I've seen enough fake videos where the person's cocker spaniel saves them from a grizzly bear because it's just people have made 15,000 of them in the last hour. I'm not even interested in any of that anymore. I mean, as compelling as it can look, I'm going to wait for the New York Times to tell me that really happened.
In a world full of misinformation, tribalism, and noise, how do you actually know what's true?
The larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows, the area of our ignorance, or at least implied ignorance, grows with it. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host Dr. Michael Gervais, a high performance psychologist named Michael Gervais, who Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks, famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project.
Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough. Today's guest is Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up App. This conversation is about defining truth, how we form it, how it shapes us, and how dangerous it becomes when we refuse to examine it.
What we need is a reality bias. We should want to be in touch with what is real in so far as that's possible and we should be alert to those cultural practices and institutions that are reliably corrupting those efforts.
We explore Sam's first principle, a radical commitment to honesty. What it means to live without lying.
Every room you walk into, whatever happens, whatever gets said, whatever topics come up, it's very powerful to know that you're not going to lie. Not at all.
As you listen, I want to encourage you to notice where in your life you feel defensive. That friction is often where growth begins. With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Sam Harris.
Sam, I'm really excited to sit with you. Your body of work and your research on the mind is stunning and so influential. It's clear, it's provocative, and so I'm really excited to have this conversation with you and also at the same time maybe slightly nervous because you think differently than I do. And I'm really curious about not the overlap, but I'm more curious about the difference in the way that we see things. And maybe there is more in common than I might think. And so I'm really curious about kind of how this conversation goes. But welcome to Finding Mastery and thank you for being here.
Oh, it's a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for the invitation.
Yeah. So, you spent much of your life studying the mind. And so, let's just start with the obvious. Why?
Well, it really is the ground truth of everything we experience. I mean, obviously we have the world to deal with and the body in the world, but the mind represents the cash value of everything that you can notice, everything you can suffer, everything that can make you happy. When you see the contributions of your thinking and your expectations and the way you cognitively frame experience to the quality of your experience, you see that it's almost never the case that the world is imposing the valence of experience on you. I mean, there are extreme cases obviously, you know, extreme pain, right? You have a terrible injury and there's not too many ways to reframe that so as to make it good, right? But even there, the difference between pain and suffering can be — there can be a lot of daylight between those two phenomena. So yeah, I mean the mind is more or less all we have moment to moment and it's the basis of everything that matters. So you know, understanding that and understanding the degrees of freedom that are there to be explored within that, I mean that seems like a pretty central life project.
I don't think there was a word out of place in what you just said and I recognize the intentionality from the words that you're choosing and so I do want to, if I could, rewind...
I speak slowly so I have an advantage. People listen to me often on 1.5 or 2x on my podcast. So yeah, I got more time to put the words in the right places.
No, that's not the case. That's true. I think when I listen to the show backwards, I'm like, damn, dude, spit it out. Like I do feel like I speak slowly but I am looking for some accuracy in the words and the language I'm using. Okay. What are the most foundational ideas that you want our community to understand to live well in the modern world?
Not lying is on a very short list of firmware upgrades to a human mind and a human life that I've discovered. The Venn diagram, certainly the region of greatest interest, is in this intersection between what's true and useful, and especially when you're talking about communication, I'm an advocate of honesty and fundamentally of having an ethical commitment to not lying, right? I think lying is among the most corrosive things we do.
Even though we lie to ourselves like 38 times a day on average or whatever. I don't know.
Well, we can talk about that. But...
You're talking about lying to other people.
I think lying to other people is generally speaking a terrible thing to do. Even so-called white lies. I think we want to do very little if any of that. But it's not that you need to just helplessly utter every thought that comes through your head. I mean, it's like you have Tourette's syndrome. No, you want to speak in terms of what is true and useful, right? So it's not just vocalizing everything.
Are you saying true with a capital T or true with a subjective small t?
Well, true is in so far as you can get a handle on it. I mean, it's always true in every sense, it's just sometimes it's probabilistic. I mean, you have a sense that you think it's more likely than not, but so we're often calibrating our confidence in how we represent what we think is true. But I think yeah, you're giving other people a view of the world as you see it, as faithfully as you can. But again, you might be — I mean, there's a role for civility here and kindness and compassion. And it doesn't quite have the shape that many people imagine, which is — I mean I think most people's default is that there's a lot of room for, and necessary room for, just lying to be kind, right? And I think when you drill down on all of those examples, in my experience, you almost never find one that survives any kind of test of integrity that I would want to stand behind. So I think white lies give a lot of scope for deception and self-deception and toxic relationships that fundamentally you don't want to have.
I took a class freshman year at Stanford. There's this great professor, Ron Howard, who was in the Engineering Economic Systems department, which had absolutely no — I was an English major. It had absolutely no relationship to what I was interested in. But he taught this seminar on lying, on just like basically it was just a — I think it was a graduate seminar, but it was just a single question in every session, which is: is it ever okay to lie? And then people would just kind of hurl examples at him. And most people came into that seminar more or less assuming that human beings have to lie. It's just something that we necessarily do. We do it some number of times a day and that's perfectly normal and compatible with a healthy life and a good career and a good reputation. And obviously there are egregious examples of lying and you don't want to be that guy, but lying's unavoidable. And you know, if your wife asks you, do I look fat in this dress? Well, of course you're going to say no, and what are you, an idiot? And so like this is that default setting in almost every case in my experience, which just got recalibrated over the course of whatever eight weeks in this seminar.
So, how do you answer that question? Because let me set up the dilemma that I see it as. Do I look fat in this dress? It's a subjective interpretation of what you think fat is. And really that question is not about do I look fat. That question is — there's a deeper question underneath of it, which is...
Well, it might be, do you love me? I mean, are you attracted to me? I mean, that's the deeper question and it's a ping, right? A little bit like a bellwether, you know, like it's looking for a calling back. Am I okay in your eyes?
So I think that there's a trap. So there's two things that I want to inspect with you. It requires your subjective take on what fat is. And if you are unbalanced in that — let's say that if you think somebody that is, I'll just create an image, five foot six and 98 pounds is fat, that's actually a clinical disordered way of thinking about body weight.
And you say to your spouse actually...
Yeah, so you told the truth.
But you are clinically disordered in your take on what healthy looks like.
But you can definitely be wrong and be telling the truth. That's...
Yeah. And you think it's useful and you think it's truthful. So this is where I think...
Yeah. And you can be wrong about that. I mean, you can be an... There's no question. I mean, so...
So how do you answer that? How do you know that your take...
Well, I think — well, I mean, one thing you discover when you're committed to not lying, whatever the situation, suddenly you have a mirror thrown up to your mind in life that you didn't have before. I mean, like if you're the kind of person who has a sort of situational ethics where you've got like one set of ethical books you keep for your friends and family and another you keep for strangers and people you meet in business. And so in a business context, you're willing to shade the truth and even lie outright because that's just the way your business is done. But obviously, I mean, like a classic example would be, you know, you imagine you're in the service industry, you're working in a store and someone comes through the front door and they're shopping in your store and you're recommending everything because that's how you do your job. After further conversation with this customer, you find out that you actually have a friend in common. Like this is your friend's sister, or suddenly you're in a different situation and...
And now you don't want to recommend...
And then if you're the kind of person where all of a sudden a different piece of software comes online, which — okay, now you're actually going to speak honestly to this person because you realize that this is your friend's sister. It's like, oh, actually don't buy that one, that's not as good. And if you're that person where suddenly you get access to more integrity and more ethical commitment simply by discovering a fact about this person that you didn't know, you might take a moment to reflect. Do you actually want to be this person? I mean, first of all, if you're that sort of person, you are always vulnerable to being embarrassed, right? Like I mean, think of what it says about you if in that situation you recommended something that was obviously you can't stand behind and then in your own defense you say, well, I didn't realize you were so-and-so's sister. That's the definition of not actually being ethical in this business relationship. So I think a little reflection could convince you that you actually don't want to keep two sets of books. You actually just want to be a unified person with respect to this variable of honesty.
And what we would shorthand integrity.
Like you are consistent with your thoughts, words, and actions across experiences.
I love the way that you just framed that. Those people I do not trust.
And those people in locker rooms get pushed out quickly to the fringe. And I don't want to be that person, to your point. And so this code switching or this dual self is something that some groups that feel marginalized and don't feel as though they can bring themselves forward because of the biases or the vitriol that they will experience if they were to bring their more true self, their more quote-unquote authentic self forward, that they hold back and then they code switch with their friends or whatever.
But maybe there's a reason. So if your true self is the sort of self that you would be embarrassed to bring forward because it's...
But that's actually your true self.
Yeah. But the true self is modifiable. Like again, let's just say you're a jerk, right? Well, if you have to be honest, if you took a vow of honesty so that you can't actually hide what a jerk you are. Like if someone says, do you want to go out on a date with me? And the answer is no. And why is the answer no? Well, you're too short. That's just the ground truth. Like, you're too short. I only like tall guys, right? Or tall girls. This is a fact about you that might be of interest to you. Like, how did you become the guy who's got a height cutoff, you know, with respect to this variable of who you're going to spend time with or who you're going to spend the rest of your life with? Now maybe it's just true and you have to get your mind around that and then there's some way to work with that in the world. But for the most part, none of us are merely condemned to be the person we were yesterday. We have that by tendency, we're kind of doing a great impersonation of who we were yesterday or a moment ago. But there's actually a tremendous amount of freedom to grow in with respect to basically anything about yourself that you can notice. And one of the things that forces you to notice everything really is just an unwillingness to lie, right? Like you just, okay, I'm not going to lie. My kid's going to ask me a question. I don't know what they're going to ask. But one thing I do know is that I will never lie to them. Right? That is a very different context for anything that's going to happen in your relationship as a parent. And it's again, you're an open system. It's like every room you walk into, whatever happens, whatever gets said, whatever topics come up, it's very powerful to know that you're not going to lie, right? Like not at all. Like you're just not like that's...
Cool. So that's a first principle for you.
Yeah. And it completely changed my life. I mean, I don't remember who I was before I had this epiphany, but it was forced upon me in this course. So I wrote a book, a very short book called Lying, which gives abundant credit to this professor who first drummed these thoughts into me. But it's...
Is your first principle do not lie, or is your first principle tell the truth that's useful?
Well, again, there's kind of a further filter on what some people would consider kind of radical honesty, which is given that you can't say everything and can't know everything, then there's some scope to editing, like saying what's true and useful. I mean, you don't just have to give the unvarnished — like everything that's happening in the privacy of your mind does not have to be externalized helplessly in the presence of other people who are there to hear it.
Even if they ask, it's not a question of dissembling at that point, but it's often a question of just getting down to what the truth really is. Like, so I mean, to come back to your wife in the dress, the classic example, I mean, the ground truth is really that you love this person, you're on the same team, you want to sort of meet that moment at all the levels that it really is emerging. So if what's really being communicated is the subtext, which is, you know, do you still love me or are you still attracted to me? Well, then obviously you want to be able to communicate those truths too. But sometimes it's just at the level of the text, which is she's got a bunch of different dresses she could wear. She looks much better in some than in others. And she actually wants to know that. Like she wants your perspective on whether this dress is flattering. And if the truth is it's not flattering and that's your actual thought, well, you're on the same team, right? Like she's asking for your view of reality. And I mean, the one thing that happens in your life once you become the sort of person that will just be honest in those moments, then your social world rearranges itself around you. You find that people just don't actually come to you for advice unless they want the truth. And that's an amazingly clarifying thing to happen in all your relationships.
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I did not think you and I were going to be talking about creating a high performance environment. I'll tell you why. People ask me all the time like what are the common threads or common themes of a high performance environment? And while there are many, the ones that I am most attracted to that I feel have an outsized impact on the results, meaning high performance, is cultures of honesty. And so...
Well, I mean, sports have to be the ultimate example of this because it's the one area where lying is totally useless.
Totally useless. However, there are people even in stick and ball sports, which I obviously spent a lot of time celebrating with the Seattle Seahawks as of the recording two days ago, being with that team for the last year again — I was with them for nine seasons and then back for this season — is that there's room to hide. Even in traditional stick and ball high performing environments, there is room to hide. But the ones that say we are going to tell the truth and we are going to be great teammates to each other, which means that we're going to have to go through things, not around.
How do you hide? Give me an example of how to hide in pro sport.
Point the finger. Blame other people inside of sport. The most honest rooms tend to be locker rooms. The most dishonest tend to be coaching rooms.
Okay. So why are the athletes so honest?
Well, one, let's have fun with the imagery. They're walking around in towels or sometimes nothing at all. And in those environments, if you're slow, you're going to get pointed out that you're not going to the gym enough. You're not doing enough work. Maybe you need to lose some weight or gain some weight. And so there's just a directness and a boldness. And in those cases, literally, there's nowhere to hide. But if you're not thoughtful and you're code switching like we're talking about, you're two different people around two different rooms, or you're saying you're putting in strain but you're actually not. You say you're about the mission, but you're out late drinking. Those environments at some point will get called out.
So they are more honest than not, but you can still quote-unquote hide.
Case in point, let me go from football to basketball for a minute. This was a gentleman that I spent time with. He won, I think, four rings in the NBA. Basketball player, there's only five players on the court. He said, Mike, in the third and fourth quarter in a championship game, he hid the entire time on the court. He came off the screens just a little bit slower. So he wasn't open. He was terrified to shoot the ball. He was purposely coming off just — and when he had the ball in his hands, he was reflexively looking to pass. So he looked like he was a good teammate, but he was terrified to shoot. So he was not honest with his experience nor with his teammates. It cost them the championship.
But the thing that could not be ignored is he had whatever number of baskets he had and no more. Right? So there was no illusions as to the results. I mean, the results are — you can't fudge the results.
No, but you can fudge a lot of ways the quote-unquote intangibles. Right.
Yeah. So this is one thing about sport I think is great, which is everybody's force-ranked, stacked and force-ranked, publicly observable data.
Yeah. And so there is in that case nowhere to hide. But the subjective — you can let me take this and move it to one more piece. Maybe I'd put an exclamation point next to what I want to say. If you want a true high performing environment, if you want a great life, there needs to be a radical commitment to honesty with self and others.
Yeah. And I am not saying brutal honesty. That's for jerks.
You're not saying what kind of honesty?
Yeah. Thoughtful. I'll use your word useful in this.
Well, again, so it's not just a posture or an artifice to be kind versus brutal. I mean, we're talking about situations even potentially with all the strangers you meet, barring some moment where they disqualify themselves and become enemies or adversaries. It's true to say that your default is that you're on the same team with everybody.
Like so it's like you actually want them to succeed. You're not in a situation where you're viewing your interaction as zero-sum. And so I mean even just in a business situation, it's like what is a good deal in business? A good deal is not where you get everything you want and the other person feels screwed. A good deal, especially when you know that you have a reputation and you want to be able to play repeated games in an open-ended way with happy collaborators, a good deal is one in which they are also happy — the person you were just negotiating with is also happy with the result. So it's just there are very few truly zero-sum situations, and when it's truly zero-sum, then we're talking about something like self-defense. And then I would put lying as sort of the first stop on the continuum of violence, where you're talking about, okay, I'm now in the presence of somebody who's not a rational actor or any kind of collaborator, and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of the situation, avoid them, nullify the threat they're posing, and maybe a lie is the first thing — if I'm choosing between do I have to punch this person in the face or a lie, well then lying would be the first act of violence I would commit. So I would just put lying in the general case as somewhere on the continuum of violence between people that is usually avoidable but not always.
And a self-defense mechanism.
Yeah, it's just — I mean, then you're talking about self-defense or defense of other people.
Very cool. Okay, so take this to the broader context. At the time of recording, I think our state of our country is in disarray and the tension between my truth and your truth. My side of the understanding of how I see politics and your side could be radically violent in thought, or could be confusing to other people, meaning that I'm just confused how you think that way, or I could have great contempt for the way that you're seeing things. So this idea of truth with a capital T is not really what we're working from. We're working from truth with a small t. My subjective truth of the way that I see the best way that our country should be run. How do you think about helping navigate the betrayal, like the Epstein files, and the betrayal of how leaders are acting independent of how if you're on the left or right of the political spectrum? How are you using this truth-telling principle as a way to maybe help the larger context of the country's health?
Well, I'm very worried about how we're entangled with our information technology. I mean, this is a story obviously of social media principally now, but it really is even just the internet itself. It's just what the internet has done to our sense of what is real, and it has created a kind of shattering of culture which is only intensifying again through social media now with AI. I mean, now it's just not getting better, it's getting worse. I have some hope, perhaps we could talk about it. I have some hope that AI might pull us back from the brink here. But...
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Optimist that I — wait, hold on, we got a crack in the pessimistic approach here.
It's a pessimistic version of optimism.
I don't think you could have both.
Yeah. Well, so the short answer there is that I think that the AI sloppification of everything — I mean, the fact that we're now moving into a world where if you look at a piece of video, your first thought is, well, is this even real? I mean, whatever the video is, it could be Vladimir Putin declaring that he's just launched all his missiles and, you know, all of you are going to die, right? It might look perfectly credible. And I think most people's sense at this moment would be to just not even react to it because there's just a basic assumption that you can't trust anything now on the internet. And so ironically, I think we're probably moving back toward a new moment where the gatekeepers are going to be the only source of ground truth for trust. Now, I mean, we're coming from a moment where the institutions have radically discredited themselves. No one trusts the New York Times or the Washington Post or anything. We just want to get it from the raw feed from X or some other social media platform, so somebody's uncle can send us a YouTube clip and it's just shot on somebody's phone. They're standing near the protests and they saw the thing that happened and that's what's real. You know, don't trust the gatekeepers. Trust the wisdom of the crowd. But now with the deepfakery and the sloppification of everything, I think we're getting to a point where, you know, we're not there yet, but I could imagine six months from now we will be at a point where we just declare epistemic bankruptcy with respect to the internet. Like we just decide, okay, I'm not going to react to anything. My bias is going to be, no, this is not a real video of a grizzly bear attacking a woman in her backyard, right? Like I've seen enough fake videos where the person's cocker spaniel saves them from a grizzly bear because it's just people have made 15,000 of them in the last hour. I basically am not even interested in any of that anymore. I mean, as compelling as it can look, it can look perfectly real, suddenly everything is boring because it stands a chance of being fake. And even the most alarming communication, right? Like, you know, dozens of people killed on the White House lawn. Okay, I'm going to wait for the New York Times to tell me that really happened. Like, I cannot trust any other source until someone that has a reputation that can be damaged says, listen, we did the work, the necessary journalistic work and forensic work to tell you that this video of Vladimir Putin declaring World War III on us is actually real, right? And so now you can panic, right? So I think that may happen. And so that will be, I think, a sea change in our relationship to social media and everything else that has been ruling our lives for the last two decades.
So at the beginning of the year I thought, okay, at Finding Mastery we don't do resolutions but we do set an intention. And for I don't know the last four years it was the same for me. It was the year of play. I just knew I needed more play in my life. I'm intense. I'm serious. And I just wanted the yin-yang kind of side of my approach in life. And so this year was different. This year was about humanness, the art of humanness. And that's what I'm waking up in the morning through my imagery and my meditation is like, what does that really mean to me now? But I do know that I'm not interested in being a quote-unquote expert. I am interested in honest expression. And the humanness piece is like the anti — like I said cult-proof earlier, I am cult-proof — is like it's the counter-rotation to the AI slop. To your point, like I really appreciate what you're saying because when I'll listen to a thoughtful commentary of even somebody that I do respect their thoughts on Instagram or whatever, and now I'm like, did they write that? Did AI write that?
So that's not even the slop. So you're talking about the other side of the AI product, which is the actual good stuff, the real expertise that can be generated in moments by anyone that is like...
I'm calling that slop too.
Yeah. But what you've just described is the value of human, you know, hard-fought expertise on some level has gone way down. If you — when you're thinking of just the information, access to information that is in fact true. So like it's like if the knowledge that literally anyone within five seconds can get a concise answer to almost any question and that answer is actually going to be good, right? That sort of devalues — I mean, on some level, what does it actually mean to be an expert if anyone — I mean, obviously there's the follow-up conversation that a real expert can have, and real experts know how to kind of edit and navigate information. But the better AI gets, the more human expertise gets devalued in the same way that it's — like, I mean, on some level everything is going to become like chess, right? Like it's just simply the case that computers are better at chess than people are. And when you add people to the game, on some level even the best grandmasters are just adding noise, right? So like there was a case for the longest time where computers were better than novice players but they were not as good as grandmasters. Then, you know, Kasparov lost to Deep Blue and there was this moment where we saw the writing on the wall where computers are going to be better than people. But there was this brief period, or maybe it was a decade, where the human-computer pair, the so-called cyborg, was better still than any computer alone because a grandmaster like Kasparov could just add the extra intuition that was valuable. Now that's no longer the case, and just the best players in the world just add noise to what is in fact the best chess that is possible to play, which is between computers. That's going to be true in succession for all of human cognition, right? So you're going to be able to push a button and say, what's the best explanation for the causes of World War I and World War II? I want it in exactly 400 words and bullet-pointed into 17 different bullet points. No person can give you that in seconds. You know, even the best scholar of the period would take an hour and a half to come up with anything close to that kind of precision, and probably longer. But AI can do that right now, and it can do it — depending on the topic, it can do a virtually perfect, certainly better than human job of it, or a nearly best-in-class job of it, and it's only getting better, right? So what you've just described is a situation where even the things that we admire about ourselves and about other people that we've trained for and we've invested a lot in, that's getting offloaded into the technology, and we're faced with a conundrum around how to revalue what it means to be human. What is talent good for? What is expertise good for?
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Yeah. So, how are you thinking about — obviously this is a real concern for many of us, but how are you thinking about getting to the truth in a world where there's so much misinformation? Getting to the truth when we've got AI that is in 400 words potentially incredibly accurate or presenting as being accurate but it's hallucinated 40% of its response. So in a world where information is more available but less trustworthy.
Well, I mean, I think the hallucinate — I mean, we're either going to solve that to several decimal places beyond the human or we're not going to be able to rely on the technology. So it's — I mean, we're — and I think we've solved it for...
You think we're okay with it right now because of the idea that it's going to get better.
Yeah. And it's also — I mean, it's very, very good for many, many topics.
Yeah. Right. Coding, aggregating information, but the emphatic nature when I ask it something in psychology, I'm like, oh my god, that's like 85% right.
But the 15% is actually quite egregious.
And so it makes errors that human experts wouldn't make. But again, I think it's a very short period of time we have to wait before it's again, it's going to be like chess where once it's superhuman for any one of these specific areas of cognition we care about, there's no looking back. It's like once driverless — I mean, I think we're probably there with certainly some driverless cars.
We know that driverless cars are safe.
