Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Taboo Topic Sam Harris Won't Touch

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Starting point is 00:00:55 Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com. slash work. Neuroscientist, an author and host of the waking up podcast, my friend Sam Harris. Sam Harris, one of the world's great thinkers. Dr. Sam Harris. What people seem to mean by free will makes no sense. Depending on the context, the AIs we have either pass the Turing test or they pass it so well that they fail it. At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are. Sam is a neuroscience, philosopher, and New York Times bestselling 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

Starting point is 00:01:36 topics, ranging from rationality to religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Here we go. Hey friends, I've been getting a lot of feedback on the short videos I've been posting for my conversation with Sam Harris last year. I've invited Sam back on the podcast and he's declined for some reason that I think I can explain after going over some of the statements he's made in public about Elon Musk and Donald Trump, but also about the conversation and how it ended with us. Now, this little mini episode is going to be about Sam's really incredulous opinions about religion and its purpose. And it came towards the end, actually at the very end of our three and a half hour conversation.

Starting point is 00:02:46 I was supposed to only be one hour, but I viewed that as a positive, when somebody says they can only spend an hour with me and then they go for three and a half hours. But this was the end of it, and I think this is the reason that he's not so interested in coming back on. And I don't have any ill will towards Sam. In fact, during the recent fires in Los Angeles that affected his very neighborhood and forced him out of his house, as he's talked about, right after the Palisades fire, which impacted and actually didn't destroy Sam's house, but he famously left town with a revolver and a supply of MDMA. I think, he said, or DMT, I'm not really sure.

Starting point is 00:03:24 I invited Sam to come to stay with us here in San Diego, and he politely declined the offer. But I think it's sort of instructive to deconstruct when an intellect such as Sam Harris has blind spots that really don't comport well with his otherwise fairly sensible positions that he's taken in many, many different fronts. And he is making the news lately a lot. He's obviously upped his game in terms of his own Making Sense podcast

Starting point is 00:03:49 and his waking up app. And I know that there's a lot of you out there that are going to say, I'm just defending religion or God or Judaism, which I practice and Sam does not practice. But that's missing the point. What I'm really trying to do is have a serious, sober conversation about the motivations behind someone's worldview. And someone who is incredibly brilliant can have incredible blind spots. Einstein made many blunders.

Starting point is 00:04:15 I'm sure I made many blunders and will continue to do so. And so it's been in a year since we have this conversation, and as I said, it's our first conversation on the podcast and likely the last. Sam Harris is perhaps the poster child for the rational skeptic movement. He's a famous Buddhist who doesn't believe in the supernatural abilities of the Buddha, but does obviously subscribe to the meditative properties that Buddha espounds. But I want to talk about the conversation that we had when we turn to the subject of religion. and at the very end of the conversation, which lasted three hours, I literally got to a point where Sam said, let's cut this short. And I felt it was revealing because it was almost embarrassing to be a part of where you have someone who's so brilliant in many ways,

Starting point is 00:05:06 but is so ignorant about the topic and the subject matter that we were actually discussing. The conversation revolved around the intellectual case and the rational, secular case, for slavery. Sam claims that slavery disproves, the very existence of slavery, disproves the existence of a good God or even God. The Creator. And when you think about how good a book could be if it were written by an omniscient being, I mean, I just how, like, just, just think. I mean, wouldn't, you don't even have to pretend omniscience. You and I could write a page of text right now. It would take us no more than 15 minutes, really. This is not an exaggeration, which if this page were in the Bible or the Quran,

Starting point is 00:05:54 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 just could some very condensed paragraphs that point to truths of mathematics that we understand now, but were not understood then. We could talk about, you know, information in a sophisticated way. It gave the basis of computation, et cetera, et cetera, right? So the fact that there's nothing like that in these books.

Starting point is 00:06:27 Actually, 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?

Starting point is 00:06:51 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. And I'm interested to see what Sam has to say. If he does hear this, he obviously listened to the podcast from last year where he was, dismayed, perhaps, by the turn to religion. And, again, cutting the short, involved a variety of different intellectual rhetorical techniques,

Starting point is 00:07:24 which I thought was sort of beyond what Sam would be. I thought that was inconsistent with Sam's otherwise intellectual bona fide. This included things like moving the goalpost and ignoring corrections and when cornered, doubling down when he's wrong, when the evidence is right in front of him. And I think it's useful to kind of do this. A lot of people seem to think that I'm a Sam Harris supporter and every single thing that he says.

Starting point is 00:07:52 And because I put clips out on the YouTube channel recently from him where he criticized Elon Musk as being perhaps one of the biggest psychopaths on Earth, certainly the most dangerous, with Donald Trump being a close second. That's actually nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, many people have accused me of being woke, Sam Harris, want to be. So this is kind of ridiculous. But nevertheless, I think it's instructive to use the

Starting point is 00:08:17 pushback that I gave to him for many, many moments in this conversation, but particularly around slavery in the Torah, in the Old Testament, the Bible. And as I said, I have no ill will to Sam. I wanted to support him and his family during the LA fires. And I would still do so. I think I have great respect for him. But I think we need to encounter where Sam. deviates from the intellectual, rational discourse image that he's cultivated to perhaps pure theater for its own sake. So in many ways, his performance at the end of the conversation wasn't just disappointing. In some ways, I feel like it's disqualifying for his, for taking him seriously, at least on the basic facts about subjects that billions of people have studied literally for

Starting point is 00:09:01 thousands of years, and those impact morality in this very day. Again, I'm not saying this to defend religion. I'm saying this is a critique of the way that Sam Harris approaches rational discourse when it comes to things that he is not an unabashed authority on, and where he does not say that he's not an expert on. So he will defy, you know, he will not talk about quantum physics in the multiverse without caveating by saying that he's not an expert in that field. But he feels more than qualified to talk about things involving, say, religion, the Old Testament, the Bible, etc. So this is quite troubling. So I think it's important for that. for us to analyze this.

Starting point is 00:09:37 So I'd love to talk about what happened during that conversation with Sam. And let's go back to where it was. Most of the podcast, just to review, was about consciousness, was about the nature of reality, was about neuroscience, which is the subject he has his PhD. And he's often called a neuroscientist. I don't think he even thinks of himself as a neuroscientist. He hasn't done an experiment or written a paper in 20 years or so

Starting point is 00:10:00 since he got his PhD. But he was trained in that he has one or two relatively important citation But let's start with the real impetus for this particular episode reaction video to my own interview with Sam. And it's something that was fascinating to see, which is that the confidence with which Sam asserted the interpretations of the biblical text that he freely admitted he can't read in Hebrew or hasn't really fully studied, but it was clearly pontificating about without actually having any comprehension or dedicating any study to, suggesting that it's trivial and easy and it could be dismissed. have had the same kinds of conversations with Lawrence Krause, who's also a militant atheist, self-declared militant atheist. But where Sam differs is that he speaks with such confidence

Starting point is 00:10:46 about matters that he has zero expertise on. He would never speak about French literature, for example, without acknowledging that he couldn't speak French. And I think there is an example of expertise, as he pointed out in the recent Douglas Murray and Dave Smith debate. You're talking about Sam Harris kind of like criticized me a little bit for not having the credentials to talk about some of this stuff, which, you know, like I, I, and said, okay, he's got a point. Where expertise is still to be respected, even though experts have led us astray in certain ways

Starting point is 00:11:14 and scientists have been gatekeepers. Look, we need gatekeepers. And some of the same right-wing folks that I'm friends with will complain about scientists being gaykeepers and having thoroughly humiliated and be cloned ourselves during the COVID epoch. I am, I believe, absolved from that. I had on the foremost advocate against lockdowns,

Starting point is 00:11:34 Jay Baticharya, Dr. J. Batachari, Dr. J. Batachar, one of my best friends, who's now the head of the NIH. So I had him on during the height of COVID pandemic and the lockdowns and so forth, and I stand behind my behavior during that period. But I think it's important to realize that there is a need for gatekeepers. Many of the same people on the right have no problem with gates around our country, call the border, nor do I. I think we do need borders, and any sensible country should have borders.

Starting point is 00:12:03 So we do appreciate gates, and we do need gatekeepers. They're called ICE. They're called Customs and Border Patrol. So I think it's nonsensical when people say, oh, you're just being a gatekeeper, Keating? In this case, I'm not being a gatekeeper. I'm pointing out that Sam is ignorant and was ignorant, at least, and shows no intellectual curiosity of the basics of the nature of slavery,

Starting point is 00:12:23 as discussed in the Old Testament, but not only in the Old Testament, in the 2,700-page-long Talmud, which is the codification of many of the early Jewish laws and thinking and philosophy and stories. So when I pointed out to Sam that the word Evid, which is the word that means slavery, which he translated as slave, is the same word that was used to describe Moses' relationship to God. That made him very uncomfortable. He, I think, realized the trap that he had been fallen into,

Starting point is 00:12:51 where he immediately said, let's cut this short. And so I think this is exactly the kind of intellectual bad faith he spent decades criticizing in others, the utter cognitive dissonance was shocking to me. And it was quite striking that when he realized that you couldn't say that the type of slavery that was practiced, the chattel slavery practiced in the South in the United States and ended also in the United States through a bloody civil war, that type of slavery had anything to do with what was mandated by God. For example, if you believe in God. I'm not even saying I believe in God, quote unquote, whatever that means I always say, I think that's ridiculous. I also don't believe in gravity. If I take this piece of dark matter and I drop it, I know it's going to fall because I have evidence that it's going to fall.

Starting point is 00:13:36 I don't need to have belief in it the way that I have faith or a moonah or trust in, say, a higher power if I profess as such. But in this case, the fact that Moses is called a slave, if you translate the word slavery, the exact same word used for the type of indentured servitude, which I claim was actually a good thing. So remember, Sam's trying to say that if God exists, he wouldn't create something as stupid as slavery and says evil. He would have known what would happen in the South in America. 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.

Starting point is 00:14:19 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, you acquired a master, that person had to have, if you had one pillow, it had to go to the slave. If the slave wanted to, look, Sam, when the slave wanted to leave, slaves were free every seven years. 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

Starting point is 00:15:08 think better of and they create 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. That's, I think, completely ridiculous. as again, the purpose of slavery in the Torah in the Bible and in the Talmud where it's explicated is to allow people that have debts that they can't pay to act as indentured servitude, indentured servants. For example, you're mandated to treat your slave at least as well as you would treat, say, a child, and that if you have one pillow in your house, the Talmud says, you have to give that to your slave, not yourself. You have to feed your slave, clothe your slave.

Starting point is 00:15:48 and in fact the slaves in many instances there's a law that if your slave doesn't want to leave you have to drive an all a tool through his ear and give him a permanent symbol in his ear that he was unwilling to exercise the liberty the freedom that god had given him again this is if you believe in god but it doesn't matter if you believe in god or not because the fact is and we're describing the relationship of the word slavery or slave or servant god's servant is what moses is called and the notion of chattel slavery in the united states and Sam is trying to make the case that because the Torah, because the Torah specifies and the Talmud specifies,

Starting point is 00:16:24 although he hasn't read either one, it's clear to me he hasn't read. Either one knows nothing about the biblical reading and literature, the commentary on this at all. He's a type of person that might say an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind perhaps, not even realizing that. Even the Talmud suggested that an eye for an eye

Starting point is 00:16:41 would leave people dead, not giving them reciprocal justice. Ambition comes in all shows, shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. At any case, he cut off the conversation when it was clear that obviously this Torah is not talking about Moses as a chattel slave. And so I think that made him extremely uncomfortable. And I don't think that's intellectually a very, I don't think we should take him as seriously

Starting point is 00:17:19 intellectually on this facet alone. Maybe we take him seriously on others. My friend Gadsand calls him the Malibu Meditator. Tim Dillon has made fun of him for his waking up app amidst other claims against Sam. I'm not talking about any of that. I'm just saying, is there a type of intellectual bad faith when you criticize others and sort of have this cognitive dissonance so that you know that you're wrong or have been proven that you're wrong and then you cut it off completely? I think this is oddly, ironically, related to what Sam is most known for, which is the optic blind spot, which we talked about at length in the episode. I even have a short about that on the channel. And Sam made this confident assertion that an omnipotent God wouldn't design humans with such an obvious flaw. But I think,

Starting point is 00:18:02 you know, Sam's no optical engineer. Neither am I, but I have a lot of more experience in optics and technology and data processing than Sam does. But he has a fundamental misunderstanding of both evolution and functional design. The blind spot is actually an elegant solution to a specific engineering constrain. It's not a design flaw. To get signals out of our cryostats, we also have to have blind spots where the cables come out and they penetrate from a 0.1 Kelvin system to a 300 Kelvin system. We have to let light in from the early universe, the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. But we also were letting in excess heat, which warms up the detectors. We have to filter out and have blind spots ourselves in order to satisfy the engineering constraints. It's brilliantly done in cryostat engineering,

Starting point is 00:18:48 and mechanical and cryogenic engineering. I think that's beautifully and brilliantly done. But it's even more so in wet, squishy matter that's evolved over billions of years in some cases with simple light sensing devices and cuttlefish and other objects, maybe not billions, but at least tens of millions of years. And so I think that that is a claim that is arrogant. Again, stating that you know better than a God, again, you don't have to believe in God to assess his argument's weakness. He's trying to say that God doesn't exist because he made an obvious engineering blunder. But that's ridiculous. Our technology, our engineering, there's simply no other way to get a two-dimensional retinal image out in a three-dimensional system without having some part of

Starting point is 00:19:28 the system either. So let's say you moved it off of the optic axis and the macula where it is, and I've done videos about this featuring Andrew Huberman and my conversation with Andrew. But when you have the macula and you have the optic blind spot, there is some part. So you could move it off to the side, but that would introduce an evolutionary disadvantage because you'd lengthen the amount of time. You would have less sensitivity and less resolution, and that would make you more susceptible to predators. So in fact, the way that it's oriented right now is somehow optimal for most living creatures that have the optic blind spot as we do. Now, other creatures don't, but they don't have anywhere near the optic sensitivity and performance that we have. Incredible.

Starting point is 00:20:07 liquid lenses effectively that change shape and last for decades. We see in color, unlike almost any of the animals, most of the animal kingdom is color blind. So I think this, again, it's ironic. It's another blind spot. And Sam didn't stop there. There's a question about the Talmud, the 2,700-page document of legal commentary,

Starting point is 00:20:28 which is developed over centuries by some of the finest legal minds in human history. And Sam's response is, well, we shouldn't have to spend thousands of years getting God off the hook. That's literally what he says. But this isn't about engagement with scholarship. It's about dismissal without understanding and arrogance that you can sort of intuit what all these things said. But you would never say that about peer-reviewed scientific literature. We shouldn't have to spend decades studying scientific literature. Now, again, Ironica, Sam is rightfully appalled by such statements, even though he is not, as I said, an active researcher. He's a body of scholarship, which is quite minimal compared to practicing you.

Starting point is 00:21:06 neuroscientist, for example, that would say, or a neuroanatomist or evolutionary biologist. So I think the slavery mischaracterization, though, is really the argument where Sam felt weakest and as evidenced by the fact that he's essentially unwilling to engage anymore, even though he spent three and a half hours and took multiple, you know, biological breaks. And he, again, this is a man who gave me an hour at the start, or actually his assistant told me, he only has one hour, three hours go by, I take that as a good sign that he's enjoying himself. He could have gotten out at the hour, but he didn't. So up until that point, everything was going swimmingly until he brought up chattel slavery and how his theory of, and how he said that the two of us could come up with a

Starting point is 00:21:49 better system of moral and societal regulation than the Torah in 15 minutes. So when I laid out the specific protections in Jewish law, the mandatory freedom after seven years, remember, how many slaves in the American South would refuse to the point of the point of the law, the mandatory freedom of of having this all drilled through their ear and remaining in their owner's house. I mean, this is ridiculous. There's no comparison between the type of slavery, the avid slavery, a vodah, slavery, servant, which is what it means, indentured servitude. All the things that these servants would have rights that they were mandated to give or else they'd be taken away by the local courts. These individuals had to have rest on the Sabbath. I mean, they made it into the Ten Commandments,

Starting point is 00:22:32 provisions on release, they have to be given a wife if needed, if wanted, if desired. It's a fascinating thing from a psychological perspective to see Sam who's built an identity around being intellectually honest when he's confronted with evidence that contradicts his narrative. And his response is essentially evasion and termination of this long and quite enjoyable conversation. Right. Right. But we also don't have to do those gedankan experiments because we know based on case law. For example, a famous one that even Obama made fun of, you know, stoning your child.

Starting point is 00:23:05 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. I know.

Starting point is 00:23:23 But we can spend a long time on this, but let me short circuit it with the real point, which is it could be. 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. So it's obvious after this conversation, we'll never talk again unless we happen to meet up in person in Arawan Market in Malibu. But it's like watching a real-time study and confirmation bias. And it kind of serves as a cautionary tale for those. I know there's many more fans of Sam than there are of me, and that's fine. And we differ on many things, but I can hold my own when it comes to discussing the ancient texts, if you will, and you may dismiss them. I don't give a crap if you dismiss them and think they're

Starting point is 00:24:07 superstitious fantasy of a supernatural skydady and blah, blah, blah, blah, the idiots like Scott Galloway and people that dismiss things. Again, with zero knowledge whatsoever, they just think they can intuit it without ever studying it. And it's ironic because in other ways, you know, Sam is quite perspicacious. I think another blind spot he has is about drug enhancement. So I want something that's become increasingly more apparent in that he has built much of his recent philosophy and insights on what he has experienced through psychedelic experiences. We talked about that in the interview. MDMA, DMT, Silas Saeban, he's tried it all. He's essentially augmented the traditional, purely spiritual Vaphasana practices. Now I subscribe to both his paid podcast and his paid

Starting point is 00:24:52 app. So again, this is not coming from a place of purely wanting to take him down. It's just grappling with someone who is intellectually honest selectively. And I want to, you know, explore this and say, look, I'm not opposed to consciousness research. But when I asked them basic historical facts about these experiments and the relative lack of knowledge in, you know, in double-blind studies, et cetera, with psychedelics, I know that it's a controversial subject,

Starting point is 00:25:20 but that he's talking about, you know, a regular encountering with Schedule I substances, it raises some interesting questions. I think you have to at least look into that. It's not irrelevant to the reverence that we should or should not have in a person who puts himself out there as a champion of neuroscientific rational discourse. So it's quite striking to me that he, again, when he was forced at firepoint as the houses around him cascaded into flames, and tragically so, billions of damage done in Los

Starting point is 00:25:55 Angeles, that he took a gun, which I don't fault him for. I would take a gun too, but that he also grabbed some Schedule I substances as well. Those, not the photographs, not the wife's wedding ring or whatever, just teasing there. But the point is, this kind of pronouncements from people that put at the same level of importance, say, as your family heirlooms, when facing an existential crisis, he didn't know if his house would survive or not. In fact, at one point he thought it wouldn't and was told that it wouldn't. So I think there's a pattern here. You know, in some ways, Sam is one of the foremost courageous, outspoken champions of rationalism. But in other ways, he's become quite the opposite of what he set out to be, making claims in confident assertions

Starting point is 00:26:45 that he is an expert in something or can speak about stuff and dismiss scholarship or thought processes, either because he thinks it's too primitive or because he thinks that it's outdated and that he could do better. Remember, he's saying that he and I could do better than the God of Moses and the Ten Commandments, of Judaism, Christianity, without doing any kind of rigorous analysis. Has he studied anything about the Old Testament, etymology of words, the grammar, Hebrew, no, he doesn't care because it's simple, it's trivial, it's a skydady, and so it's not worth really thinking about. I'm not saying, you know, we should cancel him. I mean, he's uncancelable, as he says, because he's

Starting point is 00:27:24 self-supported and he's rightfully so. You've got to give it to him. He's got a great industry going with the waking up app and the Making Sense podcast. He's got something like 100,000 paid subscribers at $100 a pop per year, $129, I think I pay for it.

Starting point is 00:27:41 Plus the podcast, another hundred bucks. So he's making a lot of money and I don't fault him at all for that. Capitalism is a wonderful thing. But I think the intellectual ethical vacuum that he exhibits in some ways in his thought processes was disappointing to me. And of course, I am not a substance user. I think it should be reserved for very, very limited cases when it's

Starting point is 00:28:05 medically necessary. And I think it's incredibly intriguing in an intellectual level for someone that's rejected moral systems, traditional moral systems, to be operating on pure intuition through his psychedelic experiences. So I think as a framework for this thought process, I found it lacking. So what I observed in this three-and-a-half-hour conversation is someone who's becoming intellectually isolated. He's increasingly getting entrenched

Starting point is 00:28:33 in a echo chamber of his own making where he chooses to criticize Donald Trump and Elon Musk at every chance that he can get, famously saying he didn't care. At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. Right? So I guess there's nothing.

Starting point is 00:28:54 He still doesn't care about it. He says that anything that Pete Hegeset did is a thousand times worse than what they did. Now, again, I listen to Sam, I respect Sam, but he's in an echo chamber, an intellectual echo chamber. And I think he needs an intervention. And maybe this is part of that way of going about it. To say that someone like Donald Trump is, you know, destroyed the planet almost as much as Elon Musk, who's destroyed it even more. He mentioned a bet that he made with Elon about COVID deaths,

Starting point is 00:29:21 and this is where their relationship broke down. And Elon, as he said literally, if you look at the Moore with Sam segment of the Making Sense podcast, which I think is free. It's not just for subscribers like me. It shows the level of, yeah, what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome and now Elon derangement Syndrome is quite hyperbolic, and I think it reveals his own intellectual blind spot. And this is what he accuses religious fundamentalists of doing. So it's very shocking to me that Sam is becoming kind of a secular fundamentalist. I mean, we have religious fundamentalists. I agree with Sam and that.

Starting point is 00:29:55 It's one of the most dangerous forces in nature. But where do you get your morality from, Sam? Where does this come from? You could say you're smarter than me. Maybe you are. Maybe you're much smarter than me, Sam. And you don't need some book to tell me what to do or tell you what to do. And you'll just divine it and derive it from drug-enhanced spirituality,

Starting point is 00:30:13 meditation, sitting on a couch somewhere in silent contemplation. But I still don't think I would dismiss it without serious engagement. I think that you present yourself as a rational skeptic with an artistic level of incredulity about the topics that you don't know anything about. And that's, you know, everyone has limits to their education. So again, this has said maybe as an intellectual intervention and hopefully it can lead to greater engagement or at least maybe having some closure and some close. closure with precision. I don't take any pleasure in this. I actually admire much of Sam's work.

Starting point is 00:30:49 And many of you are out there saying Keating, you're just a shill, you're just a Zionist, you're just an idiot, supporter of religion. Look, I've talked to all these great. And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm an idiot. I haven't been at this podcasting game as long as Sam has or other people have. But intellectual honesty is something I pride myself on. I can steal man the opposition's case. I don't think Sam could steal me on the case that Elon has done some good for the country for the world or Trump has done some good for it. He even said he's a

Starting point is 00:31:20 horrible father and he uses his kids. You'll see it in the clips that I put out and you watch the three hour episode, three hour long episode. It's actually the most popular one I did on all of Spotify in 2024. The conversation really revealed something important and it's really the

Starting point is 00:31:36 danger of becoming so convinced of your own rationality that you don't see your own biases. This is something that Sam has warned others about for decades. And ironically, he's fallen into his own trap. It's a cautionary tale about the limits of self-awareness and the corrosive effects of ideological certainty and of ideological self-capture, the solipsistic nature and tendency to really get high on your own supply, not the DMT or the MDMA. But even the most sophisticated thinkers can become prisoners of their own intellectual frameworks. The question, I think, you have to ask yourself,

Starting point is 00:32:11 Are you courageous enough to examine your hero's beliefs with the same rigor that we applied to other people? And I think that is the magic question that I want to leave you with today. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Taboo Topic Sam Harris Won't Touch

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