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.

And certainly, I didn't get into I don't wanna have any gotchas and get some clips and stuff of him just, you know, going off on Trump. So, it just it's kinda counterproductive. The audience hates it because they'll be turned off because they hate people that they perceive as being, you know, kind of dominated or possessed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. So I try to do my best, ask questions, but I push back. You know, I'm not gonna let, you know, softballs go up when we talked about religion, you know, as I say at the end, maybe I should have ended early, but, but it was too juicy a softball to just leave hanging. You'll you'll see about that speaking of earth. Let's say, baseball because it's opening week in Major League Baseball when you're listening to this coming up. So I hope you'll enjoy it.

I hope you'll forgive my foibles, peccadillos, flaws, lacunae in my judgment. But it was fun talking to him. I I think I would nerd it out on some tech stuff including artificial intelligence, Turing tests, and then later on, we get into the details of his PhD thesis and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of the brain, addiction, psychedelics, fatherhood, and just a panoply of other subjects that, again, I don't think anyone's ever talked to him about. You know, maybe there won't be a part 2, but so I want to get everything on the table. I could have gone another 3 hours, 3 and a half hours. But, it's always funny to me when I talk to, my guests or their their assistants, like Sam has. And they, you know, tell me, oh, Sam's got 90 minutes or 60 minutes and we go for 3 hours. Plus that to me means that they're enjoying it.

That's the only kind of real time feedback I can get on a podcast, you know, other than the negative feedback where they cut it short or look at their watch, etcetera. So this is being just open and honest with you guys about how hard it is to do this. This is my side hustle. You know, I'm building telescopes and we're about to get first light on one of our, biggest projects of the field's history and the cosmic microwave background, the Simons Observatory. Stay tuned for that. But, this was a great, you know, kind of Pandora's box, you know, just sitting down with him. I had to do more preparation than Priyant and the other guest because he's just so widely read and astute. And in fact, we talked about AI and it was the only time he ever used the words or he speaks in, you know, complete paragraphs of prose.

It's it's quite it's quite amazing to watch. And the only times he said those two words, and was in saying if we did a podcast and AI could predict everything we'd say down to the umms and then, he would believe start to believe in, you know, some version of artificial intelligence had been achieved at the at the Turing test level. So he didn't even use it in kind of his manner of speaking, and he just, you know, was laser focused this whole time. So I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope I'll get to do a part 2, but if not, I left, left it all in the field of battle. Now, I really enjoyed it. I don't agree with him on a lot of things. You'll find that out.

But he's got this amazing ability to simultaneously be, you know, attack problems from the right and the left in a way that no one else I know in the intellectual sphere, the former member of the intellectual dark web as past guest Eric Weinstein called it. They have this, Sam has this amazing ability to keep, you know, contraposing ideas or philosophies or mental frameworks in his mind. So he can be, you know, foremost anti Trump critic on the planet and also the foremost, you know, kind of anti diversity, equity and inclusion and anti, woke, you know, investing to, artificial intelligence and and Silicon Valley. So you'll see that. You'll enjoy it. Let me know what you think. Please do subscribe to the newsletter. It's the only way I have to communicate to you guys directly without, you know, some YouTube or censorship from some some of these things we put out.

You know, as Google slash YouTube, are they getting, you know, just pure woke? And, you know, that's not gonna get seen by many people probably, thanks to the algorithm. But my newsletter has no algorithm. You just sign up. I send you something every Monday and let you know what's going on in the universe of ideas. So for now, sit back, relax, enjoy this incredibly long episode, my longest episode. I've been on longer podcast with Rogan and Lex Fridman, but I've never hosted a podcast this long. So I hope I did a good job. I hope I spoke for you and asked the questions that you guys wanted to ask.

And, let me know if you like these audio essays or, you know, kind of introspective episodes. And please do, you know, keep in touch and let me know what you guys thought of this. Leave a review, a rating, tell me what I could do better or what I'm doing well enough. Thanks a lot. Today, we're joined by one of the most thought provoking and most requested intellectuals of our time, doctor Sam Harris. Sam is a neuroscience philosopher and New York Times best selling author. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and he's the creator of the Waking Up app. His work touches on a wide spectrum of topics ranging from rationality to religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.

He's a true advocate of reason and he's an explorer of the human condition. His ideas have transcended boundaries, challenging our perceptions. And he always invites us to think deeply about the world around us, even if we disagree with him. He's known as one of the 4 horsemen of new atheism along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, who's an upcoming guest. Sam fearlessly navigates even the most difficult of topics. In this thought provoking conversation, you'll see that Sam and I wrestled with some of the most controversial topics ranging from Donald Trump to the existence of free will to psychedelic drugs, meditation, religion, and fatherhood. Join us for an episode like no other. An exploration, a journey into consciousness, reason, morality, and even the perils and pitfalls of artificial intelligence.

Is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, pal.

Today, Sam, I wanna start with the way I always do with all my beloved guests, and that's to judge a book by its cover. And I thought of your many books, all of which I've have in audio or Kindle form, I thought we'd start with Making Sense, which is, I think, your most recent book and how that came about. So, Sam, if you tackle us through the cover art, the the title and the subtitle and the kind of origin story as I'm a cosmologist of how that book came to be.

You're gonna have to remind me on the subtitle. I've, it's been a while since I looked at that book. But, this this is unlike my other books, this is really just a a collection of podcast interviews because my podcast is making sense. These were, you know, 15 or so interviews that we thought could read well. And, and, you know, I I think that is in fact the case. There's some very smart people in that in that book.

Subtitle is conversations on consciousness, morality, and the future of humanity.

I mean, I think there's a lot of work you have to do to to make podcast conversations work on the page. You know, it's just a straight this is why I tend not to release transcripts of my podcast because no matter how articulate someone is to the ear, you look at very few people can actually speak the way they write. And, so there's there's some, you know, charitable, copyediting required to turn any even the most eloquent person into prose. And, so, yeah, we we did that for that book, and and I I think it's I think it's good.

And the cover art is this, double microphone stand with, a tangled web of of, XLR cables, in the background. So what it that is meant to represent the desire to unweave the rainbow of, conversational discourse, or is that the evocative, what we're supposed to get from that?

Yeah. Again, you've picked a book where I did not have much, I did not micromanage the the unlike my other books, I did not micromanage the cover to the same degree. It had something to do with it being a derivative of the podcast. I just, you know, like, let them roll with it. But I I I like the the concept. I mean, it's just it's it's emphasizing the the spoken origin of of the the content, you know.

Yeah. And in that book, you start off by saying, you know, when when you wrote your first book in 2004, if somebody had told you, you know, your main avocation, if not vocation, you know, or at least a lot of your time would be spent doing this thing called podcasting, you would have, kind of recoiled in horror at what had become of humanity. But I was curious, did you know the origin of the word podcast?

I kinda think it has something to do with the iPad, but I'm I'm, no. I don't think I know.

It does. It does. In fact, but the iPad owes its origin name to the sign behind me over there, if you can see it. I don't know. You can see it in the background there. It says open the pod bay doors, which famously was said by Hal, to, Dave to Hal in 2001. So, actually, this guy Vinny Sirico was a copy editor at Apple, and he proposed the name iPOD or pod because of the life sustaining and and knowledge sustaining nature of the pod. So, that that brings us to the to the nature of podcasting itself which, I I think is is is really well, we can we can go there.

Actually, I'd I'd rather go to AI, speaking of how, before we go there, before we get to podcasting, and I do wanna get your kind of tips and hacks and trips, you know, a listicle of of ways to improve, as a podcaster. But I wanna I wanna first pivot to this moment that we're in now speaking of AI and its potential threats. And, recently, we had this sort of, I don't know any other way to describe it other than debacle with Google's Gemini product, producing what can only be said as not really hallucinatory, but really kind of, you know, generative artwork based upon some encoding that it had been given. I wonder, what are your thoughts on this recent, you know, kind of development and and is this endemic to AI, in general? Or is it is it really just specific to to the Gemini folks up up in Silicon Valley and elsewhere?

What was the problem there? You mean we don't want DEI for Nazis? That's you only want a diverse range of Nazis there? Well, they have to be honest. Yeah. I mean, it it was the the reductio ad absurdum of all of this woke, identitarian, politics that so many of us have been resisting in recent years and, but this there have been many examples of this, but this was almost too good to be true. The fact that you literally could not get a white Nazi out of this this algorithm or a white Viking apparently. I mean, it was just all, it was all diversities as far as the eye could see. I you know, yeah, it was a debacle. It was embarrassing. I I I think it's I think it probably took the you know, they're so woke over there that I I think they probably got embarrassed in the wrong direction.

Like, the fact that they couldn't get any white Nazis, they probably view as an insult against people of color. Right? Like, this this this was the real indiscretion that it depicted brown people as Nazis. Right? I mean, the whole thing is so colossally moronic and and painful to behold. I I just when we're gonna pull back from this particular brink is anybody's guess. I I I feel like the pendulum is swinging back because the the just the moral arithmetic just so obviously doesn't add up. I mean, this is reverse racism. And the fact that the phrase reverse racism gets you castigated as a racist, I mean, like, only a white supremacist can utter that phrase with a clear conscience, apparently. It's it's awful.

I mean, it's just a complete pollution of our moral conversation and our political conversation, and it it will be the destroy if we don't arrest this slide into stupidity, we it will be the the destruction of the Democratic Party. It will guarantee us 4 more years of Donald Trump. I mean, it's just it's so wrong headed on every level that we just we we we need an exorcism to dispel this nonsense, and and, you know, hopefully, that is forthcoming. I mean, there's a there's a piecemeal version of that happening on on a 1,000 podcasts, presumably, and Substack newsletters and in various places in the media. But it's it seems very difficult for people to keep 2 indiscretions in view simultaneously. And it's it's it's the one on the left, which we've we've just begun speaking about, this this identity politics, and then and the one on the right with with populism and Trumpism. And many people feel that they can't keep both of those grotesque objects in view. They had they could have to focus on one to the exclusion of the other, and they can't even admit the nature of the other.

And so that that's really the problem I see that is so toxic that we just we're becoming more and more siloed into echo chambers that are self confirming and mutually incompatible. And it's just we need people in the center who can speak sanely about the untenability of of both extremes. And and so and that's what I try to do on my podcast.

I'm eagerly awaiting the episode where you where you reveal that. But, you know, for me, it it kinda revealed a a notion of the miscommunication, perhaps, the misunderstanding in the popular lexicon of, you know, accuracy and precision and and that, you know, these things were very, very inaccurate. In other words, you'd ask them for the founding fathers and they would depict, you know, some warriors from, you know, the Cherokee Nation or something like that with a white wig. I would they they got the most superficial details right, you know, the the Washingtonian pow you know, pow powdered wig and and so forth. But they got the, you know, the core details completely inaccurate. But they were very precise and that they were highly reproducible, they all had more or less the same style, you could ask it a 1,000 different ways, it was impa as you said, it was impossible. So so in in scientific circles, as you know, you know, there's a difference between accuracy and precision that sometimes gets conflated that that they're they're synonymous, that they're really quite different. And I wonder, you know, if if there ever will be an opportunity for these 2 different kind of branches of the of the human mind, the accuracy maybe in in terms of numeracy, precision, being different, but but the artistry, how you can have something that's artistic that's fundamentally subjective, and then it's gonna be generated by objective laws.

I thought maybe we talk about the Turing test and this concept, and you asked our mutual friend Cal Newport a while ago, you asked him, you know, if he'd go back and kill Turing to suppress, you know, the possible AI apocalypse. I know you're being tongue in cheek, but, but I I

don't remember that, actually. That's interesting. I have a

Well, he sent it to me on, he has a new book out. He was just out of my pocket. So I can ask him again, but if he could go back, you know, Warren Buffett said, you know, if he could have his choice, he'd go back and kill the Wright Brothers because, you know, no airline has ever made a dollar in profit in a 116 years. Do you think that there is this kind of, miss misapprehension of what AI is really going to be when it's going to be achieved? I've proposed that, you know, we we really need to see an artificial intelligence create new laws of physics, for example, before I would take it seriously. I mean, these things are mimicking perfectly mimicking the imitation game as flawless at mimicking, as you say, a woke, you know, 29 year old new employee at at Google, you know, kind of anti James Damore employee. So what would you have as as a replacement? Or do you think the Turing test is adequate as it is? What what would convince you that we've achieved AGI in a functional practical way that matters to people?

Well, I think the Turing test as traditionally conceived is is a bit of a red herring because depending on the context, these the AIs we have either pass the Turing test or they pass it so well that they fail it. Right? I mean, it's obvious that a human can't be producing what Chatt GPT produces when you ask it a question. It's just too, it's too fast. It's got access to too much information. It's too coherent. You know, I mean, you can literally ask it, give me, you know, a 170 bullet points on Roman history and it'll give you 170 bullet points on Roman history. This is immediately without pausing, right? So people can't do that. So it's already superhuman in some ways, even though it makes errors that people wouldn't make.

And I think once we get to true AGI where, you know, every capacity we care about is is being emulated at a at a human level, it won't be at a at a human level. It'll be at a superhuman level, you know, the really the moment we deploy it. Right? In the same way that you're the, you know, the calculator in your phone is already superhuman for arithmetic, we're not gonna dumb these things down. So once it's deployed, you know, it'll it'll be superhuman. And being superhuman, it will fail the Turing test in some way. Because to to remind listeners, the Turing test was simply this this, thought experiment where you're given, you know, 2 terminals and you're interacting with both and you you you can't know what you don't happen to know which is human and which is a machine, and you can't figure it out based on the kind of interaction you're having with it. I just think that's that's never gonna be our circumstance because it's these things are gonna be too good. There's a few things that that confuse people's thinking about this.

One is the variable of consciousness. Right? People are, you know, sentience, awareness, whether there's something that it's like to be a system. And I'm I'm agnostic as to whether or not consciousness will emerge out of the complexity we're we're building into our machines. It may or may not. I think the most likely thing is we won't understand how consciousness is related to physics at the point at which we build true AGI. I mean, we will not have we will not have completed a a science of consciousness yet. And so we will be agnostic as to whether these systems are conscious, but they will seem conscious. We'll we'll build them so as to seem conscious or at least certain systems will be built that way.

And seeming will seem to make it so. I mean, we'll just we'll lose sight of the fact that it's an interesting question to wonder whether they're conscious because they will it'll be so persuasive. I mean, they will pass that Turing test so persuasively, especially if you're imagining something like humanoid robots, you know, a la Westworld. Right? Just imagine being in relation to something that really is out of the uncanny valley, you know, with with in terms of facial expressiveness and and appearance. And you, you're now talking to it and it understands you better than any person has ever understood you and it has access to all of your data and, you know, so this is Siri, you know, in the flesh, who's practically an oracle now. She she or he knows so much. I think it's just gonna be, you know, whether or not it's conscious, you know, if you if you destroy that that machine, you're gonna feel like you've murdered something that is a center of of conscious life, whether or not it is, because it will it'll have seemed that way so persuasively. So I think that's interesting.

It poses certain ethical problems and and intellectual problems that we we could talk about. Because it conceptually, it's it's totally possible that we could build conscious machines that don't seem conscious. Right? They're just they're black boxes, but they're they're so complex on the inside that we have essentially built, machines that can suffer, and perhaps we don't even know that. We, you know, we we you know, in the in the limit, we could we could build a hell and populate it with conscious, you know, simulated minds and not know we've done that. Right? And that would be an appalling thing to do. The obverse is also quite possible. I think we could build things smarter than ourselves which are which are not conscious, which is fundamentally nothing that it's like to be that thing, however it seems. And we will, be no less vulnerable to their being unaligned with our interests.

Because being more intelligent, they'll be more powerful than we are.

Sam Harris is probably the most frequently requested guest I've had on the podcast. And I really couldn't have gotten him if it wasn't for you, and the huge number of you that are already subscribed to this podcast and YouTube channel. We have over 300,000 total followers across audio and video, and I couldn't be more proud. But I wonder when I look at the list of folks watching the stream right now, it's only about 18% of you that are actually subscribed. I really really am hoping that we can make a deal with each other. That I will promise to keep upping my game, getting more and better guests week after week, month after month, year after year. I want to do this forever, and I want your help. So I'm gonna make a promise to you that I am going to step it up.

I listen to your feedback. The sad truth about the podcasting business is that people care about how many subscribers you have. It's the first thing that publicists do when they want to decide if they want to waste the precious time of a guest like Sam Harris with a podcaster. They look at it. I look at it too. I I unfortunately have to turn down a lot of invitation, because I have so many demands of my time and Sam does too. If you want me to continue to score extraordinary guests like Sam Harris, Cal Newport, Robert Sapolsky, and my upcoming interviews with Daniel Dennett and Donald Hoffman. I just need a tiny bit of help.

Please reach out, share the episode, subscribe, leave a comment and a like. It's all for the algorithm's sake. I really feel guilty doing this. But I really beseech you for your help, and thank you for your support. So many of you have been so gracious. And like I said, we want to grow upward and onward from here, unbounded. So let's go back to the episode, shall we? Right. When I think, I've asked this of several researchers, you know, David Chalmers who appears I think he's chapter 1, Making Sense book.

Yeah.

And I asked him, you know, if you look back at the history of physics, you know, it's my specialty, and you come to Einstein, for example, you'll find him writing about the thought that he called his happiest thought, the thought that titillated him beyond belief. And actually, he uses this very flowery language, and that's if, if here's an Aristotle to Einstein over here. So that if he was in free fall, he'd experienced no gravitational force field. And he's called that the happiest thought. So I always ask people, you know, to what extent, a, can a computer feel happiness, and, b, maybe aping Noam Chomsky and, you know, kind of generative and physical embodiment, being a prerequisite of consciousness. How could a computer system really know what it's not not even know what it's like to be a bat, but know what it's like to be in free fall or some other experience that we can teach to my, you know, to a 3 year old. Is that fundamentally going to pose a limitation to what they can generate, say, again, in the laws of physics. Those are the things that interest me most, obviously.

So what do you think? Do you think that, a, a computer could have it? It's clear it could suffer. Right? I mean, you could make it suffer. You blow a capacitor every time it gives you, you know, George Washington, you know, looking like, Justin Trudeau in face paint or something. But but other than that, could you could you make it happy? What, you know, teleology could you ascribe to it to give it the kind of emotional connection that a physicist like Einstein would feel? Is it possible?

Well, the the moment you turn the lights on in the first person sense, the moment you make it conscious, then I think anything experiential is in principle possible. Right? I mean, it's it's just it's the the binary switch is whether the lights are on, whether there's something that it's like to be that system. However it behaves in the world, whatever sort of information processing, you you can you can construe it as doing from the outside. Right? I think consciousness is totally separable from behavior and I think it's probably separable from embodiment even though it's associated with embodiment in our case. Right? I mean, yes. In evolutionary terms, you know, in in all biological systems, you know, all creatures have bodies and if one and if consciousness has emerged in some of those, well, then that consciousness is is in many ways tethered of to embodiment and and is and, you know, when you ask what what you're conscious of, so much of that is a story of of of your body and and what it's doing. I mean, your you know, all of your perceptual channels for, you know, for us, you know, our 5 senses and we have, you know, we have more senses than 5. We've got, you know, proprioception and then there's other other senses.

But all of that is is mapped neurologically for us and therefore, it's a it's a story of embodiment. But, you know, you you could even take a person and, reduce them to some condition that really you wouldn't really call embodiment in the normal sense. I I don't think the lights would go out thereby. I mean, we you know, if people have locked in syndrome, you could imagine a a version of locked in syndrome where it's it's not just, you know, motor incapacity, but it could be sensory incapacity. You could be blind and you could be deaf and you could be unable to smell or taste, etcetera. And, you know, you you get imagine just getting stripped of all your senses. It's I don't I wouldn't expect that to be synonymous with general anesthesia. Right? I mean, there's no there would be no reason to expect that neurologically.

You'd still you could still have a 100% cortical function without the inputs and you would just you would experience that, the total vacancy of of sensory stimulation. And and I do think many of us in through meditation or psychedelics or or both, people have had experiences that they refer to as a as a pure consciousness experience where you lose your sense of of, embodiment and there's just you know, consciousness just becomes this vast space of, you know, really without content. I mean, just just knowing its own, you know, cognizance. And that's a, you know, that's a conceptually coherent notion and and, you know, it's an experience, again, that many people have attested to. There have to be experiences. In in the space of all possible conscious experiences, there have to be experiences we can't even imagine and they and and that are inaccessible to us based on the kinds of minds we have and different minds would could access them. Right? So if we if we built super intelligent machines that were that were conscious and self improving, you could imagine these these minds navigating the space of possible experience, you know, beyond horizons we can't see. And that's all very interesting to consider.

And those those could those could be very, very pleasant or very, very unpleasant experiences. Right? I mean, we know that things can can be really nice and really not nice in this university among the experiences we've sampled. And I'm sure that gets more and more extreme in all directions, you know, however many directions there there are.

I wanna get your reaction to a quote, by you, in the Waking Up app recently. I'm a long time, subscriber and very much enjoy it. So you you wake I wake up I don't always meditate with your meditations but I always, use the app and, you know, great, roster of of, teammates there at the Waking Up Corporation Incorporated. So the first one is something you said. You said, wouldn't it be really good, since all you ever have with you is your mind, to make a friend of your mind? I wanna compare that quote, so, with this one from Einstein. You said, no problem can ever be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. And so I guess the question is, what does it mean to make your mind into a friend? And if you can explain that, does that also couple into maybe what Einstein was saying? You would have how how could you transcend the brain, quote unquote, our conscious experience? How could that even be practical? In other words, are we not doomed because we're locked inside of our brain, but maybe not according to Sam Harris because you could make your mind your friend. So what do you how how could you reconcile what Einstein said with what you said perhaps or use what you said as a tool to help us transcend the level of consciousness we're born with?

Yeah. Well, I I certainly wouldn't say it's a matter of getting outside the brain. I mean, you know, again, I think we can be agnostic with respect to the the the metaphysics here. I mean, just just the ontology. Just how is consciousness and mind related to matter? At at what point does it emerge? I think with with with mind in terms of its functionality, I mean, things like perception and memory and and, you just you know, so the association between ideas and ability to to abstract ideas, reasoning, all of that is clearly a matter of what our brains are doing. Right? Because we know we can do we we can disrupt all those functions by by damaging or or impeding the the, you know, certain processes in the brain. And all of that is is increasingly well mapped. And the the really, the only outstanding mystery here is that it should feel like something or be like something to be associated with any of that processing, right, which I.

E. The the mystery of consciousness. So I think it's it's unclear how consciousness emerges and what it's what it's what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for for the the lights to come on. But for for things like, you know, vision and and, you know, language processing, etcetera, we know this is a matter of information processing in our, you know, the the the biochemical system of our brains, and I think there's every reason to just to to connect back to the AI AI conversation for a moment. There's every reason to believe that that is substrate independent. Right? There's no reason to think that there's something magical about a biological system. We we should be able to process that same information in silico and and those same functions happen, and as we see in the intelligent machines we've already built. It's not a matter of getting beyond the brain, in any way.

It's it's, there are different levels to it. There there there are, you know, one level is just thinking differently. Right? I mean, just having new ideas and and and, reaping the benefit of their consequences, you know, framing things differently, telling a different story about your experience, I mean, being able to triangulate on yourself and see yourself as others do or see yourself as you see other people. I mean, what you know, one thing I've said on this topic is that on some level, wisdom is is really nothing more profound than an ability to take your own advice. Right? I mean, we all are pretty good at giving advice to other people. If your best friend, you know, sat down with you and said, listen, I'm I'm really unhappy. I'm just you know, I really I feel like I'm not actualizing everything I can in life. You know, what should I do? What do you think I should do? You know, just give me give me an intervention.

Right? You could probably give, a lot of great advice there, And if you only took that advice yourself, a 100% of it, you know, you would be living your best life too. Right? It's probably not very different from the advice you would give yourself. It's operationalizing, and, you know, executing all these good ideas that that is really the challenge. It's not it's not, I'm gonna take the simplest possible case. I go, everyone knows how to lose weight. Right? There's no mystery anymore about how to do that. You know, this really is just physics, even if there's maybe some, you know, ways that are better than others. You know, it's not a matter of cutting off your limbs.

Right? You know you you know you have a certain energy balance and if you eat less and exercise more and you and you do that consistently, you're gonna change your the shape of your body eventually. And yet, many, many people, virtually, you know, everyone who's not marketing their their accomplishments on YouTube finds this very difficult to do. Right? And and so, that's the problem. I I think with Einstein's quote, I I the one place I would demur is that I I don't tend to think of levels of consciousness. I I I think of consciousness as a as a single condition, and the the real differentiator is in its contents. Right? I mean, there there can be consciousness with, you know, basically zero con contents, and there can be consciousness with contents of a sort and and capacities, by virtue of that contents that we can't even imagine, you know, just, you know, creativity and insight that, is so far beyond what is normal for us that, you know, we would we would find, you know, those disclosures, if put into English, fairly unintelligible. Right? So, but everything so, you know, all of all of our personal changes with respect to what we do and what we want and and, you know, how we think about our lives is a matter of of changing contents. However, the real, benefit of meditation and and the and the and the way one engages it is not so much a matter of addressing content as content.

It's it's recognizing contents, whatever they are, and learning to kinda drop back into this condition of of a purely witnessing experience and discovering an an intrinsic freedom there that that that is, that is native to to, consciousness, whatever its contents. Right? So the, like, so the the thing that's very interesting about meditation is that its benefits are not dependent on changing the character of your experience in any specific way. And, I mean, this can sound paradoxical because recognizing this more and more does does have a tendency to change the character of experience. But your the freedom you find in meditation, the freedom from self, the freedom from reactivity isn't in and of itself a matter of changing the contents of consciousness. It's a matter of of just of recognizing, of just simply witnessing experience without reacting to it, without grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away and recognizing the intrinsic freedom of just that open awareness, and its ultimate non duality. I mean, this is where it can sound a little spooky, but this is where the, the sense the sense that that there's a self, a subject that is aware of objects is the thing that ultimately you're you're interrogating with meditation and that's the thing that breaks down and you begin to experience a freedom from that that that that contracted feeling of of self, this constantly appropriating experience and reacting to it and trying to improve it. It's a project that is somewhat orthogonal to the to this other project of improving experience, right, which is, you know, which is the the a story of the kinds of changes you can make, to your experience based on behavior and ideas and and relationships and all the good good stuff you can find in life and all the bad stuff you can successfully avoid.

Most of the time, you know, I to my everlasting shame and and denigration in your eyes, I I find myself, you know, just thinking about, you know, fire tweets I could send out, you know, with my eyes closed. And, it's almost, you know, it's it's almost a source of extra frustration, you know, that I'm doing it wrong and, yeah, you're the second, you know, at least the second meditation expert I've had on, including, Deepak Chopra, doctor Deepak Chopra, who actually Sam, he gave me my mantra, my first mantra, ever. Do you wanna hear what it was?

Right. What was that?

He gave me my first mantra, which I I use, on a daily. It's called schmuck. My mantra is schmuck. I don't know why he wanted me to say that, but but he, you know, he he sort of, felt that, you know, TM is the way to go. And and I I even trying that, I I find that even more sort of almost embarrassing to do even if I'm by myself and I'm always nervous someone's gonna come in and say but even when I don't, I use Vipassana and and and the techniques that you've taught me and your and your and your team, waking up.

Up, I

still find it, you know, quite quite difficult, and it's very difficult to know when one is improving. And you you so, for those that don't subscribe, you should subscribe, but, if you don't, you can get it. There's a free trial, I think, you know, Sam offers, etcetera. But, but there was a recent there's so every day, you get at least a thought and a guided meditation from Sam. The thought may come or the musing may come from Sam himself or one of his guests, but recently, you called Vipassana, the LHC, you know, the equivalent tantamount to the LHC. And, you know, that made me break out of whatever, you know, meditative stance state I was in.

Because, you know,

you can't mention those names without me secreting, you know, endorphins. So what what did you mean by that? How how in what way is it the LHC? Because it seems like there's some and you even alluded to it, I detect a slight degree, you know, you don't wanna be your your solid, you know, hardcore scientist at at heart and by training. And so you said something like woo woo and and, of course, I got that in spades with Deepak Chopra, but even he felt the need to burnish his bona fides and say, well, I've published papers with Elizabeth Blackburn, who's a Nobel Laureate, etcetera, Frank Wilczek, etcetera. So tell me, Sam, what did you mean by that? How in what way is the is the, Vipassana, the sort of technology, tantamount to an LHC, large hadron collider?

Right. Right. Well, yeah, let me take some pains to differentiate my approach to this from Deepak's because it is quite different. If we're talking about meditation and awareness and consciousness, we can sound like we're saying some similar things, and we might actually, in fact, be saying similar things about the nature of of meditative experience, but we're not drawing the same kinds of conclusions metaphysically from them. Right? So, you know, I I tend to not draw any conclusions about the cosmos from what one can experience in meditation. I just think it's it's unwarranted. There's no there's no, there's no no necessity to do it, and I just see no, I just don't see the intellectual basis by which to do it. Right? You can make profound insights into the nature of mind from the first person side while meditating.

And again, psychedelics are also another tool here which have been useful for many people. They're different, and we can talk about, the difference, as I see it. But there's no question that perturbing your nervous system in this way by changing how you pay attention or by, you know, pharmacology or, you know, by many other experiences can show you at a minimum that it's possible to have a very different experience of yourself and the world, right, and that some of those experiences are transformative and you can you know, at every level, whether it's in your relationships or in just your relationship to yourself or in your or in your very sense of what a self is. I mean, it's just it goes very, very deep, and it can be very, very interesting and and rewarding to explore. And yet, you know, when you're meditating, you can't even tell that you have a brain. Right? I mean, like, even your own bird the existence of your brain is not among the things you can notice while meditating. Right? Much less its significance. Right? If you can't draw any direct, you know, first person conclusions about your own nervous system, how is it that we can imagine that you can say anything about what happened before the big bang or, you know, any other, you know, answer any other question of cosmology.

Right? And that's that's a move that Deepak tends to make. Right? He will, you know, he will talk about the the the pure consciousness you can see in the darkness of your closed eyes. That is the very thing that preceded the big bang. Right? That that all of a sudden you're doing physics by by by meditating. That is, you know, for lack of a better word it. Now it's not to say that in the limit, as we, you know, approach something like a completed science of the mind and something like a completed physics, we might discover something interesting about the ontology there of mind and matter, which which links things up in a in a profound way. And and, maybe there is something. Maybe there's a place where they touch.

But it's just obvious that for for most of us, most of the time, there's no reason to to pretend to know anything, about, you know, the the universe on the basis of of what you can experience directly, just just paying attention to what it's like to be you. But what you can what you can know a lot about is is what it's like in your corner of the universe. I mean, you are part of the universe. You are this this physical system that is that is illuminated by consciousness for some reason where you sit. And in in this corner of the universe, I mean, only you are are are seeing the universe. I mean, you're you're the universe on some level seeing itself from this position. Right? I mean, there's no real boundary between you and the universe physically that's that's that's important or that's that's ult it ultimately demarcates you from, you know, the rest rest of things. I mean, the boundary of your skin is is nominally where you think you start and stop.

But even there, you know, you're exchanging matter and energy with ceaselessly with with the the world around you. And the truth is when you look closely at your subjectivity, you don't tend to bound yourself at the boundary of your skin. Right? Most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're riding around in bodies as a kind of passenger. You feel like you're a mind in a body. You feel like you're a subject, very likely in the head. And you're you're in relationship to your body in some strange way.

Right? And and you know, that's from a scientific point of view, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, if you're a materialist or a physicalist and you think that everything about you and even even consciousness itself is just an emergent property of your nervous system, well, then you're gonna think, well, it's it's it's, and it's important that your nervous system be embodied. Well, then it's you are you are coterminous with your body. You are your body. Right? And so most it's just important to recognize that most people don't feel that way naturally. The default sense is that there's a kind of an inner subject, a kind of ghost in the machine that is aware of the machine from some play some place inside it. But strangely, your body is is almost part of the world. Right? You're aware of you're aware of the world.

You know, with your open your open eyes, you see your visual field, and and much of what you see is not self. Right? And your body is an appearance. Your physical body, you know, that you can see is an appearance in that same space. You can see your hands. You can see your legs. You can't see your head, but you can see everything else. And, you know, that's you're aware of all of that from some point of view inside your head, which feels like this unchanging sense of self, this this this I or me that is riding around, and is is carried through from one moment to the next, amid all of the changing data of experience, you know, changing sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and moods and emotions, everything's changing. There's this full display of energy, and yet there's this sense that there's a a subject in the middle that is in some way unchanging.

Right? This eye the sense of I, the sense of sense of self. And that's the thing that ultimately I mean, in the beginning, you don't don't really start out targeting that. But, you know, relatively quickly, at least over in in waking up, the app, you know, we instruct people to look closely at this this seeming starting point of being a subject that can pay attention to sounds or or the breath, let's say, as an exercise or a mantra if you're doing Deepak's method TM. You know, you're you're you're repeating a mantra with the voice of your mind and you're part of you is hearing that. You know, part of you seems to be saying the sound and part of you seems to be hearing it. And there's still a sense that there's a meditator in the middle of all of this doing the thing and or and and noticing changes. But the claim here and it's a it is a scientific claim. It is a, you know, you can entertain it as a scientific hypothesis and try to, you know, and just look into it for yourself.

The claim is if you look closely enough at this sense of self, what you're calling I, this feeling of being a subject, you won't find it. And you won't find it in a way that is conclusive, which is to say, you'll find its absence. You'll no longer feel its presence when you look for it closely enough, and you'll then feel what consciousness is like prior to a sense of self. And you'll be able to to inspect that this kind of boundary condition of it, of the self sort of reasserting itself and then disappearing and reasserting itself and disappearing in a way that becomes very, very precise and very clear and and really no longer a a a a circumstance of any kind of doubt. And the analogy I I tend to draw here is not a perfect one, but it's it's pretty close, honestly, with respect to several of the the key variables is to looking for the optic blind spot, which, you know, many of you are our listeners will be familiar with, and this is usually introduced at some point in high school. You you you take out a piece of paper, you make two marks on it, you know, you make like a fixation cross and then you put a dot to one side and you close one eye. And and when staring at the fixation cross, you move the paper, you know, into into a position where the dot you've drawn disappears because, you know, there's an area in your retina where you're just not getting any data because the the the optic nerve transits through the retina and there there's no photoreceptors there. This is more evidence of an intelligent designer that is omniscient and and designing, our our species perfectly, as as Christians, Jews, and Muslims imagine.

The insight there is that this is you through your own first person experience and with very little setup, I mean, just a little bit of guidance, you can do this experiment which reveals something about neuroanatomy that you wouldn't otherwise be able to inspect directly. You you you would know you're not gonna find it by by accident. Right? There's this deliberate experiment that you have to perform on yourself, and yet it's available. And it's it's not the inside is not deep within you. It's actually really right on the surface. Right? It's it's almost too close to you to be noticed without performing this this fairly precise, you know, way of looking. And meditation on the nature of the self is is analogous to that. There's a way of looking for this sense of self.

It's harder than this and it's it's you know, you can't really use a piece of paper and a pencil to to help in in quite the same way. But it's, it's it can be confer the sense of of absence in the same way that, you know, it becomes uncontrovertible with the the optic blind spot. I mean, you really can you can perform that experience that experiment enough so that you really do confirm for yourself that you can't see the dot, Right? It's like the like, there is an absence of data there, and you can just you can move it in and out of of existence, and you just you can resolve your doubts about it. And if you ever you get those doubts again, you can look at it again. And it's just it's there to be seen. There's something similar with respect to the nature of the self and, you know, much more importantly, the you begin to notice that this sense of self is really the anchor for virtually all, if not all, of your states of of psychological suffering. Right? And when you drop out this sense of self, there's a profound relief in the midst of whatever negative emotion may have arisen a moment ago on the basis of you being lost in thought. Right? So you could you could have been angry or impatient or fearful or whatever it is.

And you look closely for the self that is suffering that emotion, and when it drops away, there's a profound feeling of relief. And so that's why it's, you know, that's why it's worth doing and worth looking at beyond just the intellectual interest of it. It's just it you know, the the door the real doorway into an interest in meditation tends to be, you know, you feel worse than you wanna feel much of the time. You know, you notice that you just feel crappy. You're talking to yourself all day long about what you want and what you what you wish you had and what you almost had and what you might have had and, what you regret and what you're anxious about. And and your bandwidth is is just gunked up by, you know, fairly unhappy, routine of self talk, which strangely no one gets bored of. You know, it's like you have endless openness to hear yourself rehearse this argument you had with your wife yesterday for the 15th time, this hour, and you know, you don't get bored. But if you were if you were externalizing these thoughts to a friend, you know, for the 15th time that hour, you know, he or she would look at you like you had just lost your mind, and certainly not keep your company any longer.

Right? So it's we have very weird standards of reality testing within our in our own minds that if you imagine exporting them to human conversation, you know, you'd be branded as a madman. And and meditation is a way of getting some perspective on that and and kind of changing your your routine.

When you were, talking in the app about the optic blind spot, you talked about that in the early lessons, introductory lessons. I couldn't help as an astronomer think about the concomitant optical phenomena of peripheral vision enhancement in that the same region where their optic blind spot occurs just to the left or left or right, depending on which eye we're talking about, your eyes are actually much more heightened sensitivity to low levels of of grayscale intensity. So you can actually amplify your ability to perceive details, but not in color. So it's it's all these wonderful rich metaphors with, with the optical system. And, of course, if you look at the motor homunculus of a of a person, it's, you know, mostly eyes and hands and and and little else. I I like the LHC analogy, especially since my particle physics colleagues, I'm very jealous of them getting, you know, $12,000,000,000 a shot. We we have to make do with just a couple of $100,000,000, Sam, so poor poor us. But, I wanna talk about that and the, you know, the kind of self talk, etcetera.

I find it, curious, and and maybe we can segue into I I don't wanna talk about politics. I find politics very boring, and that's part of the reason we became an astronomer is because, you know, no one ever looks up and says, oh, that comet is a democratic comet. But I like that asteroid, you know, or that that constellation over there because it's a it's a Republican. But to talk about the self talk, it sort of strikes me that there's a danger well, there's a couple of dangers. 1, if you if I really there was one meditation which I shouldn't have listened to that you led, you know, as I was going to sleep because it it terrified me. It's basically if you just think about every thought that you had and what thoughts did you have yesterday, how many can you remember, and you start thinking about thinking about thinking about stuff. And and it it can be I I could imagine it it could be a source of of of great distress for people to think, you know, I've been to the Antarctic twice for telescopes at the South Pole, and I've never wintered over there. There are there are there are lunatics that will spend I love them and thank god we have them, but they'll spend 11 to 20 months of their life at the South Pole within a 100, you know, meter radius of one geographic spot at negative 90 degrees south latitude.

To get there, they have to take a psychological exam. And one of the questions that disqualifies you is, you know, I hear voices in my head. And it seems to me that, like, unless you're insane, you do hear voices, but how do you modulate that? Because even not for narcissistic people that that do hear voices or or psychopaths, We all hear these voices. And do you have to guard against, you know, slipping into a sort of psychopathy perhaps by dwelling upon the meta analytic nature of the nature of thought, which we can hardly understand?

1st, I should say I'm not a clinician. Right? So I, you know, take take my thoughts about mental health for what they're worth. But, there are different senses in which a person might hear voices. Right? So that is, you know, the the the true hearing of voices is a symptom of schizophrenia. Right? And that is we know from neuroimaging experiments that that is really a story of auditory cortex be, you know, being active. Right? So they really are as far as the cortex is concerned, they really seem to be hearing something. Right? As though it were, you know, you're hearing my voice now, right, with your ears. And that's different from the voice of our minds when we engage in self talk.

And, you know, let's say you're reading a book, and you're reading, you know, many many of us don't read so quickly as to escape the sound of kind of covertly reading out loud to ourselves. Right? So many people hear our own many people hear their own voice when they're reading, you know, the the kind of covert voice of the mind. You know, that's not a symptom of schizophrenia. That's just a a symptom of being a slow reader, you know, which I happen to be. And when you read faster and faster, you you kinda break the speed limit imposed by your own voice and you just scan the text with your eyes. Let's just demarcate schizophrenia from the rest of the conversation. I mean, I I'm not it's it's No. No.

No. I think it's very wise. Normal. Yeah. Not let schizophrenics go to the South Pole for 11 months and and and, sit in in negative 90 degree, Fahrenheit. But for most of us, even, even if we're the picture of of of quote normal mental health, right, our minds tend to be unhappy places to be, right? I mean, it's just very few people have really made their minds their friend. You know, so much of our self talk, so much of our what what captures our attention moment to moment is making us, if not, you know, starkly unhappy, far less at ease and, you know, filled with with love and gratitude and and ease of being as we might be. Right? And we notice this because we have these peak we have these moments of peak experience where we feel very, very different.

Right? We, you know again, this is one reason why psychedelics have been so useful for for so many of us, because many of us are, you know, hard headed skeptical types who, you know, if we had tried meditation first, we would have just been filled with, you know, doubt as to why, you know, why are we, you know, why am I sitting here doing nothing? You know, there's just so much more interesting things to do. I I could be, you know, I could be reading a good book. I could be I could be performing an experiment. I could be, you know and you're you're you're not seeing that all of this is just you not breaking through the veil of thought. Right? You're just now you're you're you're you're closing your eyes. You're trying to meditate, but now you're talking to yourself and you're you're doubting the whole project. And you're not seeing how that that's you're not even you're not even engaging the project. Right? You haven't you haven't given it a 5 second start.

You're already bouncing off. Right? So many people can't get past that. And the way but for the fact that they may have had an experience, you know, again, through something like, you know, psychedelics, where it has been proven to them beyond any possibility of doubt that that a very different experience of being a mind in the world is available. Right? So that for me, it was, you know, the first time I took MDMA. I took it very much with the intention of discovering something about myself. It had sort of been given to me as as as a therapeutically promising drug, not not as a party drug or as as just a way of getting high, but just here's a doorway into a different experience. You know, Try it when you're when you're ready. And I did and and it was, whatever the dynamics of the experience were, and I'm happy to talk about it if you want, when I came down, I realized, okay, the one thing I can't tell myself, you know, now that I have just a memory of the experience and it's no longer the way I feel, is that the way I have been living and being moment to moment is optimal.

Right? Because that would because what what happened there for about 4 hours was so much better and so much wiser and so much less conflicted than I am tending to be in my life that now I have to become really interested in the processes that are that are preventing me from being more like that more of the time. Right? And so meditation, you know, became a a one of one of the tools I engaged to to look into that.

Hey, all. It's me again, professor Brian Keating with a tiny little homework assignment for you as we start the spring quarter. And that's to make sure that you join my Monday magic mailing list, where I share tidbits from around the world of science, technology, education, math, consciousness, everything else that you're interested in, the science news that you really can use, highlights from your favorite podcast, this one hopefully. And I know that you'll enjoy the mailing list. It's a bit of tiny goodness that we start the week with. So head on over to briancating.com/list and join. And you'll also enter a giveaway to win a meteorite. A real 4000000000 year old piece of none of unconscious space schmutz that I send to one lucky subscriber every month.

But, you're guaranteed to win one if you're in an educational institution. So if you are, go to briancating.com/edu. And if you live in the USA, I'll guarantee I will send you one. I know you'll love it. Super fun. Great conversation piece. Now, back to the show. Was there sort of a, you know, kind of a comedown? I mean, a literal.

I've I should say, I've never done any drug of any kind. And I have very strict strict sort of thoughts about that that we can talk about or not. It's not not terribly important what I think. But, you know, I view the the brain as, you know, the most magnificent computer there is, and I only have so many IQ points. I don't wanna drop below a 100 as it is. So, but was there a disappointment? Because, you you know, you kind of, you got into the promised land. You not only saw it, but you it sounds like you experienced it in a visceral way. And then knowing that, you could at best obtain a minor simulacrum of that through meditation.

Let's face it. You know, actually altering the brain through chemical means is far more powerful than, you know, attempting to, you know, mimic that state or or, you know, simulate that state through tools like meditation, which I do engage in. So was there a disappointment that after, you know, you almost wished that you hadn't, you know, invented the, the the atomic bomb or, you know, the LHC in that case and and and taken these, MDMA?

Well, no. I mean, this this now goes to the difference between psychedelic experiences and meditation in terms of what what the what the goal is or what what you consider to be the the the center of the bull's eye. Meditation is is, I think, much more important ultimately than psychedelics in the sense that what you the the real target state, the real the real fundamental insight, the the wisdom that is available, isn't really a state at all. It's really it's it's continuous with all possible states of consciousness, right? It simply is, as I said earlier, the insight that there is no center to experience. There's no self there on the edge or in the middle of experience that's appropriating experience. There's just experience. You know, and again, this is not metaphysics. I'm not talking about the universe.

I'm talking about the first person side of things. I mean, what it's like to be you. The sense that most of us have is there's there's there's the self and the self is having an experience. Right? But everything you think of everything you sense as yourself is just more experience. It's just another, you know, wrinkle in the contents of consciousness. So there really is just consciousness in its contents. There's no edge to it. There's no center to it.

There's just it. Right? And as a matter of experience, subjectively, you are identical to it. Right? You're not on the edge of it looking in, and you're not in the middle of it trying to control it. Right? So there is no meditator. Right? There's no there's no place from which you're directing attention at the breath. There's just the totality of of conscious experience with its sights and sounds and sensations. I mean, the full energy of of the display of cognizance. Right? And the sense that there's this division into subject and object is the is the foundational error upon which every other error and then really every other moment of of psychological suffering is is is, you know, strung.

So that insight, again, is is you can have that insight in totally ordinary states of consciousness, like just while you're, you know, having a conversation or checking your email or or, you know, working out or whatever it is. And you can have that exact same insight in the middle of a psychedelic experience. Right? And in some sense, that insight equalizes those two types of experience. Right? So so that the psychedelic experience from the point of view of of centerlessness isn't so much better than the experience of just checking your email from the point of view of centerlessness. Right? There's still because the central you can't get more centerless than centralist. Right? You can't get, you know so it's, it's not to say there aren't, you know, wonderful experiences to have with psychedelics, but from my point of view, they no longer become necessary and they are by very by definition, transitory. Right? Because, you know, you've you've taken a drug to have them. Right? You've you've perturbed your nervous system to have them.

And, you know, this isn't unique to drugs. This is, you know, every experience is every experience that you can name is transitory. Right? There's just no first, it wasn't there, and now it's here. And and by by definition, it's going to, at some point, go. Right? It's a process, that's not gonna be sustained forever. The thing that that stands a chance of not being transitory is the the any intrinsic feature of consciousness that is always there when you're having any experience of any kind. Right now, you know, it's it'll be transitory with respect to, you know, the end of your life, presumably. Right? If if there's nothing if if if when you die, you just get a dial tone or you get nothing, well then, okay, it's all transitory, including consciousness.

But short of that, the qualities of of consciousness that are that are really freeing, that are that you can you can have insight into through meditation really can be recognized no matter what's happening. I mean, they really they're they're available when you're when you're in the middle of, you know, a bout of dysentery. Right? I mean, like, whatever the experience is, you can recognize that consciousness is free of self and open and really unconfined. So in that sense, it's a very different project than just simply having a peak experience with psychedelics that just bowls you over for a host of reasons, virtually all of which relate to the wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness that that have occurred there. Right? So, I mean, the thing that happened for me on MDMA is there are all kinds of unpleasant things about my own egocentricity and my sense of, you know, defensiveness and guardedness as a person and, like, just my neurosis. All of that got stripped away, so, like, all that bad stuff was no longer there. And a lot of good stuff came flooding into consciousness. So you have feelings of compassion and unconditional love and, I mean, really, just, you know, just check all the boxes of, you know, what you imagine you'd feel if you felt like Jesus or any, you know, any matriarch or patriarch of some great, you know, contemplative tradition or just like what is it like to feel truly at home in your own skin, truly at peace in the cosmos even with all that you don't know and will never come to know, even in the face of the reality of death? You know, I mean, just just how is it possible to be so at ease in your being in the world.

Again, despite radical uncertainty as what's gonna as to what's gonna happen next. And or and in fact, that, you know, the the very, you know, morbid certainty of of, you know, the guarantee that bad things will eventually happen. And including the death of, you know, everyone you love and and and yourself. Right? So it's just is it possible to know all that? Right, and, be completely surrendered into a state of gratitude and love and and bliss, and to kind of just a kind of just a radiance of of of cognizance in the face of each new percept percept. You know, each each each moment of of engaging, you know, each sight, each sound, everything somehow gets transfigured and becomes sacred. Right? So that that's a it's like it's something like the beatific vision. Right? That's a that is available. I mean, that's just a neurologically available.

And the truth is, there's no drug that does anything that your brain is is incapable of doing itself. Right? I mean, these drugs either chain either cause neurotransmitters you already have to hang around longer or get, you know, dumped in greater, you know, concentrations into the synapse. Or they mimic neurotransmitters. Right? And and, you know, bind to receptors that are sit sitting there ready to be bound to by, you know, the the requisite neurotransmitters. And so it is in fact true that, you know, these experiences can be had through meditation. And and, you know, I've certainly recapitulated many states I've experienced through psychedelics in in meditation. But the crucial point for me is that I don't think I would have understood that there was a there there without first having had this experience because I just I wouldn't have had the aptitude to have persevered long enough, you know, through meditation to have experienced it. It just I I would have, yeah.

I mean, I it's hard to know that, you know, run the counterfactual, but I just have that sense that I needed I needed to to just see that the grass is greener over one of these fences to just be convinced that the whole project wasn't just a a pipe dream from the outset.

Sounds, to have returned to the optical analogy, kind of like, you know, someone who's addicted to eye drops versus someone who gets LASIK. You know, you can you can sort of get some of the benefits from the eye drops, but when they're taken away, you know, the the impermanence of it will settle in. Right. You know, the the question is is that is that, is that worth it, or can you achieve it without it? I think you mentioned in a in a in a podcast perhaps or maybe several years ago, you know, you asked the question, you know, would you would you advise your daughters to to do MDMA? I mean, obviously, not not now. Even though you're, you know, from California and it's probably probably legal where you're at, remind me, what was your what was your take? I mean, because if you wouldn't do it to someone who is in your care and the most precious person, you know, assuming that you would do it and they, you know, you had control over their doing it or not by influencing them, not by forcing them, would you advise them or not?

Yeah. Well, so this is, you're referring to, a a passage in, it's actually in my book, Waking Up. But there's a chapter, drugs and the meaning of life, which I got excerpted as a podcast, and it's it's on my blog somewhere. Yeah. I mean, one thing that's misleading here is we have this one word, drugs, which names a very wide class of compounds, which are, you know, importantly different from one another. Right? So they're drugs that I would say are never worth taking. Right? They're really, they're synonymous very likely with neurological damage, and they they are pointing you, you know, nowhere worth going. Then there are drugs that that are, you know, powerfully addictive, and we, you know, we have to be aware of that biochemistry that really ruins people's lives.

They're drugs you could easily overdose on and they're drugs you could really never overdose on. Right? You know what I mean? It's just like where where there is no known lethal dose really or, you know, that you would have to take, you know, so many orders of magnitude beyond what any human being would take to find it that it's just it's not a risk. Right? So, so it's just it's very you can't just you can't generalize about drugs and yet we do. And it's it just makes a a word salad of any real, you know, conversation about, you know, drug policy and and what should be legal and illegal, etcetera. You know, alcohol is is, a drug I actually like. You know, I drink, with some regularity, you know, hopefully not to excess. But it's it's unambiguously the among the most dangerous drugs we have in terms of the dysfunction it unleashes in people's lives and that and there's just the sheer mortality associated with it. Right? It's just, and yet it's legal.

So psychedelics are the class of psychedelics MDMA actually is technically not a psychedelic, but it's, you know, it's often talked about in the same context because of its therapeutic effects. But the classic psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD, are not certainly not addictive. I mean, there's no no sign of their being addictive. And, they're not the kinds of things people tend to take, all that regularly. I mean, you know, taking it once a week. I mean, I mean, I guess microdosing is its own thing. Many people are microdosing now and it's it's a you're taking, like, a subliminal dose of it for whatever reason and, you know, the the research on the efficacy of that is is certainly somewhat ambiguous at at this at this moment. I mean, there's certainly research that suggests that it's just a placebo effect.

But, leaving that aside, you know, you take a a a psychedelic dose of of, you know, psilocybin or LSD. That is not something that anyone does every day or even every week or in in most cases, even every month. It's just the it's, it would be too disruptive of living a normal life and it's just not necessary. Right? It's just it's just too much it's too much of if it's a good thing, it's too much of a good thing. It's a very different story because, from meditation generally, because the classic psychedelics like, psilocybin and and LSD are are different from MDMA in my experience in that you really can have extraordinarily positive and extraordinarily negative experiences with with some, you know, I don't know what the the actual distribution is there, but, you know, it's it's by no means rare to have a very scary experience on LSD or or psilocybin. Right? I mean, they're they were called psychomimetic drugs for a reason. I mean, they they they can mimic psychosis. Right? I think one can go one should consider taking psychedelics with real caution, and I think there are people who really shouldn't take them.

Someone with a with a background in with schizophrenia or a first order relative, who's schizophrenic, I think is that that certainly rules those people out of any research paradigm with psychedelics. And I just think it's, you know, it's possible, like, you know, there's a lot of a lot to be said about how one tries to control for control the variables of set and setting so as to maximize the chance of having a good experience. And it's also true that even unpleasant experiences can be reframed in a way that that where they're a net good. But, you know, I'm convinced some really can't. I mean, some, you know, where it's it really is a kind of a spin of the roulette wheel and you can really have a bad experience where you wish you hadn't had that experience. Right? It's just not a net positive. With MDMA, it's it's a different story. I mean, I'm sure there are some people who've had bad experiences on MDMA.

I'm sure there are many people who've undoubtedly taken what they thought was MDMA, and they were really taking methamphetamine or something because they're by getting any legal drugs and they haven't had them tested. So you don't know what you're taking in some cases. So most people, most of the time, will have a very positive experience on MDMA. Right? If if they're they provided they have the real compound and they're taking it in a set and setting where it's, you know, they're they're they're doing that wisely. I mean, certainly, under the guidance of a, you know, a therapist, you know, in some professional setting as a compound has immense therapeutic benefit. But, you know, unhappily, unlike, psilocybin and LSD, I can't with the same institution say that it's it's, physiologically benign. Right? I I think the the the jury is still out on on MDMA. I think neurologically, I mean, a lot of the scare stories of it creating neurological harm, I think, were just that, scare stories.

But it wouldn't surprise me that you're paying some physiological price every time you take MDMA. I mean, it just it it frankly, it feels that way a little bit, and there's some research that suggests that it might be that way. Certainly, the there there is a lethal dose of it that can can can be found, well within reach of of a normal dose, you know, maybe by a factor of of 10. Right? You know, you take 10 times the the the appropriate dose and and that would that's probably something like the LD 50 for MDMA. Whereas with with LSD or psilocybin, it's it's, you know, probably a 1,000 fold dose or beyond. Right? It's really it's it's not in sight. Again, these are all differences and and these differences get get, elided when we just think we're talking about drugs as a single class of something that you shouldn't take because they're bad for your brain and may lower your IQ, etcetera. But sorry, I didn't answer your question.

So to come back to my daughters, yes, it is is true that I think I mean, unless they, for whatever reason, found an aptitude for meditation such that they took the practice far enough so as to obviate any any need for for insight any other way, right, like they just they they had all the experiences I wanted them to have wanted them to have on the notch without having to think about, psychedelics. You know, that's certainly possible. I don't think it's likely for for them or for for most people. So short of that, I do think it's a it's a rite of passage. I think it's, you know, I don't think it's at all surprising that, you know, the the mysteries of Eleusis, though we don't know precisely what compound was being taken there, you know, for 2000 years in ancient Greece and Rome, there was a right that, some of the the wisest and smartest people who who, we hear from from antiquity felt that was the most important thing they'd ever ever experienced. Right? And the the mind is potentially far vaster a place than we tend to notice, right, based on what we do with our attention. And it's, you know, for many of us, only, pharmacology at the moment. I mean, you know, who who knows what what ways of intervening in our nervous systems we'll have, you know, 10 years from now or a 100 years from now.

But at the moment, we have some compounds that really do open the doors of perception in a way that that, is is profoundly surprising and and profoundly beautiful for, for many people.

So try the try the cold plunges and the saunas first.

It's gonna have to be quite a cold plunge. It's gonna have to get it's gonna have to get so cold. I'm not sure you can get in it.

I can take them to Antarctica when they're of age. This is unless, send me an email. I wanna pivot a little bit, although perhaps, tangentially related still to meditation at least. I find again, even for I'm gonna just stick to normal people, we're not talking about schizophrenics. There is sort of, sometimes I I can feel a sort of smugness and a narcissistic, you know, when I'm listening to Sam Harris in the morning and my wife's putting, you know, a bunch of lunches in the in the lunch boxes and what the hell are you doing? I'm doing this for you, honey, you know. It doesn't really work so well, but it made me think of, a lot of what you do, and and you've gotten a tremendous amount of criticism, which I I feel is is mostly unfair. I don't agree a 100% with with all your positions. I don't think it's possible for any individual.

I don't even agree a 100% with all my positions, Sam. But but the, the thing that strikes me is that you you're you're quite balanced and you do have a a great ability to see perspectives from multiple positions. And I can't imagine that that's purely due to meditation or or MDMA or what have you. In other words, I feel a tendency to become slightly narcissistic that, oh, I can be my own adviser. I can I'm my own best counsel. I'm a self made man and I can worship my creator. When I look at the people that that you target for, you know, your ire in in a lot of cases, people like, Donald Trump or Elon or Tucker Carlson and many others, it seems to me they these are men that don't have any kitchen cabinets, so to speak, that they that they do rely on their own, you know, kinda gut instincts and and what's right. And and I I should say I don't disagree with with with them on everything either, and, in fact, I wanna talk to you about a conversation I had with Elon.

But who do you seek counsel from? Do you have a kitchen cabinet? You run a business quite successfully. I reached out to some of your employees on LinkedIn, and they told me you're a you're a vicious taskmaster. So no. I'm just kidding. But, you know, they all seem to be quite quite pleased with the, employment at Waking Up. So who do you rely on for external advice, if anybody? What who is your kitchen cabinet, so to speak?

Well, I I, you know, I have a team. I have a wife. I have good friends. I have teachers. I have mentors. I have, you know, I have books. I have, you know, wise people who I've never met, but who have given me the best side of their conversation in a book, Right? So this you know, I have many different mirrors I can hold up to myself and to my life and and wonder whether I'm I'm thinking as clearly as I might or, you know, living by the the, you know, the ethics that I, you know, in the final analysis, I'm gonna be happy to have enacted, you know. So, for me, you know, it's really the goal is to live an examined life such that there's nothing significant that I will regret, right? And, you know, at the end of my life, but it really at the end of any arbitrary period of time, right? At the end of an hour, at the end of a day, I mean, it's just like who who do you want to be? And retrospectively, are you being that person? And if not, what is preventing you from being that person? You know, what don't you know? What are what are you what skill don't you have? What are you unable to do reliably? And can you change any of that? And for the things you can't change, is it possible to have equanimity around your failings? Right? And and and do you become a better person through that door? Right? Like, if you're just I mean, it's one thing to be endlessly trying to improve yourself and, you know, you know, you just take every life a bit of life hackery you can find, and you're just optimizing everything, and you're you're that guy.

But, you know, rather often, in in the center of that person is this, you know, terrified self who's desperately trying to control, you know, all the variables of experience such so as to to be a certain person in the world. I think it's possible to actually give up the war on some basic level and be at peace with who you are, and yet paradoxically, that changes who you are in the world. Right? That that gives you different kinds of capacities that you didn't have when you were busy getting behind yourself and pushing so hard. Again, I'm trying to to optimize for a kind of wisdom I know to be my North Star and yet I lose sight of it, again, you know, hundreds of times a day, and I return to it hundreds of times a day. Right? And and that's, that's a very different way of being in the world than to not have not have that wisdom in the first place, not to have access to it, not to know what I'm talking about here. And I I I know what it was like to be that person. I used to be that person. And it was a lot of hard work to get to be someone who could, whenever he remembers, recognize the, you know, the insight that that he thinks is is foundational to his well-being and to and to, you know, no longer being an asshole.

Even if I was an asshole a moment ago, the question is what what is it what's required to stop, really stop, being that person and to interrupt the, you know, the concatenation of your mediocrity, right, as a mind, right? You know, as you've been you've become selfishly attached to something, You become, you know, just, greedy and irascible and just you're just not who you wanna be and you got stuck there in the middle of a conversation with someone who, you know, you love, but you can't even feel that you love them in that moment because you're so contracted, Right? You just got you're just pissed off. You're annoyed. You're defensive. Whatever it is, you're you're that guy, and yet you're, you're ostensibly in the presence of someone who, you know, you love more than anyone in the world, and yet you you're just closed down and you can't feel it. Right? So so how long does it take to reboot from that position? You know, is it an hour? Is it a week? Does it require therapy? Or is it or is it something that you can actually accomplish in 2 seconds? Right? That's a very different capacity. Right? And and so and it and it's possible to become the kind of person who can really do those things quickly. Who you you you like you don't have to be an an for a moment longer than you need to be. You can it just takes remembering what you're about.

You know, it's like finding the blind spot again and just imagine, like, the paper is always in your hands. Right? And and it's always just just there to be looked at. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm just, you know, trying to live more and more from that place. But, I mean, they're like the guys you mentioned, you know, I I only know one of them. But, you know, personally, I've, you know, I've met 2 of them. I only know one of them. But you've mentioned 3 guys who who, to an extraordinary degree, embody the antithesis of everything I'm talking about. I mean, these these are, I mean, in Trump, you have you literally have the most narcissistic person, I think, anyone can name in our lifetime or probably any other lifetime.

I mean, I really just don't I I don't think that's hyperbole. I think he is the he has less he's he's he's leading less of an examined life than anyone I could name. And I could go into what, you know, what I mean by that. But I mean, I think he's actually scarcely human in his incapacities. Just his his inability to care about other people, his inability to form normal relationships, his inability to even put his children before the interest of his children before his own. I mean, it's just it is just astonishing the the kinds of things he he can't do. Right?

Do you mean in the venal sense, Sam, or do you mean I mean, he seems from I know people that know him and have or live in his building and then are Right. Close to him. And he's very close in the Jewish community, and they all speak about him as a father, at least specifically as a father, not as, well, I can utilize and leverage my son in law's, you know, and my daughter's, you know, works and time and network to to for my own venal benefit, which I, look, I wouldn't do business with him either. But for Mullen, accounts that I've heard firsthand, he he is a good father. He is committed to his children and, and so forth. Yes. He may forget his wife's name or whatever, But who among us hasn't done that? But but tell me, Sam, are you, specifically with regard to I don't care about the political side. I agree with you. It's very complicated

But I'm not talking about politics either. I'm talking about who he is as a person. I mean so I don't I don't have any direct insight to what he's like behind closed doors. But what the way he is in public, I mean, I've seen enough of him, and long before he was president. We've seen this guy for he's been famous for for at least 30 years. Right? This is the kind of person who like like, I've literally seen this happen. Like where he like someone will praise his children to him.

Right? And his first response is to say that they've only accomplished what they've accomplished because they've been riding his coattails. It's all about him even in that moment. Right? It's just like the opposite intuition you'd have as a good as a as a so called good father that someone is saying he I don't believe it for a second that he's a good father.

Naches. We call it naches in

There's absolutely no way he's a good father. I mean, I'll just, you know, sight unseen, I'll play that game of poker all day long. He is demonstrably the least honest person anyone can name. He lies with a with a velocity and a pointlessness, and an obviousness that we have never seen in in public life, in any quarter of public life. It's just astonishing. It's a it's clearly a a some kind of insane compulsion to distort the truth even when it even when it doesn't matter, even when it's counterproductive. I mean, he'll lie about the thing he said 5 minutes ago when you can rewind the tape and and and see what and and see what he said 5 minutes ago. Right? It's just it's like a self immolation exercise.

It's insanity. If he were a better person, he would be more dangerous. I mean, he's he's worse than some people who are quite a bit more dangerous and and more evil than he is. He lacks the virtues you need to be as dangerous as you would as you might be. Right? Like he's not courageous. Right? If he were if he were courageous, he'd be worse. If he were ideological, if he if he could get out of himself for long enough to care about something bigger than himself, he'd be scarier. Right? He's not Hitler because he's not committed to anything beyond himself.

Right? He, like, you know, if he had if he if he were capable of having some ideology for which he would sacrifice himself, like Hitler or Osama Bin Laden or any real bad guy, right, well, then he'd be scarier. But he doesn't even have those virtues. Right? So he's just So don't even guard

say that Trump is better than Hitler. That'll be the title of the other No.

No. That that that's my point. He's actually worse than Hitler in a in a strange way, not in a way that that makes him scary, in a way that makes him less effective. It's like like again, this is a paradox which a lot of, dumb people will not take the time to understand, and they'll wanna clip me out of context and summarize what I just said as saying that Trump is worse than Hitler. But if you actually think about, you know, the components of the human mind that are virtues, in certain contexts, they are they are diabolical virtues. Right? Like, you you can become like, the the scariest person is not the least organized, least disciplined, least coherent sort of, you know, confabulator. Right?

It's not a threat. Right.

Just a just a a flabby mess. You're just appetites. Right? No. There to to be really scary and to be really dangerous, there there are certain virtues you need, certain strengths, certain kind of you need a certain kind of malign integrity. Right? He doesn't have any of that. Right? But so but so so he's a very strange person. People fail to to notice, you know, how peculiar he is. Right? This is just not a norm this is not a normal situation that we have someone this prominent who may yet be president again who psychologically is this strange.

I mean, it's just and it's there. It's just so obvious. It's just right on the surface to be seen. But the 2 other people you name are also people who are who are not normal. I mean, they're not normal in their their self absorption. Right? And to some degree, it's, you know, I think in in Elon's case, it could be a matter of what fame has done to him. And he's the one I know personally. But there's a lot of dishonesty, and there's a lot of lack of integrity ethically in all of these people.

And, you know, it worries me that they have the influence that they that they that they have.

Is it, attributable to, you know, as I was mentioning originally, their lack of external guardrails? I mean, you're basically talking about people that are, you know, pure id, right, that that are governed by, you know, an untethered, unmoored, untillared, whatever analogy you wanna use, you know, the the captain is is themselves. Do you think that's a symptom of having no guardrails, no strong let me just say female presence in their lives and being pure, you know, this masculine Andrew Tate, you know, etcetera, kinda incarnate, but more intellectual, perhaps, more financially successful. Is that attributable to a lack of guardrails, a kitchen cabinet, whatever you wanna call it, or is this lack of a kitchen cabinet a symptom of of these perhaps I'm not a psychologist either, but you might you might consider it to be pathological.

Well, I just think it's it's much more a matter of who they are as people because all of these people have primary relationships. They have wives. They have children. They have teammates. I mean, in Trump's case, when he was president, he had a literal cabinet. Not just a kitchen cabinet, he had a cabinet. I mean, he had generals, you know, advising him. But on his account, all of these people proved to be imbeciles, and they all had to be fired, and they all you know, none of them, you know, were worth listening to.

And and he, you know, he couldn't figure out why we couldn't, you know, use our nuclear weapons. And when the generals were aghast, you know, their eyebrows, you know, rose to the back of their heads. He just thought they were morons. Right? So, you know, if you're sufficiently narcissistic and and delusional about your own capacities for insight and your own knowledge of, you know, specific disciplines, you've got, you know, the Dunning Kruger effect to the ultimate degree. You'll dismiss any advice and adviser and shoot any messenger. Right? I mean, it's just it's just that's what it is to be fully immured in your, you know, your failures of reality testing. Right? I mean, this is like there there's you can see I mean, everyone's got a bit of this. Everyone can say things or think things or assert things and not take the extra step of of asking the question, wait a minute.

Is that true? Like, how do I know that? Like, how how is it that you know, I just said I believe that or I just acted as though that must be true, as though it weren't an assumption based on something that, needed to be inspected. But if you ask yourself, well, how do you know what you think you know? Right? Like, you you sound confident, but, like, if if this thing weren't true, are are you in a position where its falsity would would register? Right? Like, are you forming your beliefs about the world in such a way that if they weren't true, you would notice? Right? Is there anything about your life that is that is testing what you claim to believe on anything like a regular schedule? It takes a philosophical cast of mind or a scientific cast of mind to even think in those ways and to to to want to to hedge against the the kinds of, you know, cognitive heuristics and shortcuts that we know reliably produce errors for people. And we know we're all disposed to confirmation bias and a host of other biases. The question is, are you doing anything about that problem? And, yeah, surrounding yourself with smart people who have different points of view is a great way to do that. That is if you'll listen to them. That that is if you're interested to hear what they say, if you if you actually want to debug your operating system ever. But you, you know, you've mentioned people who I who are, you know, fairly famous for being incorrigible. Right? Who just don't who don't tend to listen to like, when they hear news they don't like, they they end that particular relationship rather than than, you know, take the take the the, feedback on board.

What do you how do how do you account, you know, the one of the great questions of theodicy is, you know, why does why do bad things happen to good people? But, also, you know, the the contraversion of that is, you know, why do good things happen to bad people? These are 3 of the most extraordinarily financially successful, you know, in human history, at least in the case of Elon and, you know, possibly I mean, Tucker is certainly in the top, you know, 0.1%, I'm sure. And Trump until his latest lawsuit, losses and at least on paper was was worth quite a good deal. Simultaneously, we hear that, you know, Trump's a buffoon and he stumbled into money and his parents, you know, he's a Nepo baby, whatever, and then you hear these he's got all these assets and so forth. But leaving that aside, to what can you account for their success? I mean, is it just the the, tragedy of the common? How does one, you know, account for their success? And and which is more annoying, Sam, when when bad things happen to good people or when good things happen to bad people?

Well, I mean, these are very different people. I mean, they're they're united by some variables like, you know, narcissism and a lack of concern, a kind of recklessness, you know, lack of concern for the the harm they cause, you know, to our in in the case certainly in the cases of Elon and and Tucker, there are public conversation, with Trump is quite a bit more than that. But they're very different in other respects. I mean, Elon is, you know, obviously a genuinely brilliant engineer, and entrepreneur and has a talent for building teams in a in a way that is, you know, visionary and inspiring and and just and just creating, whole new industries that seem at first glance to be, you know, more or less impossible. Right? So it's, you know, he's no one can can really be skeptical of, of his talents in that regard as much as he may, in some cases, take credit for things he shouldn't take credit for, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, just just, you know, you can, you can bracket all of that. His his talent is undeniable, right, and his his, the utility of many of the things he has spent time on is also undeniable. I mean, it's just it's just he's, you know, electric car if he did nothing other than to create a real market for electric cars, You know, that's already an amazing contribution to to our world, but he's obviously done quite a bit more than that.

You know, Tucker is, you know, just a very different case. Again, I don't know him personally. I think he started out as a very good writer. I think I mean, I think I think he's I think a genuinely talented writer, and he's also a genuine genuinely talented performer. He's he's like an entertainer. I mean, he's very good on the on the mic, on the camera. And, no mystery to me that he's found a very large audience. Right? But he's pandering to an audience of of imbeciles, you know, largely.

And, he's spreading an incredible amount of dangerous misinformation, and he's a very cynical person. And we know we now have his his private text from the Dominion lawsuit showing that though he carried water for Trump for years and did did did as much as anyone to carve out a space for, you know, populist lunacy on the right in our society, Behind closed doors, he was talking about Trump as a demonic force who he hated with, you know, every fiber in his bean. Right? And couldn't wait for him to to to be off off stage so that no one we didn't have to talk about him anymore. Right? That's an x-ray vision into his the very nature of his integrity as a person, and it's completely absent. Right? I I so I don't understand how yeah. I mean, so the the the tragedy of the, you know, this particular commons is that we have an information landscape where a person like Tucker can build an audience of enormous size and consequence that simply doesn't care about his obvious lack of integrity. Right? I mean, that is that is an awful thing about America, right, and and the world at the moment. I mean, I think it's a these are all all these guys are in some sense uniquely American phenomena even though Elon's from South Africa.

But, their fame, the character of their fame, their their stands on social media, their their, just the the the personality cults that have formed under them. It it has all the, the, pathology of of much that's wrong with America in particular. Right? Like, you know, just just take the the variable fame. Right? I mean, there's something that Americans like about fame. I mean, we've exported this to much of the world, but there's there's a cult of fame that, is clearly non optimal for how we, you know, govern ourselves and the the kinds of things that that prevail in our in our public conversation. You know, Trump is a gay is a game show host who's famous for being, you know, a a fake business genius. And that's how he became president. Right? It was really he rode that fame and that's that that semblance of of, a reputation as a businessman, which again was this confection of, you know, born of, you know, Mark Burnett's staging of him on The Apprentice for, I think it was 14 years.

Right? And absolutely not the product of his real record as a as a real estate developer in New York. I mean, he was not among the biggest real estate developers in New York, then or ever. Yet, most of America thought he was the greatest businessman we had on some level because of that show. But there's a way that fame functions in our society that is clearly pathological and and, screwing us over on on all kinds of counts. And social media is the technology that is kinda delivering that as a, you know, just the the lever in the rat's cage that that is wired directly to, you know, their dopaminergic circuits and just uncoupling them from reality. Right? It's no longer about food. It's no longer about mates. It's about this this immediate drip of of dopamine that's getting piped directly into the nucleus accumbens.

Something like that's going on with social media for a lot of us, and it's, I mean, you know, I consider Elon, patient 0 on some level for that. I mean, I I can't think of anyone whose life has been more properly deranged by social media than than him.

I worry about, you know, about him because as you say, he's doing a net, you know, there is net good that's coming from Tesla, from SpaceX, from Neuralink Yep. All of his endeavors as an engineer. And he's a father of, as I said before we started recording, either 10, 11, or 12 children. I don't think he knows. It's noteworthy. He doesn't, seem to live with any of them. I had the opportunity to talk to him on a, X space. I I won't say Twitter, but an X space with, with a friend of mine, Catherine Brodsky, who had a new book come out about, you know, discourse and apology, no call, No Apology.

And Elon was on for 3 hours and, you know, the guy gets nothing from this, not like he's gonna get, you know, 10% of her advance and that's gonna make some huge difference in his in his, in his investments. But he was on, his mom was on, his his kid ex was on, physically on top of him during this. And I I asked him a bunch of, you know, detailed questions about, you know, AI and, about microwave interference with radio astronomy that I do in in Chile at the South Pole.

Mhmm.

And he was very engaged and seemed willing to help out and, you know, I asked him, you know, can you basically shut these satellites off, which would cost him a lot of money, I'm sure, to do. And he said he'd look into it. He's willing to do that. But, but then it got a little morose at the end because I was, you know, when am I gonna talk to him again? And so I asked him. I said, Elon, you're you know, you have this dream, as you say, to die on Mars and, you know, I just hope it's not on impact. But, but have you thought about, you know, who you're gonna say goodbye to? Which one of your children? And I said, I don't have to explain to you, someone who's lost a child, you know, what it's like to say goodbye permanently. And I could tell he was a little choked up, and and and then his mother, you know, came in and and, you know, prevented the the the TKO, I guess, at at some it was asked in earnestness. I wasn't trying to to to, you know, unsettle him, but, but she said, oh, Elon, you know, you don't have to worry.

We we don't have to worry about that for a long time. But, but I wonder, what is behind this urge, you know, sort of, you know, the denial of death, this this book written in the seventies, and it kind of makes this point that human beings are living in perpetual denial of their impending doom and and to avert those terrifying fears of the of the morose, they construct, you know, pharaonic, you know, pyramids and win aspire to win Nobel prizes and and do all sorts of things, and fame is is one of them. You know, beside aside from the fact of, you know, it takes a year to get there, you probably will get, you know, the Hoxick radiation exposure on the way there, and then you have to live there and you know you're not coming back because there's no fuel stop on Mars and you're not gonna start turning, you know, CO 2 into methane anytime soon. I guess the question is, you know, what is behind this urge to to, you know, to extend your, your physical presence in the universe? I mean, I I always say you can live forever, but you're greedy, son of a bitch, if you think you're gonna take your body with you, and and in other words, you can inculcate people as you have done, Sam, you know, millions of people, with your it will become ideological children of you, And why isn't that not enough? I mean, why do we have this this need and it couples to the to the fame, urge as you mentioned? Why do you what do you think is in it for somebody like that to to, you know, to to really I mean, has he really thought this through? I mean, I can't imagine saying goodbye to a second child, let alone 9 others or 10 others or whatever he'd have to do. So what do you think is behind this this desire to go he said by the way, he said it's to extend consciousness to, you know, so that the flame of human consciousness won't extinguish. Okay. I don't know if that's the only way to do that, but what do you make of it? Because, certainly, there are easier ways. I mean, bearing, a tie you know, this SD card underneath, the, you know, Mariana's trench would probably do it too.

What do you think is behind it?

Well, there's a lot there. I mean, I I, you know, I don't tend to I don't feel many of those urges myself. I mean, I, you know, I feel no urge to go to Mars if even if available. But I I wouldn't begrudge somebody else who wanted to do that. I mean, I think it's a it's a cool project. Right? I I I can I I can see what's inspiring about it? I mean, in in certain of these cases, I mean certainly this is true of Elon, but you know, this is true in with many people in tech. You're talking about people whose worldview has been in fashioned to an impressive degree, and one might say to a a disconcerting degree, by science fiction. Right? I mean, these these people have read a lot of science fiction, you know, and then throw in a little Ayn Rand, and that becomes their operating system.

Right? They're like if, you know, the their intellectual life is is driven by that kind of literature to a degree that is, I don't consider it optimal. And and in certain cases, it's it's just obviously deranged. Right? I mean, it's just it's just not not at all helpful. But, you know, I'm not I don't find myself especially judgmental about the inclination to build a colony on Mars. I mean, I think it's cool. I think it's, you know, I I they're they're I I don't I don't think I'm not taken in by the idea that it really is a backup plan for Earth in any reasonable way because if we can't make Earth stable, I just, you know, how are we gonna make Mars stable? Right? If we're so prone to chaos, if we're so apish and tribal and at each other's throats and inclined to create, you know, synthetic pandemics and, you know, other catastrophes, Right? Well, we're gonna do that on if if we could actually build a self sustaining colony on Mars, well, there, you know, there's gonna be a first fist fight on Mars. Right? There's gonna be adultery on Mars that ends in murder. Right? I mean, like, all

And they always say, oh, we're gonna self select out the violent, you know, criminals and the dregs, and we're gonna give that psychological exam. And they never mention, well, there'll be a second generation that you had you had no role in in vetting, that, came about because of the mixture of men and women on the space trip.

Right. Right. And, you know, as I've already pointed out, Elon himself is not an example of a perfectly integrated human being such that, you know, we'd wanna see him, making decisions for everyone living on Mars. Right? So it's a problem. I mean, you take the ape with you, at least for a good long while. And, you know, this planet is already virtually optimized for our success because, you know, we evolved here. I mean, this is our niche, and and, you know, it's it's hostile enough largely because of what we're doing to ourselves that, our our endurance here is is by no means, guaranteed. Right? So I just don't I'm not I'm not convinced that the backup plan ideas is really coherent.

Presumably, we could deflect, you know, any Earth crossing asteroid. Eventually, we'll have that capacity if we don't have it now. That's probably a capacity we would have before we have a capacity to build a perfect city on Mars. Yeah. I I think we should we should do it because it's fun and, you know, it's it's, but I, you know, I just, you know, personally, the idea of making my mark on Mars, doesn't doesn't do it for me. Right? Like that's just not like I spend exactly no time on any given day thinking about that possibility. And I and I, you know, I'm I'm sure I'm gonna feel it over the rest of my life.

You don't have a chemical rocket company, as far as I know, that you're trying to sell.

No. But I mean, just like the idea that that is that would be the fulfillment of something for me is just that, like, that's not that's just not where my taste runs. Right? I mean, it's much more, you know, and the truth is I'm there's something very adolescent about this. In the sweep of history, it all it's all gonna vanish. Right? I mean, it's like, you know, even Shakespeare is going to vanish in the in the fullness of time. And so or or in success become, you know, practically unfindable because there'll be so much stuff. Right? Like just, you know, if we endure for a trillion years and build a culture, you know, I mean, maybe a few people who got in early like like Shakespeare will still be referred to, but, you know, no one we could name alive in this generation, is gonna make the cut including Elon and Trump, to say nothing of me or anyone else I know. So it's just it's pure adolescent pretension to think about your legacy over, you know, a sufficiently long time horizon.

So then what sort of imprint on the world do you want to make? Then who do you care about affecting? And to what degree do you care what other people think about you? Right? And where is your so much of human happiness and so much of being a good person is a matter of turning your attention in the other direction. It's not about what people think of you. It's not about it's freeing your attention from yourself such that your attention is available to pay attention to other things, the rest of the world, to other people themselves, to figure out how to help them, to to care to actually to be free of your free of self concern long enough to actually care about other people, right, and their happiness. And so so much of, you know, it's just not it's not that it's I'm incapable of thinking, you know, a narcissistic thought, but it's it tastes bad. Right? It's like it's it's ob it's like, you know, like vanity is is like, you know, it's like envy. It's like these others' emotions, you know, jealousy. It's like it it feels the moment you're caught by it, you feel diminished by it. This is a spell to be broken.

This is a dream I think we wanna wake up from, and then we see what's available when we're no longer, you know, looking in that mirror moment to moment.

But, yeah, God forbid if you, you know, criticize this noble mission of of, you know, making humanity interplanetary. And even to the same people, Sam, that, you know, preach stoicism. I mean, there's a lot of Venn diagram, you know, multicolored overplotting and a set of people that practice stoicism and, worship, you know, this this Mars fantasy that Elon propagates or promulgates. And I always say, you know, well, I I even mentioned it to Elon. You know, do you believe in memento mori? I mean, if you believe in memento mori as a precept that you should adhere to on a day on an inter, you know, on an intrinsic level, on a personal level that, you know, you're going to die. Even the the Roman emperors would have that whispered to them so much so, you know, all the more so, Elon, you know, what to what extent do you have that personally? But even as humanity, as you say, yeah, the Sun will become a red giant in not too many 1000000000 years and and everything will be gone at that point. And to think that, well, if we didn't take this step in 2024 of launching the 32nd, you know, Falcon 9 launch that we would somehow, you know, not preserve and back up onto, you know, VHS or whatever we're going to do is is strikes to me of of a type of of of of, you know, kind of civilization or or communal, hubris. But, I wanna pivot, lighten up a little bit.

You're exceptionally gifted at podcasting, and I can't, not take as I as I did with Joe Rogan when I got to appear on his podcast. I I can't not ask you some some tips. And the thing I I wanted to ask you, which I asked Joe, was when someone's talking and when we mentioned even when, you know, I had on Deepak and, you know, we're talking Quantum Healing, and this is early in my, you know, podcasting career such as it is. I mean, this is a one day a week kinda job for me as a professor, but I do enjoy it. It gives me tremendous fulfillment. It gets me to talk to people I wanna talk to, not just people I have to talk to, so I I I do love it. But it's not my main job, but, still, I wanna improve. When you're talking to somebody and you just you violently disagree you know that they're either bull you don't believe what they're saying, you don't believe that they don't like they used to say about the Soviet Union.

We they knew they were lying, we knew that they were lying, and they knew that we knew that they were lying. How do you has that happened to you and and to what extent, you know, do do you how can you handle that? How can you give a tip to a to a, you know, more more junior sort of person in this in this field to have the kind of conversations my audience wants me to have, but but push back with love and respect, but also get guests again and not get blacklisted. So sorry for rambling.

Well, you know, I I try not to have those guests. Right? I mean, there there's a certain caliber of guests that I, I look for. It's not, you know, fame is not the the, the cut there. It's really just whatever the topic, you're looking for somebody who has intellectual integrity. And and, I mean, occasionally I'll have a guest where I know we're gonna disagree about something important, and it'll have the character of a debate. And then, you know, yeah, if I detect in that person, you know, bad faith arguments or or, you know, the other tricks of the trade that, depart from the norms of just honest conversation, you know, I try to flag that and and get things back on track. I've had a few podcasts go sideways to an impressive degree, and those are out there to be listened to. And I think some are not.

I mean, some I think there's I forget if I haven't released. There there are parts of podcast I haven't released. Like, I I once had a podcast with someone. I I won't name her, but, you know, we disagreed enough at the outset. We got we just got off track for, like, 30, 40 minutes. And I said, listen. This you know, we're not gonna be doing the world any favors to be releasing the conversation we just had. Let's just start again.

Right? This is just I now know where the, you know, where we're gonna pitch into the abyss. Right? I'm and I'm gonna do my best to avoid that. But let's see if we can have a conversation that is useful on this topic without doing what we just did because this was awful. Right? And, and we did that. It was fine. And and the audience was unaware of just how bad things went before. And, but I've I've had podcasts where I I haven't a couple come to mind where I haven't released it just because it just wasn't gonna be good for the person. It wasn't gonna be good for, you know, it it just it was these are painful conversations.

Right? Like, I well, the thing I don't the the effect I don't wanna have, and I and I've I've had this inadvertently a few times is I I don't wanna give people the sense that conversation is hopeless. Right? And and I and there there are conversations that really can deliver that punch line, you know, fairly indelibly. Right? Where it's like you get too smart. The the people are obviously smart. They have access to the same facts. They're not lying. They're not using tricks. This is not a performance.

They're really they're really saying what they think, and they cannot converge in any important way. And it's just a it's just like a it's just a car accident. You know? You know, it's just like this is just what are we doing here? You know? It's like, how is it possible that you 2 people can't make any progress? And it we've been listening for 3 hours or 4 hours. Right? I've had those podcasts. Brutal. Right? Absolutely brutal. 1, I didn't release. I declined to release.

But the maniac I was talking to, then wrote an article, online lying about what was in the podcast because he wanted it released. And we had agreed that we wouldn't release it unless we both agreed that it was it was good, you know, it was a good conversation that was kind of onward leading for people and and good for the world. And he was you know, this is someone who thought, you know, he could get famous, for this encounter with me, I guess. So he, literally published an article in, I think, it was Salon, which, you know, when Salon became I don't know if Salon even exists anymore, but it became this just just absolute rag, that was just, you know, had no no journalistic standards whatsoever. But, anyway, he published this article just lying about what had happened on my podcast, and that I that I refused to release it because he had destroyed me in in a debate. And so then I released it and titled it the best podcast ever. And I've released it. The whole the whole podcast is there to be

Very Trumpian of you. Yeah.

And it is literally it is the worst podcast ever. It's just god awful. But, you know, I had to actually put the lie to his lies about what had happened there. So

I wanna pivot to your academic career and and talk about academia. But before and and some thoughts from you. I wanna pivot to your thesis and and one of your, highly cited research papers which I which I went through and I I really enjoyed it. It's called Functional Neuroimaging of Belief and Disbelief and Uncertainty. It's with, Sheth and your adviser, Mark Cohen, at UCLA. And, basically, I think you put subjects into 14 people, I think it was, into a f m r MRI. I always find that difficult to get out off the tongue. And they judge statements to be true or false or undecidable, and it occurred to me if this, you know, could be used, malevolently, if it could be used for, maybe not a lie detector, I think that would be hard because this is looking for uncertainty or or belief or this, but maybe for hypocrisy, maybe for evasion or things like that.

Can you can you talk about that study? And, and if you missed the kinda hard, you know, laboratory working with human subjects rather than, you know, books, they don't they don't really talk back as much. Right? So, do you miss being in a lab in in the in the research scenario in academia, first of all? And, a little bit about whether this would have any practical applications, the Apple Vision Pro, you know, that I recently returned cannot invoke this so I can put it on my daughter when she said she didn't eat the last cookie.

So a belief detector would be a lie detector if by lie, you you you exclude the cases where someone is is self deceived. Right? Well, like like, if someone really believes they're they're lies, not that's not what we tend to mean by lying. But that is a that's kind of its own case of, you know, someone speaking untruthfully, but they've got such a mind as that they're not even aware of where that, you know, the truth has stopped and their lives began, right? And there is a subvariant of that which, you know, goes by the technical term bull. Harry Frankfurt, the philosopher, wrote a wonderful little book. It's just really an essay titled On Bull Differentiating Bull from Lion. And, it's it's I think it's a very useful distinction. I mean, the the the bull isn't even taking the time to notice when their utterances are no longer tracking reality. I mean, so let's say a normal liar is someone who, who's trying to insert his lie into the space, you know, in such a way where it fits logically.

He's aware of the logical expectations of his audience. He's aware of the background facts and assumptions they're working with, and he's he's crafting the lie so as to be undetectable. Right? Like, you like, you wanna get away with your lie. Right? That's what lying normally is. Bull is just talking, and you're not even you're not even doing the the reality testing to know when you're when you're lying and when you're telling the truth by accident. And actually and so Trump, someone like Trump is much more of a bull than a normal liar because he's not doing the work to to to hide his lies. Right? His lies are just all too obvious. So, and and so in in that sense, and as Frankfurt says in that book, in some basic sense, the bull is is is a even a greater enemy of the truth than the liar is because he's not even take he's not even keeping track of the truth.

So, anyway, though but those papers so there were a couple of papers we did on that topic in a similar paradigm, scanning people in in neuroimaging experiments when we're when they're evaluating the the truth propositional content of of various statements drawn from a a bunch of different, content areas. And so in that first paper, I was working with the hypothesis that judgments of truth and falsity and uncertainty would be in some sense content independent, right? There's something in common when you judge an equation to be valid, you know, 2 +2 makes 4, and when you judge an autobiographical detail to be true, you know, you were born in in, Los Angeles or wherever you were born, and you you you can just multiply the categories more or less arbitrarily, that there's there'll be some kind of final common pathway there where the brain decides, yes, this is true, no, that's false, and this third condition of I can't judge it to be true or false. Right? So I give you a, you know, a 40 digit number that ends in a 1 and I say this number's prime, you know, presumably, you'd have no insight as to whether it's prime or you just you you you you you know it's either is or it isn't, but you just know you can't know, and that'll that would provoke this feeling of uncertainty. And that's what we found. And then in subsequent subsequent experiment, we tried to change people's beliefs in real time by we we we took beliefs that were presumably would be presumably, not at all resistant to change because they're just kinda normal terrestrial beliefs that your people are not identified with. And then we took, you know, political beliefs, which presumably would be harder to change, and we we we gave them, you know, counter evidence and then and then compared those conditions. But yeah. So what we found is that, there was a reporter of of belief versus disbelief versus uncertainty, that was, discernible regardless of the content.

Right? That really was, you know, it's not that it's not that the processing you need to do in order to judge a belief to be true or false was the same. I mean, obviously, judging a mathematical equation is different from answering the question from, you know, judging whether, you know, you were born in a certain city or whether you have, brown hair or what, you know, whatever the claim is. But the the final judgment is was discernible in, you know, midline structures in the brain. You know, and, interestingly, the judgment of uncertain the judgment of of disbelief, the rejection of of something as false was also was seemed to be of a piece with other psychological rejection states. I mean, the the, you know, the the area in the brain, the the anterior insula, which is, you know, often involved in in a disgust reaction, was was operative in in the disbelief condition. Right? So, and this this isn't really a surprise. I mean, like, everything we do that is a matter of, you know, higher cognition is built on on, you know, lower structures and processes that we have, you know, evolved for other things. It's not like we got new hardware once we became language using reasoners.

Right? I mean, like, every every capacity we have beyond what, you know, our our primate cousins have is a is a matter of our leveraging structures that are that are, you know, had an underlying purpose prior to our language use and and our our judgments of and to say nothing of our, you know, mathematical understanding or, you know, our, religious beliefs or anything any other domain that's discreet with respect to belief. So it's interesting work. No. I I don't actually miss doing neuroimaging experiments. I mean, I I think I I certainly would be would, you know, I might yet, you know, collaborate on more of them, but I'm I'm very happy not to be living in a lab. And, you know, I never I never taught at a university. I I never I never got a a professorship after I finished my PhD, nor did I seek one. I mean, it was it was just I always went into neuroscience very much with the mind of a philosopher who I I knew I wanted to write books and and think and speak about the the the mind.

And it's really it's never been important to me that I be the one doing the experiments. Right? You know, it's like on some level, I have, you know, whatever it is now is, 50,000, a 100,000. I don't know how many neuroscientists there are now, but it's like I've, you know, I've got tens of thousands of neuroscientists and other scientists, you know, working for me. You know, potentially, I can read their papers. And, you know, I can think I'm in a position to think about the same facts they're thinking about on the basis of their experiments. And, that actually feels like a better use of my time given how long it takes to run a single neuroimaging experiment. Right? Like like, what what's what's what is the lever that's that's best for me to get my hands around? Running the next neuroimaging experiment or, you know, reading 10 papers this week and thinking about them and and their implications for for, you know, how we live. I mean, I just think it's, it's one one is a much higher leverage use of certainly my talents than than the other.

Well, my dream is to, you know, convince, Elon then to take the f m r fMRI, machine that you used and then connect it to my podcast guests so that I won't need to guess if they're bull or not, Sam. That would be a dream.

I would predict bull would be harder to detect Yeah. Than lying because

It's self. Yes.

It's a kind of confabulatory mode, which, again, we can all get into. It's largely a story of what you're not doing rather than what you're doing. Like you're not taking the additional step of checking whether the thing you just said is concordant with anything you said 5 minutes ago or or or your experience from last week or the expectations of your listeners or you're just not there's an operation you're no longer doing or never started doing in the first place, and you're just talking. You're just creating a mood. You know, you're just you're just it's just you're just rolling. Right? And it's, that would be a hard neuroimaging experiment to to design, to to look for the neural correlates of it. But I I support it if somebody wants to do it.

So, yeah, I mean, I was reminded of it in and also in these experimental forays that you participated in with the conversation I had with Robert Sapolsky a few months ago, but it just came out on my channel, you know, about his book Determined and and Yeah. Sort of this essence where he asserts that, you know, free will is an illusion. And I've had many people on to assert that. I'm not gonna ask you about that. I I just feel like it's, you know, imagine if if my colleagues, you know, who study astrobiology couldn't define, you know, what an exoplanet is or what a star is. You know, when I when I asked David Chalmers, not to name drop, but, you know, I asked him, you know, if I had ABBA on or or, actually, I said to him, if I had ACDC on from your homeland of Australia and I didn't ask them to play, you know, you shook me all night long, I'm not worth my wait as a podcaster. So I asked him to define the hard problem of consciousness. And I just find it, you know, if we can't define consciousness, if there's really no, you know, universally accepted definition or or it's solipsistic and and Nagelian that, you know, it's like being a bat is like being a bat, and and okay.

Great. That's that's a great example of a tautology. Thank you. But it seems to me that you, as an experimentalist, exerted free will in in deciding, a, you know, which propositions to to posture and and and to test and and which categories to sort. And I'm not I'm not saying although there is a huge replication crisis, you know that, and and p hacking is is rampant in the in the social sciences as as well as in, you know, medical sciences as well. If you're doing an experiment about consciousness and and those of, in a similar camp might deny that free will exists, you know, how do you how do you, you know, cut that Gordian knot? It it just seems it just seems hopeless. I yeah. I work on easy things, like the inflationary origin of the universe.

It's much simpler, actually. When you're dealing with all these different variables that could be p hacked very easily and unintentionally, not malevolently, not maliciously, what are we to make of of papers such as that as a physicist reading a, you know, a psychology paper or something like the neuro bio neuro science paper? How how can we interpret that? Fourteen people, you know, methodologies, choice by people that maybe don't believe in free will, to begin with. So sorry to ramble again, but that's

Well, so

that's my walk.

They seem like they're, adjacent cases, but they're very far apart in my mind in terms of what it takes to operationalize them scientifically and and define them, etcetera. I think consciousness is you you might think it's a circular definition, but I just think it's a brute fact of of our engagement with the world. And I would say that consciousness is, I've said this many times before, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. Right? It's the one it it it's it's more certain we're more certain of consciousness than we are of the universe. Right? Because everything we are certain of or purport to be certain of or confused about or or distracted by is is announcing the reality of consciousness. Right? Like like no matter how confused we are about anything, I mean, we could be living in a simulation, all of our all of our physics could be wrong. We're not in touch with the base layer of reality. We're just on you know, we're just on some alien supercomputer.

You know, whatever however confused we are, we're all brains and bats. We're in the matrix. This is just a dream. All of this, whatever whatever that is about, the one thing we can't be confused about is that something seems to be happening. And that seeming is consciousness. Right? It's just the fact that the lights are on, the fact that there's something that is like to be you right now, however confused you are. I mean, we you might be asleep and dreaming and not know it, and you're gonna wake up now and realize, oh, my god. That was just a dream.

We didn't even do the podcast yet. Right? So and yet you were conscious that you were conscious even in the presence of the illusion. That's what that's what the illusion is. Right? So consciousness is just the ground truth, and yet it's very hard to operationalize and study neuroscientifically or in any other way. Right? And and it's, you know, there are reasons why that's the case and they're interesting, but it's it's just so that's consciousness. Free will is a very different case. I think free will is is an incoherent idea. I very much agree with Sapolsky that it's we know that it doesn't exist and we know that what people think they have is an illusion and, it just doesn't make any sense.

No matter how you construe causality in this universe, whether you you think it's determined, everything's determined, or you think there's some bit of randomness thrown in and, you know, of this quantum indeterminism, you know, some stochastic process added to the clockwork or it's all clockwork, you know, however you tune those dials, what people seem to mean by free will makes no sense. Right? So I and I think that's provable. I think you could easily imagine designing an experiment that would disabuse people of their their feelings of free will too. Right? Like you could you could build a machine that predicted what people were about to do before they were about to do it, and you could tune it in such a way that they would feel like they were in the presence of a mind reading machine. Like just as I was about to reach for the the the the, the right hand button the right hand button, you know, illuminated. Right?

Right. Right. But but, again, to push back with love and respect, again, that relied on an experimentalist or a sensor or some perceptive device to sense then feedback causally, you know, and fast enough not breaking the laws of special relativity to then, you know, implant, this this sensation that you did not have the free will. In other words, if another experimentalist had chosen some different sort, you know, you're talking about sort of a Maxwellian demon that knows exactly which levers and dials and stuff to to to use to trick Sam into thinking that he does not have free will because his left arm moved before he commanded it to do so. In other words, there's an seems to be an infinite regress at at work here where the the sensor is chosen by an agent. And what that sensor does is mandate

That's not the the issue. It's it's just that if I've made any unique contribution to the conversation about free will, it's it's on the this point, which is the problem that most people see, and this is and even people who agree with me that free will is an illusion, even someone like, you know, Robert Zbulski sees it this way. Most people think that we have this experience of free will. Right? And so subjectively, we know we have this thing. And yet objectively, it's very hard to make sense of how we could possibly have this thing. Right? So you you know that you your acts of will are effective and that you really are the author of your thoughts and intentions. Like, you can decide what you're gonna do next, and you don't have to do it until you do it. This assumes you're under a condition where you're not being coerced and you're not hooked up to some machine that's driving your nervous system.

Right? You're driving it. You're the subject. You can decide what to do. You're gonna you can wait for an hour and talk to yourself back and forth, back and forth, and then finally decide, alright, now I'm gonna push the button. And that's you doing it. Right? And it's and the problem is mapping that on to the physics of things seems impossible. And then people try to finesse that marriage between the first person and the third person. And, those the results of those efforts are are, you know, fairly unpersuasive, but people are just feel stuck doing that because they know they have free will and they know they have to understand the world causally, scientifically, and they have to fit together somehow.

And so some people bite the bullet, so Robert says, no, you know, what what the problem is free will is an illusion. Right? We we know enough about the physics of things. We know there's, you know, every story we can tell about why we pushed the button or why we, you know, got married or why we did anything. You can make it as deliberative as you want. That story reaches back into a concatenation of causes that precede our control. You know, it goes back to genes and environmental influences that sculpted your nervous system into just such a state so that so as to become the proximate cause of the very next thing you did. And you, you know, the conscious you didn't have a hand in any of that, right? You just, you know, you didn't tune your receptor densities such that you would find this next thought persuasive or you would have this next memory arise or this next intention arise. Right? So you look closely enough at the clockwork, the agency of any person evaporates.

And that's where, you know, you know, what Robert argues in his book. Well, the piece I add to this very much based on the kinds of experiences and insights we were talking about earlier is that if you look closely enough at your experience, you don't even have the illusion of free will. Right? The the the experience of free will you think you have isn't there to be found. It's not to say that you're you find yourself to be ruled by some outside force. Right? It's not like you feel like suddenly feel like somebody's moving your hand and you're not that person. Right? It's not like you are delivered into alien hand syndrome or some other neurological condition. But the more you pay attention, you notice that everything simply arises in consciousness all by itself. You know, from from the first person side, you don't know what you're gonna think until you till the thought itself arises.

Right? You don't know what you're gonna remember next. A memory just arises. You don't know what you're gonna intend next. You don't know what you're gonna desire next. You don't know the next time you're gonna desire something and then a counter a contrary desire is gonna arise to inhibit it. Right? You don't know when you're gonna reach for that piece of chocolate because you because suddenly you want to, but then in the next moment you think, oh, no, I've had enough chocolate and I'm really trying to stick with my diet, where your a moment of willpower is gonna arise. And you don't know when that moment of will power is gonna be, you know, mysteriously eroded in the next moment by just you reaching for the chocolate again. And and as as deliberative as you wanna make it all, as much as you wanna, you know, listen to podcasts about how to, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and and and change yourself in all kinds of deliberative ways That's true.

And you know, and and have as much agency as a person can possibly have. You know, you're just listening to Jocko Willink all day long and he's telling you to just just do it, you know. And you start setting your alarm clock and you get up at 4 in the morning and you're just as as voluntarily, you know, muscular a person as you could possibly be. Every increment of experience there is one in which you still have a mystery at your back where everything is just happening all by itself, and you can't account for how any of it's unfolding. Right? And you can and every move you make is just happening by itself. Every thought counter is happening all by itself. Right.

But sorry to interrupt. But but, again, the limitations that we have, if we had asked, you know, the question of the ancient Greeks, you know, what is this table made of right here, they would have had no idea that at the base layer, there's, you know, w bosons and and gluons and and so forth. In in other words, a failure of our knowledge of, you know, the state of every, of of of every possible state in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space is not does not, you you know, imply that those aren't knowable or those aren't measurable or those aren't, in fact, randomly determined, which in a sense mimics the sensation or perception that we do have free will. In in other words, I I ask, well,

whatever the right answers are there, whether it's random, whether it's determined, neither gives you free will. If it's determined, clearly, you don't have the free will people think they have. So so here here's the move that many people make is they actually just change the subject. Right? They They come up with a kind of free will which is not the libertarian free will people feel they have. They come up with some other construal of it which embraces determinism and, you know, these people call themselves compatibilists in philosophy, and I just think they're guilty of just changing the subject. They're not interacting with what people- with the psychological condition most people are in, which is people feel that they have what is called in philosophy contra causal free will. They feel that they could have done otherwise than they did a moment ago. Like if you rewound the movie of my life, I could have played this scene differently.

You know, you rewind me to 2 minutes ago, I could have spoken different sentences. I could have had different associations. I could I could choose like in the like, right now, I'm choosing to say something. This is me doing it. It's not being imposed on me. You know, I don't I can't feel and and and know all the causes perhaps, but it's still me here. I can own this. Right? This is this is me of my own free will struggling to complete this sentence.

Who knows if I'm ever gonna get there? It's the longest sentence I've ever uttered apparently. But this I'm doing it. No. You know, and it feels like something. It feels like like I can stop whenever I want, but I'm not stopping. I'm like, who knows why I'm not stopping yet? But I am in the driver's seat and this feels like something. It feels like a self, actually. The self that most people think they have.

Right? The subject in the middle of experience who can drive drive the boat, right, on the stream of consciousness. He's not identical to the stream. He's having the experience. Right? He's not identical to experience. But when you pay attention, you realize that experience is just appearing. Right? Including your voluntary intentions actions based on conscious intentions. You can pick and choose as much as you want or think you want. You can inventory all of your desires or not.

You can be moved by them or not to the degree that you are or not. And all of it is fundamentally mysterious. As much as you know about it, you know, as much as you can know about it retrospectively or prospectively, you know, you're you're not in a position to know what you're going to think next. The thought simply arises. Like, in the same way that my saying something out of the blue like, just just take the simplest case. Like, if I asked you to think of think of a famous person. Right? You know you know 1,000, but someone comes to mind. Right? Now why didn't you think of, Alexander the Great?

Say Carl Sagan.

Right. Well, say Carl Sagan. Maybe you thought, okay, well maybe I was thinking of, there had to be a living famous person. Okay, well then why didn't you think of Oprah? Right? Like, you know Oprah exists. You could have thought of Oprah. What does it mean to say you could have thought of Oprah? The truth is we live in such a universe that your brain was in such a state that Oprah was not in the in the cards. Or like Oprah like you you're capable of thinking of Oprah. But when I asked you a question a moment ago, your brain was not in the Oprah produce your Oprah cells were not idling in such a way so as to be among the candidate names that occurred to you.

Right? So probably a bunch of, you know, a few different names occurred to you at the boundaries, at the margins of consciousness, and then you just picked 1. In my view, it means nothing to say that you could have thought of Oprah. To say that you could have thought of Oprah, you know, counterfactually, is just to say that you may yet think of Oprah next time I ask you. Right? Like, you're capable of thinking of Oprah in the future when you're asked this question. You might in the future. But if we rewind the movie of your life to that to the moment I asked that question, a trillion times in a row, you're either gonna think of who you thought of, determine us deterministically, or you're gonna think of somebody else randomly, and maybe that somebody else is Oprah. But the introduction of randomness is not what anyone means by free will. Right? If I told you, oh, yeah, you've got free will, What happens is, you're you're otherwise perfectly determined.

You're just like a robot. Right? You know, that just has zero degrees of freedom, except we've got, you know, an a radioactive isotope in there that's that's degrading. And every time it, you know, kicks off a a beta particle, you, you know, you get jiggled and jostled in a certain way such that who knows what the hell is gonna happen. That's your free will. Right? That's not what anyone means by free will. Right? So the the the the problem is what people think they mean by free will intuitively as a gut sense that I'm a I'm a self just cannot get mapped on to any story of causality. There's no combination of determinism and randomness that makes sense of it. And what's worse, and this is again, this is my only original contribution to this, is if you look closely enough from the first person side, the whole problem evaporates.

Like it doesn't it doesn't like I don't feel that I have free will. It's perfectly obvious to me as I speak to this sentence that I have no idea how I get to the end of it. When I when I fail when I make a grammatical error, that's mysterious, and when I don't make a grammatical error, that's mysterious. And in neither case does the does the success or the failure feel like free will. It's totally compatible with determinism. If you told me that we live in a, you know, the the the final story of physics is in, We live in a block universe, and the future exists just as much as the past, and there's no such thing as an event even, right? There's no such thing as causality. Everything exists as it is. Like, it's just a static universe, right? And you're just you're living with the illusion that you're sectioning this thing.

I mean, you're sectioning this thing in a way so as to to seem like things are changing, arising and passing away, and the future isn't written yet. But this is just like a novel where the, you know, page 200 exists just as much as page 15, the one you happen to be on, and nothing's ever gonna change, and it's just just pure fatalism is is is the right answer. If that were physically true, my experience of life is totally compatible with that being true, and so is yours. Sure. Yeah. You pay attention. So agree? So if that's true, what are we talking about with free will? If there's no evidence of it in experience, I mean, everyone the problem is everyone thinks there is. Everyone's walking around feeling like they have this freedom, but I see absolutely no evidence of it.

As you see no evidence, I also see no evidence for people that deny their existence of free will acting in accord with that belief. And, I even mentioned that to Robert, and I'll ask you the same question. But, you know, I said to him, you know, if you meant some if you have you ever met somebody who wasn't a psychopath, I mean, just a normal, you know, who behaved not knew or or read your book, Free Will or read his book Determine, but behaved as if they don't have free will, that we would we wouldn't consider such a person nor I deny that such people exist, in other words, that are acting truly like everything that they're doing. They may know it, like, you know it clearly, And I asked I asked him and I said, you know, God forbid your, you know, your daughter is, you know, is is horribly, you know, her her her new Porsche is down. I'm not gonna get into, you know I never like to say, very dramatic things, but you can imagine it. Right? What would you like done to the to the perpetrator driving the, the the Cybertruck? And he said, you know, I admit it to my shame, you know, I would like them punished, you know, but but I don't think we should and and and so forth. But so I'm a behaviorist, so I I care about more how you treat me, how you act, and so forth. But yet, I I don't believe that I've met someone who who truly behaves as if they don't have free will that's not a psychopath.

Do they exist? I mean, would have you met such a person?

Well, I think I am such a person to some degree. I mean, I think in I I think you probably have some assumptions about what it would mean to behave as though you and others don't have free will that that I don't share. When you really reflect on on the fact that no one made themselves, no one really is at bottom the author of themselves and their actions, right? So like even take the worst person in the world who created just a ton of conscious harm, right, just pure malevolence, right? You know, someone like Hitler or Saddam Hussein, I mean, just pick your pick your ogre and then just just rewind the the, you know, the timeline of their life. You just imagine them as a, you know, a 14 month old infant, right? You know, they're not they're not evil, you know, mustache twirling monsters there. They're very unlucky babies who are destined to become these awful people, right? So at what point do they acquire free will where they become truly responsible for who they become? I say never. So, the thing that gets stripped away when you really reflect on this is any real foundation for hatred, right? Now, you can there are other things that don't you don't lose. Like you can fear and want to contain the damage that somebody's doing are still totally intact. Right? And and the different I mean, the the analogy I would draw here that think of how different you feel about other destructive forces to which you don't attribute free will.

I mean, like a hurricane, for instance. You have something like hurricane Katrina comes in and kills a 1,000 people. Right? It's an awful thing. We don't attribute free will to it, but we would we would lock up we would lock up hurricanes in prison if we could. Right? If we could contain their damage by imprisoning them, we would do that, but we wouldn't have this this feeling of vengeance, right, you know, animated by hatred. And we really we do we do hate their effects. Like, we don't like hurricanes, and we and we would spend a lot of our resources, you know, nullifying them if we could. But and we could view psychopaths, evil evil psychopaths that way.

We would kill them if we couldn't imprison them, right? And we imprison them, but we wouldn't feel this feeling of vengeance. The other analogy I often draw is to wild animals. Like if a grizzly bear escapes the zoo and starts killing people, What do you expect a grizzly bear to do? That's exactly what grizzly bears do. Right? But you're not gonna feel when you when you shoot the thing or you, you know, tranquilize it and put it in a zoo, you're not gonna feel the same kind of hatred for it the way you you feel for a person who does those things. And I think it's a kind of a moral illusion to feel that additional level of hatred. And that's what I think Robert was talking about when he said, you know, to my shame, I, you know, I feel I want them punished.

I don't view it as shameful. I mean, I I, you know, I'll teach you a little bit of, the Talmud Torah because I I can't resist and I have the great Sam Harris to to just share a shtikl Torah as as we say. So there's a law in the Torah that if you have an ox, and it's known to gore, from the day before yesterday is how it's phrased, basically, and it gores and it kills somebody, that the ox, if if it if it hadn't killed the day before, the ox gets killed no matter what, but you can eat the ox. But if it was known to be, you know, at this malevolent, you know, kind or not malevolent, but it was known to be this danger, then the ox is killed and you may not eat it. So you're like, what the fuck? You're not gonna eat the ox because it killed. But but the lesson I think it's a powerful one in that you if you just think about the ox, did the ox have free will? Well, obviously, you're gonna say no. It was just acting instinctively, and maybe the guy was a schmuck and got in its way. But if you think beyond the ox and you think about, well, the person who's dead, imagine the ox lives and it's just in McGillicuddy's field next door.

Every day for the rest of their life, they're gonna see this ox. And it's a sort of cruelty to keep the ox alive in a sense. And this actually happened in in Australia. This this woman's father, you know, they owned an emu farm in Australia, and the emu killed her father. And the woman kept it alive. Oh, it didn't mean to do that. And you think, like, every day you're walking by and you're saying, like, that's the emu that killed dad.

Well, it's a it's a dangerous emu. I mean, I I understand why you would kill it because, I mean, it's it's just dumb to keep it around. It's already killed a person. So

But the question of whether you can eat it means can you benefit from this this thing that in the, obviously, in the Torah's perspective had this this, you know, this this obviously not free will of volitionary because we don't believe animals have free will the same way people do. But, anyway, you would agree, though, with Sapolsky that that it's, you would like to not feel vengeance, I I assume, but but and it's I

just think you're taken in in order to feel that vengeance, there are certain things you're not understanding about human beings in order to feel that way, and that and so you're taken in by a kind of moral illusion. I'm not I'm not saying there there aren't circumstances where it's a very compelling illusion, but it's vulnerable to insight. Right? Like, just imagine, okay, someone has killed someone close to you, and you are filled with hatred for them, and all you wanna do is you just kill them with your own hands. Right? Like, if if the judge would let you, you know, climb, you know, over the, you know, the witness stand and bludgeon the person to death, you would happily do that. Right? Like, you just that's the way you feel as a as a father or a husband or a friend. Totally understandable. You know, everyone gets that. Right? But the question is is there is there more to the circumstance? Well, imagine just adding the piece that well, you know, we've scanned this person's brain and it turns out they have a brain tumor, you know, pressing up against their amygdala or some other part of the brain that makes sense of their apparent lack of impulse control.

And they are a victim of bad luck on some level. I mean, they they didn't used to be this kind of psychopath, but now they are. And now we have a story as to how they got there. You know? And so now how do you feel about bludgeoning them to death with your own hands? Right? Like what?

Yeah. Not bludgeoning, but I would want them locked in.

Right. Well, no. But what if we could do surgery and then they were no longer a danger to anyone? And what if after surgery they said, oh my god. I'm I can't believe how different I feel. I'm so horrified that I I created so much harm and I wanna spend the rest of my life working to atone for it, but I think, you know, I just I I was not myself, you know. I just, you know, I don't know how long that tumor was growing there for, but, you know, the point is if we had a cure for evil, once we understood the biology of psychopathy fully, it's gonna be brain tumors all the way down. Right? We're just gonna recognize that it's just a it's a very complex story of bad genes and bad, receptor connections and just faulty wiring. And if we could I'm not saying we're going to get there, but let's say we just for argument's sake, let's say we did get there.

We could actually cure psychopathy. We could cure evil, you know, or at least this species of evil, you know, the the truly, you know, unselfconscious malevolence of somebody who just gets off on the suffering of other people. We understand it neurologically perfectly, and we can and we can cure it easily. And let's just say that cure is a pill. Right? So now we give someone the pill for evil and they're better. Right? So what what would it make any moral sense to withhold the cure for evil from all these evil people who did their evil before we had the cure, and they're like, they're sitting on death row, and we're not gonna give them the cure because these evil bastards deserve to be on death row for all the evil stuff they did.

Well, yeah. I mean, there's there's a choice element too. Even let's say I stipulate there in the macro perspective, even if not in the behavioral day to day perspective, you know, it's like I know that eating, this bag of Pringles is gonna cause me to gain weight. I also have an epigenetic, and I also have this, you know, disposition towards gaining weight. In other words, there will, it seems to me, be an impossibility to to completely decouple, sever this connection between the actions, which is what other people care about, how you behave, and, and and what you're programming or your base layer I mean, of course, we're we all have the, you know, same number of chromosomes. Right? So at some level, there, you know, there there is a starting blueprint that we all share, but we also have to admit that we do have a ability to be a JACO or emulate the JACO Where

where is your ability? That's that's more clockwork. That's more genes

Well, I guess

and more environment Yeah. So so or some combination.

Right. But if it's all, you know, tumors all the way down, then, then I think you would deny them that there is, that there is any. In other words, I don't see it as all or nothing. I don't see that you can say that there's there's no free will. We can't prove it. We we can suggest very persuasively. But I know that if I eat these Pringles, even though I'm, you know, determined to do it, I can resist with all my will look, if I I think you even said this at one point. If if I gave you I think you said, you know, if I gave you a $1,000,000, could you really not be, you know, in a good mood? Or or or could you really not, you know, go off on Trump or or bill let me I'll give you a $1,000,000,000 to to, and you could use it for all philanthropy and and wonderful purposes, to say to go on a a 10 minute opening rant of of, making sense about the virtues of Donald Trump.

You could do it. I believe that you would do it. Maybe I'm What

do you I'm I'm not sure what you mean, though, that I would I would make up these virtues or that I would discover virtues in him that I know exist that I that I'm not currently admitting, or what what are you

I'm just saying if for for enough money or some incentive, I could incentivize your behavior act differently even though you would and maybe that that would be an example of me determining how you act. But I'm just saying there is in addition to the genetic meta layer, there's a meta epigenetic layer where there are choices. And I don't believe it it is true that every murderer is genetically tumorized or, you know, has has been tested.

It's not just genetics. It's everything. It's it's it's it's genetics plus environment.

No. I know.

Right? So there's there's nothing else. And if if you wanna add a soul, no one picks their souls. Where's the soul come from? You didn't pick your soul. You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath. So whatever you want to add to the machine, you didn't do it. The you, the conscious you, the one who thinks he's making choices. Right?

But there's different layers. Again, I'm sorry to bring it back to

the truth. My point is you couldn't choose to think of Oprah when I asked you unless you had thought of Oprah.

Right. But but again, I I don't have a problem not pushing over an old lady, and taking her purse. Like, that's not something that that troubles me. I do sometimes have have trouble when I have to fill out, you know, this inclusion, diversity, and, and and equity form. You know, today, I had to fill out a form, Sam, that said, you know, am I transgender to get a grant? Am I, you know, am I a member of a transgender group? And this is what universities are doing, and I wanna get to I I know you've been so generous with your time. But in other words, I have a hard time filling that out. Like, why should I have to say, you know, what my pronouns are? Whatever. I'm not gonna get into a whole Jordan Peterson rant.

You you you're you're very well spoken on that issue. But but the point is, there's what's and Judaism called the bejira point, the point of choice that is different for other people. Murder is not on my on my list of things that I get credit for for resisting and overcoming the urge, but for, you know, giving into these petty, you know, tyrants and bureaucrats, I don't I, that is a battle for me. In other words, there's degrees of it. That's all I'm saying. And and at those levels, I do feel if you gave me a $1,000,000, I would happily fill out I'd fill out your form. I'd fill out But in

the what sense is that a demonstration of freedom?

Well, I'm just saying, do you do you believe that a certain

amount of coercion If I pushed you off a off a ledge, you'd fall by by under the force of gravity. That's not free will.

But do you believe that with enough coercion, you can mimic free will? In other words

But that that that's mimicking gravity.

No. I understand. I guess, my my point is that to to truly divorce a person's you know, to say that at at least at this level as a, you know, thinking behaviorally, that a person has no contribution to a no no blame, as I think Robert would like to believe

that But here's the thing. Their blame is again, this this comes back to I I think you have some erroneous assumptions about what is what gets knocked down when you let go of the notion of free will. So the reason why the reason why intentions matter morally is because they tell us a lot about what about the global characteristics of a person's mind and about what they are likely to do next. Right? So, like, if if you're if if somebody harms you by accident, right, they didn't see you were there and they bumped into you and it really hurt. Right? And they say, sorry. Oh, my God. I didn't see you were there. So I'm so sorry.

That's a person who does that you know so and you know something about this person's intentions. You know they don't intend they weren't intending to harm you. That really matters. No matter how much harm they did, that matters. It makes them different from a person who did that harm intentionally because you know what to expect of them in the next moment. You know what kind of person they are. Right? The person who who who stabbed you with a knife because they wanted to and they wanted to harm you, that person is a person who in the next moment is still a danger to you. Right? And a year from now is still a danger to you unless they unless they become a different sort of person.

Right? So that it's a it's a completely different situation even if the physical harm to you is exactly the the same. So that's why intentions so the blame worthiness of the action isn't a matter of, okay, this person really did create himself and he is the true, true author of his actions, And and genes and environment aren't the whole story. No. It's just that this person is such a system. It has certain global characteristics. One of those characteristics is this person takes pleasure in harming people like you. Right? This is a malevolent person. Right? So we have to treat this person in a certain way, and there are certain situations in which we have to kill this person.

Right? Because there's nothing else to do with them. Right? You can't lock them up, and they're busy creating harm. And, yeah, get me a sniper from SEAL Team 6 to put a bullet in this person's brain. You know? Of course, there are those situations. But and and a story of their their intentions matter, right? The the global properties of their minds matter, but it matters because it's it's it's telling us what we can expect in the future from this person. This person is an ongoing harm or potential harm to things we care about. Right? Whereas the person who harmed me by accident isn't. Right? And so those are so we can make those moral moral distinctions without reference to free will, and and our our behavior in those in each case is it can be very different without reference to free will.

Yeah. I agree. I I guess, you know, the the notion of consciousness still seems to be, you know, resonant for me in that again and I think, functionally,

you're correct. Isn't part I mean, both both of those people are conscious, and it was like something to be each of them. And the evil person is consciously taking pleasure in his evil, and the person who simply harmed you by accident is mortified to have created that harm and is gonna be more careful next time and wants to send you, you know, a gift as an apology. Right? And that and that's a kind of they're each having their own kind of experience, and those are very different experiences to have. But none of that all of that's compatible with determinism, or determinism plus randomness, that doesn't give you free will.

Right. So right. I I guess that's one of my issues is with this notion of determinism as a sort of the antipode of of free will. I I think it's a mistake. Let's say it is random. Let's say there is this, microtubules are are subject to the Weil curvature tensor, which is a quantum field, in Roger Penrose and Stuart Hamaroff's conception, which, you know, Robert Sapolsky admits he he doesn't understand and and didn't dive into great depth in. But let's just say that that is so at some level, you have randomness causing a quantum cascade, which then results many, many levels downstream Brian's behavior to eat the cookie or to do whatever. Yes.

That is not I didn't do it freely, but there is a quali it seems to me there is a qualitative difference, and and that determined is not the opposite of free will. I mean, is that am I am I wrong there that, I mean, it's

Well, the short is the opposite of free will. You're not it's not you're just choosing to say that. But if I could put you in a situation where we proved that your behavior, your thoughts and intentions and and resulting behavior, were perfectly determined, right? As though and what that what does that actually mean? Well, what that means is, you know, with Maxwell's demon kind of knowledge of your starting position, you know, we could have a transcript of this conversation before we've actually had the conversation. Right? Like so if I if I could run an experiment where I could show you that I had a transcript of this sent to you yesterday, which predicted perfectly everything you were going to say, every misstep too, every and ah and and just everything. Right? The movie was shot in advance and you're only seeing it now. Right? We wouldn't be talking about free will ever again. You're done. Determinism is a perfect defeater to what people mean by free will, And only these compatibilists are tying themselves in knots as though there's some other intelligible space in which to talk about free will.

That's all bull. It just is. I mean, it's just it's it's it's just not it's not what anyone means by free will. People think that they that they could do otherwise, then they're going to do next.

Right. I guess the reason I brought up determinism not being the antipode of the sphere that is determined, you know, some hybrid superposition, is that if you had some fundamental state space of all possible activities that is dependent on something that is purely quantum mechanical and is not nonlocal and not not predictable in any sense, then, functionally, yes. So it's it's it's you wouldn't be able to predict when the when the radium nuclei became a beta particle. Right? So randomness, and, again, I'm not I'm not asserting I believe this because I agree that that takes away free will as well. If you say it's random, then it's also not free will. I I believe that that that's correct. I'm just saying, it seems if something's determined, that means I can predict, as you said, I can predict the transcript from just the knowledge that this conversation is gonna take place. But it seems to me you cannot do that if there is fundamental at some level a Well, I'm not saying indeterminate

You can't do that, but that's what determinism means. Like, if if you could do that, that would be if you could prove determinism, you would no longer find this concept of free will interesting. Now, the fact that there's uncertainty about you, like we can't run the we can't do the math. We can't it's just too chaotic or it's too it's just too, it's a determinant system, but we just can't we can't measure its starting state with sufficient accuracy to say anything about what it's gonna be doing 10 seconds from now, much less 10 years from now. Right? So that could be the situation we're in, but the point is what determinism means is 1 domino hitting the next with and that domino is going to fall. Right? And the dominoes don't have any I mean, if the dominoes have some pretension to free will, that's just more dominoes. The claim about free will, the philosophical and scientific claim about free will, the impulse to try to justify it or make sense of it is born of an experience people are having, right? If people weren't having this experience, this would not be an interesting topic of conversation, right? No one would feel like they had to invent the notion of free will if they didn't feel that they had it, right? So people know that they have this this ground truth subjectively that they are the authors of their of a certain part of their experience, their conscious intentions, their decisions, you know, they even think their thoughts on some level. My point is that if you pay close enough attention to the subjective side of this, that not unties too, right? So you can actually dispel that sense that you are the author of your thoughts and intentions and resulting actions, right? And it's not to say that there's no longer a difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior, because there is, but the difference is not a matter of free will.

The difference is that voluntary behavior is associated with a different kind of neurological signature. It's associated with, in many cases, a conscious intention to initiate it, right? Like you you know, you decided to do the thing and then you did the thing, as a matter of experience. And it's also subliminally, subconsciously associated with a kind of a predictive copy of the behavior such that you begin to note you can notice your errors, right? You have a the only way you notice an error in your behavior is you're clearly you have a what's called an efferent copy neurologically of the motor routine you're enacting and you're comparing that copy to the results moment by moment. And so, you know, if you reach for something and you knock it over rather than pick it up, that's only surprising based on the on this subconscious expectation you had based on the on the forward looking copy of your of the motor routine you were enacting. If it's an involuntary behavior, like you just have a muscle spasm, right? Or or you're a seizure, you don't have that that forward looking copy and so you don't have the you don't it doesn't it doesn't feel like the, you know, there's no error detection mechanism. The whole thing is an error, right? But that neither of those the difference between voluntary and involuntary doesn't map onto this issue of free will. Still both products of your nervous system are subjectively mysterious, and they simply appear. And again, you don't know it's I mean it just comes back to either simplest memory or the simplest decision.

You don't know what's going to arise until it arises. Right? And it's just it's not it doesn't feel like you're doing it. Like, I mean, just have a memory. Have a memory. Pick a memory, any memory. Right? Are you picking, or does something simply emerge out of the darkness? Do you feel like it's

a, you know, semantically overburdened and that it's it's threatening? These types of of ideas and thoughts are threatening to people because it's it's they're so bound up in their identity Yeah. With their ability to make free choice that it leads to a misunderstanding. Like, you did clarify for me, and I appreciate that, you know, that no matter what well, yeah. So according to these these these,

you

know, suppositions, you know, it it doesn't help if you believe it's a random occurrence or quantum mechanics or butterfly effect, etcetera. That doesn't allude to free will, it it just alludes to lack of of choice or or lack you still are not you're you still are not making a choice. It seems that many people believe, you know, artificial intel even though humans may not have free will, you know, some of the same people believe that AI will will sort of exercise a type of free will, to, you know, to to prey upon the the the fact that it may have superior moral judgments in its in its own estimation. So could AI have exhibit? Not just exhibit. Can would AI have free will? I'll just ask it. Sure. Sure.

AI can definitely have the free will we don't have. Right, and seem to think it has it, right? But no one's gonna attribute free will to AI because we will have built it and presumably, we will know how we've built it or however, to whatever degree it's a black box, we're not going to imagine that some process in that box produced free will, right? We're gonna know it's just atoms in there banging around, because we put them there on some level, right? It's interesting. It's very few people are eager to attribute the free will we think we have to robots, however complex and however fully they pass the Turing test. We are we are those robots. Right? We're just they're just atoms in here. Right? You know, like, what else could we be? And again, even if you're gonna add a soul, you didn't pick it, you didn't tune it, you didn't you didn't, you know, it's it's just it's more inscrutable causality.

Yeah. And the ultimate question is to ask, you know, if if if God so and, again, Judaism, the notion is that God demonstrates so the the question is, I always have these issues with with when I talk to Christian apologists and and I talk to Messianic Jews and and so forth. I consider myself a practicing devout agnostic, and what I mean by that is, dates back to my first conversation on the podcast with Freeman Dyson, who was my first guest. I said, Freeman, you know, you won the you won the, Templeton Prize. You're, you know, almost won the Nobel Prize. You should have won. You call yourself an agnostic, but when I look at you, you know, I I still see, you know, if I was a super intelligent alien and I saw you on Sunday, I would not be able to distinguish you from, you know, Sam's good friend, Richard Dawkins because you both don't go to the same church. Right? So in other words, how do I distinguish you, you know, Freeman, from an atheist? Because your behavior is indistinguishable.

And I said, so because of that, you know, my take on myself is a practicing, a practicing agnostic means that I don't know. I don't believe it's answerable. I truly believe it's not knowable, but I wanna act in accord with that so let me let me I'm sorry to ramble, Sam, but but when when, when I think about meditation and I think about it as a tool, the superconducting supercollider, the LHC, as you've called it, and I do believe it has that power, I wonder why not teach that to children? Why why not and

I see you do with your children. That's great.

So but I also feel like I grew up my father was a devout atheist, you know, militant atheist. My mother was not interested in Judaism very much, but, you know, both were Jewish. And, it seems to me and and Dawkins has said things like, no one's born a Christian child. Fine. Yeah. But but if you if you never expose a child to this, it seems to be a type of language, that you'll never develop, just the same way we teach our children music at an early age because we know they're gonna appreciate it later in life. We teach them languages. It's much easier to apprehend it when you're young, and so too meditation.

But I wonder why not, you know, extend that same courtesy or whatever to at least religious education? And I have a follow-up, but but I wonder how you react to it because I I know, you know, your feelings on religion, especially Christianity and Islam, are well known, but I haven't heard you talk as much, you know, about Judaism, but but let's let's just get your reaction. Why is there a downside to teach to at least exposing children to religion as a child? Just like we expose them to music and language, which they also don't like. I mean, what kid says, I really wanna sit down and do scales for 3 hours.

Well, I think we should teach religion, but we should teach many of them. We can't teach all of them. Obviously, there have been, you know, 100 and 1,000. But we should teach them, but there's teaching more than one is pretty seditious, right, because they're mutually canceling, right? So, if you teach Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and Buddhism, and you start with those, you any sane child, neurologically intact child will realize at some point that they can't all be right, you know. And if this is a multiple choice exam, whatever you pick, if you pick 1, you stand a very good chance of being wrong. In fact, you have to you'd have to bet that you're you know, if the religion you're gonna say is true is A and there are 5 choices, you stand a very good chance of being wrong. And that the the most rational choice is almost certainly none of the above when you look at the details. And you look at the cultural contingencies and historical contingencies that brought any given community into the into the embrace of any one of those faiths and and with the assurance that it was perfectly true in all its particulars.

And I don't think you need I mean, agnosticism is fine, but you're not agnostic with respect to the existence of Zeus or Poseidon or Isis or Thor or any of the other dead gods that nobody cares about now. Right? So

Yeah. That that's why I said practicing. In other words, I keep kosher. I don't work on the Sabbath. On Saturdays, I don't, you know, I learn the Torah, the Talmud. In other words, I'm practicing as if so that it because what does it mean to be agnostic if you also don't do all these things that atheists don't do? In other words, yes. I'm not gonna be able to do everything and neither is a Christian, neither is an atheist. And there are, you know, so here in San Diego, we have the Sunday Assembly.

I think they have one up there. It seems like there's a lot of religious things that are parroted or or the community and and there there are obvious benefits to religion. I mean, I don't think you have to deny that, but but, but the question is, is there is there harm? Whereas I do think it is harmful I don't know how to say it, but I think it's almost harmful. You know, the only instrument I can play is Spotify. I I kind of, you know, resent my parents for not for not really causing me to to to get into this. They they you know, my brother is a great guitarist, and and he also just thinks differently. His mind is wired differently than mine to appreciate music in a way classical jazz, I'll never

appreciate it.

I view that as as a lacuna in my intellectual development. And I do believe that and I had this debate with Lawrence Krauss. I'm sure you know about him. We debated this because I find a lot of the atheists, and I'm not including you, but a lot of the atheists are very sophistic. They they and the I asked Lawrence, when did you stop practicing Judaism? He said, well, I had my bar mitzvah and there were some, you know, shame shameful things the rabbi said, and and they didn't let girls sit with boy, you know, whatever. I said, so okay, Lawrence, that's great. So you let a 13 year old boy you influence your the rest of your life and and color the way that you think about everybody such that you call anybody believes it, you know, believer in fairy tales and supernatural shenanigans and and but, Lawrence, let me ask you a question. If somebody came upon your book, A Universe from Nothing, and just attacked it and and then you didn't know who it was, they were just typing into a terminal, and then you asked them, well, by the way, how old are you? And they said 13.

Would you have any would you have any, you know, credence in what they're saying, and and would you would you continue the conversation? He said, absolutely not. Like, some little piss show. What do you know? But I'm like, Lawrence, you're doing the same thing. You allowed your, you know, distaste and and and negative experience, I'm not denying his lived experience as I say, But you let that influence the rest of your life and your children because you didn't teach it to your children either. So, anyway, I do believe you can do I don't wanna say harm, because I I don't think everybody should be religious at all. I I don't believe that. But by not exposing everybody to or children to a your you are exposing them to something else, which is the denial of religion, I think.

Well, so And if you don't have that Again, there's an assumption here that I would take issue with. I mean, atheism does not require that one pretend to know that there the the universe isn't far more mysterious and stranger than than we currently know. In fact, I I'm sure it's far more mysterious and stranger than we currently know.

Our house, you know,

I wouldn't get it to be better than it's dreamt of in our philosophy, I have no doubt. But one thing I also have no doubt about is that the books, the Bible and the Quran in particular, show no sign of having been authored by an omniscient being, right? And that's the only thing you need to be an atheist with respect to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Because each of these traditions rests on a claim about a specific text or set of texts. And these claims are obviously indefensible as much as we've defended them for many people have defended them for 1000 of years.

Sorry, Sam. Do you mean the whole purchase of What Let's just stick to

the Just just take this one piece on board. I've never heard anyone give a satisfactory answer to this, and this really is the basis of my doubt in these three faiths. Because each each of these faiths rests on the claim that their core books are not just books written by people, but at minimum have been divinely inspired, if not actually divinely, you know, directly dictated by the creator. And when you think about how good a book could be if it were written by an omniscient being, I mean, I just how like just just just think. I mean, it wouldn't you don't even have to pretend omniscience. You and I could write a page of text right now. It would take us no more than 15 minutes. Really, it'd been just this is not an exaggeration.

Which, if this page were in the Bible or the Quran, it would prove beyond any possibility of doubt that no human being of that period could have written those books. It would prove the supernatural origin of the books. Trivially easy to do that. We could write about, you know, we could just get some very condensed paragraphs that point to truths of mathematics that we understand now but were not understood then. We could talk about, you know, information in a sophisticated way that gave that gave the basis of computation, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So, the fact that there's nothing like that in these books

Actually, I actually don't believe that. I'm sorry to interrupt. But There's nothing no, no. But there's

nothing like that that is incontestable. Right? If you're gonna go to some weird Bible code and look at the Hebrew without the vowels or whatever, But there should be. There should be. A compassionate God would have written a book like that, right? And not spend so much time telling us how we should murder our neighbors for thought crimes or keep slaves. Right? It would have gotten slavery this this moral genius that wrote these books would have anticipated that we were smart enough at that point to recognize that slavery was not the greatest thing.

Alright. Now, Sam, I love you, and I I have to say this with respect, but you just launched, like, the biggest softball Oh,

I did.

I respect. Secretly

talk to you. It's not gonna go where you think it's going.

Okay. I hope I hope you I hope, for your sake that you're right. But but, Sam, no, with with all respect. So let's just take slavery. This is very clear in the Talmud. The Talmud, which we have a Talmud like object too, which is case law in the United States Constitution. You can't just read the Declaration of Independence and get laws from so the 2nd holiest book in Judaism is Talmud. It's a book of oral it's called the oral laws later written down.

It's 27 100 pages long. It takes 7 years to read 1 page a day. And and, actually, religious Jews study it every day. Anyway, in the Talmud are all these precepts about what slavery was, And slavery is in I had an argument with Yuval Noah Harari, although he didn't answer me back. He said that following he said, if, it was really divinely inspired, we would have had great science, as sort of what you're saying, but also we wouldn't science wouldn't have been held back for 1000 of years. And just to take one example, he says slavery was endorsed by the Bible, and he's a Jew, he's an Israeli. So, he knows he was born knowing more than I'll ever know as a as a what's called a, Baal Teshuvah, returning. This slavery described in the Torah is not the chattel slavery that we ascribe to the African diaspora that came to America.

It's extremely different from that. And even in those times, it was recognized as such. For example, the Torah forbids your slave from working on the Sabbath. I don't know how many, you know, Southerners in the Deep South in 18 46 were giving their slaves time off. It also forbids stealing as one of the 8th commandment. Stealing is what was done to these it's still done to this day, as you've spoken about, in Africa and many parts of the Islamic world to this day. Slavery, it was said that when you acquired a slave, and I can't say it in the Aramaic, but when you acquired a slave, you acquired a master. That person had to have if you had one pillow, it had to go to the slave.

If the slave wanted to look, Sam, when the slave wanted to leave, well, the slaves were free every 7 years. Okay. And all slaves were

free before. This short because none of this is sumnated into what you think. I mean, I have a a response to this that doesn't require that you you read the litany of pirouettes that people have done for 1,000 of years around obviously barbaric passages that people think better of and they they create this this armature by which they can say, oh, there's some you know, there there's some reason to view this differently. If we squint our eyes in this way, we can find some exculpatory way of reading

this squinting. But what I'm saying, this isn't even squinting. In other words, ethic so Jews were meticulous documenters. That's why I said it's 27 100. They talk about specific cases where a in the Torah, in the actual

So slavery maybe slavery is not to your taste. I can find other principles in there.

How about stoning a child? How about killing a child? Do you know or or or killing a woman, a wife? Or killing a witch. We can go there.

That's not Killing a witch presupposes the the real existence of witches. Right? Witchcraft is a thing Right. And you you kill people for practicing it. Right?

So the right. So I've seen things. I've Look. In terms of actual did the mind state of these people back then, I think to look at them and say, was this carried out?

You'd kill your neighbor for working on the Sabbath, and in fact, you'd kill other people who won't kill your neighbor, who won't join in the killing of the neighbor for working on the Sabbath.

Right? So again, there I love these questions.

I'll give you a, a conversation I had in the modern era with a, a very observant Jew at a wedding. I just I just I just I didn't know him well, but he was orthodox, and I was introduced to him at a wedding. We've so we were there mutually. We we knew the bride and groom, but we didn't know each other, and I got into one of these debates as as the ceremony was kicking off. We got into one of these debates. He knew who I was, and we went round and round this this track that you're you know, you and I you and I are now on. And he was giving me these sorts of, you know, alibis and and, equivocations around, you know, just just how sophisticated it all was in in in just how many barriers there were to the kinds of theocratic barbarism that I was worried about in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. It's like this is so many reasons why this is not not actionable.

And one thing he said, he said I said, take this this beautiful couple that we're now here, you know, celebrating. I'm pretty sure they had sex before today. Right? As which is to say outside of wedlock. Right? Which is to say they're fornicators.

That's a Christian term, by

the way. Yeah. But but, I mean, but it's still the the the you're it's not supposed to be done, and it's it's a killing offense. Right?

No. It's not a kill rape is a killing and rape isn't even a killing offense. It's, it's a monetary damage, offense. Premarital sex, you

owe the salary. Is not a is not a killing offense?

No. You owe the I mean, look. We're debating it, you know, 1000 years since, but, no, the the father would be owed a dowry, and you've she has higher worth as a virgin than she did as a as a non virgin.

Alright. Well So you owe the father my daughter. The example I used then, but it was it was something he he didn't have that objection to it. But I I gave him an example of something that he said his response was, well, you don't understand. It it it's none of that none of this is, actionable in the absence of a properly convened Sanhedrin. We need a Sanhedrin convened, you know, and that's not gonna happen until the the temple is rebuilt and the the Messiah has come back and blah blah blah. And I said, okay. Well but then in a properly under under properly convened Sanhedrin, you know, let's say all that happens.

Then would you be, in favor of, you know, stoning these people to death who are watching who are watching getting married? Maybe I was talking about, someone there who was gay, who we knew was gay. I I forget the details. But he said, well, that's a very interesting point. And he had no he there there was no place for him to stand where he could say in the context of a rebuilt temple and a returned messiah and a properly convened Sanhedrin that this wouldn't be operable. Right?

Right. But we also don't have to do those Gedanken experiments because we know based on case law for example, a famous one that even Obama made fun of, you know, stoning your child. So there's a rebellious son who is going to be a drunkard and he's gonna be a murderer, and you take him to the elders of the town and the elders of the town shall stone him to death. That's barbaric, right, Sam? That's awful. But, a, there's no record of that ever having been done, and these people are taking the decision

to be sure. But that's that's dodged. It is it's I know, but okay. Fine. Okay. We could spend a long time on this, but let me short circuit it with the the real point, which is it could be such a better book. Right? You we shouldn't have to spend 1,000 of years trying to get God off the hook for writing these barbarous passages. There's so much wisdom that the 10 Command it's a it's a massive problem that you and I can improve the 10 Commandments almost without thinking.

The 10 Commandments are not the wisest. The 10 Commandments are the only thing the creator of the universe actually wrote on on on according to both Christians and Jews, right? It's not Wrote on Wrote on Wrote on tactically wrote. Like this this is God the author. The rest is just inspired by prophets and scribes and right, it's it's mediated by human brain.

I mean, what the Torah is very explicit. It says, when it says that God said something, it says, God says this. And when it says, Moses said this, it says Moses said that. But I'm sorry. It's not it's it's important that we don't just wrap up by saying the the part about well, it's never practiced. A, because some laws are meant to be as a warning, and they're not actually implemented. And and you could argue with that in a second. But but the other thing, Sam, is that think about the alternatives.

Yeah. So let's say you have better alternatives that were contemporaneous with those, period. Buddhism

No. No. I'm I'm saying that's right.

500 BC, and it was possible to to be less barbaric than Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Right? So a 1000 years after Deuteronomy, you you you Yeah.

I'm trying to make the argument it wasn't barbaric because there the the the inaction of it required unanimity of this court Why

is that true?

To enact

it and thinking about these things. There's so many better things to do.

You wanted Sam, because back then as now, there were honor killings. There were people that would kill their daughter for going on a date or doing other honor killings. He's already given me

one command commandment that's better than not coveting your neighbor's ass or or or ox or taking up my name in vain or a graven image. Here's a here's a better commandment, which is no honor killing. Right? If your daughter gets raped, the only appropriate feeling is compassion for her and not shame not murderous shame.

No. That so you're better than the Hebrew Bible the Hebrew Bible forbid that honor killing by virtue of the fact that the parents it took away the ability of the parent to kill the child, which is common back then and is common to this very day in some parts of the world. Yeah.

Right? So From for large different religious reasons that are taken to to a different effect.

I agree. I agree. I don't wanna live in a theocracy either. I guess my point is that if you look at the Linde effect, you know, the Linde effect is, yeah, something that's been around for x years is likely to be around at least another x years. Right? So this book has been around for some reason. And I do believe I mean, even on small things look, Sam, in The 5th Commandment, I had a very difficult relationship with my father. He abandoned me as a as a young person. I didn't make contact him for with him for many years, and yet and yet, at the end of his life, I could honor him.

Okay? And the reward for honoring him is a long life. Now that seems to be sure does seem to be falsifiable. Right?

Yeah. I

mean, it seems to be, provable. If Brian gets cut short, god forbid, that sure should seems like, you know but is that really the purpose? Is that really the meaning of it that in other words, you'll have a physically long life? I mean, is it your health span? Is it your lifespan? No. It's not you invest But this

whole this whole attitude of playing connect the dots in the most in the most elastic way is is the antithesis of the scientific attitude. If you bring the scientific attitude to this set of facts and this set of propositions, it falls apart. And, and that's true not just scientifically in the narrow sense it's true ethically in the broader footprint of reason in the mode of ethics practical ethics or meta ethics. When we're trying to drill down on our deepest conception of right and wrong and good and evil here, we know that you absolutely know that you can improve the Bible, any part of it, just by editing it. You mean forget about what you could add so as to make it wiser. You could just take out some of the dumbest stuff that people have spent 1000 of years trying to make sense of and trying to everyone's embarrassed by them, and they're just tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how to make God anything other than a sociopath for having said this stuff. And, you know, they now they pretend to have succeeded by saying, oh, it never really happened. You had to get everyone to agree.

No. Why are we talking about stoning children to death for talking back to us? Why is that even a thing? Well, you know, why don't we just say straight up love your kids? You know, treat them well. Protect them. To protect them with your very lives.

Sam, you know, people don't do that to this day without a code or No.

But it's possible. They they would be better. Like, if if the people people 2000 years ago so it would have been it would have been much better, take the take the case we started with, would have been much more helpful if the Bible was unequivocally condemning of slavery, right, without any ambiguity. Right?

I I disagree because the slavery meant you could this if I owed you $1,000,000, Sam, I could pay that if I didn't pay that off, I could be your slave, which meant by the way, by the

way, by the way There would be another way to to have articulated that without opening the door to chattel slavery for 1000 of years. Right?

So God should have known that humans would then He should have imposed upon you and I would

write a book. Again, and it would be trivially easy, and it's it's it's it's proof of my point that the the ease with which we could do it proves that this whole thing is a sham. Right? You and I could write a book that that would advise people about how they could ethically discharge their debts to one another, even in an Iron Age context, that would close the door to owning people and treating them like farm equipment and beating them to death if they refused to behave like farm equipment.

Okay. But that that was not so in other words, Sam, what how do you explain the fact that there was there's a law that when you're when, not if, when you're slave by the way, slave means servant, the same word is used, it's important to get semantically correct. Moses is described as eved, which means servant of God, and the same word appears for your slave, eved. So let's so God was not Moses was not God's slave.

It could have been God's slave. And I mean, again, this is this is just a game that that that is is unfalsifiable. The point is the slaveholders of the South in 18 50 America were on firm ground theologically and arguably, I think it's pretty obvious, firmer ground than the abolitionists, and that was unhelpful. It would be much better if they had no ground to stand on, that they couldn't have pretended to be good Christians because on every page the God of the Bible forget about the Old Testament. Let's talk about the New. If Jesus had been crystal clear about slavery and just that this is an abomination and no one should practice it and you should free your slaves and in case there was any confusion about the Old Testament, those weren't really slaves we were talking about. That could have all been clear. It wasn't.

Right. Christiane, I'm not gonna defend Christiane. I'll just say one last thing, and we can move on to a couple final topics. But there is a law that you if when your slave comes to you, your servant, and says, I don't wanna leave you, You must drive an awl through his ear and pierce his ear. That sounds weird, barbaric. Right? But you have to ask the meta question. Why? Why would he not wanna leave? What kind of slave in the South would not wanna leave their master?

People people over in the next valley are even scarier than you than his master is. Right? Because they're cannibals too. Right? By the

way, you had to give him money to

go on

his way. You had to give him money, and you had to give him a wife, and you had to take care of his children when he anyway. Okay.

But, Brian, actually, I'm now up at a against a hard stop. I got, parenting duties that, that I would I would be in defiance of the God that, I don't pray to if I didn't discharge him.

That's right. Alright. Well, honor your wife, Sam Harris. It's been a remarkable conversation. I do hope we can meet someday and, learn more.

Nice to meet you here.

Yes. And, thanks to Eric Weinstein for making the shit out of the connection. Sam Harris, thank you so much. We'll be in touch.