there really is a tension between being and becoming on some level being isn't enough because you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved we're all going to die right so we have to find some mode of being at peace with impermanence the best-selling author and host the number one Health
and Wellness podcast on purpose with Jay Shetty my question is what's worth pursuing or what is worthy of pursuit in life yeah well there really is a tension between being and becoming right I think we we live with this tension every moment of our lives and I think I think the domain of our spiritual concerns really focuses on the
being part where they could just say just 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 you know 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 right so that's it's an and really finding a mode of being that wherein you you 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 they're all the ways in the ways the world might be right I mean there's the possibility space of of what we can create and 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 at least one part of it is it really subsumes our ethical lives right it's like just what 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 and content and I mean all of these are projects that take work and so it's not just a matter of of just chilling out perfectly and watching what happens we we do have to do things so the the tension really is in being
at peace in the meditative sense in the contemplative sense in the spiritual sense even while you make great effort to accomplish things and I I think the peace part comes when you recognize that your happiness is not actually predicated on getting any of those things done I mean that you have to learn to love the process you
have to learn to recognize the goals themselves as valid as they might be to achieve the experience of achieving them is very brief and it has this Mirage like quality where it just it recedes I mean you've been thinking about this thing for a year and you finally get to that landmark and what is it well it's just another
moment of being alive and now you've got your thoughts about the past and the future still and the question is can you actually make full contact with the present moment and so in the quote you read my main point was most people if you don't know how to meditate you're you're basically trying to arrange the world to give you a good
enough reason to recognize at the present moment is enough right and 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 as the path right I mean kind of emotionally and cognitively you sort of
you've already arrived in terms of your own concerns about your own well-being and yet you know that life is also an unending series of problems to be solved right but you're we're all going to die right it's not there's there's no solution to the 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 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 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 yeah conversation yeah why is it so attentive 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 you know spirituality is a word I use although I use it somewhat in scare quotes because people have associations with it that I think are just not helpful so my argument is really you can have a 21st century conversation about reality and you and how to live within it or you can have a seventh century
conversation January 5th Century BC conversation you can you can locate yourself at any point in human history or you can at this moment decide to Avail yourself of all of the best ideas and 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 is just you can there's no question that our ancestors have created documents and ways of thinking and methodologies 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 human
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 it were 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 you know the 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 of Christian physics or Muslim algebra and and ultimately I think there'll be no reason to speak of Christian or Buddhist or Hindu spirituality I think we have a
common human project and whatever is true of the human mind and as possibilities there has to be a a way of talking about that that truly transcends culture and and certainly it isn't sectarian in any usual sense right 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 might tend to I also talk about the contemplative life or you know wisdom traditions and and specific practices like meditation but it names a
an approach to well-being that isn't predicated on all of the usual seeking to become happy right so it's not about getting wealthy or it's not a it's not about getting healthier and fitter and those are all worthwhile projects uh and they're not in conflict with spirituality but the the the the the
spiritual piece in spirituality is what how is it possible to pay attention in this moment so as to not suffer unnecessarily right and 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 there's 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 discursivity and identification with thought especially you can recognize that that Consciousness that you know that by which everything is seen and known and experienced and felt right just the the the qualitative character of your own being in this moment Consciousness has certain qualities that
are intrinsically peaceful and and gratifying and not and and free of problems right and to and and it's 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 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 and more
strongly and in more important circles I I have this question because I've I've often thought about this you've well documented the pitfalls of organized religion and the challenges that come with that what do you think of the pitfalls or challenges of spirituality in the fact that we move away from something as you said earlier was like
you know this very defined structured way of living that we've now come to look at it and 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 uh become contemplative about spirituality yeah well so I should say that much that goes by the name of spirituality is also something that that is worth being skeptical of right there are many beliefs that people form and many of these are 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 and we we certainly haven't but we just know that that certain superstitious magical of the worldly beliefs are just not likely to be true and and yet the most important spiritual claims traditionally
like the fact that unconditional love is a possible state of mind right or um that the self as is normally felt and conceived is actually illusory right they were 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
um and those are really those are the the babies in the bathwater of religion and spirituality that I think everyone is if they think about it long enough wants to conserve and yeah and though and those are you know fully supported by a modern discussion of of the human mind and even a a neural anatomical
discussion of the human mind there's no am I as you know my PhD is in Neuroscience that I can tell you there's no place in the brain for a 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 an illusion that it 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 what 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 I've been going through quite a few over Christmas yeah but uh they're few and far between at the moment definitely 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 you and I think we just have to become wiser curators of the totality
of human conversation and the world's literature to find what is worthy of 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 um if you take your your favorite spiritual or religious book in almost
all of them there are passages that are obviously anachronistic and and just not suited to a 21st century view of of just how we should live right so there's a lot about how to sacrifice goats you know in the in the Old Testament then and it's just if it was ever useful it's not not especially useful now people
effortlessly ignore those passages and that's fine so you're 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 either the Golden Rule and you say okay this is this is really encapsulates a lot of wisdom and it's
very hard to improve on the Golden Rule 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 as a a um a great the kind of navigation tool ethically and when you think about ethics and morality it really is a
question of what to do next and we're always faced with this this navigation problem essentially because there's this Total Space of at of possible experience individually and collectively and we're trying to figure out how to navigate in this space given that the the possible experiences 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 there's so many things that are that are in play now I mean we we are living in a time where it was possible for us to change our own genomes ultimately right I mean there's
not not many people doing that at the moment but that is just a few short years away where we're going to be confronted with the question of I mean do you actually want to modify the the genes that are that are expressed in your body and brain uh and even in the germ line you know so we're talking about the inheritance of your your you
know future children so we can do in a few short moments what evolution has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years in our case and millions of millions and millions of years before that so these are choices that that we have always had to make but now we're making them in the presence of increasingly powerful technology and our
engagement with with the internet and information I mean we we have 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 we much of our conversation is being piped through the social media platforms which are essentially outraged machines right
they're amp preferentially amplifying the the most agitating and uh and um divisive content because that's what spreads faster and their employing their amplifying misinformation more than than the debunking of misinformation right so there's a kind of an asymmetric war of information here and so we're we're
suddenly we've got these functionally we we have the genes we had you know with it with a few tweaks we had that we have the genes we have maybe 75 000 years ago right so we are we are these ancient primates now armed with nuclear weapons and an internet and increasing and AI technology now and and so and we're we're
faced with the continually faced with the conundrum of what to do with all of this and how do we solve these massive coordination problems where we get now 8 billion strangers essentially to cooperate peacefully the landscape of possibility here is always shifting and so again we have human conversation as a as a means by which to navigate
this and so yeah I mean to come back this was 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 not non-dogmatic and just open to the best evidence and the best arguments really perpetually open to the best and new evidence and better arguments where the guard rails 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 me to 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 want some belief system that guarantees your unavailability right do you want some kind of cognitive and emotional 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 uh 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 sent a very good chance of not being true or you know or not not being replicatable even in science um we have a legacy we have an inheritance of Institutions that have proved themselves over generations and so we shouldn't be eager to tear
everything down to the studs and and build again right but I think we I think there's a there's a reason to be conservative with respect to institutions and norms and I mean things that have worked for centuries there tend to be a reason why they've worked for centuries and so it's it's there's a sort of a tinkering and
an iterative process here that I think makes sense but ultimately yet we want a modern uh wisdom wisdom tradition to be the common property of a non-sectarian non-parochial non-provincial Humanity at this point and that but that nicely comes back to the waking up part of your work right the idea that we can't create something or use
something fully aligned with human values because we as humans aren't fully aligned with human values in the in the collective sense and the idea that I've always felt that the reason why we should be scared of technology is because I guess we're scared of Some Humans so if humans have the ability to create something
it will have all the imperfections that we have internally in the creator of it and so it will inherit all the same manipulative Tendencies exploitative Tendencies the you know it it's hard to free something of that if you inherently build something with that yeah 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 yeah 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 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 you had this feeling of like complete love for your friend free of envy and when I was reading that I was thinking about how much this word purification is often not talked about but it's probably my favorite word that I've
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 the thing you want to accomplish is already accomplished so they're dualistic and non-dual ways of conceiving this whole the whole path of practice and that the dualistic way is
very much a purification model which is there's something that's like current currently dirty right and you can clean it and you can it's gonna take effort to clean it right and so this is and I would argue that most spiritual Traditions are framed in that way and there's definitely a place for that
but the mature approach to meditation practice is and then the one frankly that is just free of of the of the stress of seeking is to recognize that that Consciousness as it is ordinary consciousness regardless of what its current contents are regardless of what you're currently experiencing you could be feeling a classically negative
emotion I mean you could have just gotten angry right and then you remember oh wait a minute I'm I'm supposed to be meditating okay what it was what I'm 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 what I call over and waking up into 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 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 it's 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 the 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 so all of those changes in the contents are temporary what's not temporary is the availability of this recognition that there's just this open condition which everything is spontaneously
appearing thoughts and sights and sounds and Sensations and emotions and moods and the energetics of experience is always occurring in a condition that is is fundamentally mysterious really I mean it's not because if you engage it prior to Concepts I mean you there's a layer at which you can just think about
it and describe it in psychological terms there's a lot to understand to you know correlating changes in our minds with changes in the brain right so there's a there's a there's a possible Neuroscience of of contemplative experience and people are doing that work but as a matter of your own experience
there's this ever present mystery that anything is 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 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 does it and that doesn't feel like I it doesn't feel like me and whatever feels like I or me is
yet more appearance you know it's it can be a 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 wreck of recognition it's just this it's just a feeling of 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 recognize that you have by definition broken the connection
to whatever thoughts we're telling you why you were angry and why you should be angry and why you every 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 uh and so it's um anger is no longer anger right but it's
in purification mode it is still possible to do that dualistically I mean in the beginning when you're practicing that what I tend to teach in over a waking up is 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 and the breath and and um and thoughts and emotions and so even do even dualistically you can learn the difference between being lost and thought and identified with an emotional like anger and just witnessing it from the 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 Horizon 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 um 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 of you know the flow of thought and emotion But ultimately and and that very much has this character of purifying the mind it's like you're like this is this is a anger is a classically negative thing to be stuck in and identified with and
acting out of and it's divisive it's you're going to say the thing you regret and that for what you have to apologize for and you see this is just you know you're and the normal person who doesn't know how to be mindful and doesn't doesn't know the difference between being lost and thought and and not is is
really the mere hostage of that process they're going to stay as angry as they're going to stay for as long as they're going to stay that way and they're going to do all of the things that are life deranging and and reputation harming they might do on the basis of that emotion for as long as they're going to do those things and
then they're going to have all the reaction to what they did and said and it's that's the 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 insofar as it is it is a salience cue it's telling you that something just happened that's worth paying attention to right so there's somebody just walked into the room who you know doesn't have your your well-being uh at heart you know at heart
right and they've got some intention that is that is um in conflict with uh was something that you were trying to accomplish today or um it's telling at minimum is 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 uh 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 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 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 in a much shorter periods of time
and and then you can you then there's there's just more to recognize about the circumstance it gives you a degree of Freedom by which to navigate yeah no I I fully agree with that I I've I've whenever I get asked that question which I'm sure you get asked a lot is like well don't you ever get angry or don't you ever you know
get upset or sad and 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 yeah and that I don't think I'll ever get to zero just as you could never run a mile in zero right
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 right because it needs to live I think there are more impersonal and ethically necessary modes for these emotions that that I don't think we want to get rid of them I think 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 so you see something some unnecessary harm being created deliberately by you know deeply unwise
people in the world and and you just think all right this is this is an emergency this is worth responding to right and and it's and that can feel the energy of anger can be behind that and you know so I mean I would tend to call that outrage rather than anger but they I think moral outrage is 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 that's where that's the the line that I think we want to be more aware of yeah let's use that as an example and take it through that process because I think that's 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 the skeptical like if 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 yeah so let's take the outrage idea like how do you what does someone do they feel their 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
well I think it's important to be again cautious and and 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 yes 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 that's the the mode that you're you're in and so it's not an expression of your own greed and narcissism and and you know kind of the A self-focused and and divisive
um emotion but it probably will start at that right 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 going to raise your voice if you're going to raise your voice in defense of humanity right um well you're still raising your voice yeah and so it's just that there's energy behind it and I think that energy at times is is necessary or to take another somewhat adjacent situation but analogous
it's like you know if you're in a a situation in which you have to to defend yourself from 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 and and offer yourself up as a human sacrifice no I like I think pacifism is not
actually the morally the wisest position ethically so I think the energy that would allow you to to violently defend yourself against an aggressor um should be available right but the quote is but it is you know it's not necessarily anger but it could look a lot like anger and feel a lot like anger it's certainly not
necessarily hatred and and here I would 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 you know malicious psychopath who's who's broken into your house and is now wanting to harm you and your family because that's you know what he likes to
do right that's like the quintessential circumstance where one you'd feel you'd feel fear you'd feel a lot of things but you'd probably also feel hatred for this person right like what there's a few circumstances where hatred feels more apropos than that but I do view hatred as always being
somehow extra even in extremists like that because 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 it's a wild animal you know a grizzly bear is has broken into your
house or you know a mountain lion right how you still it's still a 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 still contemplating killing a living being to defend yourself right and your kids but there's an emotional shading there
like you as energized as you would be in the presence of a mountain lion or in the presence of a grizzly bear there's this layer of the layer of hatred doesn't quite fit you know because you feel they have less Choice 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 in the same way that we could hate another human being but if we could lock hurricanes in prison we would right 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 and I do think we could have we 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 um 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 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 um
so I think so I think at bottom when you're when you're looking at these these just 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 you there's some genetic and environmental reason why you are set up to pick yourselves up pick yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody else in the similar situation wasn't right and so on some level there's we have an
ethical imperative to acknowledge the the massive role that luck plays in our lives and I think we should want to cancel the the most egregious differences in good and bad luck between people like so when we look at a 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 some terrible terrible political outcome based on all the level of corruption this layered on top of the resources I mean there's just terrible disparities in luck there right and so I think we as
a as a global civilization more and more as we grow grow wealthier and wealthier and and and can take advantage of of good luck over here we should want to engineer a tide that raises the the upon which most or all boats Rise um 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 and I think some asymmetries may in fact be the optimal way to to encourage people's creativity and Innovation right so it's like it's it's I'm not I'm agnostic as to 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 I mean certainly anyone has got the free time to to listen to this conversation right now stands a pretty good chance of being in the top 10 or even one percent of humanity with respect to luck you know all the variables whether it's respect to health and wealth and education and just just
having the free time and attention to listen to this and be interested in this and to be 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 a certain responsibility but also opportunity to to spread the the luck around yeah yeah
to create love for others yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah I loved where we were 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 outraged 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 you feel pain when someone else is in pain you feel stressed you feel outrageous you said there may be a petty personal anger to it that triggered Us in the first place but we were able to
carve that out and understand that that wasn't the basis of our real outrage that there was something bigger yeah well it just then it really just depends on what the the problem is and what the situation is and whether you can influence it right I mean if you can't do anything about it well then it's not useful to be just grinding your gears
without rage I mean that your outrage needs some kind of Outlet you know so if you have some kind of platform upon which to to try to make sense on these important topics well then do that but yeah it's it's it's never useful to just be privately seething with with outrage that has no Outlet right so you have to
figure out one what what pragmatically can you do to accomplish anything useful on the basis of this emotion uh and if there's nothing to do it's great to have the tools by which you can just let go of it right it's like and that's um and again that's where meditation or it comes into me 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 um and that's it's true for public-facing emotion like outrage but it's true for a and 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 interview intervening days how captured are you going to be by this feeling of anxiety is 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 you know perseverating on it but as far as you know as far as as far as acting in the world so as to make the world a better place I I think you know
based on outrage or or some other emotion you know I'm impressed more and more by how much that's a story of changing incentives at the system level more than it is a story of improv getting individuals to improve themselves I think I think individuals should want to improve themselves and I you know I want to improve myself and I
you know in so far as I can share wisdom about how to do that I I do that you know more or less full time but there's a there's another level of analysis and another level of discussion that needs to be applied to the to the systems in which we're all functioning and we need to recognize that in so many
places we have systems of incentives that are aligned so as to make it actually hard to be a good person right like you need 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 you know mediocre people people who are not even thinking about ethics all that much right don't don't want to they just want what they want
it's easier for them to behave more and more like Saints because the incentives are aligned that way to take a um example that's recently top of mind so like we have a problem with the problem of climate change you know we will 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 or carbon footprint and there are a lot of great ideas in this space and you know one of them is let's
buy electric cars right let's transition from a a fossil fuel economy of transportation to an electric one well that sounds wonderful and I've you know I've just I've had an electric car and I've I just had to get a new car and I was poised to buy an electric 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 um if I forgive me I've forgotten his name I think it's uh I think it's sriram Krishnan but I could have that wrong but he he's put his book coming out called Cobalt red but he just did a two-hour uh podcast with Rogan which was just this Litany of Horrors
that attend what it the the extraction of cobalt from Congo right it's like 70 two percent 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 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 uh and so how here we have a system where we all we just we all want to buy the next electric car because it's the good thing that the the this was The Virtuous thing to do but now we find out that the batteries are are soaked in blood there's no good option right and now we
have to we and we have to pretend that that we didn't hear that podcast or the the and the people you know Bill designing the batteries or pretending that I don't know where the Cobalt comes from and there's like we need to figure out I mean this is 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 uh 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 like like I could I literally was I was 24 hours from buying another EV right so it's like it's not that it's not that my
loan purchase or not or or not 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 car to drive in light of my climate change concerns this is just to say that the individual can't solve the Cobalt supply chain problem right so like we need we need these solutions to come at the system level and at the institution level 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 and really impeccable ways given good incentives and that's that's uh some more and more I'm thinking about that yeah I love that you're thinking about that and I think it's uh an idea to perform 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 lead is at the top the people have made all these decisions to go out and you know take all this Cobalt and make sure that it was picked by child slaves or child labor or whatever
it may be I haven't listened to 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 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 the loophole mindset of like okay well let me find a way to exploit this or manipulate this towards my benefit anyway right and so you've got both I I think both are important I think like if you were the decision maker yeah if you were building
EVS you would be able to make that system in your company and you'd set it out but that would come back to you yeah yeah but it could like if we taxed carbon instead of taxing incomes yeah yeah I don't know how that works out in terms of the balance sheet but something like that so we're we're dis we're using a
tax to disincentivize something we wanted disincentivize pollution and we're not penalizing something that's intrinsically good just you know creating value and being paid for that value which is you know what income in the best cases coming from so there's that and like all of a sudden people all right if if it's costing me
money to be polluting well then I'm going to figure out how to not do that and uh that's just going to be my our interests are going to be a line there right yeah and so there's probably you know 100 or a thousand cases like that but where I was going was um I've been thinking a lot about uh what has come to be called the effect of
altruism movement I mean just how to do good yeah more reliably more systematically yeah many of us have been disillusioned with with how philanthropy has been done traditionally as like there's a there's a distinction between this actually comes back to um some of what we've been talking about with the the
difference between being led by one's emotions and actually understanding what the outcomes are in the 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 you know a a children's hospital say I mean that just seems an intrinsically good thing to do
but so much we know that so much of our impulse to do good or impulse toward altruism or impulse toward effective compassion is driven by the the com the single compelling story The Single you know the single identifiable protagonist you know the one little girl who's you know got cancer and we can help her right and
that we sort of go to sleep when we're told statistics right so like we don't we 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 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 of their other
girls there are like her they're the people's compassionate impulse reliably diminishes right so this is 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 given in the world so anyway I thought you know more about
this 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 with I just decided that waking up as a company would give a minimum of 10 of his profits to to the most effective Charities each year and I
personally would give a minimum of 10 of my pre-tax income to charity each year now I was 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 of 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 and I want to give money to college or Symphony or if that's like something that I or 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 here here's 10 percent that's going to Charities that I uh in the kind of sober rational analysis have decided are going to do the most good irrespective of how I feel about these things because there are certain causes that I just don't find especially sexy you know they're 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 if one has been you know malaria mitigation in sub-Saharan Africa just just malarial bed nets right
like that's I just can't get too excited about handing out bed nets right but that's something that's worth supporting so I just decided that okay the you know givewell.org has done run this analysis they're a great uh uh 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 doing enough this is their full-time job all right 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 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 if and you want everything on you know both Pages it's like it's like like it is a it's it's a very visceral experience of selfishness and selflessness totally merging and it's like it's like why is selfishness is the same thing as selflessness but it has the energy of
like I really I want to do this and because I sort of know I'm I've 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 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 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 I'm not it's 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 I don't need Dairy anymore right so once you don't eat dinner 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 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 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 uh allowing you to not waste as much time and energy on on figuring that out Moment by moment yeah 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 meditator for so many years as someone who's so
thoughtful about these topics there's someone who wants to see change in the systems and institutions as well how do you interact with the news because I find that to be such a source of anxiety and stress for so many people who are probably listening to us right now and so I'd love to hear how you've built a
healthier hopefully systematic logical relationship with the news Well it changed recently for me because I uh 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 just seeing I was following lots of smart people and seeing what articles they were
recommending and social going through that as a it was it was kind of like my news feed uh so I still you know I read the New York Times I read the Atlantic there's so many things I read and I and uh 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 um really toxic for me and and toxic in a way that I was convinced was misleading I mean that was the thing that got me to finally just 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 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 all this is just a fun house mirror that isn't psychological psychologically healthy to keep staring into day after day after 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 the way the world is right so like it's just it was just the phenomenon being too online ultimately right yeah so my real so insofar as Twitter was news or or a simulacrum of news that has really changed for me I just I just am not seeing it and
now I just um yeah I mean I have a few sources of of news that I I go to as uh you know more or less reflexively but again it's it's um more and more I'm asking the question you know what do I want my moment to moment life to be like you know and who do I want to be at the end of the day when I'm hanging out with my wife and
kids right and and what are the consequences of having spent my attentional budget over the previous hours in one way versus another and I mean Twitter for me honestly was it was a big change because it was like getting out of an unhealthy relationship the matter was just yeah but 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 of negative motion and Etc and 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 arranging for everybody but for me because what's unique about my job and
about or my approach to my job is that you know I criticize the right and left politically you know a lot and you know with sort of equal ferocity and so I get so I'm not I'm not tribally aligned with anyone and I get a lot of pain from both sides and it's it's a lot of it's It's not honest pain it's not like it's 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 you know it's just it's just misrepresentations and people take you know Clips out of context and I mean people people cut together clips of my podcast that 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 you know retweet them so it's a it's a it was a pervasive experience for me of seeing myself lied about and then wondering whether there's anything I should do about that right 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 like this is not the outcome I want right and it's not why I have a podcast 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 was the only social media platform I ever used I never used
Facebook or I may have Facebook and Instagram accounts but those are just marketing you know channels for my team I'm never on those so I was on Twitter it really was me and I was you know as much as I could step away from it because it seemed unhealthy for a time I kept seeing the evidence of confusion and misrepresentation I
thought I was just I'm just going to try again to clarify things right and that was that was such an unrewarding experience that it was just it was it was creating a residue of of um 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 seen 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 um and that's been an immense change I mean it's really it's so sometimes you
need to actually do the thing that is you can't just keep yeah 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 yeah and so for me it was Twitter
I mean I understand other people you know depending on what they could just be put if they're sharing cat videos on Twitter they're just getting nothing but love right they have no idea what I'm talking about but trust me it's possible to have a truly lousy experience on Twitter what if anything would bring you
back because 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 create a healthier balance to reconfigure to to do the work you want to 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 in a healthier way I'm thinking of all the people who cut things out their lives because they need to feel that distance from it because it's taken a hold of them but then they know that in reality they might have to go back at one point
yeah well I'm not planning to go back I don't I don't really see that I don't I don't think I made for marketing I don't need it yeah well I miss it I miss the good parts of it yeah that's what I mean 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 um 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 I use or don't even use my other social media channels I would just use it as I would have someone pose for me or I would post without ever looking about it was coming back at me and they're people there are people who get
a lot of negative stuff coming back at them and they just never see it because they just never look and that's um 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 technology by the promise of clarifying confusion you know
because here are the like the the person just said something to me and I can say something back you know why not you know and for strangely it did 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 so that that is interesting there's many and people are recommending substitutes where they're you know building their a new platform you know they got off Twitter for whatever reason um but it's not I'm just not tempted to fill that the Twitter shaped hole in my life with anything else so that's good I
love that all right and then one last question before we dive into the final five uh 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 how does that come into your consciousness 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 um yeah so when I when I think of the the experience of having those close to me
die that's um 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 so I'm sure many times again and I mean it's 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 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 always 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 if you've got insomnia if you can't fall asleep that becomes a problem you're desperate to lose your your scene and hearing and smelling and
tasting and touching and thinking of you you just want to you want to completely get zeroed out every night and that's you know if if nothing happens after death I mean people we can leave aside the possibility that that they're you know the death is on in sometimes an illusion but if Dad 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 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 like the the worst thing about life the the thing that that people are terrified to experience themselves and they're terrified to experience in the case of of losing the the people they love
we in in the most routine way we have really analogous experiences that are fine right so like you know you're fine alone in a room and you're fine to go to sleep and these are there's a there's a bit of death in both of these things because you're 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 it's possible to be okay ultimately even with the with the reality of death from both from either side you know I'm not
I'm so I'm certainly expecting to to grieve would the next time someone close to me dies you know I'm not expecting points but but that is a I understand that as an expression of Love first of all ask yourself if you'd even want to be without the experience of grief I mean I could ask yourself for instance what you
would want to do in the event that we had designed a a perfect cure for grief right like I'll say a pill like like the perfect it's not an antidepressant but it's an anti-sadness pill you know and that's not conceptually incoherent I mean we might one day have that pill you know it might be a pill that you would
compassionately wanted like they're people who 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 you know 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 Connection in this life died you know it's like that's the body is still warm and it 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 appropriate register of what they meant to you you know and just how and the life you live together right you know you like so if you if you pop
the grief Bill and then you're 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 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 yeah that's a great answer no but yeah um all right so we we end every episode with a final five okay uh which have to be answered in one sentence maximum each each one it's a challenge for me so this is a challenge
for you for sure I'm excited to hear some of your answers the fifth question which we've asked to every guest on the show is perfectly designed for you after today's conversation 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 uh Creation in the moment and and presence in the moment from both of us yeah nice I I
love that question number one what is the best meditation advice you've ever heard received or given you are not this next thought uh second question is what is the worst meditation advice you've ever heard received or given well I practiced for a long time in a very goal-oriented tradition where it was just you know I spent months and
months on Retreats with with the uh Burmese meditation Masters who who um had a very dualistic goal-oriented seeking kind of model it's not it's not to say you couldn't benefit from that but I will get to a sentence this out of this but the set up to the sentence the the primary analogy being used was
um 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 it's just like meditation is like rubbing two sticks together to get fired you have to continuously do it and the moment you break you're back to zero right you've made nope yeah yeah wow that's yeah
that's a painful one that's that's really painful advice yeah okay question number three uh what's the biggest lesson you learned in the last 12 months honestly it's humbling to to admit it but it really was getting off Twitter just we're just the recognition that the the whole superset of preoccupation here
was not worth it and not healthy uh 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 great uh question number four what's something you think people value highly but you don't value anymore identity in what sense I mean it really
in every sense let me just just uh tribal identity you know your you know 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 right so I said how much less should you have to identify with people who just superficially resemble
you and in any way so but even just the identity of feeling like like in my career or in any mode in which I'm showing up in the world it's less and 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 yeah you know I'm not showing up in the world as a meditation teacher I don't have there's no place you can go sit with me in a 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 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 anyway in which I would label what I'm doing the label really does feel
like it's it 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 it how I see
myself so the identity is something that I mean people think about yes I'm sure there's some stage in life where you want a healthy identity like I've got two daughters I want them to have healthy identities I want them to have healthy egos But ultimately uh 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 as soon as you notice it 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 not nine and fourteen yeah right and so it's like you want them to have a healthy sense of identity because at that stage
of life that's such an important thing yeah and it's almost like the evolution of the idea is like well there's a stage of life where that isn't yeah you know that the directive thing and I think that's what's so hard because you find everyone who's listening watching experiencing life it's such different
yeah levels and it's almost like someone being able it's the same as what I was saying earlier with the identity from a systematic point of view it's like some people that's where they are that that's just where they are where their identity is what gives their life meaning yeah and then you see as someone's so yeah
it's just it's fascinating to me how a different stages of Life identity can mean different things and yeah it's really the emotion of Pride really crystallizes it for me it's like yeah for my daughter is it's it's totally appropriate for them to feel PRI 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 project just Pride just does not map I just have the right shape to map on yeah to my sense of what it is to be a person really you know it's like I'm
not responsible for any of my gifts such as they are it's like I just I I'm here 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 um 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 and my primary positive emotion now it's just that so much to be grateful for and pride just like Pride just does not fit it's a puzzle piece that you maybe once fit and maybe and you know granted if you're if you're a kid yes yeah it's it's it's it's it's a game
it's a it's a totally appropriate game at a certain stage of life but later on it's a game that you just really you have to outgrow yeah I get I can relate to that completely in a fully fully love that I loved hearing that uh Fifth and final question if you could create one law this is the one that I said we've
asked to every guest but I feel like it's perfectly designed for you if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be the price we pay for for dishonesty into at every level of society is so enormous and there's so little price paid for a lion I mean they're like when a when a
politician is found to be lying right or the person who has immense responsibility is found to be lying you know but for like specific cases of fraud that are actionable like like Lion is just under the purview of free speech really it's like it's not illegal to lie right I I think um I mean it's not so much a
lot I think if we had lie detection technology that was that we could rely on which is there various interesting reasons why we we don't have that and may never have that but if we had that if if a lie detection technology was like you know DNA analysis in a court of law like you just put someone on the witness stand and you
could tell whether they were lying right I think that would be the overnight that would be the biggest ethical change we could ever imagine in society so I think so anything that that brought the appropriate level of a program to Lion right so especially line when it matters um that would be I some version of that law
the the you can't lie when it matters Loa whatever that is you know so but I do 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 Lion right because the the technology is such or the information space is such that
it's but the the the added piece is that the norm the the the norm violation needs to be just more urgent you know because people most people are walking around with a sense oh everybody lies all politicians lies there's 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 yeah um so there's a lot of growth cultural growth in that direction but yeah I I Sam I hope you uh get involved in changing some systems from some of the stuff you've said today
of like it would be great if you were influencing the influences and well we try with our humble podcasts yeah that's what we do everyone has been listening and watching the podcast is called making sense the app is called waking up uh the book is also called by the same title uh we'll put the links in the
captions in the notes so that you have access to all of Sam's work uh go make sure you grab a copy of the book uh meditate with him on the waking up app and of course uh subscribe to the podcast making sense Sam I hope this is the first of many conversations we get to have yeah really a pleasure yeah it's
really really been uh it's it's really been a phenomenal conversation I hope we have many offline too nice and uh 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 have been listening and watching and we'll see you again for another episode of on purpose thank you guys if you love this episode you'll love my interview with Dr gabo mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to stop moving on from the past