The Psychology of Truth In a World of Lies | Sam Harris

Sam Harris (0:00)

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.

Michael Gervais (0:14)

In a world full of misinformation, tribalism, and noise, how do you actually know what's true?

Sam Harris (0:19)

The larger the circumference of our scientific knowledge grows, the area of our ignorance, or at least implied ignorance, grows with it.

Michael Gervais (0:27)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. A high-performance psychologist named Michael Gervais. Who Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks.

Sam Harris (0:38)

Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos project.

SPEAKER_3 (0:43)

Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough.

Michael Gervais (0:49)

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.

Sam Harris (1:06)

What we need is a reality bias. We should want to be in touch with what is real insofar as possible, and we should be alert to those cultural practices and institutions that are reliably corrupting those efforts.

Michael Gervais (1:20)

We explore Sam's first principle, a radical commitment to honesty, what it means to live without lying.

Sam Harris (1:27)

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.

Michael Gervais (1:35)

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. So it's influential, it's clear, it's provocative. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Also at the same time, maybe slightly nervous because you think differently. I think I'm more nervous about the body 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.

Sam Harris (2:34)

Oh, it's a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for the invitation.

Michael Gervais (2:37)

Yeah, so you spent much of your life studying the mind. And so let's just start with the obvious why.

Sam Harris (2:43)

Well, it's just, 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, I mean, it's almost never the case that the world is imposing the valence of experience on you. I mean, there are extreme cases, obviously, 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.

Michael Gervais (3:57)

I don't think there was a word out of place in what you just said. And I recognize the intentionality between or from the words that you're choosing. And so, I do want to, if I could rewind it.

Sam Harris (4:07)

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.

Michael Gervais (4:18)