#408 — Finding Equanimity in Chaos

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2025

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Harris interviews Sam Harris for Dan’s podcast, 10% Happier. They discuss how meditation helped Sam after evacuating his home during the LA fires, why Sam owns a gun, the ethics of violence, how to feel compassion for your political opponents, why it doesn’t make sense to “hate” anyone, free will and determinism, psychedelics, the importance of training your mind, and other topics.

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Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sam Harris, welcome back to the show.
0:21.6	Yeah, thank you.
0:22.9	You've had a year so far.
0:25.3	This month has been a year, yeah.
0:26.6	Yeah.
0:27.5	Well, let's start.
0:28.4	There's been a lot of shit that's happened with you this year.
0:31.2	Let's just start with the fires.
0:32.9	Can you just tell the basic story of what happened in your neighborhood?
0:36.9	Yeah, well, we just, you know, we were part of the Palisades Fire, not the real epicenter of it where, and people have seen photos of like Nagasaki level destruction.
0:47.3	But on the periphery, but four houses burned very close to our house.
0:51.8	So we're in a neighborhood that is remarkably untouched and
0:55.2	life will be, in fact, it has returned to normal there for most people, but we're close
1:01.7	enough to burned homes that we decided, you know, we're not, we can't come back to our home
1:06.3	yet and who knows when. I mean, it might be a year. I mean, we're just waiting for the cleanup.
1:11.5	So we've, you know, we've been dislocated by that whole process. And our, and, you know,
1:16.0	much of our lives were in the Palisades, our, you know, our daughter's school burned down.
1:21.6	I mean, lots of things changed about daily life as well. And obviously, we know scores of people at this point who lost their homes, right?
1:31.0	Maybe you have a million questions about this, but just remembering the night that this happened,
1:35.6	I checked in with you on text, and then you later wrote about this on substack, on your substack,
1:40.5	that you left with a wife, two daughters, two cats of jar of MDMA and a gun.
1:48.5	Yeah, I'm not sure it was in that order, but yeah, yeah.
	...

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