To me, this is a continuation of all of the above because it talks about the “self”. The self only exists in our mind but it’s a result of how our bodies developed so the mind could interact with the rest of the world. The interviewer brings in his personal experiences, which is sometimes a little much, but makes the questions a little more pointed than a journalist’s.
It starts out with charity, then religious dogma. They are good setups for the question about skills (16:03) in the description links. Sam answers with “mindfulness”. As an aside, he mentions this is now available to everyone. I remember when the meme was that you had to climb a mountain and find a guru. Now it’s confirmed by neuroscience and psychology. Sam starts by noting, most people live their lives as if the old ideas are all there is, as if those thoughts that rattle around, sneak up on us, are “us”, are the who we are that we are stuck with.
But really, you can notice that they are not. That’s how you stop the feeling, like anxiety. You can notice that it’s similar to excitement like you’re getting on a roller coaster, but that we add on that it’s bad because we’re about to go into something important like an interview, and we don’t want to feel that way. If we see the feeling as us, as something that we are generating, then it feeds back, and we keep generating it. If we can just notice it, it can dissipate very quickly.
Near the end, he shows how we all have this skill. If you are mad at something, but something else, something more demanding of our attention comes up, we can halt the anger and handle that other thing.
Instead of developing that mindfulness skill, as Sam says at 38:45, what’s happening for people, “is they are waiting for the world to give them a good enough reason to just be present, and be present so fully, that they lose their sense of self.”