Sam Harris ON: How To Break Your Social Media Habits & Ways to Master Your Anxious Thoughts

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 0:30Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favorite podcast. Choose a cellar or northeast regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine. Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective, and with the Chase Sapphire

• 1:14Jay Shetty?

  Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct, enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges, three times the points on dining, and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  There really is a tension between being and becoming. On some level, being isn't enough because you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved. We're all gonna die, right? So we have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  The bestselling author and host.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  The number one health and wellness podcast.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

• 2:04Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier, and more healed. I'm so grateful for our incredible community and all the love and support and energy that I've been seeing already at the beginning of this year. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's

• 2:45Jay Shetty?

  trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules. Go to jayshettytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. And today's guest is someone that I've been reading his books for quite a while. We were just discussing beforehand, probably started reading his work around 13 years ago or thereabouts. And I just read his latest book, which I'm going to tell you about today, and we'll be discussing some of that work today. And it's amazing to see how someone's

• 3:26Jay Shetty?

  deepened, expanded, continued their thought, especially when they write in a very logical, but also documentative way. And so I'm talking about Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers. Sam's work covers a wide range of topics: neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, rationality. And Sam focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Some of the books include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, which is the first book I read, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast and is the creator of the Waking Up app. Please welcome

• 4:11Jay Shetty?

  to the show, Sam Harris. Sam, thank you for doing this.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's a pleasure. Great to meet you.

• 4:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's great to meet you. This is the first time. We've never interacted before this.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:19Jay Shetty?

  No messages, no texts.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  First time in the same room, as far as I know.

• 4:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. But it's always, I love diving in with an author that I've read before. And so As you said a few brief moments ago, even though we've not met, I hope that I have somewhat of an understanding and insight into your mind. But I always look to extend and expand that today. I want to dive straight in and I want to pick out a quote here from you. You said, "Most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present. We're trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now." My question is, what's worth pursuing? Or what is worthy of pursuit in life?

• 5:06Jay Shetty?

  Because I guess that's probably a good place to start.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there really is a tension between being and becoming, right? I think we live with this tension every moment of our lives. And I think the domain of our spiritual concerns really focuses on the being part. Like I just say, spirituality, for lack of a better word, is whatever you put in the space provided, it is an answer to the question of how is it possible to be fulfilled in the present moment in the midst of whatever's happening? Knowing that experience is always changing, knowing that you can't possibly create an experience that doesn't change, how is it possible to be at peace with the flux?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Right? So that's, and really finding a mode of being that wherein you can recognize a type of fulfillment that isn't predicated on the next good thing happening, right? The story you're telling yourself about the future that may in fact never arrive. On some level, being isn't enough because there are all the ways in the ways the world might be, right? I mean, there's the possibility space of what we can create. And what we want to create takes effort. And so there's all these things that are not actualized now, even if we're content now. And I think the domain of our becoming, I mean, there's all kinds of healthy ways of, unhealthy ways of becoming, but the healthy mode of becoming.

• 6:40Speaker 02

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

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And I think the peace part comes when you recognize that your happiness is not actually predicated on getting any of those things done. I mean, you have to learn to love the process. You have to learn to recognize that goals themselves, as valid as they might be to achieve, the experience of achieving them is very brief, and it has this mirage-like quality where it just, it recedes. I mean, you've been thinking about this thing for a year, and you finally get to that landmark. And what is it? Well, it's just another moment of being alive, and now you've got your thoughts about the past and the future still. And the question is, can you actually make full contact with the present moment?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And so in the quote you read, my main point was, most people, if you don't know how to meditate, you're basically trying to arrange the world to give you a good enough reason to recognize that the present moment is enough, right? And then, once you actually know how to meditate, you can sink into the present moment regardless of what else you're struggling to accomplish. And so you can be, you can sort of take the goal as the path, right? Kind of emotionally and cognitively, you've already arrived in terms of your own concerns about your own well-being. And yet, you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved, right? But you're, I mean, we're all gonna die, right?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  It's not, there's, there's, there's no solution to the, the, the massive problem of impermanence, right? So we have, we have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence. And that, and that's really, that's where the contemplative life comes in.

• 9:00Jay Shetty?

  So we're talking about pursuing peace. We're talking about pursuing this ability to navigate between, as you were saying, being at peace with where you are now, but at the same time, growing and progressing and, and loving the process as well. How do you define, just for everyone who's listening, because I know you do this a lot in the book and in, in your work as well, how do you define spirituality? And how do you define religion so that people can just make sense of those terms as we use them throughout this conversation?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, so I tend, as you probably know, I tend to be a critic of organized religion because it, just forget about the, the tribalism that religion so often engenders and the conflict born of that tribalism. I just think we need a 21st century conversation about human wisdom and human happiness. And, and spirituality is a, is a word I use, although I use it somewhat in scare quotes because people have associations with it that I think are just not helpful. So my argument is really, you can have a 21st century conversation about reality and you, and how to live within it, or you can have a 7th century conversation, or a 5th century B.C. conversation. You can, you can locate yourself at any point in human history, or you can, at this moment,

• 10:12Speaker 02

  decide to avail yourself of all of the best ideas and, and just recognize that we have really a common inheritance of wisdom and insight, and it's, we can, we can use whatever works, right? And ultimately, we have to be the best judges of what works, given the needs of the moment, given technological changes that could never have been foreseen by our ancestors, right? So whether we do this with the U.S. Constitution, or we do it with the Bible, or we do it with, with the, the polycanon, you know, the Buddhist scripture, it's just, you can, there's no question that our ancestors have created documents and ways of thinking and methodologies,

• 10:54Speaker 02

  you know, science being one, the contemplative practice being another, that are incredibly valuable to us, but we, we have to recognize that, you know, in this moment in time, all we have is hu-

• 11:08Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast.

• 11:51Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected, and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand.

• 12:35Jay Shetty?

  Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle, with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives.

• 13:19Jay Shetty?

  Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details.

• 13:23Speaker 02

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

• 14:08Speaker 02

  mind and its possibilities, there has to be a way of talking about that that truly transcends culture and certainly isn't sectarian in any usual sense. In the same way that science, when it's working, transcends culture and isn't sectarian. I mean, there's no Japanese science versus American science versus, you know, there's just, there's just science. Spirituality, for better or worse, is a word that I think we still need to use because I tend to, I also talk about the contemplative life or, you know, wisdom traditions and specific practices like meditation. But it names a, an approach to well-being that

• 14:50Speaker 02

  isn't predicated on all of the usual seeking to become happy, right? So it's not about getting wealthier, it's not about getting healthier and fitter. And those are all worthwhile projects, and they're not in conflict with spirituality. But the spiritual piece in spirituality is, how is it possible to pay attention in this moment so as to not suffer unnecessarily? Right? And what are the actual mechanics of our psychological suffering such that we do suffer unnecessarily so much of the time? And when you look closely at all that, it really is a matter of being lost in thought almost all of the time. And

• 15:32Speaker 02

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

• 16:13Speaker 02

  And it's really the layer of thought that we fail to recognize all that and feel that our, you know, every waking moment is some form of emergency that has to be responded to or reacted to.

• 16:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I think the way you define spirituality and the way you talk about it, I feel like it's definitely more and more appealing today. I think it's definitely something that, as you said, we need a 21st century version of what we're pursuing and how we think about reality. And I think those conversations are happening more often and more strongly and in more important circles. I have this question because I've often thought about this. You've well documented the pitfalls of organized religion and the challenges that come with that. What do you think are the pitfalls or challenges of spirituality in the fact that we move away from something, as you said earlier, was like, you know, this very defined, structured

• 17:10Jay Shetty?

  way of living that we've now come to look at it and gone, okay, that doesn't make sense all the time. And at the other end, we have a complete kind of open paradigm of spirituality, which can often be confusing, lacking structure, lacking somewhat of a map. Like, do you see certain pitfalls as to how we practice and become contemplative about spirituality?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so I should say that much that goes by the name of spirituality is also something that is worth being skeptical of, right? There are many beliefs that people form, and many of these are imported from religion. They just can't be squared with a sophisticated scientific view of just what reality is like. You know, it's not to say we've figured everything out. I mean, we certainly haven't, but we just know that that certain superstitious, magical, otherworldly beliefs are just not likely to be true. And, and yet, the most important spiritual claims traditionally,

• 18:15Speaker 02

  like the fact that unconditional love is a possible state of mind, right? Or that the self, as it's normally felt and conceived, is actually illusory, right? That we're taken in by a powerful illusion of separateness, and that's that feeling of separateness can be inspected and ultimately penetrated and felt through and felt beyond. Those are really, those are the babies in the bathwater of religion and spirituality that I think everyone, if they think about it long enough, wants to conserve. And yet, and those are, fully supported by a modern discussion of the human mind, and even a neuroanatomical discussion of the human mind. There's no, as you know, my PhD is in neuroscience. I

• 19:00Speaker 02

  can tell you, there's no place in the brain for a, an unchanging ego to be hiding, right? I mean, the sense that we have a self that is unchanging, that's carried through from moment to moment, that is the place from which we appropriate experience, that is separate from experience, that is just, granted, it's a powerful illusion for many people, but it's, it's an illusion that can be dispelled. And once dispelled, you, it actually brings your, your experience into closer register with what we have every reason to believe neuroscientifically about just the way the mind should be, based on, on the way the brain is. If you wander into the spiritual side of a bookstore, if you can even find a physical bookstore these days, it's been, it's been a while since I've been in one.

• 19:41Jay Shetty?

  I've been going to quite a few over Christmas, yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  But they're few and far between at the moment.

• 19:46Jay Shetty?

  Yes, definitely.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  But if you, so in that section of the bookstore, there's a lot on the shelves that is bogus, or semi bogus, or, you know, filled with wishful thinking, and, and not so interesting intellectually, or ethically, frankly. But there's, there's a lot that is truly valid. And, and I think we just have to become wiser curators of the totality of human conversation and the world's literature.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  To find what is worthy of our credence at this point. And this is what we do. We do this naturally. And I think we just need to be honest that we are the ones like when you go to an ancient text, when you go to the, I mean, if we take your favorite spiritual or religious book, in almost all of them, there are passages that are obviously anachronistic and just not suited to a 21st century view of just how we should live. Right? So there's a lot about how to sacrifice goats, you know, in the Old Testament. And it's just if it was ever useful, it's not especially useful now.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  People effortlessly ignore those passages and that's fine. So you're performing editing on the fly. And then you then you find, you know, a passage in Ecclesiastes or Jesus giving the sermon on the mount. And, you know, the golden rule and he said, okay, this is this is really encapsulates a lot of wisdom. And it's very hard to improve on the golden rule. The golden rule is a fantastic heuristic for just living ethically with people. So great, there's nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence to use the golden rule as a great kind of navigation tool ethically.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  And when you think about ethics and morality, it really is a question of what to do next. And we're always faced with this this navigation problem essentially. Cause there's this total space of possible experience individually and collectively. And we're trying to figure out how to navigate in this space, given that the possible experience is on offer. And the truth is there are horizons here which we can't see beyond. And we don't know how good life could get for us individually and collectively. And there's so many things that are in play now. I mean, we are living in a time where It's possible for us to change our own genomes ultimately, right?

• 22:18Speaker 02

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

• 23:02Speaker 02

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

• 23:39Speaker 02

  And so we're suddenly, we've got these, functionally, we have the genes we had with a few tweaks. We have the genes we have maybe 75,000 years ago, right? So we are these ancient primates now armed with nuclear weapons and an internet and AI technology now. And we're continually faced with the conundrum of what to do with all of this and how do we solve these massive coordination problems where we get now eight billion strangers essentially to cooperate peacefully? The landscape of possibility here is always shifting.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  And so again, we have human conversation as a means by which to navigate this. And so, yeah, I mean, to come back, this is a very long way of getting back to your original question, which is, Once you recognize that our legacy thought structures are not well-suited to this, right, so to be a fundamentalist Christian, or a fundamentalist Buddhist, or a fundamentalist Hindu, in the face of these new opportunities and new challenges, is not the best operating system for your mind. And you're forced to be far more eclectic, and non-sectarian, and non-dogmatic, and just open to the best evidence and the best arguments, really perpetually

• 25:05Speaker 02

  open to the best, to new evidence and better arguments. Where the guardrails, right, there's no longer, it's no longer simple, right, I can't, I can no longer just consult a single book, or a single list of do's and don'ts, to guide, to guide me. Ultimately, it's a far more flexible and intelligent way to proceed, because we want, I mean, just ask yourself, do you want your next decision, or your, your decision 10 years from now, to be, do you want to be available to the best evidence and the best arguments at that moment when making that decision, or not? Do you, or do you want some belief system that guarantees your unavailability, right? Do you want some kind of cognitive and emotional

• 25:48Speaker 02

  closure, that, that, that walls you off from better arguments and better information? I think, I think almost no one would sign up for that kind of, you know, that's ignorance by another name, right? So I think we want to be persuadable, we want to be open to better arguments and, and new evidence. We also want to be skeptical and, and conservative in, in how we revise our map of the world, because we know that most new, you know, published studies have stand, stand a very good chance of not being true, or, you know, or not, not being replicatable. Even in science, we have a legacy, we have an inheritance of institutions that have

• 26:31Speaker 02

  proved themselves over generations. And so we shouldn't be eager to tear everything down to the studs and build again, right? I think there's a reason to be conservative with respect to institutions and norms. And things that have worked for centuries, there tend to be a reason why they've worked for centuries. And so there's a sort of a tinkering and an iterative process here that I think makes sense. But ultimately, yeah, we want a modern wisdom tradition to be the common property of a non-sectarian, non-parochial, non-provincial humanity at this point.

• 27:15Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them, whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process, and once something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part, there are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn. It's a simple way to clear out your closet, be less wasteful, and maybe make some extra money along the way. Give your clothes a second life with

• 27:55Jay Shetty?

  Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees, so you keep every dollar you earn. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision making, and that extends to the practical stuff, too, like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are, and they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

• 28:37Jay Shetty?

  And that nicely comes back to the waking up part of your work, right? The idea that...

• 28:45Jay Shetty?

  We can't create something or use something fully aligned with human values because we as humans aren't fully aligned with human values in the collective sense.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:56Jay Shetty?

  And the idea that I've always felt that the reason why we should be scared of technology is because, I guess, we're scared of some humans. So if humans have the ability to create something, it will have all the imperfections that we have internally in the creator of it. And so it will inherit all the same manipulative tendencies, exploitative tendencies. You know, it's hard to free something of that if you inherently build something with that.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:32Jay Shetty?

  And you see that with any sort of media, social media technology today, that even if it was built with the best intentions of trying to create good in the world, either it amplifies negative or inherently has some questionable morals and ethics to it as well.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:49Jay Shetty?

  And so it comes back to the waking up part of your work, which is this self-reflective, contemplative idea of, you know, who am I becoming? Who do I want to be? Who am I? I mean, at the very deepest level, as you said. One word that I've always loved from my studies was this idea of the word purifying. Like, there was always this, there was a needing, there was a need for purification of some of these elements. And you talk about this in the beginning of your book when you, I believe it was one of the first times you did MDMA and then you had this feeling of like complete love for your friend, free of envy.

• 30:33Jay Shetty?

  And when I was reading that, I was thinking about how much this word purification is often not talked about. But

• 30:42Jay Shetty?

  It's probably my favorite word that I've I've learned through my study of the wisdom traditions. Because to me, I was thinking, yeah, what's what's really required, as you said, is that love's already there. It's already there. It's not like you're finding or discovering something. But there's almost like a detoxing, a cleansing, a letting go of these other things that cloud our ability to be there. Is that part of what you're doing, what you feel meditation achieves? Or no, that's that's a completely different thing as well?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  The thing you want to accomplish is already accomplished, right? There's there's dualistic and non-dual ways of conceiving this whole, the whole path of practice. And the dualistic way is very much a purification model, which is there's something that's like currently currently dirty, right? And you can clean it and you can, and it's going to take effort to clean it, right? And so this, and I would argue that most spiritual traditions are framed in that way. And there's there's definitely a place for that. But the mature approach to meditation practice is, and then the one frankly, that is just free of of the of the stress of seeking, is to recognize that that consciousness, as it is, ordinary consciousness,

• 31:54Speaker 02

  regardless of what its current contents are, and regardless of what you're currently experiencing, you could be feeling a classically negative emotion. I mean, you could have just gotten angry, right? And then you remember, oh, wait a minute, I'm I'm supposed to be meditating. Okay, what what's what's true now, right? And the physiology of anger hasn't even had time to dissipate yet, right? So that that'll happen over, you know, tens of seconds, right? But still, in the in this, if you know how to recognize, you know, what I what I call over in waking up, consciousness without without a center, in that first moment of just just recognizing that you are the condition in which anger and everything else is appearing.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  There's already no center to that condition. There's already no ego in the middle of it. And it doesn't actually get emptier of self than that ever. And even if you have a very different experience, I mean, you take MDMA and you feel unconditional love, or you go on a long meditation retreat and you get really concentrated and you're having, you know, just regularly having experiences of bliss, say, so it can be very, you know, drug-like. All of those changes in the contents of consciousness are transitory. I mean, you take a drug and it's going to wear off. You get very concentrated and you feel bliss, but when you're, you know, watching Netflix two weeks later, you're not, you're not concentrated in that way and you're doing, you're doing something else with your attention and presumably you're not going to be blissed out in the same way.

• 33:22Speaker 02

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

• 34:07Speaker 02

  But as a matter of your own experience, there's this ever-present mystery that anything is any way at all. I mean, like, you don't know what you're going to think next until the thought itself arises, right? It's just, because you'd have to think it before you thought it in order to know what it is, right? So it's just, on some level, you are a witness to everything that's appearing. And in the beginning, it feels like the witness has the structure of a self, of a subject. But as you look into that more and more, that structure goes away and there's just this condition in which everything is appearing. And it doesn't, and that doesn't feel like I, it doesn't feel like me.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  And whatever feels like I or me is yet more appearance. You know, it's, it can be just a pattern of energy on your face or a contraction in the body. So as you keep dropping back and witnessing that... It has, you know, the purification model makes less and less sense because what is there to purify, right? There's not like even, even, I mean, even anger is no longer anger, right? In the moment of recognition, it's just this, it's just a feeling of heat on your face, right? It's just a feeling, it's just, it's a feeling of tension in your chest. And there's no one to whom those feelings refer, right? And, and so the moment you

• 35:33Speaker 02

  recognize that, you have by definition broken the connection to whatever thoughts were telling you why you were angry and why you should be angry and why you have every right to be angry and what you're going to say to that person next time you see them. You've broken that spell of thinking. And so the, the emotion is dissipating. And so it's, anger is no longer anger. But it's in purification mode, it is still possible to do that dualistically. I mean, in the, in the beginning, when you're practicing, what I tend to teach in, over waking up is a technique called mindfulness, which most people engage dualistically in the beginning, where they're strategically being aware of sights and sounds and sensations

• 36:17Speaker 02

  and the breath and, and thoughts and emotions. And so even, even dualistically, you can learn the difference between being lost in thought and identified with an emotion like anger and just witnessing it from a point that seems to be outside of that thought and that, that emotion. And even if it feels like a subject that's paying attention strategically to, to the physiology of anger or, or the arising and cessation of thought, that's fine. I mean, that's a, that's a starting point. That's, and a necessary one for virtually everyone.

• 36:56Speaker 02

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

• 37:36Speaker 02

  difference between being lost and thought and not, is really the mere hostage of that process. They're gonna stay as angry as they're gonna stay for as long as they're gonna stay that way. And they're gonna do all of the things that are life deranging and reputation harming, they might do on the basis of that emotion for as long as they're gonna do those things. And then they're gonna have all the reaction to what they did and said. And it's, that's the, you know, the complication of life born of that, you know, one moment where you got angry. Even dualistic mindfulness gives you a degree of freedom that most people don't have. And it is a kind of superpower to be able to say, oh, well, I just got angry. How long do I want to stay angry for? For me, an emotion like anger or fear is useful

• 38:20Speaker 02

  insofar as it is, it is a salience cue. It's telling you that something just happened that's worth paying attention to, right? There's somebody just walked into the room who, you know, doesn't have your, your well-being at heart, right? And they've got some intention that is, that is in conflict with, with something that you were trying to accomplish, say, or it's telling, at minimum, it's telling you something about yourself and about your own priorities and about, about what you were trying to do in the world and, you know, for better or worse. So it's worth paying attention to, but it's almost never the state of mind you want to be in to then solve the problem you, that just, you just noticed.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  So I'm not saying that we, the goal is to be completely without any capacity for anger or fear or any, any of these emotions. But it's, I do think psychological health and just the health of one's relationships and, and just the whole project of living wisely in the world is more and more The result of being able to get off, to unhook from that negative emotion more and more quickly. I mean, I think you want to stay angry and fearful and even sad for much, you know, much shorter periods of time.

• 39:38Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  And then you can, then there's just more to recognize about the circumstance. It gives you a degree of freedom by which to navigate.

• 39:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, I fully agree with that. I've, whenever I get asked that question, which I'm sure you get asked a lot, it's like, well, don't you ever get angry or don't you ever, you know, get upset or sad? And what you just said has always been my response, that I still feel anger, I still feel sadness, I still feel envy, I still and always believe, I always will feel all of these things just for less and less time.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:12Jay Shetty?

  And I don't think I'll ever get to zero, just as you could never run a mile in zero seconds. I won't ever get to a point where I'm able to deal with it in zero seconds. It's just not going to be possible.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:25Jay Shetty?

  Because it needs to live.

• 40:26Speaker 02

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

• 41:11Speaker 02

  And that can feel, the energy of anger can be behind that. And so I would tend to call that outrage rather than anger, but I think moral outrage is useful, but it's just, the question is... When does it tip over into personal psychological suffering that actually diminishes your capacity to do something useful? And that's where that's the line that I think we want to be more aware of.

• 41:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, let's use that as an example and take it through that process because I think that's exactly it. Like, I was gonna bring that up earlier, the idea that just as the outrage or the emotional experience can stop us from being practical, so too, not to go down this road again, but so too can this skeptical, like, you know, you can be overly skeptical and overly analytical and never practically apply anything because you can constantly find flaws in pretty much most ideas in the world if you keep looking for them.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:07Jay Shetty?

  So, let's take the outrage idea, like, how do you? What does someone do? They feel that outrage, the moral outrage, where they feel pain for the suffering of another? Where do you go from there through your process? Like, what's step two, three, four?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's important to be, again, cautious and skeptical of one's own emotional hijacking, right? So it's like, you want to know, you want to know that this isn't a personal petty, you know, egocentric reaction.

• 42:40Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 42:40Speaker 02

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

• 43:07Jay Shetty?

  But it probably will start at that, right?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Well, I think it can have something of that character in that it's, it can have the character of contraction. I mean, outrage feels like anger. It's like, you, you know, you, it is the same thing that would get you to raise your voice if you were angry, right? It's like, it's like, you're gonna raise your voice. If you're gonna raise your voice in defense of humanity, right? Um, well, you're still raising your voice.

• 43:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  And so, it's just that there's energy behind it, and I think that energy at times is necessary. Or to take another somewhat adjacent situation, but analogous.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, if you're in a situation in which you have to defend yourself from actual physical violence, or defend someone close to you, you know, someone's attacked you and your child, so what should you do? They're just gonna lie down and offer yourself up as a human sacrifice? No, I think pacifism is not actually morally the wisest position, ethically. So I think the energy that would allow you to violently defend yourself against an aggressor should be available, right? But the question is, and it's not necessarily anger, but it could look a lot like anger and feel a lot like anger. It's certainly

• 44:30Speaker 02

  not necessarily hatred. And here, I would ask you to consider how you would feel like, I mean, defending yourself against a person, you know, you think of somebody, is there some malicious psychopath who's broken into your house and is now wanting to harm you and your family because that's what he likes to do, right? That's like the quintessential circumstance where, one, you'd feel fear, you'd feel a lot of things, but you'd probably also feel hatred for this person, right? There are few circumstances where hatred feels more apropos than that. But I do view hatred as always being somehow extra, even in extremis

• 45:14Speaker 02

  like that. Imagine just how you would feel, very superficially similar situation, you know, you're still, you have an attacker in your house and you have to defend yourself violently, but that attacker now is not a person, it's a wild animal, you know, a grizzly bear has broken into your house, or a mountain lion, right? It's still an absolute emergency, right? You're still gonna have to fight for your life, you're still looking for a weapon to defend yourself with, right? You're still contemplating killing a living being to defend yourself, right, and your kids. But there's an emotional shading there, like as energized as you would be in the presence of a mountain lion, or in the presence of a grizzly bear...

• 45:58Speaker 02

  There's this layer of, the layer of hatred doesn't quite fit.

• 46:03Jay Shetty?

  Because you feel they have less choice.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Yes, of course, a mountain lion is going to be a mountain lion. You know, it's like, like a mountain lion can't be other than a mountain lion. On some level, a malicious psychopath can't be other than a malicious psychopath. Right. So I think it's, I think we do have to view people on some level as equivalent to forces of nature, right? You know, we don't, we don't get angry at hurricanes. But, and we certainly don't hate hurricanes in the, in the same way that we could hate another human being. But if we could lock hurricanes in prison, we would, right? I mean, they're immensely destructive, you know, we're still trying to figure out what to do about them. But it never gets, we never take this extra step of actually hating them.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  And I do think we could have, ethically speaking and psychologically speaking, we can, we can have a similar relationship to even the worst human beings, while doing all the things we need to do to defend ourselves against them. We can put people in prison, we can, you know, we can, I'm not in favor of the death penalty for, for actually these reasons, but, because I don't think anyone creates themselves. I think, I don't think anyone is truly at bottom responsible, responsible for being who they are. I mean, if, you know, if you had the same genes and the same life experience of whoever, Jeffrey Dahmer, you'd be Jeffrey Dahmer, right? It's like, there's no, there's no mystery there. But, so I think, so I think at bottom,

• 47:33Speaker 02

  when you're, when you're looking at these, these very stark differences in life outcomes, you're looking at differences in luck, right? I mean, there's, there's biological luck, there's circumstantial luck, there's all kinds of luck. And there's, and there's what we do with the luck, but your capacity to do good things with even your bad luck is yet more good luck, right? I mean, something is giving, there's some genetic and environmental reason why you were set up to pick yourselves up, pick yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody else in a similar situation wasn't, right? And so, on some level, there's, we have an ethical imperative to acknowledge.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  The massive role that luck plays in our lives. And I think we should want to cancel the most egregious differences in good and bad luck between people. So when we look at a whole society that is suffering from immense bad luck because it didn't have the natural resources that some other society did, or it had those resources, but even those resources created perverse incentives and so it's got a terrible political outcome based on all the level of corruption that's layered on top of the resources. There's just terrible disparities in luck there. And so I think we, as a global civilization, more and more, as we grow wealthier and wealthier

• 48:56Speaker 02

  and can take advantage of good luck over here, we should want to engineer a tide that raises upon which most or all boats rise more and more. It's not to say that capitalism is wrong. It's not to say that we're ever going to completely nullify differences in luck. And I think some asymmetries may in fact be the optimal way to encourage people's creativity and innovation. So it's like I'm agnostic on some of the questions of how to organize a society and an economy there. But I do think more and more, we need to recognize that so many of us, certainly anyone

• 49:39Speaker 02

  has got the free time to listen to this conversation right now, stands a pretty good chance of being in the top 10% or even 1% of humanity with respect to luck, all the variables, whether it's with respect to health and wealth and education and just having the free time and attention to listen to this and be interested in this and to be asking the kinds of questions we're trying to address in a conversation like this. We're immensely lucky and with that comes a certain responsibility, but also opportunity to to spread the the luck around.

• 50:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, to create luck for others.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:19Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Home should be a place that feels like a sanctuary, a space that truly reflects who you are. But it can be challenging to balance style, budget and endless options. I was looking to create a dedicated calm space for my morning meditation and reading, but I was struggling to find pieces that felt grounding but could also stand up to daily use. I went on Wayfair and found a beautiful, solid wood accent chair and a bookshelf. Now that corner is my favorite place to anchor my day. The quality is incredible, it's built to last and it completely shifted the energy of the room. Plus, you can shop with Wayfair Verified, where product specialists carefully vet items for quality and functionality, so you can shop with more confidence. And if putting it all together sounds like a headache,

• 51:03Jay Shetty?

  Wayfair can handle delivery, installation and assembly. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors,

• 51:48Jay Shetty?

  high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online. I I loved where we're going with that and loved where we went, but going back to the... The outrage piece, the understanding of, you know, almost differentiating our hate from outrage, almost extracting some piece of the ego from it being petty and individualistic, but that it's for a greater cause. Then, yeah, how do you go forward with that? Like, what do you do with that thought, that idea, that feeling? So you feel pain when someone else is in pain. You feel stressed. You feel outraged, as you said. There may be a petty, personal anger to it

• 52:33Jay Shetty?

  that triggered us in the first place, but we were able to carve that out and understand that that wasn't the basis of our real outrage, that there was something bigger.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, then it really just depends on what the problem is and what the situation is and whether you can influence it, right? I mean, if you can't do anything about it, well, then it's not useful to be just grinding your gears with outrage. I mean, your outrage needs some kind of outlet. You know, so if you have some kind of platform upon which to try to make sense on these important topics, well, then do that. But, yeah, it's never useful to just be privately seething with outrage that has no outlet, right? So you have to figure out, one, what pragmatically can you do to accomplish anything useful on the basis of this emotion? And if there's nothing to do, it's great to have the tools by which you can just let go of it, right?

• 53:26Speaker 02

  And that's, and again, that's where meditation comes in. I mean, that really is a kind of superpower. You can just decide, okay, there's nothing to do here with this negative emotion. So now I can just let go of it. And that's, and that's true for public-facing emotion like outrage, but it's true for an inwardly facing one like just anxiety about something that is coming up in the future, right? So like, you've got some medical condition. Now you need to get an MRI to see if you've got something scary. And you can't get the MRI until next Tuesday, right? So now you've got this time to wait. So the question is, in the intervening days, how captured are you going to be

• 54:10Speaker 02

  by this feeling of anxiety? Is there any utility in feeling anxious between now and Tuesday? And if there's not, wouldn't it be great to actually just let go of it? Right? And most people feel like that's... That's pretty hard to do, right? I mean, most people don't have tools apart from just diverting themselves, getting, distracting themselves with something else to take their mind off the thing that they're really sort of thinking about in the background, that they don't want to think about, but they're helplessly perseverating on it. But as far as acting in the world, so as to make the world a better place, I think, based on outrage or some other emotion, I'm impressed more and more by how much that's

• 54:55Speaker 02

  a story of changing incentives at the system level, more than it is a story of getting individuals to improve themselves. I think individuals should want to improve themselves, and I want to improve myself, and insofar as I can share wisdom about how to do that, I do that more or less full-time. But there's another level of analysis and another level of discussion that needs to be applied to the systems in which we're all functioning. And we need to recognize that in so many places, we have systems of incentives that

• 55:35Speaker 02

  are aligned so as to make it actually hard to be a good person, right? Like, you need to be some kind of moral hero to be truly ethical, given how the system is tuned. And conversely, totally normal people can be lured into behaving more and more like psychopaths in a badly tuned system, where the incentives are all wrong, right? And I think more and more, we need to be alert to that, and we need to want to design systems where it just becomes easier and easier for ordinary conflicted, mediocre people, people who are not even thinking about ethics all that much, right? Don't even want to, they just want what they want.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  It's easier for them to behave more and more like saints, because the incentives are aligned to it that way. To take an example that's recently top of mind, so like, we have the problem of climate change, well-intentioned people want to do something about it, we don't want to create the most... Profligate harms for ourselves unnecessarily, right? So it'd be great to have a system of incentives and economic opportunities and technologies that just made it easier and easier to be wise with respect to carbon, our carbon footprint. And there are a lot of great ideas in this space and one of them is, well, let's buy electric cars, right?

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Let's transition from a fossil fuel economy of transportation to an electric one. Well, that sounds wonderful and I've, you know, I've had an electric car and I just had to get a new car and I was poised to buy another electric car. But then I hear on Joe Rogan's podcast from this guy who's just published a book, it's coming out, forgive me, I've forgotten his name. I think it's, I think it's Shri Ram Krishnan, but I could have that wrong. But he has a book coming out called Cobalt Red, but he had just did a two hour podcast with Rogan, which was just this litany of horrors that attend what the extraction of cobalt from Congo, right?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  It's like 72% of the world's cobalt is in Congo. We use cobalt in all of our batteries. Basically, our supply chain for cobalt is on top of just slave labor and child labor and just, you know, kids getting buried alive. I mean, it's just, it was just as bad as you could imagine. And so here we have a system where we all, we just, we all want to buy the next electric car because this is a good thing, this was the virtuous thing to do, but now we find out that the batteries are soaked in blood. There's no good option, right? And now we have to, we have to pretend that we didn't hear that podcast or the, and the people, you know, designing the batteries or pretending they don't know where the cobalt

• 58:32Speaker 02

  comes from and there's like, we need to figure out, I mean, this, this itself, it should be a simple problem to solve and it would just, it's probably a few percentage points of profit margin that would make the extraction of cobalt a, an ethically defensible practice, right? And that's probably, there's probably some cobalt-free technology that we could design in the future, but it's just to get these things right. Really matters. And if you don't get them right, you've got people who are deeply conflicted about what they're doing, or not, or just not completely unaware of what they're doing, and creating these, these massive negative externalities that they might not even know about.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Like, like, like, I could, I literally was, I mean, I was 24 hours from buying another EV, right? So it's like, it's not that, it's not that my lone purchase or not, or not of a, of a single car is going to matter that much in the scheme of things. But it's like, I would have, had I not heard this particular episode of Joe's podcast, I would have bought that EV thinking I was doing an unimpeachably virtuous thing, right? And now I have a much more conflicted decision to make around, you know, what's the right, right car to drive in light of my climate change concerns? This is just to say that the individual can't solve the cobalt supply chain problem, right? So like, we need, we need these solutions to come at the system level and the, at the institution

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  level. And, and that's, and that's where being a good person is, is sort of beyond the scope of anyone's individual choices. Like, like, you need to, we need to collectively solve a massive coordination problem together, where in the act of getting gratifying our desires, we are, we are, are creating less and less harm and doing more and more good, more or less effortlessly. And that's, and that really is, you can have people who are just not thinking about purifying anything, behaving in really impeccable ways,

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  given good incentives. And that's, and that's some more and more I'm thinking about that.

• 1:00:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I, I love that you're thinking about that. And I think it's, uh, an idea to put forward, though, is that it's also that the people that are setting up the institutions and the systems are also individuals. So it's like a vicious cycle. It's like, the leaders at the top, the people who've made all these decisions to go out and, you know, take all this cobalt and make sure that it was picked by child slaves or child labor, or whatever it may be. I haven't listened to the podcast, so I don't have the context. But someone made that decision, and some system never thought to correct that because that was led by some people. So I think, I mean, I, I agree with you, but I think it's both. It's like, you know,

• 1:01:30Jay Shetty?

  I think even where systems have been made tight, you still see people trying to find a loophole. I mean, that's how the human mind is set up. And so you've got the loophole mindset of like, okay, well, let me find a way to exploit this or manipulate this towards my benefit anyway.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:48Jay Shetty?

  And so you've got both. I think both are important. I think like if you were the decision maker.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Jay Shetty?

  If you were building EVs, you would be able to make that system in your company and you'd set it up. But that would come back to you.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But like if we taxed carbon instead of taxing income, say.

• 1:02:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  I don't know how that works out in terms of the balance sheet, but something like that. So we're using a tax to disincentivize something we want to disincentivize.

• 1:02:17Jay Shetty?

  Yep.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Pollution. And we're not penalizing something that's intrinsically good, just creating value and being paid for that value, which is what income in the best case is coming from. So there's that. And then all of a sudden people would, all right, if it's costing me money to be polluting, well, then I'm going to figure out how to not do that. And that's just going to be, our interests are going to be aligned there, right?

• 1:02:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  And so there's probably a hundred or a thousand cases like that. But where I was going was, I've been thinking a lot about what has come to be called the effective altruism movement, which is how to do good more reliably, more systematically. Many of us have been disillusioned with how philanthropy has been done traditionally. It's like there's a distinction between, this actually comes back to some of what we've been talking about, with the difference between being led by one's emotions and actually understanding what the outcomes are in the world that one is accomplishing. When you're trying to do good in the world, when you're, let's say you're giving to a children's hospital, say.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  I mean, that just seems an intrinsically good thing to do. But so much, we know that so much of our impulse to do good, our impulse toward altruism, our impulse toward effective compassion.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Is driven by the single compelling story, the single identifiable protagonist, the one little girl who's got cancer and we can help her. Right. And that we sort of go to sleep when we're told statistics. So like we don't, we perversely, we care more about the one little girl than we care about the tens of thousands of little girls just like her, maybe even the tens of thousands of little girls, including her. Right. It's like you can run psychological experiments where you, you show people one little girl and you ask them how, how much they're inclined to help and how much money they'd give. They give the maximum amount, you know, under those conditions. If you show them the same little girl and you layer on a story of just how many other

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  And I personally would give a minimum of 10% of my pre-tax income to charity each year. Now I was, I was already giving money away to charity and that felt good. But once I decided, all right, here's the formula, I have to give this minimum amount. This, this minimum amount is already allocated to these ends. And what's more, these ends have to be not just charities and causes that I feel really personally engaged by, or just things that I want to support, like, you know, some, you know, I want to give money to a college or a symphony, or it's like something that I, or I see somebody's GoFundMe page and it tugs at my heartstrings, I want to give money to that. No, that's, that's all separate.

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  Here, here's 10% that's going to charities that I, in the kind of sober rational analysis have decided are going to do the most good irrespective of how I feel about these things. Cause there are certain causes that. I just don't find especially sexy, you know, that just not like I just can't, I have to continually rethink my, my interest in them, you know, but they are objectively, if you want to, want to save a life, you know, per unit, per dollar put into the system, this is the best use of your, your dollars, right? So one has been, you know, malaria mitigation in Sub-Saharan Africa, just, just bed, malaria bed nets, right? Like that's, I just can't get too excited about handing out bed nets, right? But that's something

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  that's worth supporting. So I just decided that, okay, the, you know, givewell.org is, has done, run this analysis. They're a great, you know, source of information about effective charities. Here are their top 10 charities. Whether I find these sexy or not, I know I can outsource the cognitive labor to these people because I've spoken to them enough. I've analyzed what they've done. They're, they're doing enough. This is their full-time job. All right. You know, until I hear otherwise, I'm going to take their advice. It doesn't matter how I feel about these charities, right? I'm going to get my good feels elsewhere. But what's happened is, once I decided that I'm going to give this amount of money to charity each year, and it's happening by default, whether I'm thinking about it or

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  not, whether I'm gratified by it or not, a very interesting thing flipped. One is, when I confront all these other opportunities to give money away that are, are tugging on my heartstrings, they almost show up as a, as a kind of guilty pleasure. Like I literally have had the feeling of giving money to a children's hospital, or giving money to, to somebody's GoFundMe page. And it's, it's almost leveraging the same greedy circuits in the brain as you'd get if you're like opening a catalog, and you want everything on, you know, both pages. It's like, I, it's like, I, like, it's, it is a, it's, it's a very visceral experience of

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  And again, it's, it's all based on having made a sort of system level default change that is a sort of hidden structure in which I'm now moving. Right. Because again, I'm not, until you make a decision like that, you're constantly rethinking what you want to do. It's almost like going on a diet. Like if you decide, like, I don't eat dairy anymore, right? So, once you don't eat dairy anymore, I eat a lot of dairy, but, but if one, it didn't eat dairy anymore, you just, it's just a bright line. And then you, you're not, you're not constantly rethinking whether you're going to have ice cream. And if so, how much? And, and so it's massively clarifying.

• 1:09:24Jay Shetty?

  That's, that's a great example. That really hit true. Yeah, the, the clarity of constraints, right? Having, having borders and boundaries and constraints are allowing you to not waste as much time and energy on, on figuring that out moment by moment.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Jay Shetty?

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

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Well, it changed recently for me because I deleted my Twitter account, which is where I was getting a lot of my news. I was not getting the news from Twitter per se, but I was, I was just seeing, I was following lots of smart people and seeing what articles they were recommending. And so I was just going through that as a, it was, it was kind of like my news feed. So I still, you know, I read the New York Times, I read the Atlantic, there's many things I read and I, and so I, I see the news in various channels, but I was using Twitter as the first filter on that. And that, for a variety of reasons, became really

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  toxic for me. And, and toxic in a way that I was convinced was misleading. I mean, that, that was the thing that got me to finally just kind of rip the Band-Aid off because I, it wasn't just that I was seeing the worst of people and that was having a certain effect. I was convinced I was seeing people at their worst who are actually not as bad as they were seeming to me on Twitter. Like, what, what Twitter was calling out of them was just a misleading picture of who they actually are. Because in some cases, I would knew, I knew the people in real life, and then I'm seeing them behave in abominable ways on Twitter. And I just think, all right, this is, this is an, this is just a funhouse mirror that isn't psychologically healthy to keep staring into day after day after

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  day. And also, just so many of the things that I was, it was, it was amplifying stories that I was, you know, as a podcaster, I was tempted to react to. And I felt like I was getting a misleading signal as to just how salient or representative those stories are of, of the way the world is, right? So like, it's just, it was just the phenomenon of being too online ultimately, right? Yeah. So my, so insofar as Twitter was news, or a simulacrum of news, that has really changed for me. I just, I just am not seeing it. And now I just, yeah, I mean, I have a few sources of, of news that I, I go to as, you

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  know, more or less reflexively. But again, it's, it's more and more, I'm asking the question. What do I want my moment to moment life to be like? And who do I want to be at the end of the day when I'm hanging out with my wife and kids? Right? And what are the consequences of having spent my attentional budget over the previous hours in one way versus another? And Twitter, for me, honestly, was a big change because it was like getting out of an unhealthy relationship. And now it's just, for all my talk about meditation and being able to unhook from anger and other states, I mean, I could unhook and I could let go of negative emotion, et cetera.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  the outcome I want, right? And it's not why I have a podcast and it's not why I went on that other person's podcast. And so there's some burden on me to try to clarify the misunderstanding and I was continually getting sucked into the illusion. That clarification was possible, right? So I would try, because I really wanted to use Twitter as a channel of communication. It was the only social media platform I ever used. I never used Facebook or, I mean, I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but those are just marketing, you know, channels for my, my team. I'm never on those. So I was on Twitter. It really was me and I was, you know, as much as I could step away from it, because it seemed unhealthy for a time, I kept seeing the evidence of confusion and misrepresentation. I thought, I'm just gonna try again to, to clarify things, right?

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  And that was, that was such an unrewarding experience that it was just, it was, it was creating a residue of despair and contempt. I mean, I just, I just felt, I just felt polluted by, I just felt like I had met, like, all the psychopaths in the world on a daily basis. Like, there can't be as many psychopaths in the world as I was, seem to be meeting online. As much as I could step away from it and just, and, and put it down, I kept picking it up again. And so I just thought, this is crazy. So, so I, I just ripped it off. And that's been an immense change. I mean, it's really, so sometimes you need to actually do the thing that is, you can't just keep

• 1:15:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Putting yourself in this dysfunctional situation and then processing your reaction. It's like, you have to ask yourself, why are you doing this? Why are you spending your time and attention this way in the first place?

• 1:16:08Jay Shetty?

  Yep.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  And so, for me, it was Twitter. I mean, I understand other people, you know, depending on what they're, they could just be put it, they should, if they're sharing cat videos on Twitter, they're just getting nothing but love, right? And they have no idea what I'm talking about. But, trust me, it's possible to have a truly lousy experience on Twitter.

• 1:16:23Jay Shetty?

  What, if anything, would bring you back? Because I, I love what you're saying there, that, you know, if, if you're doing the same thing, it's giving you the same result. You've tried a new thing with it, it's giving you the same result. Sometimes you have to cut it off to, to create a healthier balance, to, to reconfigure, to, to do the work you wanna do. What, if anything, would allow you to go back to it? Or how would you see yourself if you were to go back to it in a healthier way? I'm thinking of all the people who cut things out their lives because they need to feel that distance from it, because it's taken a hold of them. But then they know that in reality, they might have to go back at one point.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I'm, I'm not. Planning to go back. I don't see, I don't really see that. I don't, I don't think, I mean, for marketing, I don't need it.

• 1:17:06Jay Shetty?

  You don't miss it.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not. Oh, I missed it. I missed the good parts of it.

• 1:17:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's what I mean.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I was following a lot of smart, funny people, and that was entertaining. But the truth is, even the good parts were ultimately diverting in a way that in retrospect feels like a bit of a, just a waste of time. You know, it's just like I'm getting, I didn't have to spend as much time even with the good parts of it, you know. It's just, it was kind of like, you know, just like too many carbs in that part of my information diet, you know. That's what Twitter was. It was all carbs. I mean, if I went back, I would just, yeah, I would probably use it much more like I use or don't even use my other social media channels. I would just use it as, I would have someone post for me, or I would post without ever looking about what's coming back at me. And there are people,

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  for whatever reason. But it's not, I'm just not tempted to fill that, the Twitter-shaped hole in my life with anything else. So, that's good.

• 1:18:47Jay Shetty?

  I love that. All right. And then one last question before we dive into the final five, is, we spoke about this right at the beginning, and you mentioned the, you know, the problem, the impermanence problem. Like, how do you see yourself thinking about or meditating on or preparing for death, or the, the impermanence of life? Like, how does that come into your consciousness?

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  Well, there are really two sides to it. I mean, there's, there's your own death, and then there's the deaths of everyone you care about. And that's, those are really different problems, in a way. And it's,

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when I, when I think of the, the experience of having those close to me die, that's, I mean, I know, I mean, it's already happened. I've gone through that with, in the cases of certain people. And, you know, if, if I'm lucky enough to live a long time, well, then it's gonna, it's gonna happen, I'm sure, many times again. And, I mean, it's a fundamentally mysterious thing. I mean, the, the fact that we drop out the bottom of this place is just, it's, it's truly imponderable, you know? And yet, I know that it's possible to be happy in the absence of everyone, right? I mean, there's, there's

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  some paradoxes here. Like, you and I are having this conversation now, basically, everyone we love is not here, you know? Like, you and I just met, you know, so it's like, so we're just, we're just getting to know each other, you know? My mom's not here, my wife's not here, my kids are not here, you've got your list of people you love who are not here. It's okay to not be with the people we love. So we know that, right? And to take the other side, like, what it's like to, to personally die, say, you know, we, we go to sleep each night, and we, we not, it's not only is it okay to completely relinquish our hold on this world, I mean, we, we, we, we yearn for it. Like, if you're,

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  if you've got insomnia, if you can't fall asleep, that becomes a problem. You're desperate to lose your, your seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching and thinking of it. You, you just wanna, you wanna completely get zeroed out every night. And that's, you know, if, if, if, if nothing happens after death, I mean, we can leave aside the possibility that, that they're, you know, they're, that death is, in some sense, an illusion. But if death, if you really just get a dial tone after you die, right? Really, there's just nothing. It's somewhat analogous to sleep. I mean, it's like, your, the lights go out, right?

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Every night, we do that, and we do it happily, and it's not as... There's no... You know, I guess some people have sleep issues where they're afraid to fall asleep, but that's certainly not the common case, right? And so, to the contrary, we yearn for it. So, it is somewhat paradoxical that these... The worst thing about life, the thing that people are terrified to experience themselves, and they're terrified to experience in the case of losing the people they love. We, in the most routine way, we have really analogous experiences that are fine, right? So, like, you're fine alone in a room, and you're fine to go to sleep. And these are... There's a bit of death in both of these things,

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  because everyone you love really is absent, and when you fall asleep, you really forget everything about your life in this world, you know? Until you start dreaming, and then you're completely confused about your life in some other circumstance, unless it's a lucid dream. Which is to say that it's actually... It's possible to be okay, ultimately, even with the reality of death from both, from either side, you know? I'm not... I'm certainly expecting to grieve the next time someone close to me dies. You know, I'm not expecting... Of course, yeah. But that is a... I understand that that as an expression of love. First of all, ask yourself if you'd even want to be without the experience of grief.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  I mean, ask yourself, for instance, what you would want to do in the event that we had designed a perfect cure for grief, right? Like, let's say a pill, like, it's not an antidepressant, but it's an anti-sadness pill, you know? And that's not conceptually incoherent. I mean, we might one day have that pill. You know, it might be a pill that you would compassionately want to... There are people who are suffering some just intractable, unendurable bereavement that just never lifts, and they're just, you know, they can't get their life back together, and they're... You'd want to give that pill to that person, but the question is, how soon would you want to take that pill? And would you want to take that pill 15 minutes after your closest

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  appropriate register of

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  what they meant to you, you know, and just, and the life you lived together. Right. You know, it's like, so if you, if you pop the grief pill and then you're just saying, okay, what's on Netflix, right? That would be a kind of a desecration of all that you had shared with this person. So I don't know, it's a very interesting question where you would, because I think ultimately you would want to be able to give that pill to someone whose life had become completely derailed by grief, but just where, it just wears the line. I mean, that's, that's an interesting question.

• 1:24:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's a great answer. Yeah. All right. So we, we end every episode with a final five, uh, which have to be answered in one sentence, maximum each, each one.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  It's a challenge for me.

• 1:24:56Jay Shetty?

  So this is a challenge for you for sure. I'm excited to hear some of your answers. The fifth question, which we've asked to every guest on the show is perfectly designed for you after today's conversation. So, uh, and I, and I just want to say on camera, uh, we just cut because the cameras were getting reset because we've been taping for so long. But I was just saying that the conversation I've had with Sam today has been so different from the one I thought I'd have with him after reading his book. And that to me is a sign of a good conversation because it was true curiosity, mystery and, and creation in the moment and, and presence in the moment from both of us.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, nice.

• 1:25:29Jay Shetty?

  I, I love that. Question number one, what is the best meditation advice you've ever heard, received or given?

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  You are not this next thought.

• 1:25:39Jay Shetty?

  Uh, second question is, what is the worst meditation advice you've ever heard, received or given?

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  Well, I, I practiced for a long time in a very goal oriented tradition where it was just, you know, I spent months and months on retreats with, with, uh, Burmese meditation masters who had a very dualistic, goal-oriented, seeking kind of model. It's not to say you couldn't benefit from that, but I will get to a sentence out of this, but the setup to the sentence, the primary analogy being used was you're kind of rubbing two sticks to get fire and the moment you stop, they cool off. Right? So it's just, so whatever the sentence is, you're just like, meditation is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. You have to continuously do it. And the moment you break,

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  you're back to zero. You've made no progress.

• 1:26:32Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Wow. That's, yeah, that's a painful one. That's really painful advice. Okay. Question number three. What's the biggest lesson you learned in the last 12 months?

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Honestly, it's humbling to admit it, but it really was getting off Twitter. Just the recognition that the whole superset of preoccupation here was not worth it and not healthy. Even the good stuff, I mean, just every side of this diabolical jewel was sort of ugly when I really looked at it. And yeah, so that was, that was it.

• 1:27:09Jay Shetty?

  Great. Question number four. What's something you think people value highly, but you don't value anymore?

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Identity.

• 1:27:19Jay Shetty?

  In what sense?

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  I mean, really in every sense. I mean, just tribal identity, you know, your religious identity, your ethnic identity, your, I don't even think you need to identify with the face you see in the mirror each day. So how much less should you have to identify with people who just superficially resemble you in any way? So, but even just the identity of feeling like...

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Like in my career, or in any mode in which I'm showing up in the world, it's less than like who I feel I am while doing that is less and less substantial. It's like I don't, I don't really, it's not really graspable, you know? And so I don't, like, you know, I spend a lot of time teaching meditation in, on waking up. But because it's, because of the technology, because it's an app, I don't actually feel like a meditation teacher.

• 1:28:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  You know, I'm not showing up in the world as a meditation teacher. I don't have a, there's no place you can go sit with me in a, in a hall, you know? So I don't have students in the ordinary meditation teacher way. But the reality is that through waking up, you know, it seems strange to say it, but I could be teaching non-dual mindfulness to more people than anyone on earth at this moment. I mean, it's just, it's really quite crazy how it has scaled. But yet I don't, I never think of myself in that role. So like the, the role-based identity, you know, I'm a writer. I've got a bunch of books, but I, you know, I'm not, I don't really think of myself as a writer as much as I used to. I mean, there's just no, I, I just don't feel like, uh, there's no, anything that I would,

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  any way in which I would label what I'm doing, the label really does feel like it's, it's barely adhesive to the, to the project, you know? It's just, it's, it's there just for the, for the, um, the utility of just summarizing, you know, just like, what do you put on this form? You know, what's, what's your, what's your occupation, right? But it's like, it just doesn't get at what I'm actually doing and it, it doesn't get at how I see myself. So the identity is something that, I mean, people think, yes, I'm sure there's some stage in life where you want a healthy identity. Like I've, I've got two daughters. I want them to have healthy identities. I want them to have healthy egos. But ultimately.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  It's not about being someone in any kind of sense that feels it's like identity feels like a fist, you know, and I really want an open hand in life. And that's and so it's not that it's not that I never make a fist, but it's like you want to you want to relax that as soon as you notice it.

• 1:29:56Jay Shetty?

  It's it's really interesting from a personal practice point of view and from a human scale practice point of view, because what you just said is the the perfection of the idea, almost the way I see it is like with your daughters, I don't know how old they are, but you know, I'm guessing they're young.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Not nine and fourteen.

• 1:30:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, right. And so it's like you want them to have a healthy sense of identity, because at that stage of life, that's such an important thing.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Jay Shetty?

  And it's almost like the evolution of the idea is like, well, there's a stage of life where that isn't.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Jay Shetty?

  You know, the the directive thing. And I think that's what's so hard, because you find everyone who's listening, watching, experiencing life at such different.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Jay Shetty?

  Levels. And it's almost like someone being able to it's the same as what I was saying earlier with the identity from a systematic point of view, it's like some people, that's where they are, that that's just where they are, where their identity is what gives their life meaning.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Jay Shetty?

  And then you see if someone's so, yeah, it's just it's fascinating to me how at different stages of life, identity can mean different things and.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Yes, it's really the emotion of pride really crystallizes it for me. It's like I for my daughters. It's it's totally appropriate for them to feel pride. I want them to feel pride in the right moments. And I feel proud, it's some it's not quite the right framing, but something like pride for them. It's like I want to play that that healthy pride game with them. But I don't feel pride in my life at all. Like my pride just pride just does not map. I just have the right shape to map on

• 1:31:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  to my sense of what it is to be a person, really, you know, it's like I I'm not responsible for any of my gifts, such as they are. It's like I just I again, it comes back to luck in so many ways and what you do with that luck. But again, even the doing with the luck is more more good luck, you know, so I just feel immensely grateful for everything that has gone well in my life. And I just I mean, it's just my gratitude is is overwhelmingly my primary positive emotion. Now, it's just so much to be grateful for. And pride just does not fit. It's a puzzle piece that you maybe once fit and maybe, and granted, if you're a kid, yes.

• 1:32:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  It's a game, it's a totally appropriate game at a certain stage of life, but later on, it's a game that you just really have to outgrow.

• 1:32:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I can relate to that completely and I fully, fully loved that. Loved hearing that. Fifth and final question. If you could create one law, this is the one that I said we've asked every guest, but I feel like it's perfectly designed for you. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  The price we pay for dishonesty at every level of society is so enormous. And there's so little price paid for lying. I mean, when a politician is found to be lying, right, or a person who has immense responsibility is found to be lying, but for like specific cases of fraud that are actionable, like lying is just under the purview of free speech, really. It's like, it's not illegal to lie, right? I think, I mean, it's not so much a law. I think if we had lie detection technology that was, that we could rely on, which is there are various interesting reasons why we don't have that and may never have that.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  But if we had that, if lie detection technology was like, you know, DNA analysis in a court of law, like you just put someone on the witness stand and you could tell whether they were lying, right? I think that would be the, overnight, that would be the biggest ethical change that we could ever imagine in society. So I think, so anything that brought the appropriate level of opprobrium to lying, right? Especially lying when it matters, that would be some version of that law. The, you can't lie when it matters law, whatever that is, you know. But I do think it would be a technological solution if we just could, more and more if people knew that they were in a situation where They actually can't get away with lying, right?

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Because the technology is such, or the information space is such that it's... But the added piece is that the norm, the norm violation needs to be just more urgent. You know, because people, most people are walking around with a sense of, oh, everybody lies, all politicians lie, so like this normal lie, what do you expect? You know, it's like, and so it's not, but the, just the amount of harm and the amount, the amount of good that would be accomplished if you just knew people were being honest and, you know, you're not going to be unpleasantly surprised by.

• 1:34:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  So, there's a lot of growth, cultural growth in that direction, but, yeah.

• 1:34:41Jay Shetty?

  Uh, Sam, I hope you get involved in changing some systems. From some of the stuff you've said today, I was like, it'd be great if you were influencing the influences of some of these.

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  Well, we try with our humble podcasts. That's what we do.

• 1:34:57Jay Shetty?

  Everyone who's been listening and watching, the podcast is called Making Sense. The app is called Waking Up. The book is also called by the same title. We'll put the links in the captions, in the notes, that you have access to all of Sam's work. Go and make sure you grab a copy of the book, meditate with him on the Waking Up app, and of course, subscribe to the podcast, Making Sense. Sam, I hope this is the first of many conversations we get to have.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, really a pleasure.

• 1:35:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's really, really been, uh, it's, it's really been a phenomenal conversation. I hope we have many offline, too.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:35:30Jay Shetty?

  And anyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you grab your favorite segments, points, insights that really stood out to you, share them with a friend, start a conversation based on it. Tag me and Sam and let me know what really stood out to you, what resonated with you, maybe some things that are making you question or think differently. Like, I'd love to see what came out of it for you. This has been a very different type of conversation, on on purpose, and I know you're going to appreciate it. But a big thank you to Sam again for his generous time. Big thank you to every single one of you who've been listening and watching. And we'll see you again for another episode of On Purpose. Thank you, guys. If you loved this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Maté on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds

• 1:36:14Jay Shetty?

  to start moving on from the past.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing to death, that's what.

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.