Making Sense with Sam Harris - The "After On" Interview

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

This episode of the Making Sense podcast features an interview that Sam Harris did with Rob Reid on the After On podcast. They speak about publishing, psychedelics, terrorism, meditation, free speech and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, in this podcast, I'm actually releasing an interview that I did on someone else's podcast. That podcast is After On, and the interviewer is Rob Reed. Rob founded the company which built Rhapsody, the music service that created the unlimited on-demand streaming model that Spotify and Apple and others have since adopted. Rob has also spent lots of time throughout the Middle East, including a year as a Fulbright scholar in Cairo. And he's an investor, but he's mainly a novelist these days. And he started his

podcast originally as a limited run to promote his novel, also titled After On, but now he's going to continue it indefinitely. And many people who heard this interview originally thought it was unusually good. Not that I'm unusually good in it, but that we covered a lot of ground. And we certainly did. Rob and I talk about publishing and psychedelics and terrorism and meditation, publishing and psychedelics and terrorism and meditation, free speech, and many other things. And in fact, Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED conference, heard it and got in touch with me and suggested that I release the interview on my own podcast. And he felt this interview covered topics that I don't often touch, or at least don't touch in that way. And I don't take strong recommendations from Chris

lightly. The man surely knows how to put on a show. So with Rob's permission, I am giving you a slightly edited version of the podcast he released. I have to give you a little warning about the sound quality. We tried to clean it up on our end, but there are a lot of popped Ps. That's probably best listened to in your car or at your desk. But Rob is a great interviewer, and he's since had many other interesting guests on his podcast. So if you like the angle he took with me here, you might check him out at after-on.com,

and you can find out much more about his book there too. And now, without further delay, I bring you the conversation I had with Rob Reed. So, Sam, thank you so much for joining me here at Tom Merritt's lovely home studio. Yeah, happy to do it. You were a guest on the Art of Charm podcast about a year ago, and they asked you to describe what you do in a single sentence, and you said, I think in public, which I thought was a very elegant way of putting it. I was hoping you might elaborate on that, and in this case, feel free to use as many sentences as

you wish. Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that back to me because I would have totally forgotten that description. It's a useful one. Increasingly, I'm someone who's attempting to have hard conversations about what I consider some of the most important questions of our time. So the intersection of philosophy, particularly moral philosophy and science and public policy and just things in the news, topics like race and terrorism, the link between, you know, Islam and jihadism, and things that are in the news, but that have, when you begin to push on these issues, they run very, very deep into the core of human identity and how we want our politics to proceed and the influence of technology on

our lives. So there's just, you can almost, you pull one of these threads, everything that people care about starts to move. Yeah, there's a great deal of interconnection. And I'd say, and correct me if this is wrong, but I'd say you started thinking in public in earnest, perhaps back in 2004, with the release of your first book, The End of Faith, in which you argued stridently against all types of organized religion and in favor of atheism. It peaked at number four, was it, on the New York Times best seller list or thereabouts? You know, I don't even remember. It was peaked at number four, was it, on the New York Times bestseller list, or thereabouts? You know, I don't even remember. It was on for, I think, 33 weeks, but I think four sounds about right.

Yeah. So obviously you got out there in a big way with a book. You've since written, is it four more bestsellers, New York Times bestsellers since then? Yeah. Yeah. That designation means less and less, as it turns out, but I mean, there are bestsellers and there are bestsellers. There are. They're the bestsellers that bounce off the list, which most of mine have been. And then there are those that stay on forever. But yeah, I've had five that have hit the list.

Yeah. And what's intriguing to me is that quite recently you have developed a wildly successful podcast. And I was hoping you could characterize the reach that the podcast has attained compared to that of these very, very successful series of books that you did. Yeah, the numbers are really surprising. And don't argue for the health of books, frankly. A very successful book in hardcover, you know, your book comes out in hardcover first normally. book in hardcover. Your book comes out in hardcover first normally. Some people go directly to paperback. But if you are an author who cares about the future of your book and reaching lots

of people, you publish your hardcover and you are generally very happy to sell 100,000 books in hardcover over the course of that first year before it goes to paperback. Indeed ecstatic. That would probably put you in the top percentile of all books published by major publishers. Oh, yeah. And that is very likely going to hit the bestseller list. Maybe if you're a diet book, you need to sell more than that. But if you sold 10,000 in your first week, depending on what else is happening, you almost certainly have a bestseller. And, you know, in the best case, you could sell 200,000 books or 300,000 books in hardcover. And that's a newsworthy

achievement. And then there's the one one-hundredth of one percent that sell millions of copies. So, you know, with a book, I could reasonably expect to reach 100,000 people in a year, and then maybe some hundreds of thousands over the course of a decade, right? So all my books together now have sold, I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm pretty sure I haven't reached 2 million people with those books, somewhere between a million and 2 million. But with my podcast, I reach that many people in a day, right? And these are long form interviews, and sometimes it's standalone, sometimes just me just talking about what I think is important to talk about for an hour or two. But often I'm speaking with a very smart guest, and we can go very deep on any topic we care about. And again, this is not like going on CNN

and speaking for six minutes in attempted soundbites and then you're gone. This is, people are really listening in depth. And so if we were to clone you in two right now, and one of the Sam Harris's that we ended up with was to record a podcast, and the other Sam Harris was to write your entire literary output. Who would require more time? Yeah, well, that's the other thing. Forget about

the time it takes to write a book, right? Which in some cases is years, in some cases is months, depending on how long the book is and how research-driven it is. But it's a lot of time. It's a big commitment to write a book. Once it's written, you hand it into your publisher, and it takes 11 months for them to publish it. So there's that weight, you know, and then... There's a lack of immediacy, certainly. Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, that increasingly, that makes less and less sense. Both the time it takes to do it and the time it takes to publish it don't compare

favorably with podcasting. In defense of writing, there are certain things that are still best done in written form. Nothing I said has really any application to what you're doing. I mean, you're writing novels. Reading a novel is an experience that people still want to have. Yes. But what I'm doing in nonfiction that's primarily argument-driven, right? There are other formats in which to get the argument out. And I still plan to write books because I still love to read books. And taking the time to really say something as well as you can affects everything else you do. It affects the stuff you can say extemporaneously in a conversation like this as well as you can affects everything else you do. It affects the stuff you can say extemporaneously in a conversation like this as well. So I still value the process of writing and

taking the time to think, you know, that carefully about things. The thing that is striking, though, is the extraordinary efficiency that the podcast has become as a way for you and many others to disseminate ideas in terms of the hours that you put into the creation of it, which are non-trivial. I'm learning that as a very new podcaster myself. It ain't easy to research and put one of these things together. But compared to a book, there's just incredible leverage there. Now, another thing, speaking of large audiences, I believe I read somewhere that you were featured in the most heavily watched Bill Maher video clip of all time. Do you know if that statistic is accurate?

I suspect it still is accurate. It was at the time. It was the most viral thing that ever got exported from the show. And you were discussing Islamophobia with the then future Batman. Yeah. And why do you suppose that clip became so widespread? I mean, Bill Maher is no stranger to controversy. The exchange between you and Ben Affleck and between Maher and Ben Affleck did become quite heated. But in any given month, there are many interactions on

cable news and on Sunday talk shows that are at least as lively. What do you think it was about that that made it go so widespread? And also, if you'd characterized it, if you'd care to just characterize it briefly for those who haven't seen it. It was a combination of things. It was the topic. It was the fact that it was a star of Ben Affleck's caliber going kind of nuts and going nuts in a way that was very polarized into the audience. So what happened briefly is I was actually on not to talk about Islam or jihadism or terrorism or anything related to this topic. I was on to talk about my book on meditation, waking up, you know, where I was trying to put our spiritual concerns, our contemplative concerns on a rational footing.

And it just so happened that, I mean, this is a hobby horse that Bill and I have ridden for a number of years talking about the unique need for reform in Islam. You know, I have an argument against all faith-based religion, but part of my argument is to acknowledge that religions are not the same. They teach different things, they emphasize different points, and to its discredit and to the reliable immiseration of millions of people, Islam emphasizes intolerance to free speech and intolerance to political equality between the sexes and a rather direct connection between suicidal violence and martyrdom, and hence all the problems we see throughout the

Muslim world at the moment and our collision with it. So in any case, that topic came up of Islam and jihadism in the middle of this interview, and Ben Affleck jumped in. I mean, clearly he had been prepared by somebody to hate me, because his intrusions into my interview with Bill were otherwise inexplicable because he was sort of at my throat even before the topic of Islam came up. I was still talking about meditation and he said something snide, again, in a mid-show interview that is normally protected from the intrusions of the rest of the panel. So it was weird. And then the thing just lit up with him seemingly completely misunderstanding what Bill and I were saying, but doing it in an increasingly adamant and ultimately

quite heated way. So he was unhinged and not making any sense from my point of view. And he was calling us racists and bigots. And in some ways, proving the very points that you were making. Oh, yeah, in every way. My point was, listen, people get emotionally hijacked on this issue. They don't actually follow the logic of what is being said. I'm criticizing ideas, not people. Islam is a religion subscribed to, to one or another degree, by people who call themselves Muslims. But we have to speak

specifically about the consequences of specific beliefs. It becomes incredibly relevant to know what percentage of people think dying in defense of the faith is the best thing that could possibly happen to you, or that apostates should be killed, right? So we're talking about the consequences of ideas, and there are many, many millions of Muslims who would repudiate both of those ideas. So obviously, I'm not talking about them when I'm talking about the problem of jihadism or a belief in martyrdom or apostasy. And so he proved himself totally incapable of following the plot, just as I went, as I was talking about that very problem and went berserk. And the most depressing thing about that encounter was to see how many people on the left, and in particular apologists for Islam and so-called moderate Muslims, who viewed his performance as just the height of ethical wisdom, right?

Like he had unmasked May and Bill's racism as though being Muslim was to be a member of a race. I mean, that non sequitur was the first thing people should have noticed. But he was celebrated as just this white knight who came to the defense of beleaguered brown people everywhere, right? Really? I missed that part of the... To a degree that is just, I mean, if you've looked on social media in the immediate aftermath of that, it was just a tsunami of moral and political confusion, really. It was like a nuclear bomb of identity politics. Well, what's interesting to me is I looked at that in preparation for today's talk, and it would seem the tide has changed. I looked at the YouTube clip, and I know

that you've said in other places that YouTube seems to be a particularly bad cesspool for really vitriolic commentary at times. And I figured I'd scan it quickly to get a sense of like, what's the percentage breakdown. And I looked at almost 100 comments, I believe. And I did not find a single one that was pro Ben Affleck. I mean, people were making the points that you just made that he was essentially making your points for you. In that when you start talking about ideas, people presume that you're trying to paint with a broad brush people, which you were not trying to do. So it might have changed since then. But in the immediate aftermath, there was a

very pro-Ben kind of reaction to what it sounds like. Yeah. And it continues in a way that is quite shameful. So for instance, the comic Hassanhaj, who just did the White House Correspondents Dinner, so he's now the one that Trump didn't attend, but his stature has risen among comics of late. And he just released a Netflix special where he talks about this issue, just praising Ben Affleck to the skies and saying quite libelously that Bill, in that exchange, advocated for, quote, rounding up Muslims and containing them, as though in concentration camps, or at the very least internment camps. How this got past Netflix fact checkers—

He stated that as a fact, not as a punchline, not as a joke. He said that as a fact. Bill Maher said on camera, a YouTube clip viewed by millions of people, round them up. This is his position, that he wants Muslims rounded up and contained, right? And he didn't, happily, he didn't mention me by name. He was talking about Bill and Ben in that episode. But it's just pure delusion and slander. It's a massive applause line in his world. So this is a kind of form of asymmetric warfare.

Whenever I inadvertently misrepresent the views of my opponents, I mean, no matter how malicious the opponent, right, if I say something that gets their view wrong and it gets pointed out to me, I publicly apologize for it. I am absolutely scrupulous to represent their views faithfully. As they represent them themselves. Yes, yes. Because some of this gets fairly bloody. But when I'm pushing back against my critics, and again, no matter how malicious, I am always holding myself to the standard of articulating their position in a way that they couldn't find fault with. And then I can then go on and demonstrate what's wrong with their view. Anyone who criticizes Islam as a doctrine, or really anyone who touches any of these third

rails that have become so fraught among liberals and progressives. So to talk about race, to talk about gender, to talk about really any of these variables around which identity politics have been built, reliably produces people who think that defaming you at any cost is fair game. So they will attribute to you views that not only do you not hold, they are the opposite of the views you hold. They will make any attempt to make that stick. Do you think in their minds it's an ends justifies the means thing where they are so committed to their position and they are so utterly certain that their position is objectively right

that they're saying, okay, I know he didn't say round them up, but I'm going to say that he said round them up because that will eliminate his credibility and the elimination of his credibility, even by a dishonest mechanism, serves such a higher good. Yeah. Do you think that's the calculus? Obviously, there's a range of cases here. And so the most charitable case is that there's some number of people who are just intellectually lazy and are just guilty of confirmation bias. They're misled. They hear a snippet of something which strikes them a certain way, and then they just run with it, right? And they feel no intellectual or moral obligation to get their facts straight. Anyone can fall prey to that. I mean, if, you know, I've been so critical of Donald Trump, if you show me a tweet that looks insane from him, I'm not going to spend any time trying to figure out if it's really a tweet from him, because all of his tweets have been insane. So either the chances this one's real is very high. If revealed that it was fake, well, then I'll walk back my forwarding of it or whatever. But everyone only

has so much time in the day. And so it's easy to see how people get lured into just being lazy, right? But then there are the people who consciously manufacture falsehoods. You know, I think there are actually real just psychopaths in any movement, right? And they're people who just have no moral qualms in spreading lies, no matter how defamatory, no matter how likely they are to increase the security concerns of the people involved. Spreading the lie that someone is a racist or that they favor genocide against Muslims, say, which these are both lies that are just endlessly spread about me and Bill and even former Muslims or Muslim reformers with whom I support, someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Majid Nawaz, I mean, people who have excruciating security concerns.

Endless lies are told about them, and these lies have the effect of raising their security concerns. It could jeopardize their lives. Yeah, yeah. This is well understood by the people who are telling these lies. For instance, this is just, you happened to catch me in a 24-hour period where this has happened to me in a fairly spectacular way. Really? So yeah, I had Majid Nawaz, who's this brilliant and truly ethical Muslim reformer on my podcast.

And a reformed Muslim as well. He had been in prison for a period of time for radical activities. Yeah, so he's a former Islamist, which is distinct from a jihadist. He was not a terrorist. But he was trying to, you know, he was part of an organization that was trying to spread the idea of a global caliphate. And they were trying to engineer coups in places like Pakistan and Egypt. So he was doing fairly nefarious things. He was recruiting for this organization, and then spent four years in an Egyptian prison and got essentially deprogrammed in proximity to jihadists and fellow Islamists, just understanding of the kind of world they wanted to build more deeply. And

then he was also taken as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. And it was the juxtaposition of that kind of ethical overture from the enemy. Because he at that time would have considered Amnesty to be the enemy. Oh, yeah. This is a Western liberal progressive organization. Now, all of a sudden they're coming in and defending me, even though they know I loathe everything they stand for, because that is what they do. That is consistent with their values. So that got through to him. And what organization in the Muslim world or the Islamist world does that, right? It broke the spell. And so he came out of prison and very soon thereafter disavowed his Islamist

roots. But did not disavow Islam, right? He is still a practicing Muslim. He's at pains to say that he's not devout. He's not holding himself up as an example of religiosity. But he's identified as a Muslim. He's not an ex-Muslim. He's not claiming to be an atheist. And he started this counter-extremist think tank, the Quilliam Foundation in the UK, that has attracted theologians and other former Islamists and has a very active program of deprogramming extremists, both jihadist and otherwise. And this is just the most courageous and necessary work. I mean, of all the things that human beings should be doing, especially people in the Muslim community, this is just, it has to be at the top of everyone's list. And yet he is demonized as an

Uncle Tom and a native informant by so-called moderate Muslims, right? And so he and I wrote a book together, which was initially a kind of debate. I mean, we're on, you know, I was the atheist criticizing Islam and talking about the link between the doctrine and terrorism, and he was arguing for a program of reform. And it was a very fruitful collaboration and a very useful introduction to the issue for those who have read the book. And there's a documentary coming out, you know, based on the book, and we did a speaking tour in Australia together. I'm totally supportive of him, in Australia together. I'm totally supportive of him. I mean, he's a real friend now. And so he was on my podcast in January, and we're having a conversation about all these issues. And there's a part of the conversation where I'm essentially playing devil's advocate with him. And so he had

been talking about reform. And at this point, we're speaking specifically about the migrant crisis in Europe, born of the civil war in Syria, and just what to do about the millions of people who are pouring across the borders into Europe at that point, and just the ethical challenges of that. And I'm on record, both in that podcast and elsewhere, saying that I think we have a moral obligation to let in all the Syrians we can properly vet. I talk about these people as the most unlucky people on earth. I was against Trump's travel ban, right? And I have criticized that on television, on my podcast, and in print. Yeah, you've been quite unequivocal about that. Yeah, yeah. And again, within this specific podcast, made these points. I talk about secular and liberal Muslims being the most important

people on earth and the people who I would move to the front of the line to get U.S. citizenship if they wanted it, if I had any influence there. So my views on this matter are very clear. So there's a part in the conversation where I'm playing devil's advocate, and there had just been a terrorist attack in Germany in the Christmas market where a jihadist in a van plowed into dozens of people and I think killed 12 and injured 50. And at one point I said to Majid, okay, so you've said many hopeful things thus far. I want to push back a little bit. I can well imagine that there are millions of people in Europe at this moment, in the aftermath of this Christmas market attack, who are thinking, why the fuck do we need more Muslims in our society? Surely we have enough. Why not just not let anyone else in, right? So someone who apparently has been doing this to all my podcasts,

I only just noticed this time, someone in the Muslim community took a snippet of the audio, starting with, why the fuck do we need more Muslims in our society, right? And then there's just, Maja's contribution here is just, he's just kind of nodding along saying, yes, doing nothing to push back. I mean, just seeming to acquiesce to my position here. And he tweets this out, this minute of audio, witness, you know, Sam Harris's genocidal attitude toward Muslims and, you know, Majid's support. And then all the usual suspects, Reza Aslan and Max Blumenthal, you know, the odious son of Sidney Blumenthal, who has never resisted an opportunity to lie about people like me and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid.

All of them, just full court press, pushed this out. I mean, now we're talking about people who have platforms of hundreds of thousands, you know, and that percolates down to all the people who have tens of thousands of people on Twitter. So millions of people receive this. And this is just yesterday or... Yeah, yeah, this is now 48 hours ago. And I'm seeing people from, I'm seeing a writer from The Nation also push it out. And also like nearly docks me where she says, well, next time I see him at my favorite coffee house, and she names the coffee house that I'm at rather frequently, I'll tell him what I think of him, right? So it's the most irresponsible use of

social media. And in the case of people like Reza Aslan, he absolutely knows what my position is, and he knows he's lying about it. And there is clearly a world of difference between what you had characterized as the most charitable case, which is this is just somebody who's incredibly lazy and doesn't research. This person very plainly, surgically removed something out of context, very, very surgically, not an oopsie blunder kind of thing. Put it out there. And those who picked it up, presumably knowing a thing or two about both you and also the source, just spread it wantonly without any notion of checking to see if it was taken out of context. And the other thing that's crucial here is that

even if you wanted to extend the most charitable interpretation to them, that is a genuine mistake. The secondary forwarders, in a sense. Within 15 minutes, the hoax is revealed. Because I have, you know, nearly a million people following me on Twitter. And I pushed back against it, you know, multiple times. And I sent a link to the timestamp to the beginning of the actual part of the conversation that reveals just what is being said. No apologies come from any of these. No retractions. No retraction. They don't delete it. Which you wouldn't expect from the person who did it because they did it quite wittingly. But the people who forwarded it to hundreds of thousands of people, having been made aware,

would have a moral responsibility to walk that back because it does put you, aware would have a moral responsibility to walk that back because it does put you, it heightens the physical threat that you live under. We are probably either a double digit number of months from software, which we've seen the first prototypes already, that would allow somebody to basically sample your voice, which there are many, many examples, and basically do a marionette thing where they have you say whatever they want. But these tools are going to be out there and they're going to be misusable by anybody. Yeah. And you could be made to say, I could be made to say, the president, anybody could be made to say

absolutely anything. And I wonder if that's going to kind of in a perverse way help things because audio quotes will from that point forward just simply not being taken seriously. Yeah, no, I'm really worried about that. But I do actually see the silver lining you just pointed to. I think that it will be so subversive that people realize that all you can trust is the actual source. Yeah, it'll be so misused so quickly. I imagine something similar has happened with Photoshop now. Sure, yeah. People just don't use photos as forensic evidence in the same way.

And they're fairly skeptical about what they see in an image when it counts. Just imagine if someone forwarded to you a photo of Trump in some insane circumstance, your first thought before forwarding it would be, wait a minute, is this photoshopped? We'll have to be that circumspect about audio and even video. So now they have the mouth linking fakery, the completely fake audio, which again, sounds exactly like the person's actual voice, can be made to seem like it's coming out of his or her mouth. You add the visual cue and look, it always, what happens in audio happens next in video. Well, to sort of go a little bit bigger picture for a moment, I'm delighted to be talking to you now because there's almost an uncanny overlap between the subjects

you've dedicated your life to understanding and those that are discussed in my novel after on. The main topic of the book is super AI. You're very widely quoted on this subject. You gave a great TED talk about it almost exactly a year ago. Another major theme in the book is consciousness. You spent an entire decade exploring consciousness full time. I'm not sure if that's an overstatement, but it's an approximation. A connected major topic is neuroscience. You are one, or you're a neuroscientist. And yet another major theme is nihilistic terrorism. And of course, you're now one of the most outspoken people in the U.S. on this subject. I think the only lifelong focus of yours that's not a major obsession of the book is jujitsu. So we will keep the jujitsu talk to an

absolute minimum here. But before we go back into all this, and particularly nihilistic terrorism, I'd like to consider the life trajectory that made you expert in all these topics, starting at the first time our lives overlapped without either of us realizing it. We were both undergraduates at Stanford at the same time. I was a year ahead of you, young man. And I'd like to go back that far just briefly, because you embarked on an unusually bold and, as it turned out, unusually long project for one of an undergraduate age. And it's a project that I think has a great deal to do with who you are now. So when you arrived at Stanford, you're on campus, you haven't yet made this bold decision to take an enormous amount of time off. What was your thinking of religion at that point?

Were you an atheist already? If you were, was that a major part of your identity, a minor part? Well, I was definitely an atheist, but I wouldn't have called myself one. The term atheist was not really in my vocabulary. I was completely unaware of the history of atheism, organized atheism. I wouldn't have known who Madeleine Murray O'Hare was. And I had never been given religion by my parents, so I wasn't reacting against some dogmatism that had come from the family.

And you came, your parents were from very different religious traditions, correct? Yeah, but both just... not practicing. Just unreligious, yeah. I mean, they were just, but again, they were not atheists. They wouldn't have called themselves atheists. But you had, one of your parents was Quaker, is that right? Yeah, Quaker, and my mother's Jewish. And so this is also slightly an artifact of what it is to be surrounded by cultural Jews who are not religious. I mean, so Judaism is almost unique in that you can have people for whom their religion is still a seemingly significant part of their lives. They care that they're Jewish, but there is zero otherworldly or supernatural content

to their thinking about what it is, what it means to be a Jew. I believe it probably is unique. I mean, maybe the Parsis have something similar. Yeah. And this Jewish experience of secularism is fairly misleading to most Jews, I find, because they kind of assume that everyone else has lost their religion to the same degree. You know, so I've debated conservative rabbis who, when push came to shove, revealed they believed almost nothing that could be classified as religious. Their notion of God was so elastic as to commit them to almost nothing, you know, nothing specific about what happens after death, nothing that can necessarily be prayed to or that can care about human events. I'm not talking about reformed

Jews. I'm talking about conservatives. You know, the ultra-Orthodox believe a fair number of imponderable things, but short of that, Judaism has really been denuded of its otherworldliness. I grew up in that kind of context where even religious people—again, my family wasn't—but even people who went to synagogue didn't believe anything. So I was fairly sheltered from the culture wars in that respect and was just unaware of the kind of work that religious ideas were doing in the world or in the lives of even people on the coast in different faiths. When I got to Stanford, I remember being in the Great Books seminar, and the Bible was one of the books that is considered great and that we had to read. And I remember getting into debates with people who had clearly come from a Midwestern Christian background, say, or more of a Bible-built

experience, and just having absolutely no patience for their belief that this book was fundamentally different from the Iliad and the Odyssey or anything else we were reading in this seminar. And the professor's way of holding that text in particular compared to the other books. I don't know if she was religious, but she seemed to be carving out a kind of different place on the bookshelf for this text to occupy. And from my point of view, the stuff we were reading wasn't even great. I would admit that there are great parts of the Bible, but I mean, we were reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy and just, I mean, these are the most deranged recipes for theocracy that have ever been written. I mean, these are certainly sections of them are worse than

anything that's in the Quran or any other terrible book. I was just astonished that we were wasting time reading this stuff. The only argument for reading it, in my view then, and it's really my view now, is to understand how influential the book has been elsewhere. I mean, you want to be able to understand the allusions in mean, you want to be able to understand the allusions in Shakespeare, you have to be conversant with the Bible. But the idea that this is somehow a great flowering of human wisdom, you know, again, specifically books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Those are books in which the grim punishments for people who step out of line, among other things, are detailed in

kind of gory detail. Yeah. And they're not allegories for anything. It's just, these are the reasons why you need to kill not only your neighbors, but members of your own family for thought crimes. Right. Here's how you should be living. And it's just, you almost couldn't invent a worse worldview. And the corollary to that is anyone, any neurologically intact person in five minutes can improve these books spiritually and ethically and politically and in every other way, scientifically, economically. I mean, there's just nothing that this is the best for or even good for apart from creating conditions of, you know, Taliban-level intolerance in a society. That is, if, you know, people actually believe this stuff. And, you know, very few Jews now believe that you should be paying any significant attention to Leviticus or Deuteronomy. And Christians have their own reasons for ignoring it. But what we're witnessing in the Muslim world is that there are analogous texts, the parts of the Quran being one, and the Hadith, and the biography of Muhammad being the rest of the canon, which

detail, you know, very similar levels of intolerance and a commitment to prosecuting thought crime, and many, many millions of people take them very, very seriously. And so you were in a state of outrage at the fact that these texts were being held up as great. You were certainly not a believer in any manner. Atheism may not have been a word you would have applied to yourself, but it was something that you essentially, from what you're describing, that's kind of what you were on the inside. If you look at the DSM, 10-year journeys of spiritual discovery are generally not considered to be symptoms of atheism. Yet, from that point of de facto atheism, you essentially did take off on, is it fair to say, a 10-year journey of spiritual discovery and near full-time exploration of consciousness.

Yeah. So what happened is I took MDMA for the first time, and I had taken other psychedelics as a teenager. I mean, really just mushrooms a few times. And I will add that Stanford in the late 80s was awash in MDMA long before it entered the club scene in the UK. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it was all over campus. I didn't know that, actually. I'd never encountered it.

Yeah, yeah, no, it was all over the place. And we called it X in the United States, and then the Brits, who kind of discovered it a few years later, called it E. And it was something that was just so part of just sort of the fabric that I mistakenly thought it was a very, very widespread drug and it didn't become widespread until much, much later. Now, I wasn't as bold as you. I actually was fearful of this stuff, but it was everywhere. It was definitely everywhere in the 80s. Yeah. Then you were in hipper circles than I was. Well, you were hipper than I was because you actually tried it. Yeah, no, I mean, maybe it was everywhere because I had taken it. It was like all Sam's on it.

He tried it. Yeah, no, I mean, maybe it was everywhere because I had taken it. It was like all Sam's on it. I was evangelizing pretty hard, at least to three captive friends when I got back to campus, because it really did blow my mind. I mean, it just changed everything about what I thought was possible. So that was the pivoting incident. That was what caused you to, I didn't realize that. So that was the thing that caused you to say, I'm out of here, at least for now.

Its connection to my dropping out was a little less direct than that. It took a little more time, but it just took like a quarter, you know, but it was, you know, 10 weeks later, I was not enrolling again. But I guess I took it during spring break or something. I wasn't at Stanford. I was back home when I took it. This is something I write about in the beginning of my book, Waking Up. It was the first experience I had where the implications of that change in my consciousness, they were far more global and they suggested something about the possibility of changing one's consciousness

in a more durable way. I wasn't left thinking, wow, ecstasy is amazing, or that was a very interesting drug experience. It seemed to unmask something about the nature of my own mind that was more true than what I was tending to experience. So the experience of having my actual true self in a way occluded by neurotic layers of my personality that were being rebuilt by, that had been suppressed by the drug. So, I mean, the experience was briefly of just feeling all self-concern drop away so that I was, you know, sitting, I was talking to my, one of my best friends, and he still is one of my closest friends, and he had never taken it before either. So we both took this, and we, again, we took it, this is before anyone had a rave or, yeah, so, and we took it very much in the spirit of trying to find out something interesting about our minds. We

weren't partying. This was, this was... More of a Timothy Leary than a Ken Kesey type of experience. Yeah, this was given to us as it had been kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community, like this is a drug that shows you something about the nature of spirituality, the nature of love, ultimately. So we were just curious about what was there to be discovered, and I just remember talking to him, and there was nothing psychedelic about it at all. I mean, there were just no visual distortions, no sense of coming onto a drug, just this increasing sense of moral and emotional clarity where I just have more and more free attention to just talk to my friend. I'm getting less and less at every moment as I'm coming onto this. And it took a while for me to recognize what had happened friend. I'm getting less and less at every moment as I'm coming onto this.

And it took a while for me to recognize what had happened, but I'm becoming less and less encumbered by the concern about what he's thinking about me. I mean, so like I'm looking into his eyes and I'm no longer like, and you know, there's changes in his facial expression in response to what I'm saying. And I'm no longer reading that as a message about me. It's like, I'm no longer behind my face, looking at him, no longer tacking in the wind of somebody else's attention on me. There was just a sense of zero self-concern. I mean, my attention was not on myself at all. I was simply paying attention to my best friend. And that pure granting of attention was love. What I was experiencing more and more as the minutes ticked on was just a total commitment to his happiness, his well-being, just wanting everything that could that could possibly happen for someone to happen to him, right? There was nothing transactional about that. It was just a pure

state of being. It was just like the state of being fully attentive to another person as just the locus of a moral concern. And this led you to decide that you wanted to significantly alter your curriculum, I guess. I mean, you were at that point taking the, you were a sophomore at this point. So not a notoriously delightful year for anybody, but you were taking a lot of things, preparing to declare your major if you hadn't yet already. And so I assume that this made you realize that there was a different curriculum you wanted to pursue in a sense. there was a different curriculum you wanted to pursue, in a sense. So ironically, it led me to realize that all of the otherwise incoherent and offensive noises that religious people had been making for millennia actually were inspired, must have been inspired by experiences like this, right? So like, whatever you want to think about Christianity and the Bible, Jesus was probably talking about this, right?

Or something like this. So the one thing that just bore in upon me like a freight train in that experience was the recognition that millions of people had had experiences like this, and many not through drugs, but through, you know, prayer and fasting and, you know, other contemplative exercises, yoga, meditation. So there was a path. Your mind could be more and more like this than mine had tended to be. And without chemicals.

Yes, because it's all just chemicals. It is, yeah. The drug is, you know, drugs are mimicking neurotransmitters or inspiring neurotransmitters to behave differently. I mean, you only have a few levers to pull in there. But I didn't have a background in neuroscience at that point. And I had been an English major. And so when I went back to school, there was nothing in school that I could connect with that immediately seemed like this is the most rational use of your time, given what you just experienced. And I also was writing, I was planning to write fiction, and I wanted to write... I know you were working on a novel, weren't you? Yeah, yeah. So I

had a kind of a dual agenda when I dropped out. I was going to write a novel and study meditation. I started going on meditation retreats that were getting kind of longer and longer, and then I was going to India and studying meditation with various teachers and going to Nepal. And this is mostly in a Buddhist context. Did you buy into the religiosity of Buddhism? Because often, I mean, there's extraordinarily powerful spiritual practice that is embedded in Buddhism. But in other contexts, you've said you can access that and leave the religiosity behind if you wish. You're coming in as a young person, as a novice of sorts into this community.

Was it easy for you to take sort of almost the neuroscientific wisdom that was being transferred and leave out the religious wrapping that I imagine it often came in if you were going on retreat and going to monasteries and things like that? Yeah, not entirely. I mean, I was not, I never became a religious Buddhist or much less a religious Hindu, though I was studying with teachers in both traditions. But I was not yet a scientist. I was not yet really scientifically literate. I mean, my background, I'd been studying English at Stanford and hadn't taken many science courses at that point. And I became very interested in the philosophy of mind and in the conversation that was happening between

philosophers and scientists about the nature of consciousness. So I was getting some brain science in reading what philosophers were saying, and I was reading some stuff at the margins of neuroscience. And then I was also reading a fair amount of popular physics because a lot of the popular physics was being marketed as a way of cashing out a new age mysticism. People were hurling books at me on quantum mechanics. And the scientific and philosophical confusion there was not yet obvious to me. So at a certain point, undoubtedly, when I'm up to my eyeballs in Krishnamurti and reading patently magical books like Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, and then I'm also reading Ken Wilber and people who are wrapping up Eastern wisdom with basically the spookiest exports from physics.

So if you had asked me what I thought the universe was like at that moment, I undoubtedly some New Age gobbledygook could have come out, you know, which is I now view as quasi-religious. There's a fair amount of confusion there. And I've debated people like Deepak Chopra, who still promulgate that kind of confusion. I was always interested in just in the experiential component of meditation and any of these paths of practice. But when you go far enough into the experiential component and begin to confirm some of the very surprising things, some of the very surprising claims about the nature of the mind that only seem to get made by people in the East, for the most part, who are also making claims about the magic powers that come with attaining very high states of meditation and the miraculous feats of various yogis and gurus,

well, then you're surrounded by people who believe, for instance, that their favorite yoga teacher can read their minds, right? And I was always somewhat skeptical of these stories. I mean, I don't think I had the phrase confirmation bias in my head, but I could see that the disposition among these people to believe, the desire to believe these stories to be true was, I mean, there was very little resistance in the system to just accepting everything uncritically. I think I was, you know, I was on the skeptical end there, but I was not spending any time trying to debunk claims about magic. I was simply just trying to get to the most qualified teachers and learn whatever they had to teach.

And it was roughly a 10-year period, correct? Yeah. Which you were going on to retreats, coming back. How many of those 10 years were you in silent meditation? Would it total to a year or more? It totaled to about two years. If you strung them all together, the various silent retreats. Yeah. I never did a silent retreat longer than three months, but I did a couple of three months,

a couple of two months. Sounds like a doozy to me. Yeah. I mean, it's long. It's just an amazing experience. I mean, there's something, you know, paradoxically, you can experience the same thing in a moment off retreat. It's just an amazing experience. I mean, there's something, you know, paradoxically, you can experience the same thing in a moment off retreat. It's not that there's in principle, the necessity of being in silence, but for most people, it's amazingly powerful to go into silence. It's an experience unlike any you tend to have, even when you're spending much of your day alone and out in the world. You know, for those who don't have an experience with meditation, this is, I guess, some explanations in order, but whatever practice of

meditation you're doing, you're really in two conditions while doing it. You're either lost in thought, you're just distracted by your kind of the automaticity of discursive thought, and you've just forgotten that you were supposed to be meditating, or you're paying attention to the thing you're trying to pay attention to, and that is your practice of meditation. And we spend so much time in our lives lost in thought, having a conversation with ourselves that we're not aware of having. And so much of this conversation is neurotic. So much of it is producing unhappiness. You're thinking about the things you regret having done. You're thinking about the things that didn't go well moments before, hours before, days or even years before. You're thinking

about what you want, about what you're anxious about, what you're hoping will happen, you know, a moment hence or at some point in the future. And you're spending almost no time truly connecting with the present moment in a way that is deeply fulfilling. And to take my experience on MDMA, you know, one of its features was just full immersion in the present moment. There was just zero past and future going on. And part of the ecstasy of that experience is attributable just to that. And this is an experience you really can have in meditation, focusing on anything to a sufficient degree produces an ecstatic state of mind. I mean, there's bliss to be found just in being concentrated. It's just being sufficiently concentrated on the breath or a light or anything. It doesn't matter

what it is. You can also be additionally concentrated in specific states of mind, like loving-kindness, which is very much the emotion that one often experiences on ecstasy, that is a specific meditation practice within the Buddhist tradition. And, you know, in other traditions, there's a devotion to the guru, and, you know, in the Western tradition, there's, you know, the love of Jesus, right? So there's no question that you can be one-pointedly fixated on the object of your devotion and get that emotion so intensely realized in your mind that it obliterates everything else. Incredibly expansive experiences of await someone who can get that concentrated. It need not even be in the positive

emotion of love or devotion. It could just be the breath. So I started, you know, I started training in various types of meditation for periods up to three months or so. And so that was punctuating the decade of my 20s. And it took me a while to realize that I had to go back to school. And did you come back to English at that point? Because you were studying English at Stanford previously. No, I came back to philosophy because I had been reading philosophy and essentially writing philosophy nonstop throughout this period for 10 years. So very much with the attitude of someone who's going to go to graduate school in philosophy, I went back to finish my undergraduate

in philosophy. With an idea that this is a segue into graduate work, but then you ended up pivoting to neuroscience of all things, which is vastly much more of a hard science. How did that pivot come about? I mean, it makes imminent sense looking at who you are now and regarding it with the benefit of hindsight. How did that come about in the moment? The fact that I had dropped out of Stanford was also just sheer good luck because Stanford is, as you probably know, is like the one school, certainly the one good school that has this policy where you basically can never drop out. I mean, you just... Well, they call it stopping out. They don't even call it dropping out. You've stopped out.

And there's a presumption that at some point in your life, you may wish to come back. And if you do, the door is essentially always open. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Tiger Woods can go back to Stanford today. I don't know how long it's been. It's been 20 years or something, but he can just walk back in and the registrar will just have his name in the computer. Take his check for sure. You know, I guess that's the way it should be. I'm sure there's a reason why Harvard and Princeton and other good schools don't do it this way. They don't want you back unless you've been writing them letters every year. And at a certain point, I think you have to reapply. You have to give some accounting for what your years in the

wilderness have done to you. Well, I think you're probably an object lesson in that perhaps that's not such a great idea because Stanford did get you back and it was to, you know, their benefit and yours, and I'd argue to the world's, that you were able to slide back into that and make this pivot to neuroscience. It's interesting to look back on that because in my 20s, I remember at one point, I think I was probably 25 and first had the thought, you know, I should really go back to school to do this right. But the psychological barrier to going, like, I felt so old at 25. I felt so neurotic around, wait a minute, I can't go back and be a junior in college at 25. It's flabbergasting for me to glimpse who I was at that moment, because, you know, I went back at 30 or 31, very close to 31. And that's a much more neurosis producing bit of arithmetic. And it was psychologically hard to do

because I mean, you just picture it, I'm going back and I've, again, I've spent now a decade reading and writing on my own. And I'm now having to take, do a full philosophy major, taking all the courses. And I'm doing this as fast as I can because I want to get this done with as quickly as Right, because you started with English. So you're in, you're in like sophomore seminars. You're in like, you're in with freshmen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm taking, I have to take, I'm not getting any breaks.

I don't have credit for what I've already read. Yeah, yeah. And I'm taking a massive course load to do this quickly. But I'm also getting my papers graded by, you know, 20-year-old TAs. And it was just brutal. It was just, you know, so... Same way I think you need to mature as a writer. Yeah, yeah, you know... Maybe when you're a junior. It was an extraordinary experience. But it was, you know, ultimately a good one,

because it was just, at a certain point, it was not about saving face. It was just, you just have to use this as a crucible to get the tools to be able to speak clearly, write clearly, and you just have to get out of your own way. I was spending all of my time focused on overcoming the hallucinatory properties of the ego, right? It's like, I want to wake up from this hallucination where it seems to matter what another person thinks about me and conditions how I feel about myself in the next moment. And you know, if 10 years of meditation aren't going to get you there, I guess it's just time to go back to school and get it done, right? Yeah, exactly. And what meditation gets you, at least at my level, is not a permanent inoculation against all of these unpleasant states of mind. The half-life of psychological suffering gets massively reduced.

Right. You regain balance rapidly. Yes. It's sort of up to you how rapidly. At a certain point, you can just decide, all right, I'm going to stop suffering over this thing. And absent an ability to really meditate, you're a victim of whatever half-life it's going to be in your case. So if you're going to, if you get suddenly angry now about something that happens, you know, you could be angry for an hour, you could be angry for a day, you could be angry for a week. And over that period, you could do all the life-deranging things that angry people do to screw up their relationships. Because you've got plenty of time to do them.

Yeah, exactly. If you're angry over a week or a month or whatever it is. Yeah. And the difference between being angry for 30 seconds and being angry for an hour, it's impossible to exaggerate how important that is. It's a massive quality of life impact. Yeah. And so it is with embarrassment and everything else.

So you got through and then neuroscience beckons. I was going to do a PhD in philosophy, but again, my interest was in the philosophy of mind. And I thought I would do a PhD in philosophy, but it was just so obvious that the philosophers were either having to become amateur neuroscientists to actually interact with what we were finding out about the brain, or they were just having a conversation that was completely uncoupled to what was known about the brain. And so I just decided I needed to know more about the brain. But I went into neuroscience very much as a philosopher with philosophical interests. And I never went in thinking,

well, you know, maybe I'm gonna work on flies. Did you have to take like pre-med courses or anything? Because I mean, I think of neuroscience as obviously it's a deeply biological subject. You're gonna need to understand, you know, metabolic pathways, neurological pathways. Did you have to take like a whole pile of classes having finally finished this philosophy degree to qualify?

As I was finishing my degree at Stanford and my interest in the brain was starting to come online, I took a few courses that were proper neuroscience courses. And then when I applied, I got provisionally accepted. They wanted me to take a genetics course at UCLA. I had about nine months between when I finished at Stanford and started at UCLA. And I needed to take a genetics course just to show them how I would function in a proper science class. I've always been a bit of a drudge and a good student. So, I mean, there was no problem doing that. And happily, what happens when you go into, I don't know if this is true in every neuroscience program, but at UCLA, whatever you've come from, you have to take everything all over again. So I'm surrounded by people who did their

undergraduate degrees in neuroscience or in molecular biology, but we have to take all these fairly basic courses in, you know, molecular neuroscience and cellular neuroscience and systems neuroscience. And you just have to take it all again if you've done that as an undergraduate. So it's review for them and arguably a little bit easier, maybe a lot easier, but you're all going through it. You're getting put to the same level. That's good. Yeah. And on some level, all of that is a, just a vast memorization feat, you know, I mean, certainly neuroanatomy is just this memorization exercise, unlike any other. And you're just learning how to play a language game. You're just learning just the concepts and the parts and how to talk about them and how, and how

we currently understand them to be interrelated. Looking back on it, it would be daunting for me to have to do it again now, but it was, it. And then you get into your research and then you get into the, you know, having to use the methods and answer the kinds of questions you specifically want to ask. And again, there, my interests were, you know, very high level and fairly philosophical. I mean, I was studying belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI. So putting people in the scanner and having them evaluate propositions on various topics, propositions that were either clearly true or clearly false or clearly undecidable. And so I was comparing belief and disbelief and uncertainty and just looking at what

it means neurophysiologically to be in a state of accepting some propositional claim or rejecting it. So what brain regions were lighting up? Yeah. And just what the difference is. And I was interested to know if it was reasonable to speak about a kind of final common pathway or a content-neutral property of just belief? I mean, is granting credence to a statement about the world, is that a unified thing in the brain? And is rejecting something as false a unified thing that is, in some basic sense, the same, whether you're talking about the virgin birth of Jesus or two plus two makes four, claim, whether you're talking about the virgin birth of Jesus or two plus two makes four,

we're recording a podcast right now, or you're a man, or you went to Stanford, or to evaluate any of those claims as true or false, obviously invokes very different kinds of processing in the brain because, you know, math is one thing and, you know, your autobiography is another. The truth testing wouldn't be the same there, but the granting of assent, and crucially for me, becoming emotionally and behaviorally susceptible to the implications, really the imperatives of accepting something to be true or rejecting it as false. So if someone comes in and says, you know, I hate to tell you, but your wife is cheating on you. You know, I just saw her, you know, you think she's on you. You know, I just saw her, you know, you think she's on a business trip, but I just saw her at a restaurant with this Lothario who I know,

right? Is that true or false? Everything depends on whether that is true or false. And your evaluation of it, given the right evidence, it's instantaneous, right? It's like your world changes in a moment, this propositional claim, which is just language, it's instantaneous, right? It's like your world changes in a moment, this propositional claim, which is just language. It's just noises coming out of someone's mouth or, you know, it's just an email, right? So it's just a bit of language becomes your world the moment you grant it credence. And so that shift— You almost made a belief detector, it sounds like. We did, in fact, make a belief detector, which, you know, under the right conditions would also be a lie detector. If you know whether someone is representing their beliefs accurately, you know whether or not they're telling the truth. And, you know, that's an interesting topic.

The future of mind-reading machines, I think, undoubtedly will be a future in which we will be increasingly confident whether or not someone is telling the truth. Yeah, because current lie detector technology is from the, what, the 1920s and is notoriously, notoriously easy to trick. Yeah, but it's not even a valid science, even if you were not tricking it, you know, it's... You could inadvertently trick it. Yeah, it's just measuring physiological changes that are correlated with anxiety. But, you know, if you're not an anxious liar, then you're... You're going to pass with flying colors. And if you're an anxious truth teller, as some people are. Right.

So in the middle of all this research, 9-11 happens. Right. And that, was that a direct trigger to the book Into Faith? Yeah. It was. Yeah. So within 24 hours, I was writing what became that book. I mean, I was writing initially a book proposal, but I wrote essentially the first chapter of that book. You know, the very

next day I started writing it. So 9-11 came, I had finished my coursework, I was just starting my neuroimaging work, and I was already focused on belief, you know, and religious belief is a subset of that. And I had just spent this previous decade plus focused on just questions of spiritual concern and what is true in religion and why do we have these competing worldviews that are religious in the first place? And what is it necessary to believe to have a meaningful life? And then people start flying planes into our buildings, clearly expecting paradise. This is an act of worship, you know. And we immediately start lying to ourselves about why they did it. Because I had read the Quran.

I hadn't focused on Islam to any great degree, but I was pretty sure I knew what these guys were up to, right? Like, the moment I heard about what al-Qaeda was, just you have someone like Osama bin Laden, who could be doing anything he wants. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars. He could be living in Paris and dating models, but no, he's decided to live in a cave and plot, you know, the takeover of the world for the one true faith, I immediately recognized the spiritual intensity of that enterprise. He was not faking his belief. He believed what he said he believed, and it was only rational to take his stated beliefs at face value. I had been surrounded by people who believed the Hindu version or the Buddhist version of karma and rebirth, right? And

they believed it absolutely to their toes. And I understood why they believed it. And many of them were having intense experiences of the sort I was having in meditation or on psychedelics. And there's no doubt in my mind that members of Al-Qaeda were having intensely meaningful experiences of both of solidarity, you know, among their fellow jihadists, and just many of us have gotten into things that suddenly seem to answer much of what we were lacking in our day-to-day experience. You yourself did in college. Yeah, but I mean, even seemingly more trivial things.

So we all know that certain people, you know, they become vegan or whatever, and all of a sudden it's all about getting their diet straight, right? Or they get really into yoga, you know, and this happened to me with Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I mean, I got into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and all of a sudden, that's the only thing I can talk about with people. Like, it's just, you know, I've become a cult recruiter for jiu-jitsu. I mean, you go down the rabbit hole with these things and suddenly you have immense energy for paying attention. It just becomes effortless to pay attention to this thing. Now, just imagine something that has all of these components. It has the—one, you actually believe the doctrine, so you believe that this life is just a way station here, And the only thing that matters here is getting your head straight about

what's on the other side of death. You have to believe the right things now. You have to get your life straight now so that when you die, you go to the right place, right? There's no question that millions of people, billions of people, really, most people who have ever lived believe something like that about the way the universe is structured. And Islam, in particular, this especially doctrinaire version of it, gives a uniquely clear picture of just how all of that is organized. I mean, it's just, it's a very self-consistent view of just what you need to believe and how you need to live to get to the right place. Imagine having that kind of moral and spiritual clarity in your life, which immediately translates into a recipe for how to live.

There's just zero ambiguity about how society should be structured, how men and women should relate. But then there's this whole political layer, which is all of these historical grievances, whole political layer, which is all of these historical grievances, where the West, the infidel West, and the materialistic West, really the obscene West, has, by some perversity of history, acquired all this power and essentially trampled upon the only civilization that has ever mattered to God, which is the Muslim one. In addition to everything else, you have essentially the yoga component and the diet component and the personal life straightening component. You have this political component where you have to

right this great historical wrong and spread this one true faith to the ends of the earth. I mean, this is a missionary religion. This is not Judaism. This is not Buddhism. The way this works is you spread this thing, right? And there's nothing pacifist about this. As a man, you get to harness all of your testosterone. You get to be essentially a spiritual James Bond, right? You get to go to war for this thing. You get to kill the bad guys. You get to be a part of a gang. But get to kill the bad guys. You get to be part of a gang. But with social approbation within your circles, as opposed to the negatives that would come with being a gang member. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like, this is a spiritual gang. It's also incredibly well-funded. I mean, if you look at how the Saudis have funded the spread of the Wahhabi-style

Islam, this is a gang with petrodollars behind it. And the rewards are simply beyond comprehension, literally, because the rewards are paradise. I mean, it's like we see gangs motivated by, you know, money and access to women and all the things that, you know, have powered, you know, lots of gangs and lots of songs. And that's teeny compared to the upside that these folks would imagine that they're playing with. And so you felt you knew a thing or three or 10 or 100 about belief. This happens, you dive into it. And it's interesting just talking about belief because I know one of the complaints that you have about a lot of your critics

is that they don't seem to think the Islamists believe that which they actually say. Yeah, it's amazingly durable, this piece of confusion. But the idea is that the jihadists, even those who blow themselves up, right, in what is just transparently the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, they don't believe what they say they believe. They're not being motivated by religion. Religion is at worst being used as a pretext for political goals and economic grievances and, you know, psychological instability. Or it's being cited by Islamophobes as a way to sort of slander Islam by saying, well, these people did it for religious reasons. No, that's an Islamic phobic thing to say. They really did it for this other reason.

What other reason is offered as an alternative to fervently held belief? Political grievances, or they were so despairing over the state of the Palestinians, you know, under the Israeli boot. Again, this can be more or less plausible if you're talking about a Palestinian who's being mistreated in Gaza. It's completely implausible when you look at a third generation British Muslim recruit to ISIS who had to drop out of the London School of Economics in order to go to Syria, right? And there are endless numbers of cases of people who have every other opportunity in life who become, quote, radicalized in this way. There's a deep skepticism among people who simply don't know what it's like to believe in God, frankly, a real God, you know, a God who can

hear your prayers, a God who can hate homosexuals, a God who cares how you live, not this elastic God of just good vibes in the universe. People have lost touch with me in many academics how you live, not this elastic God of just good vibes in the universe. People have lost touch with me in many academics, you know, virtually every anthropologist I've ever had to talk to about this stuff. Many journalists, many so-called scholars of religion just don't know what it's like to believe in God and then doubt that anyone really does. They don't actually think that people believe that they'll get virgins in paradise, right? They think this is just propaganda, propaganda that nobody believes. Almost like the Judaism that you described of your youth, where people would go to synagogue

and they'll go through these things, but not because they believed in something ephemeral, but because that was sort of a cultural or a community activity. People are projecting that on to this world. And you certainly are not saying this as some kind of a neocon. I mean, I imagine you probably first voted in a presidential election in 1988. How many Republicans versus Democrats have you voted for? I've never voted for a Republican. Never voted for a Republican. And you actually think that this was a decisive issue or potentially decisive issue in the election that we just had, correct? Would you kind of go into that just briefly? Well, yeah, because we had a

president for eight years that just clearly lied about this particular topic. I mean, he would not name the ideology that was delivering us this form of terrorism. He would just talk about generic extremism or generic terrorism. And he was quite hectoring and sanctimonious about the dangers of naming this ideology. So at one point, he gave a speech just pushing back against his critics. You know, I was a huge Obama fan, actually. And when I compare him to our current president, You know, I was a huge Obama fan, actually. And when I compare him to our current president, it feels like we have kind of fallen into some new part of the multiverse that I never thought we would occupy. I mean, it's just unimaginable that we've taken this turn where you have a totally sane, intelligent, ethical, professional person running the country, and then you have this unhinged con man running it next. But Obama really got this part wrong, and disastrously so. And Clinton seemed to be echoing most of his delusion on this part. I mean, at one point, she talked about extremist jihadism, or radical jihadism. As if there's moderate jihadism.

Yeah, as though there's moderate jihadism that doesn't pose a problem for us. But so in the immediate aftermath of Orlando, the Orlando shooting that killed, I think, 49 people. 49. It was the biggest mass shooting in American history. Right, right. No parallel. And clearly an act of jihadism.

I mean, just transparently so. Everything that Omar Mateen said, he just connected all the dots. It could not be clearer. And Hillary Clinton spoke only about the need for gun control and the need to be on guard against racism in the aftermath of Orlando. And that was just, I know at least one Muslim who voted for Trump just because of how galling she found that. To use Trump's language, it's all true, the political correctness and delusion. I mean, it was just a refusal based on this fake concern about racism. I mean, Islam is not a race, right?

Not at all. You and I could convert to Islam right now, and we would be part of this particular problem if we converted. When I lived in Cairo, I knew lots of Western, both American and European converts who were very sincere and devout Muslims, and they had not a drop of Arab blood in them, etc. It is not a race, absolutely. actually claim to believe these specific doctrines, right? And the doctrines get fairly inimical to most things we care about in the 21st century very, very quickly. You can't convert to the lived experience of just having been a nominal Muslim surrounded by Muslim culture, analogous to the Jewish experience that we just talked about. So I

just had Fareed Zakaria on my podcast, and he's a Muslim. He identifies as a Muslim. He's clearly not religious at all. I mean, most serious Muslims would consider him an apostate. I mean, he's not a believer, right? But he has a Muslim experience analogous to the kind of Jewish experience that matters to him, and he feels solidarity with that community. You know, I can't convert to that, right, because I don't have that experience, but I could become a member of ISIS if I check the right boxes. Hillary was such an obscurantist on this issue. And again, in the immediate aftermath of this horror, when you're having attacks in Europe that are also enormous and seeming to presage more to come in our own society, right? And this need not have been a winning issue for Trump, but it was among the two or three things

that— Yeah, in an election that tight, there are arguably probably dozens of winning issues, because anything that swung a few tens of thousands of votes— 75,000 votes. Yeah, and in the right or the wrong place. Now, you mentioned, you know, political correctness and language. You have stated a few times that you view free speech as the master value. Yeah.

Would you care to just say briefly why that is? Because I think it's an intriguing, intriguing notion. Because it's the only value that allows us to reliably correct our errors, both intellectually and morally. It's the only mechanism we have as a species to keep aligning ourselves with reality as we've come to understand it. So you're talking about the data of science, you're talking about the data of human experience, everything you can conceivably use to judge whether or not you're on the right track or the wrong track. And again, this applies to everything. This applies to human health, it applies to politics, it applies to economics,

it applies to spiritual concerns, contemplative concerns. It's the corrective mechanism. It's just, it's the only mechanism. And if certain ideas are inutterable, you're not going to be able to correct. If there's certain things that you will not, you refuse to talk about, this is what's so wrong with dogmatism. So dogmas are those beliefs or those doctrines which you will assert the truth of, and you'll, you demand people remain aligned to without justification, right? It's like the time to justify them either never arrived or it's long past, and these merely must be accepted going forward. So these are off the table. You know, the Apostles' Creed, if you're a Catholic, that is off the table. It's instructive to know that the word dogma is not a pejorative term in a religion like Catholicism, but it is everywhere

else. And there's a good reason for that, because it's even the most benign dogma can produce immense human misery in surprising ways. And if you're not, if you can't keep correcting for it, you're just laid bare to the misery. So, I mean, my favorite example of this, because it is such a surprising mismatch between the seeming propositional content of the dogma and its effects in the world. But you have a dogma like kind of a twin dogmas. The life starts at the moment of conception and all human life is sacred. What could be wrong with that? So this seems to be the least harmful thing you could believe about the human condition. How are you going to harm

anyone believing those things? All human life is sacred, and human life runs all the way down to a single cell. What could go wrong? Well, what can go wrong is you suddenly get a technology like embryonic stem cell research, where there's this immense promise, obviously unforeseen by the Bible, but also unforeseen by every generation of humanity. Perhaps someone in the 1930s could have foreseen this was coming, but not much before that, right? And you have this immense promise of alleviating scores of conditions. Boundless suffering. of alleviating scores of conditions. Boundless suffering.

Boundless suffering, full body burns and spinal cord injury and Alzheimer's. Just you name it, who knows how much promise this technology holds for medical therapy. And then you have people, and again, these people are the most influential people in our society from presidents presidents and senators on down, and religious academics and bioethicists who aren't religious but still treat these magical doctrines as somehow deserving of respect. But you have this idea that every fertilized ovum contains a human soul. You've got now souls in petri dishes, just as vulnerable as the baby Jesus, that cannot be sacrificed, no matter what the argument is on the other side. You can have, you know, people with Parkinson's or little girls in wheelchairs. Doesn't matter. I'm just as concerned about the life in this petri dish.

And, you know, we've sort of moved on because there have been workarounds found biologically, but basically we dragged our feet for a good 20 years there. And who knows what medical insights weren't had as a result of that. And what do you feel about the value of anonymous speech? There are inarguable value to anonymous speech in brutal dictatorships where dissidents and others can get into enormous trouble, get tortured and killed if they say something that gets detected by somebody who's incredibly nefarious and has really no ethical standing in the minds of most folks in this country. So I think there's certain things. I'm not talking about those relatively inarguable things. But I know that you don't enable comments on your webpages. I know that you have had concerns about the quality of speech in

places like the YouTube forums and so forth. Do you feel that there is a fundamental difference between the value of anonymous speech and, for lack of a better word, owned speech? Or do you feel that anonymous speech is every bit as much of the master value, in a sense, that you attribute to free speech writ large. But I wouldn't prevent it in most cases. Certainly, there's like the whistleblower's role for it. I'm in favor of journalists protecting the anonymity of their sources if, you know, great harm would come to the sources. Generally speaking, I think it is one of the variables that accounts for why so much of what is said online is so toxic. I mean, people feel a license to be jerks that they wouldn't feel if they had to own everything they said. And then what about tools that enable tremendous anonymity to anybody?

And I'm thinking particularly of Tor. Tor, which is ironically a product of the United States Navy, it is something that I have no doubt has masked the identity of lots of dissidents in ways that any reasonable person would applaud. But at the same time, it preserves the anonymity and the secure communication, certainly between terrorists. There's an enormous amount of child pornography there. Again, it just cuts both ways. I think there's an argument to be made that something like that, something like strong encryption, is just inevitable. It's just a mathematical fact that is available, and it will therefore always be available to anyone who's

going to take the time to acquire it. This is something I kind of stumbled into on one of my podcasts. When the first controversy around the FBI's unlocking of an iPhone came online. An iPhone, it was sort of uncrackable by law enforcement. If you attempt the passcode too many times, it just goes into permanent lockdown. And apparently no one can get in, or almost no one can get in, and Apple was claiming not to have devised its own ability to get in. And that struck me as a way of punting on Apple's part that was not ethically justifiable. They refused to help the FBI, in effect. And their argument was that if they created a mechanism whereby they could

answer a court order and unlock an iPhone, that mechanism would be impossible to keep safe. Then everyone would have a hackable iPhone. And I never really bought that. I felt like they could, if they had wanted to keep it safe, they could probably keep it safe. And it seems to me that people do keep, I mean, they keep other trade secrets safe, presumably. Formula for Coca-Cola. Yeah. If those are the keys to the kingdom, then presumably they could keep it safe. Obviously, the tech community took a very strong position against the government there. But we don't have the analogous right in any other area of our lives. When you draw an analogy to, for

instance, I want to be able to build a room in my house where I can put things and even put evidence of all my criminal behavior that no one on earth in principle can get access to, right? So there's no court order, there's no government process, there's no evidence of my own culpability that could be so clear that could get that room unlocked. It's almost like your personal diplomatic pouch or having some kind of like privileged communication with a lawyer. That is an unlockable box legally, but it's a physical box in this case. Yeah. And so no one claims to feel that they have a right to that thing.

Yeah. Right? It's not feasible. We can't easily build it, right? We can't build it at all. Or if we could, there would be unlikely to be a mass movement for everybody to get one of those things. Yeah. And so if someone had managed to build such a thing, and we had reason to believe that evidence of his, you know, vast criminality was in there. There was a severed head in it or something like that. Yeah, right. So there's a murder that is going unsolved every day because we can't open this closet.

Yeah. His argument that that's his personal property that can't be opened, that wouldn't hold water to really for any of the people who are quite exercised about the necessity of keeping their iPhones private. Right. And then you have the cases. So I spoke to, I didn't have him on the podcast, but I spoke to Cyrus Vance, who's, I think he probably still is the district attorney of Manhattan. Junior, not the former secretary of state. Yeah. And so we kind of ran through this with him for a couple of hours. And he was telling me about, you know, murders that are unsolved, where they know that the murder victim was texting with someone up to the moment she was killed or that the video, the camera was on,

right? Like people who had taken pictures of their murderers. With the intention of them being seen, presumably. Right. And Apple was declining to help unlock these iPhones, right? And they had, at that point, some hundreds of phones. Really? Yeah. And so... And this is just one state. Yeah.

A big state, but still. And you can imagine being the parent of your daughter gets murdered, and it is possible to get the data. Because she took the picture wanting her murderer to go to jail, and now all of a sudden it's a violation of her privacy to see that picture. Exactly. The fact that we can't find some mechanism by which to right that wrong doesn't make sense to me. So I'm on both sides of this issue. I'm in favor of good people not having their privacy needlessly invaded, obviously, and having secure communication.

But at a certain point, if you are behaving badly enough, I think the state has an interest in sorting out what you've done and why you did it and who you collaborated with. And this controversy is going to come back to us a hundredfold the moment we have reliable lie detection technology. And I should also say that we have solved this problem in the opposite way, where people have the opposite intuition with respect to DNA technology. So you do not have a right to keep your DNA secret. You can't say, no, no, you can't take a swab of my saliva because that's private data that I don't want you to have access to. No. And that would, in a certain level, be more logical for people to say, like, I'm sorry, that is so intimate, you may not. It would be in some ways more defensible. But it's not, and we've just steamrolled over that sanctity because there's a forensic imperative to do it. There's an overwhelming benefit to social benefit and crime-finding benefit. Yeah, but the argument, people are treating their iPhones essentially as a part of their minds that they don't want read, right? Yeah. Understandably, because there's so much information there.

But when we can actually read minds, right, that's going to be, do you have a right to take the Fifth Amendment privilege when we have lie detection technology that can sort out whether or not you're telling the truth? And I mean, there are philosophical problems with relying on lie detection technology. I mean, there are people who, well, we know there are people who could be delusional, who could be telling the truth and perhaps giving a false confession, right? Well, one of your guests, Lawrence Wright, wrote a book about that very phenomenon. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was fascinating. So, I mean, that's a wrinkle we need to sort out. It seems to me that there are certain moments where any of the claims of personal

liberty and privacy just break down. I mean, you make the stakes high enough and you make a person's culpability obvious enough that we should be getting into their phones and computers by any means possible. And because of the San Bernardino connection, this actually touches on another interest and another thing that interests me quite a bit. When you sit down to write a book that's set in the very near future, certain depictions that you make of the near future almost inevitably either come true or fail to come true during the period that you're writing, particularly if you aspire for your book to be set roughly nine seconds into the future, which is what I did with this one. And one of the things in the world of After On is lone wolf terrorism and the self-organizing

lone wolf terrorism that is inspired by ideology as opposed to by a central group is a feature of the world of After On. And to my absolute dismay, I take absolutely no pride in quote unquote, predicting this correctly, that has in fact started occurring to a significantly greater degree in the couple of years since I started writing the book. Now, you made the point in your very recent podcast with Graham Wood, that in some ways, ISIS inspired attacks are more scary than ISIS directed ones. And he made the counterpoint that ISIS-directed ones tend to have much, much higher death tolls.

But the ISIS-inspired ones, is it just their ability to pop up anywhere and spread like a virus that makes them more scary to you? Yeah, well, it's the demonstrated effectiveness and spreadability of the ideas that is the scariest thing. I mean, there are two things to worry about in this world. You can worry about bad people, and you can worry about bad ideas. And bad ideas are much worse than bad people, because they can potentially inhabit the minds of good people and get even good people to do bad things, right? So I'm under no illusions,

and many people are, that all the people who joined ISIS are bad people. They're just people who believe these bad ideas. Many people imagine that ISIS is acting like a bug light for psychopaths, and so that only people who would do bad things anyway, they would have found some other reason to rape and kill and take sex slaves and cut people's heads off, and they just happened to find this reason. No, that's absolutely not what's happening. And we know that that's not what's happening. There are psychologically normal people who become as convinced of the veracity of ISIS's worldview as I became convinced of the utility of meditation practice. Right.

And then they do something very extreme. What I did was very extreme. I dropped out of a great college, right, and kind of derailed my life in conventional terms and forsook every other reasonable ambition but to understand the nature of consciousness more for this significant period of time, right? You know, you change a few of the relevant beliefs. I could have been, you know, John Walker Lind in Afghanistan with the Taliban, right? It's like, I recognize a person like that as someone who's very familiar to me, you know, and John Walker Lind, he's in prison now, he still believes all this stuff. And he's getting out soon. And the force multiplier element of it matters a great deal to me because I actually think

a raw material that a lot of these nihilistic organizations use are folks who happen to be feeling suicidal today. Humanity produces them in abundance and has across continents and societies and centuries, about a million people will kill themselves this year. And by the way, it's very hard, I think probably impossible if I were recruiting suicide bombers, I would probably stay away from people who are happy and centered and empowered because talking that person into killing themselves at all is an enormous lift compared to talking somebody who's already coming to me out of their minds with, you know, addiction, with depression, with chemical

imbalances in their minds, whatever. So society produces this raw material in some abundance, and some percentage of those people are inclined to take people with them. And some of those people are secular. I mean, the guy who shot up the school at Newtown, he committed suicide. He was relying on the police to kill him. He was committing suicide and taking as many people with him as possible. Likewise, the guy who murdered the five cops in Dallas. He didn't drop a bomb on him. Likewise, the Columbine kids. Wasn't there a Lufthansa pilot a few years ago? Yeah, Andreas Lubitz. And so that's the second force multiplier. And this gets me nervous. So when somebody gets into that mental state, my feeling is that there

are two force multipliers that stand out. One is what is now animating them. And this gets to what you're talking about, the power of these ideas. I mean, if you look at Mateen, the Orlando killer, he was a third-rate loser who failed at everything. He had been dumped by two wives before the age of 30. He could not hold down a job. I would imagine that in many parallel universes, he's the kind of guy who might have killed himself or might have killed an ex-wife or two ex-co-workers or something. He probably also had some kind of gay shame. Self-hating, some self-hating thing going on. But there are many, many hundreds of people like that who do themselves in. He got animated by an idea

that inspired him to go out and literally commit the biggest mass murder in the history of a country with a very high bar for biggest ever. He killed 49 people. Now, the second force multiplier, as you just indicated, is going to be weaponry. So this is a chilling fact. I wish I didn't know it, but I do. In the two and a half years leading up to the Newtown attack, there was a series of very strange, unrelated school attacks in China, mass murder attacks. And there were 10 of them. And by chilling irony, the last one was literally just a few hours before the Newtown attack. Now, those 10-ish attacks combined, all 10 of them put together, had roughly the same number of total deaths as the lone Newtown attack

because they were being committed literally with knives and hammers. Whereas the person who attacked in Newtown had the benefit of living in a society that sells near cousins of machine guns to people who are on the no-fly list. Not that he was on the no-fly list, but we permit that. So there's this huge force multiplier of weaponry. And then if you're Andreas Lubitz, and you have an airplane, okay, fine, you kill a couple hundred people more. And with that chilling fact in mind, I'd like to just read a couple quotes to you from End of Faith. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences, and hence our religious beliefs, antithetical to our survival. We're fast approaching a time when the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking.

And these are from three different quotes. While it's never been difficult to meet your maker in in 50 years it will simply be too easy to drag everyone else along to meet him with you. So we have this force-multiplying spread of ideas, this proliferation of lone wolf attacks. We know what weaponry does. What weapons were you thinking about when you wrote that? When you said in 50 years it will be simply too easy to drag everyone else. Were you thinking of bioweapons, synthetic biology? Nuclear is harder to do. Yeah, although it's not that hard, actually. I mean, it was hard to invent the technology. The Manhattan Project was hard. It's not hard to

render much of Los Angeles uninhabitable for 10,000 years. It's far less hard once it was invented, but still you need the resources of a nation state to create the weapon, right? Well, you actually don't. I mean, you could actually, if you're willing to die, you can be the weapon. And what you need is the enriched uranium or the plutonium, but you could literally, you wouldn't get the full yield you would want if you want to kill the maximum number of people. But you could take two, like, you know, 50-pound plates of enriched uranium and just put one on the floor and slam the other one on top of it, and it would go critical. You would not get a hydrogen bomb experience. Yes, but you would get, and you would be just kind of like the ultimate dirty bomb experience, right? So you could actually be the bomb. But a much more reasonable thing to do if you're in this business is to just do something that's analogous to the bomb design of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki, where you have a gun-style apparatus where you're shooting one piece of enriched uranium or plutonium into the other, right? And just essentially slamming them together harder than you could physically. And again, that the yield there is not as complete as, you know, a nation state would produce, but still you could get a multi-kiloton yield. There, the technical issue is just getting the fuel. Getting the stuff, which does exist, yeah. And so, yes, you do not need the tools of a nation state. You just need a few engineers and machinists. You know, it's powered by ordinary explosives to get the things

slamming together. And I mean, there are a bunch of scenarios that have been described to everyone's horror online, where you can do this in a shipping container and you truck it into the DC and it can be activated with a cell phone. And William Perry has a terrifying bit of animation that he put online that just shows you how simple and how totally destabilizing it would be to our society to do this. So just imagine you build a simple device, which is just, again, just like Hiroshima, you know, like a 15 kiloton explosion. If you put that, you know, right next to the Capitol building, right, you just, now you have a continuity of government problem. You know, who did you kill?

You killed all the senators and congressmen and the president. And the Supreme Court and the Joint Chiefs and, yeah. Imagine doing it in one American city, right? And then announcing, whether this is true or not, who knows, but then announcing, you have similar bombs placed in 10 other American cities. Which you will not identify now. Yeah, and you will do them, you'll do, you know,

one a week until your demands are met. How do we begin to respond to that, right? This is an act of terrorism, obviously orders of magnitude beyond September 11th, which ushered in a decade of just derangement, you know, and cost trillions of dollars in the aftermath, you know, at least two wars and financial crises. Imagine this happening in one city. This is within the technical capacity of a group like ISIS or al-Qaeda. You just need to get the fuel. And we have almost no way to

prevent it. I mean, we're not screening things at our ports so assiduously as to know this couldn't possibly get in. Do you worry about bioweapons as well? Yeah, you just have to imagine weaponizing something akin to the Spanish flu, which killed something like 50 million people in 1918. The sky is the limit there. You could get something that is as easily transmissible and is even more deadly. easily transmissible and is even more deadly. When you're talking about a bioweapon, the worst possible case is something that is easily transmissible and that doesn't make you floridly ill for long enough for you to do as much damage as you possibly can. You sneeze a lot on lots of grapes on lots of people for a good long time before you die. Yeah. And then those people are

sneezing on grapes and people, and then nobody knows there's an outbreak until there's a million infectees or something like that. Yeah. Something like Ebola doesn't have going for it, you know, as bad as it is, as horrible as it is. One of the reasons why it's not scarier is it is very quickly obvious how sick people are. If you're talking about airborne transmission of something that has very high mortality and a long incubation period, yeah, weaponize that. That is a civilization-canceling event if we don't have our act together. And for now, George Church may be the only person who can do it. But in 25 years with biology following what's sometimes called the Carlson curve, which is even steeper than the Moore's law curve, who knows when 10 people, then 100, then 1,000

people. So I'd like to close on something that I wrestle with a lot. You gave a great TED Talk on the risk of super AI. I won't make you replay it here because people can access it. I'll just pull two quotes from it to just set the context. You described the scenario of a super AI having better things to do with our planet and perhaps our atoms than let us continue to have them as being terrifying and likely to occur. And also saying it's very difficult to see

how they won't destroy us. And I don't think that those are shrill or irrational statements personally. I also don't think it's shrill or irrational to think that what George Church alone can do today will be the province of many millions of lab techs, probably in our lifetimes. And with those two forces out there, I don't know what scares me more. And I think about proliferating, I don't know what scares me more. And I think about proliferating, democratizing, existentially destructive technology. Just about the only thing I can think of that might protect us against such a thing would be an incredibly benign super AI that has functional omniscience because of its ubiquity in the networks and has functional omnipotence because of its mastery of, who knows, nanotechnology or something else. But boy, we're both scared about a super AI. It's almost like super AI can't live with them, can't live without them. How do we navigate those twin perils?

And do we need to perhaps embrace a super AI as a protective mechanism for democratized, super destructive power? Yeah, well, I do think it really isn't a choice. I think we will develop the most intelligent machines we can build unless something terrible happens to prevent us doing it. So the only reason why we wouldn't build... The civilization gets thrown violently backwards. Yes. I mean, so, you know, George Church loses his mind, or one of his techs does,

and we have some pathogen that renders us incapable of keeping our progress going on the technology front. And you just have to imagine how bad that would have to be in order to actually stop the progress. bad that would have to be in order to actually stop the march of progress. Yes. Yeah. You know, we would, you'd have to have a world where no one understood how to build a computer again, and no one ever understood how to build a computer again, going forward. So beyond canicle for Leibovitz type of destructiveness. Yeah. So if it's not that bad, we will keep making progress and you don't need Moore's law. You just need some increment of progress to continue. You't need Moore's law. You just need some

increment of progress to continue. You need the passage of time. Yeah. At some rate. Yeah. And at some point we will find ourselves in the presence of machines that are smarter than we are, because I don't think there's anything magical about the wetware we have in our heads as far as information processing. So the moment you admit that this can be, that what we call a mind can be implemented on another platform. And there's every reason to admit that scientifically now. And I leave questions of consciousness aside. I don't know that consciousness comes along for the ride necessarily if you get intelligent machines. And ironically, the most horrible vision is one of building super intelligent unconscious machines,

because in the presence of consciousness, at least you could argue, well, if they wipe us out, well, at the very least, we will have built something more important than we are. We will have built gods. We will have built minds that can take more pleasure in the beauty of the universe than we can. Who knows how good the universe could be inhabited by mind in their hands, Yeah. But if the lights aren't on, if we've built just mere mechanism that is incredibly powerful, that can be goal-directed, but for whom there is nothing that it's like

to be directed toward those goals, well, that really strikes me as the worst case scenario, because then the lights go out if we... If we go out. So it sounds like you believe that the super AI is inevitable unless something, the other equally terrible happens. Yes. So our best shot of surviving is to do all we can to make sure the super AI that one day inevitably arises is benign. Yeah. It's aligned with our

interests. Intelligence is the best thing we have, really. It's our most valuable resource, right? So it is either the source of or the safeguard for everything we care about. And there's overwhelming economic incentives for thousands of intensely smart people, intensely well-capitalized companies to go screaming down that path. Yeah, so all of the incentives are aligned to get into the end zone as quickly as possible. And that is not the alignment we need to get into the end zone as safely as possible. And it will always be easier to build the recklessly unsafe version than figuring out how to make those things safe. So that's what worries me. But I think it is inevitable in some form.

And again, I'm not making predictions that we're going to have this in 10 years or 20 years, but I just think at some point, and again, and the human level bit is a bit of a mirage because I think the moment we have something human level, it is superhuman. Yeah. It blows past that. Yeah.

That's a mirage. And people are imagining somehow that that's a stopping point. It will barely get there, and then we'll stay there for a long time. It could only be the case if we are ourselves at the absolute summit of cognition, which just defies common sense. And we just know that's not true. We just know it's not true. Just take, you know, the calculator in your phone. I mean, that's not human level. That is omniscient with respect to arithmetic. Yeah. You know, and's not human level. That is omniscient with respect to arithmetic. Yeah.

You know, and having the totality of human knowledge instantaneously accessible through the internet. I mean, if we hook these things to the internet, it has a memory that is superhuman and an ability to integrate data that is superhuman. So the moment all of these piecemeal all of these piecemeal cognitive skills cohere in a system that is also able to parse natural language perfectly. You can talk to it and it understands, it does what you want. All of the answers to the questions are no longer like series answers where they contain howlers every third trial, but they're the most perceptive, best informed, most articulate answers you're getting from any mind you ever interact with. Once those gains are made, they won't be unmade. It's like chess. It's like once computers were better at chess than people, you know, and now we're in this sort of no man's land, which again, which I think will be

fairly brief, where the combination of a person and a computer is now the best system. But at a certain point, and I'm amazed that anyone doubts this, but at a certain point, I think it will obviously be the case that adding the ape to the equation just adds noise to the equation. And the computers will be better than cyborgs. And once they are, there's no going back from that point. It may not be everything. There may be things we neglect to build into our AIs that turn out to be important for human common sense. I mean, this is the scary thing. We don't know what is required to fully align an intelligent system with our well-being,

intelligent system with our well-being, you know, and so we could neglect to put something like our common sense, because we don't perfectly understand it, into these systems, and then you can get errors that are deeply counterintuitive, that are, I mean, this is analogous to, you know, Nick Bostrom's cartoon thought experiment of the paperclip maximizer. I was like, well, who would build such a machine? Well, we wouldn't. But we could build a machine that in the service of some goal that is obviously a good one, could form some instrumental goal that we would never think an intelligent system could form and that we would never think to explicitly prevent. Yeah. And yet this thing is totally antithetical. It reaches some local equilibrium where it says more paperclips, good.

Yeah. Gonna do that for a while. Yeah. And soon the universe is paperclips. Well, Sam, you have been extravagantly generous with your time. I appreciate it immensely. Not at all. It's a pleasure.

And thank you very kindly. And we will, I'm sure, remain in touch. Yeah, yeah. And I wish you the best of luck, needless to say, with your book and the podcast and everything else. Thank you kindly. It's a great idea that you're combining both in this way. I think, obviously, this is the frontier of creative use of these new media, and it's great to see you doing it. If you're enjoying The Waking Up podcast,

there are many ways you can support it at samharris.org forward slash support. As a supporter of the podcast, you'll get early access to tickets to my live events, and you'll get exclusive access to my Ask Me Anything episodes, as well as to the AMA page on my website, where you can pose questions

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