Modern Wisdom – #661 – Sam Harris – How To Take Control Of Your Mind

Intro

In this episode of the “Modern Wisdom” podcast, Sam Harris reflects on life after Twitter and how it has improved his quality of life. He discusses the destructive nature of social media and the mismatch between online interactions and the real world. Harris also delves into the negative outcomes of Twitter, the challenges of being politically neutral, and the impact of social media on attention and long-form content. Additionally, he explores the importance of wisdom, the role of religion and mythology, and the potential for transformative experiences through meditation and psychedelics.

Main Takeaways

Impact of Social Media

• Sam Harris reflects on life after Twitter and how it has improved his quality of life.
• Social media can be destructive to our feelings towards humanity.
• The internet creates a mismatch between the real world and online interactions.
• Anonymity is part of the problem, but echo chambers also contribute to the issue.
• Twitter can create a network dynamic where users weaponize their fans against each other.
• Twitter can lead to negative outcomes, such as ruining a family vacation.
• Twitter is always ready for hot takes, which can be harmful if the user is not aligned with a political tribe.
• Being politically neutral on Twitter can result in being attacked by both sides.
• Social media is a massive opportunity cost for almost everybody and can make it harder to read long books.
• Social media can fragment our attention and make it harder to focus on long-form content.
• The YouTubeification of everything has degraded our ability to pay attention and created a never-ending now.
• Quality attention is our true wealth and we should resist the degradation of our attention by technology.

Challenges of Public Figures

• Tucker Carlson’s mismatch between his public persona and private commentary should trouble his audience.
• There is an appetite for someone to call out the powers that be, even if it leads to conspiracy thinking.
• Many institutions have lost trust for good reason.
• Lies, misinformation, and half-truths are being spread by some alternative media.
• Anomalies can be found everywhere, and they don’t have to add up to anything except a kind of pornography of doubt.
• Douglas Murray is a brilliant speaker but has been adjacent to many people who are not so fantastic, causing guilt by association.
• The guilt by association trend seems to be slowing down, with more reason seeping back into discourse.
• Some attacks that would have been taken seriously a few years ago are now being ignored.
• The pendulum has swung back, with people rolling their eyes at bad faith arguments.
• Malcolm Gladwell has a habit of being ad hominem in debates.

Exploring Religion and Mythology

• Death is an ever-present subtext to almost everything we care about, and should inform the way we live our lives.
• Time attention is the real cash value of time.
• You can find joy and equanimity in the midst of experiences that are not optimal.
• Everything is changing at every moment, there is no real stability.
• The perpetual challenge is figuring out what to do next.
• The efforts to become happy never fully fulfill itself.
• To be happy, want what you already have and be process-oriented rather than goal-oriented.
• The achievement of goals is a punctate experience that is brief and ultimately not enough for a satisfied life.
• The anticipation of pleasure, not pleasure itself, drives our dopaminergic system.
• Getting things is fun, not having things.
• There is a thirst for wisdom that can come from unexpected places, but it’s important to be aware of potentially toxic concepts.
• Jordan Peterson’s voice as a life guru for young men is not ideal and we need a more compassionate standard for manliness and success.
• Jordan’s abandonment of the conversation directly to young men has left a vacuum for insights, and people will look for answers from anyone who sounds fluent.
• Sometimes fluency is a brilliant proxy for truthfulness or insight, regardless of who you are.
• Shamelessness around selfishness has become a superpower for a certain audience.
• We should be asking more of our elders than just actionable and useful advice, and we need to be aware of potentially toxic concepts.
• There is a layer of storytelling and myth that needs to be distinguished from wishful thinking and delusion, but also has symbolic and figurative truth.
• The Bible is not the wisest book, but it does contain pearls of real wisdom.
• All religious texts were written by humans, and the process of coupling them together was also human.
• Wisdom can be extracted from all literature without believing anything on insufficient evidence.

Mindfulness and Attention

• Understanding the present moment is crucial for happiness. The past is a memory, and the future is merely anticipated.
• Most people live in a state of distraction, thinking about the past or anticipating the future, and are unable to make contact with the present moment.
• Taking psychedelics can provide a full collision with the present moment of a sort that you have never had before.
• It is possible to fall into the well of being such that the present moment lacks for nothing.
• Love, compassion, and awe are ways to recognize the point of life is to recognize the present moment more and more.
• The starting point for 99.9% of humanity is feeling like a self in the middle of their experience, and this is the basis for all of our dissatisfaction and psychological suffering.
• The mind is captured by automatic and reflexive seeking and not finding operation, leading to psychological suffering.
• Spiritually speaking, now is everything, and there’s never a reason to wait to recognize that.
• Meditation is the ultimate answer to breaking the spell of identification with thought and resting attention as consciousness in the present moment.
• Once you learn to meditate, you can recognize thoughts as thoughts and locate your well-being in the wider space of awareness.
• For hard-headed skeptics, an experience that snaps you out of your egocentric illusions is necessary, and psychedelics can be helpful in this regard.
• Many people are enamored with thought and can’t imagine a non-conceptual engagement with reality that reveals anything.
• Paying attention to anything, even just your breath, is difficult and people often get distracted.
• Some people find the difficulty of paying attention interesting and an intimation of a path to discover something that could provide relief.
• Psychedelic experiences can be a counterpoint to how people have been living their lives and provide a different perspective.
• Mindfulness meditation is a way to not be distracted by thought and to allow for embodiment and feeling to come back into one’s life.
• Mindfulness meditation allows for a prior condition of awareness to arise.
• The default case is to not know that you’re thinking.
• Breaking the spell of thought is like waking up from a dream.
• The failure of reality testing is something we are guilty of in every moment a thought seems to be what we are.
• Once you break the spell, once you see, it’s very much like waking up from a dream.
• Dreaming and not knowing it, and thinking every moment of the day without really knowing it are both a kind of psychosis.
• The constant distraction by the inner voice is universally subscribed but is also the basis for unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
• We tend to converse with ourselves in a way that is horrible and we wouldn’t talk to our friends that way.
• Noticing the character of this conversation and noticing how bizarre it is can help change the inner voice.
• Wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend, which can be done through non-conceptual meditation and noticing the character of the conversation.
• Wisdom is the capacity to take your own advice, and being able to give yourself compassionate advice is key.
• Regret is unhelpful, and focusing on the present moment and using your tools is more productive.
• The negative self-talk voice varies from person to person, and some people have a happier self-talk.
• Finding peace and happiness while also striving for more is a perpetual challenge, but biasing towards being and gratitude is important.
• When things are going well, it’s important to enjoy and appreciate the moment.
• Recognize the beauty of your life moment to moment.
• The mismatch between the objective truth of your life and the mediocrity of your way of being.
• Pay attention to moments where you miss it and moments where you don’t.
• Clear contact with the beauty and sacredness of the present moment is enormous.
• Once you have those punctate moments, the character of your life can more and more resemble the true virtues of being even when you’re still becoming.
• Finding happiness is not about constantly reaching and grabbing for the next thing, but locating satisfaction in the present moment.
• Happiness can’t be a matter of changing experience, but recognizing the nature of experience.
• Even the luckiest among us will encounter Greek level tragedy, and the question is whether we can embrace it with equanimity, compassion, love, and tranquility.
• The normal mode is to try to be lucky enough to pretend that none of the tragedy will happen, but this is not a sustainable solution.
• Wisdom is needed to find another gear beyond impermanent pleasures.
• Spiritual concepts and tools aim to find well-being beyond changes in experience.
• Mindfulness should aim to lower the bar for external stimuli needed to feel happy.
• The alternative to recognizing the nature of conscious life is to be incapable of happiness.
• Progressive underload is the goal to chip away and find happiness in daily tasks.
• Recognition of the alternative is crucial to avoid a constantly fragmented mind and becoming bad company.
• Magnifying happiness in the presence of loved ones is crucial.
• Mindfulness should be practical and applicable to daily life.
• Mindfulness can positively impact personal relationships and the world at large.
• Mindfulness is not just about the mind but also how one shows up in the world.
• There is no boundary between mindfulness practice and daily life.
• Mindfulness practice should not be seen as separate from daily life.
• Life itself can be seen as a form of meditation.
• Mindfulness is the non-judgmental willingness to feel both pleasant and unpleasant things.
• Real relief comes from recognizing oneself as the mirror of awareness and not successfully chasing pleasure or avoiding pain.
• The story we tell ourselves about our experiences shapes our perception of them.
• Reframing is a technique to change our experience by using certain concepts as an antidote to other bad concepts.
• Stoicism is an incredible operating system for the mind with very few tools needed, such as negative visualization.
• Greeks had many insights similar to Buddhism, but lacked a methodology of training.
• The detachment from emotions in stoicism may not be the most interesting channel to be on in the end.
• Buddhism is a useful and clear spiritual resource for the modern era.
• Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” is a great read.
• Secularism and atheism have gained popularity, causing a vacuum in meaning and purpose.
• Organized religion has lost subscribers and people have turned to politics for meaning.
• The idea that some people need mythology or religion is patronizing and lacks imagination.
• Astrology can fill a hole in people’s lives left by the absence of religion or mythology.
• There are dogmatic beliefs in both religious and political contexts that are not examined.
• The golden rule is an ethical jewel that can be used without subscribing to a specific religion.
• The benefits of modernity are not being equally distributed, leading to dissatisfaction and unfairness.
• Massive wealth inequality causes discord and upset, leading to a desire for change.
• People’s sense of well-being is comparative, based on how they’re doing relative to others.
• Trump and Trumpism are a symptom of people’s desire for change, rather than the cause.
• Flattening the playing field with UBI may not eliminate status games and competition.
• Status is a game that everybody will continue to play, regardless of wealth or income.
• Seeking status above the game is not as absurd as it sounds.
• Very rich and successful people already behave this way.
• Benign forms of status-seeking exist, such as using Uber instead of owning a car.
• Stigma is attached to squandering fuel on private airplanes.
• There may be no tension between affluence and ethics in a world of open-ended abundance.

Challenges of Misinformation and Extreme Risk

• Finding a balance between recognizing issues with wokeness and Trumpism.
• Differences in interests between the speaker and the person they are discussing, including meditation, spirituality, and psychedelics.
• Passion for certain topics can be contagious and inspire others to become interested.
• The importance of having voices that can direct culture, such as Jordan Peterson or Elon Musk.
• Missing the perspective and wit of the person being discussed, who would have been perfectly suited for certain moments in the last six years.
• Westerners are converting to Islam in adult life, with some converting on the street after speaking with Islamic scholars or imams.
• Islam is a macho religion with an imperative to conquer the world, making it perfect for a specific audience.
• Christianity is a story of failure with an expectation of waiting for Jesus to come back and rectify the injustice, while Islam has an expectation of conquering the world.
• For serious Muslims, there is an imperative to be a spiritual warrior, with an option to become a jihadist and a spiritual James Bond.
• Islam provides all the tools to be a spiritual warrior, unlike Christianity where you have to pretend to turn the other cheek.
• People are seeing Islam as a redress to women of the West who have been conned by feminism into believing that these things are good for them.
• The answer is a return to something that’s got a bit more lindy nature to it.
• The claim that Islam is regressive and backward-looking is a disavowal of nearly 1400 years of wisdom and insight.
• Modernity in the case of Islam is a disavowal of everything worth thinking about and talking about that happened in the seventh century.
• Confine ourselves to the products of conversations from the past, without necessarily believing in their religious origins.
• People like Andrew Tate or RFK or Elon Musk are living out the consequences of their dissatisfaction with the present and winning followers as a result.
• Many of these people ignore obvious problems on the right while focusing solely on the excesses of the left.
• It’s important to keep both problems in view and have some proportion when discussing them.
• People often have a one-sided take that aligns with their biases, whether they are creatures of the left or right.
• The media system facilitates bad actors either willfully or negligently or ignorantly rising risk of artificial intelligence, desktop printers that can synthesize bio weapons.
• It’s becoming increasingly difficult and in many cases impossible to have a conversation about facts that are just crucial to understand for the maintenance of democracy, for public health, for myriad fronts.
• The risk of real catastrophe is quite a bit higher than 10% over the next century.
• Widening the footprint of existential risk to extreme risk, societal collapse is a totally conceivable trajectory for our civilization.
• COVID-19 was a stress test for society, our information ecosystem, cultural norms, and politics.
• COVID-19 was a failed dress rehearsal for something scarier, and it primed us to be more fragile in our response.
• COVID-19 was a civilizational-wide vaccine, a weak virus that primed the next generation for a potentially worse scenario.
• Misinformation is a concern, but some prioritize freedom of speech over addressing it.
• Societal collapse is a conceivable trajectory for our civilization, and we must consider the possibility of extreme risk.
• People are divided between those who focus on extreme risk and those who focus on misinformation.
• Misinformation is a real problem that hinders public health and information.
• Anthony Fauci is both maligned and celebrated as an authority on public health.
• Gain of function research is a concern for many people.
• Society must prepare for future pandemics and extreme risks.
• The hope for the future is a swing back into normalcy with trustworthy institutions and decision-making.
• Innovation is needed to achieve this future but it must lead to real institutions that we can trust.
• We need institutions with real experts who capture our best thinking and decision-making on hard problems.
• A population in every democracy must trust those institutions to avoid the end of democracy.
• Social media is not a reliable source of information and we need institutions we can trust to provide accurate information.
• Social media can be unreliable and biased, with influencers and celebrities often amplifying certain viewpoints.
• Twitter during the UK general election in 2019 was not an accurate reflection of the outcome.
• Social media support for Trump in 2016 was much higher than what was reflected in the mainstream media.
• Cynicism is a trend on the internet, but there are tools such as stoicism that can be helpful in combating it.
• We are in a unique moment in history with unprecedented opportunity to live a good life and make a positive impact on the future, thanks to the power of technology.
• Technology has given us unprecedented opportunities to live a good life and make a positive impact on the future.
• The iPhone is a powerful computer that would have been considered magic 20 years ago.
• Access to large language models through AI is genuinely new and presents massive opportunities.
• Living an examined life means facing insults from your own mind and maintaining a sense of humor.
• Andrew Cuban is effective at cutting through the noise and bridging the gap between reliable experts and upstart podcasters.
• Andrew Cuban focuses on topics outside of culture wars, such as sleep and nicotine.
• He has a superpower of not feeling the need to give his opinion on contentious topics.
• His podcast has received maximum stars in reviews.
• Andrew Cuban does not give his thoughts on topics he does not have expertise in.
• Sam Harris has a different experience with audience feedback on his podcast Waking Up, with pure gratitude and no misconstrued messages.
• Harris had lost sight of the fact that it was possible to put something out with good intentions and have people appreciate it.
• The narrow band of topics on Waking Up may contribute to the aligned audience response.
• Harris’s other work receives a strong but polarizing response.
• The podcast world has contrarianism built into its DNA, making it difficult to avoid backlash.
• Some podcasters have a “hide user” function to deal with unthoughtful comments.
• It’s important to manage your audience and discourage them from attacking guests on social media.
• Having a reasonable and respectful audience is crucial for creators.
• Comment sections on social media can be a cesspit, even for unobjectionable creators.
• Despite the uncertain and fearful times we live in, people still crave connection.
• Social media algorithms are dictating the gamification of outrage and misinformation, leading to the spread of unrefuted bullshit.
• It may be possible to create a social media platform with a low tolerance for offensive content, but it would not be at the scale of Twitter or Facebook.
• Free speech should not be absolute on social media platforms, as they are businesses and owners should be able to curate content they do not want to be associated with.
• Writing is harder, takes longer, and pays less than other forms of content creation, but it allows for deeper thinking and analysis.
• Writing is necessary for fully exploring topics and may lead to another book in the