Making Sense - Sam Harris - #291 — Where is Happiness？

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:32.500 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.540 what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'm speaking with arthur brooks arthur's a

00:00:50.320 social scientist who focuses on human happiness he's a professor of the practice of public

00:00:57.020 leadership at the harvard kennedy school and professor of management practice at the harvard

00:01:02.020 business school he's also the best-selling author of 12 books and the creator of the popular how to

00:01:09.100 build a life column in the atlantic he previously served for 10 years as president of the american

00:01:15.160 enterprise institute and most recently he's the author of the book from strength to strength

00:01:20.740 finding success happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life and that is what we get into

00:01:27.500 in this conversation we talk about what it takes to build a good life the perverse power of social

00:01:35.000 comparison taboos around talking about intelligence political dignity and ethical hierarchy we talked for a

00:01:44.260 while about the dalai lama and our mutual experience of him the nature of love fluid and crystallized

00:01:53.420 intelligences the strange case of linus pauling the limits of identity and then in the second half we

00:02:01.260 have a spirited discussion about atheism and religion arthur is a devout roman catholic i am not

00:02:10.060 and we get into that a little talk about the fear of death psychedelics existentialism saint thomas

00:02:19.060 aquinas and other topics anyway i enjoyed this this is an example of the kind of conversations i'm

00:02:26.700 having more and more over in the life section of waking up but i'm presenting it here too because i

00:02:33.540 think will be of general interest to all of you and i bring you arthur brooks

00:02:38.880 i am here with arthur brooks arthur thanks for joining me thanks sam what a delight i've been

00:02:51.340 looking forward to this conversation for a long time yeah yeah we've um i know we know many people

00:02:56.300 in common but i don't think we've ever met correct me if i'm wrong but i'm not aware of having met you

00:03:01.680 anywhere i agree i think that's i think it's absolutely right yeah i feel like i know you though i've

00:03:06.460 listened to you so much well um i loved your latest book uh which we'll discuss the title of which is

00:03:13.220 from strength to strength and i think we'll focus on on that for most of the discussion but

00:03:19.740 catch me up on what you uh have done i mean this will be relevant to the conversation about your

00:03:27.760 book but how do you describe your professional and intellectual history what have you focused on

00:03:34.120 and uh and then we'll get to the present it's peripatetic um i haven't i haven't actually done

00:03:40.320 the same thing year after year after year like a lot of people have in my profession i'm an academic

00:03:44.420 like you i'm in i'm in the the world of academia but i came late to it i i started my career after

00:03:50.680 being unceremoniously ushered from college at age 19 as a professional musician i started as a

00:03:57.620 professional classical french horn player i went on tour for a long time through my 20s as a matter

00:04:02.600 of fact my parents called it my gap decade and uh and they were none too pleased about it actually

00:04:08.180 my father was a college professor as was his father i saw and i wound up in the barcelona symphony

00:04:13.540 playing in the in the symphony orchestra there until my late 20s and then i actually went back

00:04:19.240 to college by correspondence i didn't have enough money to or time to to do it traditionally and

00:04:25.860 finished my bachelor's degree at 30 and started graduate school and got very interested in in

00:04:31.940 social the social sciences just the behavior of how people what made people tick and weirdly became

00:04:37.380 an economist started my phd and became an academic for 10 years then left after 10 years most of it

00:04:43.360 was syracuse to be the president of a think tank in washington dc called the american enterprise

00:04:48.380 institute one of the most one of the oldest think tanks and largest think tanks in the world

00:04:52.000 and after doing that for 10 years i retired in my mid-50s at this point and came to harvard where i've

00:04:59.320 been for the past three years teaching at the business school and the kennedy school where i teach

00:05:03.320 the science of happiness mostly to mba students nice nice well uh i want to um circle back to the

00:05:11.440 um several of the transitions there you you and i actually have a slightly similar background in having

00:05:17.140 taken the decade of our 20s off from the the usual um academic grind only to return to it and uh

00:05:24.920 sort of do things backwards which is interesting but so when you were at aei what years were you

00:05:30.500 running aei i took over aei in the last month of the george w bush administration and i finished in

00:05:39.080 the middle of 2019 so i came on the first day of 2009 and then i left in june of 2019 10 and a half

00:05:47.280 years uh i forget what so were you running it when ayan hersey ali joined or was that no she was there

00:05:53.280 we were a coincident for a while she joined under my predecessor and she was there with me and then we

00:05:57.920 did a lot of stuff together as when she was a non-resident fellow okay yes i though my politics

00:06:03.600 have always diverged considerably from aei i have a a soft spot for the organization because it was

00:06:11.440 literally the only foundation that would take aeon uh when she was really you know just desperate for

00:06:20.160 refuge leaving the netherlands and and incurring all of these security concerns around her um

00:06:27.060 apostasy and uh you know the aei saved her and it was so i was incredibly grateful at that moment

00:06:34.420 being one of her friends yeah yeah no it's also it's a it's an organization dedicated to intellectual

00:06:40.220 apostates sort of literal apostates like ayan hersey ali but also just the intellectual apostates weird

00:06:46.680 people people who think differently because look this is what makes life interesting and and the

00:06:52.060 competition of ideas really is fundamental to a free society the the idea of conventional thinking

00:06:57.760 is antithetical to progress as far as we're concerned and so i i i was really dedicated to

00:07:02.760 that principle i was looking for weirdos quite frankly you know people who are going to break up

00:07:07.420 convention yeah okay so let's um let's start with your book and maybe we can start with the way you

00:07:16.300 actually start your book i mean you have this uh anecdote that uh is kind of the founding inspiration

00:07:24.040 and epiphany for your book perhaps you you can tell that and link it up with with these various

00:07:31.260 transitions you have made in your life yeah i start the book by telling a story that had a kind of a

00:07:37.260 foundational impact on me because it was about halfway through my time as president of this think tank

00:07:43.200 and it was a great job i mean i was working my tail off i was traveling around giving maybe 175

00:07:50.220 speeches a year and i was fundraising like crazy i had to raise 50 million bucks a year it's like

00:07:54.820 my job was like running for the senate and never getting elected basically which probably is better than

00:08:00.860 getting elected in the senate but about halfway through five years or so through i was having this

00:08:05.700 mild existential crisis you know what does this lead to what what am i actually trying to do i'm gonna do

00:08:11.160 my work and do it better and be more successful i suppose or at least create more impact and value

00:08:16.160 for society as i saw it but but then what i mean sooner or later i'll get a shove or i'll get tired

00:08:21.540 or something and stop and you know what does this mean basically what's the cadence of it basically

00:08:25.680 and around the time i was on a plane and had overheard this conversation now you and i as

00:08:31.500 basically as social scientists know that our real laboratory is overheard conversations it's the

00:08:39.620 conversation on the plane it's you know the people talking behind you at starbucks that's that's where

00:08:44.080 the real that that's where the interesting ideas come from and i heard a conversation of a couple

00:08:49.820 an elderly couple i could tell other voices i could tell it was a man and a woman and i assumed they

00:08:54.740 were married because it was a pretty intimate conversation and i couldn't see him it was it was

00:08:58.200 nighttime it was dark but i heard the husband kind of mumble a little bit and then the wife say

00:09:03.620 don't say it would be better if you were dead and now they really have my attention i mean i'm just

00:09:10.040 keyed in at this point i'm not trying to to eavesdrop but i mean who wouldn't be listening at this point

00:09:14.800 and then he mumbles a little bit more she says it's not true that nobody nobody cares about you and

00:09:20.280 nobody remembers you and i'm thinking that this is probably somebody who's not like you sam or the

00:09:26.940 people listening to your program this is not somebody who was super motivated it's probably

00:09:31.320 somebody who's disappointed because he didn't get the education that he wanted and start the

00:09:36.240 business or get the jobs that he wanted and now it's near the end and he's disappointed well we

00:09:40.740 get to we were coming from la to washington a flight i was on a lot in those days and we land in

00:09:46.160 washington maybe an hour later and the lights go on and we all stand up and i'm curious so i turn

00:09:50.940 around just to get a look at this at the disconsolate old guy and it's one of the most famous men in the

00:09:56.460 world i mean this guy is rich and famous because of things that he did in the 60s and 70s and he's

00:10:02.660 very old but he's super well known i mean people recognize him and as we were leaving the plane you

00:10:08.160 know he's right behind me coming up the aisle and the pilot stops him and says recognizes him of course

00:10:13.500 and says sir you've been my hero since i was a little boy and i turned around and he's beaming with

00:10:19.460 pride and i'm thinking to myself so which is it which is the real guy the one beaming with pride

00:10:25.460 right now or the one confessing to his wife that he might as well be dead and i thought to myself

00:10:31.220 you know the world has a kind of a bogus formula for success actually which is what i had been

00:10:38.940 suffering under and which i just had witnessed that if you want to be happy you want to die happy sam

00:10:44.440 here's the deal work hard succeed bust your pick bank your success die happy and it's wrong it's not

00:10:53.320 true and we all kind of know it's not true but i i saw this in stark relief and i started actually

00:10:58.300 reading biographies differently at that point of you know great great men and women throughout history

00:11:03.600 to see if they died happy and a lot of them didn't and it sent me on this quest to figure out what was

00:11:10.680 this curse of a lot of people who were very successful in life that they they tended to be very unhappy at

00:11:16.280 the end of life and what could somebody do to build what amounts to a happiness 401k plan i was going

00:11:23.540 to turn my social scientist toolkit on the business of getting happier as you get older and that's the

00:11:28.580 book that we're talking about and this curse is something you call the strivers curse yeah but this

00:11:35.000 the insight into the problem visited you earlier than is um really the the central lesson of your book

00:11:44.560 because your book as we will see focuses on inevitable changes that come with aging but you

00:11:50.340 kind of slammed up against a brick wall in music you know in your still in your i guess your late 20s

00:11:57.240 just maybe describe that and yeah talk about what you just what those implications were for you

00:12:02.340 well one of the things that i talk about in the book is one of the reasons that strivers really hard

00:12:07.720 workers ambitious people why this why they struggle and and suffer often later in life is because what

00:12:12.560 they're good at they can't keep doing forever that there is inevitable decline and i talk about the

00:12:17.400 the neuroscientific basis of that i mean there's very strong you know neuroscience and social science

00:12:23.720 for why that is the case but it i also have some personal experience in decline and i'd experienced

00:12:30.140 decline not the kind that comes in midlife but i'd had a weird decline in my musical career that gave

00:12:35.960 me a taste of how bitter it actually is you know i had all i ever wanted to be as a kid was a

00:12:41.600 french horn player i wanted to be the world's greatest french horn player which is kind of a

00:12:45.180 kind of a weird ambition i realized but nonetheless it was my ambition and and as i went through my

00:12:51.760 teenage years it seemed like that was actually within reach or something like it was within reach

00:12:57.080 because i was just getting better every year and my career was going well and i was playing

00:13:00.720 professionally and then something happened in my early 20s where i started getting worse

00:13:05.480 and i couldn't i couldn't figure it out now this happens to people that that rely on gross and fine

00:13:11.320 motor skills a lot and there's a lot of possible physiological or even neurological explanations for

00:13:17.880 it but it's not well understood why some athletes why they burn out early why some classical musicians

00:13:24.020 peak and decline early but i was and by the time i was 22 i was finding the things that that used to be

00:13:29.500 easy were hard and things that used to be hard were impossible and and i was noticing this decline

00:13:34.280 all the way through my mid-20s so i i was trying desperately i was going to the best teachers i

00:13:38.200 was practicing more and more i took different jobs i wound up in the symphony in barcelona because i

00:13:43.280 thought that maybe this kind of job this kind of playing would re-spark my my my ascent as a as a

00:13:49.740 french horn player and of course it didn't and you know it really took a lot of well it took getting

00:13:54.500 married to somebody who was kind of my guru to help me understand that i was not a french horn

00:14:00.900 player i was a person i was a human being that happened to play the french horn that had never

00:14:05.300 occurred to me because i was a classic success addicted self-objectifier which is one of the

00:14:10.800 things i talk about a lot in my book what holds people back is that they're hopelessly addicted

00:14:14.860 to success and i was too but and it took somebody who really loved me for who i was as a person as

00:14:20.300 opposed to what i was professionally to help me do something else well what's the normal pattern

00:14:25.860 of decline for a musician of of that sort the normal pattern of decline is that you would get

00:14:32.360 better all the way through your 20s and into your 30s so your technique would actually get better

00:14:37.360 and then you'd peak as a french horn player a violinist or something ordinarily your technique

00:14:42.060 would peak in your late 30s and you start to see pretty gradual decline through your 40s and 50s

00:14:47.860 and if you're truly a prodigy even in your 60s and 70s you can be playing very very beautifully but

00:14:52.600 your best playing will typically be in your late 30s is what you find and that had happened to me

00:14:56.840 in my early 20s for you know whatever reason there may have been an injury that had gone undetected or

00:15:01.300 or whatever reason i just was i guess i was just precociously in decline and it gave me by the way sam

00:15:08.160 it was a blessing because it gave me an opportunity to retool and you know go back to school and learn

00:15:13.760 something new but i you know i was so tied to it that i didn't even tell anybody i'd gone to college i was

00:15:19.740 ashamed that anybody would know that i was studying and you know it was a real secret the only person

00:15:25.640 literally the only person who knew was my wife and and none of my colleagues i remember one time in

00:15:31.580 the music world that we were you know hanging around and there was this one woman she's a pretty good

00:15:36.200 french horn player but she came and said i got big news you know i just got a full scholarship to go

00:15:41.200 to medical school the university of miami i'm going to become a surgeon and after she left the room

00:15:46.000 we're like see she doesn't have it talk about a low status job a surgeon yeah if you're among french

00:15:53.240 horn players that's funny it's it's questions of status are essential here and eight and questions

00:16:01.320 of identity i mean you see what you're describing is your identity was entirely anchored to this notion

00:16:07.100 of you being a increasingly wonderful musician and when that began to erode you became increasingly

00:16:15.060 uncomfortable for obvious reasons right i mean even just in the in the story you just described

00:16:20.560 one sense of identity and this is something you point out in the book is notions of success that can

00:16:27.200 accrete around it are for the most part in relation to others i mean they're born of social comparison

00:16:34.640 they're born of notions of status explicit or implicit so they're positional and yet there are multiple

00:16:42.440 axes for these kinds of comparisons and status judgments and so it's kind of you know we're both

00:16:50.260 laughing when we describe the elitism of the french horn players looking down on on lowly surgeons but of

00:16:56.940 course surgeons would return the favor and there's i think this has probably happened to you there are

00:17:02.120 many contexts in which you find yourself in the company of highly successful people and you witness you know

00:17:11.820 various status games and witness you know what they do to your own self-concept but these comparisons

00:17:19.300 occur and combine and recombine in strange ways you can be an academic who may feel you know kind of low

00:17:29.040 status compared to you know some other academics but higher status with respect to the variable of

00:17:35.780 education around people who just have a lot of money say right but right absolutely you know

00:17:41.820 and they're just there at least a dozen ways you can kind of point the the arrow of your self-regard

00:17:48.220 so as to compare yourself to those around you and it is um really the lesson in the end is that

00:17:56.480 all of this is fatuous and not the basis for a durable feeling of of well-being or a sense that one

00:18:06.520 is living a meaningful life absolutely and you know we can even find stranger versions of it today i

00:18:13.120 mean we talk about on college campuses or any place there are people who get their sense of identity and

00:18:19.660 their sense of hierarchy of identity with respect to their their grievance yeah um their sense of

00:18:26.500 victimhood and and so it's kind of like you know people often say that college campuses are like the

00:18:31.020 victim olympics in some cases and what that is about is i mean nothing to make light of because

00:18:36.600 there are legitimate grievances to be sure but to the extent that we say one group is more aggrieved

00:18:42.320 than another group that's the same thing as saying that a good french horn player has less status

00:18:46.900 somehow than somebody with a phd it's just it gets very exotic very quickly and is pretty unhelpful

00:18:53.400 and pretty unconstructive for living the best life i think it's suffice it to say so in your book you make

00:18:59.240 much of two different types of intelligence and the time course of their decline maybe we should

00:19:06.580 jump into that perhaps we should acknowledge up front that intelligence itself is a somewhat taboo

00:19:14.280 topic i mean even to acknowledge that it is unequally distributed in the world is taboo i mean it's it's

00:19:23.040 there for all to notice however you however you want to define intelligence even if we admit that

00:19:29.240 how you define it may be open to some caviline whatever definition you have you have something

00:19:36.620 that is implicitly hierarchical and it's just there is no definition that renders everyone equivalent and

00:19:44.280 yet that's it's strange that it's taboo to acknowledge that i mean you know it's not at all taboo

00:19:49.180 to acknowledge that some french horn players are better than others or some athletes are better than

00:19:55.200 others and yet to talk in any straightforward way about someone being smarter than someone else

00:20:04.440 that makes everyone uncomfortable do you you have a sense of why that is well part of it is that we've

00:20:11.060 made the mistake for a very long time of equating intelligence with with moral superiority i mean how

00:20:18.500 how many parents will will compliment their kids by saying you're so smart i mean it's that you

00:20:24.160 wouldn't compliment your kid by saying your hair is so long you wouldn't i mean it's just these are

00:20:30.140 you know if these are characteristics that actually that vary not just on the basis of your own effort

00:20:36.160 by but by you know something having to for example with your genetics it's then it's nothing worth

00:20:40.620 complimenting for peace sake it's like your eyes are so blue i mean what a weird thing to compliment

00:20:45.800 i suppose that we could to admire that particular quality but to not to equate it with some sort of

00:20:51.360 moral superiority is really important and yet that's what people have done for the longest time

00:20:55.520 and if we if we think that that there's an equivalency between intelligence and cognitive ability

00:21:01.500 for example and moral superiority then we're going to be getting into all of these this all of

00:21:05.140 this confusion to begin with now there's other ways that people have in our field yours and mine

00:21:10.240 have talked about it that's less controversial and for example in my book i talk about the work

00:21:14.960 of raymond cattel who is a social psychologist in in great britain working in the 50s 60s and 70s and

00:21:20.920 and cattel was basically just noticing that there are two types of geniuses one one that blooms early

00:21:27.200 and one that blooms late and they have different characteristics they have different strengths

00:21:31.060 that that give them these genius characteristics and then he noticed later that these genius

00:21:35.600 characteristics exist in everybody in varying degrees that you're really good at something early and

00:21:41.360 you're really good at something later so it's a lot less polemical than the way that we talk about

00:21:46.020 for example iq scores right right yeah and this is the distinction between fluid and crystallized

00:21:52.280 intelligence that yeah exactly exactly i want i just wonder if there's something more

00:21:58.060 more to it i mean i just i haven't thought about this much but you know my own relationship to this

00:22:05.240 concept strikes me as peculiar so for instance i mean like at no point in my life did i ever think

00:22:14.280 that maybe i should be a professional athlete right i mean like the sport i played the most

00:22:22.700 the team sport i played the most was soccer i definitely had enough exposure to soccer

00:22:28.960 to discover in myself the aptitude that would lead me to be a professional soccer player right i mean i

00:22:36.660 think i started playing around age nine i played straight through high school i was certainly not a

00:22:42.520 bad soccer player and you know even in the context of you know a little school team i think i probably

00:22:49.060 thought of myself as a good soccer player but then i went to college i went when i went to stanford

00:22:53.720 there was you know literally not a single neuron in my brain that thought maybe i should try out for

00:23:00.860 the varsity soccer team right it was a good team i think they even when i was there i think they beat

00:23:07.220 the olympic team so it was you know a serious soccer team and i mean i don't even think i consciously

00:23:13.060 closed that door it's just i never even looked for a door i mean it was just it was obvious that my

00:23:18.060 abilities as a soccer player were so bounded that no thought needed need be expended on on my future

00:23:26.540 professionally as a soccer player right and in no way do i feel diminished by that egoically that just

00:23:34.600 that was not my my wheelhouse but when i think about you know other things left unexplored of that

00:23:40.820 sort if i think well if i had applied myself more to mathematics you know could i have discovered in

00:23:48.820 myself that i was really a great mathematician right could i mean i was obviously exposed to

00:23:54.480 mathematics as much as i was exposed to soccer presumably you know i was exposed enough to have

00:24:00.100 discovered whether i was going to be the next alan turing or claude shannon or norbert wiener or you

00:24:06.680 take your pick i didn't discover that and yet i think if you know in my crazier moments i think

00:24:15.280 part of me believes that if i had just pushed into that area if i had persisted really the the sky was

00:24:23.680 the limit there's no telling what i could have become in that area now it takes me about 10 seconds

00:24:30.280 to convince myself that that is almost certainly bullshit right there's no way i you know was going

00:24:37.800 to be the next alan turing just statistically it's as likely as me being the you know the next lebron

00:24:44.040 james or some athlete who you know i i i never for a moment would think i would stand a chance of being

00:24:50.680 and yet it doesn't feel that way intelligence is the sort of thing that you feel like it's very hard to

00:24:59.180 admit to yourself that there is a scale and you are at a certain point on it again define intelligence

00:25:07.360 in as piecemeal a way as you want give me you know a hundred different forms of intelligence

00:25:12.280 take your pick you are not the greatest at that one very likely right and yet it's there's something

00:25:19.220 about that that's hard for people to admit and it does feel diminishing in a way that just

00:25:25.960 acknowledging that you know you weren't going to be a professional athlete isn't i don't know

00:25:31.820 what to compare this to it's a little bit like you know as writers we've run into this this is a kind

00:25:37.140 of an old saw of writers that you know basically everyone imagines that they should write a book

00:25:42.580 right everyone imagines that that they have a book in them because everyone's a language user and

00:25:47.620 everyone does some writing and it's you know you're constantly bumping into people who think they

00:25:52.080 should be writing a book whereas you're not bumping into people who think they should be playing the

00:25:56.640 french horn at the highest level and so maybe intelligence is something like that where because

00:26:02.280 everyone is using it all day long it's very hard to think about it being bounded in a way that is

00:26:10.000 invidious to oneself yeah we also have a society that is increasingly giving returns to

00:26:18.040 intellectual ability i mean we have a very complex society and this is you know it's it's it's one of

00:26:26.480 the things that virtually guarantees that you're going to do well if you're you know if you have

00:26:31.840 strong intellectual gifts and so the result of that is that it's it's a better thing to have than

00:26:37.500 good lips for playing the french horn i mean it's like and if you're gonna you have your kid and you

00:26:41.780 say well you got two choices the kid is going to be really gifted intellectually the kid's going to

00:26:45.860 have you know an unbelievable embouchure to play the trombone or the french horn or something you're

00:26:50.040 gonna it's like you'd be nuts to say look little johnny's intellectually pretty mediocre but man he

00:26:55.720 can he can he's got good technique on the trombone that's there are very few people that would take

00:27:00.480 that maybe my parents would have taken that i'm not sure but but the truth is that it's just that

00:27:04.820 intellectual giftedness is highly fungible across modern society which has been in more and more and

00:27:10.600 more rewarding that and a lot of people are you know putting moats around their castles for that

00:27:17.040 too making it into a harder and harder society and you know this is what it really does i think it

00:27:21.640 comes down to a question of we all have to recognize the the radical equality of human dignity not

00:27:27.680 withstanding our differences of all different kinds and to the point that we can't quite recognize that

00:27:33.240 everybody has the same dignity then we have to be very uncomfortable with difference with

00:27:38.340 differences that people actually have i think yeah i think there's a distinction between

00:27:43.940 human dignity and like the political equivalence between people i mean all all people are created

00:27:52.460 equal that's a political statement that's the world we want to live in and yet we know that

00:27:58.520 there are some people who add much more value to society than others right and again this is just a

00:28:06.500 you know whether you want to talk about this in in absolute terms or if this is just a contingent

00:28:10.560 fact of what a society happens to value you know you're going to find certain people who cater to those

00:28:17.300 desires and demands more than others and so in a hostage crisis you know it is natural to want to

00:28:24.920 rescue you know albert einstein and and martin luther king jr before you rescue i don't know somebody who's

00:28:34.280 has and will do nothing of special value for anyone else right and more resources will be expended upon

00:28:41.820 trying to rescue that person presumably now we don't want to live in that world we want to live in a

00:28:46.480 world where we're impartial or at least there's a pretense of impartiality more or less across the

00:28:53.120 board where so you know doctors work as hard as they ever going they're ever going to work to save the

00:28:57.320 life of anyone but you know as you say you know intelligence is this magical property that is

00:29:03.860 incredibly fungible it's just so useful across the board i mean almost anything we want either depends

00:29:11.560 more or less entirely on intelligence or or at least it's safeguarded by intelligence but you know

00:29:18.800 obviously there are many more things or at least several more things that are arguably as important or

00:29:25.280 more important and you know we'll talk about a few of those things but there's certainly a

00:29:30.160 dissociation in some people between intelligence and wisdom and certainly an intelligence and a

00:29:37.560 capacity for ethical engagement and and love and compassion and it's the love and compassion and

00:29:44.520 wisdom side of things that that wants to build a a more egalitarian view of the situation but i feel like

00:29:51.980 we can't lie to ourselves about there being a kind of ethical hierarchy as well i mean i mean to make

00:30:00.300 this absolutely clear there are people who create net harm to society you know we put certain people in

00:30:08.400 boxes for the rest of their lives because they're they're so despicable and dangerous if you let them

00:30:14.280 out of the box and yet uh we also give them competent medical care when they need it how do you think

00:30:20.720 about the situation of moral worth and dignity uh versus the the kind of gradations of benefit to

00:30:27.360 others that uh i just sketched well yeah all of these are incredibly nuanced ethical questions that

00:30:34.300 we're trying to live out day to day and i think it's interesting that we can explore these things in

00:30:39.540 the context of what we want for ourselves and what we want for our own kids so you know we tend to

00:30:45.640 prize certain things certain characteristics above all other things and and you know in the hierarchy

00:30:50.800 of what we want for our kids we want our kids to be really successful we want them to be really smart

00:30:55.220 and we want them to but if i if i gave you two choices um you know you can you have a son or a

00:31:02.520 daughter who's a psychopathic genius or one who is of moderate ability who's benevolent and loving and

00:31:10.140 kind i know which one you'd choose yeah and a hundred times out of a hundred and what you've

00:31:15.060 just told me is those are competing characteristics and in point of fact benevolence love and kindness

00:31:19.640 is probably more important as far as you're concerned and that's an important value for

00:31:24.200 our society to start prizing and be more overt about as far as i'm concerned that's one of the

00:31:29.200 things that i think that we could all probably agree on that would cool a lot of the you know the

00:31:34.200 tensions around a lot of these conversations what are the human values that should be and actually

00:31:38.840 kind of are more important to us than cognitive ability than you know academic performance and

00:31:45.140 and the answer is the extent to which we but we we can behave ethically and in a loving way toward

00:31:50.000 one another and that the sort of benevolence across society that we can and how we can foster that more

00:31:54.720 in in young people and so that's a lot of what i've dedicated my work to doing you know as an

00:31:59.560 academic for example you know when i when i left my think tank i was discerning what do i want to do

00:32:04.480 the rest of my life and and i decided that i was going to spend the rest of my i was mid-50s 55

00:32:10.700 years old and i said i'm going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together

00:32:15.260 in bonds of happiness and love using my intellect and using my ideas because i think that those are

00:32:21.580 higher values than the other things hmm yeah yeah although i would just point out that there's

00:32:28.600 an implicit hierarchy even there i mean i think it's obvious that some people are more compassionate

00:32:35.520 and wiser and more loving than others for sure that's a domain in which any one person can grow

00:32:43.320 and there's you know there are methods by which one can grow you know across all of those variables

00:32:47.960 but there's no question that there are ethical prodigies in the world at whatever point in life they

00:32:54.420 fully embody those abilities and i mean you mentioned a few in your book and i think you

00:32:59.280 mentioned in your book that you've actually had some direct connection with the dalai lama what has

00:33:06.500 that been about about 10 years ago when i was still president of aei i started thinking about the people

00:33:13.120 that i wanted to have deep conversations ethical conversations about big issues of the day with people

00:33:19.800 whom i really admired morally people whom i admired spiritually people who are adroit and and really

00:33:27.400 the person on the top of that list is the world's most respected religious leader which is the who is

00:33:31.240 the dalai lama and so i got in contact with his team and with some of my colleagues at aei they granted

00:33:37.380 us an hour with him in dharamsala in his monastery in the himalayan foothills and it was an arduous journey

00:33:42.920 getting up there for sure but yeah it was just sort of magic as soon as we met we started talking having

00:33:48.080 these big ideas i invited him to the united states he came i interviewed him we wound up writing

00:33:52.420 together i interviewed him many times we've become friends he's a beloved teacher and friend and i've

00:33:58.020 learned a great deal from him i mean he has a completely different spiritual tradition than me

00:34:03.160 he sees the world in many ways very differently than me but what we agree on is this this in this

00:34:09.140 inherent dignity of all people you know he reminds me it's interesting you know because he's he's tibetan

00:34:15.760 he's not american you and i are americans and we see things inherently a little bit differently but

00:34:19.680 he'll say remember you're one in seven billion people by which he doesn't mean that i'm a speck

00:34:24.820 that i'm insignificant but that there's a the that we're all part of you know i mean i know that

00:34:32.340 you practice meditation in a very serious way so the concept of emptiness means something to you

00:34:38.240 and the whole idea is that you know there's this koan in in zen buddhism what is the sound of one

00:34:45.000 hand clapping it's almost a cliche at this point but really what it is it's the answer to a question

00:34:50.560 who am i as an individual i am the sound of one hand clapping the truth is that i as an individual

00:34:56.480 with my ideas don't mean very much until i my hand clapping comes against the hand of sam harris and we

00:35:03.120 have this particular conversation and it's the dalai lama who's helped me understand that my dignity

00:35:07.840 that doesn't mean very much until it actually is meets that your dignity together it's the

00:35:15.540 togetherness that really matters a lot that has been one of the most valuable relationships in my

00:35:20.540 intellectual and my spiritual development hmm yeah he it's been many years since i've seen him but i

00:35:27.980 did have some very nice concentrated exposure to him uh in my i guess late 20s the most substantial

00:35:37.660 was he i was um invited to be part of a buddhist group that was arranging his tour of france for a

00:35:46.720 month and these are people these are some friends who had been on you know three-year retreats in

00:35:51.860 in tibetan buddhist retreat centers uh in france and so they were organizing his tour and and it was

00:35:57.740 this you know fairly arduous tour where he was basically changing cities every 24 or 48 hours for

00:36:05.020 a month and uh so you're you know you're packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking and and we

00:36:10.320 were his security detail uh unlike in america he was also given a like the french equivalent of a secret

00:36:18.860 service detail as well but we were the kind of the buffer between the real bodyguards and the

00:36:24.620 the rascal multitude in france so strangely we got into much more conflict with the people

00:36:30.780 than the real bodyguards did because they just used us as a buffer but it was a really interesting

00:36:36.540 experience because i got to see what he was like in all of these transitional moments with large groups

00:36:44.800 of people again and again and again in a situation where i had to be you know like my job was to be

00:36:51.060 paranoid and to be you know scrutinizing every room looking for a threat and you know his job is to be

00:36:58.640 mr compassion and just beam love and good humor at everyone so it was it was actually it was a strangely

00:37:06.580 toxic role to be in because it was just you know rather than stay on his channel you had you had to be

00:37:13.920 the jerk on some level and i got to be a jerk with very poor language skills so that you know i didn't

00:37:19.660 even have enough french to be diplomatic so you know i'm telling people there's not there's not

00:37:24.720 enough french in the world to be diplomatic sam right yeah well and the french i notice often aren't

00:37:30.580 aren't very diplomatic but but i was you know telling people not to move and back up and you know just

00:37:35.300 you know kind of barking orders at journalists and it's amazing how rude people can be i mean literally

00:37:40.160 there were journalists who at some point you know physically grabbed him and turned him wheeled him

00:37:45.600 around in order to get a photo of him it was completely insane but um what i saw in him was

00:37:52.740 just this ability to almost without exception not miss anyone i mean he would be exiting a hotel and

00:38:00.740 there'd be you know a dozen or more people just gathered to watch him go because he was such a

00:38:06.680 celebrity and again he's a bigger celebrity in france than than he is in the states at least at

00:38:12.620 that point and he would just make you know it could be you know almost instantaneous but he would make

00:38:18.460 a connection with basically everyone in the room on his way out and i mean he's just a kind of the

00:38:26.340 ultimate mensch you know i you know i guess i could be projecting somewhat on him but i actually don't

00:38:32.680 you know i don't hold him out to be you know at the top of the pantheon of of meditation masters in

00:38:38.720 tibetan buddhism i mean in fact i you know i studied with some of his teachers and you know the kind of

00:38:43.600 so i've met the people he looked up to and uh you know among tibetan contemplatives so it wasn't that

00:38:49.420 it was just that he was just such a kind and well integrated person in in the way he engaged you know

00:38:58.940 everyone at every level of society it was just so admirable and again that it's you know some of it

00:39:05.840 could be innate but you look at how he spends his time it's not far-fetched to believe that a lot of

00:39:13.200 it has to do with the training he's engaged for sure and i love him and it's it's interesting because

00:39:21.300 the model of that kind of kindness and goodness is really quite different than that which we're used

00:39:27.180 to the the dalai lama he's he's unattached to everything including to people he's not attached

00:39:35.700 to people it's the the you know it's you know he he he often talks about his cat he loves his cat

00:39:40.880 so it seems and so one time i asked him so what's your cat's name and he looked at me like i was

00:39:46.220 asking him a bizarre question like i was asking him what's your left shoe named you know what he says

00:39:51.360 no name cat right and the whole point is that there's this there's love and then there's attachment

00:39:56.840 and love and attachment are not the same thing and this has been hugely instructive for me because

00:40:02.120 you know i have traveled with him as well i wasn't i wasn't you know doing bad cop like you

00:40:06.480 um i've been in the you know the the nice situation of actually being able to be you know with him

00:40:12.040 and interviewing him and and and just being with him yeah when he's been on tour but i've noticed the

00:40:16.880 same thing that he has this this this love this universalism and the love that he has for everybody

00:40:23.000 and part of it is because he is he is loving and unattached at the same time i think this is a

00:40:28.980 standard that's very hard to attain it's a really hard thing for me to attain you know and it it's

00:40:35.040 made me reflect an awful lot about how i try to live my life in many ways you know one of the things

00:40:40.320 that i find in my own research as a as a social scientist is you know i study a lot the

00:40:44.580 satisfaction problem i mean the satisfaction problem we call it the mick jagger problem you

00:40:48.680 know i can't get no satisfaction and the truth is you can't keep no satisfaction that's the truth

00:40:54.080 that's you know the homeostasis problem the hedonic treadmill problem anybody who listens to your show

00:40:58.580 knows about all about all these ideas that you you try and you try and you try and you you think that

00:41:03.300 the new car smell will last forever the the marriage will give you permanent satisfaction nothing does

00:41:08.240 and the reason is because mother nature just doesn't care if you're happy and she wants you to pass

00:41:14.180 on your genes and and doesn't want you to be satisfied she wants you to run and run and run

00:41:18.140 to strive and strive and strive and the answer to it really comes from detaching love from attachment

00:41:23.740 that's the really important thing because if you're you're you think of something as the be all and the

00:41:29.640 end all that you that you conceive of something as your permanent source of satisfaction you will

00:41:35.600 always be disappointed it's okay to love and be non-attached at the same time how do you do that

00:41:42.660 well that's the trick isn't it ultimately that's not a question of having more that's a question of

00:41:48.200 of wanting less and and that's one of the really the great moral lessons that i've learned from the

00:41:53.460 dalai lama and something i'm trying to that i'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to

00:41:57.500 instantiate in the way i live my life yeah i think you you need to unpack what you mean by love and and

00:42:06.400 differentiating a few components i think right shows how you could could maximize love without

00:42:13.900 any real implication of attachment and and it's buddhism is i think especially useful here in

00:42:21.040 how it differentiates some of these concepts but so there's a term that is usually translated as

00:42:26.540 loving kindness from buddhism the pali sanskrit is metta and um it really is just the wish for others

00:42:36.900 to be happy right wish for them to be free of suffering is the compassion variant of that and for

00:42:42.700 that wish to really be tuned up to something like its maximum a few things have to be you know purged

00:42:52.120 you know or or kind of burned off as as impurities there and and one is the sense that you want

00:42:59.840 something from the other people right your happiness is in any way predicated on getting something from

00:43:07.340 them right or that your happiness is in any way competitive with theirs so another aspect of

00:43:13.760 another variant of it is called uh mudita which is a sympathetic joy which is you know the the antithesis

00:43:20.480 of envy right so you know we've all noticed this ghastly quality of mind where you know something

00:43:27.200 good happens in the life of a friend right they they have some great professional success or you know

00:43:33.280 something great happens and you find in yourself a limit on your capacity to actually be happy for them

00:43:40.460 right because your you feel somehow your happiness has been diminished i mean this is just a ghastly

00:43:46.620 quality of mind oh it's the worst i mean envy is a is a deadly sin for that reason my father was

00:43:52.680 very funny he used to say that son remember it's not enough to win your friends have to lose too

00:43:57.940 yeah yeah i think there's a isn't there a gore of it all quote around there which is just

00:44:02.540 incredibly ugly i forget what what it was like every time one of my friends succeeds i die a little

00:44:07.940 bit inside i think that's what he said right yeah but you know there's this there's a there's a

00:44:12.420 western tradition that gets at this in the same way that is a little bit easier for most most of

00:44:17.420 us to understand and that comes from aquinas who was really paraphrasing aristotle so aquinas of course

00:44:24.360 in the 13th century in the summa theologica he was really reintroducing he was a he was a

00:44:30.100 neoplatonist but he reintroduced aristotle to audiences we probably wouldn't read the nicomachean

00:44:36.580 ethics today were it not for saint thomas aquinas and aquinas defined in aristotelian way what love

00:44:42.520 means which gets at exactly what we're talking about here he defined love as to will the good

00:44:48.280 of the other as other i mean this could have been right out of the mouth of the buddha as a matter of

00:44:53.380 fact he was really impressed and really influenced by many eastern teachings and so when you read

00:45:01.260 aquinas it's it's it's pretty eastern but to will the good of the other this is not about

00:45:06.420 sentimentality this is not about feelings which is really important you know when i teach happiness

00:45:11.780 at the harvard business school the first day of class i say what's happiness and they start talking

00:45:15.740 about that feeling i get when dot dot dot and i say wrong happiness has feelings but the just like

00:45:23.420 the thanksgiving dinner has a smell that's evidence of happiness happiness has to be something more

00:45:28.940 tangible than that or you can't improve it there's not much you can do about it you shouldn't be

00:45:32.600 taking a class in it for pete's sake and that's and that's really an aristotelian or or a thomistic

00:45:39.240 concept very related to the buddhist ideas that we're talking about here do you love somebody well then will

00:45:45.320 their good as that person and then then you're on the road to be perhaps becoming a bodhisattva

00:45:51.900 okay well i want to get back to um aquinas and and uh related topics there but let's go back to

00:45:59.880 intelligence where we left it we did not actually describe the difference between fluid and crystallized

00:46:05.940 intelligence and the the use to which you put these concepts in your book so tell me what what are

00:46:11.200 your thoughts on that topic so cattell uh raymond cattell the social psychologist great british social

00:46:17.540 psychologists notice that people they get better at things through their 20s and 30s that kind of

00:46:23.900 10 000 hours deal where they have focus the ability to work hard a lot of working memory and almost

00:46:31.360 anything that you can get good at from being an air traffic controller to being a french horn player

00:46:35.740 to being a college professor a researcher in particular that requires innovative capacity to

00:46:40.620 crack the code to solve problems that's fluid intelligence and that gets better and better through

00:46:46.740 your 20s and 30s and and weirdly it tends to peak in your late 30s or early 40s and then it tends to

00:46:52.940 decline and he noticed this cattell noticed this that these abilities tend to decline now if you're

00:46:58.560 really a striver and you're really good at what you do and most of the people listening to us right

00:47:02.660 now they're good at something they're really the only ones in their 40s who are going to notice these

00:47:07.360 declines and the way that you notice it is what you know people in the management world call burnout

00:47:11.880 so you find that your dentist for example when he's let's say 43 has weirdly starts taking fridays

00:47:19.740 off to golf it's like why would you do that do this trivial kind of hobby instead of doing something

00:47:26.600 that you you love like being a dentist and the answer is because humans aren't happy when they're

00:47:31.640 not making progress the mathematicians will put it that all of happiness is in the first derivative

00:47:37.360 all of happiness is in getting better the status this is a reason by the way sam that that it's

00:47:42.660 very easy to lose weight but it's very hard to keep weight off because when the scale is going down

00:47:47.820 you're motivated and happy and it's when you hit your goal the the the reward for hitting your goal

00:47:53.660 is now you never get to eat the things you like ever again for the rest of your life congratulations

00:47:57.620 yeah and you know this is this is the nature of you know how we're wired progress is everything

00:48:03.020 and so what happens is that people get very frustrated and angry and desperate and afraid

00:48:09.480 and sad when they're on the downslope of this crisp this fluid intelligence curve what he also what

00:48:15.660 kattel also pointed out is there's a second intelligence curve behind it that doesn't reward

00:48:20.480 the same things it's called crystallized intelligence and it's based on all the things you know and how to

00:48:27.540 use the things that you know so your working memory is a lot worse your innovative capacity

00:48:32.800 is worse your speed and your ability to solve problems is worse but your wisdom is higher

00:48:38.660 your pattern recognition is higher your vocabulary is higher your teaching ability is higher and so

00:48:44.080 what you need to do if you want to use that is actually start doing the things that favor that

00:48:49.040 increasing intelligence the great news incredible news is that crystallized intelligence increases

00:48:54.900 through your 40s and 50s and even 60s and stays high in your 70s and 80s so there's a guy at

00:49:01.140 university california at davis a guy named dean keith simonton who's the world's i mean you've i don't

00:49:06.960 know if you've had him on your show he's no no i've read his books but yeah he's wonderful i mean he

00:49:11.360 talks about the cadence of creative careers and he talks about the half-life where he measures the

00:49:16.100 corpus of work and quantity and quality of people in different creative careers and he finds that those

00:49:20.700 that have that load on fluid intelligence like poetry where you're just inventing stuff with words

00:49:26.700 that that has a half-life around age 40 where you've done half of your lifetime work around age 40 when

00:49:33.640 you think about it you know t.s elliott and ezra pound their best works were written in their late 20s

00:49:37.880 and early 30s and both guys lived into their 80s now if you look at something that loads on crystallized

00:49:43.220 intelligence the body of knowledge and how to use it like historians they're basically just teachers

00:49:47.920 you have to know you have to have the new york public library in your head to be able to be a

00:49:52.080 historian their half their halfway point is about age 65 so if you're a historian take care of your

00:49:58.580 health because your best books are probably coming in your 80s is the point and that's the difference

00:50:03.400 between a career that loads on fluid and a career that loads on crystallized now our our job you and me

00:50:09.240 is to be walking in our 40s and 50s from our fluid intelligence curve onto our crystallized

00:50:15.620 intelligence curve by manifesting what we do in different ways probably that goes from you know

00:50:20.160 writing mathematical theorems which i was doing to writing a column in the atlantic and teaching at

00:50:24.620 harvard which i'm doing now this podcast that you're doing is a is like a master display and

00:50:31.200 crystallized intelligence because you're teaching with this particular podcast this is a good thing

00:50:36.540 that you're doing to favor what you're naturally getting good at in your 50s

00:50:39.720 one likes to think i mean there there's some skills that or some kind of career arcs that

00:50:47.540 leverage crystallized intelligence much earlier right i mean so or it's not so much about fluid

00:50:56.040 intelligence and then there's some careers where to move from fluid to crystallized is really just

00:51:03.000 requires a fundamental change of career right i mean you have to admit you've hit the ceiling and now

00:51:08.700 you've and now you're declining and it's you're not going to be i mean there there are examples of

00:51:14.540 this in science um you you um single out uh you know linus pauling as one example of somebody i mean

00:51:21.540 i guess this wasn't so much synonymous with a diminution in his abilities although that could have

00:51:27.160 been at the back of it it was more just he um in his attachment to his own status and influence he

00:51:33.720 kept jumping on to one more lurid misuse of his his abilities after the next until he finally landed

00:51:41.660 on mega doses of vitamin c we i mean we should probably i mean for people who don't know the

00:51:46.480 linus pauling story i mean it's like it would say he linus pauling of course won the nobel prize in

00:51:51.560 chemistry for the nature of the chemical bond which was just i mean if you don't have to be a chemist i

00:51:56.380 mean he his work in chemistry changed a lot of changed our lives in all sorts of ways esoteric and

00:52:02.000 not so much yeah and then later on in life i mean look the fluid intelligence curve is the fluid

00:52:07.120 intelligence curve you can't he he won the nobel prize for work that he did in his 20s they all

00:52:12.700 win for work that they do in their 20s and 30s they win it much later usually but it's for work that

00:52:18.760 they do when they have this maximum amount of this incredible ability to focus and to use their

00:52:24.500 unbelievable cognitive ability to greatest innovative ends well later on in his life just

00:52:30.200 i mean they he's like the man behind me on the plane or like so many other people he's frustrated

00:52:35.380 obviously and and to perhaps to keep the limelight or for whatever reason he got more and more involved

00:52:41.160 in in activities that were really ostentatious and probably ill-advised i mean he he won the nobel

00:52:47.460 peace prize for his work on on the limitation of nuclear arms but he took the lenin prize

00:52:53.620 in the soviet union around the same time and you know for you know the lenin peace prize really

00:52:59.760 and and then later he went on to kind of a pseudo science of massive doses of vitamins he thought

00:53:06.020 that vitamins could cure virtually all mental illness he was also very interested in eugenics

00:53:11.060 and the idea that you could you know you could find the propensity to commit crimes and you should

00:53:16.340 you should put a tattoo on people for these i mean all kinds of stuff that we would that's really

00:53:20.800 anathema to what we think is moral and appropriate but also scientific today and you would say that

00:53:25.100 he's a person who was just desperate desperate to stay on the first curve and he could have done a lot

00:53:29.720 better by getting on the second curve and so one of the things that i talk about in in my work these

00:53:34.400 days is how i can do it how you can do it and how everybody can do it by by thinking about what is

00:53:40.560 it in our lives that's more fluid and what's more crystallized and so i talk about startup

00:53:44.680 entrepreneurs they're much better later in life as venture capitalists because they have perspective

00:53:50.500 and they're teachers but they're not going to be you know sitting in a room 16 hours a day writing

00:53:55.280 code having people slip up pizza under the door it's just not going to happen if you're you know

00:54:00.040 lawyers for example they're star litigators ninjas kind of like soul cowboys early on and then later on

00:54:06.440 they make managing better managing partners you know people are better as crack employees earlier better

00:54:11.740 as managers later for people like you and me you know we write the most innovative theoretical papers

00:54:17.400 early in our academic careers but we're much better explainers and teachers later on in our career and

00:54:22.820 each one of us can find our own crystallized intelligence curve but if you don't we'll be

00:54:26.580 unto you if you stay handcuffed onto that fluid intelligence curve you're going to write it down to

00:54:31.320 the basement and feel aggrieved for the rest of your life how much of this is an actual difference

00:54:38.080 in these subtypes of intelligence and how much of it is just energy and ambition and life circumstance

00:54:49.160 i mean so there are many people delay having families this was not i guess this is not so true

00:54:55.120 if you go back far enough in history but you know now it's certainly true that you know there's a period

00:55:01.100 in your 20s and even early to mid 30s where if you're playing an academic or entrepreneurial game

00:55:08.940 and waiting for pizza to be pushed under the door

00:55:11.800 you very likely don't have kids and again you've got you've got kind of endless energy just to

00:55:19.000 to burn the candle at both ends how much of that is a variable here that could be confounding

00:55:24.560 how you're thinking about this well in the literature that's a i've as you can imagine

00:55:29.840 that's a big discussion um there is the work of both psychologists and neuroscientists that

00:55:37.720 that suggests that some of it is structural in the way that the brain works but no doubt some of it is

00:55:43.400 just the cadence of life and part of the you know the part that i find especially provocative and

00:55:48.060 interesting is that i think that a lot of people by the time they get into their 40s

00:55:51.880 have stopped falling for you know mother nature's tyrannical little trick which is you know you're

00:55:59.760 finally going to get that thing that you've always wanted and it's going to be endlessly satisfying

00:56:03.920 until the end of your life after a while you you start saying actually that's not true the new car

00:56:07.980 smell isn't going to last you know that that if i get that thing that i want in my career if i invent

00:56:13.060 the theorem or or get the patent or you know get tenure or whatever that your thing is or but become the

00:56:20.300 greatest french horn player in the world if if you know my if the things had gone my way that it's

00:56:25.420 actually just not as satisfying as you think it's going to be and not for very long and so that you

00:56:29.700 start tempering your expectations that that has to be part of it too no doubt these are separable

00:56:35.120 things but they're complementary to each other they exacerbate each other and they they make it

00:56:40.600 impossible for you to be able to be this kind of fluid genius that you were early on on the basis of

00:56:47.740 man i'm gonna i'm gonna work till i drop what are your thoughts about identity here and the and the

00:56:55.940 normative degree to which it can be um diminished or um appropriately linked to something in your life

00:57:05.700 i mean i i i know you touch on this in the book but i don't it was i don't think there was a moment

00:57:11.260 where i clearly understood whether or not you and i view this in the same way i mean just to give you

00:57:18.540 my view i i it feels to me and this is um you'll detect the buddhist influence here that um this is

00:57:27.380 the sanest relationship to identity is to basically have none right or certainly to have none that is

00:57:37.600 that is crystallized to to any sort of point of being inflexible or you know when challenged

00:57:45.420 becomes a source of suffering right it's just okay like there's no version of a self-concept actually

00:57:52.300 you do at one point invoke the term actually the the buddhist term mana which is um usually translated

00:58:00.060 as conceit and uh but i think you talk about it in the in the mode of just social comparison right

00:58:05.660 like comparing oneself favorably or unfavorably to others and i mean the the insight here for me is

00:58:12.420 that there really is no comparison to others that is a psychologically healthy basis for

00:58:20.800 satisfaction i mean so like if you're comparing yourself unfavorably to others well obviously that

00:58:25.560 hurts right you know you're you're feeling diminished by proximity to others but comparing yourself favorably

00:58:32.260 to others also is uh just a very petty morally impoverished place to be you know i mean just how

00:58:41.500 much does do you want your sense of well-being to be predicated on you know looking down on your

00:58:47.780 friends you know if you're noticing that you're smarter or richer better looking than your friends i mean

00:58:52.480 like in in what does your friendship consist right if that's where you're finding your happiness

00:58:57.140 so it's just my sense personally is that and i think it's what i believe philosophically is that

00:59:05.100 you just you want the fumes of identity to fully dissipate and it's immensely freeing

00:59:13.360 on some level not to know who one is in the world i mean it's not that you want your you want to be

00:59:19.520 able to function you don't want to have a kind of aphasia with respect to how you navigate social

00:59:25.420 roles right i mean you need to be able to say the the appropriate and civil things on cue you want

00:59:31.620 to know you know how to dress for dinner but to wear whatever self-concept you have as lightly as

00:59:39.040 possible so that it really is it's just not the place from which you're relating to the next moment

00:59:45.080 of experience that's what seems optimal to me is there any way in which that you that you disagree

00:59:49.480 with that no i just know there's no way that i disagree with that i think that's exactly right

00:59:53.980 but i also will will point out that that is not that is not human nature and and that brings me to my

01:00:01.480 sort of overarching point which is that mother nature doesn't care if you're happy mother nature has

01:00:09.040 other goals for you and you know the the great crossing of circuits in the in the human mind as far

01:00:14.200 as i'm concerned is that that we want to be happy and we have urges for money and power and pleasure

01:00:20.080 and and fame and the only way that we're going to know if we're successful along those dimensions is

01:00:24.560 by comparing ourselves to other people and we have brains by the way i mean you can oxygenate your

01:00:29.340 ventral striatum as well by having favorable social comparison as you can by taking methamphetamine

01:00:37.420 and and and and you can get that and it's a real reward people will be stuck on it but it will not

01:00:43.640 bring you ultimate happiness because happiness is not something on which we're sorting the mother

01:00:49.700 nature is not actually you know make giving us this this imperative this evolutionary imperative

01:00:55.460 that's the important thing to keep in mind and i think that that is entirely consistent with buddhist

01:00:59.900 teaching also with christian teaching the idea that if it feels good do it is not the best way to live

01:01:06.440 your life it's actually a foolish way to live your life and that you need to be in charge you can't

01:01:11.200 let your feelings manage you you should work to manage your to manage yourself and to manage your

01:01:16.040 feelings and and you know there's interesting because other traditions look at it in a slightly

01:01:20.420 different way one that i find especially useful is you know the hindus they talk about atman which is

01:01:27.480 the best way to think about it is in in english in the western tradition is that there's a difference

01:01:31.700 between i and me so i am an observer of the world me is an understanding of myself reflected through

01:01:41.220 what sam harris thinks of me right now and most people are all me and no i atman is the ultimate

01:01:47.520 i and the hindus believe that only atman can be in communion with brahman which is the godhead you can

01:01:53.980 only really have a a full communion with the universality of the true nature of things when

01:02:00.540 you're just observing as opposed to in being understanding yourself in the reflection of what

01:02:06.940 everybody else thinks and boy oh boy i mean that's that's the reason that people say that for example

01:02:11.580 zen buddhism isn't a philosophy or let alone a religion it's an attitude it's i-ness it's outward

01:02:18.980 facing observation of the world and i think that this is a really important ambition for all of us

01:02:25.360 if we if we want to be best in our and we want to have the best nature notwithstanding the fact that

01:02:31.140 it's not very natural okay well so we've landed on this uh this topic of religion and no doubt my

01:02:38.680 blasphemy or um reputation for blasphemy will have preceded me so really i'd never heard are you an

01:02:46.140 atheist i didn't know so you can anticipate we might disagree about a few things here but i'm just

01:02:51.980 wondering there's probably some useful venting of our of our different perspectives here that we could

01:02:57.720 indulge why is on your view faith the right gesture given our spiritual opportunities here why why does

01:03:11.880 this because it will perhaps describe what you what your relationship is to faith here because

01:03:16.580 obviously i know it because i've read your book but the audience won't and then tell me what i guess

01:03:21.300 you know what you mean by faith and and why is because on my account faith is in the usual sense

01:03:27.660 something i think we need to overcome as opposed to something that is the the spiritual center of the

01:03:35.640 bullseye so tell me what you what you mean by faith and what your faith is so faith i'm talking

01:03:41.880 about it in different ways as a christian and then i do as a scientist so when when i do my work when i

01:03:48.360 say faith it's simply it's uh it's an abbreviation for living in a transit if you'd like to continue

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01:04:31.300 so

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 28, 2022

#291 — Where is Happiness？

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