Sam Harris on Stoicism and Mindfulness Practice
What this covers
Ryan speaks with Sam Harris about the overlap between eastern and western philosophy, how mindfulness practices like meditation help us become better Stoics, why he is so dedicated to providing his content for free, and more.
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Sam Harris is a philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and host of the Making Sense Podcast. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Economist, London Times, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic, and he has authored five five New York Times bestselling books, including The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.
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Wisdom and freedom come not from extraordinary experiences or beliefs, but from recognizing the illusory nature of the separate self and developing the ability to return to present-moment awareness in ordinary life, which is more fundamental than any peak experience or philosophical knowledge.
- Peak experiences and insights inevitably fade; what matters is what you can access in this moment regardless of circumstances
- The self is not a fixed entity but a thought-based delusion that can be dissolved through mindfulness of the absence of subject-object separation
- Wisdom is measured by your capacity to respond wisely in ordinary situations, not by what you know or have experienced
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When something is not in your control, Marcus Aurelius teaches that you should brace yourself through stoic practice, but when something is within your control (like choosing which route to drive), the stoic wisdom is to simply take the better path rather than endure the worse one.
“the reality is you're gonna have to do a bunch of these things that's not fully under control and so you should brace yourself but if there's always traffic on this side of town but over here there's a clearer Road you'd be a fool to drive through the traffic jam if it's not necessary and so I guess it's a tension of like when does one simply endure and put up with something and when does One have some agency or ability to say hey I'm not going to subject myself to that”
What defines enlightenment is not the absence of ordinary negative emotional states but how quickly you can wake up from them—the half-life of these emotions is very short and mainly sustained by getting lost in thoughts about why you should feel them, and once you recognize the emotion without the narrative, it dissipates in seconds
“people shouldn't expect that these ordinary contractions uh into negative states of mind won't keep occurring sure it's just that the crucial difference between freedom and and bondage is how quickly you can wake up from them”
Audience capture occurs when a content creator optimizes for signals from their audience (likes, engagement, tribal approval) rather than following their own intellectual judgment, creating a feedback loop that locks them into increasingly narrow positions.
“audience captures a real thing and and I've avoided it because again it was it was the one thing that I felt was possibly corrupting of my of my um podcast because I I don't I don't have sponsors so there's no concern about being dropped by them right so I I bypassed that concern but uh it it would be possible even as with a subscription business to detect the signal in the noise of feedback and recognize okay this is what my audience wants from me and they're going to pay me more if I keep delivering this kind of pablum”
The mark of wisdom is how quickly you can return to the present moment and get back into the rhythm after being disoriented by reactivity, like a musician coming back into the beat after making a mistake, not the impossible standard of never being disoriented in the first place
“in music if you're ever like playing with a group of musicians the beat is sort of there the the groove of the thing that you're jamming on is there and you can mess up you can come off the beat you can make a mistake you can get distracted but the the song is going on right the the other people are continuing to play and you can plug right back into it you can stop count to four and get back into it and so yeah whether you want to call it a half-life or a rhythm or you know waking up there's a bunch of ways to express this idea that you you come off you you get disoriented but then you find your bearings and you get back to it and the quicker you do that that's the mark of wisdom”
The ordinary sense of neurotic confinement—wanting things, fearing things, regreting the past, worrying about the future—is intrinsically a form of bondage, and the evidence of your unenlightenment is available to you right now
“you're not enlightened um if you can't be happy doing the dishes you know you're not wise if you can't see through the noise that's happening around you if you can't be a you know a a good and decent ordinary person in ordinary circumstances”
Philosophy as a practice must function like musical scales or physical stretches—something one does repeatedly to develop skill and wisdom—rather than as a one-time intellectual exercise, and this practical application distinguishes genuine philosophical training from mere intellectual consumption.
“it's a it's a thing that you do right it's a it's a it it's something you do it is a practice right it's not if philosophy isn't supposed to be this thing that you read one time and you get it's supposed to be to go back to music it's scales that you run through or it's uh you know it's it's a thing that you do it's a set of stretches it's exercising”
The function of worry is to solve a problem, but if you can do something about a problem right now you should do it, and if you can't, worry doesn't add anything to your capacity to act and only makes you miserable, so once you recognize this dichotomy it becomes easier to relax into awareness of what is actually happening
“what is the function of worry either you can do something about this problem right now or you can't once you recognize that it becomes easier to just relax back into the mere awareness of what is actually happening right now”
The question of whether you are using a service or the service is using you is fundamental to freedom, and realizing when something has an inordinate or unhealthy amount of power over you and being able to make a break is an important muscle to flex, even for seemingly benign things like social media
“are you using the service or is the service using you and you know if if the essence of the sort of Eastern philosophy and the essence I think of the western philosophy is to get free right to free yourself from these things um realizing when something has an inordinate or an unhealthy amount of power over you and to be able to make that break I think that's a really good muscle to flex”
Twitter presented a distorted funhouse mirror that made Harris see humanity as full of psychopaths when the reality is it was a platform designed to amplify psychopathic behavior and bring it into his living room, and deleting his account resulted in a profound positive change in his sense of where he exists in the world
“it started I got the sense that I was just seeing it became this fun house mirror in which I was seeing the worst of humanity and I was I feel like I was seeing uh a a distorted picture of even people who who you know were acting badly and were you know disposed to act badly toward me but it's like I just there couldn't be that many psychopaths in the world right and I was having an experience on Twitter where I felt like I was meeting thousands of psychopaths every day like it's like I I built a machine that allowed Psychopathic to show up in my living room”
Your highest spiritual insight and contemplative wisdom is whatever you can actually access now in this moment, and if you cannot find freedom in the present moment in the midst of ordinary reactions and disturbances, then peak experiences and philosophical knowledge are just a band-aid applied to the present moment's experience
“your highest spiritual Insight your highest contemplative wisdom is whatever you can actually access now in this moment and if you can't if you can't find it now you know in the middle of the you know the bad reaction you just had to your you know the thing your spouse said or the you know the email that that uh you just received that that wound you up it's always a matter of okay what is available to you now”
The crucial distinction is between being identified with thought and not recognizing it versus recognizing thoughts as further appearances in consciousness—most people feel identical to their thoughts, feeling identical to a voice in the head or stream of images, when these are just appearances that can be witnessed from a prior condition of awareness
“there's a very bit The crucial difference is between being identified with thought not not recognizing this this um these appearances I mean is usually auditory or or visual or some combination of the two where you're it's very it's very strange that we that most of us feel most of the time feel identical to our thoughts we feel identical to a voice in our heads we feel identical to a stream of images and yet these are just appearances that can be witnessed from a prior condition of being aware of them”
When you become mindful of the absence of subject-object divide in awareness, freedom arrives even before the physiology of anger or anxiety has dissipated, because psychologically and behaviorally the emotion then has no meaning and functions like a peripheral sensory phenomenon such as heat on your face or indigestion
“if you if you become mindful of that in the midst of a feeling of anger say or anxiety your freedom arrives even before the the physiology of anger and anxiety have dissipated because in the you know in that moment what was anger a moment ago or anxiety a moment ago has no meaning psychologically or philosophically or in any other way so it has no it has no behavioral implications it really is just like you know a feeling of heat on your face”
Buddhist meditation texts are empirical and phenomenological and can be 'lifted out' of their metaphysical framing and iconography to function as a very modern analysis of consciousness and the mechanics of psychological suffering
“you can get whole rafts of uh just meditation guidance which are almost perfectly designed for export into a secular context because they really they it really is purely empirical and phenomenological and apart from some you know metaphysical Framing and you know some iconography that sneaks in there I mean really they're you know whole passages that you could lift out and it would it would be a very modern uh analysis of the nature of Consciousness”
Harris faced a choice on Twitter: be stoical about it and price in the psychopaths he would encounter, or remove himself from the situation, and while he could have done the former, he chose the latter because he recognized that mindfulness includes the wisdom to change the circumstances rather than just accept them with thick skin
“there's two choices there one I could be stoical about it I could just say all right you know I could follow Marcus Aurelius and say okay you're going to be okay when I get out of bed today I know I'm going to meet lots of you know Psychopathic and and I can just price that in and sure and uh have a thick skin and not react um but like but and I did that you know for for significant stretches of time”
Much of our suffering around physical pain is psychological contraction around it—anxiety about what it means, worry about whether it's cancer, whether we need an MRI—and while these concerns may be legitimate, at each stage there is always the question of what is worth paying attention to right now, which is where the stoics have wisdom
“so much of our suffering in response to something like physical pain is our psychological contraction around it and our anxiety about it and our you know fear that it won't go away and our fear of what it means and do I need to get an MRI and does you know is this cancer and like like all of that again there's not you can figure all that out I mean I'm not saying you never need to go to a doctor and never need to get an MRI and that you're never going to get cancer but each stage along the way there's always the question of what is worth paying attention to now”
Reframing and cognitive restructuring (thinking about a situation differently) is a higher-level approach to solving problems than just being mindful of difficult emotions—such as recognizing that anxiety and excitement produce the same physiological response and differ only in cognitive framing
“reframing is a higher level approach to solving the problem which is actually just thinking about it differently um and there are you know various levels at which you could do that but uh one level is just is just to well you know the ultimate level is to have enough experience doing the thing in this case public speaking where you and have enough a positive experience with it where you begin to feel differently about it”
Ancient wisdom traditions in both East and West have brought profound insights about how to live a good life, but for centuries modern Western philosophy became divorced from the question of how to live well and focused instead on abstract theoretical questions, losing the practical dimension of philosophy
“you have been the most prominent person to my eye and it's uh it's really fantastic to see ancient wisdom suddenly being uh of interest to a new generation of people and and it's it's really the best of philosophy because you know for hundreds of years as you probably know philosophy got fairly divorced from the question of just how to live a good life and there was no implication maybe to hear to hear that someone was a philosopher uh for absolutely no uh implication that that person would be wise or happy or well integrated or compassionate or anything right it's just um I mean basically all you knew is that that person was smart or thought they were smart”
Audience capture—the tendency to detect signals in audience feedback and begin pandering to what the audience wants in exchange for greater engagement or revenue—is a real corrupting force in media, and Harris has avoided it by not being partisan, by calling balls and strikes fairly across political lines, and by not depending on a tribal audience that rewards ideological consistency.
“audience captures a real thing and and I've avoided it because again it was it was the one thing that I felt was possibly corrupting of my of my um podcast because I I don't I don't have sponsors so there's no concern about being dropped by them right so I I bypassed that concern but uh it it would be possible even as with a subscription business to detect the signal in the noise of feedback and recognize okay this is what my audience wants from me”
Harris created the Waking Up meditation app with a business model where paying subscribers subsidize free access for those who cannot afford to pay, never wanting money to be a barrier to spiritual practice.
“I never once I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to it so and people just have to send us an email and they get they get free access”
The podcast and waking up app create two very different feedback loops: over waking up, the feedback is nearly 100% positive because there is alignment between what the speaker intends to put out and what people are receiving, whereas the podcast touches controversial culture war issues and gets a mix of love and hate and misrepresentation
“I can't I started the podcast first and the podcast is where I touch all these controversial culture War issues and I spent a lot of time on you know thinking about interesting things that are not political too but I certainly don't shy away from politics and and the feedback there has been always a mix of you know love and hate and and so I lost I just I lost sight of the fact that it was actually possible to have a career and have an a mode of engaging with the world where what you get back is virtually 100 positive right”
If there is a way of being radically free in life that can be actualized, it must be compatible with ordinary waking consciousness—something you can notice about yourself while walking down the street, driving a car, having a conversation, or looking at email—it cannot be elsewhere or dependent on altered states
“if there really is a way of being radically free in this life you know if there if there is some uh ultimate goal here that can be actualized it has to be compatible with ordinary waking consciousness I mean you it has to be the kind of thing you can notice about yourself and about the nature of your mind while you're walking down the street or driving a car or having a conversation or looking at your email it can't be elsewhere right”
Eastern philosophical traditions, especially Buddhism, developed a systematic methodology for studying the mind from the first-person contemplative side that was not built out in the West largely because different religious assumptions meant Christianity and Islam's Abrahamic dualistic propitiatory prayer-based relationship to the Divine 'basically swallows everything' in Western thought
“I think a major difference is the methodology of meditation and and just the the systematic approach to studying the Mind from from the first person's side from the contemplative side that really got built out in the east in a way that it didn't in the west uh I think largely because some of the religious assumptions uh were different and um I mean you can just like in the in the Buddhist canon in particular you can get whole rafts of uh just meditation guidance which are almost perfectly designed for export into a secular context”
We tend to keep score of our progress and failures by looking at the past, but evidence of unenlightenment is only available in the past, while the present is always free from past narratives, and we are always free to begin again without rehearsing a litany of psychological crimes perpetrated yesterday
“we tend to keep score in ways that are are um not helpful I mean are the evidence of our unenlightenment is always in the past right it's always the thing that happened a moment ago it's always a thing that happened yesterday it's actually not findable in the present if you really pay attention and so we're it's like we're we're um we're always free to just begin again and not rehearse to ourselves this kind of litany of a you know psychological crimes we have perpetrated in the past”
Many spiritual teachings are misleading because they are predicated on the belief that you need to make wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness to make spiritual progress, but this misses the possibility of recognizing the illusory nature of the self without such changes
“that's what's potentially misleading about so many spiritual teachings and spiritual paths so many of them seem predicated on the belief that you really need to make wholesale changes in the contents of Consciousness to make progress right”
There is significant overlap between Stoicism and Buddhism, and between Greek skepticism and Buddhism, particularly in bracketing moment-to-moment experience with a non-conceptual, non-clinging, non-judgmental attitude where knowledge is provisional and being cannot be doubted
“there's really significant overlap between stoicism and Buddhism and but prior to that I would say that the Greek skepticism has a lot of wisdom to share uh on just um kind of bracketing or moment-to-moment experience with a a um a a non-conceptual non-clinging non-judgmental attitude you know just just knowledge is provisional and yet your being is you know the the unity of being your existence and your your awareness of the moment can't really be doubted”
Meditation is ultimately a matter of ceasing to be distracted by thought and lost in the dreamscape of thought, not a matter of ceasing to think, and is therefore doing less rather than more—a gradual figure-ground reversal where what seemed like an artificial practice becomes recognized as the ground where you already are
“mindfulness based meditation and ultimately your non-dual mindfulness is a matter of ceasing to be distracted by thought it's not it's not a matter of ceasing to think it ceasing to be identified with thought and lost in the kind of the Dreamscape of thought and so you're actually doing less rather than more”
Buddhism and Confucian thought have reached far more people in the modern world than stoicism, suggesting there is still enormous untapped potential for bringing ancient wisdom traditions (East and West) to people who don't know these tools and strategies exist
“I sort of point to your work and then also just sort of uh the sort of Buddhist and Confucian thought and I go stoicism is a tiny like the awareness of stoicism in the modern world is a tiny fraction of what some of these other ideas have managed to reach so I I get excited also about just how many people there are left in the world that have no idea that there's been these tools East and West um that uh tools insights you know strategies whatever you want to call them that that help um and people have no idea they exist”
Ad-based internet business models have created a race to the bottom in how we value digital media and have given everyone the sense that digital content should be free, creating perverse incentives where companies manipulate attention and spread divisive and false content
“I mean the the ad based business model of of the internet I think really screwed us and you know never more so than than on social media with things like Facebook but you know really across the board it has it has given everyone the sense that digital content should be free right you know it's like you shouldn't have to pay for anything that's digital um because the expectation is it all should be ad supported and you know as as I'm sure you've talked about elsewhere this has created a really perverse set of incentives in our in our um economy you know where we just you know people are being manipulated their attention is being uh is is being gamed in ways that are beneficial to companies and but not beneficial to the to the person”
Subscription-based media models (like Netflix) produce better outcomes than ad-supported models because users pay for content rather than having their attention harvested, creating stronger alignment between creator and audience interests
“the better model is a subscription model that on some level you get what you pay for and you know it's not an accident that you know Facebook and Twitter and these other platforms have a fairly shattered society and yet a a service like Netflix can just you know show you good movies and good television and you you pay for it and it's fine um so I would I would like a lot more of Netflix and a lot less of of the Facebook Twitter experience in in general”
The term 'the work' should be reserved for the actual application of insights in daily life—dealing with being cut off in traffic, managing desires and temptations, navigating social judgment—rather than for intellectual study, reading, peak experiences, or meditation practice, which are preparatory but not the work itself.
“there's something that's bothered me about calling that the work right calling doing psychedelics the work when the reality is the work is what we're talking about here the work is the thing happens you get cut off in traffic uh you're thinking about what other people are thinking about you you know um you're tempted between right and wrong like the work that's the work right having the peak Insight in an experience or reading about it in a philosophy book or listening to a podcast I mean I guess that's not not work but it's not the work right like the work is the choices and actions you take in your life”
Negative emotions often contain information and can function as salience signals pointing to something that requires attention, but anger and anxiety are almost never the right state to be in to marshal an effective response.
“I mean maybe these emotions are contain information right I mean they there's very often something has just happened that has jumped out of the background of you know of of ambient noise and it's either worth paying attention to or not it either requires a response or not but anger and anxiety and these other negative emotions are almost never the right state to be in to Marshal that response right you want you want a cooler ahead to actually act in the world”
The greatest utility of psychedelics, particularly MDMA at age 18, was revealing viscerally that patterns of thinking and quality of attention had been radically limiting experience, showing that it was possible to have a fundamentally different experience emotionally, socially, and ethically that one's philosophical reading hadn't yet made land
“the greatest utility for me was in the beginning and this is admittedly something that not everyone needs but I I think I needed it I mean it's hard to know what would have happened without psychedelics and in my case but when I went when I was 18 I took MDMA for the first time and the Breakthrough for me there was that it it revealed to me in a very visceral way that my patterns of thinking and the quality of my attention had been radically limiting my experience in life”
Mantra-based meditation practices can raise legitimate philosophical questions (Why Sanskrit? Why add something to experience?) while mindfulness-based meditation avoids this confusion by having you simply notice what is already happening without adding anything new, making mindfulness methodologically cleaner.
“if you're doing a mantra based practice you know you're you're you're rehearsing a Sanskrit phrase in your head and you're adding that and then you could Wonder well why am I adding that to my experience and what does it mean and you know we are this is there something magical about Sanskrit why couldn't this be in some other language uh and so there's a a basis for doubt there um ultimately with mindfulness you're not doing anything other than noticing what is happening all by itself”
The speaker is uncomfortable recommending their business model (offer paid service, but never let cost prevent access by offering free accounts) to other businesses because it works for meditation but might not work for other products like Netflix, which would likely be destroyed if they offered free access to anyone who asked
“I can't quite recommend this business model to other people like I do think that for instance if Netflix had my policy I think Netflix would be destroyed I think if Netflix said listen we never want anyone I would never want money to be the reason why you can't watch our great shows and movies so just send us an email if you want it for free you know I think probably 100 million people would send that email because they would rather have Netflix Netflix for free and there would be no Netflix”
Being fully enlightened or wise requires being able to maintain equanimity and presence even during ordinary activities like washing dishes, and if one cannot be happy doing dishes or cannot see through the noise and distraction of circumstances around oneself, then one is not yet wise regardless of what one claims to understand.
“you're not enlightened um if you can't be happy doing the dishes you know you're not wise if you can't see through the noise that's happening around you”
The interviewer read Harris's work on Buddhism and philosophy in a religious context and found it opened his mind, suggesting that philosophical work can have profound effects on readers.
“well that that means a lot to me because I uh you opened my eyes I was probably your ordinary that's probably a cliche at this point but you're sort of college kid that read your stuff and Doc and stuff and it sort of opened my mind from uh from a sort of a religious standpoint which was beautiful and important”
Without psychedelics, Harris likely would have bounced off meditation practice entirely because he wouldn't have had natural aptitude, would have found nothing to see, and would have concluded that meditation doesn't work and all accounts of mystical experience are symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, conscious fraud, or delusion
“I have no idea what I would have thought if you had suggested that I might want to try to meditate to to be happier or to discover something about the nature of my mind is it and I I think if I had tried to meditate I probably would have just bounced off the whole project because I wouldn't have I wouldn't have had a natural aptitude for it”
The common experience where listeners or practitioners struggle to follow a conversation while a competing internal voice comments on what they're hearing, asks what is being said, and tries to interpret it is evidence that most people are not fully present with their actual experience.
“what they have a voice in their head most of them certainly you know 99 of them have a voice in their head that is competing for their attention so they'll be thinking well what's he talking about you know we're like wait a minute that's not what I I i've read about Buddhism that's not what and and who who are they talking to and who's talking”
The speaker has not found anything in psychedelic experiences that they haven't also found in philosophy texts, and while they respect the difference between being told something and feeling it, many psychedelic insights seem pedestrian and have not been compelling enough to pursue that path
“I have yet to hear of an experience from a person doing psychedelics that I have not found in literally every philosophy text you know what I mean I I haven't been that Blown Away by the in by the insights I I get I I'm willing to concede there's some there's a difference between being told something and feeling it so I respect the people coming away with the wowness of what they got um but some of the um some of the insights I hear just seem so so pedestrian or basic to me”
Stoicism has been brought back to prominence largely by Harris and Bill Irvine, and this represents a restoration of the best of philosophy—a focus on the utility of philosophy for helping people live good lives, which is a fantastic contribution to society
“I just I wanted to congratulate you on uh being one of a handful of people who have brought stoicism back into such prominence I mean it was it was really your work and uh Bill irvins and uh I mean it's really just that two of you I mean I'm sure other people have been putting their shoulder to the wheel but like you know you have been the most prominent person to my eye”