#661 - Sam Harris - How To Take Control Of Your Mind

Even beyond time, your attention is what you have. Your true wealth is the quality of your attention. And we have now interfaced with machinery that has systematically degraded our ability to pay attention.

The effort to become happy never fully fulfills itself ... The becoming part contains its own dissatisfaction. At a certain level, you have to figure out how you can be happy with whatever is already the case—to want what you already have.

I've watched enough of [Andrew Tate's] stuff to see why young men are getting addicted to his content and thinking that he's their life guru, and I've also watched enough to think that it's not ideal that he's the voice of a generation.

Andrew Tate, Trump, there's like a 'I've got a fucking Bugatti, and you know you want one, and I've got no apologies. I've got no fucks to give. I know you want to be like me, and if you're not good enough to be like me, I'll sleep with your girlfriend.' That's not an ethically wise person on any fucking level—even if he can string together a few sentences that seem actionable and useful...

We have lost trust in the normal channels of information and normal institutions during COVID and post-COVID for obvious reasons, but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust. And we're not going to navigate this moment by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters.

I'm hopeful that if [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] keeps expounding upon how COVID was targeted to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and people. I mean, if you give him a mic enough, he'll put both feet in his mouth and in your mouth and any mouth that's available.

They'll be a time in your life where you would give anything to trade places with who you are now.

I like Jordan [Peterson] ... I have not had any dialogue with him in a couple years. Jordan and I disagree fundamentally about religion... and I'm always happy to talk to him. And I think while we disagree, I think he has really helped millions of people.

Someone sent me a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe were talking about me, and Jordan [Peterson] seemed to be talking about me like a cautionary tale ... In my view, they are in this contrarian echo chamber.

The mismatch between who [Tucker Carlson] is pretending to be for his audience and who he is behind closed doors is something that, I think, should trouble his audience, but it apparently doesn't right—and that's also true of someone like Trump.

I think [social media] is a massive opportunity cost for almost everybody ... Look at what you're doing and not doing based on your engagement with these platforms. You're not tending to read good long books anymore ... It has served to fragment our attention and our lives in ways that just can't be good.

Our dopaminergic system gets driven not by pleasure itself but by the expectation of pleasure.

I just don't think that the Bible is the wisest book we have, even though there are pearls of real wisdom there, which I understand that people love. It's a book. It was clearly written by human beings.

I can only imagine, though, that in his world, given what was happening to me on Twitter when I left, [Jordan Peterson] perceives me as somebody who has just gone off the rails in some way.

Breaking the spell of thought is very much like waking up from a dream you just didn't know you were having.

You can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend, and then your mind is much more your friend. On some level, wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend.

Wisdom is simply a capacity to take your own advice. You effortlessly give that advice to others. If you could just give it and successfully receive it from yourself, you're basically Socrates.

Barring some bad health outcomes among friends and family over the years, objectively the worst things that happened to me in a decade were the result of my engagement with Twitter.

Every goal you attain becomes a memory the moment you attain it. And then you're just left to think about it. And then the question is what are you going to do next? And we have this perpetual challenge of figuring out what to do next.