Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Sam Harris: God Did NOT Write the Bible! (#401)

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Today’s guest needs no introduction… Meet Sam Harris. Neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, host of Making Sense, creator of Waking Up, and one of the most thought-provoking intellectuals of our time. Known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, he fearlessly navigates even the most difficult of topics.  He’s a true advocate of reason and an explorer of the human condition. His ideas transcend boundaries, challenge our perceptions, and invite us to think deeply about the world around us. In our thought-provoking conversation, we wrestle with topics ranging from the existence of free will to psychedelic drugs, meditation, and religion.  Join us for an exploration of reason, morality, and consciousness like no other! Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:10:18 Judging a book by its cover 00:13:37 Woke identitarian politics and recent developments in AI 00:25:43 Making your mind into a friend 00:30:52 Meditation and the nature of self  00:52:51 Slipping into psychopathy 01:00:59 The psychedelic experience  01:18:52 Who Sam relies on for external advice 01:25:42 On Trump’s narcissism  01:42:21 Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars 01:59:14 Does Sam miss academia?  02:08:51 Free will, consciousness, and scientific experimentation 02:52:32 Can AI have free will? 02:54:38 Should we teach kids religion?  03:03:50 Barbaric beliefs in different religions  03:18:46 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Sam Harris: 💻 Website: https://www.samharris.org/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Welcome to a very special episode with Sam Harris. On the end of 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 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 this time 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 we're talking about diverse topics as generative AI images and their wokeness. And he'll come back to Trump. We'll talk about psychedelics, Trump. 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 attack that, except that I feel I let down my audience. My job on this podcast is to

ask questions that you guys want to 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 going to happen, it's going to 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 Dr. 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 point of doing that is not to say that sad or I miss them, Although, you know, it's always better not to lose subscribers 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 going to 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 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 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 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 mentioned this in my Monday Magic mailing list, which you should all subscribe to, Brian kidding.com slash list. I mean to communicate with you guys, tell you about cool things coming up, like my upcoming appearance at TEDx, Diego, April 10th. But 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 in any way to ascribe these evil, you know, 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 non-existence of free will and the non-behaviorist activities. Nobody behaves if they have no free will, as I mentioned with Suppulski. And Supolsky 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 it. 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 length timer. So that was an embarrassing foible, chalk it up to, you know,

trying to let the guests speak and not interrupt too many times with my own opinions because I know most of you want to 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 love how I brought out stuff in him that no other podcast host is 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 want to have any gotchas and get some clips and stuff of him just, you know, going off on Trump. So it's just kind of 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. I'm not going to let softballs go up when we talked about religion, you know, as I say at the end, maybe I should have ended early, but it was too juicy as softball to just leave hanging. You'll see about that. Speaking of our, let's say baseball, because it's opening week and 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, flas, lacunae in my judgment. But it was fun talking to him. I think I would nerd it out and some tech stuff, including artificial intelligence, touring tests. And then, And 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 talking about.

You know, maybe they won't be a part too, but so I wanted to get everything on the table. I could have gone another three hours, three and a half hours. But it's always funny to me when I talk to my guests or their assistants like Sam has. and they, you know, tell me, oh, Sam's got 90 minutes or 60 minutes and we go for three 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, et cetera. 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 memory background, the Simon's observatory. stay tuned for that. But this was a great kind of Pandora's box, you know, just sitting down with him. I had to do more preparation than probably any 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, um, or he speaks in complete paragraphs of prose. It's quite, it's quite amazing to watch. And the only times he said those two words, um and ah, was in saying if we did a podcast and AI could predict everything we'd say down to the ums and ah then uh he would believe start to believe in you know some version of artificial intelligence had been achieved at the at the turning test level so he didn't even

use it in kind of his manner of speaking and he's 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 too but if not i left uh left it all in the field of battle no 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, controposing 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, infesting, artificial intelligence 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 some YouTube or censorship from some of these things we put out,

you know, as Google slash YouTube, are they getting, you know, just pure woke? That's not going to 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 podcasts with Rogan and Lex Friedman, 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 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 rating. Tell me what I could do better or what I'm doing well. know. Thanks a lot. Today we're joined by one of the most thought-provoking and most requested intellectuals of our time, Dr. 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, 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 four 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. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Today, Sam, I want to 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 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 tack us through the cover art, the title and the title and the kind of origin story, as I'm a cosmologist, of how that book came to be. You're going to have to remind me on the subtitle. It's been a while since I looked at that. book, but this is, unlike my other books, this is really just 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, you know, I think that is, in fact, the case. There's some very smart people 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 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 some charitable copy editing required to turn any, even the most eloquent person into prose. And so, yeah, we did that for that book, and I think it's good. And the cover art is this double microphone stand. with a tangled web of XLR cables in the background.

So that is meant to represent the desire to unweave the rainbow of conversational discourse, or is that the evocative of 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, 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 let them roll with it. But I like the concept.

I mean, it's just, it's emphasizing the spoken origin of the content, you know. Yeah. And that book, you start off by saying, you know, when you wrote your first book in 2004, if somebody had told you, you know, your main avocation, if not vocation, 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 got to think it has something to do with the iPod,

I'm, I'm, no, I don't think I know. It does, it does, in fact. But the iPod 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 Dave to Hal in 2001. So actually, this guy, Vinnie Serico was a copy editor at Apple, and he proposed the name iPod or pod because of the life-sustaining and knowledge-sustaining nature of the pod.

So that brings us to the nature of podcasting itself, which I think is really, well, we can go there. Actually, I'd rather go to AI. Speaking of how, before we go there, before we get to podcasting. And I do want to get your kind of tips and hacks and trips, you know, a listical of ways to improve as a podcaster. But I want to 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 generative artwork based upon some encoding that it had been given. I wonder, what are your thoughts on this recent kind of development? And is this endemic to AI? in general or is it really just specific to the Gemini folks up in Silicon Valley and elsewhere? What was the problem there? You mean we don't want DEI for Nazis? That's only one of a diverse range of Nazis there. Well, they have to be. It was hilarious. Yeah. I mean, it was the reductioad absurdum of all of this

woke, identitarian politics that so many of us have been resisting in recent years. And 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 algorithm or a white Viking, apparently. I mean, it was just all, it was all diversities as far as I could see. You know, yeah, it was a debacle. It was embarrassing. I think it's, I think it probably took the, you know, they're so woke over there that I think they probably got embarrassed in the wrong direction. Like the fact that they couldn't get any white Nazis, they probably.

probably view as an insult against people of color, right? Like this, this was the real indiscretion that it depicted brown people as Nazis, right? I mean, the whole thing is so colossally moronic and painful to behold. I just, when we're going to pull back from this particular brink, is anybody's guess? I feel like the pendulum is swinging back because 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, only a white supremacist can utter that phrase with a clear conscience, apparently. It's awful. I mean, it's just a complete pollution of our moral conversation and our political conversation. And it will be the distra—we don't arrest

this slide into stupidity. It will be the destruction of the Democratic Party. It will guarantee us four more years of Donald Trump. I mean, it's just—it's so wrongheaded on every level that we We need an exorcism to dispel this nonsense, and hopefully that is forthcoming. I mean, there's a piecemeal version of that happening on a thousand podcasts, presumably, and substack newsletters and in various places in the media. But it seems very difficult for people to keep two indiscretions in view simultaneously. And it's the one on the left, which we've just begun speaking about, this identity politics, and the one on the right with populism and Trumpism.

And many people feel that they can't keep both of those grotesque objects in view. They 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's really the problem I see that is so toxic, that 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 sense. who can speak sanely about the untenability of both extremes.

And so that's what I try to do on my podcast. I'm eagerly awaiting the episode where you reveal that. But for me, it kind of revealed a notion of the miscommunication, perhaps, the misunderstanding in the popular lexicon of accuracy and precision, and that these things were 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.

They got the most superficial details, right, you know, the Washingtonian powdered wig and so forth. But they got the, you know, the core details completely inaccurate. But they were very precise in that they were highly reproducible. They all had more or less the same style. You could ask it a thousand different ways. As you said, it was impossible. So in scientific circles, as you know, you know, there's a difference between accuracy and

precision that sometimes gets conflated, that they're synonymous, but they're really quite different. And I wonder, you know, if there ever will be an opportunity for these two different kind of branches of the human mind, the accuracy, maybe in terms of numeracy, precision, or being different, but the artistry, how you can have something that's artistic that's fundamentally subjective, and then it's going to be generated by objective laws. I thought maybe we talked about the Turing test in this concept, and you asked our mutual friend Cal Newport a while ago, you asked him, if he'd go back and kill Turing to suppress, you know, the possible AI apocalypse. I know you're being tongue-in-cheek.

I don't remember that, actually. That's interesting. Well, he said it to me. He has a new book ad. He was just on my podcast. I can ask him again, but if you 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 116 years.

Do you think that there is this kind of misapprehendentious, of what AI is really going to be, when it's going to be achieved. I've proposed that, you know, 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 is flawless at mimicking, as you say, a woke, you know, a 29-year-old new employee at Google, you know, kind of anti-James-Demore employee. So what would you have as a replacement, or do you think the Turing test is adequate as it is? 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 a bit of a red herring because depending on the context, 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 ChatGPT produces when you ask it a question. It's just too fast. It's got access to too much information. is too coherent, you know, I mean, you can literally ask it, give me, you know, 170 bullet points on, you know, Roman history, and it'll give you 170 bullet points on Roman history. This is just immediately without pausing, right? So people can't do that.

So it's, 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 being emulated at a human level. It won't be at a human level. It'll be at a superhuman level, really the moment we deploy it, right? In the same way that the calculator in your phone is already superhuman for arithmetic,

we're not going to dumb these things down. So once it's deployed, you know, it'll be superhuman and being superhuman, it will fail the Turing test in some way. To remind listeners, the Turing test was simply this, this thought experiment where you're given, you know, two terminals and you're interacting with both, and 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 never going to be our circumstance because these things are going to be too good.

There's a few things 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's like to be a system. And I'm agnostic as to whether or not consciousness will emerge out of the complexity where 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 completed 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 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 lose sight of the fact that it's an interesting question to wonder whether they're conscious,

because 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? You just imagine being in relation to something that really, is out of the uncanny valley, you know, in terms of facial expressiveness and appearance, and 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 or he knows so much. I think it's just going to be, you know, whether or not it's conscious, you know, if you, if you destroy that, that machine, you're going to 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 intellectual problems that we could talk about, because it conceptually, 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, 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 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 there 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 them, but 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 could 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. And 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 going to 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 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. Let's go back to the episode, shall we? Right. When I think, I've asked this of several researchers, 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. He actually uses this very flowery language. And that's if, here's, here's old 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 three-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 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 and face paint or something. But other than that, could you make it happy? What 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 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 just the binary switch is whether the lights are on, whether there's something that is like to be.

that system. However it behaves in the world, whatever sort of information processing, 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 all biological systems, you know, all creatures have bodies, and if consciousness has emerged in, you know, if consciousness has emerged in some of those, well, then that consciousness is in many ways tethered to embodiment and is, and, you know, when you ask what you're conscious of, so much of that is a story of your body and what it's doing. I mean, you're, you know, all of your perceptual channels for, you know,

for us, you know, our five senses and we have, you know, we have more senses than five. We've got, you know, appropriate deception and there's other other senses. But all of that is, mapped neurologically for us, and therefore it's a story of embodiment. But, you know, 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 don't think the lights would go out thereby. I mean, we, you know, people have locked in syndrome. You could imagine a version of locked in syndrome where it's not just, you know, motor incapacity, but it could be sensory incapacity, or you you could be blind and you could be deaf and you could be unable to smell or taste, etc.

And, you know, you 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'd be no reason to expect that neurologically. You'd still, you could still have 100% cortical function without the inputs. And you would just, you would experience that, the total vacancy of sensory stimulation. And I do think many of us through meditation or psychedelics or both people have had experiences that they refer to as a pure consciousness experience where you lose your sense of embodiment and there's just, you know, consciousness just becomes this vast space of, you know, really without

content. I mean, just knowing its own, you know, cognizance. And that's a, you know, that's a conceptually coherent notion and, you know, and, you know, It's an experience, again, that many people have attested to. There have to be experiences. In the space of all possible conscious experiences, there have to be experiences we can't even imagine. And that are inaccessible to us based on the kinds of minds we have, and different minds could access them, right?

So if we built super-intelligent machines that were conscious and self-improving, you can imagine these minds navigating the space of possible experience beyond horizon. we can't see, and that's all very interesting to consider. And those could be very, very pleasant or very, very unpleasant experiences, right? I mean, we know that things can be really nice and really not nice in this universe, 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 are.

I want to get your reaction to a quote by you in the waking up app recently. I'm a longtime subscriber and very much. enjoy it. So you wake, I wake up. I don't always meditate with your meditations, but I always use the app and you have a great roster 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 want to compare that quote with this one from Einstein. He 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, 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 could you reconcile what Einstein said with what you said perhaps, or use what you said as a tool to help our transcend the level of consciousness we're born with?

Yeah, well, I certainly wouldn't say it's a matter of getting outside the brain. I mean, you know, I think we can be agnostic with respect to the metaphysics here. I mean, just just the ontology, just how is consciousness and mind related to matter? At what point does it emerge? I think with mind in terms of its functionality, I mean, things like perceptual, and memory and and you just you know so the association between ideas and ability to abstract ideas reasoning all of that is clearly a matter of what our brains are doing right because we know we can we we can disrupt all those functions by by damaging or impeding the you know certain processes in the

brain and all of that is is increasingly well mapped and that 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 mystery of consciousness. So I think it's unclear how consciousness emerges and what it's what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for for the lights to come on. But for things like, you know, vision and, you know, language processing, et cetera, we know this is a matter of information processing in our, you know, the, the biochemicals. system of our brains. And I think there's every reason, just to connect back to the 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 should be able to process that same information in silico and those same functions happen, 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, I mean, the different levels to it. There, you know, one level is just thinking differently, right? I mean, just having new ideas 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 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 really unhappy. I'm just, you know, I really 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 a, give me an intervention, right? You could probably give a lot of great advice there. And if you only

took that advice yourself, 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 is really the challenge. It's not, it's not, I'm going to take the simplest possible case. Like 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 know you have a certain energy balance, and if you eat less and exercise more, and you do that consistently, you're going to change the shape of your body eventually. And yet many, many people,

virtually everyone who's not marketing their accomplishments on YouTube, it finds it's very difficult to do, right? And so that's the problem. I think with Einstein's quote, the one place I would demur is that I don't tend to think of levels of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a single condition and the real differentiator is in its contents, right? I mean, there can be consciousness with you know basically zero contents and there can be consciousness with contents of assort and capacities by virtue of that contents that we can't even imagine, you know, just creativity and insight that is so far beyond what is normal for us that we would find those disclosures have put into English fairly unintelligible.

So, but everything, so, you know, all of our personal changes with respect to what we do and what we want and, you know, how we think about our lives is a matter of changing contents. However, the real benefit of meditation and the way one engages it is not so much a matter of addressing contents as contents. It's recognizing contents, whatever they are, and learning to kind of drop back into this condition of a purely witnessing experience and discovering an intrinsic freedom there that is native to consciousness, whatever its contents. Right? So 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 have a tendency to change the character of experience. But 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 just recognizing, 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 what the sense that there's a self, a subject that is aware of objects is the thing that ultimately you're interrogating with meditation. and that's the thing that breaks down and you begin to experience of freedom from that contracted feeling of self that's constantly appropriating experience and reacting to it and trying to improve it.

It's a project that is somewhat orthogonal to this other project of improving experience, right? Which is a story of the kinds of changes you can make to your experience based on behavior and ideas and relationships and all the good stuff you can find in life and all the bad stuff you can successfully avoid.

Most of the time, you know, to my everlasting shame and denigration in your eyes, 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 almost a source of extra frustration, you know, that I'm doing it wrong. And you're the second, you know, at least the second meditation expert I've had on, including Deepak Chopra, Dr. Deepak Chopra. who actually, Sam, he gave me my mantra, my first mantra ever.

Do you want to hear what it was? Right. What was that? He gave me my first mantra, which I use on the daily. It's called schmuck. My mantra is schmuck. I don't know why he wanted me to say that. But he, you know, he sort of felt that, you know, TM is the way to go.

And even trying that, I find that even more sort of almost embarrassing to do, even if I'm by myself. And I'm always nervous. someone's going to come in and say, but even when I don't, I use Vapasana and the techniques that you've taught me and your team waking up. I still find it, you know, 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, Sam offers, et cetera. But there was a recent, 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

guest, but recently he called Vapasana the LHC, you know, the equivalent tantamount to the LHC. And, you know, that made me break out of whatever, you know, meditative state I was in. Because, you know, you can't mention those names without me secreting, you know, endorphins. So what did you mean by that? 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 want to, your you're a solid, you know, hardcore scientist at heart and by training. And so you said something like woo-woo, 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, et cetera, Frank Wilcheck, et cetera. So tell me, what did you mean by that? How, in what way is the, is the, the POSNA, the sort of technology tantamount to an LHC, a large Hadron Collider? Right, right. Well, let me take some pains to differentiate my approach to this. from Deepak's because it is quite different. I mean, 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 meditative experience, but we're not drawing the same kinds of conclusions metaphysically from them, right? So, you know, I tend to not draw any conclusions about the cosmos from what one can experience in meditation. I just think it's unwarranted. There's no necessity to do it, and I just don't see the intellectual basis by which to do it. 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 some of those experiences are transformative, and you can, you know, at every level, you know, 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 goes very, very deep, and it can be very, very interesting 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, the existence of your brain is not among the things you can notice while meditating, right? Much less it's 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 a move that Deepak tends to make, right? He will, you know, he will talk about 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 all of a sudden you're doing physics by by meditating. That is, you know, for lack of a better word, but 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 links things up in a profound way. And maybe there is something, maybe there's a place where they touch. But it's just obvious that for most of us, most of the time, there's no reason to pretend to know anything about the universe on the basis of what you can experience directly, just paying attention to what it's like to be you. But what you can know a lot about is what it's like in your corner of the universe. I mean, you are part of the universe. You are this physical system that is illuminated by consciousness for some reason where you sit. And in this corner of the universe, I mean, only you are seeing the universe. I mean, 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 important or that ultimately demarcates you from, you know, the rest of things. I mean, the boundary of your skin is nominally where you think you start and stop. But even there, you know, you're exchanging matter and energy with ceaselessly. with 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 in relationship to your body in some strange way, right? 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 consciousness itself is just an immersion property of your nervous system, well, then you're going to

think, well, it's, and it's important that your nervous system be embodied, well, then it's, you are, you are co-terminous 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 someplace inside it. But strangely, your body is almost part of the world, right? You're aware of the world. You know, with your open, your open eyes, you see your visual field, 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, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this is carried through from one moment to the next, uh, 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. Uh, there's this full display of, uh, there's this full display of, of energy, and yet there's this sense that there's a subject in the middle that is in some way unchanging, right? This sense of eye, the sense of self. And that's the thing that ultimately,

I mean, in the beginning, you don't really start out targeting that, but, you know, relatively quickly, at least over in waking up, the app, you know, we instruct people to look closely at this seeming starting point of being a subject that can pay attention to sounds or the breath, let's say, as an exercise, or a mantra if you're doing Deepak's method, TM, you know, you're repeating a mantra with the voice of your mind, and 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 noticing changes.

But the claim here, and it is a scientific claim, it is a, you know, you can enter a, 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 really no longer a circumstance of any kind of doubt. And the analogy I tend to draw here is not a perfect one, but it's pretty close, honestly, with respect to several of the key variables, is to looking for the optic blind spot, which many of our listeners will be familiar with them. This is usually introduced at some point in high school. You take out a piece of paper, you make two marks on it. You make like a fixation cross,

and then you put a dot to one side, and you close one eye, and when staring at the fixation cross, you move the paper into a position where the dot you've drawn disappears because there's an area in your retina, you're just not getting any data because the optic nerve transits through the retina and there's no photoreceptors there. This is more evidence of an intelligent designer that is omniscient and designing our species perfectly.

As Christians, Jews, and Muslims imagine, the insight there is that this is through your own first-person experience and with very little setup, just a little bit of guidance, you can do this experiment which reveals something about neuroanatomy that you would otherwise be able to inspect directly. You would know you're not going to find it by accident, right? There's this deliberate experiment that you have to perform on yourself, and yet it's available, and it's not, the inside is not deep within you. It's actually really right on the surface, right?

It's almost too close to you to be noticed without performing this fairly precise, you know, way of looking. And meditation on the nature of the self is analogous to that. a way of looking for this sense of self. It's harder than this, and it's, you know, you can't really use a piece of paper and a pencil to help in quite the same way. But it's, it can be conferred, the sense of absence in the same way that, you know, it becomes uncontrovertible with 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 existence. And you just, you can resolve your doubts about it. And if 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 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, the door, the real doorway into, an interest in meditation tends to be, you know, you feel worse than you want to 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 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 your bandwidth is just gunked up by, you know, a 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 own minds that if you imagine exporting them to a human conversation, you know, you'd be branded as a madman. And meditation is a way of getting some perspective on that and kind of changing your routine. When you were talking in the app about the optic blind spot,

you talk 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 same region where their optic blind spot occurs just to the left or right, depending on which I were talking about. your eyes are actually much more heightened sensitivity to low levels of gray scale intensity. So you can actually amplify your ability to perceive details, but not in color. So it's all these wonderful, rich metaphors with the optical system. And of course, if you look at the motor homoculus of a person, it's mostly eyes and hands and little else.

I like the LHC analogy, especially since my particle physics colleagues, I'm very jealous of them getting $12 billion a shot. We have to make do with just a couple hundred million dollars, Sam, so poor us. But I want to talk about that and the kind of self-talk, et cetera. I find it curious, and maybe we can segue into, I don't want to talk about politics. I find politics very boring, and that's part of the reason they came in astronomers because, you know, no one ever looks up. It says, oh, that comet is a democratic comet. But I like that asteroid, you know, or that constellation over there because 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 dangers. One, 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 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 it can be, I could imagine it could be a source 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 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 hundred 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 unless you're insane, you do hear voices. But how do you modulate that? Because even not for narcissistic people that do hear voices 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. First, I should say, I'm not a clinician, right? So, you know, 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 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 being active, right? So they really are, you know, as far as as the cortex is concerned, they really seem to be hearing something, right? As though we're, 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 let's say you're reading a book and you're reading, you know, 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 kind of covertment of voice of the mind. You know, that's not a symptom of schizophrenia. That's just a symptom of being a slow reader, you know, which I happen to be. And when you read faster and faster, you kind of 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'm not, I think it's very wise to not let schizophrenics go to the South Pole for 11 months and sit in negative 90 degree Fahrenheit. But for most of us, even, even if we're the picture of, you know, quote, normal mental health, right, our minds tend to be unhappy places to be, right? I mean, it's just, you know, very few people have really made their minds their friend. You know, so much of our self-talk, so much of our, 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 love and gratitude and ease of being as we might be, right? And we notice this because 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 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, you know, why, you know, why are we, you know, why am I sitting here doing nothing? You know, there's so much more interesting things to do. I could be, you know, I could be reading a good book. I could be, 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, you're, you're,

you're closing your eyes, you're trying to meditate, but now you're talking to yourself and 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 know, you haven't given it a five 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 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 a therapeutically promising drug, not as a party drug or as just a way of getting high, but just here is a doorway into a different experience, you know, try it when you're ready. And I did, and it was whatever the dynamics of the experience were, 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 what happened there for about four 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 preventing me from being more like that, more of the time, right? And so meditation, you know, became a one of the tools I engaged 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 it over to Brian Keating.com slash list and join. And you'll also enter a giveaway to win a meteorite, a real 4 billion-year-old piece 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 Briankeating.com slash 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 come down, I mean, a literal, 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 terribly important what I think. But, you know, I view the brain is, you know, the most magnificent computer there is. And I only have so many IQ points that I don't want to drop below 100 as it is. So, but was there a disappointment because you, you know, you kind of got into the promised land. You not only saw it, but it sounds like you experienced. 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, you know, simulate that state through tools like meditation, which I do engage. And so was there a disappointment that after, you know, you almost wish that you hadn't, you know, invented the atomic bomb or, you know, the LHC in that case? case and taking these MDMA? Well, no, I mean, this now goes to the difference between psychedelic experiences and meditation in terms of what the goal is or what you consider to be the center of the bullseye. Meditation is, I think, much more important, ultimately than psychedelics in the sense that

what you, the real target state, the real fundamental insight, the wisdom that is available, isn't really a state at all. It's really, it's continuous with all possible states of consciousness, right? It's 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. 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 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, consciousness as contents. There's no edge to it. There's no center to it. There's just it, right? And you're identical, 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 place from which you're directing attention at the breath. There's just the totality of conscious experience with its sights and sounds and sensations. I mean, the full energy of the display of cognizance, right? And the sense that there's this division into subject and object is the foundational error upon which every other error and really every other moment of psychological suffering is, is, you know, strung. So that insight, again, 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, 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 that the psychedelic experience from the point of view of centrallessness isn't so much better than the experience of just checking your email from the point of view of centralistness, right? There's still, because the central, you can't get more centralists than centralists, right? You can't get, you know, so it's, um, 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 taken a drug to have them, right? You've perturbed your nervous system to have them. And, you know, this isn't, you know, you know, this isn't, you know, you know, you're 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 by definition, it's going to, at some point, go, right? It's a process that's not going to be sustained forever. The thing 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'll be transitory with respect to, you know, the end of your life, presumably, right? If there's nothing, 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 consciousness that are really freeing that you can, you can have insight into through meditation, really can be recognized no matter what's happening. I mean, really, they're available when you're in the middle of, you know, about 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 bulls you over for a host of reasons, virtually all of which relate to the wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness

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, like, feelings of compassion and unconditional love. And I mean, really, you know, 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, it just, it just, how is it possible to be so at ease in your being in the world? Again, despite radical uncertainty as to what's going to happen next, and in fact that the very morbid certainty of the guarantee that bad things will eventually happen, including the death of everyone you love 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 bliss and kind of, just a kind of just a radiance of cognizance in the face of each new percept, you know, each moment of engaging, you know, each sight, each sound, everything somehow gets transfigured and becomes sacred, right? So that's, it's like, it's something like the beatific vision, right? That is available, and that's just a neurologically available. And the truth is, there's no drug that does anything that your brain is incapable of doing itself, right? I mean, these drugs either cause neurotransmitters you already have to, hang around longer or get, you know, dumped in greater, you know, concentrations into the synaps.

Or they mimic neurotransmitters, right? And, you know, bind to receptors that are sitting there ready to be bound to by, you know, the requisite neurotransmitters. And so it is, in fact, true that, you know, these experiences can be had through meditation. And, you know, I've certainly recapitulated many states I've experienced through psychedelics 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 would have, yeah, I mean, it's hard to know that, you know, run the counterfactual, but I just have that sense that I needed, I needed 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 pipe dream from the outset.

Sounds to return to the optical analogy, kind of like, you know, someone who's addicted to eyedrops versus someone who gets LASIC. You know, you can sort of get some of the benefits from the eyedrops, but when they're taken away, you know, the impermanence of it will settle in. You know, the question is, is that worth it or can you achieve it without it? I think you mentioned 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 do MDMA? I mean, obviously not now.

Even though you're, you know, from California, and it's probably legal where you're at, remind me, what was your take? I mean, because if you wouldn't do it to someone who's in your care and the most precious person, you know, assuming that you would do it and they, you know, you had control over there doing it or not by influencing them, not by forcing them, would you advise them or not? Yeah, well, so this is a, you're referring to a passage in, it's actually in my book waking up, but there's a chapter, Drugs in the Meaning of Life, which I got excerpted as a podcast, and 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 there are drugs that I would say are never worth taking, right? They're really, you know, they're synonymous, very likely with neurological damage,

and they're pointing you, you know, nowhere worth going. Then there are drugs that are, you know, powerfully addictive, and we have to be aware of that biochemistry that really ruins people's lives. They're drugs you could easily overdose on, and there are drugs you could really never overdose on, right? I mean, it's just like whether there is no known lethal dose, really, or, you know, that you'd 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, um, so it's just, it's very,

you can't just, you can't generalize about drugs and yet we do, and it, it's, it just makes a, a word salad of any real, you know, conversation about, you know, drug policy and, and, and what should be legal and illegal, et cetera. You know, alcohol is, is, is, uh, a drug I actually like, you know, I drink, uh, with some regularity, you know, hopefully not to, excess. But it's unambiguously among the most dangerous drugs we have in terms of the dysfunction it unleashes in people's lives and 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 often talked about in the same context because of its

therapeutic effects. But the classic psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD are not, as a Certainly not addictive. I mean, there's no sign of there being addictive, and they're not the kinds of things people tend to take all that regularly. I mean, you know, we're taking it once a week. I mean, I guess microdosing is its own thing. Many people are microdosing now, and it's a, you're taking a, like, a subliminal dose of it for whatever reason. And, you know, the research on the efficacy of that is certainly somewhat ambiguous 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 psychedelic dose of, you know, psilocybin or LSD,

that is not something that anyone does every day or even every week or, 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 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, for, for, meditation generally because the classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD are different from MDMA in my experience in that you really can have extraordinarily positive and extraordinarily negative experiences with some um 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 psilocybin right i mean they They were called psychotomimetic drugs for a reason. I mean, 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 background with schizophrenia or a first-order relative, who's a schizophrenic, I think, is, that certainly rules those people out of any research paradigm with psychedelics.

And I just think it's possible, like, you know, there's a lot of, a lot to be said about how one tries to control for, you know, 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 a different story. I'm sure there are some people who have 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 getting illegal 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 they're 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 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 insoucients say that it's physiologically benign, right? I think the, the jury still out on MDMA, I think neurologically, I mean, a lot of the scare stories of it create a 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, frankly, it feels that way a little bit,

and there's some research that suggests that it might be that way. Certainly, there is a lethal dose of it that can be found well within reach of a normal dose, you know, maybe a by a factor of of 10, right? You know, you take 10 times the, the, the, the appropriate dose, and, and that would, that's probably something like the LD50 for MDMA. Whereas with LSD or psilocybin, it's, it's, you know, probably a thousandfold dose or beyond, right? It's really, it's, it's not in sight. Again, these are all differences, and these differences get, get elided when we just think we're talking about drugs as a single class of something that, you know, you shouldn't take because they're bad for your brain and may lower your IQ, et cetera.

But sorry, I didn't answer your question. So to come back to my daughters, yes, it 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 need for insight any other way, right? Like they just had all the experiences I wanted them to have on the natch without having to think about psychedelics. you know, that's certainly possible. I don't think it's likely for them or for most people. So short of that, I do think 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 mysteries of Elusis, though we don't know precisely what compound was being taken there, you know, for 2,000 years in ancient Greece and Rome, there was a right that some of the wisest and smartest people who we hear 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 um you know for many of us only um pharmacology at the moment i mean you know who knows what what ways of intervening in our nervous systems will have you know 10 years from hour or 100 years from now, but at the moment we have some compounds that really do open the doors

of perception in a way that is profoundly surprising and profoundly beautiful for many people. So try the cold plunges and the saunas first. It's going to have to be quite a cold plunge. It's going to 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. Let's send me an email. I want to pivot a little bit, although perhaps tangentially related still to meditation, at least.

I find, again, even for, I'm going to stick to normal people. We're not talking about schizophrenics. There is sort of, sometimes 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 lunch boxes and what the hell are you doing? I'm doing this for you, honey. It doesn't really work so well. But it made me think of a lot of what you do.

And you've gotten a tremendous amount of criticism, which I feel is mostly unfair. I don't agree 100% with all your positions. I don't think it's possible for any individual. I don't even agree 100% with all my positions, Sam. But the thing that strikes me is that you're quite balanced and you do have a great ability to see perspectives from multiple positions. And I can't imagine that that's purely due to meditation or MDMA or what have you. In other words, I feel a tendency to become slightly narcissistic. that, oh, I can be my own advisor. 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 you target for your ire, in a lot of cases, people like Donald Trump or Elon or Tucker Carlson and many others, it seems to me these are men that don't have any kitchen cabinets, so to speak, that they do rely on their own kind of gut instincts and what's right. And I should say, I don't disagree with it, with with them on everything either. And in fact, I want to 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 vicious taskmaster. So, no, I'm just kidding. But, you know, they all seem to be quite pleased with the employment at waking up. So who do you rely on for external advice, if anybody? Who is your kitchen cabinet, so to speak? well i you know i have um a team i have a wife i have good friends i have uh teachers i have mentors i have um 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 into my life and and and wonder whether i'm i'm thinking as clearly as I might, or, you know, living by the, you know, the ethics that I, you know, in the final analysis, I'm going to be happy to have enacted, you know. So for me, it's really, the goal is to live an examined life such that there's nothing significant that I will regret, right? 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 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 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 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 just take every bit of life hackery you can find,

and you're just optimizing everything, and you're that guy. But, you know, rather often, 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 as to be a certain person in the world. I mean, 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 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 that's a very different way of being in the world than to 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 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 he thinks is foundational to his well-being and to, you know, no longer being an asshole. Even if I was an asshole a moment ago, the question is, what is it, what's required to stop, really stop being that person and to interrupt the, you know, the concatenation of your, your mediocrity, right? As a, as a mind,

right? You know, you've become selfishly attached to something. You've become, you know, just greedy and irascible and just, you're just not who you want to be and you got, you got stuck there in the middle of a conversation with someone who, you know, 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 that guy, and yet you're ostensibly in the presence of someone who, you know, you love more than anyone in the world, and yet you're just closed down and you can't feel it, right? 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 something that you

can actually accomplish in two seconds, right? That's a very different capacity, right? And so, and it's possible to become the kind of person who can really do those things quickly. Who you, you, like, you don't have to be an asshole 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 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, like the guys you mentioned, you know, I only know one of them, but, you know, personally, I've, you know, I've met two of them. I only know one of them. But you've mentioned three guys who, who, to an extraordinary degree, embody the antithesis of everything I'm talking about. I mean, 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 don't think that's hyperboles.

I think he is the, he has less, 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. 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 kinds of things he can't do, right? Do you mean in the venal sense, Sam, or do you mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I seem from, I know people that know him and are live in his building and are 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-laws, you know, and my daughters, you know, works and time and network to, for my own venal benefit, which I, look, I wouldn't do business with them either. But from all accounts that I've heard firsthand, he is a good father. He is committed to his children and so forth. Yes, he may forget his wife's name or whatever. But who among us hasn't done that?

But tell me, Sam, are you specifically with regard to children, I don't care about the political side. I agree with you. He's a very complicated person. I'm not talking about politics either. I'm talking about who he is as a person. I mean, so I don't have any direct insight to what he's like behind closed doors. But the way he is in public, I've seen enough of him, and long before he was president. I mean, we've seen this guy for, he's been famous 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 so-called good father that someone is saying he, don't believe it for a second that he's a good father.

Nahas, we call it nachus. Yeah, 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 velocity and a pointlessness and an obviousness that we have never seen in public life, in any quarter of public life. It's just astonishing.

It's clearly a some kind of insane compulsion to do. distort the truth, even when it doesn't matter, even when it's counterproductive. I mean, he'll lie about the thing he said five minutes ago when you can rewind the tape and see what he said five 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 worse than some people who are quite a bit more dangerous 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 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 had, you know, if he had, if he had, if he were capable of having some ideology for which he would sacrifice himself, Right. Well, then he'd be scarier, but he doesn't even have those virtues, right? So he's just, don't get me sorry. So you at least say that Trump is better than Hitler. That'll be the title of the other. No, no, that's my point. He's actually worse than Hitler in a strange way, not in a way that makes him scary in a way that makes him pathetic. It's like like it again, this is a paradox, which a lot of dumb people will not take the time to understand and they'll want to 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 the components of a human mind that are virtues, in certain contexts, they are diabolical virtues, right? Like, you can, like, the scariest person is not the least organized, least disciplined, least coherent, sort of, you know, confabulator, right?

It's not, right. Just a flabby mess. You just appetites, right? No, to be really scary and to be really dangerous, there are certain virtues you need, certain strengths. You need a certain kind of malign integrity, right? He doesn't have any of that, right? But so he's a very strange person.

People fail to notice how peculiar he is, right? This is just not a normal, this is not a normal situation, that we have someone this prominent who may yet be present 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 two other people you name are also people who are not normal. I mean, they're not normal in their self-absorption, right? And to some degree, it's, you know, I think in Elon's case, it could be a matter of what

fame has done to him. I mean, 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 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 are governed by, you know, an untethered, unmowered. untillard, whatever analogy you want to use, you know, the captain 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, et cetera, kind of incarnate, but more intellectual, perhaps, more financially successful? Is that attributable to a lack of guardrails, a kitchen cabinet, whatever you want to call it, or is this lack of a kitchen cabinet a symptom of these perhaps? I'm not a psychologist either, but you might consider it be pathological. Well, I just think 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 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 he couldn't figure out why we couldn't use our nuclear weapons, and when the generals were aghast, their eyebrows rose to the back of their heads, he just thought they were morons, right? So, you know, if you're sufficiently narcissistic and delusional about your own capacities for insight and your own knowledge of specific disciplines, you've got the Dunning Kruger effect to the ultimate degree,

you'll dismiss any advice and advisor and shoot any messenger, right? I mean, it's just, that's what it is to be fully amured in your, you know, your failures of reality testing, right? I mean, this is like, there's, you know, you can see, I mean, everyone's got a bit of this. Everyone can say things or think things or assert things and not, you know, take the extra step of asking the question, wait a minute, is that true? Like, how do I know that? Like, 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 sound confident, but like if this thing

weren't true, are you in a position where its falsity 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 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 want to hedge against the kinds of cognitive heuristics and shortcuts that we know reliably produce errors for people. I mean, 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 is, if you're interested to hear what they say, if you actually want to debug your operating system ever. But 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, you know, take the, take the, take the feedback on board. How do you account, you know, one of the great questions of theodicy is, you know, why do bad things happen to good people, but also, you know, the controversy of that is, you know, why do good things happen to bad people? These are three 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 worth quite a good deal. Simultaneously, we hear that Trump's a buffoon and he stumbled into money and his parents, he's a nepo baby, whatever, and then you hear 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 tragedy of the comment? How does one account for their success? And which is more annoying, Sam, 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 united by some variables like, you know, narcissism and a lack of concern, a kind of recklessness, you know, lack of concern for the harm they cause, you know, to our, certainly in the cases of Elon 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 genuine. brilliant engineer and entrepreneur and has a talent for building teams in a way that is

visionary and inspiring and just creating whole new industries that seem at first glance to be more or less impossible, right? So it's, you know, he's, no one can can really be skeptical of his talents in that regard as much as he may in some cases take credit for things he shouldn't take credit for, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you 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, or it's also undeniable. I mean, it's just, he's, you know, electric car, if he did nothing other than 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 just a very different case. Again, I don't know him personally. I think he started out as a very good writer. I think he's a genuinely talented writer, and he's also a genuinely talented performer. He's like an entertainer.

I mean, he's very good 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 imbeciles. largely, and he's spreading an incredible amount of dangerous misinformation, and he's a very cynical person. I mean, we know we now have his private texts from the Dominion lawsuit showing that though he carried water for Trump for years and did as much as anyone to carve out of 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 being. and couldn't wait for him to be off stage so that no one, we didn't have to talk about him anymore, right? That's an X-ray vision into the very nature of his integrity as a person, and it's completely absent. So I don't understand how, I mean, so the tragedy of 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 an awful thing about America, right, and the world at the moment. I mean, I think it's a, these are, 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 stands on social media, they're just the personality cults that have formed under them. It has all the pathology of much that's wrong with America in particular. Just take the variable of 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 a cult of fame that is clearly non-optimal

for how we govern ourselves and the kinds of things that prevail in our public conversation. You know, Trump is a game show host who's famous for being, you know, 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 a reputation as a businessman, which, again, was this confection, 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 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 screwing us over on all kinds of counts. And social media is the technology that is kind of delivering that as a, you know, just the lever in the rats cage 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 immediate drip of dopamine that's getting piped directly into the nucleus incumbents.

Something like that's going on with social media for a lot of us, and it's, I mean, you know, I consider Elon on patient zero on some level for that. I mean, I can't think of anyone whose life has been more properly deranged by social media than him. I worry 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 Neurrelink, all of his endeavors as an engineer, and he's a father of, as I said, before we start 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 an ex-space, I won't say Twitter, but an ex-space with a friend of mine, Catherine Brodsky, who had a new book come out about, you know, discourse and apology, no, it called no apology. And Elon was on for three hours, and the guy gets nothing from this. Not like he's going to get, you know, 10% of her advance, and that's going to make some huge difference in his investments. But he was on, his mom was on, his kid, X was on, physically on top of him during this. And I asked him a bunch of detailed questions about AI and about microwave interference with radio astronomy that I do in Chile at the South Pole.

And he was very engaged and seemed willing to help out. And I asked him, 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 then it got a little morose at the end because I was, you know, when am I going to talk to him again? And so I asked him, I said, Elon, you have this dream. as you say to die on Mars and, you know, I just hope it's not on impact. But have you thought about, you know, who you're going to 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 you he was a little choked up. And then his mother, you know, came in and, you know, prevented the TKO, I guess, at some it was asked in earnestness. I wasn't trying to, you know, unsettle him. But she said, oh, yeah.

Oh, Alon, you know, you don't have to worry, but we don't have to worry about that for a long time. But I wonder, what is behind this urge, you know, sort of, you know, the denial of death, this book written in the 70s, and it kind of makes this point that human beings are living in perpetual denial of their impending doom. And to avert those terrifying fears of the morose, they construct, you know, pharaonic, you know, pyramids and aspire to win Nobel Prizes and do all sorts of things, and fame is one of them. You know, aside from the fact of, you know, it takes a year to get there, you probably will get, you know, the toxic 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 going

to start turning, you know, CO2 into methane anytime soon. I guess the question is, you know, what is behind this urge to, you know, to extend your physical presence in the universe? I mean, I always say you can live forever, but you're greedy son of a bitch if you think you're going to take your body with you. 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 need and couples to the fame urge, as you mentioned? What do you think is in it for somebody like that to, you know, to really, I mean, has he really thought this through?

I mean, I can't imagine saying goodbye to a second child, let alone nine others or ten others or whatever you'd have to do. So what do you think is behind this desire to go? He said, by the way, he said it's to extend consciousness 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, burying this SD card underneath the, you know, Marianas Trench would probably do it too.

What do you think is behind it? Well, there's a lot there. I mean, 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, even if available. But I wouldn't begrudge somebody else who wanted to do that. I mean, I think it's a cool project, right? I can see what's inspiring about it. I mean, in certain of these cases, I mean, certainly this is true of Elon, but, you know, this is true with many people in tech. You're talking about people whose worldview. has been fashioned to an impressive degree one might say to a disconcerting degree by science fiction right

I mean these people have read a lot of science fiction you know and then thrown a little iron rand and that becomes their operating system right they're like if you know their intellectual life is is driven

by that kind of literature to a degree that is, I don't consider it optimal, and in certain cases, 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'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 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 going to 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 going to do that. If we could actually build a self-sustaining colony on Mars, well, you know, there's going to be a first fist fight on Mars, right? There's going to be adultery on Mars that ends in murder, right? I mean, like all... And they always say, oh, we're going to self-select out the violent criminals and the dregs, and we're going to give that psychological exam, and they never mentioned, well, there'll be a second generation that you had no role in vetting that came about because of the mixture of men and women on the space room. Right, right. And as I've already pointed out,

Elon himself is not an example of a perfect... integrated human beings such that, you know, we'd want to 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, you know, virtually optimized for our success because, you know, we evolved here. I mean, this is our niche. And, you know, it's hostile enough, largely because of what we're doing to ourselves, that our endurance here 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 think we should we should do it because it's fun. And, you know, 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 sure I'm going to feel the rest of my life. A chemical rocket company, as far as I know, that you're trying to... No, but I mean, just like the idea that is, that would be the fulfillment of something for me.

It's just, like, that's just not where my taste runs, right? I mean, it's much more... And the truth is, I'm... There's something very adolescent about this... In the sweep of history, it all... It's all going to vanish, right? I mean, it's like, you know, even Shakespeare is going to vanish in the fullness of time. And so, or in success become 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 Shakespeare will still be referred to. But, you know, no one we could name alive in this generation is going to 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, sufficiently long time horizon. So then, so then what sort of imprint on the world do you want to make? You know, then who do you care about affecting? And who, you know, and, you know, 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 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 actually be 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 obvious, it's like, you know, like vanity is like, you know, it's like envy.

It's like these other emotions, you know, jealousy. It's like it feels, the moment you're caught by it, you feel. you feel diminished by it. This is a spell to be broken. This is a dream I think we want to wake up from, and then we see what's available when we're no longer looking in that mirror moment to moment. But yeah, God forbid if you criticize this noble mission

of making humanity interplanetary, and even to the same people, Sam, that 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 Mars fantasy that Elon propagates or promulgates. And I would say, you know, well, I even mention 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 an inter, you know, on an intrinsic level,

on a personal level, that, you know, you're going to die. And even the Roman emperors would have that whisper to them so much so, you know, all the more so. Elon, to what extent do you have that personally? But even as humanity, as you say, yeah, the sun will become a red giant and not too many billion years 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 strikes to me of a type of, you know, kind of civilization

or communal hubris. But I want to pivot, lighten up a little bit. You're exceptionally gifted at podcasting, and I can't not take, as I did with Joe Rogan when I got to appear on his podcast. I can't not ask you some tips. And the thing I wanted to ask you, which I asked Joe, was when someone's talking shit.

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 kind of job for me as a professor, but I do enjoy it. It gives me tremendous fulfillment. It gets me to talk to people I want to talk to, not just people I have to talk to, so I do love it. But it's not my main job. But still, I want to improve when you're talking to somebody and you just violently disagree, you know that they're either bull-shundering, you don't believe what they're saying. You don't believe that they

don't believe, like they used to say about the Soviet, you know, 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 to what extent, you know, do you, how can you handle that? How can you give a tip 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 push back with love and respect, but also get guests again and not get blacklisted. So sorry for rambly. Well, you know, I try not to have those guests, right? I mean, there's a certain caliber of guests that I, I look for.

and it's not, you know, fame is not the cut there. It's really just, whatever the topic, you're looking for somebody who has intellectual integrity. And, I mean, occasionally I'll have a guest where I know we're going to 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, you know,

the other tricks of the trade that depart from the norms of just honest conversation, and, you know, I try to flag that 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. I think some are not. I mean, some, I think there's, I forget if I haven't released. There are parts of podcasts I haven't released. Like, I once had a podcast with someone, I won't name her, but, you know,

we disagreed enough at the outset. We just got off track for like 30, 40 minutes. and I said, listen, this, you know, we're not going to 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 going to pitch into the abyss, right? And I'm going to 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 the audience was unaware of just how bad. And, you know, and we did that. And it was unaware of just how bad. And, things went before. But I've had podcasts where I haven't, a couple come to mind where I haven't released it just because it just wasn't going to be good for the person. It wasn't going to be good for, you know, it was, these are painful conversations, right? Like, the thing I don't, the effect I don't want to have, and I, and I've, I've had this inadvertently a few times, is I don't want to give people the sense that conversation is hopeless, right?

And there are conversations that really can deliver that punchline, you know, fairly indelibly, right? Where it's like you get too smart. 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 saying what they think.

And they cannot converge in any important way. And it's just like a, it's just a car. accident, 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 two people can't make any progress? And we've been listening for three hours or four hours, right? I've had those podcasts. Brutal, right? Absolutely brutal. One, 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. I mean, 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 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 absolute rag that was just, just, just, just, just, just, you know, had no journalistic standards whatsoever. But anyway, he published this article just lying about what had happened on my podcast

and that I refused to release it because he had destroyed me in a debate. And so then I released it and titled it the best podcast ever. And I released it. The whole podcast is there to be. Very Trumpian of you. 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 life.

lies about what had happened there. I want to pivot to your academic career and talk about academia, but before and some thoughts from you. I want to pivot to your thesis and one of your highly cited research papers, which I went through, and I really enjoyed it. It's called functional neuroimaging of belief and disbelief and uncertainty. It's with Sheath and your advisor, Mark Cohen at UCLA. And basically, I think you put subjects into 14 people, I think it was, into an FMRI.

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 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 belief or this, but maybe for hypocrisy, maybe for evasion or things like that. Can you talk about that study? And if you missed the kind of hard,

laboratory working with human subjects rather than books, they don't really talk back as much, right? So do you miss being in the lab in the research scenario in academia, first of all? And a little bit about whether this would have any practical applications, the Applevision Pro 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 exclude the cases where someone is, is self-deceived, right? Like if someone really believes their lies, that's not what we tend to mean by lying.

But that's kind of its own case of someone speaking untruthfully, but they've got such a mind as that they're not even aware of where the truth has stopped and their lives began, right? And there's a sub-variant of that, which goes by the technical term, bullshit. Harry Frankfurt, the philosopher, wrote a wonderful little book. It's just really an essay titled On Bulls, differentiating bull-from-lying, and I think it's a very useful distinction. I mean, the

the bullshitter isn't even taking the time to notice when their utterances are no longer tracking reality. I mean, so 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 want to get away with your lie, right? That's what lying normally is. Bullshitting is just talking and you're not even, you're not even doing the reality testing to know 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 bullseller than a normal liar because he's not doing the work to hide his lies, right? His lies are just all too obvious. And so in that sense, as Frankfurt says in that book, in some basic sense, the bullshunders is even a greater enemy of the truth than the liar is, because he's not even taking, he's not even keeping track of the truth. So anyway, but those papers, so there were a couple of papers we did on that topic and similar parents. paradigm, scanning people in neuroimaging experiments when they're evaluating the truth propositional content of various statements drawn from a bunch of different content areas. 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.

There's something in common when you judge an equation to be valid. you know, two plus two makes four. And when you judge an autobiographical detail to be true, you know, you were born in Los Angeles or wherever you were born. And you can just multiply the categories more or less arbitrarily that there will 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 40-digit number that ends in a one, 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 know it's either is or it isn't, but you just know you can't know, and that would provoke this feeling of uncertainty. And that's what we found.

And then in subsequent experiment, we tried to change people's beliefs in real time. by we we we took beliefs that were presumably would be presumably um not at all resistant to change because they're just kind of normal terrestrial beliefs that people are not identified with and then we took you know political beliefs which presumably would be harder to change and we we gave them you know counter evidence and then and then compared those conditions but yeah so what we found is that um 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 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 whatever the claim is. but the final judgment is was discernible in you know midline structures in the brain you know and interestingly the judgment of uncertain judgment 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 you know the area in the brain the the interior insula which is you know often involved in a disgust reaction was operative in the disbelief condition. Right? So, and 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 capacity we have beyond what, you know, our primate cousins have is a matter of our leveraging structures that are, that are, you know, had an underlying purpose prior to our language use and our judgments of, and to say nothing of our, you know, mathematical understanding or, you know, our religious beliefs or anything else, any other domain that's discreet with respect to belief. So it's interesting work. No, I don't actually miss doing neuroimaging experiments. I mean, I think I certainly would be, you know, I might yet, you know, collaborate on more of them, but I'm very happy not to be living in a lab.

And, you know, I never, I never taught at a university. I never got a professorship after I finished my PhD, nor did I seek one. I mean, it was just, I always went into neuroscience very much with the mind of a philosopher who, I knew I wanted to write books and think and speak about 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 now is 50,000, 100,000. I don't know how many neuroscientists 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's, what is the lever 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 their implications for, you know, how we live?

I mean, I just think it's, one is a much higher leverage use of certainly my talents than the other. Well, my dream is to, you know, convince Elon then to take the FMRI machine that you used and then connected to my podcast guests so that I won't need to guess if they're bullshit or not, Sam. That would be the dream. I would predict bullshit and would be harder to detect. Yeah. Than lying. Because it's a kind of confabulatory mode, which, yeah. 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 five minutes ago 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 just, you're just, it's,

just rolling, right? And it's, that would be a hard neuroimaging experiment to design to look for the neural correlates of it. But I support it if somebody wants to do it. So, yeah, I mean, I was reminded of it 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 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 going to ask you about that. I just feel like it's, you know, imagine 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 asked David Chalmers, not to name drop, but, you know, I asked him, you know, if I had Abba on, or actually I said to him, if I had ACDC on from your home land of Australia and I didn't ask them to play, you know, you shook me all the night long, I'm not worth my weight as a podcast. 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 it's solipsistic and negelian that, you know, it's like being a bad is like being a bad. And okay, great. That's a great example of a totology.

Thank you. But it seems to me that you as an experimentalist exerted free will in deciding, A, you know, what's propositions to, to, to, posture and to test and which categories to sort. And I'm not, I'm not saying, although there is a huge replication crisis, you know that, and pee hacking is rampant in the social sciences as well as in, you know, medical sciences as well. If you're doing an experiment about consciousness and those of, in a similar camp might deny that free will exist, you know, how do you, how do you, you know, cut that gordon knot? It just seems, it just seems hopeless. 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-HACC very easily and unintentionally, not malevolently, not maliciously, what are we to make of papers such as that as a physicist reading a psychology paper or something like the neurobiol neuroscience paper? How can we interpret that? 14 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 my wife. So 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 define them, et cetera. I think consciousness is, you might think it's a circular definition, but I just think it's a brute fact of our engagement with the world. And I would say that consciousness has 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'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, 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, we're just on some alien supercomputer, you know, whatever, however confused we are, We're all brains and vats. We're in the matrix. This is just a dream. All of this, 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, you might be asleep and dreaming and not know it and you're going to wake up now and realize, oh, my God, that was just a dream. We didn't even do the podcast yet, right? And yet you were conscious even in the presence of the illusion. 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 there are reasons why that's the case, and they're interesting, but it's just, so that's consciousness. Free will is a very different case. I think free will is an incoherent idea. 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 think it's determined, everything's determined, or you think there's some bit of randomness thrown in and, you know, there's 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. And I think that's provable. I think you could easily imagine design an experiment that would disabuse people of their feelings of free will too, right? Like 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 right-hand button, the right-hand button, you know, illuminated, right? Right, right. But again, to push back with love and respect. Again, that relied on an experimentalist or a censor or some perceptive device to sense then feedback causally, you know, and fast enough not breaking the laws of special relativity to then implant 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 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 seems to be an infinite regress at work here where the sensor is chosen by an agent and what that sensor does is mandated. That's not the issue. It's just that if I've made any unique contribution to the conversation about free will, it's on this point, which is the problem that most people see, and even people who agree with me that free will is an illusion, even someone like Robert Zubalski 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 know that 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 going to 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 can wait for an hour and talk to yourself back and forth, back and forth, and then finally decide, all right, now I'm going to push the button. And that's you doing it, right? 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 the results of those efforts are, you know, fairly unpersuasive, but people 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, the problem is free will is an illusion, right? We know enough about the physics of things. We know there's, you know, every story we can tell about why we push the button or why we 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. It goes back to genes and environmental influences that sculpted your nervous system into just such a state so that it's 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, 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 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 the first person side, you don't know what you're going to think until the thought itself

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

You know, you're just listening to Jock O'Willink all day long, and he's telling you to just do it, you know, and he starts setting your alarm clock, and you get up at four 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 and counterthought is happening all by itself. Sorry to interrupt. 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 gluons and so forth. In other words, a failure of our knowledge of, you know, the state of every of every possible state in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space does not 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 other words, I ask you, but 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, think they have. So here's the move that many people make is they actually just change the subject, right? 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're, you know, that they're

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

Who knows if I'm ever going to get there. It's the longest sentence I've ever uttered, apparently. But this is, I'm doing it. And it feels like something. It feels like, like I can stop whenever I want, but I'm not stopping. 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 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 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 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 take the simplest case. Like if I asked you to think of a famous person, right?

You know thousands, but someone comes to mind, right? Now, why didn't you think of Alexander the Great? Say Carl Sagan. Right, well, then you thought, okay, well, maybe I was thinking of they 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 cards. Like Oprah, like you're capable of thinking of Oprah. But when I asked you a question a moment ago, your brain was not in the Oprah produced,

your Oprah cells were not idling in such a way so as to be among the candidate names that occurred to you, right? So you 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 one. In my view, it means nothing to say that you could have thought of Oprah. You, 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 the moment I ask that question, a trillion times in a row, you're either going to think of who you thought

of deterministically, or you're going to 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 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, a radioactive isotope in there that's degrading. And every time it, you know, kicks off a beta particle, you know, you get jiggled and jostled in a, you know, you get jiggled and jostled in a, a certain way such that who knows what the hell is going to happen. That's your free will, right? That's not what anyone means by free will, right? So the problem is what people think they mean by free will intuitively as a gut sense that 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's side, the whole problem evaporates. Like, it doesn't feel, 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 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, does the, success or the failure feel like free will. It's totally compatible with determinism. If you told me that we live in, you know, 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, You're sectioning this thing in a way so as 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 page 200 exists just as much as page 15, the one you happen to be on. And nothing's ever going to change, and it's just pure fatalism is the right answer. If that were physically true, my experience of life is totally compatible with that being true. And so is your. Sure, yeah.

And I, attention. 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 behave, not knew or read your book, free will or read his book, determined, 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. bid, your, you know, your daughter is, you know, is horribly, you know, her new Porsche is down. I'm not going to 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 cyber truck? And he said, you know, I admit to my shame, you know, I would like them punished, you know, but I don't think we should and so forth. But so, so I'm a behaviorist. So I care about more how you treat me, how you act, and so forth. But yet, I don't. I don't. I don't. believe that I've met someone who truly behaves as if they don't have free will, that's not a psychopath.

Do they exist? I mean, have you met such a person? Well, I think I am such a person to some degree. I mean, 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 I don't share. When you really reflect on the fact that no one made themselves, No one really is at bottom the author of themselves and their actions. So even take the worst person in the world who created just a ton of conscious harm, just pure malevolence, right? You know, someone like Hitler or Saddam Hussein, I mean, just pick your ogre.

And then just rewind the timeline of their life. You just imagine them as a, you know, a 14-month-old infant, right? you know, they're not evil, you know, mustache-twheeling 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 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 I want to contain the damage that somebody is doing are still totally intact, right? And the different, I mean, 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 thousand people, right? It's an awful thing. We don't attribute free will to it.

but 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 feeling of vengeance, right, you know, animated by hatred. And we really, we do hate their effects. Like, we don't like hurricanes. And we would spend a lot of our resources, you know, nullifying them if we could. but and we could view psychopaths, evil psychopaths that way. You know, we would kill them if we couldn't imprison them, right?

And we imprisoned them, but we wouldn't feel this feeling of vengeance. You know, I mean, the other analogy I often draw is to wild animals. Like, you know, if a grizzly bear escapes the zoo and starts killing people, well, what do you expect a grizzly bear to do? That's exactly what grizzly bears do, right? You know, but you're not going to feel, when you, when you shoot the thing or you, you know, tranquilize it and put it in a zoo, you're not going to feel the same kind of hatred for it the way 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, you know, I'll teach you a little bit of the Talmud Torah because I can't resist and I have the great Sam Harris to just share a schickle Torah 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 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 this malevolent, or not malevolent, but it was known to be this danger,

then the ox is killed and you may not eat it. You're like, what the fuck? You're not going to eat the ox because it. a kill, but the lesson, I think it's a powerful one in that if you just think about the ox, did the ox have free will? Obviously, you're going to 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 going to see this ox. And it's a sort of cruelty to keep the ox alive in a sense. And this actually happened in Australia. This woman's father, they owned an emu farm in Australia. And the emu killed their father. And the woman kept it a lot. 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 dangerous emu. I mean, I understand why you would kill it because it means 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 thing that in the, obviously, in the Torah's perspective had this, you know, this, this obviously not free will of a

missionary, because we don't believe animals have free will the same way people do. But anyway, you would agree, though, with Sapolsky that it's, you would like to not feel vengeance, I assume, but, but, I just think you're taken in, in order to feel that vengeance, there's certain things you're not understanding about human beings in order to feel that way. And so you're taken in by a kind of moral illusion. I'm not saying there aren't circumstances where it's a very compelling allusion. 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 want to do is you just kill them with your own hands, right? Like, if the judge would let you, you know, climb, you know, over 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 father or a husband or a friend. Totally understandable. you know, everyone gets that, right?

But the question is, 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're a victim of bad luck on some level. I mean, 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. 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 up. 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 can't believe how different I feel. I'm so horrified that I created so much harm and I want to spend the rest of my life working to atone for it. 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 going to be brain tumors all the way down, right? We're just going to recognize that it's just a, it's a very complex story of bad genes and bad, you know, receptor, you know, receptor connections and just, it's a 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 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 we now we give someone

the pill for evil, and they're better. right so 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 going to 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 a choice element too even let's say i stipulate there in a 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 going to cause me to gain weight. I also have an epigenetic and I also have disposition towards gaining weight.

In other words, there will, it seems to me, be in a possibility to completely decouple, sever this connection between the actions, which is what other people care about, how you behave, and what you're programming or your base layer. I mean, of course, we all have the same number of chromosomes, right? So at some level, there is a starting blueprint that we all share, but we also have to admit that we do have ability to be a jaco or emulate the jocco. Where is your ability? That's more clockwork.

It's more genes and more environments or some combinations. Right. But if it's all, you know, tumors all the way down, then I think you would deny then 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 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 willpower. Look, if I, I think you even said this at one point. If I gave you, I think you said, you know, if I gave you a million dollars, could you really not be, you know,

in a good mood? Or could you really not, you know, go off on Trump or billion, let me, I'll give you a billion dollars to, and you could use it for all philanthropy and wonderful purposes to say, to go on a 10-minute opening rant of making sense about the virtues of Donald Trump. You could do it. I believe that you would do it. Maybe I'm, I'm not sure what you mean, that I would make up these virtues or that I discover virtues in him that I know exists that I'm not currently admitting or what do you I'm just saying if for for enough money or some incentive I could incentivize your behavior to 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 layer there's a meta-epigenetic

layer where there are choices and I don't believe it is true that every murderer is genetically tumorized or, you know, has, no, you're not, it's not just genetics. It's everything. It's, it's, it's genetics plus environment. No, I know. Right. So there's, there's nothing else. And if, if you want to add a soul, no one picks their souls, right? Like, 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. Right. So, so whatever you want to add to the machine, you didn't do it. The you, the conscious view, the one who thinks he's making choices, right? But there's different layers. Again, Again, I'm sorry to bring it back to the tradition.

My point is you couldn't choose to think of Oprah when I asked you unless you had thought of Oprah. Right. But again, I don't have a problem not pushing over an old lady and taking her purse. Like, that's not something that troubles me. I do sometimes have trouble when I have to fill out, you know, this inclusion, diversity and an 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 a member of a transgender group? And this is what universities are doing.

And I want to get to, I know you've been so generous with your time. But in other words, I have a hard time filling that out. Why should I have to say what my pronouns are, whatever? I'm not going to get into a whole Jordan Peterson rant. You're very well-spoken on that issue. But the point is there's what in Judaism called the Beheera point, the point of choice that is different for other people. Murder is not on my list of things that I get credit 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 at those levels, I do feel, if you gave me a million dollars, I would happily fill out. I'd fill out your form. I'd fill out the whole universe. But in what sense is that a demonstration of freedom? I'm just saying, do you believe that a certain amount of coercion? If I pushed you 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, not mimicking gravity. No, I understand. I guess my point is that to truly divorce a person's, you know, to say that at least at this level, as a, you know, thinking behaviorally, that a person has no contribution to a no blame, as I think Robert would like to believe that. But this is a thing. Their blame is, again, this comes back. too, 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, 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 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, and you know something about this person's attentions. You know, they weren't intending to harm you. That really matters. No matter how much harm they did, that matters. That 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, who, who, who, stabbed you with a knife because they wanted to and they wanted to harm you, that person is the 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 become a different sort of person, right? So it's a completely different situation, even if the physical harm to you is exactly the same. So that's why intentions, so the blameworthiness 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 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 a story of

their intentions matter, right? The global properties of their minds matter. But it matters because 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 we can make those moral distinctions without reference to free will. And our behavior in each case can be very different without reference to free will. I agree. I guess, you know, the notion of consciousness still seems to be, you know, resonant for me in that, again, and I think functionally you're correct. Consciousness isn't part of, I mean, 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 was simply harmed you by accident is mortified to have created that harm, and is going to be more careful next time.

and wants to send you, you know, a gift as an apology, right? 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 guess that's, one of my issues is with this notion of determinism as a, as sort of the antipode of free will. I think it's a mistake. Let's say it is random. Let's say there is this microtubules are subject to the wild curvature tensor, which is a quantum field. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hammerov's conception, which Robert Sapolsky admits he doesn't understand and didn't dive into great depth.

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 qualitative, it seems to me there is a qualitative difference and that determined is not the opposite of free will. I mean, is that, am I, am I wrong there? That, I mean, it sort of is the opposite of free will. You're 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 resulting behavior, were perfectly determined, right? As though, and what that, what does that actually mean? Well, what that means is, you know, with a Maxwell's demon kind of knowledge of your starting position, but, you know, we could have a transcript of this conversation before we've actually had the conversation, right? Like, so 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 um and awe 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 compatibleists are tying themselves in knots as though there's some other intelligible space in which to talk about free will that's all bullshit it's just is i mean it's just it's it's just not it's not what anyone means by free will. People think that they could do otherwise than they're going to do next. Right. I guess the reason I brought up determinism not being the antipode of the sphere that is 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 non-local and not predictable in any sense, then functionally, yes. So,

you wouldn't be able to predict when the radium nuclei became a beta particle, right? So randomness, and again, 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 believe 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 going to take place. but it seems to me you cannot do that if there is fundamental at some level a indetermined you can't do that but that's what determinism means like 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 that we can't do the math we can't it's just too chaotic or it's too it's just too um it's a determinate system But we just can't, we can't measure its starting state with sufficient accuracy to say anything about what it's going to 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 one 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. If people weren't having this experience, this would not be an interesting topic of conversation. No one would feel like they had to invent the notion of free will if they didn't feel that they had it. So people know that they have 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 to, 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 signatures. It's associated with, in many cases, a conscious intention to initiate it, right? Like, 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. it 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, 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, to the results moment by moment. And so, you know, if you, if you reach for something and you knock it over rather than pick it up, That's only surprising based on this subconscious expectation you had based on the forward-looking copy of the motor routine you were enacting. If it's an involuntary behavior, like you just have a muscle spasm, right, or you're a seizure, you don't have that forward-looking copy. And so you don't have the, it doesn't feel like 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 just comes back to the 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 to have a memory.

Have a memory. Pick a memory, any memory, right? Are you picking or does something simply emerge out of the darkness? I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, gets you more of the experiences you value. The can be a hotels got it all, a rooftop bar, Have a ball Cocktails up here

Feel just right Is Cambri your home Bring a date Your team Or even your mom Book direct At choiceotails.com See you on the roof

I feel like it's a You know semantically overburden And that it's threatening These types of ideas And thoughts Are threatening to people Because it's

They are so bound up In their identity 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, it doesn't help if you believe it's a random occurrence or quantum mechanics or butterfly effect, et cetera. That doesn't allude to free will. It just alludes to lack of choice or lack, you still are not, you're still are not making a choice. It seems that many people believe, you know,

artificial intelligence, even though humans may not have free will, you know, some of the same people believe that AI will sort of exercise a type of free will to, you know, to pray upon the fact that it may have superior moral judgments in its own estimation. So could AI have exhibit? Not just exhibit. Would AI have free will? I'll just ask it. 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 going to 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 going to know it's just atoms in there banging around because we put them there on some level right it's interesting I mean, 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 those robots, right?

We're just atoms in here, right? You know, like, what else could we be? And again, even if you're going to add a soul, you didn't pick it, you didn't tune it, you didn't, you know, it's just, it's more inscrutable causality. I mean, the ultimate question is to ask, you know, if God, so again, Judaism, the notion is that God demonstrates. So the question is, I always have these issues with when I talk to Christian apologists and I talk to Messianic Jews 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.

He was my first guest. And I said, Freeman, you know, you won the, you won the Templeton Prize. you're almost won the Nobel Prize. You should have won. You call yourself an agnostic. But when I look at you, you know, 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 indistible? And I said, so because of that, you know, my take on myself is 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 want to act in accord that. So let me, let me, I'm sorry to ramble, Sam, but 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 not? And I assume you do with your children. It's great. But I also feel like I grew up. My father was a devout atheist, you know, militant atheists. My mother was not interested in Judaism very much, but, you know, both are Jewish. And it seems to me, and Dawkins has said things like no one's born a Christian child, fine. But 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 going to appreciate it later in life. We teach them languages. It's much easier to apprehend it when you're young, and so too in meditation. But I wonder why not, you know, extend that same courtesy or whatever to at least religious education. And I'll have a follow-up, but I wonder how you react to it because I know your feelings and religion, especially Christianity and Islam are well-known. But I haven't heard you talk as much, you know, about Judaism.

But let's just get your reaction. Is there a downside 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 want to sit down and do scales for three 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 hundreds and thousands. But we should teach them, but 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 to start with those, you, any sane child, a neurologically intact child will realize at some point that they can't all be right. And if this is a multiple choice exam, whatever you pick, if you pick one, you stand a very good chance of being wrong. In fact, you'd have to bet that you're, you know, if the religious, you're

religion you're going to say is true is A, and there are five choices, you stand a very good chance of being wrong, and that 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 embrace of any one of those faiths, 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's why I say practicing. In other words, I keep kosher.

I don't work on the Sabbath and 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're also don't do all these things that atheists don't do? In other words, yes, I'm not going to 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 the community. And there are obvious benefits to religion.

I mean, I don't think you have to deny that. But the question is, 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 kind of, you know, resent my parents for not really causing me to get into this. You know, my brother is a great guitarist. 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 a lacuna in my intellectual development. And I do believe that, and I had this debate with Lawrence Krause, 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 sophisticated. I asked Lawrence, when did you stop practicing Judaism? He said, well, I had my

bar mitzvah, and there were some shameful things, the rabbi said, and they didn't let girls sit with boy, whatever. I said, okay, Lawrence, that's great. So you let a 13-year-old boy you influence the rest of your life and color the way that you think about everybody

such that you call anybody who believes it, you know, believer in fairy tales and supernatural shenanigans, but Lawrence, let me ask you a question. If somebody came upon your book, a universe from nothing, and just attacked it. 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 would you continue the conversation? He said, absolutely not. Like some little pisha, what do you know? But I'm like, Lawrence, you're doing the same thing. You allowed your, you know, distaste and negative experience.

I'm not denying his lived experience. 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 want to say harm because I don't think everybody should be religious at all. I don't believe that. But by not exposing everybody to – or children to – you are exposing them to something else, which is the denial of religion, I think. Well, so – anyway, you don't have to – again, there's an assumption here that I would take issue with. I mean, atheism does not require that one pretend to know that the universe isn't far more mysterious and stranger than we currently know. In fact, I'm sure it's far more mysterious and stranger than we currently know, right?

I wouldn't get the more in heaven and earth 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 me. Many people have defended them for thousands of years.

Sorry, Sam, do you mean the whole purchase of? Let's just take to the Torah. Just take this one piece on board, but 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 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 think.

I mean, 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. 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 would just some very condensed paragraphs that point to truths of mathematics

that we understand now, but we're not understood then. We could talk about, you know, information in a sophisticated way. It gave the basis of computation, et cetera, et cetera, right? So the fact that there's nothing like that. in these books. I actually don't believe that. I'm sorry to interrupt. There's nothing, no, no, but there's nothing like that that is incontestable, right?

If you're going to 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 spent so much time telling us how we should murder our neighbors for thought crimes or keep slaves, right? It would have gotten slavery. 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.

All right. Now, Sam, I love you. And I have to say this with respect. But you just launched, like, the biggest softball. I was secretly. I guarantee you it's not going to go where you think it's going. Okay. I hope for your sake that you're right.

But Sam, no, 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 for it. So the second holiest book in Judaism is Talmud. It's a book of oral. It's called the oral law that's later written down.

It's 2700 pages long. It takes seven years to read one page of it. And actually, religious two, studied every day. Anyway, in the Talmud are all these precepts about what slavery was. And slavery is, I had an argument with you of all know or Harari, although he didn't answer me back. he said the 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 thousands 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 what's called a Balthashova returny. This slavery described in the Torah is not the chattel slavery that we ascribe 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 1846 were giving their slaves time off. It also forbids stealing as one of the Eighth 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, required to 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, slaves were free every seven years. And all slaves were free before. I think we've cut this short because none of this is

summed into what you think. I mean, I have a response to this that doesn't require, you read the litany of pirouettes that people have done for thousands 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's some reason to view this differently. If we squint our eyes in this way, we can find some exculpatory way of reading this. But I'm saying this isn't even squinting. In other words, I think so Jews were meticulous documenters. That's why I said it's 2700. They talk about specific cases where in the Torah, in the actual 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 killing a woman, a wife. Or killing a witch. We can go there. Killing a witch presupposes the real existence of witches, right? Witchcraft is a thing. And you kill people for practicing it. Right.

So I've seen things. Look, in terms of actual the mind state of these people back then, I think to look at them and say, was this carried out? You 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, I love these questions. I'll give you a conversation I had in the modern era with a very observant Jew at a wedding. I just, I just, I didn't know him well, but he was Orthodox.

And I was introduced him at a wedding. So we were there mutually. We knew the bride and groom, but we didn't know each other. And I got into one of these debates. 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 track that you're, you know, 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, 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, I said, take this beautiful couple that we're now here celebrating, I'm pretty sure they had sex before today, right, which is to say outside of wedlock, right, which is to say they're fornicators. That's a Christian term, by the way. Right, yeah. But it's still the, it's not supposed to be done, and 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 a monetary damage offense. Premarital sex, you owe the dowry. Wetlock is not a killing offense? No, you owe the, I mean, look, we're debating it, you know, a thousand years hence, but no, the father would be owed a dowry. And she has higher worth as a virgin than she did as a non-vourgin. All right. So you owe the father.

I forget the example I used then, but it was something, he didn't have that objection to it. But I gave him an example of something that he said, his response was, well, you don't understand. it's none of that, none of this is actionable in the absence of a properly convened Sanhedron. We need a Sanhedron convened, you know, and that's not going to happen until the temple is rebuilt and the Messiah has come back and blah, blah, blah. And I said, okay, well, but then in a properly, under a properly convened Sanhedron, you know, let's say all that happens, then would you be in favor of, you know, stoning these people

to death who were watching getting married? Maybe I was talking about someone there who was gay, who we knew was gay, I forget the details. But he said, well, that's a very interesting point. And he had no, there was no place for him to stand where he could say in the context of a rebuild temple and a returned messiah and a properly convened Sanhedron that this wouldn't be operable, right? Right. But we also don't have to do those Godunkin 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 going to 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 meticulous. That's a dodge. It is. We can spend a long time on this, but let me short-circuit it with the real point, which is, it could be such a better book, right? We shouldn't have to spend thousands of years trying to get God off the hook for writing these barbarous passages. There's so much wisdom. The Ten Commandments, it's a massive problem

that you and I can improve the Ten Commandments, almost without thinking. The Ten Commandments are not the wisest. The Ten Commandments are the only thing the Creator of the universe actually wrote, on on on on on according to both Christians and Jews right is not wrote wrote actually physically wrote like this is 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 says when it says

that God said something it says God says this and when it says Moses said this is okay 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 oh it's never practiced. A, because some laws are meant to be as a warning and they're not actually implemented, and you could argue with that in a second. But the other thing, Sam, is that think about the alternatives. There were better alternatives that were contemporaneous

with those period. Buddhism No, no, I'm saying that's right. It was possible to be less barbaric than Leviticus and Deuteronomy. A thousand years after Deuteronomy. Yeah, I'm trying to make the argument. It wasn't barbaric because there, the

the inaction of it required unanimity of this court to enact it. Why is that you're thinking about these things? There's so many better things. Because you wanted to, Sam, because back then as now, there were honor killings. There were people that would kill their daughter for going on a day or doing other. Honor killings this is a day. You've already given me one commandment that's better than not coveting your neighbor's ass or ox or taking my name in vain or a graven image. 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 would be a better commandment. 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 was common back then and is common to this very day in some parts of the world. Yeah. Right?

It's still relevant. Religious reasons that are taken to a different effect. I agree. I agree. I don't want to live in a theocracy either. I guess my point is that if you look at the Lindy effect, you know, the Lindy effect is 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 Fifth Commandment, I had a very difficult relationship with my father. He abandoned me as a young person. I didn't contact him 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?

I mean, it seems to be provable. If Brian gets cut short, God forbid, that sure should it 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 that you invest. But 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 that's true not just scientifically in the narrow sense. It's true ethically in the broader footprint of reason in the, 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 could improve the Bible any part

of it just by editing it. 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 thousands of years trying to make sense of and trying to everyone's embarrassed by them and they're just tying themselves and knots trying to figure out how to make God anything other than a sociopath for having said this stuff. And, you know, now they pretend to have succeeded by saying, oh, it never really happened. You had to get everyone to agree. Now, why are we talking about stoning children to death for talking back to us? Why is that even a thing? 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 the code or with a person. It's possible they would be better. Like if the people, people 2,000 years ago, so it would have been, it would have been much better. Take to 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 have to disagree because if slavery meant you could. If I owed you a million dollars, 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 have articulated that without opening the door to chattel slavery for thousands of years, right? So God should have known that humans would then, she should have imposed upon. You and I would write a book, again, and it would be trivially easy. And it's proof of my point that 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 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, that is not, so in other words, Sam, 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 Evid, which means servant of God, and the same word appears for your slave, Evid. So let's, so God was Moses was not God's slave. Hold on. This could have been God's slave. And I mean, again, this is, this is just a game that, that is unfalsifiable. The point is, the slaveholders of the South in 1850 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 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.

about. I could have all been clear. It wasn't. Right. Christian. I'm not going to defend Christian. I'll just say one last thing, and we can move on to a couple of final topics. But there is a law that you, when your slave comes to you, your servant and says, I don't want to leave you. You must drive an all 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 want to leave? What kind of slave in the South would not want to leave their master? They all did. People over in the next valley are even scarier 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, now I'm up against a hard stop. I got parenting duties that I would be in defiance of the God that I don't pray to if I didn't discharge him. That's right. All right. 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 of the connection. Sam Harris, thank you so much. We'll be in touch.