Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 25

Key Takeaway

Today, run a small honesty audit: before answering a question, pause long enough to distinguish a lie from a boundary. Instead of inventing an excuse or smoothing over discomfort, say what is true and appropriate—such as “I’d rather not discuss that” or “I can’t commit to that.” Harris argues that this reduces the mental overhead of managing conflicting stories while preserving discretion, privacy, and kindness. Start with low-stakes conversations and notice which reflexive “white lies” you can replace with clear truth.

Episode Overview

Steve Levitt speaks with neuroscientist, author, and meditation teacher Sam Harris about honesty, mindfulness, spirituality without religion, and the nature of consciousness. Harris makes a secular case for mental training: attention can be cultivated, suffering can be reduced, and meaningful experiences need not depend on supernatural beliefs.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 25 from Freakonomics Radio. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Sam Harris came to prominence in 2004 with the publication of his first book the end of faith it was a harsh criticism of organized religion and has spent 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list he's got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and he's been described as an Evangelical atheist so how is it even possible that 15 years later Mind Body Spirit magazine identified him as the 13th most influential spiritual person on the planet welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt I think like a scientist I view the world through the lens of data skepticism and hypothesis testing I'm not the slightest bit religious bite of that though I have to confess I've always been curious about spirituality but I was embarrassed about it and I kept that Curiosity to myself because I felt like there was no place for spirituality in the scientific mind well that all changed when I read Sam Harris's amazing 2014 book waking up a guide to spirituality without religion it's a rigorous scientific exploration of spirituality and it made him the thinking person's Guru the subsequent release of the wildly popular waking up app his 2020 book making sense conversations on Consciousness morality and the future of humanity and it's making sense podcasts have further cemented his Guru status to Sam Harris before and I'm so curious to see what he's like will he talk like a scientist or a guru will he be full of ego or free from ego foreign I can't tell you Sam how much I've been looking forward to getting to talk to you after reading so much of your amazing work oh nice thank you it's a pleasure I know lots of scientists and I find it easy to talk to neuroscientists and I know lots of people who are students of meditation and mindfulness and I know how to talk to them and I know how to talk to atheists I know how to talk to best young authors but I talk to them all differently and I'm not sure how I'm going to talk to you because they're all these things rolled into one I had to talk to a Venn diagram that's the problem exactly so you have this sort of intimidating effect on me do you think you have that effect more generally or is that something weird about me certainly there's no reason for it but I've spent a lot of time criticizing what I consider to be bad ideas so many people come into a conversation at least trying to take the other side of issues so that negative halo accompanies me into many conversations but indeed not because there are many things that I'm simply for rather than against and meditation neuroscience rationality are among those things I'm surprised that people try to take an adversarial stance because it's always been my view that when I'm talking to someone super smart it's better to try and find the common ground rather than to try to pick a fight that I'm likely to lose yeah my appetite for debate has diminished more or less along with the realization that it doesn't work all that well it's really hard to change people's minds in real time people tend to change their minds in private I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've witnessed somebody it fundamentally changed their mind which is to say relinquish fairly core cherished beliefs under pressure in the conversation itself it's like witnessing a supernova burst or something it just doesn't happen very often so insofar as the goal is to have satisfying conversations It's usually the wrong strategy yeah I'm surprised you've ever convinced anyone to change a core belief I can't think of a case I've ever been that persuasive yeah I gave up on persuasion a long time ago maybe a great place to start today is with the topic of lying and that's when you've written a book about can you just explain your stance on honesty and lying yeah well it's uncontroversial to say the line is often wrong and often gets you into trouble and is a kind of engine of Chaos in relationships but still most people think that there is a fairly vast scope for more benign forms of dishonesty and there's this notion of a white lie which many people think exists and is not only benign but necessary sometimes you have to lie to people because you care about their feelings that's the way most people come to the topic but when I was a freshman in college I took a course which was more or less a quarter long examination of White lives and the psychological and social costs of telling them and it really is one of the few things in my life where I can remember coming into a room and leaving the room a different person and ever since I've been convinced that you more or less never want to lie except in cases where violence is appropriate so you know you can lie in self-defense that's just to say that it's ethical when your relationship with the other person has totally broken down you can't presume any possibility of collaborating with that person or cooperating with them or reaching them and so if the Nazis come to the door and ask if you have Anne Frank in the Attic yes you can lie but I think in every other case the idea that line is benign is an illusion and so for now more than 30 years I've had a conscious commitment in my life to just never lying and it's been immensely clarifying there's so much cognitive overhead required when you're telling lies all the time unlike you I have not had a 30-year commitment to telling the truth I value honesty but I do lie sometimes and in particular I found myself in a time where I had recently been divorced and I had four kids and I had a new girlfriend my now wife who lived on a different continent and my ex-wife got breast cancer and I had all of these demands on me and on a number of occasions I'd say like five occasions I very thoughtfully decided that I was going to tell a major lie because I couldn't figure out a way out of my situation other than that and the interesting thing is that my wife Suzanne is incredibly intuitive and has an unbelievable memory and each of those five lies in some cases it took six months to a year but in each of those cases I got caught red-handed so I just decided after that whatever inclination I had to lie it just didn't pay in this particular situation which is a different way into the problem than the one that you took would you say the reason you don't lie is it a moral principle or is it because you think it just serves your purposes better well mostly it's totally aligned with my self-interest in terms of how I want to be with other people so I have all these feelings and thoughts and beliefs and opinions and I do all these things in private and then I'm talking to people and at every moment the conversation threatens to expose this gulf between how I want to seem and how I really am so Integrity is really a matter of closing that Gulf now keeping secrets is its own topic to be honest is not to say that you can't keep secrets or that you can't conceal information you can just be honest about it if someone asks me how much money do I have in my bank account the truth can be I don't want to tell you I don't trust your motives for asking so you can deny people access to information and not lie to do that but the larger goal is to not want to keep two different sets of ethical books right where it's like I have my ethics for my friends and family the people I love and then I have the ethics for strangers or people I haven't yet formed a connection with but who I might form a connection with and then all of a sudden I'll have to rewrite my ethical code in front of them if you could make one change in your life that guarantees you won't have something absolutely mortifying happen that could have been easily avoided a commitment to not lying is I can't think of any longer lever to pull than that I'm guessing people listing this are saying oh that's obvious but I actually think it's really radical and the more that I delved into your book and the more I thought about my own inner dialogue versus the external Impressions that I try to give to people the more terrified I got of your approach to radical honesty I'm still thinking about it I'm still debating it and and one of the things that I find most challenging about it is thinking about the transition from the world I've been in where I haven't lived radical honesty the one where I would so I've got this huge stock of partial truths or untruths that I've laid out do you have a strategy for overcoming that I mean because once I got over that I think I might be able to handle it but I can't really figure out how to get over that hump right you're trailing this kind of endless tale of mendacity that you're going to have to correct for exactly so one clarification there is this phrase that some people use radical honesty that's not how I would describe what I'm up to there is a callousness that creeps into their discussion of how committed you should be to to being honest a commitment to the truth isn't a commitment necessarily just saying every true thing about everything no matter how alarming or unwelcome it would be that's not what I'm advocating it's not that you have to helplessly kind of vomit up your opinions in every circumstance so that everyone knows exactly how judgmental you are and how much you don't like the way they look or don't like the food they serve you can have some discretion and civility so I allow for the fact that there are certainly situations where awkward to tell the truth or it's important to find out just what part of the truth is worth telling the cleanest example for me is as a parent you should tell your kids you know about the world when they ask and it's obvious you should be telling them age-appropriate truths right my daughters are now six and eleven I'm only aware of having ever once told a lie to one of them I was kind of ambushed by a question that I just couldn't think on my feet fast enough to get to a truth that was admissible so I found myself lying I've been surprised at how readily people make up things like Santa Claus I find it disturbing that we lie to kids so happily about Santa Claus and we just wait for the moment in which they understand that it's a lie and then everyone just moves on it's definitely to me an odd social construct we've made that was literally the most common question I got in response to my book line it's like what about Santa Claus people who remember what it was like to find out that Santa Claus was a fiction and that their parents had been lying to them all that time and how disturbing they found it and it's just so unnecessary the the idea that Christmas wouldn't be fun fun but for the fact that you tell this lie to kids no kid wants to be the last kid in class who still believes in Santa Claus right it's worth rethinking even Christmas one of the first times I ever really reflected on honesty was when I was in high school and a good friend of mine's mother had a stroke and would ever impact the stroke had it just released all of her inhibitions and from that point on she said whatever came into her head and it struck me as the worst possible curse one of the things I did after reading your book was just track my own daily interactions and how many little lies I told and how my reflexive response in many situations was to create little lies and it was disturbing and I really haven't resolved it yeah so I don't know if I should thank you for that or not I think maybe I was better off before I read your book good luck foreign I'd love to talk about your book waking up and I'm going to say something that I literally have never said before about any book and that is that I think waking up is important and it's important in the sense that I think it can have a large and a positive impact on many people's lives and let me explain where I'm coming from so I think there are many people like me who identify a scientists who believe in the scientific method and have been raised in terms of evidence and rationality and implicitly or explicitly somehow the scientific Community derides spirituality and it diminishes spirituality and yet my own experiences suggest that there's a really powerful role for spiritual Pursuits in life and while there are I'm sure thousands of books on meditation and mindfulness your book waking up is the only one I've ever run into that I could read through my scientific mind and not feel embarrassed about thinking that I could pursue spirituality does that reading of your book resonate with you at all yeah yeah that is certainly its purpose spirituality is a loaded term we don't have a great term for what the most positive end of human psychology should be called right but we want to explore this range of human experience we want to understand it scientifically we want to access it personally on the most basic level as a matter of experience all we have is our minds right happiness and suffering or mental events and that opens the door to various possibilities one is that the changes you make in the way you pay attention to the world and to the content of your own experience and the contents of Consciousness that it's possible to make you know real changes in your relationship to experience itself and to suffer less and even not at all in circumstances that would have otherwise caused you an immense amount of pain and to find joy and beauty and connection in places that you were unable to even notice before and there's a training that allows for that and meditation is sort of the generic term for that but all of this can be hypothesis driven and empirical and nothing needs to be assumed on insufficient evidence so it all potentially Falls within the space of a first person science and so my goal in writing the book and subsequently releasing the meditation app by the same name is to convey that we should have a 21st century conversation about the deepest possibilities of human well-being and if I try to dumb down what you said I think your main point is that there's a lot of evidence for practicing various techniques like meditation which will then lead you to experience the world in a way which is more fulfilling and gratifying and less troubling and disturbing than if you don't do it is that a fair summary of your view of the world yeah and I would just point out that 150 years ago the only person lifting weights was the crazy guy in the circus with the handlebar mustache and the leopard skin singlet right and yet we all now know that physical exercises is one of the best things you can do and most of us have found a way to not just tolerate it but actually love it but the notion of mental training is fairly esoteric and it has to be argued for and one difference is that you can't see the results in quite the same way the body admits of immense plasticity and given commitment and Native talent and good luck you can make some serious changes in your physical body but most people feel like their minds are more or less whatever they wound up with when they stumbled into adulthood right they understand that they can get educated and they can learn new facts but the idea that through training you could really change your mind that's not understood and it's not helpful frankly that the people who've done this work traditionally have always done it explicitly in a religious context we do have to break it out of these traditional framings because we should be able to use all of the world's literature and the Millennia of conversations that have been had about the mind or anything else about what works and what makes sense and if you're willing to do that you find that there has been a kind of perennial philosophy that has converged on a few points and one being that the sense of self the sense that there's a subject in the head the ego as we often call it in the west it is in illusion that can be cut through and cutting through it is quite a relief it's not the only purpose of meditation it's not really the low-hanging fruit of meditation but it really is the core Insight it can be argued for neurologically I mean there's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding it's also there to be experienced every bit as much as the optic blind spot is there to be recognized someone can teach you in three minutes how to see your blind spot the same is true of meditation it's just it requires more training I imagine a thoughtful skeptic might reasonably after reading your book say okay so I understand that the end goal if I could achieve it might be really valuable but honestly the path might be really long and maybe the payoff highly uncertain is this a worthwhile investment and what do you say to people if they challenge you like that well I I don't think the path need be long it's effectively long for many people because many of us don't have great information about it when we start and we have false assumptions that aren't sufficiently rebutted early enough so the path can be an exercise of One's Own confusion and it's also very often framed explicitly by religious beliefs that are I would argue unnecessary and distract and I don't know if I would have gotten deeply into meditation had it not been for an initial experience with psychedelics because I was very skeptical of anything in this area and I don't think I had any kind of great aptitude for it but there really is much to debate here if you're life depended on it you couldn't pay attention to anything for the next 30 seconds without your attention wandering into thought being captured by thought you could be quite an accomplished and Brilliant person and yet you do not have control over your attention in the way that you might think and some people are so distracted that it takes some effort and meditation to even notice how distracted they are and the payoff can come much more quickly than anyone's expecting so let me just go back because I'm not sure that people listen will know so much about your background so you clearly speak like a scientist and I think anyone who's listening to you will understand that you've had scientific training and you're highly intelligent what people won't necessarily know though is that you dropped out of Stanford and spent a decade pursuing these insights could you just tell us a little bit about that part of your life yeah yeah so I was at Stanford and the reason why that's relevant is that Stanford has this policy of stopping out rather than dropping out you can literally just disappear for 20 years and come back and the registrar never blinks and so that gave me a freedom that was important I dropped out when I got really interested in meditation and just the nature of the mind and I became interested in spiritual experience for lack of a better word based on an initial experience I had with MDMA otherwise known as ecstasy and so I started reading books and then I found my way to got my first Meditation Retreat and made many trips to Indian Nepal studying with various teachers and in my 20s I spent something close to two years on silent meditation Retreats mostly in a Buddhist context at the end of that decade I went back to Stanford and got my degree in philosophy and I thought I would probably do a PhD in philosophy but decided that I really just wanted a better education in brain science because so much of my philosophical interest was essentially a matter of neuro philosophy I never went into it thinking well I'm going to run a neuroimaging lab it was more to get the intellectual Tools in hand so that I could continue to think and speak and write about the nature of the Mind you're listening to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with Sam Harris after this short break they'll return to talk about Steve's own experiences with mindfulness before we get back to my conversation with Sam I want to share a new segment we're launching we're going to start Fielding questions from you yes you The Listener and I will answer him on this podcast ask me anything questions about my research beliefs Hobbies or about something you heard on this podcast and I might address it in a future episode we want to hear from you so don't hold back email us your questions at Pima freakonomics.com that's p-i-m-a at freakonomics.com and to kick off this new segment I'm going to answer a few questions we got about our golf episode featuring Greg the shark Norman and golf analyst Mark Brody if you haven't heard that episode you can find it in our archive now I made the case that golf would be a lot more fun for amateurs if we change the scoring system rather than just adding up Strokes like we do now I would count scores differently one question that someone asked is what's a hole in one worth in your system and my answer to that is whatever you wanted to be I'd say like a million or 7 million a hole in one is a once in a lifetime event you should celebrate it if you get one my recommendation is walk off the course right there don't hit another shot and don't go back for a long time just Savor the fact that you had a hole in one and I will tell you uh I once went bowling with Stephen Dubner my friend in Freakonomics co-author and I'm not a good bowler at all I'm pretty good golfer but I'm terrible bowler and lightning struck and I pulled 222 which is just absurd like I would never do it again in my life and Governor said well let's Bowl another uh 10 frames are you kidding me not only am I not going to bowl more now I'm literally Never Gonna Bowl for the rest of my life I retired from bowling and I have not bowled again in maybe the decade since we did that that's the answer to today's question and send me your question I want to be able to answer your question on this podcast in the future now back to Sam Harris reflecting back on the beginning of our conversation where Sam tells me he's been able to change the minds of a handful of people I've been trying to think if anyone has ever persuaded me to change my core beliefs about something and I literally can't think of a single thing I mean people teach me stuff all the time Stephen Dubner he taught me how to tell stories and my wife Suzanne has helped me unlearn all sorts of crazy beliefs about relationships that I've carried my whole life but I can't think of a single case where anyone ever persuaded me to change my mind about anything I tend to think of myself as being open-minded but I'm starting to wonder is that just self-delusion so I've had a few experiences in my own life that really opened me up to the ideas that you are putting forth the first was when I adopted my daughter Amanda so she was adopted from China and one of the rules was that you had to spend two weeks in China with your daughter before you were allowed to leave the country and bring her home and for reasons related to other children my then wife couldn't come and so I went and did it alone and I have to say I dreaded those two weeks like almost nothing I've ever dreaded in my life I just steeled myself to the idea of survival that I would somehow have to get through these two weeks alone in China with this baby I didn't know and something completely unexpected happened which is that I met her and we spent those two weeks together and I developed a love for her that I've never had before for any other human being on the planet and it was for me a very spiritual experience I was just completely committed to the moment and every second of that time in China my focus was on her you know I'm never quite sure I understand mindfulness very well so I guess I'm reaching out to get a sense of whether the store I just told you feels consistent with her or whether you think I'm misinterpreting that experience well it's definitely consistent with the demonstrable fact that how you pay attention to experience changes the quality of experience right so that is the thing that gives us this feeling of profundity meaning awe love when you're talking about it in the context of a relationship it's all gated by attention and it's just a fact that everyone's attention is bound up in their thoughts Moment by moment they're having a conversation with themselves that is incessant and that spell only gets broken for most people by what are recognized to be Peak experiences enough changes in the environment or in one's expectations or beliefs that all of a sudden the reservoir of truly undistracted attention opens up and we feel a flow experience where there's no distance between you and your experience anymore and people tend to get that in athletics or sex or some aesthetic encounter with art but generally speaking we're spending a lot of time looking over our own shoulder somehow abstracted away from experience in the present not really connecting with our lives in the present so an encounter with your daughter like you just described is one where the details of the present become so captivating that there's no possibility of attention wandering and that becomes profound I'm surprised to hear you describe flow and attention really you're saying they're two sides of the same coin so I've experienced flow myself in the context of both Sports and academic Pursuits but my experiences with Amanda in China were nothing like the experiences I've had with I would call Flow having a concentrated mind is intrinsically pleasurable and the more concentrated it gets the more pleasurable it gets and it can become just an ocean of bliss and very drug-like by paying sufficiently close attention to any arbitrary object I mean the breath is often one that's picked because it's always accessible and it's just a repeated sensory experience the person who thinks that the only way to have a deep flow experience is to get up at four in the morning and grab the surfboard and get out there and catch some really good waves they're mistaking the point of access you can have that experience paying sufficient attention to anything but mindfulness is actually an independent principle from that ultimately mindfulness is about just noticing how experience is without trying to change it so you're not actually even trying to cultivate and exalt the state of mind or change anything about your experience you're just dropping back into the mode of merely witnessing what's appearing on its own meditation can mean one or two things it can be a kind of concentration practice where you're trying to produce a specific state of mind or it can be what's generally called an awareness practice where you're simply trying to be aware more and more clearly of what is arising on its own if you pay closer and closer attention to anything and all of a sudden it becomes more and more like the best experiences you've had in life I had a second experience which I think relates to what you're talking about my then girlfriend and now wife Suzanne decided that she was going to go to India for a month and she has a lot of spiritual interests and she was going to pursue those spiritual interests I had zero interest in spirituality I had zero interest in India I had zero interest in being gone for a month and I decided to go for all the wrong reasons insecurity and lack of trust in her judgment to keep safe and fearing she wouldn't love me if I didn't go and to make things worse she said that she would only let me go if I didn't use any Electronics on the trip and for two weeks I would wake up in the morning and I cannot think of a single thing ahead of me that holds any promise whatsoever and then a little more than two weeks into it we missed a train and as a consequence of missing that train we have tremendous inconvenience and I remember that I wasn't bothered by it at all and it just hit me that there was literally nothing that I could be doing that was better than waiting in the train station and in a crazy way it was completely liberating because I was completely content with nothing and it sounds kind of a corny but for the next two weeks I was probably happier in cheerier and smilier and more patient than I've probably ever been in my life and this Halo hung over me really for months and still if I work at it I can bring myself into it that was the experience for me that rattled me out of my cage of scientific rationality and brought me to waking up to which I'm you know incredibly grateful to have discovered you talk in waking up about the very different roles of the right and the left sides of the brain could you briefly recount that discussion because it had a really profound impact on the way I thought about the world I mean there are some results in Neuroscience that are Stranger Than The Strangest things in in physics and even neuroscientists find it just very difficult to to integrate these facts into their perception of the human mind but we've known for many decades now that the brain can be partitioned into islands of Consciousness by a simple surgery so when you have a bad case of epilepsy one of the final remedies for that is to sever the white matter tracks that connect the left and right hemispheres so as to keep the seizure activity localized to one half of the brain those surgeries are still done and when you tested people who'd had the surgery for the longest time it seemed like they were unchanged right apart from the mitigation of their epilepsy and so people thought that okay maybe the white matter tracks connecting the two hemispheres weren't doing much of anything except holding the brain together but when you tested them in a specific way it revealed that actually when you disconnect the the two hemispheres you're partitioning the person the subject and essentially creating two independent conscious subjects and this can be revealed if you present a stimulus to one half of the visual field so that let me let's say the left half of the visual field so you only see it with your left eye it would be the left half of each eye the left visual field in each eye that information gets sent to the right visual cortex and in the absence of a intact corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres it stays there it doesn't get sent over to the left hemisphere so that the left hemisphere hasn't seen what the right hemisphere has just seen and in most people the left hemisphere has more or less total control over language the right hemisphere understands language and can be somewhat expressive but for the most part it's mute and you can interrogate the hemispheres independently in these you know very artificial experiments the language using left hemisphere when asked what did you just see It'll say one thing when something else was presented to the right hemisphere but then you ask it okay well with your left hand can you pick up the object that you may or may not have seen well the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere right so the left hand will reach out and pick up the object let's say it's a key that was just shown to the right Hemisphere and then when the subjects I ask why did you just pick up a key again now we're talking to the left hemisphere you know it'll just lie the left hemisphere when it's left to its own devices just makes up stories and seems to not suffer any internal sense of a need to be reality testing you just and so the left hemisphere without missing a beat would say something like oh because I I lost my keys last week and we know that's not why it picked up the key because we know we just flashed an image of a key to the right hemisphere you know which the left hemisphere knows nothing about so it's fascinating work and it leads very directly to the conclusion that Consciousness can be literally cut in half with a knife and partitioned within a brain and so you can have these independent perspectives on the world but it does possibly open the door to a quasi Freudian sense that we may be somewhat partitioned already because even in an intact brain There's No Illusion that we could have perfect connectivity across the hemispheres I mean there's just no way that the data sharing is perfect so it's quite possible even likely that there can be points of view within your own brain that you the conscious witness of what it's like to be You In This Moment aren't sharing like a kind of Venn diagram that's constantly separating and coming together it's a picture of the mind that is deeply foreign the self isn't a unified thing it's a kind of Illusion foreign have you thought at all about what we teach kids in school I've begun to think we should be maybe teaching kids more life skills say mindfulness things they'll actually use when they grow up yeah I mean this does to some degree relate to the degradation of philosophy somewhere around the middle of the 20th century philosophy became almost entirely denuded of the traditional project of arriving at something like wisdom it became a language game largely and as a matter of what you'd want to teach children so as to equip them to become adults wisdom has to be on the menu and wisdom can mean many things but at least it means not suffering unnecessarily right I mean just having some kind of internal guidance system that tracks the possibility of human flourishing and what prevents it in each moment you can teach mindfulness in school and I would say five or six is the earliest you'd want to start I mean it's amazing to see a a room full of six-year-olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes is like coming upon Stonehenge what do you know it existed and then they'd report back some genuine insights into their own subjectivity it's really quite amazing I'm sure a lot of people are looking to you to be some kind of a guru or through your app there are thousands of people there looking to you for guidance do you find yourself slipping into a guru mode and if you do or you don't would it be a bad thing no well it's quite a relief frankly to have found this technology by which to teach because it disentangles me from all the other ways in which one might show up as a teacher and I've wanted to avoid those ways I didn't want that role in the world really I've had incredibly positive experiences with meditation teachers and gurus or Tibetan llamas but I'm very clear about the extent of my experience and the limitations of it I'm not ready to be anyone's Guru but I'm also not confused about many of the things that many people are confused about so back to the Venn diagram I'm not the best meditator in the world I haven't had the most experience but I have an unusual amount of experience when you look at just the world itself and likewise I'm not the greatest neuroscientist in the world I'm more of a moral philosopher or a philosopher of mind but there are many books that to be a professional philosopher I should have read which I haven't read yet or will never read so I'm not the best at any one thing but if you stack all of these things on top of each other most scientists don't have my experience in philosophy most philosophers don't have my experience in science and most philosopher scientists don't have my experience in meditation but I'm under no illusions that I'm the final product of the ultimate fulfillment of this path you will maybe one day you will you're just not there yet yes then it's going to have to be a long life indeed I think are you afraid of dying I think about death a lot I guess I'm afraid of the chaos and discomfort that can surround dying I'm not afraid of the loss of experience and it's strange that anyone would be I mean this is a point that obviously lucretius made a couple thousand years ago but if death is just the absence of experience and that's not something to be afraid of but you can recognize that you're not actually afraid of it either because just think about your relationship to deep sleep right I mean everyone gets into bed each night desperate to have the plug pulled on experience and then you come back and you never really reflect on how strange it is to have been okay with the zeroing out of everything and I think there is a lesson there for what it will be like to die and it's not to say that deep sleep is necessarily synonymous with a total zeroing out of experience there's everything else around death the grief and the bereavement and the concerns about whether you lived your life in a way that you regret in any way you know but you can prepare for it in many ways and I think the best way to prepare for it is to live a more and more Mindful and self-examined life that will create in its wake the least regrettable life I didn't get a chance in our discussion to tell Sam that he is responsible for perhaps my weirdest Hobby Sam talked briefly in the conversation about how the left and right sides of our brains function almost independently and now for most people only the left side of the brain is able to express itself through language in his book waking up he goes further speculating on the possibility that the right side of our brain is more or less enslaved by the left side of our brain because we're so dependent on language after reading that I started to pay attention to how deeply language impacts the way I interact with the world even when I'm alone I use words constantly to describe everything I'm experiencing talking to myself so just for fun I made it a hobby of mine to see whether for periods of time I could experience the world without using language and it turned out with just a little practice I got pretty good at stopping the constant banter in my head I became able to for instance watch a car drive by me with its radio blaring and without the word car or radio or blaring coming into my head I could just know that that's what I saw I'm not sure whether that distinction will make any sense to you or not but I have to say I experienced the world in a surprisingly different way when the words are absent and it's strangely enjoyable and without say I'm here it's his influence I would never admit that people I mostly admire is part of the Freakonomics radio network which also includes Freakonomics radio no stupid questions and Sadir breaks the internet this show is produced by Freakonomics radio and Stitcher Morgan Levy is our producer and Dan dezula is the engineer our staff also includes Allison craiglow Mark McCluskey Greg Rippin Emma Terrell lyric bowditch and Jacob Clementi we had help on this episode from Matt hickey all of the music you heard on the show was composed by Luis Guerra to listen ad free subscribe to Stitcher premium we can be reached at Pima freakonomics.com that's p-i-m-a at freakonomics.com thanks for listening I noticed you were ranked number 13 recently on a list of the most spiritually important people in the world I haven't seen that list that's funny Radio Network Stitcher