake up and the very first thing that we do is we become distracted and we become distracted for 16 hours. And we basically, unbeknownst to us, become pros at being distracted. We have literally distracted ourselves from every single moment from we wake up, we literally look at our text messages or emails, we go to Facebook, Instagram, we wake up, go through all of those motions, take a shower,

and then we listen to something, we go to the work and there's people that distract, distract, distract, and literally we become masters of distraction. And so for us to be in the present moment, number one is so foreign, but it's also hard as hell right now. And I'm really curious with you for people who are out there. I know there's a lot of people that listen that meditation is just hard as hell to have, to be in the present moment without feeling some anxiety tends to be really hard. So what's the first step for someone that's out there to be able to actually experience the present moment and not be pulled by some distraction? Well, the first step is really to notice how

distracted you are. And that can come in stages. Most people, when they try to meditate, for first, I should say, there are different styles of meditation, there are different techniques. There are at least two basic principles that differentiate various approaches here. But both entail non-distraction as a basic goal. So the antithesis of meditation, whatever meditation you're attempting, is to be lost in thought, is to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking, right? So you want to be able to place attention on something and notice, in fact, what you intend to notice in those moments.

And you can do this narrowly. You can try to focus on a single object. So this is very common in the beginning. Let's say you're being taught a form of mindfulness meditation. You're told to pay attention to the breath, say, and then there's nothing magical about the breath, but it's always appearing, right? As long as you're alive, you're breathing and it's fairly salient. You can notice it. It's fairly salient. You can notice it. And unlike a mantra or some visualization or anything else you might strategically add to your like TM, you immediately begin thinking, well, you know, why what's, what's so important about these syllables. And, you know,

what is it a little, a little goofy pretending to be a Hindu here. I mean, there's skepticism that creeps in there for many of us. There's no dogma attached to your breath. No, exactly. I mean, it's just like, just pay, I mean, here, here's the basic hypothesis. If you want to understand your mind more deeply, if you want to become more sensitive to the mechanics of your happiness and suffering, it makes sense to pay attention, right? So let's see if you can pay attention. And the truth is, I would invite all of our listeners to try this.

If you tried to pay attention to something for the next minute, say, let's say your breath, or anything in your environment, you could just stare at an object, and you tried to do that to the exclusion of everything else. And in particular, you tried not to get carried away by thought while doing that. Unless you happen to be some kind of prodigy of concentration or you've trained significantly, the truth is you just won't be able to do that. And in the beginning, you'll be so distracted and distractible. You might not even notice how distracted you are. Right. You might come away thinking,

Oh, I did it. I paid attention to my breath for a full minute. And, you know, so what, what, what next?

You know, that was easy, right? That the reality is that the more you attempt to do that, the more you'll discover that there's just torrents of white noise in your mind, which is this conversation you're having with yourself. You'll try to pay attention to the breath and a voice in your head will say, what's that guy talking about? I can pay attention to the breath, right? And that's a thought that you're not noticing.

And it's a thought that feels, strangely, it feels like self, right? I mean, there's this identity that many of us feel identical, you know, virtually everyone by default feels identical to, which is this sense of being a thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience. So there's, most people feel that there's, it's not that there's just experience as a matter of their subjectivity. They feel that they're appropriating their experience. They're having an experience from some point of view as a subject inside their heads. And that is the central illusion that meditation is really designed to inspect and ultimately cut through. And it's something that falls away for us all the time haphazardly. And those are the moments in life we most value i mean the moments of of flow or or

you know ecstasy or you know just just a real connection with the present moment that seemed to come over us but we can't control that right it seems to depend on arranging things in the world so as to be really extraordinary. I mean, if you're a surfer, you have to be actually catching, you know, a great wave to feel suddenly slammed down into experience so fully that... And the wave always has to be bigger and you have to go for something more every time. Exactly. And, you know, you have to actually be having sex.

And it's just a moment, you know, in sex that, you know, may or may not come, right? It's like you're just, you're seeking a peak experience for the purpose of getting consciousness to fully coincide with the present moment. And it does, you it does occasionally for everybody, and that's why people value specific experiences. And then life becomes really an unending effort to keep arranging experience such that we can have more and more moments like that.

And we're constantly trying to get back to our favorite things on the menu. What meditation teaches you is that it's really not about those diverse experiences. There's nothing wrong with having those experiences and you'll continue to enjoy them. But what really is the principle there is the quality of attention, right? It's not the fact that you happen to be in the ocean and covered with saltwater and getting pushed around by a wave that makes surfing so extraordinary for someone who's really into it.

It's the, because really, we're just talking about a collection of sensations, right? We're just talking about, you know, your five senses and proprioception. And it's just not, that is not what is so extraordinary. What's so extraordinary is that it has done something to your mind that you haven't figured out how to do any other way, right? And meditation is a technique for directly seizing the reins there and learning that paying attention to anything sufficiently yields that kind of reward. And it really can be any arbitrary object even something as simple as the breath you know and something as as apparently boring as the breath so in the beginning you you attempt to do that you attempt to pay attention to the breath and you the first

thing you notice is how hard that is and And, I mean, as you say, on the point of anxiety, people can tend to encounter a lot of resistance. The mental effort of paying attention can be unpleasant. But the reality is that you can simply just drop back and relax. There is no straining effort that is actually required to do this. What you need to do is just recognize that you're already fully paying attention to something. I mean, you can notice simply what you're noticing in each moment.

And this is where the second type of meditation is more relevant. And this is just more interesting ultimately. And it's the one I recommend, which is, you're not trying to focus on one thing, not the breath or anything else, to the exclusion of everything else. You're simply trying to notice clearly

whatever you're in fact noticing. So sounds and other sensations in the body, and ultimately even thoughts themselves are not distractions from meditation, as long as you're clearly noticing what's arising in consciousness. And so in the end, you really want your mind to be like a mirror where everything just is spontaneously reflected you know whenever it comes before it and it's there's no there's no effort required the mirror doesn't have to reach out and seize its objects right it just you know it is just this this luminous context in which everything is appearing. And your mind can be like that. And you don't have to make it like that.

It's already like that. But meditation is the process whereby you would recognize that and become more familiar with it. Hey, is there something that's interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals? Maybe it's anxiety or stress or worry with how much is going on in the world right now. Well, BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. And you can start communicating with them in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line. It's not self-help. It's professional counseling done securely online. And there's a broad range of expertise available depending on what you need. And there's service available for clients worldwide and you can log into your account at any time send messages to your counselor and better

help is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change your counselors if you need to and it's more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available and better help wants you to start living a happier life today. So visit betterhelp.com slash dial. That's better H-E-L-P. And join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health with help from an experienced professional and get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash dial. Yeah, I love that. I did a Vipassana about two years ago and it's crazy. Exactly like you're saying, the first three or four days of Vipassana about two years ago. And it's crazy, exactly like you're saying, the first three or four days of Vipassana, the only thing they tell you to do is just watch your breath go in and out of your nose and just feel what it feels like to have it going out of your nose. And you notice

that- Where did you do that? I did it out in Dallas, right outside of Dallas. There's a Vipassana center that's out there. And was it a 10-day retreat or? Yep. 10-day retreat. And they follow the traditional Vipassana and you can't look anybody in the eyes. You can't journal, you can't do yoga. I mean, literally all that you can do is you can either meditate or you can go for a walk outside in this little tiny area that they had. And what you notice is how many, what I noticed specifically is how I could only get to like two or three breaths before my mind was already somewhere else. And the thing that they tell you is not to judge the fact that your mind is going everywhere. Just bring it back. And that's one of the hardest things that people tend to just judge themselves. Oh my God, there goes my mind again. No, it's not about that. It's just about bringing your mind back and just going, okay, yep, we did it again. You went off and now we're going to bring it back. And it's funny because after seven days, it started getting easier. And then eighth day, and I remember eighth or ninth day, I was sitting there and I was about two and a half

hours into meditation. And I just started to cry because of how amazing I felt. The amount of presence and joy, I was like, if I didn't have to go to the bathroom, I could stay here forever. And it was just, I've never felt so good in my life just by sitting there and meditating. And it's kind of like, the thing I love about what you're saying is that whether it's surf or sex or rollercoaster or racing that somebody wants to get into that brings them to the present moment, it's really the amount that they love is the amount of presence that they are feeling in that moment. And I guess from what we're saying is that meditation is allowing you to get rid of all of the distractions and bring as much presence as you possibly can to a

present moment so that even just sitting there and watching your kids play without feeling like you have to check your phone, the amount of presence and attention you can bring to that moment makes your life more rich. Yeah. Yeah. And ultimately it's not about changing experience. So it's very easy to get the sense that the goal of meditation is to experience extraordinarily pleasant states of mind. Now, as you point out, those states are available, right? You can certainly go on to a retreat and develop significant concentration. And along with that concentration, just these amazing qualities of mind begin to develop, right? You can feel bliss and rapture and thoughts can cease to arise and you can lose all sense of your body. So the mind becomes this really vast open space.

And it's very drug-like, right? It's very much like taking certain psychedelics or MDMA. You can be in an altered state. certain psychedelics or MDMA or anything. I mean, you can be in an altered state and it's very, I mean, it's almost inevitable that someone who has that experience for the first time or even the hundredth time will think, okay, this is the center of the bullseye. I mean, this is why I meditate. This is why I put my life on hold to come on this retreat. This is, now it's working, right? This is the I meditate. This is why I put my life on hold to come on this retreat.

This is, now it's working, right? This is the whole point. And if I could just feel more like this most of the time, you know, I'd be good, right? This is the project to get back here and stay here. But the problem is- It's another trap. Yeah, anything, any change in the character of experience

of that sort is predicated on some causes and conditions coming together which are by their very nature unstable right you have to be very concentrated you can't be you know you can't be checking your email you can't be you're as you said, if I didn't have to go to the bathroom, I could stay here, right? But you do have to go to the bathroom. And the more fundamental insight, which is the ultimate purpose of this kind of practice, is to recognize that consciousness itself, right? That the very consciousness that you would use to check your email or go to the bathroom or do anything else that seems to be not meditating that consciousness is already wide open free of self any kind of impediment i mean there's just no there's no problem there's no problem to solve

when you in consciousness as consciousness and that is the that is the thing that is experiencing everything, including states of mind and body like anxiety or anger, right? And so ultimately mindfulness becomes a practice of recognizing the openness and clarity and centerlessness, the selflessness of mere awareness, whatever's arising. And you can do that in the midst of your ordinary life and in the midst of even seemingly undesirable and neurotic states of mind, the very states of mind you're trying to get rid of, or maybe trying to get rid of by practicing meditation, so something like anxiety. So for instance, let's say you're afraid of public speaking and you need to go out and give a lecture and you have all this anticipatory anxiety, that experience, right, that can

be punctuated by mindfulness in a way that really is freeing. And it can be freeing even in the midst of anxiety, which is say that that you can you can recognize that you're free in some basic sense even before the the physiology of anxiety has dissipated and you can you can also reframe it as as um just energy essentially i mean like you know because when you're mindful of anxiety like because there's there's the physiology of it, the sensations in your body and in your face, right? And at the level of raw sensation, it, anxiety is very similar to other states of mind that you actually like, right? I mean, the, like the, the thrill of doing something that, you know, seems to be risky or, you know, or going on a roller coaster, you know,

or go, you know, going white, whitewater rafting or whatever it is that gives you a slightly adrenalized thrill, right? Something you would pay to do, right? That is very close to what you're feeling when you are having to give a lecture or a presentation and are nervous about it. It's just the frame around it is different. The cognitive summary of the experience is different. But when you get out of this,

the story you're telling yourself and you just connect with the raw sensations, they're not that bad. And in fact, they're not even valenced as bad or good. I mean, they're really indistinguishable from, again, the guy who's about to go on a roller coaster or get on a jujitsu mat or something. And so breaking that connection is actually stepping out of the thoughts and going to the raw experience can be freeing, really freeing, even before the qualities of experience have changed. I mean, they will change because the truth is once you break the spell of identification with thought, it's impossible to stay anxious or angry or in any of these classically negative states of mind for very long at all. I mean, the half-life of these emotions is very short, but they do have a half-life.

So if you're thinking anxiety-producing thoughts and then you suddenly become mindful, you can break the connection to psychological suffering instantly and just become interested and open to the sensations in your body. But the sensations have a half-life of their own, you know, 30 seconds, say. And so, the amazing thing is that even coincident with classically unpleasant experience, you can recognize that your mind is just this open context in which everything is appearing and find the freedom in

that. And that freedom isn't actually predicated on the next really pleasant thing happening. It's not predicated on, oh my God, this feels so good. That's more of a, again, it's more, you know, when you're doing that, you leap back on the treadmill of seeking to change your experience. And again, it's not that you can't change your experience, but all these changes are impermanent. And eventually we have to become interested in the context of these changes. And that's what meditation ultimately is. Yeah, I love that. And yeah, there's actually, I did an episode on this not too long ago about anxiety and excitement. There's an actual clinical term called arousal congruent, the way it's

like the actual physiological feelings inside of your body are exactly the same between anxiety and excitement. And it's called anxious reappraisal. Whenever you're just really anxious, you can actually trick your brain into thinking that it's actually excited. And they've done a lot of studies on this, but really what you're in that going to it actually is semi against what you're talking about in the first place, which is not even trying to change the emotions. It's just trying to be free from the emotions and not identify yourself as the emotion, right? Because some people say, oh, I'm an anxious person. And when you now have the identity of an anxious person, the habits, the traits, the qualities, the thoughts that you have are now going to be

congruent with that identity that you've now said for yourself. So what you're talking about is seeing the emotion, feeling the emotion and taking a step back and going, yeah, but it's going to end one time and I'm free from this emotion. And it seems like in that moment is actually where you step back and you're able to give yourself some power. Yeah. Well, I would recommend both. I think both approaches are very useful and practically speaking, indispensable for most of us. It's not that you couldn't speaking indispensable for most of us. It's not that you couldn't accomplish all of this with just meditation, but I think it's, I mean, to take the specific case of public speaking, right? I think the way to get comfortable in that circumstance is to get comfortable in that

circumstance, right? Theoretically, you could spend 10 years in a cave meditating, never testing your comfort in public speaking and get over your hangups and then magically find that when you're thrust in front of an audience, you're totally comfortable. You know, that's conceivable. I think that the mind can

certainly work that way, but for most of us, the experience would be to continually meet in ourselves this habit pattern of becoming anxious in response to this particular stimulus. And then the opportunity seems to be, okay, I can be mindful of the anxiety. I can be compassionate with myself around the anxiety. I can be nonjudgmental. I can keep dropping back and relaxing. I can decide that this is just not a bad experience.

This is just the experience bad experience this is just just just the experience and that's okay but i think it's it's rational to want something more than that which is there's no reason for this anxiety really right and there's and you can you want to be able to to find some point of leverage in yourself so that it's just this is no longer a problem fundamentally right and they're the you know techniques of cognitive reappraisal and reframing are just very useful and it's um and also just the sort of the this is more like, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, just becoming just manageable exposure to the stimulus that freaks you out and becoming more and more comfortable in its presence, right? And it's a kind of, you know, it's almost like a muscle building

principle here. I mean, you're just gradually increasing the load on yourself and becoming more and more comfortable with it. And then things begin to shift where whether or not anxiety, whether or not you're still adrenalized at all, it doesn't have the same meaning. I mean, you know, I used to be someone who was truly afraid of public speaking. I mean, it was something that I took steps to avoid, right? And then at a certain point, it was unavoidable. I was publishing my first book. I realized I had to do a book tour. And so I just had to get over it. And yes, mindfulness was certainly a part of getting over it, but I just also had to do it. And, you know, then, you know, if I, if I have to give a speech now, I'm sure if you, if you were tracking my galvanic skin response and my cortisol levels and, and, you know, every other physiological measure of anxiety, you would detect a change in my state, right?

It's not, if I have to go out on stage in front of 3,000 people, it's not exactly the same as me just walking down to the kitchen and making myself a cup of tea, right? Something I'm sure I'm adrenalized to some degree, but the whole thing has been so totally reframed for me that there's no problem with any of that. In fact, that energy

is useful, right? It makes me less of a sleepy guy. I mean, I tend to be a low energy guy anyway. guy anyway, I can use a little energy. And a lot of that is more than just mindfulness. It is simply having the experience and finding the various gears within it and just getting, frankly, succeeding at it, getting positive feedback for doing the thing in the first place, that begins to rewire your brain. And so it's, I mean, the basic principle here is that, you know, your brain is a machine that changes based on how it has been used, right? I mean, this is just neuroplasticity has this as a consequence. Your brain is continually changing as a matter of its physical structure and its moment-to-moment function and capacity to function in the future. It becomes what you do with it in some basic sense and this is there's a an analogy here to what we spoke about earlier in terms of our you know our exposure to to social media and media in general it's a you know every one of us has noticed that youtube is training itself to predict what we will want to

see right i mean the algorithm is is it is responding to how we use it, right? And, you know, and on some, in some basic sense, you get more of what you click on, right? If you keep clicking on films about, you know, bears attacking, you know, other animals, you just start seeing animal attack videos being sent your way, right? And they tend to get more extreme. And there's a deep analogy there with our own minds and brains, right? You begin to conform to what you pay attention to. You begin to conform to what you have found rewarding. And

in some basic sense, you can make your mind. You can intelligently guide and curate the contents of consciousness such that you become one way rather than another way. And I mean, I think you said this at the beginning of our conversation, that this, you know, in some sense, each of us is a pro at remaining distracted. And I mean, we're, you know, each of us really is the world champion at remaining similar to who we were yesterday. And that's not destiny. That's not, you know, we're not condemned to be that way. I mean, we're making a thousand choices that we're not even aware are choices each day. And, you know, something like meditation practice is a, is a choice, it seems like a, seems like a real choice that people have to make. I mean, they, they, they do feel like they have to

sort of get behind themselves and push in order to do it. And it takes some discipline, but eventually it just becomes a quality of your mind. I mean, it becomes something that's not actually what you're doing with your legs crossed on a cushion and then you stop doing when you go check your email. No, it becomes a kind of default state of your own awareness where this is just how you see the world. And meditation in that case is not something you're adding to experience. It's something you're doing less of it really is just less distraction right you're just you're just just whenever you're not distracted that is meditation once you know how to meditate and that's that's not something you could say of

somebody who who doesn't know what they're doing i mean their way is to be focused and to not be meditating you can be you know hyper focusedfocused on something that you hate, right? And that's not meditation. But once you know how to meditate, it's compatible with any other experience. This can sound a little paradoxical because people often want to say, well, I don't meditate, but I jog, or I play music, or I want to say, well, you know, I don't meditate, but I jog or I play music or I listen to music or I go out in nature.

And as though those things were substitutes for learning how to meditate. And the truth is that they're not substit any of those things substitute for any other. to meditate in particular how to be mindful and non-distracted well then you can do that doing any of those other things you can do that while jogging or surfing or whatever it is and and then those things become synonymous with meditation but the bridge can only be walked in in one direction right you just can't you can't get there from just jogging more. Yeah. I was really open up to that when I went. I was over in Thailand and I spent a couple of days with some monks over there and they taught us a walking meditation. It's a slow meditation where it's just, but you can't just take it and go, well, I'm just going to walk and that's going to be my meditation every single day.

And I think it's almost like escapism for a lot of people trying to find something to do to escape from this present moment. I'm curious your opinion, or if you happen to have any actual data on this as well, but are people running from something? That's what I'm always so curious of. Is the present moment so hard because we're running from something? Or is it, like you said, the quality of our mind, we don't want to come in contact with that, or we don't want to think about past traumas, or we don't want to think about we have a job that we hate? Do you feel like people are running from something, or is it just because we've trained ourselves not to be present? Well, I think it can be both, but part of it is just this unhappy accident of evolution.

I think what's happened is that language in particular, conceptual thought in general, but linguistic thought in particular, is so useful for us. I mean, just as social primates, we have evolved this capacity. And it is the thing that makes us human. I mean it is why we are so much more interesting than our ape cousins and it's how we create culture. It's how we pass down knowledge, you know, brain to brain and across generations. It's the basis of everything we do and and across generations. It's the basis of everything we do.

And yet it is a kind of curse psychologically for most of us most of the time, right? Because once this conversation gets started, once it gets internalized, I mean, just look at what happens with a young child. A young child is more or less discovered in his or her crib by others, but before he or she discovers himself there, right? Like there can't be a significant sense of self, certainly not a, you know,

a consciously, you know, recursive one in a six-month-old child, right? Now there's some rudiments of individuation there, but what's happening is you have a mind which is continually confronted with by other people

for whom it is an object in the world right like you're being perceived as an object in the world by your parents mainly and they're talking to you and you have this you know you you come into this world with the the operating system that that is is poised to learn language and poised to learn how to differentiate self from world. And this gets tuned up in dialogue with your parents. But it's really, it takes a while. And you begin to participate in this language game. And you're always, once you can learn to talk, you're talking to your parents.

And then you begin to talk to them on, in some sense, when they're not there, right? They leave the room and you're still chattering and you're talking to yourself as though that made any sense. So just look at the structure of our subjectivity here and how peculiar it is. When we're alone with our thoughts, we are very often in conversation, explicit conversation with ourselves. conversation explicit conversation with ourselves right and we'll be narrating our experience to ourselves as though there was some part of us that wasn't also having the experience like you

know who are we who are we telling right like what you know if uh if you know i'm looking for something on my desk and i find it i might think oh, oh, there it is, right? But I see it, right? Who am I telling? Like, is there somebody else in the search party who needs to be told that we found this thing, right? There's an implied duality here that makes absolutely no sense. And to just, to get a kind of triangulate on yourself and get a sense of how crazy and non-normative your, your default thinking is, just imagine how crazy you would seem if all of your thoughts were broadcast on a loudspeaker for everyone to hear. wherever you walked you know you walk into a room and you just helplessly externalized every single judgment and comparison and self-judgment and half noticing and it's like well why is she doing that and what's what's what's with that hair like just just like just compulsively fragment the experience with this just logorrhea, right? I mean, you're just vomiting words on everything all the time inside. And the real difference between a normal, healthy mind

and the mind of a psychotic is we have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. If you're talking to yourself out loud in public, well, then people, within three seconds, people understand that you're crazy. And all of us have done that too. I mean, some of us, you know, we talk to ourselves when we're alone, we'll say something out loud. I mean, sometimes, you know, your thoughts escape your lips. But if that happens compulsively, well,

then that is kind of the bright dividing line between mental illness and normal unhappiness. But the normal unhappiness is so similar to mental illness right it's so similar to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming and and so so on some level that the the um the real context here for meditation is to form a different expectation about what it means to be healthy and, quote, normal. What can you expect of your mind on a day-to-day basis? And what are you right to to expect here and it does it just it does take some training to even see the see a glimmer of daylight here so that you can see that okay it's actually possible to uh be at peace more and more of the time,

and actually most of the time. And when you get destabilized by anxiety or anger or there is some real emergency in your life, well, then that swing into obvious mental suffering need not last very long. Most people, before you know how to meditate, and if you get angry, if something in the world makes you angry, you will be as angry for as long as you'll be angry, right?

Like there's nothing, there's nothing but just the dynamics of your own conditioning that will determine, or some intervention from the world that will determine how much of an emergency that becomes for you and how, and how, how fully you, you destabilize your own life based on, on the things you might say and do based on being angry, right? Like what are you going to say to the people you're angry at? Right. And how deranging of your relationships is that going to be? You're just hurled on the winds of your conditioning.

And yet once you develop even a little bit of mindfulness, you then have the ability to decide how long you want to stay on that ride for. to decide how long you want to stay on that ride for, right? And you can literally just step off and decide, okay, anger is serving no purpose here. I'm over it. And you can do that very, very quickly because, again, the half-life of an emotion like anger is very, very short when you're no longer lost in the thoughts that are telling you

that you should be angry about this thing. So it becomes a kind of superpower to be able to do that. Yeah. I always say the path of growth for most people is realizing that something happens and there's a reaction to it. And that reaction can last. Someone can do something to me and I can be pissed off at her for a week before I start working on myself and trying to become mindful and start reading and better myself and grow. And as I work on myself for a year or two years, that thing can happen again. And maybe it's five days this time instead of seven days. And then I work myself for a few more days. Maybe it's three days. Maybe it's one day. And then you get it down to maybe it's 30 minutes. And then the real path is that something could happen and you might not even react to it

because you might reframe the situation that just happened. And really that's the paths of growth that people are working for is that no matter what circumstances come at me, I will be able to handle them by building up my strong mind. And I want to take a really weird pivot because I'm really, really curious with this as well. One thing that you're really good at obviously is mindfulness, meditation, understanding the human mind. But I know that you also have your thumb on the pulse of what's going on in the world, politics, that type of stuff that's happening. And I'm really curious. There's one thing that you said in one of the interviews I was listening to, and this was actually a few

years ago, was that we have to be open to the fact that we might be wrong. And in fact, probably are wrong a lot of the time. And I love that because I've actually tried to be like, hey, maybe I'm always wrong. And I feel like lately, I don't know if you felt this way, a lot of people are so stuck into who they are in their beliefs, their political beliefs, whatever happens. And I've noticed, and I'm sure everybody else listening has, that it seems like over the past year, maybe, the divide between one side and another side, whatever side those are, has gotten really strong from one side to the other. And I'm curious with you, do you feel like it's a psychological thing of tribalism of, I am a Democrat or I'm a Republican or I believe in this and I believe in this and that people are the psychological, this is who we are and this is how I've been for millions of years, that the tribalism that's kicking in and it's really hard because of all of the circumstances have gotten harder over the past year? Or do you

feel that maybe there is a system that's actually working against us in our own psychology and creating the circumstances that's making us divide faster? Well, there's a lot of tribalism and tribalism is something that we're evolved to participate in, right this is this is really old legacy code you know predates our humanity even right so there's that layer of things and then it's being leveraged by technology again because now your tribalism can be can be amplified it can be it can be brought to scale you know your tweet can go viral right so you can be seemingly leading the tribe in any moment, right? Right. And you can also silo yourself so that you're not getting any kind of information corrective from, you know, any other tribe, right?

So you can become, you know, informationally xenophobic you know and and and really succeed at that right you can you can you can kind of pre-stigmatize any inconvenient information in such a way that you you live in a in a in a hermetically sealed worldview yeah and and because of the internet because of just how much information there is on anything right now, because it's not just you and a few crazy people in your village, it's, it's, you know, thousands of people at minimum for anything you want to get embedded in. Right. So it's reinforcing it almost. Yeah. You can get endless reinforcement for the craziest possible idea.

If that's, if you, if you want to go down that rabbit hole and, you know, and, you know, literally you can be a flat earther and just spend full days seemingly having your,

your, you know, genuinely, genuinely crazy idea confirmed. Right. And what's more, know, genuinely, genuinely crazy idea confirmed. Right. And what's more, the, the, the provenance of this information can be rendered opaque in a way that, that it never could be in the real world. Right. So like if, if you were, let's say going to be, you were, let's say, going to be totally obsessed with the idea that people are getting abducted by UFOs, right?

The abduction phenomenon is something you take a strong interest in. You believe it's really happening and you read a bunch of books on it and it just seems like it's really worth your attention. And you read a bunch of books on it. And it just seems like it's really worth your attention. And intergalactic travelers have come here for no purpose other than to probe us anally and kill our cattle. And it's kind of a strange agenda. But clearly it's happening, right? It used to be that if you were going to get really into that, well, then you would have to kind of physically go to one of these conferences

and meet the people who are also really into that. And it would just so happen that there would be many other social cues that would begin to reveal other aspects of this project that give some clue as to why it's fairly disreputable. I mean, you're meeting people who are, for the most part, advertising their capacity to believe in lots of crazy things. This doesn't capture everyone who's ever paid attention to that phenomenon but it's it's just there's a there's a um uh there are many tells you know to to to the the problem of of somebody you know devoting their lives to something

that is is is fringe and and requires a lot of you know conspiratorial uh thinking that is fringe and requires a lot of conspiratorial thinking that is not governed by the most careful principles of reasoning. It's not an accident that people who believe one outlandish conspiracy theory tend to believe many of them, if not all of them right and many of them are working in cross purposes and people are comfortable with the the incoherence there but so having to do that in the in the in the brick and mortar world was one thing but now doing it online you just it's stripped away from all of those contextualizing cues, right? You're not meeting the people who don't bathe quite enough, right? You're seeing a fairly slickly produced video that may have been produced by some 18-year-old in his mother's basement, but is really pretty well done, right? And you're not in a position to to

debunk it right and all of a sudden it becomes yet another data point in your worldview that is that may in fact be just um you know every bit as persuasive to you as a a documentary you know that took a million dollars to produce and is getting run on frontline on PBS that night. Right. And, and just basically you think you have in hand the frontline version of the confirmation of, of, uh, whatever it is. And so there's, there's a, a leveling of, of, um, kind of a reputational leveling and a coincident loss of trust in the normal gatekeepers of information. And some of this loss of trust has been earned, right? I mean, many of these institutions have degraded themselves in how partisan they've become or just how gamified they've been by the change in business models online.

I mean, the clickbaitification of everything has crept into even the New know, the New York Times and, you know, our best organs of journalism. So, you know, that's a problem with the business model and, you know, the technology, but it has left us, we just don't have a cognitive immune system for this yet. We have to build one. And it's left us in this very precarious place where, you know, our politics and our ability to collaborate with one another generally and just to find common projects that we agree on, right? You know, how do we respond to a pandemic, right? What do we do about global warming? Is global warming even a thing, right? Is it a Chinese hoax?

The president just said it's a Chinese hoax. Well, what do I think about that? How can I know? Let's listen to Alex Jones for the next four hours. It's completely deranging. And we have to find some way to put our house in order. And it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. I think what it all comes back to, whether it's meditation, whether it's all this is full self-reliance and realizing that you're in control of every thought that you have, whether it wants to be crazy and completely out there and you want to go out and Google it and see if you can reinforce that thought. Or if you just see every thought that's coming in and go, all right, well, that's a thought that's coming in.

I'm not attached to it. And don't put any emotion behind it as well. The thing that I love about what you preach is, you know, it's kind of, you have to go out there and experience it, right? There's no dogma behind it. It's for you to go out and experience and see what works for you, what doesn't work for you, but ultimately the power's in your hands, which is the most beautiful part about it but um but i appreciate your time oh go ahead rob i just add one thing here so a crucial piece here is to become sensitive to the the mechanics of all of this and again this is the meditation is the tool you would use to to become sensitive but i mean for instance to notice that the way certain facts or arguments or

notice that the way certain facts or arguments or information make you feel right is separable from the truth of any proposition right so if you know somebody tells you something that is a fact and this causes you anxiety or you know you're disgusted that that such a thing could even be true, or you notice that you hope it's true, right? Like all of these, the emotional valence with which your mind greets any proposition, that is separable from evidence for or against that proposition. And so when someone is challenging one of your cherished beliefs and you feel angry or anxious or you're in the grip of some psychological rejection state, right?

psychological rejection state, right? That should, most people's default setting is that the very feeling itself is evidence against the proposition, right? Or for it in the opposite case when you want to believe something. And the first thing to notice is that that's just not true, right? I mean, that is a guaranteed way to be misled in life, right? That is the emotional code that gives us confirmation bias and wishful thinking and several obvious reasoning fallacies and bad heuristics. you know, reasoning fallacies and, you know, bad heuristics. And so to step out of the mechanics of that is really important. And, you know, the alternate piece of code you could be running here is just to become interested in your reactions to things like that. in your reactions to things like that. To have the metacognitive layer of just being curious about,

what does it say about me that I'm so reactive to this proposition that I'm spending all my fuel now trying to figure out what's wrong with it and how to knock it down rather than just entertaining the argument for a few more seconds. Right. you're often entertaining things that just would bother anyone else.

I did a podcast with someone who's a, what's called an antinatalist, somebody who thinks that by bringing children into the world, you're creating great harm because life is really unendurable in the end. And you're basically committing a crime on anyone who you bring into the world. And therefore, it's a good thing not to have kids. It'd be a good thing for all of us to disappear. There are many different flavors of this kind of nihilism. But anyway, there are people who are committed to this idea that life is not worth living.

We should admit it. If we all died in our sleep tonight, that would be a net positive. And a few things follow from that that strike many people as starkly unethical or at least undesirable. And so you sort of get into the thicket of these thoughts. And you can just have a bad taste in your mouth. You can think, I don't want to think about this. This is awful. And, you know, who is this person who would try to spread these ideas, right? But

you can completely flip the script here and just become interested in both the ideas and in the game of trying to figure out what's wrong with them. And in the discovery, I mean, the thing you And in the discovery, I mean, the thing you should learn to find mental pleasure in is to discover that you are wrong about something of consequence, right? Yep. And that is a kind of a firmware upgrade that most people have not downloaded at this point. Most people do not want to discover where they're wrong, they certainly take no pleasure in it. Right. Uh, and this is, this is something that I, I really, I strongly recommend that, that you, that people find this gear and, and begin to, to seek it out because it's, that is the, the ultimate error correcting mechanism, right?

To be asking the question, what if you're wrong? Be interested in it and ultimately to be rewarded by it. Because the thing is, what we see so often is this doubling down phenomenon where it becomes obvious that somebody's wrong. It's certainly obvious to most of the people in the audience. And yet you see this person doubling down and tripling down on a bad idea. Right. And it's, it's,

it's mortifying or it should be, it should be mortifying, right? This is the, you, you shouldn't want to be wrong publicly, emphatically longer than you need to be. right? And so, you know, what you want is the cognitive flexibility. I mean, even if your only concern is for how you appear as an ego in

the world, the way you want to appear is flexible enough to realize that you were wrong before your opponents do, right? Or you're so fast to recognize it that when they point it out, they don't even get the satisfaction of landing a blow on you because you're already pivoting. You're already saying, oh yeah, well, that's a good point, of course. And they get the pleasure of instructing you and they don't even feel like they've consummated a debate anymore. It just feels like, okay, this is just, he wasn't, you know, I tried to hit him in the face, but his face wasn't there long enough. Right. And so again, even if egocentricity is your, you know, your, your true operating system,

right. You still don't want to be one of these people who is doubling down on an obvious error ever. And yet so many people just can't. It really is a kind of childlike automaticity where it's a reflex. It's like, okay, it's some version of the sunk cost fallacy. You've been committed to this thing and so you've invested in it and now you're going to throw good money after bad until you know essentially you go

broke reputationally and you know you see so much of that on social media and it's so reinforced within the echo chamber of any kind of digital tribe that, I mean, what is so dysfunctional here is that there's so many ecosystems now you can find where nobody's keeping score in any kind of honest way. I mean, in my view, the ultimate example of this is in Trump's bubble, right? I mean, like nobody who is a fan of Trump is actually keeping track of his errors, right? I mean, they don't, they don't care about his errors, right? And so he has learned not to care about his errors. And it becomes a kind of, I'm sure you've seen these, these fake martial art videos, right? Where you have the, the, the, the grandmaster of some completely fake martial art. Someone who falls over.

Yeah. But the truth is, you can get deep enough into that world where apparently you, the fake martial artist who's knocking people over with magic, believes that he actually has magical powers, right? Because no one has, it's been decades since anyone resisted you, right? Everyone has been collaborating with your bullshit for years

and I mean it's gotten to the point, I don't know if you've seen these videos, but there's been a couple of cases where these fake martial artists have issued challenges to out to the world of other martial artists, you you know people who are people who are not part of their cult to come in and test my powers and you know they there's this one ghastly video of this you know 80 year old master of hocus pocus just getting repeatedly punched in the face by a real martial artist yeah i've seen like that that disconfirmation uh you know where you you bump into hard objects in reality, that doesn't happen enough in, I mean, there are certain places where it is guaranteed to happen. And that's, but, you know, unfortunately, those are, those corrections are coming from the uns unspoken world right like you know the world

of a pandemic you know the coronavirus doesn't care about our politics it just cares about the actual dynamics of the the epidemiology right so it'll spread by its purpose you know by its its you know uh principles and it will will affect us to whatever degree it does. And then there's the layer of all of our talking about it and disagreeing about it and fighting about whether or not to wear masks. If we're going to thrive as a species, we have to get the map to fit the territory better and better. And what we're seeing more and more now is that the cartographers have lost their minds. And they're shrieking at one another and they're not making any sense. And it certainly doesn't help when you see that style of conversation begin to invade science and journalism as it has.

Yeah, I completely agree. And it seems like with both of them, it's more of like whether it's the meditation, whether it's realizing that you're wrong and admitting it, it's a mental gym. It's realizing that there's growth through all of it. There's growth through sitting through a meditation when you don't want to and seeking that growth. There's growth in going, damn, I was wrong. There's growth in that versus, and that's where people should get their dopamine release from is from, oh, I'm getting growth from this of realizing that I was wrong versus my dopamine release is proving to myself that I'm right. And I think if we could all kind of take a page from that book, I think a lot of people would, well, what would be a better place if more people meditated, more people admitted they were wrong?

That's for sure. So I appreciate your time, man. I know that you're busy. And I know you've got an app. You've also got a podcast as well that are perfect for my listeners and people that are out there. So if people want to find you out on the Internet, what's the best places to find you? Well, for the app, it's just wakingup.com. And for the podcast, the podcast is called Making Sense.

So you just search under that and you'll get it. But my website is samharris.org, which can give you all the other information about me. Amazing. Well, I definitely appreciate your time. Thank you, Rob. It's great to talk to you. Absolutely, man. I hope you have a great day. Thank you for everything. You too. Take care.