Sam Harris: Neuroscientist (UCLA PhD), philosopher, author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. Creator of the Waking Up meditation app and a prominent public intellectual on consciousness, meditation, and free will.
What this episode covers
Andrew Huberman and Sam Harris go deep on what meditation can actually accomplish, distinguishing its familiar benefits (focus, lower stress) from its deeper promise: recognizing that the felt sense of a self behind one's experience is an illusion. Harris frames meditation as non-distraction and a recognition of the non-dual nature of consciousness, illustrated through analogies to the optic blind spot, visual saccades, and bi-stable percepts. They explore the development of the self in childhood, free will as an illusion, time perception and 'frame rate' changes, and how negative emotions dissipate when observed mindfully. Harris also discusses psychedelics (MDMA, LSD, psilocybin) as gateways that proved to him there was an inner landscape worth exploring, and closes with a candid account of why he deleted his Twitter account.
The guest's own work
Waking Up
Sam Harris
“the Waking Up app is one that I've used for some period of time now and find very, very useful. I have family members that also use it.”— Andrew Huberman
Making Sense
Sam Harris
“Please also check out his incredible podcast, the making sense podcast. And you can find any number of Sam Harris's different books”— Andrew Huberman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Projections
Karl Deisseroth
“your colleague at Stanford whose book I know I have. I haven't read it. This is a-- he wrote a book, Projections.”— Sam Harris
Game of Thrones
HBO
“You have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to check out and watch Game of Thrones again for the third time.”— Sam Harris
Deep Work
Cal Newport
“I'm a big fan of Cal Newport's work, deep work... He's really ahead of his time with this notion of deep work and limiting distractions.”— Andrew Huberman
Big reveals from this episode
- Harris argues meditation's real purpose is not stress relief or focus but discovering that the self is an illusion that was never actually there.
- Claims that if you rewound the brain to its exact prior state, you'd produce the identical thought a trillion times over, so free will makes no sense.
- Reveals the illusion of self and the illusion of free will are 'opposite sides of the same coin.'
- Admits psychedelics, starting with MDMA, were indispensable; without them he'd likely have bounced off meditation entirely as a hard-headed skeptic.
- Discloses he tried and failed to teach Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to meditate, ambushing Dawkins with a guided meditation on his own podcast.
- Reveals he deleted his 12-year Twitter account impulsively on Thanksgiving Day, calling it 'a suicide of that self.'
- Cal Newport encouraged Harris to delete Twitter on a podcast recorded the day before he actually deleted it.
Worth remembering
- We perform a visual saccade about three times a second, briefly going blind each time without ever noticing it.
- Each eye compensates for the other's blind spot; with one eye closed, someone in a crowd is literally missing a head and you don't notice.
- Harris spent roughly a year on silent retreat in week-to-three-month increments, meditating 12 to 18 hours a day.
- Paul Bloom's experiments show infants as young as six months prefer 'good' cooperator puppets over 'bad' defector puppets.
- In Vipassana, attention can break the felt sensation of a 'hand' into a diaphanous cloud of fleeting sensations until the hand-concept disappears.
- On LSD above Muir Woods, Harris and friends were so absorbed by an ordinary 20-foot oak tree it consumed six hours of their attention.
- Harris notes people who spend 10 years alone in a cave can emerge 'beaming with compassion and joy' rather than psychotic.
- Deadlifting a near-failure rep feels physiologically like a medical emergency, yet the mental frame makes it net-positive.
- Being a political centrist who criticizes both left and right meant Harris got hate from both sides with no tribe reflexively defending him.