The School of Greatness - 824 Suffering vs. Satisfaction with Sam Harris, Part 2

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

THERE IS JUST CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS CONTENTS. When you’re dreaming, you don’t know that you’re asleep. You’re caught up in the dream. That’s how most of us go through life. We’re unaware that we’re not actually experiencing the things we are feeling. But you can break the spell in a moment with meditation. When you become present, you’re no longer asleep. It’s time to wake up. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I continue my conversation on meditation and mindfulness with one of the greatest thinkers of our time: Sam Harris. Sam Harris is a New York Times best-selling author, podcast host, and creator of the Waking Up Course. 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. Sam shares that when he experiences emotions like anger to sadness, he becomes interested in the emotion. He observes his body’s reaction and tries to distance himself from the feelings. So get ready to learn how mindfulness can end suffering on Episode 824. Some Questions I Ask: How do you eliminate worry? (49:00) How do we stay satisfied in an unsatisfied world? (1:07:00) When do you feel the most loved? (1:15:00) What’s the one lesson you want to teach your kids? (1:21:00) What’s the question you wish you had the answer to? (1:31:00) What are you most proud of? (1:40:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: The landmarks for mindfulness (53:00) Why the feeling of self is an illusion (54:00) The hardest part of meditation (01:11:00) What death has meant in Sam’s life (01:37:00) If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/824 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes

This is episode number 824, part two, with New York Times bestselling author, Sam Harris. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. My friend, thank you for being here. And if you listened to part one, then you are excited about this episode because, man,

he went off, Sam went off on a lot of different things, talking about eliminating worry, how people feel like passengers in their own bodies, and how life is not about seeking happiness. He also spoke about when he feels the most loved, sympathetic joy, and how that gives us more reasons to be happy. Sam talked about his mother and the lessons he learned from her, Sam talked about his mother and the lessons he learned from her and how death has influenced how he lives his life today. In this episode, we cover the importance of identifying when you're lost in thought and when you're present. So how do we identify that?

The truth of emptiness and how it can free you from your experiences. How recognizing consciousness is the antidote to always seeking satisfaction, real love as the antithesis of envy, and how feeling sympathetic joy for others can bring happiness. And the benefit of facing death as a reality, I've been talking about this more, facing your own death can actually bring you more joy. Very excited about this. Again, if this is your first time being here and you don't know who Sam Harris is, he's a New York Times bestselling author, five-time New York Times bestselling author. He's been featured all over the place in topics including neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice,

human violence, and rationality. His work has been published in 20 different languages, been discussed in New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone, all over the world. He's studied and practiced meditation for more than 30 years with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation experts. And he's created the Waking Up course for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern scientific context. How do we move on from the story, or how do you do it? Do you live with a lot of worry each day, or are you so good now at just saying, this doesn't matter, this is in the past, or I'm

concerned about something that's not going to happen potentially in the future, so let me get back to present. Like, how do you not worry? Well, so, I mean, everything for me is sort of at my level of practice. I've done a lot of meditation practice, but, you know, there's apparently much more to do in my case. Because you still worry? There's no emotion that I don't experience, right? So I can experience, you know experience intense anger, intense sadness, depression, worry, all of it.

And the difference for me, and this is something that I wouldn't have but for the fact that I've really learned to practice mindfulness, the difference is when my suffering becomes at all intense, it functions as a kind of mindfulness alarm, right? And so, like, the truly kind of mediocre path for me is to be within the range of sort of normal annoyance and normal desire. Mid-level suffering. Yeah, where the alarm's not going off, and I'm just a normal jerk, you know, within those bounds, right? Like, you know. A little anxious here

and there, yeah. Yeah, so I go to the dry cleaner and discover that they, you know, within those bounds, right? Like, you know. A little anxious here and there, yeah. Yeah, so I go to the dry cleaner and discover that they, you know, destroyed my suit, right? So it's like, in the scheme of things, it does not matter at all, right? But you're frustrated, you're annoyed. Yeah, it's like, what do you do? You know, so it's like attention is captured, and when attention is captured by that, you know, I'm the same guy i always was right right um you're always a jerk yeah well just like whatever it's like i or

attention can be captured pleasantly by something that you're like oh god i mean this is the best bagel i've ever had right so i'm like i'm just going for the food and there's no perspective you know like i'm not i'm not consciousness is trimmed down to just the pleasure or pain of that experience for that moment, right? And all of those moments for me have the character of being, they really are deeply analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. So the reality is you're in your bed, prone or supine, or you're in a situation that's completely unlike the situation you think you're in. And you think you're on a beach, you know,

talking to somebody or, you know, arguing with somebody or you showed up at a conference and, you know, you didn't have your pants, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, you're relating to people who don't exist. And I mean, just, I mean, we're psychotic when we're dreaming. We're completely confused, right, unless it's a lucid dream, right, which is its own interesting experience. But assuming your dreams are not lucid, you are completely unaware of a larger, the true larger context to your experience.

And you're merely hostage to whatever is playing out in that dream. And that most of experience that is mediated by thought, apart from mindfulness, most experience has that character. So for me, once you turn up the dial on the intensity of the experience, then something else comes online for me more reliably. And then you can, you know, if you really know how to meditate, you can break the spell decisively in an instant. And in that instant, you have woken up.

I mean, you're no longer in bed asleep, right? So I can do that. I mean, I guess there are two landmarks I would suggest to notice. I mean, if somebody's practicing meditation and they're really getting into it, I would say there are kind of two points that I would flag as points of real durable progress. points of real durable progress. The first is just to notice the difference between being lost in thought and clearly paying attention to experience, you know, prior to thought, prior to concepts. That's sort of small-M mindfulness that people learn,

you know, once they start a practice. And that has the consequences of if you do that enough, if you keep punctuating your ordinary experience with that just nonjudgmental, nonreactive acceptance of what the present moment is, right? So you feel anxiety. You feel irritation. You become mindful. You just become interested in that feeling, in just the neurophysiology of it, the sensation of it.

You get out of your thinking about all the reasons why you should feel anxious or you should feel irritated. You just become merely present with the experience. And then you notice this kind of half-life, it just dissipates, right? And there's a certain kind of freedom in that. There's another point, which in my meditation app, I spent a lot of time trying to push people toward earlier than is conventional. There's another point where you realize that the feeling of self, the feeling that there's a subject in the center of experience, is an illusion. It's actually not there. You can look for it deliberately enough.

That we are an illusion. Yeah, it's not that your body is an illusion. It's not that people are illusions. But the sense that you have that you are a subject in your head, kind of riding around in the body. Like you're behind your face in this moment. Like you and I are talking. I'm looking at you. The normal, the default situation is for you to feel implicated by my gaze. Like I'm looking at something. You're on the other side by my gaze. Like I'm looking at something.

You're on the other side of my gaze. Right. You mean my mind is or my consciousness? It's you. It's like you're, there's something, if you say something and I get a weird expression on my face, like I don't believe you or whatever, you can read that back.

It falls back to you. It's like it points back to you. Like if I point at you, it feels like I'm pointing at something. I mean, this feels rude. This is normally a rude gesture, right? So it's like you feel like you're over there. You're behind your face, right? That's what we call I.

I mean, the personal pronoun for most people refers to that feeling of being in the head. It doesn't refer to the whole body. You know, it doesn't refer to, because people don't feel identical to their whole bodies. They feel like passengers in their bodies. They feel like subjects. They feel like the center of experience. And the real goal of meditation is to recognize that that is an illusory position. That's actually not your position.

There really is just experience. There's just consciousness and its contents, and there's no center to it. So at a certain point, mindfulness can become the experience of just cutting through that illusion. So it's not that you're having to be strategically mindful of anxiety or anything else that you may notice that you want to have dissipate. You suddenly recognize that there's just no center to experience. And then your meditation practice becomes

recognizing that in each moment. And that has the consequence of just, I mean, that's synonymous with not being lost in thought in that moment. It's synonymous with not giving any more energy, therefore, to this reaction you're having. It's synonymous with no resistance to whatever is appearing, right? So you're actually free even before the physiology of the negative state dissipates. So let's say you're angry, you're feeling road rage, you recognize there's no center. Your freedom in that moment isn't even contingent upon the anger going away. Because anger at that moment is no longer anger.

Anger is just tension. It's just tension in your face. You could have tension in your face because you had some dental procedure. It literally just completely disconnects the sense of your own well-being and expansiveness because, again, the center has dropped out. There's just consciousness and its contents. has dropped out. There's just consciousness and its contents. And it doesn't actually... So this is, again, this can sound paradoxical, but then, from that point of view, the kind of experience I had on MDMA

doesn't even improve one's situation. Because when there's just consciousness without a center, on some level there's no... I mean, this is the... The truth here that I'm alluding to, I mean, the jargon in Buddhism is the truth of emptiness, right? Sure. There's just, there's nothing,

there is no thing, right? Everything is just, to take an analogy that works for me, have you ever gone to a restaurant where there's one wall that is a kind of perfect and perfectly clean floor to ceiling mirror. And for most of the meal, you're, you've been assuming that the restaurant is twice the size that it actually is, right? So you're like, there's a bunch of people over there that you just thought were people, but you know, at some point in the meal, you recognize it's just half the size right and that's just glass and it's a wall of

light right yeah yeah and so that transition where you like like if someone just walks up and puts their hand on the glass and in that moment all the stuff you thought was happening there someone could have been having an argument right or like someone could have someone could physically assault someone there. Now, forget it. This is where the analogy breaks down because you know there's something happening in the real world. But what happens when you touch the mirror and equalize all of that as just a display of light, on some level, everything has become equalized. The ugly things are the same as the beautiful things.

It's just life. And that's a good analogy for the freedom you can experience when the illusoriness of the self drops out of consciousness. For that moment, and it might only be a moment. The course of practice, once you're able to practice in that way, it's really just about punctuating your life with brief moments of that, you know, a hundred moments like that over the course of a day or an hour, right? It's not about, at least not, you know, anytime soon for most of us, it's not about spending an hour in that state, right? But being able to punctuate life with that insight, it really does change the game. Because in each one of those moments, you realize life isn't about seeking to become happy. You can only be happy.

You can only be free in this moment. It's only ever this moment. Now. Now. Seeking for the future. What you have is this moment and then your thoughts about the past and the future. That's always been true and that will always be true for as long as you have any experience at all. So you're either looking over the shoulder of this moment for what's coming, you know, worrying about it or greedily, you know, kind of reaching out to the thing you want.

So much of life, 99.9% of life for most of us is seeking certain experiences and getting them and feeling kind of the briefest moment of gratification. Like we unite with the object of desire for barely a second. Then we're on to the next thing. Or then we're even, I mean, even the thing we desired, if it persisted longer, would become undesirable. I mean, just imagine like, you know, you're going for the bowl of ice cream. You're getting sort of the peak taste of it. Imagine if that taste never went away, right? Like that wouldn't, that's the pleasure, you know, that's not the pleasure you want. And that would be intolerable. I mean, you'd go to a doctor's, like, I had a bowl of chocolate ice cream last week, and I can't get this taste of chocolate out of my mouth, right? I mean,

so what happens is that you take a bite of ice cream that you thought you wanted more than anything at that moment, but actually it's a little too much. And you reach for a glass of water and you wash it out at a certain point, right? Like it's not, on some level, all of these things we want are a mirage, right? You know, you get, you know, whatever. It's like you wanted a new watch and you want to be associated with this object, and you went shopping for it, and you finally got it. It's like, this is exactly how I wanted it to look on my wrist, and boy, am I happy with this. And then you have these brief moments of interaction with it. But when you actually drill down on what the experience is like, the experience of being satisfied with something in sensory space,

it is kind of paradoxical and insubstantial. And the thing we actually want is a good enough excuse to totally relax into the present, like to fulfill the desire so that we no longer feel desire. Interesting. You want to be free of desire, right? You want to be free of all of your problems. You want your to-do list to be all checked off and then empty. And those become peak moments, right?

But the problem is we associate the experience of completely giving up the war and being completely satisfied in the present, the brief moments we touch that, you know, in positive psychology, many of these states are called flow states, those brief moments where we're not worried about anything, right? we're not worried about anything, right? We associate that with some enormous effort we made to get here, right? And yet that is, in fact, the way consciousness already is if we can just pay attention to it. And that's why meditation becomes kind of the ultimate hack in how one can pursue one's well-being because it's just true that consciousness

is that way and yet we're spending all of our time seeking to have a good enough reason to realize that. It's like if I could just win the Nobel Prize, I'd feel good enough about myself that I wouldn't feel like I would have to do anything. Stop everything else. Just, you know, there would be no egocentric grandiosity program that I would need to run because I'd have a Nobel Prize. But then you'd be like, well, what's next? And how do I stay relevant?

That's exactly what happens to everyone who wins the Nobel Prize. What happens is someone says, what are you going to do next? You're like, I just won the Nobel Prize. What else can I do? And the half-life of those peak experiences is incredibly short. It's a moment. In the best case, it's days. But in reality, it's unwinding over the course of minutes.

I remember my whole childhood, I wanted to be an All-American athlete. It was like all I obsessed about. I cared about it deeply. I would sacrifice my life. I never had a sip of alcohol in high school or college because I was like, I'm going to do whatever it takes to be an All-American athlete. Was it football? Football, yeah.

I didn't go partying. I didn't go do anything. I was like, I'm not gonna date girls, whatever it takes, I will train in the morning, in the afternoon, no sugar, anything. And I remember, I did it in football and decathlon, but the first time it happened was in the decathlon. And I remember, it was down to the last event in the decathlons, two-day event, 10 events.

I knew exactly who I needed to beat in this 1,500-mile, 1,500 race to get the eighth place. And eighth place was the cutoff for the All-American. So I was like, okay, it comes down to this event, and I just got to do something I've never done before to make it happen. All my life comes down to this moment, right? 22 years of existence, dreams, dedication, commitment, everything. And I go out and I run the race of my life. I beat this guy by like a couple of seconds

and it was so close to see how many seconds I needed to beat him. And they call my name as the eighth place. So I get the All-American, I get the trophy, I stand up on the thing in front of the whole stadium, and I'm excited for literally maybe seven minutes. Maybe 10 minutes. And then I was mad the whole dinner.

Like I'm sitting there with my family, my parents are there, my teammates, everyone's celebrating me, and I'm angry. I don't want to talk to anyone. And I didn't understand why. And I think it was because I was so obsessed of reaching this moment that I was like, I don't feel like it's good enough for me. I only got eighth place all over. Can I get number one? You know, what am I going

to do now? You move the goalpost. Yeah. And I was just like, well, what now? Like I'm done with school. Now what do I do? I've been chasing this thing for so long. What do I do now? All the drugs and alcohol. Everything I gave up for this. So how do we stay satisfied in an unsatisfied world? Well, that's the false premise. This is why, again, I don't consider myself a Buddhist, and in my meditation app, I'm not teaching Buddhism, but it's true that Buddhism has such a good handle on this that it's easy to default to Buddhist language. So it's often said that, you know, the Buddha talked about life being suffering, and that's actually a mistranslation of what the original Pali, the term is dukkha, and the better translation is unsatisfying or unsatisfactory. So not life is sufferingatisfying or unsatisfactory.

So not life is suffering, life is unsatisfactory. Yeah, and it's unsatisfactory because the core reason is that whatever arises, having arisen will of necessity pass away. Everything that is conditioned, you bring conditions together, mental and physical conditions, is conditioned. You bring conditions together, mental and physical conditions, and whatever has been born of that assembly is impermanent, right? So to take your experience, you can only stand on that podium for so long, right? At a certain point, everyone who's been clapping will stop clapping and leave the room right and

The neurophysiology of elation like oh, you'll finally I did it. I did it I did like it's just to say I did it I like you you can only say that to yourself with the voice of your mind so many times right before you sound Psychotic, right everything just dissipates Experiences like that and every other is literally like trying to scoop up water in your hands, right? You can't hold on to it. So the Buddha was not denying that there are extraordinarily pleasant experiences in life. I mean, that's undeniable. But however pleasant they are, they pass away. And then there are unpleasant experiences that are bound to come, right?

It's just like if you sit, no matter how comfortable you make your body, this is a very comfortable chair. I could, given 10 minutes, I could get myself in precisely the right position here to be able to sit for as long as possible. But at a certain point, if I just don't move, I will begin to feel excruciating pain. And you can try this. Just try to sit in the most comfortable position you can possibly find for four hours. At a certain point, for most of us, well short of four hours,

you will feel pains in your body that are amazing. It's like laying in the most comfortable bed. For two days, you're going to be like sores. If you just decide, I mean, meditators do this where they vow not to move for some period of time because it's incredibly instructive. I mean, what happens is you sit as comfortably as you want. You feel pain. And then just don't move. The pain comes or the itching comes. And if you're not going to move and scratch or you're not going to move and relieve the pain that has just been born like a supernova in your knee, what you'll then experience is, and this is why it's instructive, because you can experience incredibly intense pain that you know conceptually can't be really problematic. I mean, you're not getting injured. You're just sitting in a chair, right? So whatever you can experience there,

even if it is the worst pain you've ever felt, you know if you just move, you're gonna be fine, right? So what happens is, I mean, there are people who will sit for 12 hours, right? I mean, and you can experience, I mean, it can feel like someone has just driven a nail into your knee or that you just broke a vertebrae. I mean, just like awful pain. But it becomes an amazing tool of concentration because it's impossible to ignore. ignore, right? So the problem with meditation for most people is that, or for everyone in the

beginning, is that you have so little concentration that you're just, you're lost in thought perpetually. You're trying to follow the breath or you're trying to pay attention to sounds and you do that for a second or two and then you start thinking about it. I wonder, you know, how that interview went. And then you notice you're thinking and you come back to the object of meditation. When you're feeling excruciating pain, it's very easy for attention to just dive into it and you can become fantastically concentrated. And concentration, it just so happens, is intrinsically pleasurable. I mean, so much of what we like about flow states or even just being lost in our work, I mean, these satisfying moments of not being scattered at

all and being totally focused on something, the pleasure component of that is really just the concentration. It doesn't matter what you're focused on. I mean, literally, if you can focus on the breath to the exclusion of everything else for five minutes, that becomes like a drug experience. I mean, and that's, you know, again, that's also a temporary experience. I mean, concentration is another one of these things where, you know, you create the conditions for it and those conditions are impermanent.

And then you're, so the fundamental insight to have is that it's possible to recognize that consciousness itself is free of its contents. And that's really the purpose of meditation. And that's why it's an antidote to the normal ordeal we experience of seeking satisfaction. the normal ordeal we experience of seeking satisfaction. I mean, you're talking about an experience that lasted minutes that you spent years, even more than, even decades seeking. So many people are living their lives with that framework. Acknowledged or not, we're living with this sense of implicit in all of our efforts to become happy is this prospect of finally arriving at something. And you never arrive,

right? You can't arrive until you can just drop your search, right? So it's the search for happiness that is making us uncomfortable. It is the practice of being uncomfortable in each moment. Meditation is just a technique. And again, there are many techniques. But at bottom, it's just relinquishing that act of indulging the illusion that you would be happy if only, if only this cup were full of hot coffee, right, then I would, you know, then I could relax. I'm curious, when do you feel the most loved?

When do I feel the most loved? Well, it's interesting because, you know, there is a kind of transactional notion of love that most of us grow up with, which, again, I mean, I have, you know, I have, I'm very lucky I'm surrounded by people who love, who in fact love me, and they successfully communicate that, and that's nice, right? Right. But the real satisfaction is feeling love. Well, like, again, that's a state. It's not predicated on what the other person's doing, you know? So, like, parents, I don't know, do you have kids? No.

Okay, so this is an experience. Okay, this awaits you. So much of parenting is not about getting the clear signal of love back, shining back at you from your kids, right? You can't wait for that to feel love for them, right? And so much of the experience of my feeling love for my kids happens when they're not especially happy, right? Or if they're happy, they're certainly not shining it back on me. I mean, they might be annoyed at me, and that annoyance is just the most adorable thing in the world, right?

It's like, you know, I've got a five-year-old who's like, she can just, whatever is going on with her, I mean, she can be, she's a little tyrant. I mean, sometimes it's like I'm living in North Korea with Kim Jong-un, right? So, like, you know, if she could have her way, you know, the whole cities would burn. But she's so adorable, right? And so it's like, and so that state of being, of just taking delight in her full range of experience, right? That is, on some level, that's possible even with grownups who are unpleasant, right? Like you can just see, like on some level, if you look out at the world, you can see that you are surrounded by people who are suffering. You know, like, so like, I mean, this is sort of the compassion side of the coin rather than the love. world, you can see that you are surrounded by people who are suffering. This is sort of the compassion side of the coin rather than the love.

I view love as having a few different modes. One is what it's like just to have a fundamental good intention for other people and other sentient beings. That's the state of love. What does that feel like in the state of other people and other sentient beings. And that's the state of love. So what does that feel like in the state of other people's suffering? Well, it feels like compassion. I mean, you just wish that they were no longer suffering. You wish there was something you could do to help.

And what does it feel like in the state of other people's happiness? The Buddhist term for that is sympathetic joy. It's like you actually take joy in their joy. It's like the feeling you feel, like if you see someone win on American Idol or whatever, it's like that feeling. You can burst into tears of joy for that other person's joy, right? Now, this is a good corrective for where many people are at. I mean, just notice what it's like when someone in your life experiences some great success, right? And it becomes potentially more uncomfortable if they do it in a zone where you are, like, imagine you're trying to become the decathlete, right?

And your best friend is also trying to become a decathlete, he comes in first in that race, right? You know, like, just how good do you feel for him, right? Now, that really is the limit of friendship. If what you feel is envy rather than joy in his joy, right, you're not a good friend, right? Like, that's a boundary that you want to be able to blow past in yourself, right? So, and love is, real love is the ability to do that. I mean, real love is the antithesis of envy in that moment. Like, you actually do want your friend to totally succeed. Even if he's beating you. Yeah, I mean, it's like, that's the person you want to be. Like, you want to be so stoked that your friend got what he wanted and was dreaming for that you are undiminished by it, even when you guys are in the same lane.

That's what it would – and again, given the right or the wrong arrangement there, that could be harder or easier to do, but that's, I mean, ethically and emotionally, I think that's the goal, to be that kind of person, where it's like, you want people's dreams to be realized, and when they're realized, that becomes yet more reason for you to be happy. True. So, but when do you feel the most loved, personally? Wrestling with my five-year-old or ten-year-old daughter, I mean, that's just awesome. Yeah. I mean, that's just, that's the greatest fun, you know, I ever have on any given day.

I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and so, like, I'm trying to teach them the rudiments of jiu-jitsu, which has the, at this point, the routine is kind of like the Peter Sellers movies, where, like, you know, Peter Sellers and Kato are constantly attacking each other, you know, surprise attacks. So that goes down a lot.

They're very girly girls, but they can unleash impressive violence on them. So it's a great counterpoint to all the princess stuff that's going on. Yeah, it's just pink, and then it's just like Quentin Tarantino. It's like Kill Bill. What's the lesson you want to teach your kids the most if you could teach them one lesson what would it be well a lot of what we've been talking about is relevant there i mean just what just what are the real mechanics of of suffering and happiness the power of mindfulness is is one um but what gets emphasized even more at this stage, and I think is even kind of the coarser-grained corrective that improves people's lives the most, is just to value honesty as the most consequential course I took in college was a course on just, it was a graduate seminar on whether it was ever ethical to lie. And everyone came into this course assuming that lying was sometimes a problem. And obviously, if you're lying all the time, you're a sociopath.

But I would say everyone comes into that course thinking, well, there's certain situations where you have to lie. We all know there are white lies, and you want to spare people's feelings. So you've got some amount of lying that's just essential for doing business, right? And so the course became just a crucible for kind of pressure testing that assumption. And it was taught by this, I don't know if he still teaches it, but this wonderful professor at Stanford, Ron Howard. And I wrote a book, Lying, a few years ago based on this course. But this course, since someday when I was 18, I recognized that basically I never wanted to lie again under any circumstances. The lying was that occupied some point on the continuum of violence where if I'm in a situation where I have to decide whether to punch someone in the face, well then, okay, then lying is part of that toolkit.

kit, but it's really only in emergencies where you would even consider it because it is synonymous with a total breakdown of rational cooperation and collaboration with another person. You're no longer treating somebody like a person who can be reasoned with or related to. You're treating them like some emergency that you need to navigate around. And that's true even for white lies. So my book, Lying, gets into that and gets into white lies especially. So since you're 18, do you feel like you've lied at all? I have in a few cases kind of by accident. You're intentionally trying to lie.

Yeah, like you say something and then you realize, okay, that wasn't quite true. There was some embellishment that came online or something just came out and then it just becomes too awkward to actually massage the truth. Or it's just too pedantic or too something. I'm only aware of having told my 10-year-old daughter one lie in her life, right? What was that? Are you allowed to share? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's a completely ridiculous lie.

Santa Claus is real. Yeah, yeah. So that's actually the most common question I get in response to this paradigm. Like, what about Santa Claus? Tooth fairy or whatever, yeah. Yeah. And the answer there is that Christmas can be, you don't have to lie to your kids to make Christmas fun.

Notice no one feels like you have to lie about Halloween to make it fun. No one says, no, these witches are real. You don't have to do that. Fiction is fun enough for kids that you can make Santa Claus fun. So what did you lie to her about? We were looking at a, we had done some kind of Google search. I mean, she was maybe six, right? So she didn't even understand the lie that I told.

But we had done a Google search on something that was producing medieval woodcuts. Something about the Middle Ages or knights or something. And a woodcut came up that was just one of these happily it was a wood cut not a real image but it was it was like one of these 15th century wood cuts of you know someone being decapitated right and during the inquisition right someone's head is getting sawed off i swiped by that and and she says daddy what was that and so i pull it back and i said well that that was a um a very uh ancient and impractical form of surgery. She was not prepared for me to say, like, listen.

Someone got killed. Yeah, there's circumstances where other people cut other people's heads off, you know, for bad reasons. Do you feel bad that you told the lie, or do you feel like that's a situation? Well, I just didn't. I didn't think on my feet quickly enough. think on my feet quickly enough. There's a role for radical honesty isn't incompatible

with withholding certain information. You don't have to tell kids everything about what's going on. My daughters don't need to know exactly what ISIS was up to and just how horrible all that was. There's a time to tell them what's going on in the world. The honest

truth for my kids in those situations is there's stuff you don't need to know. Yeah, of course. We'll tell you later. Yeah, you'll learn that later. You know what's interesting about this? For the last six months, I've been thinking about honesty more than ever in my life.

I feel like I cheated almost all my way through school on quizzes and tests and homework out of necessity because I couldn't comprehend the information. And no matter how many tutors I had all through school, it's like it was survival for me. And I'm not saying I'm proud of this. I stole things that I lied about from stores when I was a kid. You know, for two years, I had to steal every time I went to a store. from stores when I was a kid. You know, for two years,

I had to steal every time I went to a store. Mostly candy bars or whatever it may be, smaller things, but still I stole things for a couple years. Right. Not proud of that. And would lie about it. And in relationships,

intimate relationships, I remember wanting to tell the truth, but having these negative consequences when I would. And so I would start to have more white lies. Yeah. And I would never feel good about it. Yeah. Ever. Yeah.

But I felt like it was more of a defense mechanism or a way to survive or whatever it may be. And I just started dating someone at the beginning of this year. And within the first few weeks of us dating, she said, I want you to promise me you'll always tell me the truth. And it was like I had a moment where I said, okay, my condition from the past is most of my experiences, people can't handle the truth in intimate relationships. And there's consequences when you tell the truth, there's reactions, there's all this energy that's, I don't want to feel, but I just said, okay, I'm going to say everything a hundred percent true that happens from this moment out. And it's the most liberating thing. Yeah. To'm going to say everything 100 true that happens from this moment out and it's

the most liberating thing yeah to be able to say okay i'm telling you the truth about everything no matter what yeah and if it doesn't work out it doesn't work out between us or whatever or if you're going to react but i'm going to be honest and it just feels more peace yeah yeah and peace. Yeah, yeah. And then the growth is in, I mean, it forces growth on you and other people in surprising ways. I mean, so for instance, once you decide that you can't lie, then that suddenly becomes a mirror held up to yourself. Then you find out what kind of person you are, right? If I'm not going to... How integrity am I? Yes. So why don't you want to go out with me?

If I don't have recourse to a lie, well, then I'm forced to both, on some level, articulate who I am to the other person. You're too fat. Am I that kind of person? You're forced to recognize just how deep that runs in yourself if you're not going to lie. Right? And then there's growth that happens in all of those areas.

Yeah. The, I mean, so much of the notion of white lies is a matter of avoiding awkwardness. Sure. And it's just not. Avoiding pain, right? Yeah. Yeah. of avoiding awkwardness. Sure.

And it's just not. Avoiding pain, right? Yeah, yeah. But the thing that happens in relationship when you resolve not to lie is that, and then people know this about you or discover this about you, is that then you become a refuge for people

who actually want honest feedback. And they want to know, then they know that you're not gonna lie to them. Right, so like then they know that you're not going to lie to them right so like so and then when you tell them that you love something they did like if someone hands you their novel and you say you love it they know you're not bullshitting right right they really matter and and i've had this i've gone through this with so many people where it's like they've shown me one thing and i said okay you you want to know what I think about this and I tell them something they really felt like they didn't want to hear sure but they

you know they recognized on some level I mean on some you can always frame it as listen I mean this is just my opinion I'm not you know omniscient like yeah it's like so this is my this is how your novel strikes me like it may have a different effect on other people, but here's what I feel very strongly about. And then you give them the download, and certain people you'll discover actually didn't want honest feedback, and they'll never give you the novel again, right? Which is fantastic, right? You don't want to hear from them on that point. But the people who do want honest feedback really appreciate it. And then when they give you the other novel they wrote and you love it, they know it's not bullshit.

And that's, you know, you become incredibly valuable creatively to people in that way. What is the question that you wish you had the answer to? That you were like, this is a certain fact about this answer. Well, the deepest one is related to what we were talking about earlier, just exactly how is consciousness integrated with the physics of things? How does consciousness arise?

What's the answer to what's called in philosophy the mind-body problem? That would be, if there were one scientific mystery I the answer to the, you know, what's called in philosophy the mind-body problem? That would be, you know, if there were one scientific mystery I would want to solve, that would be it. And we talked about your parents briefly before we started on camera. I'm curious, who was more influential in your life and what was the biggest lesson they taught you? Well, it was definitely my mom. My mom raised me essentially as a single mom. My dad left when I was two and a half.

And I had a relationship with him until he died when I was 17, but it was a long-distance one. He moved to New York, and so it was interesting. I didn't really see the implications of all of that until I became a dad and just how, you know, aberrant that was to just leave it to it. Like I, at a certain point I had a two and a half year old daughter and I thought, you know, what kind of guy would I need to be to leave now and move 3000 miles away and have the level of involvement my dad had with me. So kind of my child's eye

view of him, I didn't really see the problem. On some level, I probably thought I was the problem, right? But like, it was just, it was not, once I had a kid, I realized not only was that unthinkable for me, like, I don't think, I mean, I know people of, you know, varying quality in my life. I don't think I know a dad who would do that, right? Like, I mean, it was just very, it was a very strange epiphany to be able to triangulate on him in that way. So it was definitely my mom. And what was the lesson, the greatest lesson she's taught you? It's hard to say. I mean, she's, you know, we've been best friends for so much of my life.

You know, I think my love of books and my love of writing and all of that got set by her. I mean, she was somebody who was a big reader and just loved, I grew up with, the television in the living room just had books. It was like a wall of books all around it. It was like a television just set in books. And I remember from a very early age,

from age five, I remember just like there were books everywhere. And she has a great sense of humor. So it's like insofar as finding the funny in things, you know, that's a corrective for almost everything.

And that's where she lives. What's the greatest lesson your dad taught you in his absence? Or maybe that you learned i remember he explicitly taught me a lesson it's funny this is this is i don't know how old i was but i remember he explained i mean i think i you know i was always somewhat shy i think i mean i definitely default to shyness i'm more of an introvert than an extrovert. At one point, I think he must have noticed this about me. And he said, when you meet somebody, I want you to notice whether they go to shake your hand first or you

go to shake their hand first. And I realized it wasn't just about that. He was like, that way of thinking about just being conscious of how I was relating to people was something that had never occurred to me at that point in my life. Wow. Like I just,

again, I might have been, you know, 10 years old or something, but like, it realized like that was like a new piece of software that I,

you know, I could have that, you know, I didn't even know was possible. Like, oh, you can actually change

this sort of thing about yourself. Yeah, yeah. And this might matter have that, you know, I didn't even know was possible. Like, oh, you can actually change this sort of thing about yourself. Like, this might matter. So, yeah, I remember him, you know, consciously trying to impart that lesson. What's the lesson you wish he would have taught you? Oh, the truth is I'm not even sure. So he died when I was 17, so I didn't really have a fully adult relationship with him. And this was strangely, so everything we've been talking about in terms of what I've realized in my life that's of value, the wisdom component of life, and really most of my intellectual

interests, all of that came online when I was 18. He died when I was 17. So there's an amazing bifurcation in my life between who I am and have become and who I was when I had a father. So I have no idea what he would have thought about any of this or what he would have been like to interact with. Wow. I don't know how wise he was or wasn't.

It's very, it's interesting. or wasn't. It's very, it's interesting. It's just like, again, I mean, the lesson there that he teaches me

in my absence, in his absence is that, you know, everything's, you don't know how long anything's going to last, right?

You don't know when the last, when it will be the last time you are seeing a person, right? Wow. And so what's the quality of that interaction?

What haven't you said to the people you care about, you know? I mean, he was a very loving guy. I mean, so what's the quality of that interaction? What haven't you said to the people you care about? You know? I mean, he was a very loving guy. I mean, it was not, there was a circumstance of zero conflict, but it was just, yeah, it's just, it's odd to consider the life choices he made as a father. Do you think you'd be where you are today without his death as successful in pursuing the questions and the work and the mission that you have?

If he was at home with you when you were a child and supported you the whole time? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, death has been a very important part of my life. My best friend died when we were both 13. Wow. And that was, as far as an experience of death, kind of the rude interruption in one's otherwise carefree life. It wasn't kind.

Yeah, the fact that that was on the menu, that your 13-year-old friend can just die and disappear, that was the biggest shock with respect to people close to me who have died. You know, other people have died since. But – and that – you know, so from when I was 13 on, I was somebody who had kind of big picture philosophical concerns about, you know, what does it all mean and, you know, what's – you know, what is and what does it mean to die and what happens after death. And so when I was 18, I had certain experiences that really answered some of those concerns. But I was thinking about issues of life and death from kind of 13 on,

and that's been super. And so when my dad died when I was 17, and he had had cancer for the better part of two years before that. So I kind of saw that whole process. And so that was, yeah, I mean, it's sobering. You realize that it's good to get your head straight about things sooner rather than later.

And so I've always, you know, I'm always amazed to meet people who don't think about death at all and do their best not to think about death and succeed, right? So it's just like they're just living their lives. It's just the goal is to have as much fun and have as much success and just keep it all positive. And they seem to think that the alternative is to be made morbid by death, right, or to become a kind of, you know, Woody Allen character who's just neurotic and tortured by one's concern about death, right?

Whereas there's kind of a third channel to be on, which is it can actually be a primary source of wisdom. It's massively clarifying to realize that you've only got a certain number of days, right? And so how do you want to live in each moment and how trivial do you want to be? How long do you want to suffer over this thing that you know is not going to matter, but certainly not going to matter on your deathbed. It's not even going to matter two days from now. And yet now it's the thing that you're completely buried in. Obsessed with, yeah.

Yeah. What's the thing you're most proud of that you've done in your life that you wish your dad would have seen or know about? That's funny. So many of these words don't land on the right shelf. Like proud. I'm very in touch with the fact that, I don't know if you've heard my argument against free will, but I don't actually feel personally responsible for the good things have or don't have, the level of effort I can exert or not, the priorities I have or lose sight of and then find again. All of this, when you become aware of what it's like to be you moment to moment, you see that everything is just happening, including your capacity for effort. The days you set an alarm and wake up early, the days you hit the snooze button once, and the days you hit the snooze button five times, like all of that is part of what's just happening in the universe, right? And it's not that you can't make choices, but again, the choices

themselves are also just happening. And so when I look at what I've done that strikes me as good, you know, if given a chance I would have done that again, right, what I see is a lot of good luck, right? Like I'm lucky to have had, you know, the capacity to do those things, you know, or to have developed it. And I'm lucky to be born into a society where I don't have to worry about all the things that, you know, someone in Syria has to worry about right now. You know, I can't take any responsibility for the fact that I wasn't born in Syria, you know, in a civil war. So I just see like, I just see that I have all of these opportunities that I've been able to make much of, but, you know, not every, and I can't account for why I haven't been able to make more of them. So I don't feel like the flip side of pride is shame or self-reproach or some corollary negative state. I don't spend a lot of time on that either. So yeah, things are going well, and I'm very grateful for the opportunities I have to deal with interesting ideas and meet interesting people and add value to people's lives and be surrounded by people who are adding value to mine.

That's great. This is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's called the three truths. So imagine it is your last day, as many years away as you want it to be you can be 500 years old 100 years old whatever it is it's your last day you gotta go it's time to die you get to have the situation you want it to be you've got your family surrounding you it's the the good way of dying i guess if we want to call it that and you've accomplished the things you want to accomplish you've said the things you needed to say. You've said the things you needed to say, written the books.

People admire you. Whatever you want, it happened. But for whatever reason, you can only share three final things you know to be true about all of your existence, your life. And everything that you've created has to go with you, hypothetically. So no one has access to your podcast or your app or your books or anything like that. But you get to write down on a piece of paper and share your three final truths, the lessons you would leave behind to humanity. What would you say are your three truths?

Well, we've covered that. We've actually been talking about them more or less this whole time. The first one is that there's just consciousness and its contents. The implication that all of that has for well-being, kind of an admonition to look more deeply into that fact, because of all the good things that come and all the bad things that stop happening

once you do that. That's one. That's one. So that's the contemplative well-being side of it. Then there's the, I guess I could put it in the form of a question, why would you ever lie? And that's the ethical side of it. That sorts out one's relationships.

It sorts out one's relationships. Once you seize hold of that, all the people you shouldn't be spending time with kind of magically disappear. And all the people who want to have an honest relationship with you are there and appreciate your honesty. That's great. The third one, I guess the third one should address kind of more society. How do we organize society in a way that makes sense? This isn't poetry, but the... It's your last truth, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is... All the world knows you buy. This is an ugly last truth, but it's nonetheless consequential. I think incentives are everything at the level of society. It's like what we want is to organize society in such a way where ordinary, neurotic, selfish people are incentivized to behave better and better toward one another. I mean, that's how we built this thing to really be a kind of utopia. You can't be dependent on everyone becoming a saint or even especially wise.

We need to incentivize the things we want to see happen in the world that is creating needless human misery is a matter of incentives being badly aligned so that you have good people doing horrific things just because they're incentivized to live that way. And they're not incentivized to do the alternative. Those are great truths. I love it. You've got the Making Sense podcast. you're not incentivized to do the alternative. That's a great truth. I love it. You've got the Making Sense podcast. You've got the Waking Up app, which everyone should get on their phone app store.

Where else can we connect with you? What else can we do to support you in your mission? Well, those are the two main places. I mean, it's all samharris.org is my website. So if you want to know more about what I'm doing or like a calendar of live events or anything like that, that's always there. You're touring, you're speaking.

Occasionally. There's not much on the calendar at the moment, but I've got an event in LA at the Wiltern on July 11th. I don't know when this is going to come out,

but that's happening then. But yeah, I'm trying to keep the calendar a little clear at the moment. But yeah, everything gets eventually announced on my website or on my podcast or in the app.

You're on Instagram, Twitter, everywhere. For better and worse, I'm on Twitter. I see a lot of your tweets. I like it. The tweets can be brutal. You've got great opinions. I'm less on Twitter, but Twitter's the only one I really engage with personally. I mean, we put stuff out in a funfair way everywhere.

Twitter is where you go on. Yeah, that's me on Twitter. That's your opinion. For better and worse. I like it. So make sure you guys check out the Making Sense podcast. That's about once a week on average. Yeah, a couple times.

Waking Up app, I highly recommend it. It's really powerful what you've done there, so congrats on that. I know it's been helping tens of thousands of people who have been using it already, if not more, maybe right now, but congrats on that. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Sam, for your wisdom and your intellect and your ability to dive into topics that are very controversial for people who have set beliefs that don't want to look deeper into another option or another way. And you continue to research, dive in, test, analyze ideas, thoughts, and beliefs that can hopefully end suffering for a lot of people or support people

in less suffering to live a happier life and bring more peace to their hearts. So I acknowledge you for your gift, even though you say that everything is, you know, you're lucky in situations, but you've decided to continue to make the choices to serve people in this way. And I acknowledge that.

Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you for listening. Of course. The final question is, what's your definition of greatness? Well, I mean, Thank you for listening. Of course. The final question is, what's your definition of greatness? Well, I mean, there's really two. I mean, the conventional one of whatever your goal is to be able to meet that most efficiently.

I mean, so there's greatness in so many areas of our lives. But, I mean, beauty is an elegance as variables are. We recognize greatness when those are also maximized, right? So it's like it's sort of how you arrive at something matters as well. It's just not that you arrive. Real greatness is a matter of meeting worthy goals that has the well-being and ethical component to it as elegantly as possible. There you go. Sam Harris, thanks, man.

Appreciate it. Pleasure. Appreciate it, man. There you have it, my friend. I hope you enjoyed this one. Let me know if you did. Tag me on Instagram, at Lewis Howes. The link for this is lewishowes.com slash 824.

You can share it out for part two, and you can listen to part one at lewishowes.com slash 823 to listen to part one as well. Powerful two-part section. I wanted to keep going because it was just mind-blowing for me. And hopefully I'll get Sam back on in the future. But share this with a friend today.

You can text a friend. You can put it in a WhatsApp group chat. You can put it on your social media account. Be the hero in someone's life by spreading the message of greatness. Just send it to a few friends or post it on social media. It really means the world to me.

And a lot of people ask me, how can I best support you, Lewis? The best way you can support me is spreading this message. It's free and it helps so many people transform their life, overcome any struggles or pain or insecurities that they have by getting the right information from the best people in the world. So just share with a few friends

and that's an amazing way you can support me and also support someone else in your life today. And Mahatma Gandhi said, I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. You know, we have so many thoughts every single day. Don't let a thought that is dirty, that is nasty, that is controversial, that is harmful to walk around in your mind. Eliminate this thought. Remove it. Find peace within your own mind. And when you do that, you'll have peace in your body and in your life.

It starts with the thoughts in your mind. And Gandhi said, I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. Don't let anyone do that. You are in control of what you think about. You are amazing. You are loved. You are one of a kind. And as always, you know what time it is.

It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music