Making Sense - Sam Harris - The Russell Brand Interview

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

00:00:22.860 Okay, well this is not an official podcast episode. I have not numbered it as a Waking Up Podcast episode.

00:00:31.400 This is an episode, in fact, of the Russell Brand podcast, Under the Skin.

00:00:37.220 This is an interview that Russell did with me about a week ago and released on his podcast,

00:00:42.760 but I am releasing it here because I said I would. Russell's happy to have me do it.

00:00:47.760 And so many of you have asked me to have a conversation with Russell that I just wanted to make sure you hear this.

00:00:55.100 I decided to do it on his podcast rather than on mine, so he's interviewing me.

00:01:00.740 And that has the effect of making me say some things that many of you may have heard before

00:01:06.520 because he's asking how I got involved in atheism and writing and some background questions.

00:01:13.260 And we also had the conversation in person, which was instructive because this is a conversation

00:01:19.120 that really could have run off the rails, as you'll hear.

00:01:22.860 Russell and I disagree about many fundamental things.

00:01:26.420 If I had done this over the internet on my podcast,

00:01:29.760 this could well have been one of those conversations that went into the ditch,

00:01:33.780 like my conversation with Mariam Namazi or the one with Omer Aziz,

00:01:38.780 which I titled the best podcast ever, ironically.

00:01:43.380 But the vibes were quite good.

00:01:45.320 Russell's a very nice guy.

00:01:46.660 I really enjoyed meeting him.

00:01:48.700 So there's the paradox here of real disagreement at points,

00:01:53.780 kept on the rails by nice face-to-face rapport.

00:01:58.760 That is instructive for me going forward.

00:02:01.160 I think it's useful to consider which podcasts I should do in person

00:02:05.520 and which I should do online.

00:02:07.280 But for better or worse, this is a podcast that will frustrate many of you.

00:02:14.480 There's a fair amount of talking over one another.

00:02:17.640 There's a fair amount of him talking over me, no doubt.

00:02:20.400 There's not a real meeting of the minds on some of the foundational issues here,

00:02:26.280 morally and politically.

00:02:27.900 Anyway, this is the conversation that many of you expected Russell and I would have.

00:02:33.320 So I will bring you that now.

00:02:35.420 I have one announcement to make.

00:02:37.280 Speaking of experiments and conversation,

00:02:40.000 my event with Jordan Peterson in Vancouver in June sold out very quickly.

00:02:45.920 So we added a second night.

00:02:48.060 June 23rd is sold out.

00:02:50.040 So we added June 24th.

00:02:52.380 And tickets for that event are now available to supporters of the podcast.

00:02:56.060 A pre-sale code has gone out to you by email.

00:02:59.800 If you're a supporter and did not get that code, please email us at info at samharris.org.

00:03:06.020 And if you're interested in going to that event, you should act sooner rather than later,

00:03:10.780 because once it becomes available to the general public, it may well sell out as quickly as the first one.

00:03:16.440 Just to be clear, Jordan and I will try to cover different ground at the two events.

00:03:24.780 So going to both wouldn't necessarily be a waste of your time if you're into this sort of thing.

00:03:30.180 We will try to move on from whatever progress we make the first night.

00:03:34.760 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.

00:03:43.540 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,

00:03:52.280 especially on the minds of young men, for better or for worse.

00:03:56.940 And I would say for better and for worse.

00:03:59.760 It's pretty clear to me that much of it is for better and certainly some of it's for worse.

00:04:06.220 And I just think it is a very intriguing social phenomenon, which could be straightened out.

00:04:15.420 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

00:04:22.220 and hope to broadcast at least the best parts here on the podcast.

00:04:27.960 So that's what's happening there.

00:04:30.200 And Jordan and I are talking about adding other dates, possibly New York City, possibly London.

00:04:38.500 Please check my events page if you're interested for those and all other events at samharris.org forward slash events.

00:04:46.580 And again, supporters of the podcast will get advanced tickets to everything I do going forward.

00:04:54.480 And now without any further delay, I bring you my conversation with Russell Brand.

00:05:00.200 Sam Harris is a writer, neuroscientist, philosopher and host of the podcast Waking Up With Sam Harris.

00:05:09.460 He's written five New York Times bestsellers covering a range of topics from neuroscience and religion to violence and human reasoning.

00:05:16.160 These include the end of faith, letter to a Christian nation, free will and the moral landscape.

00:05:21.680 And has argued that science can determine moral values.

00:05:24.460 He's previously studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism,

00:05:29.320 making several trips to India and Nepal.

00:05:31.680 He is now a proponent of secular meditation practices.

00:05:34.580 He's vegetarian, practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and is married with two daughters and has a correction.

00:05:40.200 I'm going to have to recant on the vegetarianism.

00:05:42.100 You're recanting the vegetarianism.

00:05:43.840 For the moment, unfortunately.

00:05:45.400 Apostasy!

00:05:46.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:46.780 Well, it's exactly like apostasy. 0.71

00:05:49.700 Well, welcome.

00:05:52.080 Thank you.

00:05:52.520 Regardless of the embracing.

00:05:55.460 The abattoir that I'm trailing by.

00:05:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:59.660 Thanks for coming on.

00:06:00.620 I've wanted to talk to you for such a long time.

00:06:02.440 Oh, yeah.

00:06:02.780 And I've heard from so many of our mutual audience members that we should be getting together.

00:06:07.660 So it's been in the works for a long time.

00:06:10.220 Yeah, yeah, we exist in that sort of, in the sonic boom created by Joe Rogan, perhaps.

00:06:16.940 Yeah, yeah, maybe.

00:06:18.000 Heard you on Joe Rogan.

00:06:18.980 I listened to Waking Up.

00:06:21.280 Yeah, and I've heard a bunch of your stuff.

00:06:22.780 I saw you on Joe Rogan as well.

00:06:24.120 So, yeah, Joe is the 800-pound gorilla of podcasters.

00:06:27.900 Yes, he is, isn't he?

00:06:28.600 As everyone knows.

00:06:29.560 Yeah, he is very much the, we are all orbiting Joe Rogan.

00:06:34.200 Let's face it.

00:06:34.860 Yeah.

00:06:35.460 Like, God, there's so much stuff I want to ask you about.

00:06:38.160 But, you know, because there's loads of things we agree on, loads.

00:06:41.880 But there are some pretty distinct things that I imagine we disagree on.

00:06:45.100 And I suppose these will be some interesting things to analyze.

00:06:51.140 But just to start us off, I suppose, tell us a little bit about the fusion of neuroscience,

00:07:00.640 philosophy and atheism that has become sort of the defining of people's perception of you,

00:07:10.100 that there's a sort of, I suppose, a neurological underwriting for your sort of personal perspective of atheism.

00:07:15.320 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.

00:07:22.280 The atheism connection is probably just an accident of history more than anything,

00:07:27.700 because it really is what happened to my intellectual life right after September 11th.

00:07:33.320 So I was doing my neuroscience PhD.

00:07:35.940 I had a background in philosophy.

00:07:37.600 I went into neuroscience very much with the interest of a philosopher.

00:07:42.080 I was always interested in understanding the human mind at a high level that really I would only be doing work in people.

00:07:50.720 And I was never thinking of curing diseases.

00:07:53.660 I mean, it was all about just understanding human subjectivity and consciousness and morality and human reason.

00:08:00.220 These were the kinds of higher level mental attributes that interested me.

00:08:04.100 And I was in the middle of my PhD.

00:08:07.700 I had done my coursework.

00:08:09.220 I was getting into neuroimaging work on belief.

00:08:12.400 I was studying the difference between belief and disbelief and uncertainty.

00:08:15.800 And then September 11th happened.

00:08:18.320 And I had a background in meditation.

00:08:21.780 I had a background in trying to cash out rather ancient spiritual concerns through whatever methodology was available.

00:08:29.980 So I had taken psychedelics in my 20s.

00:08:32.220 I had spent about two years on silent retreat.

00:08:34.980 I was very connected to the experiential side of what people think only religion is good at.

00:08:43.060 Right.

00:08:43.320 But I was not a believer of any sort.

00:08:46.360 So I was an atheist, but I never thought of myself as an atheist.

00:08:49.220 I was totally unaware of atheism as an organized political movement.

00:08:53.920 I couldn't have told you who Madeleine Murray O'Hare was.

00:08:56.700 I mean, there's a famous atheist.

00:08:57.900 I was aware of people like Richard Dawkins for their science, but I was not someone who had read books on atheism.

00:09:06.220 And so my first book, The End of Faith, which really, really initiated this publishing phenomenon that was called The New Atheism.

00:09:13.160 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.

00:09:21.640 I never even used the word atheism in The End of Faith.

00:09:24.520 And it wasn't that I thought not to use it.

00:09:26.620 It just was not a word I used.

00:09:28.220 So I was just talking about the conflict between reason and faith, the conflict between science and religion, the obvious untenability.

00:09:36.320 I mean, the actual proper horror of the fact that we have a world that is shattered into these separate religious communities and these separate and incommensurable worldviews based on an adherence to these ancient books.

00:09:49.660 And that struck me then and strikes me now as just as perverse as people blowing themselves up over rival interpretations of Shakespeare.

00:09:58.260 I mean, just imagine there was some Hamlet cult versus some King Lear cult, right?

00:10:02.780 And people are willing to die for these differences.

00:10:04.600 I'm English. Those cults exist.

00:10:06.540 Right, right.

00:10:06.960 But that's the world we're living in.

00:10:08.640 I mean, our world is just that absurd.

00:10:10.300 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.

00:10:20.480 But then I got inducted into the conversation about atheism.

00:10:23.960 So it's somewhat ironic that atheist is one of the first words in my bio, but it's not an identity.

00:10:30.620 It's not really how you see yourself.

00:10:31.900 That was retrospectively applied.

00:10:33.180 Although you're, as you say, you're kind of the inciting incident of your public life, your life as a public intellectual was 9-11, which you rigidly define as a, I suppose, judging from what you've just said, as a religious event primarily or an act of religious violence.

00:10:55.220 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.

00:11:04.640 You know, you might want to talk about politics or economics or U.S. foreign policy or the legacy of colonialism.

00:11:10.280 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 percent of their motivation being a religious expectation of an afterlife.

00:11:28.800 I can just find you these people who have none of the other variables that people would want to use to explain the terrestrial variables, economics, politics.

00:11:38.220 There are people who have never suffered any economic insecurity who devote their lives to jihad.

00:11:43.920 There are people who drop out of the London School of Economics who are British citizens so that they can go fight with ISIS.

00:11:51.840 What does that, to you, imply, the toxicity of religious ideology?

00:11:59.460 It's the power of belief.

00:12:00.960 It's not even purely toxic.

00:12:02.560 I mean, this is the horrible paradox here.

00:12:04.520 I think the experience of people, even in the most extreme, and we might want to say psychopathic cults, something like ISIS, the experience, by and large, is not of being a psychopath.

00:12:20.040 Obviously, my criticism of religion is much wider than focusing on fundamentalist Islam.

00:12:24.480 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 this badly.

00:12:36.680 And then what you're talking about is bad people who would behave badly anyway. 0.67

00:12:42.340 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.

00:12:51.040 That's just not true. 0.58

00:12:52.160 I mean, we just know enough about the bios of these people.

00:12:54.900 And you would never say that of someone who was observing some other religious behavior slavishly under some doctrine.

00:13:04.920 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.

00:13:13.780 You wouldn't say, well, this is just politically motivated cracker-eating behavior.

00:13:18.080 These people would find pretext to eat crackers on Sundays anyway.

00:13:22.000 They would ritualize their cracker-eating behavior for some other reason.

00:13:25.180 No, no.

00:13:25.480 They have a belief that explains exactly what they're doing with this cracker.

00:13:30.200 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.

00:13:36.640 Sure.

00:13:36.940 But, like, personally, and presumably you would agree with this, the Catholic mass is serving a particular function, as all ritual and ceremony is.

00:13:47.120 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.

00:14:10.500 If we take Christ from a more theological as opposed to sort of reductive, simplistic, and I think, for me personally, spiritually useless perspective, as the metaphor of Christ being the potential for transcendence beyond the flesh individual to the enlightened male or the enlightened being, I suppose.

00:14:34.160 But then the mass, for me, is an opportunity to ceremoniously acknowledge that meaning.

00:14:41.300 So, like, I would look at a mass and go, oh, this ain't about literally eating crackers.

00:14:46.320 And even the metaphor as explicitly stated in the scriptural terms of that denomination, there's more—even that is limiting.

00:14:56.020 I would say that people's drive to do that is myriad.

00:15:01.100 But you're flipping the logic of what I'm saying.

00:15:03.200 So I'm saying that the thing that explains the actual ritual, the cracker eating, is the doctrine, right? 0.88

00:15:09.600 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?

00:15:17.300 Don't eat anything.

00:15:18.520 To eat anything is to pollute your body.

00:15:20.160 You should just be thinking about me, right?

00:15:21.600 If that was the doctrine, there would be no cracker eating ritual, right? 0.77

00:15:25.200 So the doctrine is, I mean, it's a bizarre act of human sacrifice and cannibalism at the bottom of it, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

00:15:33.840 But 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.

00:15:43.320 It doesn't make sense that people would want to be eating his body.

00:15:46.640 Like, they wouldn't—people—

00:15:48.260 Except as a metaphor for union and oneness.

00:15:51.020 Except it's not preached as a metaphor.

00:15:53.240 I mean, the doctrine's not metaphorical.

00:15:54.520 Also, as well, Sam—

00:15:55.860 I will 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.

00:16:02.400 And I think that's important.

00:16:04.020 And also, I think we have to look beyond rationalism.

00:16:06.200 I think when we're dealing—you know, you're a man who's deeply interested in mysticism and spirituality and anything.

00:16:10.600 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.

00:16:21.840 Because, yeah, eating a wafer or drinking some wine.

00:16:24.960 But if you have a relationship with the wholeness—

00:16:28.720 I would be slow to conclude that.

00:16:30.400 I think—I don't think you have to be irrational to use these tools.

00:16:36.280 Or beyond rational.

00:16:37.180 Not just irrational, not like a necessarily less than rational, possibly more than rational.

00:16:41.820 There's clearly more than forming a rational understanding of the universe.

00:16:46.960 There's more to life than that.

00:16:48.320 I mean, there's fun.

00:16:50.340 There's love.

00:16:51.200 There's beauty.

00:16:52.080 There's more that we want from life than simply not being wrong.

00:16:56.760 Right?

00:16:57.320 So I'm not saying that reason is everything.

00:17:00.640 But the question is, do you ever have to be irrational to go beyond merely conceptually understanding the world?

00:17:08.560 Do you ever have to lie to yourself?

00:17:10.060 Do you ever have to have to lie to others or believe the lies of others to go into these other areas that—

00:17:16.160 No, but—

00:17:17.500 Well, no, but most people are living as though absolutely you do.

00:17:20.460 Religion is just the most profligate example of lying and self-deception that we know. 1.00

00:17:25.880 As much as politics, is it? 0.55

00:17:27.060 I mean, like, it's just—I think it's just more evident.

00:17:29.120 Every bit is bad, except then it just pauses an afterlife where it gets all cashed out.

00:17:33.440 Except, of course, you know, like, again, to return to the point about 9-11, your particular induction—

00:17:39.060 Sure.

00:17:40.580 —unwittingly or otherwise into what's become known as the new atheistic movement, that for me, what—this is a question, I suppose.

00:17:49.600 That particular event, taken in isolation, is like, you know, barbaric and horrific and dreadfully cinematic and totemic, but definitely taking place within a historical context.

00:18:08.200 For me, the variables that you fleetingly mentioned—economics, colonialism—these are like, how do we delineate?

00:18:15.880 How do we sort of—where are these imaginary lines drawn between this is religious violence, this is political violence, this is acceptable violence?

00:18:24.200 Who draws those lines also?

00:18:26.260 I think they can be very easily drawn when you take the case of any individual and his or her motives.

00:18:32.640 Individuals?

00:18:33.640 Yeah.

00:18:33.760 What do you think—we have to resort to individualism as opposed to cultural, national movements?

00:18:39.440 You have to say, that individual's crazy, but that state and that state's actions—

00:18:43.180 I would first say that very few of these people are crazy.

00:18:45.540 So let me just break this down a little bit, because there are many different types of violence.

00:18:50.660 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.

00:18:59.740 They're suffering from some kind of delusion, right?

00:19:02.640 So, you know, many of these people are schizophrenic, but there are probably other ways we want to class a thought disorder here.

00:19:10.740 But they're not rational.

00:19:12.580 They don't have rational goals.

00:19:13.880 They're hearing voices.

00:19:14.920 They think they're talking—the son of Sam thought his dog was telling him to kill people.

00:19:19.180 Next door's dog, actually.

00:19:20.440 Not even his own dog.

00:19:21.380 All right, okay.

00:19:22.000 Start listening to other people's pets.

00:19:23.140 Worse still, yes, exactly.

00:19:24.700 Pay attention to your own dog before you start worrying about the neighborhood of pets. 0.53

00:19:28.220 So, yeah, that's—we all recognize there's a thing of mental illness.

00:19:31.440 Yes.

00:19:32.140 You see reality different from everyone else.

00:19:33.800 And most people who are mentally ill are not dangerous, but there are some people who are mentally ill who are.

00:19:38.580 Right. 0.95

00:19:38.920 Now, there are people who do horrific things for no ideological motive, no rational animus, but purely because they're crazy.

00:19:49.060 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?

00:19:59.580 I think 26 people were gunned down.

00:20:01.780 He—I don't know if anyone gave a diagnosis.

00:20:04.480 I mean, he was probably almost certainly on the autistic spectrum, but he had something else going on.

00:20:09.280 But he didn't—he wasn't a white supremacist who had some ideology, who was acting out in this way.

00:20:14.920 He wasn't a jihadist who thought he was going to get into paradise, right?

00:20:18.320 And there are many other examples of mass shootings like that.

00:20:21.800 Jared Loeffner was a guy like that.

00:20:23.860 If you're going to talk to this person and find out why he did it, nothing is going to make sense, right?

00:20:28.660 Now, we could talk about the same superficial crime of going in and killing children in a school, right?

00:20:35.960 There's that version of it. 0.96

00:20:37.440 Then there's the really angry and, I would argue, psychopathic, sadistic, classically evil person who just wants to kill kids, right? 0.84

00:20:49.480 Who just gets off on all of the misery he's going to create as a result of this crime. 0.53

00:20:54.720 Now, this person is not suffering a thought disorder.

00:20:56.640 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.

00:21:02.820 I mean, human evil is a species of neurological disorder, but we don't understand it yet.

00:21:07.800 And so now it's tempting just to say, well, these people are evil, right?

00:21:11.200 It's a very different kind of person from the first person.

00:21:14.020 The boundary between those people can be kind of fluid, but these are different types of people.

00:21:19.160 No, but let me get to the worst case.

00:21:20.880 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. 0.95

00:21:39.940 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?

00:21:59.600 Well, 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.

00:22:10.060 This is perfectly rational behavior given the requisite beliefs, and that is what is so horrible about this kind of dogmatism.

00:22:16.340 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.

00:22:23.860 There would be particular passages you go, oh, here's the passage.

00:22:27.700 Not so much, unfortunately.

00:22:29.660 There's loads of stuff that's like live a peaceful life of devotion.

00:22:33.520 Not loads of stuff.

00:22:34.580 Have you read the Quran?

00:22:35.560 Have you read the Quran cover to cover?

00:22:36.580 Of course I bloody well haven't.

00:22:37.740 Okay.

00:22:38.280 But I barely got through these notes for this interview, Sam.

00:22:41.200 I'm doing this thing on the fly.

00:22:42.880 You can do it.

00:22:44.100 It's a short book.

00:22:45.060 No, no, I've checked out.

00:22:45.960 You know what I mean?

00:22:46.420 My general feeling is that the Quran holy is like most religious scripture.

00:22:52.000 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.

00:23:03.380 But there's more to that.

00:23:04.420 There's life after death.

00:23:04.780 Act within religion and politics.

00:23:07.200 But I don't know.

00:23:07.880 I think, again, I wouldn't deliberately misread the metaphor.

00:23:10.860 For me, life after death, and this is a person that spent two years in a silent retreat.

00:23:14.360 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.

00:23:28.740 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.

00:23:38.140 The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth and man sees it not.

00:23:41.640 The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the life after the death of your ego.

00:23:45.180 I suppose so, Sam.

00:23:46.080 Yes.

00:23:46.340 I would say, 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.

00:23:56.560 Also, Sam, there's so much, mate.

00:23:57.620 Let me, hold on a sec.

00:23:58.360 We've got to go for you. 0.54

00:23:59.020 You did a big classification system of the degrees of who's the worst madman.

00:24:02.000 I just want to put a flag right here.

00:24:03.280 We've got to do the schools.

00:24:04.120 Okay, well, we'll do that.

00:24:04.680 Go on, do your flag, and then we're going back to the schools.

00:24:06.500 I just want to acknowledge that whatever you're 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.

00:24:20.340 And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the Christian and the Islamic tradition, it really matters whether you believe the right thing or not.

00:24:28.380 In fact, this life doesn't matter at all, and that's what's so corrosive about this belief system.

00:24:32.500 Sure, but let's look at some of the alternatives.

00:24:36.240 Now, we just there 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.

00:24:45.960 But we should probably bring into the mix from the sky by a drone.

00:24:49.400 For me, I don't want my kids killed in a school for any ideology, whether it's grounded in rationalism and economics or whether it's a book that's a bit older and more, I don't know, esoteric or colorful or imaginative.

00:25:06.300 I don't know how to determine it.

00:25:08.000 But what I suppose 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,

00:25:23.920 Buddhist violence in Burma and Christian violence in, you know, like in the Middle East or secular violence underwritten by Christianity,

00:25:31.800 resourced entirely from Christianity and sort of Christian dualistic notions undertaken by far right Christian presidents and whatever.

00:25:40.480 Or, you know, sort of the more lucid, livid and obvious and contemporaneous far right extremist Islamic violence.

00:25:50.460 It's like, how do we see that as distinct from rational violence, political violence, particularly when that is far more potent, far more widespread and is, I would say, is the violence of the dominant culture.

00:26:04.360 What interests me, Sam Harris, is power and the powerful.

00:26:07.480 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.

00:26:17.960 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.

00:26:29.380 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 economic aspect, the occupation of Middle Eastern countries, the historical.

00:26:41.900 I mean, for me, it seems like how how can you conduct that extraction?

00:26:46.200 How can you divorce those different types of violence?

00:26:48.640 They seem to me to be part of one narrative.

00:26:50.760 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.

00:27:07.240 Here's an almost perfect scientific experiment.

00:27:10.500 You have Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims living in the same occupied territories, right?

00:27:19.200 Before the Israelis put up the wall, who was blowing themselves up in pizza parlors and discotheques, right? 0.97

00:27:25.800 It was 99.9% Muslim, right? 0.95

00:27:30.500 It was not Christian. 0.99

00:27:31.440 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? 1.00

00:27:44.240 The beliefs matter.

00:27:45.200 The details matter.

00:27:46.180 Why do you fetishize your antagonism towards that particular type of violence?

00:27:51.500 It's not a fetish.

00:27:53.380 You know, of course, that that violence exists in the context of a far more potent opponent's violence.

00:27:59.300 No, no, no, no, no.

00:28:00.500 Okay.

00:28:01.460 Like you can't, we can't talk about Palestinian violence and Christian-Palestinian violence without saying, not talking about history. 0.55

00:28:07.620 No, of course we can because...

00:28:09.820 We can?

00:28:10.420 Because you can have...

00:28:11.100 Why would we, though?

00:28:11.800 And isn't that the very problem?

00:28:13.380 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.

00:28:22.920 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.

00:28:30.500 Sure.

00:28:30.860 I know that a belief is just a thought that you like having.

00:28:33.840 But luckily, you know, you and I, we live in a sort of a secular society and our beliefs seldom come into opposition with the dominant philosophy.

00:28:43.320 And when it does, there are problems.

00:28:46.660 Here are my background concerns.

00:28:48.600 I think ideas are the most powerful things we've got.

00:28:51.960 Ideas are the operating system for human life and human culture.

00:28:55.120 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.

00:29:06.260 So, I mean, how do you get 7 billion strangers to peacefully collaborate with one another?

00:29:11.560 It is a matter of conversation that ultimately gets people to converge on common projects and common values.

00:29:18.100 And so all we have is conversation.

00:29:20.180 And when conversation fails, all we have is violence.

00:29:23.920 There's really just two modes, conversation and violence.

00:29:26.220 And what you're talking about, when you're talking about power and its misuses, you're talking about state violence or state coercion that you deem to be illegitimate.

00:29:36.960 Now, I'll grant you, if we took a list of all of these cases, you know, CIA run coups in other countries.

00:29:43.200 Sure.

00:29:43.600 You know, you and I may just check the same boxes like, well, that looks illegitimate or that had consequences that could have easily been foreseen.

00:29:50.200 Lots of people suffered and died there that shouldn't have.

00:29:52.480 And what were the objectives?

00:29:54.020 All of it, yes.

00:29:54.660 But when I'm looking at, when I prioritize shining the light of my criticism 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.

00:30:14.300 The human behavior that should seem impossible.

00:30:16.300 And suicide bombing.

00:30:17.540 So it's just aesthetics, really.

00:30:18.960 No, it's not.

00:30:19.280 A suicide bombing looks bad.

00:30:21.020 A drone bombing looks nice. 1.00

00:30:22.240 It's not just aesthetics.

00:30:23.360 It's not just aesthetics.

00:30:24.540 But how is it not aesthetics?

00:30:25.760 Because suicidal people are undeterrable.

00:30:28.380 Jihadists are undeterrable. 1.00

00:30:29.920 If the best thing that can happen in an operation is that you die while conducting it, you are the perfect weapon.

00:30:36.860 But Sam Harris, why would you make that the dominant?

00:30:39.360 I just have to hammer this home.

00:30:41.660 Go on.

00:30:41.940 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.

00:30:52.400 Well, let's just mention that nuclear terrorism is not hypothetical.

00:30:56.560 It already happened 50 years ago.

00:30:58.540 No.

00:30:59.240 Underwritten by secularism.

00:31:01.240 I won't call that nuclear terrorism.

00:31:03.020 Or nuclear, I don't know.

00:31:04.380 There was certainly a first use of-

00:31:05.580 If you're in Nagasaki that day, semantics wouldn't be your primary concern.

00:31:09.900 What should we call that thing?

00:31:11.360 Ow! 1.00

00:31:11.780 My teeth!

00:31:12.180 It's reasonable to ask how the Japanese view it now and how the Japanese view the relationship to the United States now.

00:31:18.300 There's an argument.

00:31:19.200 I'm not defending-

00:31:20.160 Just because perhaps there are narratives, Sam, that supersede the apparent narrative of nationalism and geopolitics where there is an economic determinant-

00:31:28.920 They make more or less sense.

00:31:29.800 Where Japan and the U.S. no longer see themselves in oppositional positions.

00:31:34.700 Right, right.

00:31:35.140 Do you see?

00:31:35.600 So one question is, how are we going to get all of these societies that are at loggerheads-

00:31:40.860 And these 7 billion people.

00:31:42.260 Yeah, to see themselves in non-zero-sum arrangements with everyone else?

00:31:47.600 And what will have to change to make that possible?

00:31:51.240 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.

00:32:02.020 They're the least negotiable.

00:32:03.240 I mean, they're by definition non-negotiable.

00:32:05.220 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.

00:32:14.080 And I will want to resort immediately to violence or the threat of violence.

00:32:18.260 I will want blasphemy laws. 1.00

00:32:19.580 I will want to pass a law at the U.N. that will give you jail time if you say the wrong thing about my holy book.

00:32:25.980 Right?

00:32:26.440 That's where a conversation has totally broken down, and there's nothing to resort to but force.

00:32:31.000 Yes.

00:32:31.860 But when you say a suicide bomber, I admit that it's extraordinary and it's difficult for us to understand.

00:32:38.140 But what I'm curious about, Sam, is what are the prerequisite conditions for suicide bombing even to be relevant?

00:32:45.380 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 – well, not American because I think this goes beyond nation.

00:32:58.520 If you find yourself 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.

00:33:12.720 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 fire and don't have a belief system that's like, oh, I'll be in some sort of Valhalla subsequently.

00:33:34.660 You were using Waco as an example of state oppression or suicidal sacrifice?

00:33:39.840 I'm using it as an example of that if you – that the kind of violence that interests me is the violence of the truly powerful.

00:33:49.920 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.

00:33:58.520 But for me, when analysing 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, shortchanges us and means that we focus –

00:34:21.420 My sole interest, Sam, is who – like 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.

00:34:33.280 My own spirit – my own spiritual pursuits have led me to the point where I have a basic optimistic view of humanity.

00:34:39.120 My own personal experience with Muslims has led me to believe that Islam is essentially a positive thing, essentially a positive thing.

00:34:47.700 But that's a bad way to take its temperature because how many Muslims have you had a personal experience with?

00:34:52.240 I'll grant you – I'll be very generous. 0.90

00:34:53.180 Well, I know, but you're taking the temperature on the basis of bloody suicide bombers.

00:34:55.680 No, no, no, no.

00:34:56.600 No, I'm taking the temperature on the basis of the actual doctrine that makes sense of this behavior and also –

00:35:02.460 Or aspects of the doctrine.

00:35:04.040 The aspects of the doctrine –

00:35:05.060 No, no, but wait, wait, hold on.

00:35:06.200 Wait, I've got to –

00:35:07.300 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. 1.00

00:35:12.360 I didn't come into this room thinking that.

00:35:14.580 But it's worth connecting a few of these dots because it's not just a matter of the killing of people.

00:35:19.780 I'm talking about how people want to live.

00:35:21.580 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.

00:35:32.000 So you gave them – this is a magic wand argument that I use in my first book. 0.93

00:35:35.120 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. 0.83

00:35:47.200 What would he have done if he had the power just to make life in the Middle East and in Afghanistan any way he wanted it? 0.96

00:35:54.120 It would have been overstated. It doesn't need – we did not need to conjecture.

00:35:56.540 They said we want to remove the ability of our opponents to respond.

00:36:01.780 It's in the public sphere. That's what they said to Cheney and Bush.

00:36:04.260 We want to annihilate the possibility of response.

00:36:06.120 Let's go a little further in our imagination.

00:36:09.420 Do you actually think – and maybe Dick Cheney has been so demonized that he's the wrong case here.

00:36:14.320 I don't have a strong opinion about Dick Cheney. It might be all right. He likes golf, no matter how you spell that word.

00:36:19.480 This is what I would guess, right? Someone like Dick Cheney, if given unlimited – again, just magic, the resources of magic.

00:36:26.060 We don't need magic. He said remove the ability for them to respond.

00:36:30.560 You're doing a too narrow reading of that, right? Yes, we don't want these people to be able to attack us, right?

00:36:34.840 That's the goal of the war. I'm saying – 0.77

00:36:36.480 Or to oppose our objectives in the Middle East. We want to do whatever we want.

00:36:40.900 So what would we want?

00:36:41.960 To ransack that region for all of its energy resources for a kickoff.

00:36:46.000 And we want total unchallenged power, tyranny, totalitarianism.

00:36:48.680 But I'm talking about magic. We don't even need to steal their resources. We have the power of magic now.

00:36:53.880 What life would you impose on these people, right?

00:36:57.100 What life would the worst of us in power, like Dick Cheney, impose on these people?

00:37:01.600 I think he'd make Afghanistan or Iraq like Nebraska, right? 1.00

00:37:07.920 This would not – it would not be some hellscape of unnecessary suffering.

00:37:10.960 It would be a Starbucks on every corner, mere capitalism.

00:37:15.100 Now, you have your critique of this way of life, no doubt.

00:37:17.680 But what he would want to impose on these people is orderly, economic, probably good Christian behavior, right? 0.96

00:37:24.720 He would want movie theaters.

00:37:25.960 Possibly.

00:37:26.440 They'd all be watching the Oscars, right?

00:37:28.420 Now, what would Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi impose on everyone else?

00:37:32.940 He's told us explicitly because he tried the experiment in Syria and Iraq.

00:37:37.960 We know exactly how he wants to live and he wants others to live.

00:37:41.500 It is 7th century theocratic barbarism.

00:37:44.820 And there's no doubt about that. 1.00

00:37:47.060 It is fornicators, homosexuals thrown from rooftops and fornicators with their throat slit. 1.00

00:37:52.420 But Sam Harris, the one thing that surely we can agree on is that what the second guy whose name I don't know, tellingly – 1.00

00:37:57.020 The head of ISIS.

00:37:58.020 – is irrelevant.

00:37:59.480 He's not irrelevant.

00:38:00.260 He's the head of ISIS.

00:38:00.900 This is – it's broadly speaking irrelevant in terms of impact.

00:38:04.740 Let's return back to the sort of macro view of 7 billion individuals.

00:38:09.200 Dick Cheney's Starbucks on every corner.

00:38:11.140 That's happening.

00:38:12.180 There are 1.7 billion Muslims, a majority of which live under some significant theocratic constraint.

00:38:20.300 You're talking about women – 0.58

00:38:21.340 But we live under theocratic constraint.

00:38:23.300 It's not the same theocracy.

00:38:24.700 Listen, I'm just as concerned about Christian theocracy as you are. 0.98

00:38:27.920 How can you – because I think you're about to talk about sort of gender issues, but you're once again –

00:38:32.700 It's not just gender.

00:38:33.400 It's free thought issues.

00:38:34.400 It's science.

00:38:35.080 Surely.

00:38:35.240 But the metric by which we evaluate them is a distinct metric drawn from another narrative. 0.95

00:38:41.860 And the free – and our – like so like we might say, oh, bloody hell, women dressing like that or whatever. 0.99

00:38:46.020 You know, we can't – I don't think we're in a position to make those kind of decisions.

00:38:48.600 Of course we are.

00:38:49.400 Of course we are.

00:38:50.140 You don't think you're in a position –

00:38:51.060 Why do you think that their narrative should adhere to our template?

00:38:54.740 Well, first of all, so you imagine that most women forced to wear a burqa. 0.90

00:38:58.780 I don't know about forced.

00:38:59.800 In my experience, in my conversation –

00:39:01.300 Well, they're all forced.

00:39:01.320 They're all being forced.

00:39:02.060 It's being that it's more that we ought to regard it.

00:39:04.580 Yeah, but I've asked Muslim women about it, and they said it's like a discipline and we dig it. 0.99

00:39:09.280 Yeah, okay.

00:39:09.740 Oh, yeah.

00:39:10.080 But first of all, now I'm talking about a burqa. 0.85

00:39:12.740 I'm not talking about someone going to Barnard who elects to wear a headscarf because she likes the way Linda Sura looks.

00:39:18.440 So am I.

00:39:18.980 The imposition of our heterogeneous, hegemonic ideas of how masculine and feminine relationships work might not be universally applicable.

00:39:29.920 No, something is universally applicable.

00:39:32.800 If it's not universal, we can understand those differences.

00:39:35.220 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.

00:39:46.640 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. 1.00

00:40:00.920 I'm taking the local case of Afghanistan under the Taliban, actually Afghanistan currently as well.

00:40:07.000 You're talking about women who have almost the worst possible life on planet Earth. 1.00

00:40:12.040 I mean, we're talking about maternal mortality rates that are off the charts.

00:40:15.400 You're talking about illiteracy that is – you have to go back 200 years in the West to find that level of illiteracy.

00:40:20.240 I think this is precisely the kind of reasoning that's used to justify the bombing and commercial colonization of those territories.

00:40:28.460 They're not like us.

00:40:29.340 They treat women different from us. 0.99

00:40:30.860 I don't think we're in a position to make those judgments.

00:40:33.380 So then tell me how you would react to this.

00:40:35.860 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 a Taliban family? 0.99

00:40:48.080 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. 0.99

00:40:54.860 You don't need to explain all this to me.

00:40:56.260 I see where you're going.

00:40:57.480 I'm not nine years old.

00:40:59.420 Sam, darling.

00:41:00.240 But listen, my point is, all of your thought experiments – well, I'm from a Western culture.

00:41:04.760 I've been indoctrinated differently.

00:41:05.840 So you're saying there's no right or wrong here, really.

00:41:08.020 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.

00:41:18.160 I wouldn't want her to go to the Deep South either, like there's all sorts of things.

00:41:22.440 I wouldn't want her to go to places in Britain.

00:41:24.420 You don't think it's unlucky to be born a girl in Afghanistan five years ago?

00:41:28.240 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 nature to underwrite the modern-day colonization and subjugation of these people on a massive scale.

00:41:52.380 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 the 9-11 that was a riposte too.

00:42:13.820 It is better.

00:42:14.840 So you're invoking many things here which we should treat systematically, things like collateral damage.

00:42:20.220 So you drop a bomb.

00:42:21.320 I don't even like that language, collateral damage.

00:42:23.440 It's a euphemism.

00:42:24.240 No, it's a euphemism, but that's the word we use to talk about unintended people getting killed by bombs.

00:42:28.900 But what is it like when 87% of drone strikes result in fatalities?

00:42:35.000 The data here are hard to get our hands around as well because it's highly politicized.

00:42:39.140 Of course it is.

00:42:40.020 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?

00:42:48.780 Okay, but so let's treat these things point by point.

00:42:52.400 So first-

00:42:53.540 No, let's take them in a giddy blur.

00:42:55.740 Yeah, right.

00:42:56.360 Exactly.

00:42:56.720 Yes.

00:42:56.900 I'm trying to get out of the blur.

00:42:58.260 Yeah.

00:42:58.440 The giddy blur is now in my mind.

00:42:59.780 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.

00:43:08.000 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.

00:43:16.300 These are not merely cultural or personal affectations, right?

00:43:20.520 It's not that we're not free to just make up-

00:43:22.000 You can do one of your thought experiments in a minute.

00:43:23.880 Well, no, no, but- 0.82

00:43:24.540 I see you're on the edge of saying, if someone wants to have sex with a baby, you'll say it's wrong.

00:43:29.200 No, the reason why thought experiments are so useful is that they're the pure case.

00:43:33.200 You can take one variable at a time.

00:43:35.400 But this idea that it's all a matter of 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?

00:43:55.360 Yes, yes.

00:43:55.600 And I think that link is very direct.

00:43:57.080 I mean, that's a separate conversation we could have.

00:43:58.460 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.

00:44:07.820 So it's animals.

00:44:08.420 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, breed pigs that don't suffer, whatever it is.

00:44:22.280 Suffering should be our concern.

00:44:23.660 And the moment you grant that, you have to grant that not every culture and not every society and certainly not every family, right, has perfectly solved the human well-being problem, right?

00:44:38.260 They haven't solved it equally.

00:44:39.520 So if you find a family over here that's forcing their children to live in a basement for 20 years and to interbreed and not showing them the light of day, okay, this is a problem that society has an interest in.

00:44:51.680 Now we're talking about power dynamics.

00:44:53.520 The society has an interest in rescuing those children from their deranged and evil parents, right?

00:44:59.700 This could be true just in a single city like Los Angeles, right, as happened very recently.

00:45:04.140 That scales.

00:45:05.380 That scales to whole nations and to our global situation.

00:45:09.120 I think it becomes more complex with scale, doesn't it?

00:45:10.860 It does, politically complex.

00:45:12.060 But for you to withhold judgment of the burqa makes absolutely no sense.

00:45:16.440 For you to withhold judgment of female genital mutilation makes absolutely no sense.

00:45:20.800 Or male genital mutilation.

00:45:23.880 Again, now it's a perfect case of getting misled by words because they're highly non-analogous, those two procedures.

00:45:31.060 I'm not in favor of male circumcision either.

00:45:33.100 But I'm just saying, to use the word mutilation or circumcision synonymously there.

00:45:37.360 You use the word mutilation.

00:45:38.160 No, you just jump to the men though.

00:45:39.800 Now listen, but when we sort of interchange styles of dress.

00:45:44.320 We're still in the giddy blur, by the way.

00:45:46.080 Good, I never leave it.

00:45:47.280 And personal submission.

00:45:48.600 When we interchange that with sort of subjugation of a family and keep people in the cellar.

00:45:53.900 There's different levels of complexity.

00:45:55.300 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 do I want to call it, without being deliberately provocative, zeal and love of ethics and morality.

00:46:11.200 And I would like to know how that relates to your personal spiritual life.

00:46:15.160 I know you are a great meditator.

00:46:17.080 You said like, you know, I've never had the, Jesus, two years silence.

00:46:19.780 I think I'd struggle for 25.

00:46:21.080 Well, I mean, I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes and I don't find it easy.

00:46:23.800 I mean, for me, this stuff is the answer.

00:46:27.180 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, I have to take personal responsibility for the fact that I'm a complex individual, that I, within me, all of the things I would condemn over the course of a podcast, talking to a brilliant man like yourself.

00:46:51.760 Maybe one minute I'll condemn violence, another minute I'll condemn egotism and self-centeredness, that I am victim to all of these.

00:46:58.660 I'm perpetrator of self-centeredness and egocentricism.

00:47:01.820 And the tool that has helped me most to overcome these personal problems has been a kind of a spiritual Weltanschauung.

00:47:09.060 And I planned to use that word with you today.

00:47:11.280 I got it.

00:47:12.200 My German's bad, but I got that one. 1.00

00:47:14.020 Well, that's literally the only German word you'll hear.

00:47:16.780 It's the only one I know.

00:47:17.720 So, like, so my spirituality has been my personal vehicle for carrying me away from sort of selfishness, self-destruction.

00:47:24.880 And like I'm talking as a person that's overcome, you know, through the help of others and to a degree faith, I must say to a huge degree faith, my own addiction.

00:47:35.400 Now, you've got addiction issues, haven't you?

00:47:37.540 No, not that I know of yet.

00:47:39.860 It's just for you dabbling in, it was your brother, no.

00:47:42.540 Like Dan.

00:47:44.220 No, neither of you have got no addiction background.

00:47:45.780 No, Dan Harris had, Dan Harris, who's also, he's a friend, he's not, there's no relation, but he wrote the book 10% Happier and it was a big bestseller about mindfulness.

00:47:56.540 And so he's had issues that he's talked about.

00:47:58.920 I see.

00:47:59.380 Well, forgive me.

00:48:00.080 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.

00:48:24.440 This, for me, I think, is an incredibly valuable resource.

00:48:28.700 And these things, and ethics in general, are drawn, not ultimately, because who knows what preceded religion, some form of theatre and ritual.

00:48:38.060 Who knows what they're doing down deep in the dank of the forests, what gods they devise there.

00:48:43.340 They're probably eating mushrooms, yeah.

00:48:44.660 Well, precisely, where consciousness is a little more open.

00:48:47.540 I suppose what I want to understand is, like, how does your personal spirituality serve you ethically?

00:48:54.160 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?

00:49:04.100 And what solutions do you think can be derived from your personal experiences of mysticism and spirituality?

00:49:11.900 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.

00:49:19.600 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. 1.00

00:49:29.500 And I see that it doesn't require any divisive bullshit to be saved, right? 0.99

00:49:35.520 You don't have to lie to yourself. 0.86

00:49:37.200 You don't have to believe that a book was written by the creator of the universe.

00:49:40.120 You don't have to believe that hellfire awaits people who don't call a historical person by the right name.

00:49:45.640 You don't have to believe any of those things.

00:49:47.460 And all of those things are absolutely integral to the doctrines of these religions.

00:49:51.760 And there's many separate religions on offer that are incompatible.

00:49:55.660 I'll 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.

00:50:00.860 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 things that are difficult to quantify scientifically.

00:50:09.160 And I would wonder how valuable and useful those image scans and neuro image scans are when dealing with fun and love.

00:50:18.420 I'm sure they're a great service, I'm sure.

00:50:20.240 But these 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.

00:50:34.360 And I think 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.

00:50:47.360 And some of the extreme issues that you're addressing, they're not imaginary.

00:50:53.720 I know what you're saying is true.

00:50:55.260 They're not imaginary.

00:50:56.060 But this baby bathwater issue, I'm interested in the baby.

00:50:59.000 And you're always on about the bathwater.

00:51:00.560 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.

00:51:10.980 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.

00:51:21.100 These are universal features of what it's like to have a human mind that is based on human neurochemistry.

00:51:32.640 And this is not something we just made up.

00:51:36.020 It's not something that's purely a product of our time.

00:51:38.320 It's not merely cultural.

00:51:40.160 And that's why sticking girls in bags for their entire lives and not letting them read is bad. 1.00

00:51:45.520 You should stop saying that.

00:51:46.300 I think it's derisory.

00:51:47.480 It's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan.

00:51:51.120 I'm not talking about, again, I'm not talking about the voluntary use of...

00:51:54.480 You shouldn't use incendiary language.

00:51:56.220 If you're here to convey love, then why use that?

00:52:00.140 No, because how can you pretend to love girls if you're not as concerned as I am about this mistreatment of them?

00:52:06.140 Because I don't pretend to understand complex historical and cultural issues from a very particular perspective of an American or an English white man.

00:52:16.260 You're overthinking it.

00:52:17.440 It has nothing to do with skin color.

00:52:18.640 Who knows what the level of thought that's required is, Sam?

00:52:22.460 But you, like, you know, you are an American intellectual in 2018.

00:52:27.260 No, no, but just take a few facts on board here.

00:52:30.820 I can introduce you to women of whatever shade of brown skin you require...

00:52:37.380 I have no requirements.

00:52:38.200 That's one of the beautiful things about me.

00:52:39.900 ...who have grown up in these cultures, who will say exactly what I'm saying about the consequences of compulsory evailing.

00:52:45.120 They could introduce you to women of a variety of fusions that would say the contrary. 0.99

00:52:49.600 No, no, they wouldn't say that.

00:52:50.740 It's a practice of personal subjugation. 0.53

00:52:52.980 It's the same as doing yoga or exercise.

00:52:55.060 It's a way of refining your consciousness.

00:52:57.120 But you're drawing the wrong lesson here.

00:52:59.560 No, I'm not drawing the wrong lesson.

00:53:00.680 You can't say wrong lessons, people should do.

00:53:01.840 No, no, no, because you're just missing a few facts.

00:53:03.920 If you have those two people have a conversation,

00:53:06.360 if you take someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Sarah Hader, who runs the ex-Muslims of North America, right, 0.96

00:53:12.900 and you have her talk to someone like Linda Sarsour, you know, the hijabi icon of the Women's March, right,

00:53:19.840 darling of the left now, who's actually a closet theocrat and quite a nefarious person when you get her talking about religion.

00:53:25.880 I mean, she will not admit that life for women in Saudi Arabia is bad by comparison at all for women in the West, right?

00:53:33.140 America should stop having such complicit trade relationships with them then.

00:53:37.360 I'll agree with you there.

00:53:39.020 But if you have two women of this sort talk, right, 1.00

00:53:42.260 one who has taken off the hijab for reasons of not wanting to wear it

00:53:46.600 and wanting to live in a system where she's free not to wear it,

00:53:49.140 and one who says I'm wearing it purely as an expression of my own religious faith

00:53:53.500 and it's just pure female empowerment, 1.00

00:53:55.880 if you let that conversation proceed,

00:53:59.400 you'll see that this side has to lie endlessly about the actual doctrines,

00:54:04.880 about why most people, most women most of the time are wearing this. 0.65

00:54:08.700 It's being forced upon them.

00:54:10.140 I mean, if we talk about the misuse of power,

00:54:11.660 you're talking about take the perfect case that sounds like it's a thought experiment,

00:54:15.780 but it actually happened.

00:54:16.940 You take the religious police in Mecca who wouldn't let the girls who are burning alive in a dormitory be rescued 0.99

00:54:24.160 because they weren't wearing their veils, right?

00:54:26.780 They wouldn't let the firemen go in and rescue girls from a burning building because they weren't properly veiled. 0.97

00:54:31.960 Don't get all delighted about it.

00:54:33.680 That's the reductio ad absurdum of this.

00:54:35.720 Particularly in our time where gender relationships in this country have become so complex,

00:54:38.280 particularly where, you know, we're both fathers of daughters.

00:54:40.820 Are you not concerned about the cushure and aesthetic obligations that will be placed upon my daughter

00:54:48.540 to look a certain way, to behave a certain way, to believe certain things?

00:54:52.840 I don't even think that's a reasonable possibility.

00:54:54.800 I just think you are in a position to judge how wrong that would be.

00:54:58.880 In a position to judge how wrong what would be?

00:55:00.860 Imposing those restrictions on your girls.

00:55:03.520 You know that would be a diminishment of the well-being of your girls.

00:55:06.920 And to pretend to not know it of a girl in Afghanistan.

00:55:09.240 I have to return to this fetishism idea.

00:55:11.000 Why are you not more concerned by the continual objectification of women? 1.00

00:55:16.200 I am.

00:55:16.740 The commodification of female sexuality. 0.60

00:55:17.920 Oh, I am.

00:55:18.560 I've got two girls. 0.95

00:55:19.180 The advertising industry using females purely as props. 0.99

00:55:22.540 It's just a different order of problem, but I'm totally with you there.

00:55:25.600 Well, which one is more prominent?

00:55:27.200 What do you think is more likely to happen to your daughter,

00:55:29.200 that she's going to be whisked off to Afghanistan to be wife number five, 1.00

00:55:32.780 or that she's going to have sex with some dickhead because she's got daddy issues? 1.00

00:55:36.880 Oh, yeah, but my concern is for both things. 1.00

00:55:39.200 Well, your concern should be for reality,

00:55:41.160 not for abstract ideas that play into the hands of an already overly bloated power dynamic

00:55:48.020 and a well-served power dynamic.

00:55:49.920 Okay, well, let's get that.

00:55:51.060 Whose side are we on?

00:55:52.260 Who does the grail serve, Sam?

00:55:54.820 Where is this mythic truth?

00:55:57.020 Where does perennialism come from?

00:55:59.180 Why are these themes found throughout the great faiths?

00:56:02.720 The oneness, the unity, the possibility for love.

00:56:06.440 We're going giddy, Sam.

00:56:07.960 We're going for another ride in the tumble dryer of love.

00:56:11.040 All right, so let me try to connect a few of these things because you're concerned about power, right?

00:56:17.700 And you're concerned about the misuses of our power.

00:56:20.240 So our being Western power, say.

00:56:22.880 I suppose so, but to tell the truth, now I've got you.

00:56:25.520 Like, I don't even, I think that those, the mask of nationalism is superficial.

00:56:31.940 The real power operates and has done probably since British colonialism on an economic scale

00:56:37.600 that doesn't pay a great deal of attention to sort of trade tariffs

00:56:41.480 or those very trade tariffs have withdrawn up, you know, with the powerful in mind.

00:56:46.340 So what, for me, Sam, what interests me are not sort of like,

00:56:50.220 while, you know, I've got no argument about bloody ISIS when I read about that, 0.99

00:56:52.980 I think, fucking, this is some terrifying shit going down. 0.99

00:56:55.520 But what interests me more is who is it that gets to determine 1.00

00:56:59.900 what is happening in the world in my life right now?

00:57:03.420 Right.

00:57:03.620 And it seems to me that that's transnational corporations

00:57:06.740 and governments of Western democracies that don't need to resort to the kind of

00:57:10.140 sort of vivid acts of violence on their domestic population

00:57:13.420 because it's unnecessary, because we've all been beautifully conditioned.

00:57:16.900 And when it is required, when brutality and violence is required, it will be used.

00:57:21.880 It is enacted.

00:57:23.440 Okay.

00:57:23.920 And that, for me, seems more important than people responding to that power.

00:57:29.120 But, well, if it's all important, Sam, then why is your focus continually on the sort of

00:57:33.420 fetishized aspect of it?

00:57:35.060 Well, it's, again, to say fetishized is to reveal the problem that causes me to focus on it,

00:57:42.940 because, again, it comes back to the power of ideas.

00:57:45.960 And I think one of the worst ideas going, really, is the one that you've expressed here,

00:57:50.500 which is, who am I to judge?

00:57:52.280 I'm just a white guy who grew up in the Western context.

00:57:54.560 Who am I to judge the burqa? 1.00

00:57:55.660 This kind of moral relativism, post-modernism.

00:57:58.920 I'm not a post-modernist.

00:57:59.980 Well, no, but this is the origin.

00:58:02.600 I know you don't want to answer that name, but this is the intellectual trend that gave us

00:58:06.820 this kind of apprehension around making these judgments, right?

00:58:11.580 Who am I to say what would be a good life for somebody else?

00:58:16.640 And no matter how grotesque the example of human suffering.

00:58:20.380 I'm not afraid of saying that non-violence, compassion, and love is the answer.

00:58:24.680 But I think where we disagree is what should be the key target, what is generating, ultimately

00:58:31.540 generating the problem.

00:58:33.220 So, well, there are many problems, but to take it at the level of greatest abstraction

00:58:38.660 and I think greatest leverage for us to think about it is, for the most part, this is not

00:58:45.500 a problem of the world being filled with bad people, right?

00:58:48.540 There are some bad people.

00:58:49.620 There's some, let's say, 1% of people in every culture are probably psychopaths, right?

00:58:53.620 So there's 1% of people who really do feel no compunction about harming other people and

00:58:58.760 they kind of get off on it and they're going to keep doing it no matter what you change

00:59:01.840 about the system.

00:59:03.020 But most harm is the result of bad ideas, good people having bad ideas and good people being

00:59:10.620 in systems where there are bad incentives.

00:59:13.560 And the crucial word here is incentives, right?

00:59:15.780 I think we need economic systems and political systems and institutions and ways of being

00:59:22.500 with one another publicly, which align our incentives in such a way so as to make ordinary, mediocre,

00:59:30.940 not so insightful, not so reflective, not so philosophical, and frankly, not even that ethical

00:59:36.480 people more and more effortlessly do the right thing, right?

00:59:40.140 So you shouldn't have to be St. Francis of Assisi to act well in the world, right?

00:59:45.420 But there are systems where the incentives are bad enough that you really have to be a

00:59:50.800 moral hero to be just basically decent, right?

00:59:54.260 All of the incentives are pointing the other way, right?

00:59:56.720 And I'll give you an example for this life in a maximum security prison.

01:00:00.820 So if you're a good guy, you're not a racist, you just want to get along with people, if you

01:00:05.860 were put into a maximum security prison, all the incentives would be pushing you the other

01:00:10.720 way.

01:00:11.080 So for you not to join a white gang in a maximum security prison would be effectively suicidal, 0.83

01:00:18.440 right?

01:00:18.560 Like you would just be the victim of everyone.

01:00:21.020 The place is set up to segregate everyone by skin color, right?

01:00:24.340 So even if you don't have a racist bone in your body, you're just self-preservation alone.

01:00:29.620 Prisons don't exist in an abyss, do they?

01:00:31.240 They are sort of, that's concentrated society.

01:00:33.660 It's a federal institution.

01:00:35.080 But it's the perfect example of bad incentives and misaligned incentives.

01:00:39.600 I know.

01:00:39.620 And look, how do these things happen?

01:00:41.300 And where are they happening?

01:00:42.600 They're happening everywhere.

01:00:43.680 In America.

01:00:44.460 But most of these examples of bad incentives, most of these examples of where power is victimizing

01:00:53.440 millions and millions of people are, I would argue, examples where the system is set up

01:00:59.320 in such a way that it is reliably exporting this misery, right?

01:01:05.000 And there is no author of it.

01:01:07.040 There is no bad person or there are very few bad people who are the actual authors of this

01:01:13.140 human suffering or the perpetrators of it.

01:01:15.540 What we have are systems where selfish people being selfish most of the time manage to export

01:01:23.480 a fair amount of misery to people who are less lucky than themselves.

01:01:26.460 And if we want a fairer economic arrangement, we have to design it.

01:01:30.440 And we have to design it for people as they are.

01:01:32.480 We need systems that will allow people-

01:01:34.940 But people are mutable and constantly changing.

01:01:36.740 In fact, that's part of your main edict is that we respond to ideas.

01:01:40.940 And we respond to incentives, yes.

01:01:42.460 Ideas and incentives.

01:01:44.500 To be a bit more personal for a moment, are you a bit cynical about human beings?

01:01:50.320 Because when we talk, it's like I feel that you're-

01:01:53.920 We've been fighting about terrorism and female genital mutilation.

01:01:58.260 With my pro-terrorism, pro-genital mutilation stance, I will not waver on those issues. 0.98

01:02:05.000 Shoulder to the wall.

01:02:05.840 No, but you seem so very, you seem like angry about, you seem angry about humanity almost.

01:02:14.260 No.

01:02:14.400 Or like that human beings are not good or something.

01:02:17.200 No, no.

01:02:17.520 On the contrary, I see, well, it's all mixed, right? 1.00

01:02:20.240 I mean, we're good and we're bad and we're careless, right?

01:02:23.480 And we're short-sighted.

01:02:24.560 Like Sonson Nixon would say, the line between good and evil runs for every human at heart.

01:02:27.320 Yeah, absolutely.

01:02:27.800 That's certainly a more eloquent way of saying it.

01:02:29.820 But it is, but there's, again, to talk about the situational problem,

01:02:34.820 the problem of incentives is doing more work than human evil is doing.

01:02:41.700 All of us have work to do on ourselves to be happier and better people, right?

01:02:46.700 And that is spiritual life and that is ethical life.

01:02:49.260 But I think better than, and these are not mutually exclusive projects.

01:02:54.460 These can be done simultaneously.

01:02:56.620 But better than each of us figuring out how to be a saint would be to design a system

01:03:01.640 that made it easier for everyone to be far better than they're tending to be now.

01:03:06.020 And that's possible.

01:03:06.840 I think that's absolutely possible.

01:03:08.200 I think so, too, with a lot of decentralization and a lot of significant change,

01:03:12.860 particularly in our nations, around what is called the political.

01:03:17.200 But I sort of see as the religious.

01:03:18.800 Now, let me tell you something again.

01:03:20.260 Let's again, a little more, what do I want to say, trivial or personal.

01:03:25.040 It's not trivial.

01:03:26.180 The other day, I was driving home from, I don't know, seeing a movie or something.

01:03:29.980 It was the daytime still.

01:03:31.340 The homeless guy just collapsed, laying in the middle of the road.

01:03:34.980 You know, it's L.A., homeless people are just everywhere, forming shanty towns like 1.00

01:03:39.180 the apocalypse has already happened and is creeping in around us like a slow tide.

01:03:44.460 And it was some homeless guy.

01:03:46.060 And I thought, oh, no, that homeless guy is just laying there.

01:03:48.880 I should do something about that.

01:03:50.800 And then I didn't.

01:03:51.780 I just went home.

01:03:52.760 And I thought, like, oh, why didn't I do anything about that?

01:03:56.680 This is a great example here.

01:03:58.380 So, OK, because in the current system, there's nothing very easy to do.

01:04:04.780 So you have to be an absolute moral hero to do something about that particular homeless

01:04:11.060 guy.

01:04:11.900 And it's very likely that what you would do wouldn't help a lot and would just complicate

01:04:18.680 your life massively.

01:04:19.780 So let's say you just say, well, this is totally untenable.

01:04:22.200 I cannot step over the body of yet another homeless person.

01:04:24.960 I'm going to take this guy into my life.

01:04:26.320 He's going to come back to my hotel room.

01:04:28.180 I've got to go to London in a week.

01:04:29.500 I'm going to figure out what to do with this guy.

01:04:31.580 And it's going to be your whole project.

01:04:33.140 I've done it a couple of times.

01:04:34.160 It's complex.

01:04:35.660 Yeah.

01:04:36.300 So the reason why he's lying on the side, there are many reasons why he's lying on the

01:04:40.040 sidewalk.

01:04:40.520 And probably those reasons aren't immediately actionable by you.

01:04:44.720 Now, what we need is a system that recognizes the problem of homelessness in the most compassionate

01:04:51.300 and pragmatic way and figures out whatever solution there is, what, you know, there's

01:04:55.940 substance abuse issues, there's mental health issues, there's, there's zoning issues.

01:05:00.780 There's like, I mean, we, we, there's this not in my backyard ism that where people are

01:05:04.780 just getting pushed to different parts of the city because you don't see this in Beverly

01:05:08.100 Hills, but you see this in Santa Monica.

01:05:09.700 Right.

01:05:10.260 We have to figure out a solution that is compassionate.

01:05:13.540 And Sam, do you think part of it is the relegation of spiritual principles?

01:05:16.700 The fact that broadly speaking, culturally, spiritual principles have been relegated to

01:05:20.020 the point of almost insignificance.

01:05:21.500 So it's sort of no longer feels like a sort of a personal duty to help homeless people.

01:05:26.160 Of course, as you said, the systems aren't in place.

01:05:28.140 One wonders what would happen if I just sort of put him over my shoulder and tried to take

01:05:31.260 him somewhere.

01:05:31.620 I know what would happen.

01:05:32.660 Shelters would be full, complex medical issues, issues of finance.

01:05:36.620 But, you know, don't you think that sort of this sort of idea of individualism and individual

01:05:40.880 freedom kind of leads to sort of, it somehow favors primal and selfish drives over sort

01:05:46.360 of communal fraternal drives.

01:05:48.400 And whilst I agree with you on that baby bathwater dynamic, I don't think we do enough to, to

01:05:54.760 focus on, to illuminate and present the baby, the baby that is spirituality, that is unity.

01:06:02.080 The kind of things that we're, you know, when you're meditating for two years in silence,

01:06:04.600 when you're continuing to meditate now, probably when you're doing Brazilian jiu jitsu, strong

01:06:08.280 senses of fraternity, togetherness, oneness.

01:06:10.720 How do we, for me, I think that the priority, the most useful way of getting those values

01:06:16.380 into our culture is to demonstrate them, to confront power where possible and necessary.

01:06:22.460 And it seems to me less significant, and this is what I'm fascinated by, to attack, to

01:06:27.760 focus on the arguments that you have been focusing on and arguments that you've been brilliantly

01:06:31.980 making and writing about sort of wonderfully, whilst I disagree, has become evident on many

01:06:37.040 of the tenets of it.

01:06:38.400 So for me, I suppose what I'm saying is, oughtn't people like you and I who believe in spirituality,

01:06:43.840 who believe in compassion, who believe in love, be doing more to elevate those values?

01:06:49.660 Yeah, well, I'm doing that a lot.

01:06:52.960 Oh, go on.

01:06:53.440 I mean, I talk about meditation and spirituality and well-being and ethics a lot.

01:06:59.640 But it's got a behavioral, I know you're chairman of that, deal with, you know, secularism and

01:07:04.780 all that kind of thing.

01:07:05.640 And so, but like, you know, how does that convert into, you know, boots on the ground love for

01:07:11.060 other humans?

01:07:12.280 I mean, just to talk about what the ground truth is here.

01:07:15.840 I mean, we have consciousness and its contents in each moment.

01:07:19.740 I mean, that's what our lives are.

01:07:21.680 We have changing states of consciousness.

01:07:24.360 And this is all there is to care about.

01:07:25.800 All there is to care about are changes for good or for ill in conscious creatures like

01:07:31.660 ourselves.

01:07:32.140 So if you love someone, you care that they be happy and that they no longer suffer.

01:07:37.180 Or if they suffer, they suffer in ways that are productive that lead to even deeper states

01:07:41.720 of well-being.

01:07:42.380 It's not like we're just pure hedonists.

01:07:44.360 There's these kinds of suffering that has a silver lining that gets us somewhere worth going.

01:07:49.040 But when you're talking about finding meaning in life and making meaning together in community,

01:07:53.700 you're talking about just what it's like to be you.

01:07:56.820 You're talking about consciousness.

01:07:58.040 And we actually know a lot about how to improve states of human consciousness and creativity and

01:08:07.820 aesthetic beauty and ethical interactions and not lying and treating people the way you

01:08:14.480 would want to be treated.

01:08:15.440 Something like a precept like the golden rule.

01:08:17.140 Super useful.

01:08:18.480 I mean, as I could say, that's a great piece of software.

01:08:19.980 These fall under the heading of baby, right?

01:08:21.720 They're all there in religion.

01:08:22.740 These all come from scripture.

01:08:23.740 They all come from theology.

01:08:24.600 Yeah, but they don't only come from scripture.

01:08:27.280 People had these ideas outside of religious traditions.

01:08:30.040 You can find Greek philosophers who've said all this.

01:08:32.140 You can find Romans.

01:08:32.700 They were religious.

01:08:33.640 But nothing has to be believed on insufficient evidence to use these ideas and to find them

01:08:39.680 compelling.

01:08:40.280 I'll ask you this.

01:08:41.140 Yeah, no, of course.

01:08:42.040 I agree with you.

01:08:42.860 You don't have to, oh, I believe that, you know.

01:08:44.680 And there's a cost to believing any dogma.

01:08:48.020 The problem is-

01:08:49.140 Any dogma, Sam.

01:08:50.300 Any dogma is costly.

01:08:51.340 Consumerism, consumerism, expensive dogma.

01:08:54.020 It depends what those-

01:08:54.900 Look at the homeless people on the street.

01:08:56.880 Now, they are the price.

01:08:58.560 They are the collateral damage of our culture.

01:09:00.640 Sam, are you confident that individual consciousness, like my individual Russell Brand consciousness and

01:09:07.720 your individual Sam Harris consciousness are distinct, separate things that are not qualitatively

01:09:14.180 similar, if not ultimately the same.

01:09:18.280 I know there is zero scientific evidence to suggest that all consciousness is one.

01:09:24.000 But given your research scientifically and personal spiritual investigations, is there

01:09:29.900 anything that suggests to you that consciousness as a phenomena may be universal?

01:09:33.600 Well, it's universal in the sense that it is simply the fact of experience.

01:09:40.960 It's the fact that there's something that it's like to be you, and there's something

01:09:44.440 that it's like to be me.

01:09:45.920 And so it's almost analogous to space.

01:09:49.300 It's like the space in this room is seamless, right, and undivided.

01:09:54.300 And you ask yourself, well, so what about the space inside this water bottle?

01:09:58.460 Well, where is the water bottle with reference to space?

01:10:01.980 Well, it's the only place it can be.

01:10:04.600 It's right there where the water bottle is.

01:10:06.600 If I move it, it moves.

01:10:07.740 But if you're asking about the space, it has a kind of sameness regardless of what object

01:10:14.300 in that space you're talking about.

01:10:16.880 And consciousness has that property, at least conceptually.

01:10:19.720 Now, we don't know how consciousness arises in the physics of things.

01:10:24.360 We don't know if it's a product of...

01:10:26.980 Matter.

01:10:27.700 Yeah.

01:10:28.120 I mean, there's certainly good reason to believe that it is, but we don't know how far down

01:10:31.460 it goes.

01:10:32.060 It could be a fundamental constituent of matter, or it could arise on the basis of assemblies

01:10:36.900 of neurons.

01:10:37.480 Is the good reason to believe that it comes from matter that the more complex an organism

01:10:41.400 is, the more evidence of functioning rational consciousness there is?

01:10:45.300 I mean, again, you sort of start the universe from the Big Bang, right?

01:10:49.920 And the idea that we find complex arrangements of matter giving rise to different emergent properties

01:10:59.040 and life is one of those properties and all of the features of life, reproduction and metabolism

01:11:04.840 and the order we see in the natural world is the result of a process of increasing complexity.

01:11:15.360 And at the end of some significant period, I mean, in our case, you know, billions of years,

01:11:20.680 you find organisms that exhibit the properties of consciousness.

01:11:25.500 But the only consciousness we're sure of, 100% sure of, is the consciousness in our own case.

01:11:33.100 Now, we can reason by analogy.

01:11:34.600 We look at dogs and other complex animals, and we can say, well, to imagine that they don't

01:11:41.960 have consciousness but only seem to have it, that's actually not parsimonious.

01:11:47.020 Because, I mean, they're so similar to us neurologically and in every other way, that to imagine that

01:11:52.760 the lights come on somewhere between them and us seems irrational.

01:11:57.660 But how far down that goes is anybody's guess.

01:12:00.700 And intuitions really divide.

01:12:02.180 So if you ask most neuroscientists or philosophers of mind, is there something that it's like to

01:12:07.300 be a fly, right, that's got 100,000 neurons in its brain? 0.93

01:12:11.980 People just, you know, it's a kind of coin toss, right?

01:12:14.360 Now, I think there's, again, we simply don't know at what point consciousness emerges.

01:12:20.140 But it's possible that single cells are conscious in some way, right?

01:12:24.560 I mean, it's like that wouldn't, you wouldn't expect the living world to appear differently

01:12:28.620 if cells were conscious, right?

01:12:31.360 But it would be genuinely mysterious because when you look at the human brain, there seems

01:12:36.380 to be a lot of neural activity, in fact, most neural activity, that is not associated with

01:12:42.400 what you experience as consciousness or I experience as consciousness from a first person side.

01:12:48.240 So what most neural activity is not related to what we experience as consciousness, so

01:12:51.700 it's most anatomical, biological stuff.

01:12:53.680 Yeah.

01:12:53.900 I mean, yeah.

01:12:54.320 Most of what your brain is doing isn't showing up in your first person experience as consciousness.

01:13:01.720 My individual identity, just like the cherry on the cake, the kidneys and the blood and

01:13:06.060 all that stuff.

01:13:06.760 But it's the only thing that ultimately matters, right?

01:13:08.960 I mean, it's a conscious, and it's the only thing that any of us can be absolutely sure

01:13:14.560 of.

01:13:15.020 And this is my line about consciousness being the only thing in the universe that can't

01:13:19.320 be an illusion.

01:13:20.440 I'm not the first person to say this, obviously, but it's the only thing that has to be true

01:13:26.380 of us no matter how mistaken we might be about everything else.

01:13:29.540 So if we're in the matrix right now, and this is just a, you know, we're just living in

01:13:33.260 a simulation on some alien supercomputer, and none of what we think is real is actually

01:13:38.860 real, consciousness is still real.

01:13:41.060 I mean, consciousness is just simply the fact that anything seems to be happening at all.

01:13:44.940 Or if you're really asleep and dreaming right now, and we're not really doing this podcast,

01:13:49.480 you're totally confused about your actual circumstance, but you're actually not confused about the

01:13:53.260 fact that you're conscious.

01:13:54.280 Although it would explain why I've got no trousers and pants.

01:13:56.320 I was hoping you had trousers on.

01:14:00.940 Hey, but Sam, like, see how you just described consciousness then as a potentially sort of

01:14:06.180 a construction, and it's only our personal consciousness that we can be certain is not

01:14:09.560 an illusion.

01:14:10.520 Many of you know about, you know, sort of the Mahārabhāta and the Bhagavad Gita.

01:14:13.960 Many of these ideas are sort of using a vernacular that is naturally determined by the time in

01:14:21.840 which it was conceived.

01:14:22.620 It talks about these ideas, maya, illusion, that.

01:14:27.720 And for me, like, you know, because of, like, like you also said, that list of values that

01:14:33.400 would be useful, and which I've sort of said, oh, well, they have, they're part of the baby

01:14:37.080 in the bathwater, aren't they?

01:14:38.280 Like, it seems to me that possibly within, like, you know, if we can somehow extract what

01:14:44.080 is positive from what is called religion, that it might, it leads us to ideas such as fraternity,

01:14:52.600 unity, oneness, compassion.

01:14:55.080 And like, do you not find connections between what you have learned in neuroscience and what

01:15:03.940 you have learned from studying sort of Buddhism?

01:15:06.600 Oh, yeah.

01:15:07.680 You know, the connections are very direct, but...

01:15:10.500 How they know that stuff.

01:15:11.760 But we don't want, well, just because it's just the nature of consciousness.

01:15:18.520 You're talking about people who have spent, especially in the Buddhist case, just an incredible

01:15:23.660 amount of time studying from the first person side what experience is like, what its character

01:15:29.840 is.

01:15:30.140 And so, I mean, one analogy would be the central claim of Buddhism, and it's not just Buddhism,

01:15:36.500 but Buddhism, and I would put several of the Indian traditions like Advaita Vedanta in there,

01:15:41.180 where the central claim is that the self is an illusion.

01:15:44.540 The ego is an illusion.

01:15:45.680 And when I say self, I don't mean that people are illusions.

01:15:49.120 I mean that the sense that you have a subject riding around in your head, thinking your thoughts,

01:15:53.880 right?

01:15:54.000 That there's a thinker in addition to the thoughts, that's an illusion.

01:15:57.900 Yes.

01:15:58.240 And that makes perfect sense neurologically.

01:16:01.340 Does it?

01:16:01.520 Because there's no place in the brain for your ego to be sitting.

01:16:04.880 There's no central place where everything comes together.

01:16:07.700 There's no unchanging center in the brain.

01:16:10.340 You're just talking about a cascade of neurophysiology, and everything is distributed everywhere.

01:16:15.220 And there are various parts of the brain that are coming online and off and subserving conscious

01:16:19.780 states and not.

01:16:21.040 It's a process.

01:16:22.200 And if you could experience consciousness as a flow of sensory and emotional and interoceptive

01:16:33.040 experience without the sense that there's an unchanging center riding around on that flow,

01:16:39.840 like a man in a boat on the stream of consciousness, if you could experience consciousness without

01:16:46.720 that, that would be an experience that is much more coincident with what we understand

01:16:53.420 neurologically.

01:16:54.280 That would be to experience something that is more true from the third-person brain-based

01:17:00.420 what-do-we-see-inside-the-head side.

01:17:02.920 And it just so happens you can experience that.

01:17:04.740 That is what meditation is like when you really know how to meditate.

01:17:08.820 The sense that there's a meditator in the head strategically paying attention to experience

01:17:15.680 rather than just pure experience, that drops away, right?

01:17:18.940 So this is one piece of data in favor of introspection here.

01:17:23.840 And it's not a piece that the Western intellectual tradition or the Western spiritual tradition ever

01:17:30.500 got a good handle on.

01:17:32.140 Yes, you can find specific Christian and Jewish and Muslim mystics making these noises, but they

01:17:38.560 make the, when they make these noises sufficiently, they start to sound like Buddhists and their 0.98

01:17:42.740 co-religionists want to kill them rather often, right? 1.00

01:17:45.200 Yes, and not only the co-religionists, the powerful entities within nation states and economic 0.98

01:17:52.080 entities.

01:17:52.560 Like, if people start believing they're not individuals, it's very hard to market at them.

01:17:56.300 But we haven't had a lot of problems with people being killed for not doing enough shopping

01:18:00.320 and shopping malls, because they...

01:18:02.500 Unless there's a shooting in the shopping mall, or unless the stuff they buy in the shopping mall kills them.

01:18:06.760 But if you look at the history of Christianity and Judaism and Islam, you find people who...

01:18:12.740 I mean, these are explicitly dualistic traditions.

01:18:14.860 You have a soul that exists in relationship to the divine, and that division is maintained theologically.

01:18:24.060 But I would say, Sam Harris, that the reason that bifurcation occurred is precisely because

01:18:29.240 were man's relationship with the divine prioritized in the manner that you've just been describing

01:18:36.560 that seems neurologically apposite, were that to become our priority?

01:18:42.060 A materialistic, let's call it, lifestyle, a mechanistic social system such as the ones that

01:18:49.180 we inhabit would be less fertile, because if people believed that the ultimate reality

01:18:55.400 was not being experienced by the self, that there was no self, that that unbinds us, that

01:19:02.360 makes oneness a real possibility, that starts to suggest that your consciousness and my consciousness

01:19:07.100 ultimately are the same, or at least there's nothing to suggest that they're any different

01:19:10.320 and that the things that we believe to be different are superficial accents acquired through

01:19:16.140 culture and education.

01:19:17.080 But that's also true materially, and we shouldn't give the material short shrift, because the

01:19:21.780 material progress is the thing that frees attention to...

01:19:28.400 You roll back the clock long enough, you find people living in perpetual states of trying

01:19:35.380 not to die, right?

01:19:36.640 I mean, you're fending off wild animals, you're exposed to the elements, you're suffering the

01:19:43.720 consequences of disease, and you have no concept of what disease is, right?

01:19:47.420 You don't know about the germ theory of disease, and your child dies, and you think it's because

01:19:52.080 your neighbor shined the evil eye on the child, right?

01:19:55.300 I mean, so it's like you have magical beliefs accounting for changes in the world, and they're

01:20:00.420 completely fallacious, right?

01:20:01.640 So the progress we've made in understanding the material world is all to the good, except

01:20:08.400 we have all of these misaligned incentive problems and externalized damages to very good things.

01:20:17.680 I mean, like you want an iPhone, right?

01:20:19.600 But you don't want people jumping off the roof of Foxconn because life is so painful there

01:20:24.480 to make an iPhone, right?

01:20:25.600 So is it possible to make an iPhone without creating just unendurable misery for some number

01:20:32.020 of people?

01:20:32.660 Undoubtedly, it must be true, right?

01:20:35.280 We haven't figured it out yet so as to make that the default, and we need to do that.

01:20:42.380 But there is no distance between the material and the spiritual here.

01:20:45.880 I mean, because if consciousness is just a matter of information processing in the right complex

01:20:53.040 systems, and if consciousness could one day be born in our computers, right, well, then

01:20:57.440 we'll have an ethical obligation to not make our computers suffer, right?

01:21:01.320 If Siri could suffer, right, well, then it matters how you talk to her, you know?

01:21:06.260 And it would matter every- 1.00

01:21:07.300 I've only used her for stupid questions. 1.00

01:21:09.120 Mine's a bloke, actually. 1.00

01:21:10.500 Oh, yeah?

01:21:10.960 Mine complicate life.

01:21:12.100 And we're obviously not there yet, or it certainly seems obvious that we're not there yet.

01:21:16.500 But at a certain point, we will very likely either be in the presence of conscious machines

01:21:22.980 or think we are.

01:21:24.300 They'll emulate conscious systems in a compelling enough way that our default will be, I'm in

01:21:30.020 relationship to this thing now.

01:21:31.760 And to withdraw a sense of consciousness in that case would seem just unprincipled and

01:21:37.500 unethical.

01:21:38.100 And we'll have, we could well build machines that seem to have emotional lives and even have

01:21:44.500 richer emotional lives than we do, because they're going to have access to all of human

01:21:48.960 knowledge, all of human, all of the aesthetic products of human ingenuity for all of history.

01:21:55.580 And they'll be able to talk about them and appreciate them and remind you of how much you

01:21:59.840 love certain things and react to your emotion faster and more accurately than your best friends

01:22:06.660 or your spouse, right?

01:22:08.580 Ultimately, we will very likely build these machines.

01:22:10.500 And if we haven't understood how consciousness arises in physical systems, we'll think they're

01:22:15.580 conscious and we will maybe right or wrong about that.

01:22:18.200 And whether we're right or wrong about that will be a huge consequence, because it would

01:22:23.360 be an absolutely abhorrent act to build conscious systems that can suffer in ways we don't even

01:22:29.700 understand.

01:22:30.380 And just to cavalierly, you know, spawn this off in simulations and, you know, on, you know,

01:22:36.080 the Amazon cloud and not know what the hell we're doing.

01:22:39.240 For me, though, of course, we've already created like this is not just a hypothesis, because

01:22:44.700 already all around us, as we've already fleetingly discussed, lie scattered, damaged and broken

01:22:50.100 and presumably conscious entities that our fellow human beings, our fellow Englishmen and American,

01:22:56.600 Americans scattered and broken around us.

01:22:59.300 And Sam, so for me, here's two points to wrap up, because we've gone much longer than

01:23:03.620 I intended to.

01:23:04.440 Sure.

01:23:04.700 It was trippy, huh?

01:23:05.580 Yeah.

01:23:05.800 Like, you know, there's quite a lot of questions still.

01:23:09.420 Let me see if I can.

01:23:10.800 I'm fine on time, so you can just.

01:23:12.520 I'll see if I can do this.

01:23:13.260 One tumble dryer, one whirling neurological sprawl, one linguistic regurgitation in your general

01:23:22.280 direction.

01:23:23.060 Here are the things that interest me.

01:23:24.040 One, on a podcast I was listening to you do once, like, you know, and it's an idea that's

01:23:28.160 sort of more commonly understood that possibly free will is an illusion, that decisions are

01:23:32.620 made prior.

01:23:33.260 So the morality and ethics sort of suffer somewhat, if that's true.

01:23:38.220 Two.

01:23:38.600 I don't think that final part holds.

01:23:41.360 Oh, really?

01:23:41.740 I think you can have all the morality.

01:23:43.540 You can have all the morality.

01:23:44.360 I mean, it's a person.

01:23:45.340 Helplessly, yes.

01:23:46.000 I've realized about you.

01:23:46.520 Yeah.

01:23:47.000 So you can have your morality and ethics without free will.

01:23:49.400 You can have morality and ethics without free will.

01:23:51.760 But their role, but the way we evaluate them has to be sort of looked at differently.

01:23:55.360 Do it in one big, let me do my vomit. 0.97

01:23:57.700 Yeah, go for it.

01:23:58.280 Then you do yours back.

01:23:59.700 Go for it, yeah.

01:24:00.320 Yours is more piecemeal.

01:24:01.880 Mine's a sort of a literal slew.

01:24:03.720 Yours has all sorts of rationalism and academia built on a sort of a Minecraft, a beautiful

01:24:11.580 architecture.

01:24:12.200 So Sam Harris, the other thing is when you were, when you've taken psychedelics, did

01:24:17.540 you not experience things that are comparable to what you described is neurologically demonstrable

01:24:24.040 and what you've experienced in meditation?

01:24:26.480 I sense that your individual identity is a sort of a confection of sort of ideas and sensation

01:24:33.600 and that there is a sort of a beautiful oneness.

01:24:37.180 I must have taken hallucinogenic.

01:24:38.640 I'm clean now for 15 years.

01:24:39.860 But prior to that, when I used to take hallucinogens, the thing, I didn't have the vocabulary,

01:24:44.980 artillery or education to understand what the hell was going on.

01:24:48.560 And I wish I'd been born into some sort of shamanic tradition where people taught you

01:24:51.960 what spirit is, where they taught you what it is to be a man, what they taught you, what

01:24:54.940 love is and how to behave and how to create systems and how to father a daughter and how

01:24:59.940 to take care of, regardless.

01:25:01.120 I experienced something within my identity, seemingly beyond my identity as a 16 year old

01:25:06.880 boy.

01:25:07.320 I remember thinking, oh my God, this is not who I am.

01:25:09.900 I am not this body.

01:25:11.820 My consciousness is other than this in temporarily individuated form that only the distinction

01:25:19.960 and, you know, even just on the, on the physics level, like everything was one.

01:25:24.680 Everything is expanding.

01:25:26.660 I am only experiencing time in an animalistic way because of my own entropy and atrophy.

01:25:32.700 Were I a limitless and eternal material being, I would see myself as part of the whole, as

01:25:38.820 part of oneness, because the way that I narrativize my life is as a result of biocentric experience

01:25:46.140 as opposed to objective experience.

01:25:49.040 I've just been subjected to this stimuli and I've built an identity around it.

01:25:53.580 It felt extremely true and it stayed with me ever since.

01:25:57.780 And I've revisited it through meditation.

01:26:00.400 The, aside from it being a, an interesting experience intellectually is an interesting

01:26:05.220 experience emotionally and spiritually.

01:26:06.940 And if this sense of oneness does not translate into a sort of a personal ethical code, that

01:26:13.680 means I treat people lovingly.

01:26:16.180 What is its value?

01:26:17.480 So there's two questions.

01:26:18.140 Have you experienced that state and what do you think of it?

01:26:20.180 There are moral and ethical implications on an individual and what does it, how does it

01:26:24.200 translate into our behavior?

01:26:25.480 Well, there are two states I would want to differentiate.

01:26:28.040 There are two ways in which you can think about the loss of self and the sense of oneness.

01:26:33.440 So to come back to what I said before, you have consciousness and its contents, right?

01:26:37.740 There's just, there's the fact that things are appearing.

01:26:40.780 There's the fact that there is experience.

01:26:42.400 And consciousness is the knowing aspect of experience.

01:26:47.760 And nor, in the normal course of events, you have, you know, ordinary sights and sounds

01:26:52.420 and smells and sensations and thoughts and emotions.

01:26:55.740 And you go through, and most people go through life thinking every moment of the day in the,

01:27:01.580 in that context.

01:27:02.600 They don't know how to meditate.

01:27:03.680 They don't know, they don't have any mindfulness.

01:27:05.060 They have this sort of white noise of discursivity where they're talking to themselves and everything

01:27:10.620 they see and, and, and sense and every interaction is filtered through this conversation they're

01:27:17.100 having with themselves.

01:27:18.360 And, and the world they see visually and, and the world they sense with, you know, with touch

01:27:24.920 and other senses is tiled over with concepts.

01:27:28.160 So I look at a bottle and I see bottle, right?

01:27:30.540 I'm not, this, this field of light and shadow and color is differentiated by concepts.

01:27:36.280 I see my phone, I see a bottle, I see the table and everything is solidified that way.

01:27:41.020 Now, what happens with psychedelics is your, your habit pattern of thought and attention

01:27:48.480 is completely bowled over by the pharmacology of whatever you've just ingested, right?

01:27:53.920 So if it's acid or, or mushrooms or any of those classic psychedelics, it's just whoever

01:27:59.820 you are, whatever your talents are at introspection, you know, whether you've ever wanted to meditate

01:28:04.700 or not, you are guaranteed to have a change in your experience if you take a sufficient

01:28:09.200 dose of a psychedelic.

01:28:10.260 Now it can be a very chaotic and unpleasant change.

01:28:12.800 It can, it can mimic psychosis, right?

01:28:14.500 There you can, a bad acid trip is really bad and not spiritually uplifting at all, but

01:28:20.700 a good one can put you in a state which is just unimaginably expansive where like all

01:28:27.920 of the normal perceptual categories and, and emotional barriers between you and the world

01:28:35.340 break down.

01:28:36.420 And there can be this kind of like just this free flowing exchange of energy and, and sense

01:28:40.920 of oneness where you can, you know, you touch a tree with your hand and the, there can be

01:28:46.560 kind of a laser like concentration in the sensation of just having your hand make contact with the

01:28:53.000 tree and they can be just this, this sense of the energy of that touch, right?

01:28:58.060 Can become, it's like you turn, you're turning up the volume on this channel of information

01:29:02.660 and making it conscious in a way that it never is in normal life.

01:29:06.340 And so you can just, you can spend two hours just in this kind of orgasmic union with a

01:29:12.560 tree, right?

01:29:13.400 On the right drug.

01:29:14.420 Now you can do all, you can have all of those changes happen in your consciousness, you know,

01:29:20.340 like the full pyrotechnics of a psychedelic display without losing the sense of an ego.

01:29:26.760 You can still feel that there, that you are the center of that.

01:29:29.760 And you're just, you're just, it's just so much better or in the chaotic, you know, psychotics 0.87

01:29:34.640 side, so much worse to be you at that moment.

01:29:37.420 If you go an intensive retreat and you're spending, you know, 12 to 18 hours a day meditating, you can

01:29:42.360 have psychedelic-like changes in the contents of consciousness.

01:29:45.580 But the more important change for me is the insight that there is no center to consciousness,

01:29:51.340 that there simply is consciousness and everything appearing.

01:29:54.660 And when you have that insight, it actually doesn't matter what is appearing.

01:29:59.700 It doesn't matter if you, when you touch the tree, it feels like, you know, a million watts

01:30:05.400 of sublime energy and there's no barrier between you and the tree.

01:30:09.380 That is the same on some fundamental level.

01:30:12.360 That's the same as just seeing a water bottle and picking it up and having a drink in a completely

01:30:17.380 otherwise ordinary state of consciousness.

01:30:20.360 The center can drop out equally or be present equally in both of those cases.

01:30:26.100 And I'm much more interested in finding this unifying experience of centerlessness in the

01:30:35.700 midst of whatever is happening because the problem with the psychedelic experience or any peak

01:30:40.560 experience is that they come and go.

01:30:42.340 They're by nature impermanent, right?

01:30:44.780 And you had to bring some causes and conditions together to make them happen, whether they're

01:30:50.680 pharmacological or meditational.

01:30:53.520 You know, you had to go on retreat for a year and meditate 18 hours a day in order to see those

01:30:57.920 inner lights or whatever it was.

01:30:59.620 And or you had to kind of blow your mind on acid and be kind of useless for the rest of

01:31:04.520 the day in order to have that.

01:31:06.960 It's possible to have no ego and have none of the problems which an ego gives you in a

01:31:16.880 state of otherwise totally ordinary consciousness, in a state that's compatible with having this

01:31:21.280 conversation.

01:31:22.160 You either feel like there's someone behind your face in this moment or not.

01:31:27.840 And that's really what it is.

01:31:28.660 It's like if you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, the default state of consciousness

01:31:33.180 is to feel like you're behind your face looking out at a world that's not self.

01:31:39.820 Like you're over there, you're kind of behind the mask that is your face, and you're looking

01:31:44.180 at me.

01:31:45.460 And when I look at you, when I react to something you say, right? 1.00

01:31:48.880 When I say, well, that's clearly bullshit. 1.00

01:31:51.000 Well, hey, you haven't thought that through. 0.99

01:31:52.020 That feeling of you're implicated over there, right?

01:31:56.600 And you begin to react based on that implication.

01:31:59.760 It's possible to lose that and to have like just the world remains and yet nothing else

01:32:04.780 changes.

01:32:05.300 There's no strange lights.

01:32:07.020 There's no kundalini in the body.

01:32:09.640 There's nothing.

01:32:09.920 Nothing has to get weird or psychedelic.

01:32:13.400 And it doesn't matter if it does get weird and psychedelic in that place.

01:32:18.000 No, you're right.

01:32:18.740 That there is a sort of, if there is no pragmatism to spirituality, if there is no practical application

01:32:24.500 to these extreme experiences within consciousness, then what is their value?

01:32:30.600 My feeling is that the sort of linguistics and grammar of mechanics, the apparent separateness,

01:32:38.480 the meaning of gesture, the very notion of you and I, there are moments where I experience

01:32:45.000 it as temporal.

01:32:46.140 There are moments where, to use the great Bill Hicks's, I think, perfect phrase, I feel

01:32:51.080 that we are one consciousness experiencing itself.

01:32:54.840 Subjectively.

01:32:56.280 When you talk about the loss of the being behind the mask of the face, for me, this is, we

01:33:07.700 are talking about enlightenment and you're talking about a rather ascetic version of that without

01:33:13.700 bells and whistles and pyrotechnics, to use your earlier phrase.

01:33:18.060 But similarly, when you talk about the psychedelic, that sort of very emotional description of connection

01:33:23.740 and love.

01:33:24.660 For me, these are the kinds of experiences that we need to convey into an environment that

01:33:33.080 deprived of that kind of experience and understanding creates maximum security prisons, which find

01:33:39.760 further means for degradation and gangs and separation once within it.

01:33:45.020 That we are living perhaps in a time that is, for me, determined by the extraction of the 1.00

01:33:52.520 spiritual as opposed to the amplification of it.

01:33:58.720 And for me, the distinction that you and I have in the way that we view the world is that I

01:34:07.160 feel that the main agent in extracting this element of spirit, without which I don't see a solution

01:34:14.140 for the seven billion people on this planet, that the main agent is post-secular capitalist

01:34:20.500 culture.

01:34:21.380 And you believe that it's religion.

01:34:25.340 Well, no, it's not only religion, but it's dogmatism.

01:34:29.600 It's bad ideas that are immune from criticism and therefore remain effective.

01:34:36.820 So what we need, again, it comes back to conversation and violence.

01:34:39.960 We need successful conversations.

01:34:42.100 We need to converge.

01:34:42.960 We need to find the thing that can be said so as to get the people who are wrong to recognize

01:34:50.960 it, right?

01:34:51.860 And that's all of us some of the time, right?

01:34:53.920 It's like, how long do you want to be wrong for?

01:34:56.520 You know, how long do you want to be living under the sway of a powerful bad idea?

01:35:03.400 Now, there are people who have powerful bad ideas that they class as religious who are determined

01:35:09.940 to live the rest of their lives under the sway of those ideas, no matter how much evidence

01:35:14.200 piles up against them, and no matter what the consequences.

01:35:17.780 And so that's why religion, for me, has a special character.

01:35:20.620 But political dogmatism is, in many cases, just as problematic.

01:35:25.700 Economic dogmatism, in certain cases, could be the greatest engine of harm we ever see,

01:35:33.340 right?

01:35:33.740 So again, it matters what is true.

01:35:35.940 It matters what causes systems to work or to reliably fail.

01:35:40.840 It does, Sam.

01:35:41.580 And given that, I think, in the last few minutes of our conversation, we've got close to something

01:35:46.140 that seems like a fundamental truth that we can agree on, that there seems to be some

01:35:50.460 essence behind temporal individuality that has some kind of seeming universality, though

01:35:56.580 how could anybody ever possibly really say?

01:35:59.280 That it is, if we can bring our focus as individuals and as a society to that notion,

01:36:05.580 a notion which does exist in all religions, in a, I would say, in a relegated role, and

01:36:12.380 as you said earlier, in a role that, you know, when mysticism ends through Christianity,

01:36:16.840 through narcissism.

01:36:16.940 Let me just ask you, what's the reason to say that it exists in all religions?

01:36:19.880 Because what if it doesn't?

01:36:21.100 Like, what then?

01:36:22.640 Or what if it doesn't equally?

01:36:23.760 Or what if much of the religion repudiates this core truth?

01:36:26.540 Well, I would say that you and I are having the same conversation and agree about something

01:36:33.600 fundamental.

01:36:34.940 And to elect to disagree for the purposes of hypotheses would be a silly thing to do, because

01:36:40.460 within Christianity, as you've already said, there's a mystical tradition within Islam,

01:36:43.880 there is within Buddhism, it's sort of more practically, it's in Jainism.

01:36:48.500 I don't know all religions, I don't know enough about it.

01:36:50.040 But what I'm saying is, is it, look, that what excites me is when I see perennial mythic

01:36:56.240 templates recurring through folklore, faith, monotheism, pantheism, that all seem to infer

01:37:03.240 the truth that you are personally describing, that you have psychedelically described, that

01:37:07.740 you have neurologically described.

01:37:09.960 For me, that's important, Sam.

01:37:11.500 But it's very important to realize that they don't all do it equally.

01:37:14.820 And to pay lip service to the idea that they're all teaching the same thing equally well, is

01:37:22.020 creating, I would argue, an immense amount of harm.

01:37:24.420 But there are some dogmas and doctrines that say it doesn't exist, and that it's irrelevant,

01:37:31.080 and that it's not there at all.

01:37:32.220 Also a huge problem.

01:37:33.140 I don't think, like, say, take our two countries, I don't think the dominant ideologies are drawn

01:37:40.580 from religion.

01:37:41.140 They're drawn from sort of post-Enlightenment, rational, materialistic ideas, and from economic

01:37:48.760 ideas, and colonial ideas, and post-Westphalian treaty ideas of state and nation and power.

01:37:58.040 You know, people aren't going, like, the big problems aren't derived from a sort of a religious

01:38:02.760 source.

01:38:03.340 And if they are, they are the very components that share those qualities with non-religious 1.00

01:38:08.720 power structures.

01:38:09.760 The important thing, and the thing that is not present, almost by definition, in a secular

01:38:15.660 culture, is this idea of essence and truth, other than through mechanistic exploration

01:38:22.220 through science, which, whilst, as you have already brilliantly explained, is invaluable,

01:38:27.600 it can't, like, I know you've done talks that particularly, directly contradict this, but

01:38:33.600 we can't answer the questions of the experience of essence yet.

01:38:39.500 And perhaps one day we will.

01:38:40.760 Perhaps one day we will.

01:38:42.160 But it seems to me that at some point faith will be required.

01:38:44.340 Let me give you one example that I think ties together a lot of what we disagree about

01:38:48.040 here.

01:38:48.420 And it crystallizes the point I'm urging you to take seriously.

01:38:54.940 Do you think that I don't take it seriously?

01:38:56.240 Yeah.

01:38:56.680 I mean, this is the...

01:38:57.300 Do you think I don't take it seriously?

01:38:58.440 This particular point, let me just crystallize this point.

01:39:01.820 It's the problem of dogmatism, why dogmatism is basically always bad and unforeseeably bad.

01:39:08.740 You can't in advance know how bad a dogma is going to be just by considering the sentence

01:39:14.900 on paper.

01:39:16.180 Dogmatism is just the wrong methodology for getting anywhere worth going, because it is

01:39:21.300 the antithesis of open conversation.

01:39:23.960 And this is the example that I now always use, because it just is so clear.

01:39:29.820 The dogma that all human life is equally sacred, all human lives are equally valuable, and that

01:39:37.740 life starts at the first moment, the moment of conception, right?

01:39:41.840 Now, this on its face, if you just told me, 20 years ago you said, if someone who believes

01:39:46.680 this, what sort of needless human misery is he going to manufacture, I would say, well,

01:39:51.620 this is just a totally...

01:39:52.700 This is the most benign thing you could possibly believe.

01:39:55.100 Who's going to get killed in the service of this dogma, right?

01:39:58.600 Who's going to be tortured for decades in the service of this dogma?

01:40:02.520 But when you look at what people have traditionally done with this specific idea, and this is a

01:40:08.060 Judeo-Christian idea... 0.89

01:40:09.280 And it's in the American Constitution, so it's a nationalistic idea also.

01:40:13.280 Yeah, no, but especially the link to the moment of conception, you look at the millions of

01:40:19.040 Americans who opposed embryonic stem cell research, right?

01:40:22.920 With all the promise that held, right?

01:40:25.160 Here we have Petri dishes filled with, it's imagined, you know, hundreds of human souls

01:40:30.440 that are microscopic. 0.76

01:40:32.860 And to kill those souls would be tantamount to murder. 0.89

01:40:37.100 To experiment on those souls would be tantamount to murder.

01:40:39.520 And therefore, they didn't want to have a conversation about all of the children and

01:40:45.440 adults with life-deranging injuries and diseases who might have been helped, had progress been

01:40:51.460 made in that area.

01:40:52.620 Now, that is a psychotic moral attitude made possible by the most benign-seeming dogma,

01:41:01.440 right?

01:41:01.800 I mean, literally, we're talking about people who...

01:41:03.380 No, but that's just one aspect of it.

01:41:04.640 There's an understandable squeamishness about human life, and we've all seen the little

01:41:08.380 baby pro-life type images and stuff.

01:41:10.620 But also, Sam, there's an ongoing dialectic between the scientific community and religious

01:41:15.380 community of who's got the right to be the dominant, the parental figure in ownership of

01:41:21.040 the public sphere and the public soul, in inverted commas.

01:41:24.320 So, like, you know, there's a lot of kickback, atavistic kickback from Christian groups over 1.00

01:41:30.160 these sort of, you know, like, evidently beneficial scientific endeavors.

01:41:34.320 But it's a sincerely held belief.

01:41:36.020 I believe the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception, and therefore I'm worried.

01:41:40.980 And it's sort of an interesting sort of notion.

01:41:44.260 And, you know, I think you and I would be on the same side of that particular argument,

01:41:47.760 clearly.

01:41:48.140 But what I would say is that we need to, again, revert to focusing on what is truly

01:41:54.540 divine or sublime, these moments of interconnectivity and oneness.

01:41:58.020 And then we wouldn't need trash talismans to be placeholders for meaning in a culture that

01:42:04.120 has lost its meaning, I would say, in significant part because the role of the spiritual has been

01:42:09.420 relegated to meaninglessness in favor of a materialistic, mechanistic culture that leads

01:42:14.660 ultimately to sort of widespread consumerism and sort of unconsciousness, unconsciousness,

01:42:21.440 that we are continually in that world of reiterative thought, constant tangled thought,

01:42:29.360 that because people have no experience of the sublime, of the divine.

01:42:32.340 But again, I just wouldn't, I mean, so you have your own fetishistic objects like this

01:42:39.800 notion of consumerism, right?

01:42:41.200 So like consumer, like you and I are having this conversation in a podcast studio at Headspace,

01:42:47.560 right?

01:42:47.960 Headspace is a meditation app that on the one hand is the quintessence of consumerism.

01:42:56.200 I mean, this is something that only happens in a smartphone, right?

01:42:59.640 The very phone that I was talking about that's causing people to jump off rooftops, right?

01:43:03.780 And yet, I think Headspace is an absolutely good thing to have out there.

01:43:08.380 And it is bringing an incredibly useful practice to millions of people.

01:43:14.360 And podcasts bring incredibly useful conversations to millions of people.

01:43:18.740 All of this is enabled by mere materialism and mere consumerism.

01:43:23.960 And there has to be an ethical and spiritually correct way to do all this.

01:43:30.020 It's not a matter of getting rid of the microphones and getting rid of the smartphones.

01:43:33.540 Of course.

01:43:33.880 And I'm not suggesting that.

01:43:35.220 I'm just, the same way as you would posit there is an extremist and dangerous version

01:43:40.300 of Islam, which I would say has, I don't think is an essentially malevolent idea.

01:43:46.460 I would disagree with that strongly.

01:43:48.100 I would say that people having objects isn't necessarily wrong.

01:43:53.300 But to fetishize objects and to believe that some kind of fulfillment and spiritual solution

01:43:59.060 can be achieved through the acquisition of objects is dangerous.

01:44:03.800 And all the more dangerous because it's not so explicitly understood that that's what's

01:44:08.340 happening, that the extremist ideology that we already live within is so all-encompassing

01:44:14.700 that we cannot see its horizons, that we have lost the tools to understand it and describe

01:44:18.700 it.

01:44:19.040 I'm not talking about sort of a post-Stalinist leftist position.

01:44:23.080 I'm talking about the reinvention and the re-embracing of the human soul.

01:44:27.260 Can we find that?

01:44:28.400 You've talked, Sam, endlessly about we need to have a conversation.

01:44:32.120 Well, you and I are having a conversation.

01:44:33.680 I believe in God, you don't believe in God, and it turns out that the differences aren't

01:44:38.640 actually, when it boils down to it, that meaningful.

01:44:41.600 Because when it comes to love of our daughters, freedom, compassion, we ultimately believe the

01:44:48.440 same things.

01:44:49.040 I think that unless you and I can find a way of saying, OK, I respect that, you know, like

01:44:53.840 a lot of the people whose guidance I seek most earnestly are atheists.

01:45:01.020 But that doesn't change the fact that I believe that there are levels of consciousness that

01:45:06.800 are beyond material phenomena that we'll never understand through magnifications of

01:45:11.680 the human senses or further analysis of the material objects because there are limitations

01:45:18.560 to the human mind.

01:45:21.500 You know, and ultimately, and importantly, Sam, I also think that all of this stuff, all of

01:45:27.700 this ethereal wittering has no meaning unless it translates into love and compassion, unless

01:45:34.840 there is some meaning in the idea that there is some connection between a tree and a hand

01:45:38.720 if you achieve the correct mental state.

01:45:41.380 Yeah.

01:45:41.560 I mean, again, there are wrinkles here that I just want to flag.

01:45:46.160 One is that extreme mental pleasure is divorceable from ethics.

01:45:51.640 So, for instance, to go back to this perverse case that we started with, suicide bombing,

01:45:57.280 I have good reason to believe that the mental state of a suicide bomber before he...

01:46:02.900 You think it's euphoric.

01:46:04.040 Yes.

01:46:04.580 Yes.

01:46:04.980 We're not talking about suicidal people who are just trying to end the depression as fast

01:46:09.600 as possible.

01:46:10.300 We're talking about people who are on the cusp of the deepest spiritual reward.

01:46:15.700 But then let's take this.

01:46:16.540 Listen, you like full experiments and you've had so much time with suicide bombers.

01:46:18.960 Take a person like a policeman that's willing to risk his own life to rescue a child in

01:46:24.900 jeopardy.

01:46:25.380 Similarly, their regard for their own life is being abandoned in that moment.

01:46:29.520 And that, too, could be described as a kind of euphoria.

01:46:32.540 Oh, sure.

01:46:32.700 But because it happens to fit in with our worldview, we're cool with it.

01:46:35.980 Yeah.

01:46:36.260 Oh, yeah.

01:46:36.780 But that's what I'm saying.

01:46:38.360 The real consequences for human beings matter.

01:46:41.620 And euphoria is something and a sense of meaning is something that can be totally misaligned

01:46:48.920 with what I think we would agree is an actual ethical relationship and an actual spiritual

01:46:53.720 insight.

01:46:55.380 And so euphoria is not a perfect guide.

01:46:59.360 It can be a very misleading guide for wisdom and compassion.

01:47:03.640 That's the point I was making.

01:47:04.720 This is true.

01:47:05.180 I've made some bloody bad decisions as a result of euphoria.

01:47:07.500 And the absence of euphoria can also be misleading because they're genuine.

01:47:13.820 So what I just said about this kind of non-dual experience in meditation, you can have it in

01:47:20.300 a very subtle way that doesn't have, doesn't summon, at least certainly doesn't immediately

01:47:25.720 summon some radical change in the feeling tone of your experience.

01:47:30.540 It can be as simple as just looking at a water bottle.

01:47:33.880 And it's just the lights are on and there's no center.

01:47:37.500 Now, you can feel that for just a moment and not recognize its revolutionary significance

01:47:43.700 because it doesn't come with the upwelling of rapture or bliss that people associate with

01:47:49.260 good meditation or a psychedelic experience or ordinary religiosity like feelings of love

01:47:55.660 while chanting or singing in church or whatever it is.

01:47:59.860 Or at a football match or wherever.

01:48:01.260 There are various contexts in which these states can be achieved.

01:48:04.920 And I suppose what I believe is that we should be looking to create these states, prioritize

01:48:10.020 these states and give more people access to them through whatever means.

01:48:15.740 Certainly, I don't agree with the imposition of an ideology or dogma on anybody else.

01:48:22.120 And I think the key obstacles to that are huge centralized power bases.

01:48:26.780 And without the removal of that, I don't see how there could be a solution.

01:48:31.040 Yeah.

01:48:31.340 Well, I don't know how much we disagree about all that.

01:48:36.300 I mean, we haven't...

01:48:37.140 Again, it's all a matter of alternatives.

01:48:39.820 It's like democracy seems impressively broken to me and capitalism seems impressively broken

01:48:45.620 to me, except the alternatives seem worse.

01:48:48.620 I mean, this is...

01:48:50.180 It's an old argument against change, right?

01:48:52.600 It's an old argument against change, yeah.

01:48:53.160 So, but no, but I think we just need to find our way, but just recognize what we're doing.

01:48:59.920 We are trying to grab whatever lever or dial we can get within reach to change the human

01:49:05.980 experience in predictably benign and ultimately positive ways.

01:49:10.580 Do you feel much fear in life?

01:49:12.980 Do you feel afraid much?

01:49:14.400 Like in your tummy, I mean, not in your brain.

01:49:16.220 Oh, it's more in my brain than in my tummy.

01:49:20.940 You feel everything in your brain, don't you?

01:49:22.720 Well, I mean, no, it's not that I can't feel fear, but the things that I worry about publicly

01:49:28.780 as a matter of, you know, being someone who talks and writes about these things is not

01:49:34.760 indicative of my feeling adrenalized and fearful all the time.

01:49:40.760 I mean, it's not...

01:49:41.580 You can...

01:49:42.440 Actually, the thing that worries me most, again, at the brain level, is that the greatest risks

01:49:49.000 to human well-being are hard to take seriously.

01:49:53.940 It's like, I mean, the people who think, who professionally think about nuclear war and

01:49:58.520 the consequences of proliferation, you know, people like William Perry, you know, I guess

01:50:03.260 he's close to 90 now, maybe he's 85, these people think that we are at the most dangerous

01:50:09.080 place we've been in the last 75 years with respect to the likelihood of a nuclear exchange,

01:50:14.720 right?

01:50:14.840 So it's like the Cold War is not only not over, it is, from Perry's point of view, we are in

01:50:21.700 another Cuban missile crisis right now and nobody's worried about it. 0.93

01:50:25.920 With Russia or Korea? 0.92

01:50:27.540 Well, yeah, all of it, yeah.

01:50:29.560 But I mean, I think it's the possibility of a mistake.

01:50:33.000 I mean, the book I would recommend your listeners read, which should make them suitably afraid,

01:50:38.920 is Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control, which is just a story of how many mishaps and

01:50:45.460 how many, how haphazard our stewardship of these nuclear weapons has been.

01:50:51.340 It's just, it's been by dint of sheer dumb luck that we haven't nuked ourselves or provoked

01:50:56.240 an exchange between Russia and the United States based on just bad information, you know.

01:51:02.380 But so what is worrisome here is that it's hard to spend more than five minutes worrying

01:51:08.220 about that on any given day.

01:51:09.800 You know, like, well, I can worry, I can worry a lot about totally trivial things in my own

01:51:14.440 life, right?

01:51:15.180 Like, if my website goes down, you know, the feel, my feeling of, of kind of moral emergency

01:51:21.080 is at 11, right? 0.95

01:51:23.460 Like, what the fuck is happening?

01:51:24.760 My website is down. 0.94

01:51:25.700 Like, I, you know, I want to call my website developers and it's an emergency.

01:51:31.800 And yet, when talking about, when I hear that the people who make it their business to think

01:51:38.040 about the prospect that whole cities may be annihilated by the biggest bombs in our lifetime,

01:51:44.440 when I hear that they are more worried than they have ever been, I can, you know, five

01:51:50.220 minutes after we talk about this, I'm not going to be thinking about it, right?

01:51:53.220 And that worries me.

01:51:54.140 It's hard to have an appropriate emotional response to what we think the data show.

01:51:59.200 And so it is with the suffering of other people.

01:52:01.580 I mean, you feel it about the homeless person you can see on this sidewalk that you happen

01:52:05.180 to be walking on.

01:52:05.980 But to hear that 90,000 people in Los Angeles County are homeless, it's, it's inconceivable

01:52:12.380 and it's hard to summon an appropriate emotional response.

01:52:15.680 Yes.

01:52:16.100 I wonder why that is.

01:52:18.080 Perhaps, Sam, we have been brought out of alignment with what we're capable of receiving,

01:52:24.260 what we're capable of transmitting.

01:52:26.340 Talking of sort of anthropology, I suppose, that perhaps human beings have been so extracted

01:52:33.160 from these conditions that, you know, where you said we wouldn't even recognize what disease

01:52:37.460 was.

01:52:38.200 We have become as gods.

01:52:40.760 We have surmounted so many obstacles that perhaps we have no, we are no longer living within

01:52:46.480 a palette that is appropriate for this particular mammal.

01:52:50.300 But we also just have bugs in our hardware and software that we are bad at correcting

01:52:57.220 for.

01:52:58.120 And that's why, that's why, again, systemic corrections, you know, like good laws and good

01:53:04.440 tax codes and good governments and good institutions, I think will do much heavier lifting for us

01:53:10.300 than all of us getting our heads straight and keeping them straight day after day.

01:53:15.100 So, I mean, the example that I'll give here is based on the work of Paul Slovic, who found

01:53:20.820 it was just, it's a propensity for moral error that is totally shocking.

01:53:24.040 So if you tell people, you give them like the classic sort of UNICEF pitch, like here's,

01:53:28.780 you know, one little girl in Sudan, you know, her name is, is Jenny.

01:53:34.940 She, you know, her parents were killed.

01:53:37.080 She needs your help.

01:53:38.220 Five dollars a day will keep her in school and all the rest, right? 1.00

01:53:40.980 You tell that story with one identifiable child, you get the maximum response of compassion

01:53:47.540 and, and, and actual altruism from people.

01:53:50.020 You ask them how much they'll give every month and you get their maximum number.

01:53:54.100 If you show that same girl to a different group of people along with her brother and

01:53:59.320 you say, here's Jenny and here's Jacob, they've suffered this horrible atrocity, five dollars

01:54:04.480 a day, we'll, five dollars a month, we'll, we'll keep them in school, et cetera.

01:54:07.660 The altruism and the, and the self-assessment of compassion reliably goes down.

01:54:13.640 Just adding more to the scope of the problem, right?

01:54:16.420 And it's the same girl and the same boy.

01:54:17.920 You add 10, it goes down further.

01:54:20.160 It goes through the floor.

01:54:21.020 And if you add background, background statistics, if you say this little girl, Jenny, she's got

01:54:26.960 this terrible problem, you can help.

01:54:29.040 And there's a hundred thousand girls just like her in Sudan alone. 0.99

01:54:32.520 People just, the compassion just washes out.

01:54:34.840 It induces a kind of apathy.

01:54:35.540 It induces a kind of despair and a kind of hopelessness.

01:54:37.960 Yeah, there's just no, there's no point in doing anything.

01:54:40.560 And so that, we have to correct for that.

01:54:42.220 I say, the teleology of civilization then seems somewhat broken.

01:54:46.240 The idea that sort of like the bigger and bigger states and a sort of a globally mandated

01:54:52.960 government, these would seem to be poor ideas.

01:54:55.880 Like what may work for human beings for the seven billion is decentralization.

01:55:01.540 And to achieve that, to achieve real change, where do you suppose the fulcrum will need

01:55:06.660 to be applied?

01:55:07.300 Who are the people for whom the 90,000 homeless and little Jenny and the 100,000 others are

01:55:12.660 not really a problem because their system is operating precisely as it was intended to

01:55:17.800 operate?

01:55:18.280 Well, it's all of us.

01:55:19.740 Again, there are not that many bad people.

01:55:22.840 We have a default level of selfishness in virtually everyone all the time.

01:55:30.840 And we have to figure out how to game that and channel that successfully toward more benign

01:55:37.180 ends.

01:55:37.980 I mean, what you want, the perfect system, and this is what capitalism promises but doesn't

01:55:41.940 deliver, is everyone selfishly seeking happiness for themselves and prioritizing the happiness

01:55:50.900 of their families, their loved ones, and then maybe extending that circle more and more as

01:55:56.640 they learn more and more about the other problems in the world.

01:55:59.060 Yes.

01:55:59.280 They'll never extend that circle perfectly, or most people certainly won't.

01:56:04.300 And what you want is a system that captures all of that energy in a way that allows all

01:56:12.020 boats or most boats to rise with the same tide most of the time.

01:56:16.560 And is there a perfect solution to all of these zero-sum and positive-sum arrangements?

01:56:25.280 I don't know.

01:56:26.320 But there's certainly better and worse ones.

01:56:28.600 And we know there's some bad ones on offer that we don't want to experiment with again.

01:56:33.920 And we want to refine our current set of solutions so that life gets better and better.

01:56:39.760 And the truth is, this can sound like a very despairing conversation, but life has gotten

01:56:45.320 better and better for virtually everyone in our lifetime.

01:56:51.800 I mean, if you look at the last century, it's something like 10% of people now live in extreme

01:56:57.580 poverty, and 90% of people don't.

01:56:59.800 We've got 7 billion people.

01:57:00.880 90% of them are not in what we're calling extreme poverty.

01:57:05.160 Something like 150 years ago, that was flipped.

01:57:08.000 It was 90-10 the other way.

01:57:09.560 It was 90% in extreme poverty.

01:57:12.960 I suppose, again, though, Sam, the metric by which we judge poverty and the metric by which

01:57:16.620 we judge human experience is something that could be long debated.

01:57:21.180 And for me, I suppose what I'm interested in, and here I think we concur, is truth, a truthful

01:57:29.820 experience.

01:57:30.740 I listened to a podcast you did once with someone I also respect very much, Jordan Peterson,

01:57:35.300 and it got caught up a long while on some sort of semantic tangle.

01:57:38.560 But what I feel is that I am interested in my own sweet, selfish, egotistical way in conveying

01:57:50.820 and transmitting love and change.

01:57:54.600 And I think that the point where I feel pressure needs to be applied, if that's even the right

01:58:00.920 attitude, you need it be combative.

01:58:04.000 For me, the focus, I think individual personal revolution and personal salvation, I think,

01:58:09.900 is an important component.

01:58:11.880 And the introduction of ideas that go beyond rationalism and materialism may be a necessary

01:58:17.360 spur for significant change.

01:58:19.840 I feel like rationalism and materialism lead people to believe, well, we're just individuals.

01:58:23.580 We're here for a short amount of time, pleasure, sensation.

01:58:26.840 It seems to me that just looking around, that seems to be what is happening.

01:58:30.940 It seems to disengage people and some of the examples you've given about human compassion.

01:58:36.420 It seems very hard for people to access love, to access community within the operating system

01:58:43.840 that currently abides.

01:58:45.500 I would agree, yeah.

01:58:46.460 And again, what you're talking about are systems and institutions that just how good could a school

01:58:53.180 be, right?

01:58:54.360 How good could entertainment be?

01:58:56.260 How good could the internet be?

01:58:59.120 How good could social media be in terms of leading us where we want to go, both personally

01:59:05.140 and interpersonally?

01:59:06.440 And I think we are at the beginning of perfecting those things.

01:59:13.100 And it's not that we'll reach perfection, but all of these things are obviously so broken

01:59:18.140 as they are now that we just don't know how much better life would be if we got halfway

01:59:24.180 to the optimum.

01:59:25.960 There's an immense amount of work to do, and the work will be done on the basis of having

01:59:32.440 insights into truth and having a fact-based discussion about the consequences of turning

01:59:39.020 any of these knobs.

01:59:41.360 Sam Harris, in the background, there's the gallery to this small facility that Headspace,

01:59:46.400 the brilliant app, in spite of the contradictions of having existed in a consumerist technological

01:59:51.200 world, which I would like to give props, Steve.

01:59:54.380 I realize your back was against the wall on that one.

01:59:56.580 I mean, where we're going, there ain't no wall, to sort of semi-quote Doc Brown.

02:00:02.660 In the transcendent realm, the wall, the me, the you, all one, all glorious oneness.

02:00:07.520 People have been holding up like ice skating scores like 45 minutes, 60 minutes, we're 120

02:00:13.580 minutes now.

02:00:14.300 Just the duration of the podcast.

02:00:16.080 Now, for me, it's been a great joy and a great pleasure and a rigorous intellectual

02:00:21.060 workout to speak with you, and I've enjoyed it very much, Sam Harris.

02:00:23.980 I'm most grateful, and I've returned to the idea that conversations are what's likely to

02:00:31.220 produce change, particularly conversations between people that don't automatically agree

02:00:35.160 on the most significant issue.

02:00:36.560 So I'm incredibly grateful to you.

02:00:38.040 Yeah, likewise.

02:00:39.040 Well, thank you.

02:00:39.600 Thanks, man.

02:00:40.080 Yeah, keep it up.

02:00:40.780 Cheers.

02:00:41.040 Godspeed.

02:00:42.320 God bless you, Sam Harris, and science and everything.

02:00:49.740 If you're enjoying the Waking Up podcast, there are many ways you can support it at

02:00:53.760 samharris.org forward slash support.

02:00:57.440 As a supporter of the podcast, you'll get early access to tickets to my live events, and you'll

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02:01:11.660 And please know that your support is greatly appreciated.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 09, 2018

The Russell Brand Interview

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