The Tim Ferriss Show - #87: Sam Harris on Daily Routines, The Trolley Scenario, and 5 Books Everyone Should Read

Episode Date: July 8, 2015

Sam Harris is a neuroscience Ph.D. and the author of the bestselling books, The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek,Rolling Stone, and many other journals. In this episode we discuss: -Five books he thinks everyone should read -Why have he stopped doing public debates -Morning rituals and meditation -The one tip for better brain health outside meditation or exercise Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 1980’s, or as sleek as a black panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that’s where MeUndies comes in. I’ve spent the last 2-3 weeks wearing underwear from these guys 24/7, and they are the most comfortable and colorful underwear I’ve ever owned. Their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you’re at it, don’t miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies. This podcast is also brought to you by LegalZoom. Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic – now worth more than a billion dollars) first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom, which I’ve used myself, can help you with almost anything legal, including setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a non-profit, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract review, and otherwise help you run your business. Use the code “Tim” at checkout to get $10 off your next order. Take a gander at everything you can get for a fraction of what you’d expect — LegalZoom.com Enjoy! ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

optimal minimal at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking can i ask you a personal question now what is your next project i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton this episode is brought to you by ag1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation

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limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can of course easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I interview and deconstruct world-class performers. This episode is a special episode. It is a round two with Sam Harris, H-A-R-R-I-S, who is a neuroscience PhD and the author of many bestselling books, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will,

Waking Up, and Lying. His work has been discussed in many different places, ranging from the New York Times to Scientific American, Nature, many journals, Rolling Stone, etc. In the last episode together, we explored the science of lying, the uses and different types of meditation, psychedelic drug use, spiritual experiences, and much more. But it's really broadly a discussion of the human experience. In this round two, we dig even deeper into all sorts of fascinating topics because you all submitted questions and voted nearly 19,000 times on almost 700 questions. And Sam is going to answer your top questions. So before we get to that, just want to tell you where to find more on Sam. It's SamHarris.org. He has some great guided meditations and other essays. He's also at SamHarris.org on Twitter. So please say hello,

let him know what you thought of this episode. And without further ado, please enjoy round two with Sam Harris. Hey, Tim and Tim's many fans. This is Sam Harris. I'm very happy to be doing this Q&A for my buddy, Tim Ferriss, who, among other things, has inspired me to do my own podcast. So thank you, brother. Now, Tim has sent me to a Google Doc file, or actually a Google moderator, which ominously says that it will disappear on June 30th. I think the entire piece of software looks like it's going to disappear. So I will answer your questions now. There have been almost 19,000 votes on almost 700 questions from over 1,000 people, 1,168 people. So that's a nice response. I've looked this over a little bit.

There's some good questions here. There are, I think there's probably a founder's effect where the early questions to get voted up are the ones that everyone reads and seems to like and they get voted on, and the questions that got added to the mix much later have far fewer eyes on them. So it's a bit of an illusion, I think,

to say that these are the most popular. But I will start with the most popular and maybe dig around at the bottom of the list at some point. What are five books you think everyone should read? This is from Matt in Houston. This is a hard question. I just went to my shelves to get some ideas, but there are just so many good books in all my areas of interest. I'll probably name more than five. One book I recommend in philosophy, just to get your bearings, is Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. Bertrand Russell, as you surely know, is one of the great philosophers of his time, and just a remarkably clear thinker and writer, just a great example of how English should be written, and just a great voice to have in your head as a result. And being a philosopher himself, he was quite opinionated about the various schools

and traditions in philosophy, so it's a fun read, provided you care about the history of Western philosophy. I also recommend Derek Parfit's book, Reasons and Persons, which is just brilliant and written as though by an alien intelligence. It's a deeply strange book filled with thought experiments that bend your intuitions left and right, and it's just a truly strange and unique document and incredibly insightful about morality and questions of identity and well worth reading if you are of a philosophical cast of mind. I also am a big fan of Thomas Nagel's earlier work. Thomas Nagel is a philosopher of mind and a moral philosopher. Of late, unfortunately, he's made some slightly crazy noises about evolution and some annoying defenses

of religion. And he wrote a review of my book, The Moral Landscape, that I thought was fairly wrongheaded. But his earlier stuff is great. And I actually align with him on questions related to consciousness and the philosophy of mind in general more than actually align with him on questions related to consciousness and the philosophy of mind in general more than I align with people like Dan Dennett, with whom I have more of a relationship. And Nagel's a very fine writer, a very clear writer, and it's just as a style of communication I think he's worth going to school on. I would recommend you read his little book, The Last Word, which champions rationality in a very compelling way. Also, he has a book called Mortal Questions, which is a

collection of essays. And there's some very good essays in there that were very influential in philosophy and should be more influential in the culture generally. He introduces a concept of moral luck, for instance, which very few people think about. I think it's very important ethically, and it boils down to this. If you imagine someone texting while driving and killing some pedestrians, what should happen to that person? Well, this person is very likely doing something that you or your best friend

or your sister will do later this afternoon, right? This person is behaving not in an egregiously irresponsible way, although we may ultimately decide that about texting while driving. I think we probably should. I think it is egregiously irresponsible, but yet many, many millions of people are doing it. It's not viewed in the same way as drunk driving. It should be, but it isn't. And this person is guilty of doing something that you and your friends very likely do from time to time, if not incessantly. And yet this person is so unlucky that he's the guy or the gal who's going to run over a child in the crosswalk and spend the rest of his life in prison, perhaps, or many years in prison,

have his life ruined by having caused so much suffering for others based on his negligence. The concept of moral luck is this, is that managing to be moral, managing to function well in the world, entails a certain amount of luck. And there are people who get very unlucky and wind up doing things that have hugely negative consequences. And it seems to me we should think about, we should factor that in how we punish people. In any case, it's a very interesting and useful concept, and I think there should be a space in our conversation about morality that more or less fits this shape, and I think Nagel is the first person

to put a name to it. There is significant luck involved in living a moral life, and that fact itself has moral significance. So moving on from philosophy, I think everyone should read the Holy Quran. Very few of you have read the Quran. Many of you have heard me make unpleasant assertions about it. Read it. It's much shorter than the Bible. You can read it in a weekend, and you will be informed about the central doctrines of Islam in a way that you may not be. And it's good to be informed, given how much influence these ideas have currently in our world. Actually, there's another work of philosophy here, sort of philosophy slash science

that I've been greatly influenced by of late. The philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a book called Superintelligence, which has impressed many people for the thoroughness with which he has argued that we have a serious problem looming with respect to the birth of intelligent machines. There have been many books on this topic, and there are other good books. Our Final Invention by James Barrett is also good. But superintelligence is really the clearest book I've come across that makes the case that the so-called control problem, the problem of building human level and beyond artificial intelligence that we can control, that we can know in advance will converge with our interests, that that's truly a difficult and important task because we will wind up building this stuff by happenstance if we simply keep going in the direction we're headed. And unless we have solved this problem in advance and have good reason to believe that the machines we are building are benign and their behavior predictable,

even when they exceed us in intelligence a thousand, a million, or a billion fold, this is going to be a catastrophic intrusion into our lives that we may not survive. Very interesting topic. I've been getting more and more into it. I'm actually in the middle of writing a short book myself with a collaborator on it, and I'll say more about that when that book is further along. So yeah, read Bostrom's book. It's a little dense for the uninitiated, but it really repays study. There's a writer, William Ian Miller, who I think is unfairly neglected.

He writes some fascinating books. Several have been on negative emotions. One book is entitled Humiliation, which was a great read just on the phenomenon of being humiliated and differentiating it from embarrassment and other similar emotions. And he also wrote a book on disgust called The Anatomy of Disgust, which is also fun. These are very interdisciplinary books. He is a lawyer, I believe, or professor of law, but he goes deep into the relevant sociology, and these are cool books. I suspect many of you want recommendations on books about meditation and spiritual experience. You know, there's no book out there that is free of the superstition and religiosity you tend to get with books about Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta,

the Hindu teachings of non-duality. And so I can't really recommend those books without caveat. I wrote the book that I think needed to exist, Waking Up, which was my last book. I am reluctant to include my own book in a list of books everyone should read, however. But there was a reason why I wrote that book, because there was really no book I could point rational people, students of science, critics of religious mumbo-jumbo, with a clear conscience. There are certainly books written by wiser yogis and meditators and more experienced ones than I am or am ever likely to be. But they are, as I said, mingled with a fair amount of woo. So with that caveat in mind, I will recommend in the Dzogchen tradition, which if you've read Waking Up, you know, I think is the center of the bullseye as far as meditative wisdom. There's one book called The Flight of the Garuda, which I think is especially

beautiful and wise. And among the Hindus who teach Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual teachings of yogic meditation that really just talks about pure consciousness and the illusion of the self, don't be confused

by the assertion of the existence of the Big Self, capital S. They're just talking about awareness in that case. But the book I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who was a guru in Bombay in the 60s, 70s, and I think he died in the mid-80s, I believe, around 87. I never met him. I studied with one of his students. And he was an incredibly clear and amusingly irascible guru. He said a few crazy things, as many gurus do.

But if you stick to what he was claiming about the nature of experience, I think you're on firm ground. And that book is very accessible, and it's in dialogue format. So I've given you more than five books, and I haven't covered many other interesting areas like neuroscience or psychology or really any science. I guess Bostrom's book is technically science in addition to philosophy. But I've given you enough to chew on. Oh, sorry, William E. Miller is also treading on science there. Actually, another book comes to mind. Many of you probably know that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about people's misbehavior, just how spectacularly wrong things can go in our world.

And if you want to see what it's like when things go about as wrong as they can go, read Machete Season, which is a short book about the Rwandan genocide that is, if I recall correctly, entirely born of interviews with some of the main perpetrators of this genocide. So not merely the people who were swinging the machetes, but the people who were running those gangs and enforcing people's membership therein. So these were people who were ordering Hutus who wouldn't kill their Tutsi

neighbors to be killed. There was an immediate and ultimate penalty paid for not collaborating in these gangs. I believe they were called Interhomwe. Forgive me if that pronunciation is terrible. And this is a fascinating and harrowing book because these were, at least the people they chose to interview, were rather disconcertingly smart, introspective guys who have totally clear consciences with respect to what they did. It is amazing to get into their heads, and they invite you in there, and they give you the full tour. It's just, it is uncanny that circumstances can come together, culturally, neurophysiologically, and otherwise,

so as to produce this kind of behavior, again, with a clear conscience. These guys were just unhappy to have been caught and to have landed in jail, but you really get the sense that they would do this over and over again. Their behavior really survived Nietzsche's principle of eternal recurrence. They would be happy to live in a universe where they do this an endless number of times because it was clearly the right thing to do from their point of view. So it's a short book and it is a very sobering one, worth reading if you can stomach that sort of thing. Okay, on to the next question. In The End of Faith, you briefly discuss the ethics of

having children and the evidence that parents are less happy and less productive than their child-free counterparts. Why did you decide to have children? From Benjamin Lithgow in Beverly, I guess there are two possible answers. One is it's just a failure to be emotionally moved by the data. There are certain things you may understand to be true, but you just can't make their being true emotionally relevant enough to have it guide your behavior. That's one explanation. I don't think it's the most likely in my case. I actually feel like it's more a matter of my feeling based on who I am and who I'm married to and what she wanted and what I wanted, that we were very likely to be exceptions to the rule.

There's no doubt a certain amount of self-deception, if not delusion, on offer there when you begin looking at scientific data and imagining that it doesn't apply to you. But in our case, I think we stood a very good chance of being happy parents, having happy kids, and being glad that we were parents and finding the alternative, at least retrospectively, unthinkable. And that's sort of where we are. I'm a very happy father. I love my daughters. The idea that I might not have had them does seem unthinkable now. But I'm also aware that having them has created forms of suffering that we wouldn't otherwise know. And we've certainly given hostages to fortune,

as someone, I think it was Francis Bacon, said. You worry about the future, you worry about all sorts of things that you would be quite insouciant about if you were just on your own, living out your adulthood productively. So it's not without its downsides, but even the downsides have a silver lining, or many of them do. I think being concerned about the future because you have kids is good ethically, and it does lead to a kind of productivity that might not otherwise be available. In fact, I was just at this conference on artificial intelligence

where the main agenda was to try to get a handle on its dangers and on the pressing issue of the control problem that I just mentioned. And one of the organizers, in fact, the main funder of the conference, Jan Talen, one of the founders of Skype,

said that when he talks to people about this issue, he asks only two questions to sort of get an understanding of whether the person he's talking to is going to be able to grok just how pressing a concern artificial intelligence is. And the first is, are you a programmer? The relevance of which is obvious. And the second is, do you have children? And he claims to have found that if people don't have children, they just can't, their concern about the future isn't sufficiently well calibrated so as to get just how terrifying the prospect of building super intelligent machines is in the absence of having figured out the control problem.

And I think there's something to that, just it's not limited, of course, to artificial intelligence. It spreads to every topic of concern. To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future, and in a future that hopefully extends beyond your own. You can certainly tell a story about all the work you're not able to accomplish because you're busy changing diapers or pushing your kids on the swings, but there's other work that you do connect with in a way that

you might not otherwise. And I have certainly noticed that in myself. And one of my great joys, honestly, at this point is pushing my daughters on the swings. So there's a lot to be said for having kids. And that really is not a rejoinder to the research that suggests that people are made for a very long time reliably less happy as parents. You can find this in Daniel Gilbert's work on effective forecasting, which he summarized in a book, Stumbling Upon Happiness, which is also a good book, which I recommend. Okay, so question three. Why have you stopped doing public debates? Is there anyone you would like to debate? Well, I haven't so much as stopped as I haven't been offered one that has made any sense of late.

And I've also, I haven't been doing much public speaking. This goes back to all the work I'm not doing because I'm a father. I just don't like leaving my family at this point. And so it really, there has to be a good reason for me to get on a plane and go somewhere to stand at a lectern and argue with someone about God or anything else. And so it really has to be a debate that is compelling, where I'm not merely going to repeat myself with someone against whom I feel like I'm going to make points that make a difference. It really has to be worth it. So I don't actually know who I would debate in the usual vein. If you're talking about debating religion versus science or religion versus atheism, a little of those debates goes a long way at this point. And so it just has

to be worth it. I would debate people on other topics and have tried to engineer debates that seemed worth it. And those often fall through. Often I'm trying to do that in writing just because it allows for more precision and doesn't require travel. And so I have a few of those on my blog and quite an ill-fated attempt with Noam Chomsky recently. But I am trying to have difficult conversations that I now don't tend to think of as debates. And the debate format is not really a good context in which to make progress on these issues. It's a foregone conclusion that the participants in the debate are not going to have their mind changed. And it really is not about even having a semblance of a conversation. you are colliding and deliberately not changing your

mind, and in many cases, deliberately not even noticing the other person's point, if you're a dishonest debater, in the presence of others who can be swayed one way or another. So it's really not, it's all about the audience experience. It's not about having an honest conversation, at least most people approach it that way. I've never really approached it that way. I've just known the kinds of things I've been debating are not the kinds of things that I'm likely to be swayed on. So standing up there with William Lane Craig, what were the chances that he was going to say something that was going to convince me that I should fall on my knees and give myself over to Jesus Christ as my savior?

It wasn't likely, so it's not that it's impossible, but it's setting the bar pretty high. On other topics where I've had a debate, I really have approached it as a circumstance where I may very well change my mind in real time in front of the audience, and I would be thrilled to be able to do that. And to some degree, that did happen in this exchange I wrote with Majid Nawaz, which is coming out under the title, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. It's a book coming out in the fall. And that is a circumstance where, yeah, it's much more of a conversation, though many people will view it as something of a debate. So I think debate is the wrong frame,

but I'm into having difficult conversations. But again, I try to have them more and more remotely. And at some point that'll change, and it'll certainly change on any given weekend if I have the right interlocutor. And as far as anyone I would like to debate, there are people who I've challenged to debate on these issues, and they haven't accepted the challenge, or they've accepted it only to then disappear. Francis Collins is someone who I've gone after before. He's declined to debate me for understandable reasons.

There's no percentage in it for him. He's the head of the NIH. Why does he want to be on stage with me, for understandable reasons. There's no percentage in it for him. He's the head of the NIH. Why does he want to be on stage with me having his totally illegitimate commitment to evangelical Christianity exposed as unscientific in all the ways that he wants to pretend it's scientific? It's just there's no reason for him to do that.

So I don't take it personally, and I think there are many people who don't want to be in that situation for understandable reasons. Many people have urged me to debate Robert Pape, who is a scholar or is often believed to be a scholar of terrorism, and he's looked at all the terrorist incidents in recent history and categorized them in various ways that has made it seem like terrorism has nothing to do with Islam or religion and has everything to do with politics and nationalism. And many people have thrown Pape's work at me as a rejoinder to everything I've said about the link between Islamic extremism and Muslim violence, Muslim terrorism. So I offered to debate Pape. He agreed. I announced it publicly. We were going to do this in writing. And then he disappeared and

disappeared in such a way that he, you know, is he alive? I don't know. I mean, I'm sorry if he's dead and I've just castigated the man's ghost, but I think he's very much alive and he just disappeared. And that happened with David Eagleman, the neuroscientist. He does very interesting work scientifically. He's a very nice writer. He said some deeply silly things about religion and atheism, and so many readers wanted the two of us to get together and debate those things. He agreed to debate and then at some point declined.

So it's not the easiest thing in the world to find the right people to debate. But I'm certainly open to it and I'm open to suggestions. The goal is to not bore myself and everyone else. So not every suggestion makes sense. Could you talk about one of your differences with Hitch, that is, Christopher Hitchens, specifically his pro-life stance? Do you believe he was mistaken? Now, Hitch, it could be that I'm unaware of everything Hitch said about abortion, but from what I recall, I don't think it's fair to call him pro-life. I think he said that he found abortion, depending on the stage at which it occurs in a pregnancy,

to be a serious ethical concern and not to be entered into lightly. And I certainly agree with that. I would never call myself pro-life. I'm certainly pro-choice in the conventional sense. But I don't think anyone should be eager to have a late-term abortion, and I can't imagine anyone is. Now, where one draws the line between it being a trivial loss of a few dozen cells and something more akin to a murder of an infant, that's not obvious. And the convention of breaking a pregnancy into three trimesters and considering the first 12 weeks to be more or less a time at which one

is free without any ethical concern to choose to terminate a pregnancy, I don't know that there is a neurologically principled stand to take there. I'm not close to this developmental literature at this point. I don't know what we know about the possibility of suffering at each week past conception. I mean, any line you draw is going to seem arbitrary if you're a day on either side of that line. So there's no way to escape the sense of these landmarks being arbitrary. But I'm certainly pro-choice. And I think if a woman really wants to terminate her pregnancy, more often than not, there's a very good reason why she would. And that's not a child you want to bring into the world. And a woman can't be forced to have a child and put it up for adoption. So the ethical ballast is all on the

side of the freedom for a woman to choose what to do with her body. But at a certain point, it is obvious it's not merely her body. You're talking about now a creature increasingly like a newborn infant who can feel pain and who has interests of some sort. And where they become fully human interests, at the moment I don't know a better line to draw than the viability of the fetus outside the body. So at 22 weeks or so, you're talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, just a premature infant that could be delivered at that point and survive. And I know people who have had infants that premature who, you know, after a few months in the NICU are now wonderful children who are fully intact. So a third trimester abortion is problematic ethically. And I don't know how someone finds themselves

in that situation. So I think that's the kind of salad of concerns I just served you, is what Hitch was thinking about, if I'm not mistaken, and I think I share his view. More book recommendations. If you haven't read Christopher Hitchens, you should. He was a brilliant writer and also a brilliant speaker. You should watch him on YouTube. And you can get the benefit of both his voice and his writing if you listen to his audiobooks, the ones he read himself. And God is Not Great and Hitch 22 are two of those. I don't know if he read any of the others, but that's great listening. Next question. Oh, sorry, that last question was from Gentry in Austin, Texas. Next question.

What fact slash event has made you change your mind about a topic recently? And that's from, forgive me for this pronunciation, it's spelled H-R-O, Hro. Is that actually a name from Sweden? Hro, Hru, the line that either hadn't panned out or wasn't likely to, in any time frame, that should motivate us to think about its dangers. I now have gotten religion on that topic. I'm not a conventional fan of the singularity. I'm not somebody who's awaiting these changes with Kurzweilian glee. I'm referring to Ray Kurzweil, whose work most of you probably know. If we can do this well, obviously huge benefits will come from building artificial general intelligence. Everything that's good in our lives, more or less, is the result of human intelligence.

So intelligence is almost an intrinsic good. We want more of it if we can have it. But the question is, how do you get there without inadvertently building an angry little god in a box that takes no more concern over your interests than we take over the interests of snails and cockroaches and ants. It sounds like pure science fiction, but when you get into the details, you see that not only is this a plausible set of concerns, we are on collision course with this reality unless we destroy ourselves some other way. It's like we

stand in front of two doors. Door number one, you open that and you find that we have destroyed ourselves for some reason and not invented artificial general intelligence. We had a global nuclear war. We had an incident of bioterrorism that created a global pandemic that set civilization back 300 years, or we had an economic catastrophe that did the same thing, and we just now no longer know how to build computers or improve their software. But absent that, door number two is we continue to make progress on hardware and software, and at a certain point, this progress gets into the end zone of superhuman-level intelligence. And then those intelligent systems themselves make the further progress. And then you get what's called an intelligence explosion,

or the singularity. There's, again, a lot to say about this, but I was convinced until somewhere around New Year's of this year that all of that either may not happen or is likely some species of techno-religious bullshit that I didn't have to pay attention to, and my mind has totally changed on that point. Okay, next question. This is from Urban Nomad in Portugal. I've never heard Sam Harris explain his morning ritual. Usually you ask this question, Tim, but on your podcast you didn't ask Sam. I would especially love to know what his meditation ritual is. Is it daily? How long? And at what time does he wake up?

Okay, well, I think I'm going to have an embarrassingly sloppy response to this. What I do is I get up in the morning and then I more or less break all of the wise and helpful rules that Tim has laid out for us. I check my email. I get, from time to time, perturbed and derailed by it, which is to say I get handed something that is not on my to-do list, but it's on someone else's to-do list, and then I do that thing for the better part of the morning. I break all the rules. But I think Tim's advice is good, and I take it when I have my wits about me. And the piece of advice I now take more often than not is when I get to my desk to do the one thing that, if done, would make the day truly productive. So I'm often focused on the one most important thing when I hit my desk now. So that's part of the ritual. And that

often comes early, and it often comes before I would meditate. It's, you know, so I would get up at six or seven or eight, it's probably the latest, depending on how late I've gone to sleep the night before. I'm not a great sleeper. Then I, sometimes we'll just make a cup of tea or coffee and just go straight to my desk. I don't, you know, sometimes I'll meditate first, but again, there's no ritual. What you should have in your mind is a picture of controlled chaos. These are not the smoothly oiled gears of a well-calibrated machine. This is somebody staggering out of his bedroom in search of caffeine, and he may or may not have checked his email before the whistle on the kettle

blew. But I do meditate frequently and certainly try to make that every day. I've been in various modes. It's another influence of having kids. Depending on how old your kids are and how many you have of them, it can be hard to hold to any real structure. But I do sit for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, somewhat reliably, every day. There have been periods of my life when I've dropped that. I think that was probably the longest has been a few months where I stopped meditating in the last going on 30 years. But for the most part, I've been a daily meditator for 30 years, and this has taken various forms. There were periods where I did a lot of retreat, so then I would come back into daily life and meditating for an hour or two or even more a day was just a very easy thing to

do, having come from a context of weeks and months where I was meditating 12 to 18 hours a day, and not having the same kinds of responsibilities that I have now. I would say that meditating regularly every day is, I think, a very important thing to do. In my case, it didn't really become useful, which is to say it really didn't become true meditation until after I had sat my first one or two intensive retreats. I remember the experience clearly. I don't remember if it came after the first, I think it came after the first 10-day Vipassana retreat. I think I'd been very disciplined and been sitting an hour every day in the morning for a year before I sat my first 10-day retreat. And I remember looking back over that year,

at some point, somewhere around the middle of my first Vipassana retreat, and realizing that I had just been more or less thinking with my legs crossed every hour that I had practiced that year. This is not to say that that's true of all of you who are practicing meditation without ever having gone on a retreat, but it's very likely true of many of you who are practicing meditation without ever having gone on a retreat, but it's very likely true of many of you. It's hard to build enough concentration in your daily life to really connect with mindfulness or with whatever other practice you're doing. a crucible where you can develop enough energy and attention to break through to another level where you can see what the practice really is about and what you need to be noticing to be

paying attention. And that experience of breaking through to deeper levels continues to happen. And as I write about in my book, Waking Up, the crucial level for me is the insight that the self, as we imagine it to be, doesn't exist. So the sense that there's an ego, a self in the center of consciousness, the one who is doing the meditating, the one who's paying attention, the point behind your eyes from which you would pay attention to the breath, or to a mantra, or to any object of meditation, that point is a fiction. There is no point there behind your eyes. There's just a field of consciousness,

and everything that you can notice is arising in it, and arising as a perturbation of consciousness. And it is being noticed effortlessly by consciousness itself, without a center. And so for me now mindfulness is a matter of cutting through the illusion of a center, cutting through the illusion of the self. And when you have that insight, then daily practice does have a different character. It's not as dependent upon concentration, and therefore it's not as dependent upon building up enough concentration to have sustained attention so that you can feel that your mindfulness is really

connecting with experience in a deep and sustained way, you're then able to, the moment you look, see the deepest and most profound thing you were ever going to see on a three-month retreat, say. So then sitting for five minutes here and there throughout the day can be quite profound in a way that it might not be, almost certainly won't be, if you don't know what to look for and you're just trying to pay attention to the breath. That's not to say that sitting for five minutes paying attention to the breath is a bad thing to do. It's a great thing to do. It's the preliminary practice for anything else I would recommend. This is just a way of saying that now the way I think I should practice would be to sit for some period during the day for 20 minutes or half an hour, but to then sit for a minute or two every hour.

I find myself essentially doing that without having a timer or any kind of mechanism that enforces it. But there are experiences I have where I'm essentially enforcing a kind of meditative clarity, whether I'm pushing my daughters on the swing or whatever it is, and there's no difficulty in doing that. So I view practice as not being very separate from life at this point. But it's also true to say that most of my life is too distracting, most of my work is too distracting, most of what I'm doing with my attention is too distracting

for me to have any pretense of calling that meditation. I am lost in thought most of the time, but an ability to cut through the illusion really is available, and it punctuates my day more or less no matter what I'm doing. So I hope that wasn't a totally confusing answer to this question. The picture you should get is of somebody who does not have quite as much structure in his various enterprises as he should, but I'm still managing to get most of what I want to get done, done. And I am not miserable. Other things that fall into the pattern of ritual might be exercise. I think that's probably of interest to Tim's audience to an unusual degree.

I try to do something more or less every day. Probably I do that at least five, maybe six days a week, whether it's going to the gym and lifting weights or doing martial arts or climbing stairs. I have a few different things I do to keep fit, and half of them also injure me, so there are diminishing returns here. But usually sometime in the afternoon I work out, and often my meditation is in the afternoon as well,

and I often try to do it outside. If you know anything about Dzogchen, you know that Dzogchen yogis often use the sky as a kind of a support for practice. You meditate with your eyes open looking at a clear sky or any place where you can see the horizon. And I do like to practice that way. I don't always get a chance to do it, but I find that clears the head in a very useful way. And also sitting outside for me is good because I have tinnitus, so silence is not great for me now because it seems to tune up this ringing in my ears, or at least make it something that I can't help but focus on. And it's not clear to me that focusing on it isn't

actually turning up the gain on it, which is not something I want to have happen. And many people have asked me, many people have written to me about questions about how to practice with tinnitus. I recommend having some ambient noise. Sitting outside, hearing the wind or waves or traffic or whatever it is, makes it much easier to not be focused on what is, for many of us, an intrinsically unpleasant sound which you're worried about tuning up. So being out in the world is not bad, and otherwise I would recommend background music if your tinnitus is really driving you crazy. This is not to say that one can't have equanimity with this sound. It's just, I think it's rational to worry that focusing on it too much could make it louder in some real sense,

which is to say actually increase the activity of those misfiring neurons. There are a bunch of questions on brain health and smart drugs and related matters. There's one question here. If you had to recommend one thing for brain health and you couldn't say meditation or exercise, what would you recommend? And that's from Ronan Filmer in Southern California. I haven't spent much time trying to separate the hype

from the real science here. But the one thing that I have heard about and take with some regularity, not every day but occasionally, is concentrated turmeric, curcumin I think is what it's called. And I take that rather often and that has been shown to have some protective effect against dementia. But again, I spend very little time reading about any of this and have assumed that most of what people take in this area, ginkgo biloba and all the rest, there's either no science behind it or the science has shown no effect. When I have looked, I have often found that's the case. And then we have these recent stories where you can't even rely on the manufacturers to put the supposedly important agent in the pills. So you're just, you're eating sawdust or some other crap that has been put in gelatin capsules. So these recent reports of

testing what's on the shelves at GNC and elsewhere have been pretty alarming. So something like 40% contained none of the ingredients advertised. It was something on that order. So you can't even know what you're taking in many cases. So I tend not to take supplements of any kind. Curcumin aside, sometimes I take vitamin D3. But I've been convinced by the research that has shown that for the most part, multivitamin supplementation is a bad idea. It actually seems to raise mortality from a number of causes for reasons not specified, but that suggests that no one is really running low on these vitamins in their diet and taking them in excess is toxic in some ways. So, you know, I'm certainly open.

As you, I think, know, I'm a big booster of science, and I'm waiting for science to deliver all of the things we want to bathe our brains and bodies in so as to live the best possible lives. But I'm not aware of much in that area that has obvious benefits. I think probably getting enough sleep should be on the short list of good things to do for your brain. And again, there I also fail. On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It's actually, it's very easy to give people good advice. It's very hard to follow the advice you know that is good. If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily. And, you know, one recommendation would be

be a little more disciplined about how you protect your sleep. So I will struggle to follow that. Merely having to answer these questions, I have a feeling it's going to impose far greater wisdom and rigor on my life. I think I will answer to follow that. Merely having to answer these questions, I have a feeling it's going to impose far greater wisdom and rigor on my life. I think I will answer these questions very differently a year from now. I'll be scheduled down to five-minute increments and doing everything I think I should do up front.

Okay, so now I'm going to go deeper into these pages, trying to get some questions that have been perhaps unfairly ignored. Your first book, The End of Faith, featured a blistering attack on religious moderates. Now, however, you strive to encourage religious moderation in the Islamic world. Have you therefore changed your mind about religious moderation? This is from Jeff Back in Toronto. Well, that's a good question. I can see a basis for confusion there. Religious moderation has always been better in some sense than religious fundamentalism. I've never denied that. It's just that I've argued that religious moderates, because they insist that we

respect religious faith and respect the claim that certain books were inspired by omniscient deities, etc., that they provide shelter for religious fundamentalism and religious extremism. They provide a context in which we can't adequately criticize really dangerous religious dogmatism. And it's the religious moderates who, because they are religious in this very elastic and non-committal way, they are the ones who deny the link between real religious commitment and certain forms of terrible misbehavior. real Islam. The real Islam is a religion of peace, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. This is not Islam. This is a perversion of the faith. They've hijacked the faith. Well, that's actually not an honest analysis of why jihadists do what they do. Jihadists are as religious as it gets, and they are motivated explicitly by the Quran and the Hadith. And so it is among religious demagogues in other contexts. The people who are behaving badly for religious reasons, in most cases, really believe what they say they believe. And so the moderate respect for faith

and the moderate confusion about what it's like to really believe in paradise just gives cover to fundamentalism. is a lack of commitment to the most retrograde and repellent and divisive doctrines in any faith. It's the moderate who looks at the Bible and sees all the stuff in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that is more or less synonymous with the most extreme form of theocracy and intolerance. And he or she says, well, I don't want to live that way. There's no reason to live that way. I'm just not going to pay attention to any of that. I'm not worried that God is going to send me to hell for not believing in it. You know, I've got many other concerns beyond what this book says that I take as foundational. So I'm just going to pick and choose the wisdom I find in this book, So I'm just going to pick and choose the wisdom I find in this book,

and I'm not going to spend any time worrying about whether I have to kill my neighbor for working on the Sabbath, or stone his daughter to death if she turns out not to be a virgin on her wedding night. But the religious moderate tends not to honestly acknowledge that those changes in his or her worldview have come from outside

the faith. This is what science and secular politics and a notion of human rights and just a larger conversation about what is good in life and how we should order our world, this is what all that has done to religion. It has moderated it from the outside. And that's a good thing. So I view moderation in the Muslim world as a transitional form of religious commitment as it has been in the West. We need moderation in some sense, but what we need even more than moderation is a commitment to secularism, which is a specific commitment. And so I don't argue so much for Muslim moderation. I argue that we need a genuine and viable tradition of secularism in the Muslim world. And secularism is simply a commitment to keeping religion out of politics and public policy. So you

can be as crazy as you want in the privacy of your own mind or in the privacy of your own life with respect to religion. To be secular, however, you have to be willing to keep that craziness within the walled garden of your own life and not impose it on anyone else. And so the moment you begin saying, well, my faith tells me that homosexuals shouldn't marry. It's not merely that you're talking about yourself, you're talking about what your neighbor should and shouldn't be able to do based on your faith. Well, then you're not being secular. So you can hate homosexuals all you want. You can think homosexuality is an abomination. It's the disposition to force others to live by the lights of your religious worldview.

That really has to be opposed, and it has to be opposed especially in the Muslim world at this point because the commitment to secularism there is almost non-existent. That's not to say that everyone is a jihadist, but a majority of Muslims are far less secular than the world needs them to be at this point. And again, if you want more on that topic, you can read my forthcoming book with Majid Nawaz. He was a former Islamist, and now he's someone who argues with really wonderful clarity about the need for a

strong secular tradition in the Muslim world. Would you push the fat man in the trolley scenario? Do you think a society could occupy a peak on the moral landscape if its inhabitants would all push the fat man? Well, that's an interesting question. This question, unfortunately, requires some explanation if you are unaware of the fat man in question. So he's referring to a series of thought experiments called trolley problems, which have been very influential in philosophy and increasingly influential in the psychological and neuroscientific study of morality because these problems are given as moral puzzles that people need to think through, and how they answer these questions says a lot

about them. And we study people's brains while they think through problems of this sort, and trolley problems are the most used in this research. And so the situation is this. You have a trolley coming down a track, and it's on course to kill five workmen who are working down track from it. But you stand at a switch, and you can throw this switch, diverting the trolley onto another track where there's only one workman. And you can't save everybody, but you can decide to throw this switch or decide not to. And the question is, do you throw the switch? And when given this problem, something like 95% of people say, oh, you have to throw the switch.

You'd be a monster not to throw the switch. People tend not to say that it's noble not to get your hands dirty there. They don't worry that you're going to be a murderer of that one person for throwing the switch. No, you have saved a net four lives. And we tend to order our society with that consequentialist view working in the background. We tend to make choices where if there's a trade-off between saving one life or five, we tend to want to save the five, all things being equal. And that makes perfect sense. But if you describe the trolley problem in another way, the response changes. And this other way, classically, is you imagine a footbridge over the tracks, and now there's a fat man standing on the bridge directly over the track. And you can push this man onto the track, into the path of the oncoming

trolley, and killing him, obviously, but saving the five workmen below. Now, when people imagine this, they get a very different feeling about what is entailed, and something like 95% of people say, no, no, you can't push this guy to his death. They consider it kind of a monstrous act of evil to push this person to his death, even if the intention and the effect is to save five lives. And there are various explanations for this. Certain kinds of reasoning and intuition come online here. You actually imagine touching a person up close and personal as opposed to throwing a switch, and that seems to change things. And the question is, what is morally normative here? Should you want to be able to push the fat man without caring or with as clear a conscience as you would throw that switch?

I happen to think there are certain artifacts here where people, if only unconsciously, worry that the mechanism isn't the same here, so there's some maybe some uncertainty about the physics and whether the whether a fat man is in fact fat enough to stop a trolley and even even if you stipulate that oh no no he will stop stop the trolley our intuitive physics don't track through it in the same way when we imagine diverting it onto another path but even if you overcome that i think it probably is just a difference between the idea of touching a person and physically initiating his death in that way, and throwing a switch and initiating death at some distance. And this obviously opens to other problems we have to think about, and the way we

fight wars remotely with drones now, is that making it much easier to kill people, or even dropping bombs from airplanes? I think the jury is probably not out on that any longer. It must be easier to kill people. It is, in fact, easier to kill people by dropping bombs than it is by stabbing them over and over again

with a bayonet, but it's also morally easier to do it. You're less in touch with the details of the death and destruction you're causing. This is a very interesting area to think about, but the question is, if the right answer really is the consequentialist one, we should be committed to saving the most number of lives, all things considered, in each situation. So we should push the fat man if we would throw that switch, and we should throw that switch. So that's the spirit of the question. Would you push the fat

man in the trolley scenario, and do you think a society could occupy a peak on the moral landscape? Could a society be as good as it could possibly be if its inhabitants would all push the fat man? Which is to say, if its inhabitants were all able to overcome the emotional bias against causing this kind of death up close and personal. And that's a hard question to answer. The truth is, I think it may be good to feel differently about the two cases. And I think that those situations where you want to be callous for good reasons don't extend to all of life. You know, I'm not a surgeon, and I'm happy I'm not one, given my squeamishness in that area. But I can imagine that a surgeon has to have a very different attitude

toward pain and suffering and the prospect that the person on the table in front of him might die than the attitude of family members or that even he would have to another person in the context of not performing his work as a surgeon. A surgeon has to be a little bit of a psychopath in terms of having just a cold and calculating and purely instrumental view of the person in front of him. It's not to say that surgeons aren't committed to the well-being of their patients. They obviously are. But there's something that has to come offline. and that something is too much empathy. And I think that that's incredibly useful for a surgeon to be able to do that. You table the empathy and just get the job done as effectively as possible. But I don't think you want a surgeon's

level of clarity and lack of empathy all the time in your relations to people. So the situation isn't bounded in any principled way. We're often going to be in a situation where the difference between pushing the fat man and throwing the switch is the difference between the contexts we're in in the world and to normalize all of them to the same ethical standard would, I think, create a fair amount of harm or at least close the door to kinds of experiences that we want to have. So this goes to the question of the role of empathy in our relationships and in our life and where it needs to be reined in in the governance of public institutions and society and in areas where we have to write laws and enforce them. It's a difficult question.

I don't know that I can generalize apart from saying that we should be consequentialist across the board, but part of the consequences of actions of this sort is that there may in fact be a difference between pushing the fat man and throwing the switch in many circumstances, and that's not a difference we can get rid of. So it just may cause more psychological suffering for the person involved. Even if you push the fat man for the best of reasons, knowing that it would work in that sense is exactly like throwing a switch. The fact that you had the experience of running up to the guy and shoving him and seeing the look on his face,

etc., and you didn't just have the experience of throwing a switch, that may haunt you for the rest of your life, and there may be no way to correct for that. So it is, in fact, a different phenomenon, even though the body count at the end is the same. And I think there may be no way to correct for that, and maybe there should be no way to correct for that, given all the other moving parts.

So, therefore, your consequentialism has to be broader than just looking at body count. It has to account for the psychological consequences and the lack of analogy between cases which do have the same body count. So, hopefully, some of that made sense. Anyway, Tim, I think I will leave it there. It's been a pleasure to be on your podcast yet again.

I am your worst student, but thanks again for everything you're doing. I love your podcast. I listen to it a lot, and it is an honor to be on it. And until I next see you, be well.