Making Sense with Sam Harris - The Russell Brand Interview

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

This episode of the Making Sense podcast features an interview that Sam did with Russell Brand on the Under the Skin podcast. They speak about religion, terrorism, politics, meditation, psychedelics, 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, well, this is not an official podcast episode. I have not numbered it as a Waking Up Podcast episode. This is an episode, in fact, of the Russell Brand podcast, Under the Skin. This is an interview that Russell did with me about a week ago and released on his podcast, but I am releasing it here because I said I would. Russell's happy to have me do it, and so many of you have asked me to have a conversation with Russell that I just wanted to make sure you hear this. I decided to do it on his podcast rather

than on mine, so he's interviewing me, and that has the effect of making me say some things that many of you may have heard before because he's asking how I got involved in atheism and writing and some background questions. And we also had the conversation in person, which was instructive because this is a conversation that really could have run off the rails, as you'll hear. Russell and I disagree about many fundamental things. If I had done this over the internet on my podcast, this could well have been one of those conversations that went into the ditch, like my conversation with Mariam Namazi or the one with Omer Aziz, which I titled The Best Podcast Ever, ironically. But the vibes were quite good. Russell's a very nice guy. I

really enjoyed meeting him. So there's the paradox here of real disagreement at points, kept on the rails by nice face-to-face rapport. That is instructive for me going forward. I think it's useful to consider which podcasts I should do in person and which I should do online. But for better or worse, this is a podcast that will frustrate many of you. There's a fair amount of talking over one another, a fair amount of him talking over me, no doubt. There's not a real meeting of the minds on some of the foundational issues here, morally and politically. Anyway, this is the conversation that many of you expected Russell and I would have. So I will bring you that now. I just have one announcement to make.

Speaking of experiments and conversation, my event with Jordan Peterson in Vancouver in June sold out very quickly, so we added a second night. June 23rd is sold out, so we added June 24th. And tickets for that event are now available to supporters of the podcast. A pre-sale code has gone out to you by email. If you're a supporter and did not get that code, please email us at info at samharris.org. And if you're interested in going to that event, you should act sooner rather than later, because once it becomes available to the general public, it may well sell out as quickly as the first one. Just to be clear, Jordan and I will try to cover different ground at the two events, so going to both wouldn't necessarily

be a waste of your time if you're into this sort of thing. We will try to move on from whatever progress we make the first night, and we'll probably go out in advance to all of you for questions and topics so as to make sure we cover a different set of five or ten each night. I'm not sure how many events like this will do, but if you've been paying attention, you'll know that Jordan has been having quite an impact, especially on the minds of young men, for better or for worse. And I would say for better and for worse. It's pretty clear to me that much of it is for better, and certainly some of it's for worse. And I just think it is a very intriguing social phenomenon, which could be straightened out.

So insofar as I can help make sense to our respective audiences, I will try to do that for as long as it seems useful, and hope to broadcast at least the best parts here on the podcast. So that's what's happening there. And Jordan and I are talking about adding other dates, possibly New York City, possibly London. Please check my events page if you're interested for those and all other events at samhharris.org forward slash events. And again, supporters of the podcast will get advanced tickets to everything I do going forward. And now without any further delay, I bring you my conversation with Russell Brand. Sam Harris is a writer, neuroscientist, philosopher and host of the podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris.

He's written five New York Times bestsellers covering a range of topics from neuroscience and religion to violence and human reasoning. These include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, Free Will and The Moral Landscape. And has argued that science can determine moral values. and the moral landscape, and has argued that science can determine moral values. He's previously studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, making several trips to India and Nepal. He is now a proponent of secular meditation practices. He's vegetarian, practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu,

and is married with two daughters and has a correction. I'm going to have to recant on the vegetarianism. You're recanting the vegetarianism. For the moment, unfortunately. Apostasy! Yeah, well, moment, unfortunately. Apostasy. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's exactly like apostasy. Well, welcome. Thank you.

Regardless of the embracing. The abattoir that I'm trailing behind. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for coming on. I've wanted to talk to you for such a long time. Oh, yeah. And I've heard from so many of our mutual audience members that we should be getting together. So it's been in the works for a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. We exist in that sort of in the sonic boom created by Joe Rogan, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Heard you on Joe Rogan. I listened to Waking Up. Yeah.

And I've heard a bunch of your stuff. I saw you on Joe Rogan as well. So Joe is the 800- pound gorilla of podcasters. Yes, he is, isn't he? As everyone knows. Yeah, he is the very much that we are all orbiting Joe Rogan, let's face it. And like, God, there's so much stuff I want to ask you about, but you know, because there's loads of things we agree on loads, but there like some pretty distinct things that i imagine we disagree on and i suppose these will be some of the some interesting things to to um to analyze um but

just to start us off um i suppose tell us a little bit about the the fusion of neuroscience philosophy and atheism that that has become sort of the defining of people's perception of you, that there's a sort of, I suppose, a neurological underwriting for your sort of personal perspective of atheism and what you've learned in the sort of like the 10 years since you've come to prominence and how your position has perhaps evolved. The atheism connection is probably just an accident of history more than anything, because it really is what happened to my intellectual life right after September 11th. So I was doing my neuroscience PhD. I had a background in philosophy. I went

into neuroscience very much with the interest of a philosopher. I was always interested in understanding the human mind at a high level that really I would only be doing work in people. And I was never thinking of curing diseases. I mean, it was all about just understanding human subjectivity and consciousness and morality and human reason. These were the kinds of higher-level mental attributes that interested me. And I was in the middle of my PhD. I had done my coursework. I was getting into neuroimaging work on belief. I was studying the difference between belief and disbelief and uncertainty. And then September 11th happened, and I had a background in meditation. I had a background in trying to cash out rather ancient spiritual concerns

through whatever methodology was available. So I had taken psychedelics in my 20s. I had spent about two years on silent retreat. I was very connected to the experiential side of what people think only religion is good at, right? But I was not a believer of any sort. So I was an atheist, but I never thought of myself as an atheist. I was totally unaware of atheism as an organized political movement. I couldn't have told you who Madeline Murray O'Hare was. I mean, there's a famous atheist. I was aware of people like Richard Dawkins for their science, but I was not someone who had read books on atheism. And so my first book, The End of Faith, which really, really initiated this publishing phenomenon that was

called The New Atheism, because then it was me and then Dawkins, and then I came out with my second book, and then Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, all of us had these books that came out. I never even used the word atheism in The End of Faith. And it wasn't that I thought not to use it. It just was not a word I used. So I was just talking about the conflict between reason and faith, the conflict between science and religion, the obvious untenability. that is shattered into these separate religious communities and these separate and incommensurable worldviews based on an adherence to these ancient books. And that struck me then and strikes me now as just as perverse as people blowing themselves up over rival interpretations of Shakespeare.

I mean, just imagine there was some Hamlet cult versus some King Lear cult, right? And people are willing to die for these differences. I'm English. Those cults exist. Right, right. But that's the world we're living in. I mean, our world is just that absurd. And so I reacted to all of this in the aftermath of September 11th

without ever defining myself in my own mind as someone who was now shilling for atheism. But then I got inducted into the conversation about atheism. So it's somewhat ironic that atheist is one of the first words in my bio, but it rigidly define as, I suppose, judging from what you've just said, as a religious event primarily or an act of religious violence. It was clearly that. You might want to talk about other variables that could explain it or that could have other motives that people might have. You might want to talk about politics or economics or U.S. foreign policy or the legacy of colonialism. But I think it is absolutely clear that while those variables account for some of the

misbehavior in our world, there are still people who get up in the morning with 100% of their motivation being a religious expectation of an afterlife. I can just find you these people who have none of the other variables that people would want to use to explain, I mean, the terrestrial variables, economics, politics. There are people who have never suffered any economic insecurity who devote their life to jihad. There are people who drop out of the London School of Economics who are British citizens so that they can go fight with ISIS. And it's- What does that to you imply? The toxicity of religious ideology? It's the power of belief. It's not even purely toxic. I mean, this is the horrible paradox here.

It's not even purely toxic. I mean, this is the horrible paradox here. I think the experience of people, even in the most extreme, and we might want to say psychopathic cults, right, something like ISIS, the experience, by and large, is not of religion is much wider than focusing on fundamentalist Islam. But to take this case, many people think that ISIS was acting like a bug light for the world's psychopaths, that only psychopaths would go over there and behave badly anyway. These are people who were going to rape and kill anyway, and they just found an excuse or a pretext by which to do it under the aegis of religion. That's just not true. I mean, we just know enough about the bios of these people. And you would never say that of someone who was observing some other religious behavior slavishly under some doctrine. So you wouldn't say that, you wouldn't explain the behavior of people at the mass, the Catholic mass, you know, where they line up to eat a cracker. You wouldn't say, well, this is just politically motivated cracker-eating behavior. These people would find pretext to eat crackers on Sundays anyway. They would ritualize their cracker-eating behavior for some other reason. No, no, they have a belief that explains exactly what they're doing with this cracker.

This is a doctrine that they're following. And if the doctrine were different, if the doctrine said eat two crackers, they'd be eating two crackers. Sure, but like personally, and presumably you would agree with this, the Catholic mass is serving a particular function as all ritual

and ceremony is. And the literalness of the cracker is secondary to its evident perfunctory role as a place for social cohesion, acknowledgement of mortality and the potential for the human soul or the human essence to aspire to something beyond the carnal blood and body drives if we take christ from a more theological as opposed to sort of a sort of reductive simplistic and i think for me personally spiritually useless perspective as, as the metaphor of Christ being the potential for transcendence beyond the flesh individual to the enlightened male or the enlightened being, I suppose, then the sort of the mass for me is an opportunity to ceremoniously acknowledge that meaning.

So like I would look at a mass and go, Oh, this ain't about literally eating crackers. And even the metaphor as explicitly stated in the scriptural terms of that denomination, there's more, even that is limiting. I would say that people's drive to do that is myriad. But you're flipping the logic of what I'm saying. So I'm saying that the thing that explains the actual ritual, the cracker eating, is the doctrine, right? If the doctrine were different, if Jesus had said, well, this bread has nothing to do with my body, so it doesn't matter what you do at the mass, right? Don't eat anything.

To eat anything is to pollute your body. You should just be thinking about me, right? If that was the doctrine, there would be no cracker-eating ritual. So the doctrine is a bizarre act of human sacrifice and cannibalism at the bottom of it, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. It does if you look at the roots of agricultural deity worship and the relationship between the known and the unknown and the necessity to have a relationship with plants and seasons. It doesn't make sense that people would want to be eating his body.

Like they wouldn't, people... Except as a metaphor for union and oneness. Except it's not preached as a metaphor. The doctrine's not metaphorical. Also, as Will said... I'll grant you that many people aren't thinking about it literally now, but that's just to say they've lost their faith in the actual doctrine of the church.

And I think that's important. And also I think we have to look beyond rationalism. I think when we're dealing, you know, you're a man who's deeply interested in mysticism and spirituality and anything. Once it's on the plane of the corporal and the rational, then to evaluate the symbols purely rationally, they're always going to be sort of kind of left wanting because, yeah, in a wafer or drinking some wine.

But if you have a relationship with the wholeness. I would be slow to conclude that. I don't think you have to be irrational to use these tools. Or beyond rational. Not just irrational, not like necessarily less than rational, possibly more than rational. There's clearly more than forming a rational understanding of the universe. There's more to life than that. I mean, there's fun, there's love,

there's beauty, there's more that we want from life than simply not being wrong, right? So I'm not saying that reason is everything, but the question is, do you ever have to be irrational to go beyond merely conceptually understanding the world? Do you ever have to lie to yourself? Do you ever have to lie to others or believe the lies of others to go into these other areas that… No, but the… Well, no, but most people are living as though absolutely you do. Religion is just the most profligate example of lying and self-deception that we know.

Not as much as politics, is it? I mean, I think it's just more evident. Every bit as bad, except then it just pauses an afterlife where it gets all cashed out. Except, of course, you know, like again, to return to the point about 9-11, your particular induction unwittingly or otherwise into what's become known as the new atheistic movement. For me, this is a question I suppose. That particular event taken in isolation, is it like barbaric and horrific and dreadfully cinematic and totemic? But definitely taking place within a historical context. For me,

the variables that you fleetingly mentioned, economics, colonialism, these are like, how do we delineate? How do we sort of, where are these imaginary lines drawn between this is religious violence, this is political violence, this is acceptable violence. Who draws those lines? I think they can be very easily drawn when you take the case of any individual and his or her motives. Individuals? What do you think? We have to resort to individualism as opposed to cultural national movements. You have to say that individual is crazy, but that state and that state's actions. I would first say that very few of these people are crazy. So let me just break this down a little bit because there are many different types of violence. There are crazy people who are just

crazy in the more clinical sense of that term, which is to say they're suffering some thought disorder. They're suffering from some kind of delusion, right? So, you know, many of these people are schizophrenic, but there are probably other ways we want to class a thought disorder here. But they're not rational. They don't have rational goals. They're hearing voices. They think they're talking. The son of Sam thought his dog was telling him to kill people.

Next door's dog, actually. Not even his own dog. All right, okay. Start listening to other people's pets. Worse still, yes, exactly. Pay attention to your own dog before you start worrying about the neighborhood of pets. So yeah, we all

recognize there's a thing called mental illness. You see reality different from everyone else. And most people who are mentally ill are not dangerous, but there are some people who are mentally ill who are. Now, there are people who do horrific things for no ideological motive, no rational animus, but purely because

they're crazy, right? So you take like one example would be probably this guy, Adam Lanza, who went into the school in Newtown and killed 20 some odd children and half a dozen teachers, right? I think 26 people were gunned down. He, I don't know if anyone gave a diagnosis. I mean, he was probably, almost certainly on the autistic spectrum, but he had something else going on. But he didn't, he wasn't a white supremacist who had some ideology, who was acting out in this way. He wasn't a jihadist who thought he was going to get into paradise, right? And there are many other examples of mass shootings like that. Jared Loeffner was a guy like that. If you're going to talk to this person and find out why he that. If you're going to talk to this

person and find out why he did it, nothing is going to make sense, right? Now, we could talk about the same superficial crime of going in and killing children in a school, right? There's that version of it. Then there's the really angry and, I would argue, psychopathic, sadistic, classically evil person who just wants to kill kids, right? Who just gets off on all of the misery he's going to create as a result of this crime. Now, this person is not suffering a thought disorder. If we knew more about the brain, I think in the end, we would be happy to say, well, there's still something wrong with this guy's brain. I mean, human evil is a species of neurological disorder, but we don't understand it yet. And so now it's tempting just to say, well, these people are evil, right?

It's a very different kind of person from the first person. The boundary between those people can be kind of fluid, but these are different types of people. But Sam— No, but let me get to the worst case. get to the worst case. The worst case is there are people who are as good, who are as moral and as ethical and as committed to the well-being of themselves and others as you and I are, who still go in and shoot up schools and kill everybody and hope to die in the process because they think they can get into paradise that way. So when members of the Taliban went into a school in Pakistan and killed, I think it was 137 kids and burned their teacher alive in front of them, you have to ask yourself, well, do you think all members of the Taliban who did this and then all of those in the Taliban who endorsed this were all just psychopaths or mentally ill? No, no. If you listen to what they're saying, if you listen to what they believe, if you read the texts that they think are the verbatim word of the creator of the universe, it all falls into place.

This is perfectly rational behavior given the requisite beliefs, and that is what is so horrible about this kind of dogmatism. But even that process, that sort of extreme example of the execution of children in schools, it would be sort of an elective reading of even that particular doctrine. There would be particular passages you go, oh, here's the passage where the sort of an elective reading of even that particular doctrine. There'd be particular passages you'd go, oh, here's the passage where the... Not so much, unfortunately. There's loads of stuff that's like, live a peaceful life of devotion. Not loads of stuff. Have you read the Quran?

Of course I bloody well haven't. I've barely got through these notes for this interview, Sam. I'm doing this thing on the fly. You can do it. It's a short book. No, no, I've checked out. You know what I mean? My general feeling is that the Quran,

holy, is like most religious scripture. The intention is to create a social environment where people are benevolent and cohesive, which ultimately became a tool for social control as a result of the way the power structures. But there's more to that. There's life after death. Acts within religion and politics. But I don't know.

I think, again, I wouldn't deliberately misread the metaphor. For me, life after death, and this is a person that spent two years in a silent retreat, I would gather you would dig this, is that beyond the life that is determined by primal desires and biographical wants and your imagination of yourself, there is a life after the death of that individual. After that individual dies and you recognize that the temporal can never provide fulfillment, you gain access to a sort of a second life, an afterlife. The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth

and man sees it not. The kingdom of heaven is within. Are you talking about the life after the death of your ego? I suppose so, Sam. Yes. I would say I would imagine like if it's not talking about that, I don't know what it's talking about and what the value of that would be as a manual for being human. Also, Sam, there's so much, mate.

Let me, hold on a sec. We've got to go through. You did a big classification system of the degrees of who's the worst madman. I just want to put a flag right here. We've got to do the schools. Okay, well, we'll do that. Do your flag and then we're going back to the schools. I just want to acknowledge that whatever

my personal reading is. Whatever your reading is, most people most of the time think that the afterlife is a literal place you go after you die. That consciousness survives the death of the body. And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the Christian

and the Islamic tradition, it really matters whether you believe the right thing or not. In fact, this life doesn't matter at all. And that's what's so corrosive about this. Sure. But like, you know, but let's look at some of the alternatives. Now, we just devised a barometer of degrees of madness and the worst types of madness and the worst way to have your kids murdered in a school by which particular type of madman you know but we should probably bring into the mix you know from the sky by a drone yeah like yeah because for me like i don't my kids killed in a school by for any ideology whether it's grounded in sort of rationalism and and or and economics or whether it's a book that's

a bit older and more i don't know esoteric or colorful or imaginative. I don't know how to determine it. But what I suppose the heart of what I want to get to is whilst undoubtedly religion has been used to justify violence from all types of angles in different historical moments and, you know, angles in different historical moments and, you know, Buddhist violence in Burma and Christian violence in, you know, like in the Middle East or secular violence underwritten by Christianity, resourced entirely from Christianity and sort of Christian dualistic notions undertaken by far-right Christian presidents and whatever. Or, you know, sort of the more lucid livid and obvious and contemporaneous uh far right is extremist islamic violence it's like how do we see that as distinct from rational violence

political violence particularly when that is far more potent palm far more widespread and is i would say is the violence of the dominant culture what interests me sam harris is power and the powerful like and for me i'm interested in who gets to decide who the other is who gets to decide by what metric rationalism and religion is evaluated and it seems to me that the kind of violence that's focused on in a lot of your work is the violence of desperate people desperate and possibly subjugated people and i would say to this i know that you don't do this but i want you to educate me on this but to dismiss the colonial aspect the the sort of economic aspect the occupation of middle eastern countries the historical i mean for me it seems like how

how can you conduct that extraction? How can you divorce those different types of violence? They seem to me to be part of one narrative. Well, I can do it very simply because you have examples, just to dissect out the variable of colonialism or oppression from the outside. You have examples of people who have been oppressed as oppressed as any other people who don't resort to this kind of violence because they don't have the same belief structure. Here's an almost perfect scientific experiment. You have Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims living in the same occupied territories, right? Before the Israelis put up the wall, who was blowing themselves up in pizza parlors and discotheques,

right? It was 99.9% Muslim, right? It was not Christian. You have Coptic Christians in Egypt being murdered by their Muslim neighbors by suicide bombings who don't resort to their own suicide bombings in return, right? The beliefs matter. The details matter. Why do you fetishize your antagonism towards that particular type of violence? It's not a fetish. Of course, that violence exists in the context of a far more potent opponent's violence. No, no, no, no. Okay. Like we can't talk about Palestinian violence and Christian Palestinian violence without saying, not talking about history.

No, of course we can, because. We can. Why would we, though? And isn't that the very problem? Because tomorrow morning, someone in Orange County will be converted to this belief system and want to fight in the name of this cause. And it's purely a matter of belief. and it's purely a matter of belief. It's as much a matter of belief as you wanting to go on a diet or learning to meditate or maybe I'll go to Hawaii this year for my vacation. Sure. I know that a belief is just a thought that you like having. But luckily, you and I, we live in a sort of a secular society

and our beliefs seldom come into opposition with the dominant philosophy. And when it does, there are problems. Here are my background concerns. I think ideas are the most powerful things we've got. Ideas are the operating system for human life and human culture. And if we fail to build a civilization that works, it will be because of the failure of ideas or our failure to communicate good ideas to one another in such a way that's persuasive. So how do you get 7 billion strangers to peacefully collaborate with one another? It is a matter of conversation that ultimately gets people to converge on common projects and common values.

And so all we have is conversation. And when conversation fails, all we have is violence. There's really just two modes, conversation and violence. And when you're talking about power and its misuses, you're talking I may just check the same boxes like, well, that looks illegitimate or that had consequences that could have easily been foreseen. Lots of people suffered and died there that shouldn't have. And what were the objectives? on specific ideas and specific human behavior, I'm looking by and large for the craziest and most dangerous ideas that should be, I mean, this is really the low-hanging fruit for bad epistemology, the human behavior that should seem impossible. And suicide bombing... So it's just aesthetics, really.

No, it's not just... Suicide bombing looks bad. A drone bombing looks nice. It's not just aesthetics. It's not just aesthetics because... But how is it not aesthetics? Because suicidal people are undeterrable. Jihadists are undeterrable. If the best thing that can happen in an operation is that you die while conducting it, you are the perfect weapon.

But Sam Harris, why would you make that the dominant? I have to hammer this home. Go on. I have to hammer this home. Go on. When you're talking about the possibility of something like nuclear terrorism or biological terrorism that, you know, where someone tries to weaponize smallpox and kill 100 million people. Let's just mention that nuclear terrorism is not hypothetical. It already happened 50 years ago. No.

Underwritten by secularism. I won't call that nuclear terrorism. Or nuclear, I don't know. There was certainly a first use of- I bet if you were in Nagasaki that day, semantics wouldn't be your primary concern. What should we call that thing? Ow, my teeth. It's reasonable to ask how the Japanese view it now and how the Japanese view the relationship

with the United States now. There's an argument. I'm not defending- Just because perhaps there are narratives, Sam, that supersede the apparent narrative of nationalism and geopolitics where there is an economic determinant. They make more or less sense. Where Japan and the U.S. no longer see themselves in oppositional positions. Right.

Do you see? So one question is how are we going to get all of these societies that are at loggerheads to see themselves in non-zero-sum arrangements with everyone else. And what will have to change to make that possible? And my concern with religion, religious fundamentalism, and not all religions equally, but my concern is that these are the beliefs that are held most closely. They're the least negotiable. I mean, they're by definition non-negotiable. My faith-based beliefs are the beliefs that if you challenge them by whatever evidence or whatever argument, I will take that as a personal insult. And I will want to resort immediately to violence or the threat of violence. I will want blasphemy laws. I will want to pass a law at the

UN that will give you jail time if you say the wrong thing about my holy book. That's where a conversation has totally broken down and there's nothing to resort to but force. Yes. But when you say a suicide bomber, I admit that it's extraordinary and it's difficult for us to understand. But what I'm curious about, Sam, is that what are the prerequisite conditions for suicide bombing even to be relevant? And I also can't help but thinking when I sort of feel when we sort of recall events like Waco or any disruption or anything that sort of ruptures the sort of like the American mainframe. We're not Americans. I think this goes beyond nation. in opposition to the state, the means by which the state will deploy violence doesn't need to resort to sort of lurid, livid, blatant, clumsy acts like suicide bombing because the power is so evident, the ability to exert power and control is so total that it doesn't need sort of like

almost the sort of graphic and horrific whimsy of something like a suicide bombing, albeit underwritten by something that looks peculiar to people like us that value life and value fun and don't have a belief system that's like, oh, I'll be in some sort of Valhalla subsequently. You were using Waco as an example of state oppression or suicidal sacrifice. I'm using it as an example of that if you that the that the kind of violence that interests me is the violence of the truly powerful and the kind of so for me like suicide but i can see that it's kind of it's gratuitous and sort of and therefore an appealing form but for me when when analyzing 9-11 to focus on the perpetration of that event and the motivation of the

individuals involved as opposed to the geopolitical circumstances and what happens generally when two narratives come into conflict with one another short changes us and means that we focus, my sole interest Sam is when you talk about how

are we going to get these 7 billion people to cooperate and form communities based on mutual values, which for some reason I believe is a possibility. My own spiritual pursuits have led me to the point where I have a basic optimistic view of humanity. My own personal experience with Muslims has led me to believe that Islam is essentially a positive thing. Essentially a positive thing.

But that's a bad way to take its temperature. How many Muslims have you had a personal experience with? I'll be very generous. You're taking the temperature on the basis of bloody suicide bombers. No, no, no. I'm taking the temperature on the basis of the actual doctrine that makes sense of this behavior. Or aspects of the doctrine.

Aspects of the doctrine. No, no. But wait, wait, hold on. I didn't imagine that we'd of this behavior. And also... Or aspects of the doctrine. The aspects of the doctrine. No, no. But wait, wait, hold on. Wait, I got to connect a few... Look, I didn't imagine that we'd have this conversation and there'd be a bit where you went, yeah, no, Islam's not that bad. I didn't come into this room thinking that. But it's worth connecting a few of these dots

because it's not just a matter of the killing of people. I'm talking about how people want to live. So if you ask yourself, and this is just a thought experiment, if you ask yourself, if you gave perfect power to any one group, so they could impose their way of life on every other group. So you gave them, this is a magic wand argument that I use in my first book. You give Dick Cheney a magic wand, Dick Cheney, the prototypical evil mustache twirling bastard who gave us the Iraq war and is as demonized on the left as anyone.

What would he have done if he had the power, you know, just to make life in the Middle East and in Afghanistan any way he wanted it? It's explicitly stated. We do not need to conjecture. They said, we want to remove the ability of our opponents to respond. It's in the public sphere. That's what they said to Cheney and Bush. We want to annihilate the possibility of response. Tyranny. Let's go a little further in our imagination. Do you actually think, and maybe Dick Cheney has been so demonized that he's the wrong case here.

I don't have a strong opinion about Dick Cheney. He might be all right. He likes to golf. Yeah. No matter how you spell that word. This is what I would guess, right? Someone like Dick Cheney, if given unlimited, again, just magic, the resources of magic. We don't need magic, he said. Remove the ability for them to respond.

You're doing a too narrow reading of that, right? Yes, we don't want these people to be able to attack us, right? That's the goal of the war. Or to oppose our objectives in the Middle East. We want to do whatever we want. So what would we want? To ransack that region for all of its energy resources for a kickoff. And we want total unchallenged power, tyranny, totalitarianism. I'm talking about magic. We don't even need to steal their resources. We have the power of magic now.

What life would you impose on these people, right? What life would the worst of us in power, like Dick Cheney, impose on these people? I think he'd make Afghanistan or Iraq like Nebraska, right? This would not, he would not be some hellscape of unnecessary suffering. It would be a Starbucks on every corner, mere capitalism. Now, you have your critique of this way of life, no doubt. But what he would want to impose on these people is orderly, economic, probably good Christian behavior, right?

He would want movie theaters. They'd all be probably good Christian behavior, right? He would want movie theaters. He'd all be watching the Oscars, right? Now, what would Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi impose on everyone else? He's told us explicitly, because he tried the experiment in Syria and Iraq. We know exactly how he wants to live and he wants others to live. It is 7th century theocratic barbarism. And there's no doubt about that. It is fornicators, homosexuals thrown from rooftops and fornicators with their throats

slit. One thing that surely we can agree on is that what the second guy's name, I don't know, telling the head of ISIS is irrelevant. He's not irrelevant. He's the head of ISIS. It's broadly speaking irrelevant in terms of impact. Let's return back to the sort of macro view of 7 billion individuals. Dick Cheney's Starbucks on every corner. That's happening. There are 1.7 billion Muslims, a majority of which live under some significant theocratic constraint. You're talking about women. But we live under theocratic constraint.

It's not the same theocracy. Listen, I'm just as concerned about Christian theocracy as you are. How can you, because I think you're about to talk about sort of gender issues, but you're once again going to use the… It's not just gender. It's free thought issues. It's science. Surely. But the metric by which we evaluate them is a distinct metric drawn from another narrative.

And Alfred, like, so, like, you know, we might say, oh, bloody hell, women dressing like that or whatever. You know, we can't, I don't think we're in a position to make those kinds of decisions. Of course we are. Of course we are. You don't think you're in a position. Why do you think that their narrative

should adhere to our template? Well, first of all, so you imagine that most women forced to wear a burqa. I don't know about forced. In my experience, in my conversation, has been that it's more

that we ought to regard it. Yeah, but I've asked Muslim women about it and they said it's like a discipline and we dig it. Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. But first of all, now I'm talking about a burqa. I'm not talking about someone going to Barnard who elects to wear a headscarf because she likes the way- So am I. So am I. The imposition of our heterogeneous, hegemonic ideas of how masculine and feminine relationships work might not be universally applicable. No, something is universally applicable. If it's not universal, we can understand those differences. So if there's a culture where they like spicy food and we don't, but eating spicy food is just another way to be happy as an ape. We can understand those differences biologically and culturally.

The idea that it just may be as good a solution for how to maximize human well-being to put half the population in bags and not let them learn to read. I mean, I'm taking Afghanistan. I'm taking the local case of Afghanistan under the Taliban. Actually, Afghanistan currently as well. You're talking about women who have almost the worst possible life on planet Earth. I mean, we're talking about maternal mortality rates that are off the charts. You're talking about illiteracy that you have to go back 200 years in the West to find that level of illiteracy. This is precisely the kind of reasoning that's used to justify the bombing and commercial colonization of those territories. They're

not like us. They treat women different from us. I don't think we're in a position to make those judgments. How about people have different systems? So then tell me how you would react to this. I have two daughters. And if I were thinking the way you were thinking about this issue, what if I thought it would be a great idea to have a cultural exchange program where I just sent my daughters over to Afghanistan to live with the Taliban families? So rather than go to summer school here and get prepared to go to an Ivy League college or whatever it is, I send them to live with the Taliban. You don't need to explain all this to me. I see where you're going.

I'm not nine years old. Sam, darling. But listen, my point is this. No, but you've got to answer it. All of your thought experiments. Well, I'm from a Western culture. I've been indoctrinated differently. So you're saying there's no right or wrong here, really?

I don't think that there's, I'm not in a position. I think it's very different, me saying I've been born in the West. I've grown up in the West. My daughter's born in the West. Now impose upon her a totally different set of values. I wouldn't want her to go to the deep South either. You know, like there's all sorts of things. I wouldn't want her to go to places in Britain.

You don't think it's unlucky to be go to places in Britain. You don't think it's unlucky to be born a girl in Afghanistan five years ago. I think that these kind of sort of theoretical tableaus are used to create a false hierarchy and a moral superiority by a dominant culture that subsequently uses thinking of this of this nature to underwrite the modern day colonization and subjugation of these people on a massive scale and as barbaric and disgusting as 9-11 was a daily 9-11 since then so that a state system can perpetuate itself using rationalism, using comfortable means of executions that glide slyly by all white in the sky is no better than 9-11.

It is better. It is better. So you're invoking many things here which we should treat systematically, things like collateral damage. So you drop a bomb. I don't even like that language, collateral damage. It's a euphemism.

No, it's a euphemism. But that's the word we use to talk about unintended people getting killed by bombs. But what is it? Like when 87% of drone strikes result in fatalities. And the data here are hard to get our hands around as well because it's highly politicized. Of course it is. But the language is important. And who decides what language is used?

And who decides what is powerful? And who decides what's rational violence, and who decides what religion is even. Okay, but let's treat these things point by point. No, let's take them in a giddy blur. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to get out of the blur. The giddy blur is now in my mind. So there's a fundamental claim that you have just made, at least implicitly, that I disagree with and that I wrote my third book to rebut. My third book, The Moral Landscape, is an argument that we can talk about questions of right and wrong and good and evil in universal terms. These are not merely cultural or personal affectations. We're not free to just make up.

You can do one of your thought experiments in a minute. I can see you on the edge of saying, if someone wants's have sex with a baby, you'll say it's wrong. The reason why thought experiments are so useful is that they're the pure case. You can take one variable at a time. But this idea that it's all a matter of personal taste or all a matter of culture. personal taste or all a matter of culture, right, it suggests that all cultures, therefore, the moment you make the link between questions of good and evil and the well-being of conscious creatures, like questions of happiness and suffering, right? And I think that link is very direct. I mean, that's a separate conversation we could have, but I think the only intelligible

morality has to focus on human suffering, human well-being, and even more broadly to the suffering of any conscious system. So it's animals. If we're torturing pigs so as to get bacon, we have an ethical obligation to not do that, do that less, find a better way of doing that so that it's no longer torture. Of course. Breed pigs that don't suffer, whatever it is. Suffering should be our concern. Feed pigs that don't suffer, whatever it is. Suffering should be our concern. And the moment you grant that, you have to grant that not 20 years and to interbreed and not showing them the light of day. Okay, this is a problem that society has an interest in.

Now we're talking about power dynamics. The society has an interest in rescuing those children from their deranged and evil parents, right? This could be true just in a single city like Los Angeles, right, as happened very recently. That scales. That scales. That scales to whole nations and to our global situation. I think it becomes more complex with scale, doesn't it? It does. Politically complex.

But for you to withhold judgment of the burqa makes absolutely no sense. For you to withhold judgment of female genital mutilation makes absolutely no sense. Or male genital mutilation. It's a different... Again, now is a perfect case of getting misled by words because they're highly non-analogous, those two procedures. I'm not in favor of male circumcision either, but I'm just saying to use the word mutilation or circumcision synonymously...

You use the word mutilation. No, you just jump to the men, though. Now listen, but when we sort of interchange styles of dress... We're still in the giddy blur, by the way. Good. I never leave it. And personal submission, when we interchange that with sort of a subjugation of a family and keep people in the cellar. There's different levels of complexity.

Now, I'd like to, if I may, shift gears a little, Sam, because one of my great interests in you is your immense intellectual capacity and your, what I want to call it, without being deliberately provocative, zeal and love of ethics and morality. And I would like to know how that relates to your personal spiritual life. I know you are a great meditator. You said like, you know, I've never had the, Jesus, two years silence. I think I'd struggle for 25. Well, I mean, I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes and I don't find it easy. Yeah. I mean, for me, this stuff is the answer. Now, what the reason I meditate, the reason that I embrace a spiritual life is because I believe I have experienced. I've experienced that for me personally to become a valuable member of society, whether that's on the micro level of my family or and hopefully on a broader level. of my family and hopefully on a broader level,

I have to take personal responsibility for the fact that I'm a complex individual, that within me all of the things I would condemn over the course of a podcast, talking to a brilliant man like yourself, maybe one minute I'll condemn violence, another minute I'll condemn egotism and self-centeredness, that I am victim to all of these. I'm perpetrator of self-centeredness and egocentricism. And the tool that has helped me most to overcome

these personal problems has been a kind of a spiritual self-centeredness and egocentricism. And the tool that has helped me most to overcome these personal problems has been a kind of a spiritual Weltanschauung. And I planned to use that word with you today. My German's bad, but I got that one. That's literally the only German word you'll hear. It's the only one I know. So my spirituality has been my personal vehicle for carrying me away from sort of selfishness, self-destruction. And like I'm talking as a person that's overcome through the help of others and to a degree faith, I must say to a huge degree faith, my own addiction. Now, you've got addiction issues, haven't you? No, not that I know of yet.

Just for you, dabbling in. It was your brother, no? Dan. No, neither of you have got no addiction background. No, Dan Harris had. Dan Harris, who's also, he's a friend. There's no relation. But he wrote the book 10% Happier, and it was a big bestseller about mindfulness.

And so he's had issues that he's talked about. I see. Forgive me. So my personal experiences have been that sort of spirituality and a faith that is determined resolutely by as best as possible non-judgmentalism, benevolence, kindness, being of service to others. Principles that, broadly speaking, don't require me to enter into conflict, but to be of service. This, for me, I think is an incredibly valuable resource. And these things and ethics in general are drawn, not ultimately, because who knows what preceded religion, some form of theatre and ritual? Who knows what they're doing down deep in the dank of the forests?

What gods they devise there? They're probably eating mushrooms, yeah. Well, precisely, where consciousness is a little more open. I suppose what I want to understand is, how does your personal spirituality serve you ethically? And where does that intersect with beyond tolerance, because tolerance suggests that there's something to tolerate. Where does it lead you to compassion and love? And what solutions do you think can be derived from your personal experiences of mysticism and spirituality?

Well, I would say first that it really, while it may seem different from what we've been just talking about, it's of a piece with what we've just been talking about. And the reason why I have such passion for criticizing this particular species of bad ideas, the religious ones, is because I see the baby in the bathwater that everyone is afraid of losing. And I see that it doesn't require any divisive bullshit to be saved, right? You don't have to lie to yourself. You don't have to believe that a book was written by the creator of the universe. You don't have to believe that hellfire awaits people who don't call a historical person by the right name. You don't have to believe any of those awaits people who don't call a historical person by the right name.

You don't have to believe any of those things. And all of those things are absolutely integral to the doctrines of these religions. And there's many separate religions on offer that are incompatible. I have to stop you because I think there's a point where religion and politics intersect and it's not always clear where that line is drawn. And I would say that the point where spirituality stops being about kindness love fun remember early in this podcast you did a list of the things that difficult to quantify scientifically and i would wonder how uh how valuable and useful those image scans and neuro image scans are when dealing with fun and love i'm sure they're great service i'm sure but like these things the way

that we access them the way that we increase them and and to your things, the way that we access them, the way that we increase them. And to your earlier point, the way that we as best as possible eliminate suffering. For me, this is the function and the role of spirituality. And I think sort of some of the furniture and ornamentation that religions have variously acquired due to the cultural inflections of the times in which they were conceived. For me are less important and less relevant whilst I acknowledge that I'm a relatively unique case. And some of the extreme issues that you're addressing, they're not imaginary. I know that what you're saying is true. They're not imaginary.

But this baby bathwater issue, I'm interested in the baby. And you're always on about the bathwater. Well, so what you just described about your own spiritual life and ethical life, it is obvious to me that there are universal principles there, that what you just described about the consequences of paying attention to certain things, so meditation, getting off certain substances that are not good for you, so breaking with addiction. These are universal features of what it's like to have a human mind that is based on human neurochemistry. And this is not something we just made up.

It's not something that's purely a product of our time. It's not merely cultural. And that's why sticking girls in bags for their entire lives and not letting them read is bad. Stop saying that. I think it's derisory. It is. It's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan. I'm not talking about, again, I'm not talking about the voluntary use of...

You shouldn't use incendiary language. If you're here to convey love, then why use that? No, because how can you pretend to love girls if you're not as concerned as I am about this mistreatment of them? Because I don't pretend to understand complex historical and cultural issues from a very particular perspective of an American or an Englishman. It's not that you're overthinking it. White man. I'm not overthinking it. You're overthinking it.

It has nothing to do with skin color. Who knows what the level of thought that's required is, Sam. But you, like, you know, you are an American intellectual. No, no. I can introduce you. Okay, but just take a few facts on board here. I can introduce you to women of whatever shade of brown skin you

require. I have no requirements. That's one of the beautiful things about me. Who have grown up in these cultures, who will say exactly what I'm saying about the consequences of compulsory bailing. Sure, and I could introduce you to women of a variety of views that would say the contrary. No, no, they wouldn't say that. It's a practice of personal subjugation.

It's the same as doing yoga or exercise. It's a way of refining your consciousness. But you're drawing the wrong lesson here. No, I'm not drawing the wrong lesson. I'm back to the whole... No, no, no, because you're just missing a few facts. If you have those two people have a conversation, if you take someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Sarah Hader, who runs the ex-Muslims of North America, right, and you have her talk to someone like Linda Sarsour, you know, the hijabi icon of the Women's March, right, darling of the left now, who's actually a closet theocrat and quite a nefarious person when you get her talking about religion. I mean, she will not admit that life for women in Saudi Arabia is bad by comparison at all for women in the West. America should stop having such complicit trade

relationships with them then. I'll agree with you there. But if you have two women of this sort talk, right, one who has taken off the hijab for reasons of not wanting to wear it and wanting to live in a system where she's free not to wear it. And one who says, I'm wearing it purely as an expression of my own religious faith and it's just pure female empowerment. If you let that conversation proceed, you'll see that this side has to lie endlessly about the actual doctrines, about why most people, most women, most of the time are wearing this. It's being forced upon them. I mean, if we talk about the misuse of power, you're talking about take the perfect case that sounds like it's a thought experiment, but it actually happened.

You take the religious police in Mecca who wouldn't let the girls who are burning alive in a dormitory be rescued because they weren't wearing their veils, right? They wouldn't let the firemen go in and rescue girls from a burning building because they weren't properly veiled. Don't get all delighted about it. That's the reductio ad absurdum of this. Particularly in our time where gender relationships in this country have become so complex, particularly where we're both fathers of daughters. Are you not concerned about the kushur and ascetic obligations that will be placed upon my daughter to look a certain way, to behave a certain way, to believe certain things? I don't even think that's a reasonable possibility. I just think you are in a position to judge how wrong that would be.

In a position to judge how wrong what would be? Imposing those restrictions on your girls. You know that would be a diminishment of the well-being of your girls and to pretend to not know it of a girl in Afghanistan. I have to return

to this fetishism idea. Why are you not more concerned by the continual objectification of women, the commodification of female sexuality? I've got two girls. The advertising industry

using females purely as props. It's a different order of problem, but I'm totally with you there. Well, which one is more prominent? What do you think is more likely to happen to your daughter, that she's going to be whisked off to Afghanistan

to be wife number five, or that she's going to have sex with some dickhead because she's got daddy issues? Oh, yeah, but my concern is for both things. Well, your concern should be for reality, not for abstract ideas that play into the hands of an already overly bloated power dynamic and a well-served power dynamic. Okay.

Well, let's get. Whose side are we on? Let's get. Who does the grail serve, Sam? Where is this mythic truth? Where does perennialism come from? Why are these themes found throughout the great faiths? The oneness.

The unity. The possibility for love. We're going giddy, Sam. We're going for another ride in the tumble dryer of love. All right. So let me try to connect a few of these things because you're concerned about power, right? And you're concerned about the misuses of our power. So our being Western power, say. I suppose so. But to tell you the truth, now I've got you. Okay. Like, I don't even, I think that those, the mask of nationalism is superficial.

The real power operates and has done probably since British colonialism on an economic scale that doesn't pay a great deal of attention to sort of trade tariffs or those very trade tariffs have withdrawn up, you you know with the powerful in mind so what for me sam what interests me are not sort of like while i you know i've got no argument bloody isis when i read about that something fucking some terrifying shit going down but what interests me more is who is it that gets to determine what is happening in the world in my life right now right and it seems to me that that's transnational corporations and governments of Western democracies

that don't need to resort to the kind of vivid acts of violence on their domestic population because it's unnecessary, because we've all been beautifully conditioned. And when it is required, when brutality and violence is required, it will be used. It is enacted.

And that, for me, seems more important than people responding to that power. But if it's all important, Sam, then why is your focus continually on the sort of fetishized aspect of it? Well, again, to say fetishized is to reveal the problem that causes me to focus on it because, again, it comes back to the power of ideas. And I think one of the worst ideas going, really, is the one that you've expressed here, which is, who am I to judge?

I'm just a white guy who grew up in the Western context. Who am I to judge the burqa? This kind of moral relativism, postmodernism. I'm not postmodernist. Well, no, but this is the... I'm starting from the perspective of... I know you don't want to answer to that name, but this is the intellectual trend that gave us this kind of apprehension around making these judgments.

Right. Who am I to say what would be a good life for somebody else? And no matter how grotesque the example of human suffering. I'm not afraid of saying that nonviolence, compassion and love is the answer. But I think where we disagree is what should be the key target? What is generating, ultimately generating the problem? So, well, there are many problems, but I think to take it at the level of greatest abstraction and I think greatest leverage for us to think about it is, for the most part, this is not a problem of the world being filled with bad people, right? There are some bad people. There's some, let's say, 1% of people in every culture are probably psychopaths, right? So there's 1% of people who really do feel no compunction

about harming other people, and they kind of get off on it, and they're going to keep doing it no matter what you change about the system. But most harm is the result of bad ideas, good people having bad ideas and good people being in systems where there are bad incentives. And the crucial word here is incentives, right? I think we need economic systems and political systems and institutions and ways of being with one another publicly, and institutions and ways of being with one another publicly, which align our incentives in such a way so as to make ordinary, mediocre, not so insightful, not so reflective, not so philosophical, and frankly, not even that ethical people more and more effortlessly do the right thing, right? So you shouldn't have to be St. Francis of Assisi to act well in the world.

Right. But there are systems where the incentives are bad enough that you really have to be a moral hero to be just basically decent. Right. All of the incentives are pointing the other way. Right. I'll give you an example for this life in a maximum security prison. So if you're a good guy, you're not a racist, you just want to get along with people, if you were put into a maximum security prison, all the incentives would be pushing you the other way. So for you not to join a white gang in a maximum security prison would be effectively suicidal, right? Like you would just be the victim of everyone. The place is set up to segregate everyone by skin color, right? So even if you don't have a racist bone in your body, you're just self-preservation alone.

It's weird as well, because prisons don't exist in an abyss, do they? They are sort of, that's concentrated society. It's a federal institution governed. But it's the perfect example of bad incentives and misaligned incentives. I know. And look, how do these things happen? And where are they happening? They're happening everywhere. In America. But most of these... Britain. Most of these examples of bad incentives,

most of these examples of where power is victimizing millions and millions of people are, I would argue, examples where the system is set up in such a way that it is reliably exporting this misery, right? And there is no author of it. There is no bad person or there are very few bad people who are the actual authors of this human suffering or the perpetrators of it. What we have are systems where selfish people,

being selfish most of the time, manage to export a fair amount of misery to people who are less lucky than themselves. And if we want a fairer economic arrangement, we have to design it. And we have to design it for people as they are. We need systems that will allow people- But people are mutable and constant change. In fact, that's part of your main edict is that we respond to ideas. And we respond to incentives, yes. Ideas and incentives. Be a bit more personal for a moment.

Like, are you a bit cynical about human beings? Because, like, when we talk, it's like I feel that you're... We've been fighting about terrorism and female genital mutilation. With my pro-terrorism, pro-genital mutilation stance.

I will not waver on those issues. Shoulder to the wall. No, but you seem so very... You seem, like, angry Progenital mutilation stance. I will not waver on those issues. Shoulder to the wall. No, but you seem so very, you seem like angry about, you seem angry about humanity almost. No. That human beings are not good or something. No, no. On the contrary, well, it's all mixed, right? I mean, we're good and we're bad and we're careless, right?

And we're short-sighted. Like Sonson Nixon would say, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Yeah, that's certainly a more eloquent way of saying it. But there's, again, to talk about the situational problem, the problem of incentives is doing more work than human evil is doing. All of us have work to do on ourselves to be happier and better people, right? And that is spiritual life and that is ethical life. But I think better than, and these are not mutually exclusive projects. These can be done simultaneously. But better than each of us figuring out how to be a saint would be to design a system that made it easier for

everyone to be far better than they're tending to be now. And that's possible. I think that's absolutely possible. I think so, too. A lot of decentralization and a lot of significant change, particularly in our nations, around what is called the political. But I sort of see as the religious. Now, let me tell you something again. Let's again, a little more, what do I want to say, trivial or personal.

It's not trivial. The other day, I was driving day I was driving home from I've seen a movie or something It was the daytime still the homeless guy just collapsed laying in the middle of the road You know, it's LA homeless people are just everywhere Forming shanty towns like the apocalypse has already happened and is creeping in around us like a slow tide There was some homeless guy. And I thought, oh, no, that homeless guy is just laying there. I should do something about that. Yeah. And then I didn't. I just went home. And I thought, like, oh, why didn't I do anything about that?

This is a great example here. So, OK, because in the current system, there's nothing very easy to do. So you have to be an absolute moral hero to do something about that particular homeless guy. And it's very likely that what you would do wouldn't help a lot and would just complicate your life massively. So let's say you just say, well, this is totally untenable. I cannot step over the body of yet another homeless person. I'm going to take this guy into my life. He's going to come back to my hotel room. I've got to go to London in a week. I'm going to figure out what to do with this guy and get him. And it's going to be your whole project. I've done it a couple of times. It's complex.

Yeah. So the reason why he's lying on the side, there are many reasons why he's lying on the sidewalk. And probably those reasons aren't immediately actionable by you. Now, what we need is a system that recognizes the problem of homelessness in the most compassionate and pragmatic way and figures out whatever solution there is. There's substance abuse issues. There's mental health issues. There's zoning issues. There's this not-in-my-backyard-ism where people are just getting pushed to different parts of the city because you don't see this in Beverly Hills, but you see this in Santa Monica, right? We have to figure out a solution that is compassionate.

Sam, do you think part of it is the relegation of spiritual principles? The fact that broadly speaking, culturally, spiritual principles have been relegated to the point of almost insignificant. So it sort of no longer feels like a sort of a personal duty to help homeless people. Of course, as you said, the systems aren't in place. One wonders what would happen if I just sort of put him over my shoulder and tried to take him somewhere where I know it would happen. Shelters would be full, complex medical issues, issues of finance.

But, you know, don't you think that sort of this sort of idea of individualism and individual freedom kind of leads to sort of it somehow favours primal and selfish drives over sort of communal fraternal drives and whilst i agree with you on that baby bath water dynamic i don't think we do enough to uh to focus on to illuminate and present the baby the baby that is spirituality that is you the kind of things that we're you know when you're meditating for two years in silence when you're continuing to meditate now, probably when you're doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, strong senses of fraternity, togetherness, oneness. How do we, for me, I think that the priority, the most useful way of getting those values into our culture

is to demonstrate them, to confront power where possible and necessary. And it seems to me less significant, and this is what I'm fascinated by, to attack, to focus on the arguments that you have been focusing on and arguments that you've been brilliantly making and writing about wonderfully whilst I disagree has become evident on many of the tenets of it.

So for me, I suppose what I'm saying is Orton, people like you and I who believe in spirituality, who believe in compassion, who believe in spirituality who believe in compassion who believe in love be doing more to elevate those values yeah well well i'm doing that a lot i mean i talk i mean i talk about meditation and spirituality and well-being and ethics a lot is it got behavior but it's got behavioral i know you're chairman of that deal with you know secularism and all that kind of thing.

How does that convert into boots on the ground love for other humans? Just to talk about what the ground truth is here. We have consciousness and its contents in each moment. That's what our lives are. We have changing states of consciousness. And this is all there is to care about. All there is to care about are changes for good or for ill in conscious creatures like ourselves. So if you love someone, you care that they be happy and that they no longer suffer.

Or if they suffer, they suffer in ways that are productive that lead to even deeper states of well-being. It's not like we're just pure hedonists. There's kinds of suffering that has a silver lining that gets us somewhere worth going. But when you're talking about finding meaning in life and making meaning together in community, you're talking about just what it's like to be you. You're talking about consciousness.

And we actually know a lot about how to improve states of human consciousness and creativity and aesthetic beauty and ethical interactions and not lying and treating people the way you would want to be treated, something like a precept like the Golden Rule. Super useful. I mean, as I could say, that's a great piece of software. These fall under the heading of baby, right? They're all there in religion.

These all come from Scripture. All come from theology. Yeah, but they don't only come from Scripture. People had these ideas outside of religious traditions. You can find Greek philosophers who've said all this. You can find Romans. They were religious. They were pagans.

Nothing has to be believed on insufficient evidence to use these ideas and to find them compelling. I ask you this. No, of course. I agree with you. You don't have to, oh, I believe that we're all... And there's a cost to believing any dogma. Any dogma, Sam. Any dogma is costly.

Consumerism, consumerism, expensive dogma. It depends what those dogmas is. Look at the homeless people on the street. Now, they are the price. They are the collateral damage of our culture. Sam, are you confident that individual consciousness like my individual russell brand consciousness and your individual sam harris consciousness are distinct separate things that are not qualitatively similar if not ultimately the same i know there is zero scientific evidence to suggest that all consciousness is one. But given your research scientifically and personal spiritual investigations,

is there anything that suggests to you that consciousness as a phenomena may be universal? Well, it's universal in the sense that it is simply the fact of experience. It's the fact that there's something that is like to be you, and there's something that is like to be me. And so it's almost analogous to space. It's like the space in this room is seamless, right, and undivided. And you ask yourself, well, so what about the space inside this water bottle? Well, where is the water bottle with reference to space? Well, it's the only place it can be. It's right there where the water bottle is. If I move Well, it's the only place it can be. It's right there where the water bottle is. If I move it, it moves. But if you're asking about the space,

it has a kind of sameness regardless of what object in that space you're talking about. And consciousness has that property, at least conceptually. Now, we don't know how consciousness arises in the physics of things. We don't know if it's a product of... Matter. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly good reason to believe that it is, but we don't know how far down it goes. It could be a fundamental constituent of matter

or it could arise on the basis of assemblies of neurons. Is the good reason to believe that it comes from matter that the more complex an organism is, the more evidence of functioning rational consciousness there is? I mean, again, you sort of start the universe from the Big Bang, right? And the idea that we find complex arrangements of matter giving rise to different emergent properties, and life is one of those properties,

and all of the features of life, reproduction and metabolism and the order we see in the natural world is the result of a process of increasing complexity. And at the end of some significant period, I mean, in our case, billions of years, you find organisms that exhibit the properties of consciousness. But the only consciousness we're sure of, 100% sure of, is the consciousness in our own case. Now, we can reason by analogy. We look at dogs and other complex animals, and we can say, well, to imagine that they don't have consciousness but only seem to have it, that's actually not parsimonious.

Because they're so similar to us neurologically and in every other way that to imagine that the lights come on somewhere between them and us seems irrational. But how far down that goes is anybody's guess. And intuitions really divide. So if you ask most neuroscientists or philosophers of mind, is there something that it's like to be a fly that's got 100,000 neurons in its brain? People just, it's a kind of coin toss, right? Now, I think there's, again, we simply don't know at what point consciousness emerges. But it's possible that single cells are conscious in some way, right? You wouldn't expect the living world to appear differently if cells were conscious, right? But it would be genuinely mysterious because when you look at the human brain, there seems to be a lot of neural activity, in fact, most neural activity, that is not associated with what you experience as consciousness or I experience as consciousness from a first person side. So what most neural activity is not related to what we experience as consciousness, but it's most anatomical biological stuff.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Most of what your brain is doing isn't showing up in your first person experience as consciousness. My individual identity, just like a cherry on the cake, while the kidneys and the blood and all that stuff is kicking in. But it's the only thing that ultimately matters, right? And it's the only thing that any of us can be absolutely sure of. This is my line about consciousness being the only thing in the universe that can't be an illusion. I'm not the first person to say this, obviously, but it's the only thing that has to be true of us no matter how mistaken we might be about everything else.

So if we're in the matrix right now and we're just living in the simulation on some alien supercomputer and none of what we think is real is actually real, consciousness is still real. I mean, consciousness is just simply the fact that anything seems to be happening at all. Consciousness is still real. I mean, consciousness is just simply the fact that anything seems to be happening at all. Or if you're really asleep and dreaming right now and we're not really doing this podcast, you're totally confused about your actual circumstance, but you're actually not confused about the fact that you're conscious. Although it would explain why I've got no trousers and pants on. I was hoping you had trousers on.

Hey, but Sam, like, see how you just described consciousness then as a potentially sort of a construction. And it's only our personal consciousness that we can be certain is not an illusion. Many of you know about, you know, sort of the Mahārabhāta and the Bhagavad Gītā. Many of these ideas are sort of using a vernacular that is naturally determined by the time in which it was conceived. It talks about these ideas, maya, illusion, that. And for me, like, you know, because of, like you also said, that list of values that would be useful and which I've sort of said, oh, well, they're part of the baby in the bathwater, aren't they?

It seems to me that possibly within, like, you know, if we can somehow extract what is positive from what is called religion, that it might, it leads us to ideas such as fraternity, unity, oneness, compassion. And like, do you not find connections between what you have learned in neuroscience and what you have learned from studying sort of Buddhism. Oh, yeah. The connections are very direct, but... How do they know that stuff?

But we don't want... Well, just because it's just the nature of consciousness. You're talking about people who have spent, especially in the Buddhist case, just an incredible amount of time studying from the first person side what experience is like, what its character is. And so one analogy would be the central claim of Buddhism is not just Buddhism, but Buddhism, and I would put several

of the Indian traditions like Advaita Vedanta in there, where the central claim is that the self is an illusion. The ego is an illusion. And when I say self, I don't mean that people are illusions. I mean that the sense that you have a subject riding around in your head, thinking your thoughts, right? That there's a thinker in addition to the thoughts. That's an illusion. And that makes perfect sense neurologically because there's no place in the brain for your ego to be sitting. There's no central place where everything comes together. There's no unchanging center in the brain. You're just talking about a cascade of neurophysiology and everything is distributed

everywhere. And there are various parts of the brain that are coming online and off and subserving conscious states and not. It's a process. And if you could experience consciousness as a flow of sensory and emotional and interoceptive experience without the sense that there's an unchanging center riding around on that flow, right? Like a man in a boat on the stream of consciousness. Yes, yes. Like a man in a boat on the stream of consciousness. If you could experience consciousness without that, that would be an experience that is much more coincident with what we understand neurologically.

That would be to experience something that is more true from the third person, brain-based, what do we see inside the head side. And it just so happens you can experience that. That is what meditation is like when you really know how to meditate. This sense that there's a meditator in the head strategically paying attention to experience rather than just pure experience, that drops away, right? So that's one piece of data in favor of introspection here. And it's not a piece that the Western intellectual tradition or the Western spiritual tradition ever got a good handle on. Yes, you can find specific Christian and Jewish and Muslim mystics making these noises. But when they make these noises sufficiently, they start to sound like Buddhists and their co-religionists want to kill them rather often. Yes.

And not only the co-religionists, the powerful entities within nation states and economic entities. If people start believing they're not individuals, it's very hard to market at them. But we haven't had a lot of problems with people being killed for not doing enough shopping in shopping malls. Unless there's a shoot-in in the shopping mall or unless the stuff they buy in the shopping mall kills them. But if you look at the history of Christianity and Judaism and Islam, you find people who...

I mean, these are explicitly dualistic traditions. You have a soul that exists in relationship to the divine. And that division is maintained theologically. I would say, Sam Harris, that the reason that bifurcation occurred is precisely because were man's relationship with the divine prioritized in the manner that you've just been describing that seems neurologically apposite, were that to become our priority, a materialistic, let's call it, lifestyle, a mechanistic social system such as the ones that we inhabit would be less fertile.

Because if people believed that the ultimate reality was not being experienced by the self, that there was no self, that unbinds us, that makes oneness a real possibility. That starts to suggest that your consciousness and my consciousness ultimately are the same, or at least there's nothing to suggest that they're any different, and that the things that we believe to be different are superficial accents acquired through culture and education. But that's also true materially, and we shouldn't give the material short shrift, because the material progress is the thing that frees attention to... You roll back the clock long enough, you find people living in perpetual states of trying not to die, right?

I mean, you're fending off wild animals, you're exposed to the elements, you're suffering the consequences of disease, and you have no concept of what disease is, right? You don't know about the germ theory of disease, and your child dies, and you think it's because your neighbor shined the evil eye on the child, right? I mean, so it's like you have magical beliefs accounting for changes in the world, and they're completely fallacious, right? They're completely fallacious, right? So the progress we've made in understanding the material world is all to the good, except we have all of these misaligned incentive problems and externalized damages to very good things. I mean, like you want an iPhone, right? But you don't want people jumping off the roof of Foxconn because life is so painful there to make an iPhone, right? So is it possible to make an iPhone without creating just unendurable misery for some number of people?

Undoubtedly, it must be true, right? We haven't figured it out yet so as to make that the default. And we need to do that. But there is no distance between the material and the spiritual here. Because if consciousness is just a matter of information processing in the right complex systems, and if consciousness could one day be born in our computers, well, then we'll have an ethical obligation to not make our computers suffer.

If Siri could suffer, well, then it matters how you talk to her, you know, and it would matter every... I've only used her for stupid questions. Yeah, neither... Mine's a bloke, actually. Oh, yeah? Mine complicate life. And we're obviously not there yet, or it certainly seems obvious that we're not there yet. But at a certain point, we will very likely either be in the presence of conscious machines or think we are. They'll emulate conscious systems in a compelling enough way that our default will be, I'm in relationship to this thing now. And to

withdraw a sense of consciousness in that case would seem just unprincipled and unethical. We could well build machines that seem to have emotional lives and even have richer emotional lives than we do because they're going to have access to all of human knowledge, all of the aesthetic products of human ingenuity for all of history, and they'll be able to talk about them and appreciate them and remind you of how much you love certain things and react to your emotion faster and more accurately than your best friends or your spouse, right? Ultimately, we will very likely build these machines. And if we haven't

understood how consciousness arises in physical systems, we'll think they're conscious and we will maybe right or wrong about that. And whether we're right or wrong about that will be a huge consequence because it would be an absolutely abhorrent act to build conscious systems that can suffer in ways we don't even understand and just to cavalierly spawn this off in simulations and on the Amazon cloud and not know what the hell we're doing. For me, though, of course, we've already created... This is not just a hypothesis because already all around us, as we've already fle like that this is not just a hypothesis because already all around us as we've already fleetingly discussed lie scattered the damaged and broken and presumably

conscious entities that our fellow human beings our fellow englishmen and american americans scattered and broken around us um sam uh so for me for me here's two points to wrap up because we've gone much longer than i intended to sure it was trippy yeah like you know there's quite a lot of questions still let me see if I can

I'm fine on time so you can just I'll see if I can do this one tumble dryer one swirling neurological sprawl one linguistic regurgitation

in your general direction here are the things that interest me one on a podcast I was listening to you do once, like, you know, and it's an idea that's sort of more commonly understood that possibly free will is an illusion, that decisions are made prior, so morality and ethics sort of suffer somewhat, if that's true.

Two... I don't think that final part holds. Oh, really? I think you can have all the morality. You can have all the morality. You're an argumentative person. Helpfully, yes. I've realized about you. You can have all the morality. You're an argumentative person. I've realized about you. You can have your morality and ethics without free will.

You can have morality and ethics without free will. But the way we evaluate them has to be sort of looked at differently. Do it in one big, let me do my vomit. Yeah, go for it. Then you do yours back. Yours is more piecemeal. Mine's a sort of a literal slew. Yours has all sorts of rationalism and academia built on a sort of Minecraft.

It's a beautiful architecture. So Sam Harris, the other thing is when you have taken psychedelics, did you not experience things that are comparable to what you described is neurologically demonstrable and what you've experienced in meditation. I sense that your individual identity is a sort of a confection of ideas and sensation and that there is a sort of a beautiful oneness. I myself have taken hallucinogenic,

I'm clean now for 15 years, but prior to that when I used to take hallucinogens, the thing, I didn't have the vocabulary, artillery or education to understand what the hell was going on prior to that when i used to take hallucinogens the thing i didn't have the vocabulary artillery or education to understand what the hell was going on and i wish i'd been born into some sort of shamanic tradition where people taught you what spirit is where they taught you what it is to be a man what they taught you what love is and how to behave and how to create systems and how to father a daughter and how to take care of regardless i experienced something within my

identity i seemingly beyond my identity as a 16 year old boy i remember thinking oh my god this is not who i am i am not this body my consciousness is other than this in temporarily individuated form that only the distinction and you know even just on the on the physics level. Everything was one. Everything is expanding. I am only experiencing time in an animalistic way because of my own entropy and atrophy. Were I a limitless and eternal material being, I would see myself as part of the whole,

as part of oneness because the way that I narrativize my life is as a result of biocentric experience as opposed to objective experience. I've just been subjected to the stimuli and I've built an identity around it. It felt extremely true and it stayed with me ever since. And I've revisited it through meditation. Aside from it being an interesting experience intellectually, it's an interesting experience emotionally and spiritually. And if this sense of oneness does not translate into a sort of a personal ethical code that means I treat people lovingly, what is its value?

So there's two questions. Have you experienced that state? And what do you think of the moral and ethical implications on an individual? And how does it translate into our behavior? Well, there are two states I would want to differentiate. There are two ways in which you can think about the loss of self and the sense of oneness. So to come back to what I said before, you have consciousness and its contents, right? There's the fact that things are appearing. There's the fact that there is experience. And consciousness is the knowing aspect of experience. And in the normal course of events, you have ordinary sights and sounds

and smells and sensations and thoughts and emotions. And most people go through life thinking every moment of the day in that context. They don't know how to meditate. They don't have any mindfulness. They have this sort of white meditate. They don't have any mindfulness. They have this sort of white noise of discursivity where they're talking to themselves, and everything they see and sense and every interaction is filtered through this conversation they're having with themselves. And the world they see visually and the world they sense with touch

and other senses is tiled over with concepts. So I look at a bottle and I see bottle, right? This field of light and shadow and color is differentiated by concepts. I see my phone, I see a bottle, I see the table, and everything is solidified that way. Now, what happens with psychedelics is your habit pattern of thought and attention is completely bowled over by the pharmacology of whatever you've just ingested, right? So if it's acid or mushrooms or any of those classic psychedelics, it's just whoever you are, whatever your talents are at introspection, whether you've ever wanted to meditate or not, you are guaranteed to have a change in your experience if you take a sufficient dose of

a psychedelic. Now, it can be a very chaotic and unpleasant change. It can mimic psychosis. A bad acid trip is really bad and not spiritually uplifting at all. But a good one can put you in a state which is just unimaginably expansive, where like all of the normal perceptual categories and you know, you touch a tree with your hand and there can be kind of a laser-like concentration in the sensation of just having your hand make contact with the tree. And there can be just this sense of the energy of that touch, right, can become, it's like you're turning up the volume on this channel of information and making it conscious in a way that it never is in normal life. And so you can spend two hours just in this kind of orgasmic union with a tree, right, on the right drug. Now, you can have all of those changes happen in your consciousness, you know, like the full pyrotechnics of a psychedelic display without losing the sense of an ego. You can still feel that you are the center of that, and it's just so much better, or in the chaotic psychotic side, so much worse to be you at that moment. If you go on intensive retreat and you're spending 12 to 18 hours a day meditating,

you can have psychedelic-like changes in the contents of consciousness. But the more important change for me is the insight that there is no center to consciousness. There simply is consciousness and everything appearing. And when you have that insight, it actually doesn't matter what is appearing. It doesn't matter if when you touch the tree, it feels like a million watts of sublime energy and there's no barrier when you touch the tree, it feels like, you know, a million watts of sublime energy and there's no barrier between you and the tree. That is the same on some fundamental level. That's the same as just seeing a water bottle and picking it up and having a drink in a completely otherwise ordinary state of consciousness. The center can drop out equally or be present equally in both of those cases. And I'm much more interested in finding this unifying experience of centerlessness in the midst of whatever is happening.

Because the problem with the psychedelic experience or any peak experience is that they come and go. They're by nature impermanent, right? or any peak experiences, that they come and go. They're by nature impermanent, right? And you had to bring some causes and conditions together to make them happen, whether they're pharmacological or meditational. You had to go on retreat for a year and meditate 18 hours a day in order to see those inner lights or whatever it was. Or you had to kind of blow your mind on acid and be kind of useless for the rest of the day in order to have that. It's possible to have no ego and have none of the problems which an ego gives you in a state of otherwise totally ordinary consciousness, in a state that's compatible with having this conversation. You either feel like there's someone behind your face in this moment or not. And that's really what it is. It's like if you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, the default state of consciousness is to feel like you're

behind your face looking out at a world that's not self. Like you're over there, you're kind of behind the mask that is your face, and you're looking at me. And when I look at you, when I react to something you say, right, when I say, well, that's clearly bullshit. Well, hey, you haven't thought that through. That feeling of you're implicated over there, right? And you begin to react based on that implication. It's possible to lose that and to have just the world remains and yet nothing else changes. There's no strange lights.

There's no Kundalini in the body. Nothing has to get weird or psychedelic. And it doesn't matter if it does get weird and psychedelic in that place. No, you're right. If there is no pragmatism to spirituality, if there is no practical application to these extreme experiences within consciousness then what is their value my feeling is is that the sort of linguistics and grammar of mechanics the apparent separateness the meaning of gesture the very notion of you and i there are moments where i experience it as temporal. There are moments where, to use the great Bill Hicks' perfect phrase,

I feel that we are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. When you talk about the loss of the being behind the mask of the face, for me, this is... we are talking about enlightenment and you're talking about rather ascetic version of that without bells and whistles and pyrotechnics to use your earlier phrase but similarly when you talk about the psychedelic that sort of very emotional description of connection and love. For me, these are the kinds of experiences that we need to convey into an environment that, deprived of that kind of experience and understanding,

creates maximum security prisons which find further means for degradation and gangs and separation once within it that we are living perhaps in a time that is for me determined by the extraction of the spiritual as opposed to the sort of the amplification of it and for me the the distinction that you and I have in the way that we view the world is that I feel that the main agent in extracting this element of spirit, without which I don't see a solution for the 7 billion people on this planet, that the main agent is post-secular capitalist culture. And you believe that it's religion.

Well, no, it's not only religion, but it's dogmatism. It's bad ideas that are immune from criticism and therefore remain effective. So what we need, again, it comes back to conversation and violence. We need successful conversations. We need to converge. We need to find the thing that can be said so as to get the people who are wrong to recognize it. And that's all of us some of the time. It's like how long do you want to be wrong for? How long do you want to be living under the sway of a powerful bad idea. Now, there are people who have powerful bad ideas that they class as religious who are determined to live the rest of their lives under the sway of those ideas, no matter how much evidence piles up against them and no matter what the consequences. And so that's why religion for me has a special character. But political dogmatism is, in many cases, just as problematic. Economic dogmatism,

economic dogmatism, in certain cases, could be the greatest engine of harm we ever see, right? So again, it matters what is true. It matters what causes systems to work or to reliably fail. It does, Sam. And given that, I think, in the last few minutes of our conversation, we've got close to something that seems like a fundamental truth that we can agree on, that there seems to be some essence behind temporal individuality notion which does exist in all religions in a, I would say, in a relegated role. And as you said earlier, in a role that, you know, when mysticism. Let me just ask you, what's the reason to say that it exists in all religions? Because what if it doesn't? Like what then?

Or what if it doesn't equally? Or what if much of the religion repudiates this core truth? Well, I would say that you and I are having the same conversation and agree about something fundamental. And to elect to disagree for the purposes of hypotheses would be a silly thing to do because within Christianity, as you've already said, there's a mystical tradition. Within Islam, there is. Within Buddhism, it's a mystical tradition within Islam. There is within Buddhism. It's sort of more practically, it's in Jainism. I don't know all religions. I don't know enough about it.

But what I'm saying is that what excites me is when I see perennial mythic templates recurring through folklore, faith, monotheism, pantheism, that all seem to infer the truth that you are personally describing, that you have to infer the truth that you are personally describing, that you have psychedelically described, that you have neurologically described. For me, that's important, Sam. But it's very important to realize that they don't all do it equally. And to pay lip service to the idea that they're all teaching the same thing equally well is creating, I would argue, an immense amount of harm.

But there are some dogmas and doctrines that say it doesn't exist and that it's irrelevant and that it's not there at all. Also a huge problem. I don't think, like, say take our two countries. I don't think the dominant ideologies are drawn from religion. They're drawn from post-en-enlightenment rational materialistic ideas and from economic ideas and colonial ideas and post-westphalian treaty ideas of state and nation and power you know people aren't going like the big problems aren't derived from a sort of a

religious source and if they are they are the very components that share those qualities with non-religious power structures the important thing and the thing that is not present almost by definition in a secular culture is this idea of essence and truth other than through mechanistic exploration through science, which whilst, as you have already brilliantly explained, is invaluable, it can't, like I know you've done talks that directly contradict this, but we can't answer the questions of the experience of essence yet.

And perhaps one day we will. Perhaps one day we will. But it seems to me that at some point, faith will be required. Let me give you one example that I think ties together a lot of what we disagree about here, and it crystallizes the point I'm urging you to take seriously. Do you think that I don't take it seriously? Yeah. Do you think I don't take it seriously? No, this particular point. Let me just crystallize this point. It's the problem of dogmatism, why dogmatism is basically always

bad and unforeseeably bad. You can't in advance know how bad a dogma is going to be just by considering the sentence on paper. Dogmatism is just the wrong methodology for getting anywhere worth going because it is the antithesis of open conversation. And this is the example that I now always use because it just is so clear. The dogma that all human life is equally sacred, all human lives are equally valuable, and that life starts at the first moment, the moment of conception, right? Now, this on its face, if you just told me, 20 years ago, you said, if you just told me, 20 years ago, you said, if someone who believes this, what sort of needless human misery is he going to

manufacture? I would say, well, this is the most benign thing you could possibly believe. Who's going to get killed in the service of this dogma, right? Who's going to be tortured for decades in the service of this dogma? But when you look at what people have traditionally done with this specific idea, and this is a Judeo-Christian idea- And it's in the American constitution, so it's a nationalistic idea also. Yeah, but especially the link to the moment of conception, you look at the millions of Americans who opposed embryonic stem cell research, right, with all the promise that held. Here we have Petri dishes filled with, it's imagined, hundreds of human souls that are microscopic. And to kill those souls would be tantamount to murder. To experiment on those souls would be tantamount to murder.

And therefore, they didn't want to have a conversation about all of the children and adults with life-deranging injuries and diseases who might have been helped had progress been made in that area. Now, that is a psychotic moral attitude made possible by the most benign-seeming dogma, right? I mean, literally, we're talking about people who, if you— No, but that's just one aspect of it. seeming dogma, right? I mean, literally we're talking about people who... No, but that's just one aspect of it. There's an understandable squeamishness about human life, and we've all seen the little baby pro-life type images and

stuff. But also, Sam, there's an ongoing dialectic between the scientific community and religious community of who's got the right to be the parental figure in ownership of the public sphere and the public soul, in inverted commas. So, like, you know, there's a lot of kickback,

atavistic kickback from Christian groups over these sort of, you know, like evidently beneficial scientific endeavors. But it's a sincerely held belief. I believe the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception, and therefore I'm worried. And it's sort of an interesting sort of notion, and I think you and I would be on the same side of that particular argument, clearly. But what I would say is that we need to, again, revert to focusing on what is truly divine or sublime, these moments of interconnectivity and oneness.

And then we wouldn't need trash talismans to be placeholders for meaning in a culture that has lost its meaning, I would say in significant part because the role of the spiritual has been relegated to meaninglessness in favour of a materialistic, mechanistic culture that leads ultimately to widespread consumerism and unconsciousness, that we are continually in that world of reiterative thought constant tangled thought that because people have no experience of the sublime of the divine but again i just wouldn't i mean so you have your own fetishistic objects like this notion

of consumerism right so like consumer like you and I are having this conversation in a podcast studio at Headspace, right? Headspace is a meditation app that on the one hand is the quintessence of consumerism. I mean, this is something that only happens in a smartphone, right? The very phone that I was talking about that's causing people to jump off rooftops, right? And yet I think Headspace is an absolutely good thing to have out there. And it is bringing an incredibly useful practice to millions of people. And podcasts bring incredibly useful conversations to millions of people. All of this is enabled by mere materialism and mere consumerism. enabled by mere materialism and mere consumerism. And there has to be an ethical and spiritually correct way to do all this. It's not a matter of getting rid of the microphones and getting

rid of the smartphones. Of course. And I'm not suggesting that. The same way as you would posit there is an extremist and dangerous version of Islam, which I would say has, I don't think is an essentially malevolent idea. I would disagree with that strongly. I would say that people having objects isn't necessarily wrong, but to fetishize objects and to believe that some kind of fulfillment and spiritual solution can be achieved through the acquisition of objects is dangerous and all the more dangerous because it's not so explicitly understood that that's what's happening that the extremist ideology that we already live within is so all-encompassing that we cannot see its horizons that we have lost the tools to understand it and describe it I'm not talking about sort of a post-stalinist leftist position

I'm talking about the reinvention and the re-embracing of the human soul. Can we find that? You've talked, Sam, endlessly about we need to have a conversation. Well, you and I are having a conversation. I believe in God. You don't believe in God. And it turns out that the differences

aren't actually, when it boils down to it, that meaningful. Because when it comes to love of our daughters, freedom, compassion, we ultimately believe the same things. I think that unless you and I can find a way of saying, okay, I respect that. A lot of the people whose guidance I seek most earnestly

are atheists. But that doesn't change the fact that I believe that there are levels of fact that i believe that there is there is there are levels of consciousness that are beyond material phenomena that will never understand through magnifications of the human senses or further analysis of the material objects because there are limitations to the human mind you know and and ultimately and, Sam, I also think that all of this stuff, all of this ethereal wittering

has no meaning unless it translates into love and compassion, unless there is some meaning in the idea that there is some connection between a tree and a hand if you achieve the correct mental state. Again, there are wrinkles here that I just want to flag. One is

that extreme mental pleasure is divorceable from ethics. So for instance, to go back to this perverse case that we started with, suicide bombing, I have good reason to believe that the mental state of a suicide bomber before he- You think it's euphoric? Yes. Yes. We're not talking about suicidal people who are just trying to end the depression as fast as possible. We're talking about people who are on the cusp of the deepest spiritual reward. But then let's take this. Listen, you like full experiments and you've had so much time with suicide bombers. Take a person like a policeman that's willing to risk his own life to rescue

a child in jeopardy. Similarly, their regard for their own life is being abandoned in that moment. And that too could be described as a kind of euphoria. But because it happens to fit in with our worldview, we're cool with it. Yeah. But that's what I'm saying. The real consequences for human beings matter. And euphoria is something, and a sense of meaning is something that can be totally misaligned with what I think we would agree is an actual ethical relationship and an actual spiritual insight. And so euphoria is not a perfect guide. It can be a very misleading guide for wisdom and compassion. That's the point I was making. This is true.

I've made some bloody bad decisions as a result of euphoria. Yeah. And the absence of euphoria can also be misleading because you can – they're genuine. So what I just said about this kind of non-dual experience in meditation, you can have it in a very subtle way that doesn't have – doesn't summon – at least certainly doesn't immediately summon some radical change in the feeling tone of your experience. It can be as simple as just looking at a water bottle, you know, and it's just the lights are on and there's

no center. Now you can feel that for just a moment and not recognize its revolutionary significance because it doesn't come with the upwelling of rapture or bliss that people associate with good meditation or a psychedelic experience or ordinary religiosity like feelings of love while chanting or singing in church or whatever it is. Or at a football match or wherever. There are various contexts in which these states can be achieved. And I suppose what I believe is that we should be looking to create these states,

prioritize these states and give more people access to them through whatever means. Certainly, I don't agree with the imposition of an ideology of dogma on anybody else. And I think the key obstacles to that are huge centralized power bases. And without the removal of that, I don't see how there could be a solution. Yeah. Well, I don't know how much we disagree about all that. I mean, we haven't... Again, it's all a matter of alternatives. It's like democracy seems impressively broken to me, and capitalism seems impressively broken to me, except the alternatives seem worse. I mean, this is Winston Churchill, right?

No, but I think we just need to find our way, but just recognize what we're doing. We are trying to grab whatever lever or dial we can get within reach to change the human experience in predictably benign and ultimately positive ways. Do you feel much fear in life? Do you feel afraid much? Like in your tummy, I mean, not in your brain. It's more in my brain than in my tummy. You feel everything in your brain, don't you? Well, I mean, no, it's not that I can't feel fear. But the things that I worry about publicly as a matter of being someone who talks and writes about these things is not indicative of my feeling adrenalized and fearful all the time. Actually, the thing that worries me most, again, at the brain level is that the greatest risks to human well-being are hard to take seriously. The people who professionally think about nuclear war and the consequences of proliferation, people like William Perry,

I guess he's close to 90 now, maybe he's 85. These people think that we are at the most dangerous place we've been in the last 75 years with respect to the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. So it's like the Cold War is not only not over, it is from Perry's point of view, we are in another Cuban missile crisis right now, and nobody's worried about it. With Russia or Korea? Well, yeah, all of it. Yeah. But I mean, I think it's the possibility of a mistake. I mean, the book I would recommend your listeners read, which should make them suitably afraid, is Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control, which is just a story of how many mishaps and how many how haphazard our stewardship of these nuclear weapons has been. It's just it's been by dint of sheer dumb luck that we haven't nuked ourselves or provoked an exchange between between Russia and the United States based on just bad information.

You know, but so what is worrisome here is that it's hard to spend more than five minutes worrying about that on any given day. You know, like, well, I can worry a lot about totally trivial things in my own life, right? Like if my website goes down, you know, my feeling of kind of moral emergency is at 11, right? Like what the fuck is happening? My website is down. Like, you know, I want to call talk about this, I'm not going to be thinking about it. Right. And that worries me. It's hard to have an appropriate emotional response to what we think the data show. And so it is with the suffering of other people. You feel it about the homeless person you can see on this sidewalk that you happen to be walking on. But to hear that 90,000 people in Los Angeles County are homeless,

it's inconceivable and it's hard to summon an appropriate emotional response. Yes. I wonder why that is. Perhaps, Sam, we have been brought out of alignment with what we're been brought out of alignment with what we're capable of receiving, what we're capable of transmitting. I'm talking of sort of anthropology, I suppose, that perhaps human beings have been so extracted from these conditions that, you know, where you said we wouldn't even recognize what disease was. We have become as gods. We have surmounted so many obstacles that perhaps we are no longer living within a palette that is appropriate for this particular mammal. But we also just have bugs in our hardware and software that we are bad at correcting for. And that's why, again, systemic corrections, like good laws and good tax codes and good governments and good

institutions, I think will do much heavier lifting for us than all of us getting our heads straight and keeping them straight day after day. So, I mean, the example that I'll give here is based on the work of Paul Slovic, who found it was just, it's a propensity for moral error that is totally shocking. So if you tell people, you give them like the classic sort of UNICEF pitch, like here's one little girl in Sudan. Her name is Jenny. Her parents were killed. She needs your help.

Five dollars a day will keep her in school and all the rest, right? You tell that story with one identifiable child, you get the maximum response of compassion and actual altruism from people. You ask them how much they'll give every month, and you get their maximum number. If you show that same girl to a different group of people along with her brother, and you say, here's Ginny and here's Jacob. They've suffered this horrible atrocity, $5 a day, $5 a month, we'll keep them in school, et cetera. The altruism and the self-assessment of compassion reliably goes

down, just adding more to the scope of the problem, right? And it's the same girl and the same boy. You add 10, it goes down further, it goes through the floor. And if you add background, background statistics, if you say, this little girl, Jenny, she's got this terrible problem. You can help. And there's 100,000 girls just like her in Sudan alone. People just, the compassion just washes out. It induces a kind of apathy. It induces a kind of despair and a kind of hopelessness.

Yeah, there's no point in doing anything. And so we have to correct for that. The teleology of civilization then seems somewhat broken. The idea that bigger and bigger states and a globally mandated government, these would seem to be poor ideas. What may work for human beings, for the seven billion, is decentralization. And to achieve that, to achieve real change, where do you suppose the fulcrum will need to be applied? Who are the people for whom the 90,000 homeless and little Jenny and the 100,000 others are not really a problem because their system is operating precisely as it was intended to operate? Well, it's all of us. Again, there are not that many bad people.

Again, there are not that many bad people. We have a default level of selfishness in virtually everyone all the time. And that we have to figure out how to game that and channel that successfully toward more benign ends. this is what capitalism promises but doesn't deliver, is everyone selfishly seeking happiness for themselves and prioritizing the happiness of their families, their loved ones, and then maybe extending that circle more and more as they learn more and more about the other problems in the world. They'll never extend that circle perfectly, or most people certainly won't.

And what you want is a system that captures all of that energy in a way that allows all boats or most boats to rise with the same tide most of the time. And is there a perfect solution to all of these zero-sum and positive-sum arrangements? I don't know, but there's certainly better and worse ones. And we know there's some bad ones on offer that we don't want to experiment with again. Yes. And we want to refine our current set of solutions so that life gets better and better. And the truth is, this can sound like a very despairing conversation, but life has gotten better and better for virtually everyone in our lifetime. If you look at the last century, it's something like 10% of people now live in extreme poverty and 90% of people don't.

We've got 7 billion people. 90% of them are not in what we're calling extreme poverty. Something like 150 years ago, that was flipped. It was 90-10 the other way. It was 90% in extreme poverty. I suppose, again, though, Sam, the metric by which we judge poverty and the metric by which we judge human experience is something that could be long debated. And for me, i suppose what i'm interested in and i here i think we concur is truth a truthful experience i listened to a podcast you did once and like with someone i also respect very much jordan pearson and it got caught up a long while on some sort of semantic tangle and you know like so but what i feel is that you know i am interested in my own sweet, selfish, egotistical way in conveying and transmitting love and change.

And I think that the point where I feel pressure needs to be applied, if that's even the right attitude You need it be combative. For me, the sort of the focus, I think individual personal revolution and personal salvation, I think, is an important component. And the introduction of ideas that go beyond rationalism and materialism may be a necessary spur for significant change. I feel like rationalism, materialism lead people to believe, well, we're just individuals. We're here for a short amount of time. Pleasure, sensation. It seems to me that just looking around, that seems to be what is happening. It seems to disengage people. And some of the examples you've given about human compassion, it seems very hard for people to access love, to access community within the operating system that currently abides. I would agree, yeah. And again, what you're talking about are systems and institutions

that just how good could a school be, right? How good could entertainment be? How good could the internet be? How good could social media be in terms of leading us where we want to go, both personally and interpersonally? And I think we are at the beginning of perfecting those things. And it's not that we'll reach perfection, but all of these things are obviously so broken as they are now that we just don't know how much better life would be if we got halfway to the optimum. There's an immense amount of work to do, and the work will be done on the basis of having insights into truth and having a fact-based discussion about the consequences of turning any of these knobs. Sam Harris, in the background, there's the gallery to this small facility, the Headspace, the brilliant app, in spite of the contradictions of having existed in a consumerist technological world, which I would like to give props to.

I realize your back was against the wall on that one. I mean, but, you know, where we're going, there ain't no wall to sort of semi-quote Doc Brown in the transcendent realm, the wall, the me, the you, all one, all glorious oneness. People have been holding up like ice skating scores, like 45 minutes, 60 minutes. We're 120 minutes now, just the duration of the podcast. Now, for me, it's been a great joy and a great pleasure and a rigorous intellectual workout to speak with you. I've enjoyed it very much, Sam Harris. I'm most grateful. And I've returned to the idea that conversations are what's likely to produce change,

particularly conversations between people that don't automatically agree on the most significant issues. So I'm incredibly grateful to you. Yeah, likewise. Well, thank you. Thanks, man. Keep it up. Godspeed.

God bless you, Sam Harris, and science and everything. 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 and vote on the questions of others. And please know that your support is greatly appreciated. It's listeners like you

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