Sam Harris & Dan Harris: This Is How to Stay Calm in a Turbulent World

Yeah, thank you. Um, you've had a you've had a year so far. This is this this month has been a year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, we just were, you know, we were part of the uh the Palisades fire, not the not the the real epicenter of it where, you know, people have seen photos of like Nagasaki level destruction. Um, but on the periphery, but four houses burned very close to our house. So, we're we're in a neighborhood that is remarkably untouched and life will be uh in fact it has returned to normal there for most people, but we're close enough to burned homes that we decided we, you know, we we're not we can't come back to our home yet. And who knows when I mean it might be a year. I mean, we're just waiting for the cleanup. So, we've, you know, we've been dislocated by that whole process. And our and you know we our much of our lives were in the Palisades. Our you know our daughter's school burned down. I mean lots of things changed about daily life as well and obviously we know um scores of people at this point who who lost their homes, right?

Yeah. I'm not sure it was in that order, but Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, a lot. I mean that's uh you know I can't say it helped the girls that much but I mean it helped us with the girls. Um I mean we you know I think I should acknowledge you know by comparison with many other situations we were in a very fortunate situation. Although for about um 12 hours I was actually sure we had lost our home. Like I I got some false information online that convinced me at at about you know midnight the night of the fire that our our home was burning at that moment. And um and that was a really kind of an amazing experience just to kind of let let go of all that in real time because when when I left the house I you know we left we left pretty early and I felt like we were being very conservative to leave and then when Anukica picked our daughter up at school it was quite clear that the extent of the emergency but when I was leaving the house I took basic you know virtually nothing and Um, I mean, I didn't really think it was within the realm of of I I guess I knew it was in the realm of possibility, but it did not seem likely that the fire was going to reach our house and um or where you know our neighborhood and um I mean much less burn down seemed to burn down half the city. I mean, it was just at a certain point the fire was such that like why doesn't the entire city burn down? And clearly we can't stop this, you know, and and this is now in the flats of Los Angeles and in multiple places. And there was, as people know, there was there were many cases of arson and it was just it was a it was it was Armageddon of some sort in Los Angeles. And um but we after 12 hours, I realized our house hadn't burned down. And then, you know, then I recognized we were in a very lucky situation compared to many, many people, you know, thousands of people.

Yeah. Yeah. The Buddhists win in in situations like this, you realize that the impermanence reigns and, you know, there's no it's all rented and it's all subject to entropy. You know, there's just no there's nothing stable. You know, your your your your body isn't stable, your health isn't stable, your relationships aren't stable, your career isn't stable, your house isn't I mean, it's just there's it's constantly being shored up by effort to maintain it and improve it uh and diminish the chaos. But in a situation like this, you realize you just can't take anything for granted really. I mean what you can take for granted is it's all unstable and it can change at any moment.

Well recognizing what you actually have in each moment which is this moment of conscious experience and and your ability to locate a feeling of well-being in the midst of that or your failure to do that. Right? Right? So you what you're constantly experiencing whether you think of think of it in these terms or not is this this alternation between some state of contraction where you're you're unhappy, you know, grossly or subtly and you're you're responding to the world as though you have a problem that you must solve. And sometimes you do have a problem you must solve. I mean in this case we had the problem of you know having to evacuate and having to find another place to stay and etc etc. So it's not I'm not saying that you can just meditate your way you know blissfully out of a situation without having to solve problems but the question is always how unhappy do you have to be to respond to this challenge in the world and most of us most of the time even after we learn to meditate are by default far more contracted and unhappy and you know prevaricating and and ruminating uh self-lacerating etc etc um than we need to be you know you just don't you can actually I mean and there are ways to to to to have this epiphany or provoke and provoke this epiphany every time you lose it uh one is meditation but one is just a kind of reframing that many people are familiar with now based on the the growing popularity of stoicism you can just recognize just how much worse things can be, you know, or could have been in this moment, right? And and you can easily imagine a situation where if you were in that situation, you would consider your prayers answered if you could only be restored to the problem you are confronting right now, right? Like you know, you know, you could have you don't have the cancer diagnosis or the you know, the amputated limb or you know, everything you you know to come back to the fire every you didn't lose everything you you own, right? You just you just now have a a different problem to solve. And if you had been in one of those buckets, you'd be desperate to get out of it and into the one you're in now. Right? So, you can you there's a way to actually just kind of reset and feel, okay, this is this is so much better than a than an adjacently possible alternative. Um, and in this case with the fire, it's so much better than what I thought I had, you know, the the night of the fire, which was I, you know, I was meditating on the evaporation of everything we had had built, you know. Um, and but I was, honestly, I was surprisingly, perhaps not surprisingly, but I was I was quite equanimous in the midst of that experience, thinking, you know, at that moment I'm, you know, lying in bed. I hadn't yet told the girls or or Anukica. Um but I had looked at my phone and I got, you know, information that convinced me again around it was around midnight or 1:00 in the morning that okay, our house is burning right now, right? And um then I was just meditated on that fact. It was just like a you know kind of one of those Buddhist graveyard meditations where you're just kind of meditating on the decay of the body or you know you just how the you know meditation on impermanence. Um and it was there's something quite beautiful about it to just to recognize that there's you know there's no um it it would would only be attachment to the idea of those things that would allow me to suffer in this moment.

And and also it's not just for just to give some more color to that it in this case when I was thinking about it it wasn't so much the possessions but it was also just the amount of sunk cost with respect to time and attention that they represent. And it's like you know we had designed the house we had built the house with like that was a whole process you know and when you think about just you know the thousands of books you collected and I mean like all the choices that that created that you know that material circumstance is there's so much time. Yeah. You know, it's like it's, you know, it looks in in retrospect when you imagine it all evaporating, you just think, "Wow, that that was, you know, I spent a lot of time gathering all that stuff." And we're all going to have obviously at the end of our lives, we're all going to have that analogous reflection. You know, we don't need a fire for that. The fire is is burning in our bodies at at this very moment. Um, but yeah, it's just you when you think about it's kind of a reset. It forces a reset of your priorities. I mean, what you have is your time and attention.

Yeah. Well, actually in that moment I was I didn't have much fear or anger or anything to to meditate on. It was it was there was much more equanimity than um I mean honestly I was I was surprised at just how easy it was to let go of all our material possessions. You know again I'm an incredibly fortunate circumstance. Like I you know unlike many people I we had fire insurance, right? So like I knew this isn't like you know you're losing all of your actual wealth because you know the fire is burning everything you own and nothing's insured. And there there were people in that situation too. Um but yeah, it was just there there's something again it's it's once you have this this module installed in your brain, once you've thought about impermanence as much as we have and and use that thought to motivate a a a practice which allows you to to let go of thoughts of past and future moment by moment. I mean, you know, mindfulness by another name. There's something um you know almost perversely satisfying about having to to deal with a moment like that, right? You know, and and I honestly I expect the same experience when you know I get some terrible health diagnosis. I mean I mean this is the on some level we're training for those for those moments. Um where I where I more reliably fail you know and this is actually on some level much more consequential because it's much more frequent. I fail in all the little moments in life where it's just a completely petty thing to which you should be psychologically impervious, but it is just annoying to have this thing happen, right? Whatever it is, you know, the I mean, honestly, for me, it's something like I'm out in the world and I spill, you know, uh, food on a shirt and I now have to spend like four hours out in the world with like tomato sauce on my shirt. That's the kind of thing that just, you know, just jams a stick into every gear in my in in my emotional brain. Um, that's worse than having than believing that everything in my house, everything I own is is burning up at that moment. Then I'm going to have to tell the girls the next morning that that happened, right? Like honest honestly in terms of my departure from what I consider a norm a normative state of you know well-being and kind of recognition of you know psychological freedom the tomato sauce on the shirt is worse for me.

I'm with you, brother. Yeah. Um just to say our wives are on the other side of this wall affirmatively having chosen not to listen to this conversation so that they can kibbitz. So we have many similarities in our domestic situations.

Yeah. Well, this I guess a larger ethical consideration. So um I mean actually not that many steps. So so for anyone who's interested I I wrote at least a decade ago I wrote an article um which certainly blindsided most of my audience titled uh the riddle of the gun um wherein I I could talk about what I consider I mean kind of the the ethics of violence more and and self-defense more broadly. Um, I wrote a couple of articles. I think I think I wrote an article, the logic of violence, too. But, um, kind of in quick succession, I like part of my midlife crisis took the form of me getting back into martial arts and and training with firearms and and doing those sorts of things. And, um, but I had always had kind of had that gear. Me from being a teenager on um unless you're a pacifist and I and I have an argument as to why one would not want to be a pacifist. Uh you know I think as as though Gandhian style pacifism seems to occupy something like a moral high ground in people's thinking about violence and and how one can be ethical in the world especially once one starts taking on you know overtly spiritual meditative contemplative concerns it's actually not a high point on the on the moral landscape I would argue I think I think being a pacifist is really just a way of outsourcing a real ethical consideration of violence to other people who are not pacifists. You know, you're relying on the police. You're relying on people who are going to shoulder the burden of protecting the people you love when when things fail. Um otherwise, it's just for in my view, it's a starkly unethical um position. And you know, I have some argument about, you know, why that's the case, which we could get into. But um so once you decide you're not a pacifist and you then you're then you're just then we're just talking about in what situations is the use of force necessary and and ethical and and uh and then what is your relationship to that and can you outsource everything or or not? And I've just been around long enough and read enough books and and seen and news stories to know that there are many situations in fact even most in which you could find yourself you know threatened by violence where you can't really effectively outsource your self-defense to the police. You know which is to say that in in most American cities dialing 911 is not a self-defense strategy. Right. It's a it's it's a you know, we're happy to have the police and and we're happy to have them respond to crime and we want them to solve crime, but in in almost every case, they're responding to the aftermath of whatever situation you were in that you managed to solve or not, you know, before they got there. Um so once you understand that then the question is even if you think it's a very low probability event and and and it's you know depending on where you live it it can be a higher probability than than you think um what preparation do you want to have made to face a situation where you know someone comes into your home for the the purpose of of killing you and your family right which is you know I'm not worried about people stealing televisions. I'm worried about actual violence, right? People who, you know, come in for the purpose of harming you.

I that's just you know that's been true for 20 years uh at least. So, um, yeah. So, and then, but this was a situation where I was anticipating, however, dimly, I mean, again, when I left the house, it was not obvious that this thing was going to get totally out of control. But once it was obvious that it was going to get totally out of control. And what a few hours later, I was hearing reports of people looting homes, you know, a few blocks from where we're sitting, right? And um you know the cops just not responding like there's just no that the city's on fire, right? And people are are looting neighborhoods that are being evacuated or or soon to be will soon be evacuated. There were even reports whether spurious or not. I never actually never got to the bottom of them, but there were reports on social media that people were lighting fires so as to provoke an evacuation order so that they could loot the homes, right? Um there were definitely cases of arson. So once you're in that situation, then you realize, okay, this is you really can't rely on cops to to necessarily protect you. And so yeah, so and the justification for a gun, uh, is I mean, you know, provided you're trained to use it and you're, you know, you're a responsible gun owner. Um which is to say you know how to store a gun safely and and uh I mean there's just there's no excuse for kids picking up guns and killing themselves or killing other you know other people you know by accident um because you can store a gun safely and and have quick access to it. Um, but the reason the justification for a gun is very much as the the the odious organization, the NRA would would allege. It is the only thing that really equalizes your capacity to use force against somebody else. You in the absence of a gun, even if you even in the presence of other weapons, right? Even you even everything else becomes an athletic event, right? Like you are the you are wise to expect that the younger, more aggressive, larger person is going to win. Certainly the the better trained person, you stack all of those advantages, uh, you know, then there's there's nothing that the little old lady can do to defend herself, right? You know, um there's nothing that the even well-trained, very fit, uh young man can do to defend himself against multiple attackers, right? Right. I mean the the stuff you've seen you know I mean there yes there kind of one in a thousand results where you know um and there a few associated YouTube videos where you see one guy defeat you know four attackers because he's he's a boxer and he just he's being attacked by by bozos and and he you know he manages to defend himself. But normally speaking, you know, it doesn't matter if you're a Navy Seal, you're not, you know, you can't defend yourself against multiple young guys who are not bozos. Um, except if you have a gun, right? So, so like so, so a gun is an equalizer. Um, and more importantly, it gives you it's one of the only weapons and the only, you know, really reliable weapon that gives you range from the problem, right? Like it's the only thing that you know when if someone kicks down the door of your house and you're in the living room 20 feet 20 feet away from this person, you can you can defend yourself, right? You you get you can negotiate. You can tell them to leave and if they don't leave, you can defend yourself. You know, once you're, you know, grabbing, you know, pots and pans or or kitchen knives, right? Like this is now you're you're very much closer to the state of nature and a and in a contest with a with a grizzly bear and it's um and again you you know many people don't want to think about these things certainly most meditators I think we're talking about the kinds of people who want to hear us talk about mindfulness these are probably not the kinds of people who are also obsessing on the details of of you know criminal violence but you know I have gone deeply down the rabbit hole of both. And um yeah, I mean you should it's just it is just simply a fact that when someone you know in the rare case of you know like a home invasion by you know some sociopath who wants to actually who's decided that night that he wants to kill someone or rape and kill someone or you know whatever it is you are you have many disadvantages stacked against you right like you're just this is this person has done this sort of thing before in many cases many times before this person probably spent years in prison, right, and was released, right? He went to graduate school for criminal violence. And um uh this is there are people like that in the world. And again, it's it depending on where you live, it could be a very low probability consideration such that it's it could seem completely paranoid to ever worry about it. But it's also paranoid to worry about plane crashes certainly you know and people worry about that and we we want to design our planes and our systems so as to really minimize that you know the threat of that kind of uh destruction and yeah it's just not you know it's it's not a it's not a one in a million chance that if if you live in a big city you might be the target of violent crime. It's it's more like a a one in 500 chance depending on where you live.

I mean, that's a little tongue in cheek, but it it definitely captures an emotion that I was feeling, which is just I mean, just like the absolute limit of moral outrage. I mean, just the the idea that someone would do that, right? You know, you you have this catastrophic fire that is driving people from their homes. The idea that you're going to have people who are setting more fires so as to drive more people so they could they could prey on the people who are fleeing their homes. Um yeah, it's just I mean that's the complete collapse of civilization, right? And and the idea that we're living in a I mean and there were so many things that I was was noticing and I think I wrote about in that piece that was um yeah kindling a very worried and very kind of cynical view of human nature. I mean there like I I think the the one that got to me and this seems somehow um I don't know if this resonated with with most people. I mean I think I wrote about it in that piece but um for some reason this got to me. I saw when it was reported that Steven Spielberg's house was saved and I saw people online just trashing him like like just like did like clearly they would have been happier to hear that his house had burned. Um and they thought it was somehow sinister that his had been saved, you know, like that, you know, he leveraged his wealth or this or there was some Jewish, you know, conspiracy theory that explained it, whatever, whatever it was. Um, I mean there was some nexus of awfulness that explained that response. But the the thing that got me was that I know that many of these people, if not all of these people, have over over decades happily watched his films, right? Like these are these are the people who buy tickets to Spielberg's films and yet they were not even covertly overtly poised to celebrate the you know the kind of the ruination of everything he you know he had accumulated in life. Um there's just something so I this this goes into this larger bin of just what the internet is doing to us, right? It's like there's, you know, it it's just it's selecting for the worst aspects of of human psychology, you know, it's like you false outrage and schadenfreude and um you know, a complete obsession with fame, but like this this subterranean hatred of the people you're obsessed with. Like you're like you you you know, you you build these people up only to to gleefully watch them come undone, you know? It's just it's there's something just ghastly about this funhouse mirror that we're spending so much time in front of which is you know which is in large measure why I you know as you know we've talked about before I I deleted my Twitter account years ago and I mean that was I'm still embarrassed to say it. I mean, that was like the biggest life hack I've managed to find in more than a decade of of looking at life hacks. And I mean, it was just it was the highest leverage move psychologically that I found in in many many years. It was it's just a fantastic change to my life. Uh because of how toxic I I was finding it it to be to just see just to witness who people were on on social media, you know, and and and you know, I I was not I mean I I certainly wasn't my best self on social media. I I I don't think I did. I don't think I participated in kind of pile-ons or or um interesting um squabbles that that embarrass me in retrospect. I mean, I definitely I definitely contaminated my life with with more um controversy than than it needed, but I it's not that I ever really behaved badly online. At least I'm not remembering anything that I regret, but there's it was just toxic to see what everyone else was doing and to know that I was I I knew it was a if not not an entirely false perception of of them, but it was it was certainly a partial view of these people. And yet it was I you know it was turning me into a kind of misanthrope. I mean I was just I was getting it was my view of humanity was getting darker and darker and darker and you know once I stepped away from it it you know that I realized okay life is it's rather often very good and the people you meet you know even you strangers out in the world are are mostly very very nice people and and it's you know um and people not everyone is a psychopath you know even though they they can appear to be psychopaths on Twitter.