Hey, everybody. Welcome to a very special episode with Sam Herms. On the end to the impossible podcast, my longest episode ever. I've never done an episode this long. And this audio essay I'm about to give you is going to add to the length of it, but I wanted to express a little bit of my kind of inner workings and what what goes through my mind when I'm doing a podcast with somebody, a big name podcaster like Sam Harris. And in that sense, it's, incumbent upon me to try to do my best and make it so that people can really benefit from the wisdom of my guest. And and this time, I I kind of made a mistake as you'll find out. I did not ask Sam, some tough questions, especially about Donald Trump.

And you'll see almost every question he will reflect upon Donald Trump, even when we're talking about, diverse topics as generative AI images and their wokeness. And, he'll come back to Trump. He'll talk about psychedelics, Trump. And we'll talk about, we'll talk about meditation, Trump. So the question is, how can we learn from such people that seem to be obsessed with people that, you know, many of my listeners and audience members support? So I don't know. I don't know the best way to, to attack that except that I feel I let down my audio. My my job in this podcast is to ask questions that you guys wanna ask, not to be a star, not to show off, not to do, kind of the, verbal gymnastics to ingratiate myself with my guests. If that's gonna happen, it's gonna happen.

And it didn't really work with a big name guest like Sam Harris because I lost many, many subscribers on the podcast. And, it's unfortunate, at least on the video, they tell me they're unsubscribing. And I see a lot of unsubscribes from people that watch the clips on doctor Brian Keating on YouTube and the shorts that I put up there prior to this episode being aired, today. So I lost many, many subscribers, and the the point of doing that is not to say that sad or I miss them. Although, you know, it's it's it's always better not to lose subscribers than to than to try to gain more subscribers, you know, keep it to have in the leaky boat from going under. But in this case, you know, it's not really my concern. I'm not gonna just do things to pander to what the audience, wants. I mean, obviously, can you imagine me going off and accusing him of Trump derangement syndrome? And it it would be it would be, you know, kind of a very brief conversation and a pointless one at that.

And so I didn't do that, but I did fail. Of course, you know, he views Trump and he does it. You hear it compare Trump unfavorably in some ways to Hitler. And I had to bite my tongue really hard during that, but let him talk. And for all the things that he said and and done online and elsewhere, he's incredibly courageous, and he just doesn't give a you know what. But, you know, during those comparisons, I did fail to really ask the question that I should have. And I I mentioned this in my Monday Magic mailing list, which you should all subscribe to. Briankeating.com/list.

Mean to communicate with you guys, tell you about cool things coming up, like my upcoming appearance at TEDx San Diego, April 10th. But the, the main question I really should have asked him, and I wanted to ask him, but I didn't, is knowing his Sam's opinions about free will that we don't have free will, how is it appropriate in any way or logical any way to ascribe these evil, you know, just just malevolent, malicious notions to Donald Trump if they're not caused of his own volition. He doesn't choose to be this way according to Sam. I don't believe that. And you'll hear me pushing back extraordinarily hard but respectfully on that notion from Sam about the nonexistence of free will and the non behaviorist activities. Nobody behaves as if they have no free will as I mentioned with Sapolsky. And Sapolsky admitted as he said, quote, to my everlasting shame. So Sam, you know, is in a unique category in that he believes nobody has free will, and yet he believes Donald Trump is to blame for much evil and much more evil if he is elected again as president in November.

So we didn't talk only about politics. You'll find that we also talked about religion. And as my wife told me, you know, maybe I should have ended the episode early. This is as you can tell from the podcast, indication, a linked timer. So that was, embarrassing foible. Chalk it up to, you know, trying to let the guest speak and not interrupt too many times with my own opinions because I know most of you wanna listen to Sam. Although, it's very very, pleasing to me how many of you just reach out and always say things, to me that give me such love and support, including that they loved how I brought out stuff in him that no other podcast host has brought out ranging from interviews he's done with, you know, Ben Shapiro or Chris Williamson or Stephen Bartlett, Diary of the CEO. I don't think that people ask the kinds of questions that I do.