Welcome to the Making Sense podcast.

This is Sam Harris.

Well, it has been an interesting two weeks.

If you followed me on Substack, you know that I had to flee my house, which contains my recording studio. And we have not been back,

and it remains to be seen when we will go back. The house happily was spared, but it's very

close to houses that burned down. So it remains to be seen what we're going to do about that.

I will get back to the podcast soon enough.

I think I have a video podcast coming up soon with Rick Caruso to talk about the L.A.

fires and the future of California politics, perhaps.

And obviously there's so much to talk about in politics and in the world.

I'm recording this just after watching the inauguration, which brought up several thoughts.

But two weeks ago, when I was at my desk, seeing the first clouds of smoke emerge in the West,

I was about to release a sample of lesson content from the waking up app,

which I thought might maintain the New Year's resolution frame of mind that I imagined people would be in at this point in January.

I must say I'm pretty far from that myself. But I'm also quite in touch with how important

meditation and the insights derived from it have been for me in the last two weeks. Honestly, I don't know what my mind

would be like, but for the fact that I can notice the mad work that thoughts about the past and

future do moment by moment and break the spell. And that's certainly meditation by another name.

So anyway, if this can be useful to you

or is of interest, feel free to seek out more over at wakingup.com. As always, if you can't

afford the app, you can get a free subscription or you can pay whatever you want same policy as the podcast and

I will be back with you soon in another vein and I look forward to it We have this notion that mental growth stops in adulthood.

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