Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:48 - Where do thoughts come from?
7:49 - Consciousness
25:21 - Psychedelics
34:44 - Nature of reality
51:40 - Free will
1:50:25 - Ego
1:59:29 - Joe Rogan
2:02:30 - How will human civilization destroy itself?
2:09:57 - AI
2:30:40 - Jordan Peterson
2:38:43 - UFOs
2:46:32 - Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
2:56:17 - Love
3:07:21 - Meaning of life

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 The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. He also has a meditation app called Waking Up that I've been using to guide my own meditation. Quick mention of our sponsors. National Instruments, Balcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me, as he has been for many, many people. First from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith, his conversations with Christopher Hitchens, and since 2013, his podcast. I didn't always agree with all of his ideas, but I was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas. The calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult, at times controversial, discourse. I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast, and more that he thought I had a unique voice that added something to this world. Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do this thing, and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words. Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Sam Harris. I've been enjoying meditating with the waking up app recently. It makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness, so let me ask, where do thoughts come from? Well, that's a very difficult question to answer. Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right? It's just they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs, subjectively, right? So, which is to say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next, right? Now, you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it, right? You're not, unless you're schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you, they do have a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them, and people readily identify with them. They feel like what you are. I mean, this is the thing, this is the spell that gets broken with meditation. Our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, right? Which is fairly paradoxical, because how could you as a mind, as a self, you know, if there were such a thing as a self, how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs into conscious view? But, and meditation is ultimately about examining that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification. But the subjectively thoughts simply emerge, right? And you don't think them before you think them, right? There's this first moment where, you know, just anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves. I mean, just imagine something or remember something, you know, just pick a memory, any memory, right? You've got a storehouse of memory, just promote one to consciousness. Did you pick that memory? I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday, or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house, or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night, or you remembered something that happened to you when you were four years old, whatever it is, right? First, it wasn't there, and then it appeared. And that is not a, I mean, I'm sure we'll get to the topic of free will ultimately. That's not evidence of free will, right? Why are you so sure, by the way? It's very interesting. Well, through no free will of my own, yeah. Everything just appears, right? But what else could it do? And so that's the subjective side of it. Objectively, you know, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically. I mean, that these are the products of some kind of neural computation and neural representation. And when you're talking about memories. Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts to try to get to its root, to try to dig in past the obvious surface, subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out of nowhere. Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of, from the firing of the cells? Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction? Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents in consciousness, right? So you can notice things more and more clearly and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting. And if you take psychedelics, you know, it opens up, you know, wide, depending on what you've taken and the dose, you know, it opens in directions and to an extent that, you know, very few people imagine would be possible, but for having had those experiences. But this idea of you getting closer to something, to the datum of your mind or something of interest in there or something that's more real is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it. There's no your part of that journey, right? Like we tend to start out, you know, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self-examination or, you know, taking psychedelics, we start out with this default point of view of feeling like we're the kind of the rider on the horse of consciousness or we're the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness, right? But we're so we're differentiated from what we know cognitively, introspectively, but that feeling of being differentiated, that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that's going uninspected, right? Like it's a false point of view. And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth ultimately, everything is right on the surface, everything, there's no center to consciousness. There's just consciousness and its contents. And that those contents can change vastly. Again, if you drop acid, you know, the contents change, but there's in some sense that doesn't represent a position of depth versus, the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart. So you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you're riding it and the actual riding is very shallow. This is all surface. So let me ask about that horse. What's up with the horse? What is consciousness? From where does it emerge? How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality? How fundamental is it to what it means to be human? And I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems. Yeah, well, it remains to be seen if we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by accident. That's a major ethical problem potentially. That, I mean, my concern here is that we may in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and demonstrates that, but we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious. We will have built it to seem conscious. And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious, right? We'll just, they may say, listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder, right? And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we will, just in the extreme case, who knows when we'll get there, but if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in a Westworld-like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines. They're just gonna seem, they're just gonna advertise their consciousness in every glance and every utterance, but we won't know. And we won't know in some deeper sense than it may, than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people. I mean, someone could roll that back and say, well, I don't know that you're conscious or you don't know that I'm conscious. We're just passing the Turing test for one another, but that kind of solipsism isn't justified biologically. Or we just, anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same roll of the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wetware of brains like ours, right? So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate. I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes and even other mammals ultimately. And once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are not really clear. The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain. And ultimately the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain. You can, it's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing, even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge. Like an ability to process language, that clearly is a matter of information processing because you can disrupt that process in ways that is just so clear. And the problem, the confound with consciousness is that yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness. I mean, you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them, well, what was that like? And they say nothing. I don't remember anything, but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness. Whereas it's not with interrupting speech, we know when we've done it. And it's just obvious that you disrupt the right neural circuits and you've disrupted speech. So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other, would you say, do you earn the side of panpsychism where consciousness is really fundamental to all of reality or more on the other side, which is like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful like hack for us humans to survive. On that spectrum, where do you land when you think about consciousness, especially from an engineering perspective? I'm truly agnostic on this point. I think it's kind of in coin toss mode for me. I don't know. And panpsychism is not so compelling to me. Again, it just seems unfalsifiable. I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true. It's just to remind people, panpsychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matters. So there might be something that it's like to be an electron or a quark, but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different. So it may be unfalsifiable. It just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are. And that if that is base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically, is to misconstrue it, right? I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom. And this idea doesn't originate with me. This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and others, you know, a hundred plus years ago. But I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and matter, it may in fact be part of our problem, right? Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here are things like, well, what is death? Right? Any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death, that really seems to be the many people's concern here. Well, I tend to believe just as a small little tangent, like I'm with Ernest Becker on this, that there's some, it's interesting to think about death and consciousness. Which one is the chicken? Which one is the egg? Because it feels like death could be the very thing. And like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness. Yeah, well then you're using consciousness differently than I am. I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's an experiential quality to anything. So much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now certainly seems to be happening in the dark, right? Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense that there's something that is like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing. But for other parts, the lights are on and we can talk about and whether we talk about it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that is like to be us. There's something that seems to be happening, right? And the seeming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and proprioception and taste and smell and thought and emotion. And there are the contents of consciousness that we are familiar with and that we can have direct access to in any present moment that when we're quote conscious. And even if we're confused about them, even if we're asleep and dreaming and it's not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance, what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness. Like you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion because on this account, it just means that things seem any different. Things seem any way at all. I mean, even like if this, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table. Now I could be wrong about that. It could be a hologram. I could be asleep and dreaming. I could be hallucinating, but the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion. It's not something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed. And it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through because we're not, we can be wrong about what it's like to be us. And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience, but for instance, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will. And I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that. And that you can cut through those experiences and then things seem a different way, right? So it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions to be overturned, but this kind of consciousness is something that I would think, it doesn't just come online when we get language. It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death or the finiteness of life. It doesn't require a sense of self, right? So it's prior to a differentiating self and other. And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people. I do think probably any mammal has this. But certainly if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this, right? And that's a very safe assumption, even though you can argue the jury is still out to some degree, then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps or chimps and rats even in the end, given the underlying neural similarities. So, and I don't know, phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that. So there are people who think single cells might be conscious or that flies are certainly conscious. They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains. I mean, it's just, there's a lot going on even in a fly, right? But I don't have intuitions about that. But it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through. I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be it is an illusion constructed by, just by humans. I'm not sure I believe this, but it, in part of me hopes this is true because it makes it easier to engineer, is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness that like the rich lights on experience. So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth in that construction. So do you think it's possible that that is the case? That it is a sort of construct of the way we deal almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world, the social interaction with other humans. Or is, because you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to single cell organisms and trees and so on. Right, well, yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it. I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious, but they might be. And I just, and again, I could be unfalsifiable. But as far as babies not being conscious or you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or have a conversation or treat other people. First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for and they certainly do it before they have language, right? So it's got to proceed language to some degree. And you can interrogate this for yourself, because you can put yourself in various states that are rather obviously not linguistic. You know, meditation allows you to do this. You can certainly do it with psychedelics where it's just, your capacity for language has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious. In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way, that there's something about language and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience. That we're potentially much more conscious of data, sense data and everything else than we tend to be. And we have trimmed it down based on how we have acquired concepts. And so like when I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room, I have certain expectations of what is in a room. You know, I would be very surprised to see, you know, wild animals in here or a waterfall or, there are things I'm not expecting, but I can know I'm not expecting them or I'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised once I walk into a room and I see a, you know, a live gorilla or whatever. So there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning and language learning. And it causes us not to, and one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes incredibly overloaded with, it can become overloaded with meaning and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people. And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically. And as you're coming down, right, have you done psychedelics, have you ever done acid or? Not acid, mushroom, and that's it. And also edibles, but that's, there's some psychedelic properties to them. But yeah, mushrooms several times and always had an incredible experience. Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is if it's true that language constrains our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints. Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on. Yeah, and the experience of coming down is an experience of encountering the futility of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words, right? Like especially if you have, if any part of your self-concept and your ego program is to be able to capture things in words. And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate the profundity of what just happened, the total fatuousness of that enterprise when you really have gotten, when you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself, so that you could describe it to others. It's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows. I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't, it's like the mere gesture proves its impossibility. And it's, so yeah, so that, I mean, that for me, that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language structuring your experience and you're having much more experience than you tend to. So the primacy of language is primary for some things, but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world. But it's clearly more to mine than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others. Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit? Sure. Where do you think, so Joe Rogan apparently and many others meet apparently elves when they, on DMT, a lot of people report this kind of creatures that they see and again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience. But DMT is an interesting one. There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on on psychedelics currently in MDMA, psilocybin, and John Hopkins and much other places. But DMT, they all speak of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic. Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on psychedelics, but in DMT especially? Well, unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT. Unfortunately or fortunately? Unfortunately, yeah. Although I presume it's in my body, but I don't know if it's in my mind. Although I presume it's in my body as it is in everyone's brain and many, many plants apparently. But I've wanted to take it. I haven't had an opportunity that was presented itself where it was obviously the right thing for me to be doing. But for those who don't know, DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting. I mean, you smoke it and it's basically a 10 minute experience or a three minute experience within like a 10 minute window that when you're really down after 10 minutes or so. And Terrence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT. That was the center of the bullseye for him psychedelically apparently. And it is characterized, it seems for many people by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is your, it's not just your perception being broadened or changed. It's you, according to Terrence McKenna, feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a different circumstance. You have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind. So the place is populated with things that seem not to be your mind. So it does feel like travel to another place because you're unchanged yourself. According, again, I just have this on the authority of the people who have described their experience, but it sounds like it's pretty common. It sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke. So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the cannon and land among the, what McKenna called self-transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled, Fabergé egg-like, self-drippling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge. It's an experience I haven't had, so I just have to accept that people have had it. I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand that are totally compelling to us. There's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest. Every night we go to sleep, some of us don't remember dreams very often, but some dream vividly every night. And just think of how insane that experience is. I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right? That's the strangest part. I mean, this is psychosis, right? You have lost your mind. You have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes, right? Like you're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep, and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised, right? You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people, you're someplace you couldn't physically be, you can fly, and even that's not surprising, right? You have lost your mind, but relevantly for this- Or found it. Lucid dreaming is very interesting because then you can have the best of both circumstances and then it can be kind of systematically explored. Well, what I mean by found, just to start to interrupt, is like if we take this brilliant idea that language constrains us, grounds us, language and other things of the waking world ground us, maybe it is that you've found the full capacity of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics. You're stepping outside the little human cage, the cage or the human condition to open the door and step out and look around and then go back in. Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but you've also lost something, right, you've lost certain capacities that you want. Well, just, yeah, in this case, you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of mind in the dream, in the dream you said, or even in the psychedelic state, if you take enough. To do math? There's no psychological, there's very little psychological continuity with your life such that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be, you should know is dead or you should know you're not likely to have met by normal channels, right? Yeah. You're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends, right? And you're not even, you have no memory of how you got there. Like, how did you get into the room? You're like, did you drive to this restaurant? You have no memory and none of that's surprising to you. So you're kind of brain damaged in a way, you're not reality testing in the normal way. The fascinating possibility is that there's probably thousands of people who've taken psychedelics of various forms and have met Sam Harris on that journey. Well, I would put it more likely in dreams, because with psychedelics, you don't tend to hallucinate in a dream-like way. So DMT is giving you an experience of others, but it seems to be non-standard. It's not just like dream hallucinations. But to the point of coming back to DMT, the people want to suggest, and Terrence McKenna certainly did suggest that, because these others are so obviously other, and they're so vivid, well then they could not possibly be the creation of my own mind. But every night in dreams, you create a compelling, or what is to you at the time, a totally compelling simulacrum of another person. And that just proves the mind is capable of doing it. Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows that the mind isn't capable of doing everything you think it might be capable of even in that space. So one of the things that people have discovered in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming, so I can't confirm all of this, but I can confirm some of it. Apparently, in every house, in every room in the mansion, in every room in the mansion of dreams, all light switches are dimmer switches. Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light, it gradually comes up, it doesn't come up instantly on demand, because apparently this is covering for the brain's inability to produce from a standing start, visually rich imagery on demand. So I haven't confirmed that, but people have done research on lucid dreaming claim that it's all dimmer switches. But one thing I have noticed, and people can check this out, is that in a dream, if you look at text, a page of text or a sign or a television that has text on it, and then you turn away and you look back at that text, the text will have changed. There's a total chronic instability, graphical instability of text in the dream state. And I don't know if that, maybe that's, someone can confirm that that's not true for them, but whenever I've checked that out, that has been true for me. So it keeps generating it, like real time, from a video game perspective. Yeah, it's rendering, it's re-rendering it for some reason. What's interesting, I actually, I don't know how I found myself in this sets of that part of the internet, but there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math on LSD. Because apparently, one of the deepest thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians or theoretical computer scientists, basically doing anything that involves math is proofs, and you have to think creatively, but also deeply, and you have to think for many hours at a time. And so they're always looking for ways to, is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected? And apparently, out of all the psychedelics, the worst is LSD, because it completely destroys your ability to do math well. And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind and hold them there and stitch things together, which is often what's required for proofs. But again, it's difficult to kind of research these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder where, what are the spaces, how's the space of things you're able to think about and explore morphed by different psychedelics or dream states and so on? And how's that different? How much does it overlap with reality? And what is reality? Is there a waking state reality? Or is it just a tiny subset of reality, and we get to take a step in other versions of it? We tend to think very much in a space time, four dimensional, there's a three dimensional world, there's time, and that's what we think about reality. And we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B in the three dimensional world. But that's a very kind of human surviving, try not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality. What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics and meet the elves? What if it's something, what if thinking or the space of ideas as we kind of grow and think through ideas, that's traveling? Or what if memories is traveling? I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality or if you had, by the way, I should say, excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman. Yeah, yeah, he's interesting. Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is very far from actual, like objective reality is very far from the kind of reality we imagine, we perceive and we play with in our human minds? Well, the first thing to grant is that we're never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness. So we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents. And then the question is, how does that circumstance relate to quote reality at large? And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate, well, maybe there isn't a reality at large, maybe it's all just consciousness on some level. And that's interesting, that runs into, to my eye, various philosophical problems that, or at least you have to do a lot, you have to add to that picture, picture of idealism, that's usually all the whole family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness at bottom, we'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy. You have to add to that idealistic picture, all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences and to get the predictability of our experience and the success of materialist science to make sense in that context. So the fact that we can, what does it mean to say that there's only consciousness at bottom, right? Nothing outside of consciousness, because no one's ever experienced anything outside of consciousness. There's no scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter how far removed from our sense bases, whether it's they're looking at the Hubble deep field or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using, they're still just experiencing consciousness and its various deliverances and layering their concepts on top of that. So that's always true. And yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the character of our continually discovering that our materialist assumptions are confirmable. So take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom. First we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible to come back to Einstein. There's a lot of energy in that matter. And what if we could release it? And then we perform an experiment that in this case, the Trinity test site in New Mexico, where the people who are most adequate to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer are standing around not altogether certain it's going to work, right? They're performing an experiment. They're wondering what's gonna happen. They're wondering if their calculations around the yield are off by orders of magnitude. Some of them are still wondering whether the entire atmosphere of earth is gonna combust, right? That the nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop. And lo and behold, there was that energy to be released from within the nucleus of an atom. And that could, so it's just, the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments and just the knowledge is just our understanding of evolution, just the fact that the earth is billions of years old and life is hundreds of millions of years old. And we weren't here to think about any of those things. And all of those processes were happening, therefore in the dark. And they are the processes that allowed us to emerge from prior life forms in the first place. To say that it's all a mass, that nothing exists outside of consciousness, conscious minds of the sort that we experience, it just seems, it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim analogous to the moon isn't there if no one's looking at it, right? I mean, the moon as a moon isn't there if no one's looking at it. I'll grant that, because that's already a kind of fabrication born of concepts, but the idea that there's nothing there, that there's no nothing that corresponds to what we experience as the moon, unless someone's looking at it, that just seems just a way too parochial way to set out on this journey of discovery. So there is something there, there's a computer waiting to render the moon when you look at it. The capacity for the moon to exist is there. So if we're indeed living in a simulation, which I find a compelling thought experiment, it's possible that there is a kind of rendering mechanism, but not in the silly way that we think about in video games, but in some kind of more fundamental physics way. And we have to account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet, that no one has any expectation of having. It can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully, and then there's some lawful understanding of why that's so. It's like, I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics, I'm like, certain numbers are prime whether we have discovered them or not. Like there's the highest prime number that anyone can name now, and then there's the next prime number that no one can name, and it's there. So it's like, it's to say that our minds are putting it there, what we know as mind in ourselves is in some sense putting it there. That, like the base layer of reality is consciousness, right? You know, that we're identical to the thing that is rendering this reality. There's some, you know, hubris is the wrong word, but it's like, it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience, you know, and has structure that we can't anticipate and that isn't just, I mean, again, there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever's out there to produce what we call, you know, the stuff of life, but it's not the idea that it's, I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and Eastern philosophy that I don't, philosophically, I don't see a need to take. I mean, the place, experientially and scientifically, I feel like it's, you can get everything you want acknowledging that consciousness has a character that can be explored from its own side so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience back into the conversation about, you know, what is a human mind and what is true and you can explore it with different degrees of rigor and there are things to be discovered there, whether you're using a technique like meditation or psychedelics and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand about ourselves from a third person side, neuroscientifically or in any other way. But to me, the question is, what if reality, the sense I have from this kind of, you play shooters? No. There's a physics engine that generate, that's- I have, you mean first person shooter games? Yes, yes, sorry. Not often, but yes. I mean, there's a physics engine that generates consistent reality, right? My sense is the same could be true for a universe in the following sense that our conception of reality as we understand it now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality. It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there, the moon being there is not there somehow. It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. And so the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics, the useful reality, quote unquote, for us to have a consistent experience as human beings. But maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001% of actual physics of reality. Like this, we can even just start with the consciousness thing, but maybe our minds are just, we're just too dumb by design. Oh yeah, I, that truly resonates with me and I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more with most scientists that I talk to. When you just look at, you look at how close we are to chimps and chimps don't know anything. Clearly they have no idea what's going on. And then you get us, but then it's only a subset of human beings that really understand much of what we're talking about in any area of specialization. And if they all died in their sleep tonight, you'd be left with people who might take a thousand years to rebuild the internet, if ever. Literally it's like, and I would extend this to myself. I mean, there are areas of scientific specialization where I have either no discernible competence and I mean, I spend no time on it. I have not acquired the tools. It would just be an article of faith for me to think that I could acquire the tools to actually make a breakthrough in those areas. And your own area is one, I mean, I've never spent any significant amount of time trying to be a programmer, but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right? It's like, if that were my capacity, I would have discovered that in myself. I would have found programming irresistible. My first fall starts in learning, I think it was C. It was just, I bounced off. It's like, this was not fun. I hate trying to figure out what the syntax error that's causing this thing not to compile was just a fucking awful experience. I hated it, right? I hated every minute of it. So it was not, so if it was just people like me left, like when do we get the internet again? Right, and we lose the internet. When do we get it again, right? When do we get anything like a proper science of information, right? You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing to plant a flag in the ground right here and say, all right, can everyone see this? Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to, you all have to come over here to make some progress. And there are hundreds of topics where that's the case. So we barely have a purchase on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation. And yeah, I'm just, Max Tegmark makes this point. He's one of the few people who does in physics. If you just take the truth of evolution seriously, right? And realize that there's nothing about us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly. I mean, we're just not that kind of ape, right? There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines. So what we are making do with tools that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right? And it's amazing we can do as much as we can. I mean, we just, you know, the UNR just sitting here on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine, you know, that has certainly changed our life given what the last year was like, and it's gonna change the world if rumors of coming miracles are born out. I mean, it's now, seems likely we have a vaccine coming for malaria, right? Which has been killing millions of people a year for as long as we've been alive. I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now because we've spread so many bed nets around, but it was like two and a half million people every year. It's amazing what we can do, but yeah, I have, if in fact that, you know, the answer at the back of the book of nature is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand and half of what you think you understand is wrong, that would not surprise me at all. It is funny to look at our evolutionary history, even back to chimps. I'm pretty sure even chimps thought they understood the world well. So at every point in that timeline of evolutionary development throughout human history, there's a sense like there's no more, you hear this message over and over, there's no more things to be invented. But 100 years ago, there were, it was a famous story, I forget which physicists told it, but there were physicists telling their undergraduate students not to go into, to get graduate degrees in physics because basically all the problems had been solved. This is like around 1915 or so. Turns out you were right. I'm gonna ask you about free will. Oh, okay. You've recently released an episode of your podcast, Making Sense, for those with a shorter attention span, basically summarizing your position on free will. I think it was under an hour and a half. Yeah, yeah. It was brief and clear. So allow me to summarize the summary TLGR and maybe you tell me why I'm wrong. So free will is an illusion and even the experience of free will is an illusion. Like we don't even experience it. Am I good in my summary? Yeah, this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people. I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is an illusion. Like there is no illusion of free will. And that is unlike many other illusions, that's a more fundamental claim. It's like it's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong. I mean, that's, I guess that was, I think Wolfgang Pauli who derided one of his colleagues or enemies with that Aspergian about his theory in quantum mechanics. It's, so there are things that you, there are genuine illusions. There are things that you do experience and then you can kind of punch through that experience or you can't actually experience, you can't experience them any other way. It's just, we just know it's not a veridical experience. You just take like a visual illusion. There are visual illusions that, a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days. There's these amazing visual illusions where like every figure in this GIF seems to be moving, but nothing in fact is moving. You can just like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving. Some of those illusions you can't see any other way. I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently hackable. And you have to use a ruler to convince yourself that the thing isn't actually moving. Now there are other visual illusions where you're taken in by it at first, but if you pay more attention, you can actually see that it's not there, right? Or it's not how it first seemed. Like the, like the Necker cube is a good example of that. Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube, of a transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other. The one phase can pop out and the other phase can pop out, but you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out, which is a more veridical way of looking at it. So there are subject, there are kind of inward correlates to this. And I would say that the sense of self, the sense of self and free will are closely related. I often describe them as two sides of the same coin, but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness. I mean, so the sense of self is something that people I think do experience, right? It's not a very clear experience, but it's not, I wouldn't call the illusion of self an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your experience, you begin to see that it's totally compatible with an absence of free will. You don't, I mean, coming back to the place we started, you don't know what you're gonna think next. You don't know what you're gonna intend next. You don't know what's going to just occur to you that you must do next. You don't know how much you are going to feel the behavioral imperative to act on that thought. If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that. I can do that tomorrow. You don't know where that comes from. You didn't know that was gonna arise. You didn't know that was gonna be compelling. All of this is compatible with some evil genius in the next room just typing in code into your experience. It was like this, okay, let's give him the, oh my God, I just forgot. It was gonna be our anniversary in one week thought, right? Give him the cascade of fear. Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's gonna take him no time at all in this overpowering sense of relief. All of our experience is compatible with the script already being written, right? And I'm not saying the script is written. I'm not saying that fatalism is the right way to look at this, but we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action where we go back and forth between two options, thinking about the reason for A and then reconsidering and going to thinking harder about B and just going eny, meeny, miny, mo until the end of the hour. However laborious you can make it, there is a utter mystery at your back finally promoting the thought or intention or rationale that is most compelling and therefore deliberately, behaviorally effective. And just, this can drive some people a little crazy. So I usually preface what I say about free will with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. You get off the ride, switch the channel. You don't have to go down this path. But for me and for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind because one, you realize that you're, I mean, cutting through the illusion of the self is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons that we can talk about separately. But losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me. One is it totally undercuts the basis for, the psychological basis for hatred. Because when you think about the experience of hating other people, what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions. I mean, that someone is doing something that you find so despicable. Let's say they're targeting you unfairly. They're maligning you on Twitter or they're suing you or they're doing something, they broke your car window, they did something awful and now you have a grievance against them. And you're relating to them very differently emotionally in your own mind than you would if a force of nature had done this. Or if it had just been a virus or if it had been a wild animal or a malfunctioning machine. Like to those things, you don't attribute any kind of freedom of will. And while you may suffer the consequences of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having your car break down or whatever, it may frustrate you. You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers your mind and deranges your life. I mean, you just don't, I mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did and it's just pure poison. So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy. But the question is, say that this called, what was it, the horse of consciousness? Let's call it the consciousness generator black box that we don't understand. And is it possible that this script that we're walking along, that we're playing, that's already written, is actually being written in real time? It's almost like you're driving down a road and in real time that road is being laid down. And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where this script is being generated. So it's not, it is being generated, it didn't always exist. So there's something we don't understand that's fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both consciousness, let's call it maybe the self. I don't know if you wanna distinguish between those. Yeah, I definitely would, yeah. You would, because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to. There's the illusion of free will, there's the illusion of self, and there's the illusion of consciousness. You're saying, I think you said there's no, you're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness. You're a little bit more- In fact, I would say it's impossible. Impossible. You're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self, and you're definitely saying there's an illusion of free will. Yes, yes. I'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion, not every, we mean many different things by this notion of self. So maybe I should just differentiate these things. So consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other veridical perception. I mean, if you're hallucinating now, that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness as really seeing what's a quote actually there. If you're dreaming and you don't know it, that is consciousness, right? If you're, you can be confused about literally everything. You can't be confused about the underlying claim, whether you make it linguistically or not, but just the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening. It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness. Can I take a tiny tangent? Okay. So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that I'm human? So it's a useful social tool, not a fundamental property of experience, like of being a living thing. What if it's just like a social tool to almost like a useful computational trick to place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality? And another way to ask that, cause you said it much earlier, you talked negatively about robots as you often do. So let me, cause you'll probably die first when they take over. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots. I mean, I'm not, if we can get this right, this would be amazing. Right, but you don't like the robots that fake consciousness. That's what you, you don't like the idea of fake it till you make it. Well, no, it's not that I don't like it. It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem and the problem has massive ethical consequences. If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing, right? And if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing. This is how I know you're not Russian. Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer? Isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which like beauty springs? Like without suffering, do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world? That's a tangent on a tangent. We'll go there. I would love to go there, just yet, but I do think it would be, if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real minds that really can suffer in that hell, that's bad. That's the, you are worse than any mass murderer we can name if you create it. I mean, this could be in robot form or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world where we managed to populate it with conscious minds so that whether we knew they were conscious or not. And that world is a state of, it's unendurable. That would just, it just taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing that mind intelligence and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent. You don't need a biological brain to be conscious. You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent. So if we just imagine the consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence, well, then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are miserable. And that's just like creating a person who's miserable. It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable. It could be even more sensitive to suffering. Cloning them and maybe for entertainment and watching them suffer. Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment. So, but back to your primary question here, which is differentiating consciousness and self and free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusoriness, the problem with free will is that what most people mean by it and that, you know, and Dan, this is where Dan Dennett is gonna get off the ride here, right? So like he doesn't, he's gonna disagree with me that I know what most people mean by it. But I have a very keen sense having talked about this topic for many, many years and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that I was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way, right, I mean, to know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that sense, cognitively and emotionally and to recognize what's left, what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany. I have a sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether free will exists. And it is the flip side of this feeling of self, it's the flip side of feeling like you are not merely identical to experience, you feel like you're having an experience, you feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience. There's a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you, it's not just the movie, right? It's like there are sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony of experience, of felt experience, of felt experience of embodiment, but there seems to be a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body, right? People don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes, they sort of feel like they have bodies, they feel like their minds in bodies and that feels like a self, that feels like me. And again, this gets very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk. I mean, if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening? Like, why do you need the pep talk and why does it work if you're the one giving the pep talk, right? Or if I said, where are my keys? If I'm looking for my keys, why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys? I know I'm looking for the fucking keys, I'm the one looking, who am I telling that we now need to look for the keys, right? So that duality is weird, but leave that aside. There's the sense, and this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate, most people, they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object like the breath, say. So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen and you're paying attention and you feel something vague there and then you think, I thought, why the breath? Why am I paying attention to the breath? What's so special about the breath? And then you notice your thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore and then you realize, okay, the practice is, okay, I should notice thoughts and then I should come back to the breath. But this starting point is of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head, a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience. Like I can focus on the breath and then I get lost in thought and now I can come back to the breath and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face looking out at a world that's other than me and there's this kind of subject-object perception and that is the default starting point of selfhood, of subjectivity and married to that is the sense that I can decide what to do next, right? I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup, I can listen to sounds. There are certain things that I can't control, certain things are happening to me and I just can't control them. So for instance, if someone asks, well, can you not hear a sound, right? Like don't hear the next sound, don't hear anything for a second or don't hear, don't hear, you know, I'm snapping my fingers, don't hear this, where's your free will? You know, well, like just stop this from coming in. You realize, okay, wait a minute, my abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this. Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent but at least I can decide what I'm gonna do next and I'm gonna pick up this water, right? And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the thought that occurs to you, with the feeling of speaking, like, you know, what am I gonna say next? Well, I'm saying it, so here goes, this is me. It feels like I'm the thinker, I'm the one who's in control. But all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you. And so this is where meditation comes in or this is where, again, you can get at this conceptually. You can unravel the notion of free will just by thinking certain thoughts but you can't feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise. So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself, I didn't make my genes, I didn't make my brain, I didn't make the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely the state it's in right now, such with all of the receptor weightings and densities and, you know, it's just, I'm exactly the machine I am right now through no fault of my own as the experiencing self. I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental influences here. And yet those are the only things that contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behavior. And if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork like an immortal soul, you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul, right? You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or, you know, or was a psychopath or was, you know, had an IQ of 40. I mean, like there's nothing about that that the person who believes in a soul can claim to have controlled. And yet that is also totally dispositive of whatever happens next. But everything you've described now, maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature of the hardware. But even if you add magical ectoplasm software, you didn't produce that either. I know, but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware and running on the software, there's something you said recently, which you think of culture as an operating system. So if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization being a collection of humans, and rather us just being a distributed computation system on which there's some kind of operating system running, and then the computation that's running is the actual thing that generates the interactions, the communications, and maybe even free will, the experiences of all of those free will. Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world in that way where it's like ideas are just using us, thoughts are using individual nodes in the system, and they're just jumping around, and they also have ability to generate experiences so that we can push those ideas along. And basically the main organisms here are the thoughts, not the humans. Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary between self and world. Right. So then there's no self, really integrated self to have any kind of will at all. Like if you're just a memeplex, I mean, if you're just a collection of memes, and I mean, we're all kind of like currents, like eddies in this river of ideas, right? So it's like, and it seems to have structure, but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water and the rest. I mean, if you are, and I would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description. I mean, so much of our mind has been, it's obviously not self-generated, and it's not, you're not gonna find it by looking in the brain. It is the result of culture largely, but also the genes on one side and culture on the other meeting to allow for manifestations of mind that aren't actually bounded by the person in any clear sense. It was just, I mean, the example I often use here, but there are so many others, is just the fact that we're following the rules of English grammar to whatever degree we are. It's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented these rules for ourself. We haven't invented these rules. We haven't, I mean, there are norms of language use that we couldn't even specify because we haven't, you know, we're not grammarians. We haven't studied this. We don't even have the right concepts, and yet we're following these rules and we're noticing, you know, we're noticing as, you know, an error when we fail to follow these rules. And virtually every other cultural norm is like that. I mean, these are not things we've invented. You can consciously decide to scrutinize them and override them, but I mean, just think of, just think of any social situation where you're with other people and you're behaving in ways that are culturally appropriate, right, you're not being wild animals together. You're following, you have some expectation of how you shake a person's hand and how you deal with implements on a table, how you have a meal together. Obviously this can change from culture to culture and people can be shocked by how different those things are. Right, we all have foods we find disgusting, but in some countries, dog is not one of those foods, right? And yet, you know, you and I presumably would be horrified to be served dog. Those are not norms that we're, they are outside of us in some way, and yet they're felt very viscerally. I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation. You know, if you are, just imagine, you're in somebody's home, you're eating something that tastes great to you, and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever, you know, you didn't realize dog was potentially on the menu, and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites of what is, you know, really a cocker spaniel, and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right, based on an idea, right? Like, you did not, you're not the author of that norm that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation. And I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history, you know, vaguely where it sort of got in. I mean, very early on as kids, you realize you're treating dogs as pets and not as food, or as potential food. But yeah, no, it's, but the point you just made opens us to, like, we are totally permeable to a sea of mind. Yeah, but if we take the metaphor of the distributed computing systems, each individual node is part of performing a much larger computation, but nevertheless, is in charge of doing the scheduling of, so assuming it's Linux, is doing the scheduling of processes, and it's constantly alternating them. That node is making those choices. That node sure as hell believes it has free will, and it actually has free will because it's making those hard choices, but the choices ultimately are part of a much larger computation that it can't control. Isn't it possible for that node to still be, that human node is still making the choice? Well, yeah, it is. So I'm not saying that your body isn't doing, really doing things, right? And some of those things can be conventionally thought of as choices, right? So it's like, I can choose to reach, and it's like, it's not being imposed on me. That would be a different experience. Like, so there's an experience of, there's definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. So that has to get conserved by any account of the mind that jettison's free will, you still have to admit that there's a difference between a tremor that I can't control and a purposeful motor action that I can control and I can initiate on demand and it's associated with intentions. And it's got efferent motor copy, which is being predictive so that I can notice errors. I have expectations when I reach for this, if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle because it's a hologram, I would be surprised, right? And so that shows that I have a expectation of just what my grasping behavior is gonna be like even before it happens. Whereas with a tremor, you don't have the same kind of thing going on. That's a distinction we have to make. So I am, yes, I'm really the proximate, my intention to move, which is in fact can be subjectively felt really is the proximate cause of my moving. It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe. I'm not saying that. So in that sense, the node is really deciding to execute the subroutine now, but that's not the feeling that has given rise to this conundrum of free will. So people feel like, people feel like the crucial things that people feel like they could have done otherwise. That's the thing that, so when you run back the clock of your life, right? You run back the movie of your life, you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life, they feel that at this point, they could behave differently than they did, right? So like, but given, you know, even given your distributed computing example, it's either a fully deterministic system or it's a deterministic system that admits of some random, you know, influence. In either case, that's not the free will people think they have. The free will people think they have is, damn, I shouldn't have done that. I just like, I shouldn't have done that. I could have done otherwise, right? I should have done otherwise, right? Like if you think about something that you deeply regret doing, right? Or that you hold someone else responsible for because they really are the upstream agent in your mind of what they did. You know, that's an awful thing that that person did and they shouldn't have done it. There is this illusion and it has to be an illusion because there's no picture of causation that would make sense of it. There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago, it could have played out differently. And the only way it could have played out differently is if there's randomness added to that, but randomness isn't what people feel would give them free will, right? If you tell me that, you know, I only reached for the water bottle this time because somebody's, because there's a random number generator in there kicking off values and it finally moved my hand, that's not the feeling of authorship. That's still not control. You're still not making that decision. There's actually, I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata, that's a really nice visualization of how simple rules can create incredible complexity that it's like really dumb initial conditions are set, simple rules applied, and eventually you watch this thing and if the initial conditions are correct, then you're going to have emerged something that to our perception system looks like organisms interacting. You can construct any kinds of worlds and they're not actually interacting. They're not actually even organisms and they certainly aren't making decisions. So there's like systems you can create that illustrate this point. The question is whether there could be some room for, let's use in the 21st century the term magic back to the black box of consciousness. Let me ask you this way. If you're wrong about your intuition about free will, what, and somebody comes along to you and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture, what would that proof look like? What would- Well, that's the problem. That's why it's not even an illusion in my world because for me, it's impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing. It doesn't conceptually map onto any notion of causation we have. And that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make. So like, if you're gonna believe in ghosts, right? I understand what that claim could be. Where like, I don't happen to believe in ghosts, but it's not hard for me to specify what would have to be true for ghosts to be real. And so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts, right? So like, okay, so you're telling me that when people die, there's some part of them that is not reducible at all to their biology that lifts off them and goes elsewhere. And it's actually the kind of thing that can linger in closets and in cupboards. And actually it's immaterial, but by some principle of physics, we don't totally understand. It can make sounds and knock objects and even occasionally show up so they can be visually beheld. And it's just, it seems like a miracle, but it's just some spooky noun in the universe that we don't understand. Let's call it a ghost. That's fine. I can talk about that all day, the reasons to believe in it, the reasons not to believe in it, the way we would scientifically test for it, what would have to be provable so as to convince me that ghosts are real. Free will isn't like that at all. There's no description of any concatenation of causes that precedes my conscious experience that sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise and that they really, that they, the conscious agent is really in charge. If you don't know what you're going to think next and you can't help but think it, take those two premises on board. You don't know what it's going to be. You can't stop it from coming. And until you actually know how to meditate, you can't stop yourself from fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences, right? Like you have no, once you, mindfulness arguably gives you another degree of freedom here. It doesn't give you free will, but it gives you some other game to play with respect to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of thoughts. But short of that, I mean, the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will is because you can't account for why in one moment, mindfulness arises and in other moments it doesn't, right? But a different process is initiated once you can practice in that way. Well, if I could push back for a second, by the way, I just have this thought bubble coming, popping up all the time of just two recent chimps arguing about the nature of consciousness. It's kind of hilarious. So on that thread, you know, if we're even before Einstein, let's say before Einstein, we were to conceive about traveling from point A to point B. Say some point in the future, we are able to realize through engineering a way which is consistent with Einstein's theory that you can have wormholes. You can travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light. And that would, I think, completely change our conception of what it means to travel in the physical space. And that like completely transform our ability. You talk about causality, but here let's just focus on what it means to travel through physical space. Don't you think it's possible that there'll be inventions or leaps in understanding about reality that will allow us to see free will as actually, like us humans somehow may be linked to this idea of consciousness, are actually able to be authors of our actions? It is a non-starter for me conceptually. It's a little bit like saying, could there be some breakthrough that will cause us to realize that circles are really square or that circles are not really round, right? No, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form. Right, like it's not on the table to be revised. And so I would say the same thing about consciousness. It's just like saying, is there some breakthrough that would get us to realize that consciousness is really an illusion? I'm saying no, because the experience of an illusion is as much a demonstration of what I'm calling consciousness as anything else, right? Like that is consciousness. With free will, it's a similar problem. It's like, again, it comes down to a picture of causality and there's no other picture on offer. And what's more, I know what it's like on the experiential side to lose the thing to which it is clearly anchored, right? Like the feel, like it doesn't feel, and this is the question that almost nobody asks. People who are debating me on the topic of free will, I'm at 15 minute intervals, I'm making a claim that I don't feel this thing. And they never become interested in, well, what's that like? Like, okay, you're actually saying you don't, this thing isn't true for you empirically. It's not just, because most people who don't believe in free will philosophically also believe that we're condemned to experience it. Like you can't live without this feeling. So you're actually saying you're able to experience the absence of the illusion of free will. For, are we talking about a few minutes at a time or is this require a lot of work and meditation or are you literally able to load that into your mind and like play that movie? Right now, right now, just in this conversation. So it's not absolutely continuous, but it's whenever I pay attention. It's like, is it the same, and I would say the same thing for the illusoriness of the self in the sense, and again, we haven't talked about this. So can you still have the self and not have the free will in your mind at the same time? Do they go at the same time? This is the same, yeah, it's the same thing. So they're always holding hands when they walk out the door. There really are two sides at the same point. But it's just, it comes down to what it's like to try to get to the end of the sentence or what it's like to finally decide that it's been long enough and now I need another sip of water. If I'm paying attention, now, if I'm not paying attention, I'm probably, I'm captured by some other thought and that feels a certain way. And so it's not vivid, but if I try to make vivid this experience of just, okay, I'm finally gonna experience free will. I'm gonna notice my free will. Like it's gotta be here, everyone's talking about it. Where is it? I'm gonna pay attention to it, I'm gonna look for it. And I'm gonna create a circumstance that is where it has to be most robust, right? I'm not rushed to make this decision. I'm not, it's not a reflex. I'm not under pressure. I'm gonna take as long as I want. I'm going to decide, it's not trivial. So it's not just like reaching with my left hand or reaching with my right hand. People don't like those examples for some reason. Let's make a big decision. Like where should, you know, what should my next podcast be on, right? Who do I invite on the next podcast? What is it like to make that decision? When I pay attention, there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight. It's like, it doesn't feel like, it feels profoundly mysterious to be going back between two people. You know, like, is it gonna be person A or person B that all my reasons for A and all my reasons why not and all my reasons for B and that there's some math going on there that I'm not even privy to where certain concerns are trumping others. And at a certain point, I just decide. And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network that has made that decision. Absolutely. I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere, but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision is totally without a sense, a real sense of agency because something simply emerges. It's literally as tenuous as what's the next sound I'm going to hear, right? Or what's the next thought that's gonna appear? And it just, something just appears, you know? And if something appears to cancel that something, like if I say, I'm gonna invite her and then I'm about to send the email and then I think, oh, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. There was that thing in that New York article I read that I gotta talk to this guy, right? That pivot at the last second, you can make it as muscular as you want. It always just comes out of the darkness. It's always mysterious. So right, when you try to pin it down, you really can't ever find that free will. If you construct an experiment for yourself and you try to really find that moment when you're actually making that controlled author decision, it's very difficult to do. We're still, we know at this point that if we were scanning your brain in some podcast guest choosing experiment, right? We know at this point, we would be privy to who you're going to pick before you are, you the conscious agent. If we could, again, this is operationally a little hard to conduct, but there's enough data now to know that something very much like this cartoon is in fact true and will ultimately be undeniable for people. They'll be able to do it on themselves with some app. If you're deciding where to go for dinner or who to have on your podcast, or ultimately who to marry, right? Or what city to move to, right? Like you can make it as big or as small a decision as you want. We could be scanning your brain in real time and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted, we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy, all right, Lex is, he's moving to Austin, right? I didn't choose that. Yeah, he was, it was gonna be Austin or it was gonna be Miami. He got, he's catching one of these two waves, but it's gonna be Austin. And at a point where you subjectively, if we could ask you, you would say, oh no, I'm still working over here. I'm still thinking, still considering my options. And you've spoken to this, in you thinking about other stuff in the world, it's been very useful to step away from this illusion of free will. And you argue that it's probably makes a better world because it can be compassionate and empathetic towards others. And towards oneself. Towards oneself. Radically toward others in that literally, hate makes no sense anymore. I mean, there are certain things you can really be worried about, really want to oppose. Really, I mean, I'm not saying you'd never have to kill another person. Like, I mean, self-defense is still a thing, right? But the idea that you're ever confronting anything other than a force of nature in the end goes out the window, right? Or what does go out the window when you really pay attention. I'm not saying that this would be easy to under, to grok if someone kills a member of your family. I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes on free will and then you should be able to see that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus. Because there's so, I mean, we are so evolved to deal with one another as fellow primates and as agents. But it's, yeah, when you're talking about the possibility of, you know, Christian, you know, truly Christian forgiveness, right? It's like, you know, as testified to by, you know, various saints of that flavor over the millennia. Yeah, that is it. The doorway to that is to recognize that no one really at bottom made themselves. And therefore everyone, what we're seeing really are differences in luck in the world. We're seeing people who are very, very lucky to have had good parents and good genes and to be in good societies and had good opportunities and to be intelligent and to be, you know, not sociopathic. Like none of it is on them. They're just reaping the fruits of one lottery after another and then showing up in the world on that basis. And then so it is with, you know, every malevolent asshole out there, right? He or she didn't make themselves. Even if that weren't possible, the utility for self-compassion is also enormous because it's, when you just look at what it's like to regret something or to feel shame about something or feel deep embarrassment about it, these states of mind are some of the most deranging experiences anyone has. And the kind of the indelible reaction to them, you know, the memory of the thing you said, the memory of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago that was just mortifying, right? The fact that that can still make you hate yourself, right? And like that psychologically, that is a knot that can be untied, right? Speak for yourself, Sam. Yeah, you gave a great toast. It was my toast that mortified. No, no, that's not what I was referring to. I'm deeply appreciative in the same way that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive, but I'm also powered by self-hate often. Like several things in this conversation already that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about, like that was the dumbest thing. You're sitting in front of Sam Harris and you said that. So like that, but that somehow creates a richer experience for me. Like I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature of however my brain was built. I don't think I wanna let go of that. Well, I think the thing you wanna let go of is the suffering associated with it. So like, so for me, so, this is just very, psychologically and ethically, all of this is very interesting. So I don't think we should ever get rid of things like anger, right? So like hatred is divorcible from anger in the sense that hatred is this enduring state where whether you're hating somebody else or hating yourself, it is just, it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless, right? Like it becomes self-nullifying, right? Like you become less capable as a person to solve any of your problems. It's not instrumental in solving the problem that is occasioning all this hatred. And anger for the most part, isn't either except as a signal of salience that there's a problem, right? So if somebody does something that makes me angry, that just promotes this situation to conscious attention in a way that is stronger than my not really caring about it, right? And there are things that I think should make us angry in the world. And there's the behavior of other people that should make us angry because we should respond to it. And so it is with yourself. If I do something, as a parent, if I do something stupid that harms one of my daughters, right, my experience of myself and my beliefs about free will close the door to my saying, well, I should have done otherwise in the sense that if I could go back in time, I would have actually effectively done otherwise. No, I would do, given the same causes and conditions, I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right? But regret and feeling bad about an outcome are still important to capacities because like, yeah, I desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy. So if I've done something, if I crash the car when they're in the car and they get injured, right? And I do it because I was trying to change a song on my playlist or something stupid. I'm gonna feel like a total asshole. How long do I stew in that feeling of regret, right? And what utility is there to extract out of this error signal? And then what do I do? We're always faced with the question of what to do next, right, and how to best do that thing, that necessary thing next. And how much wellbeing can we experience while doing it? Like how miserable do you need to be to solve your problems in life and to help solve the problems of people closest to you? How miserable do you need to be to get through your to-do list today? Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all of it, right? And even navigating moments that are scary and really destabilizing to ordinary people. And I mean, again, I'm always up at the edge of my own capacities here. And there are all kinds of things that stress me out and worry me. And I'm especially something if it's, you're gonna tell me it's something with the health of one of my kids. It's very hard for me to be truly equanimous around that. But equanimity is so useful the moment you're in response mode, right? Because the ordinary experience for me of responding to what seems like a medical emergency for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized by concern to respond to that emergency. But then once I'm responding, all of my fear and agitation and worry and oh my God, what if this is really something terrible? But finding any of those thoughts compelling, that only diminishes my capacity as a father to be good company while we navigate this really turbulent passage. As you're saying this actually, one guy comes to mind, which is Elon Musk. One of the really impressive things to me was to observe how many dramatic things he has to deal with throughout the day at work. But also if you look through his life, family too, and how he's very much actually, as you're describing, basically a practitioner of this way of thought, which is you're not in control. You're basically responding, no matter how traumatic the event. And there's no reason to sort of linger on the negative feelings around that. Well, so, I mean, but he's in a very specific situation, which is unlike normal life, even his normal life, but normal life for most people. Because when you just think of like, he's running so many businesses and they're very, they're not, they're highly non-standard businesses. So what he's seeing is everything that gets to him is some kind of emergency. Like it wouldn't be getting to him. If it needs his attention, there's a fire somewhere. So he's constantly responding to fires that have to be put out. So there's no default expectation that there shouldn't be a fire. But in our normal lives, we live, most of us, most of us who are lucky, not everyone obviously on earth, but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude in terms of our lives, where we're reasonably healthy and life is reasonably orderly and the political apparatus around us is reasonably functional. So I said, functional for the first time in my life through no free will of my own. See, like I noticed those errors and they do not feel like agency and nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency. When you're looking at normal human life, right? Where you're just trying to be happy and healthy and get your work done, there's this default expectation that there shouldn't be fires. People shouldn't be getting sick or injured. We shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources. So when something really stark like that happens, people don't have that muscle. I've been responding to emergencies all day long, seven days a week in business mode. And so I have a very thick skin. This is just another one. I'm not expecting anything else when I wake up in the morning. No, we have this default sense that, I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense that we aren't gonna die, right? Or that we should, like maybe we're not gonna die, right? Like death denial really is a thing. You know, we're, and you can see it, just like I can see when I reach for this bottle that I was expecting it to be solid because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram and I just, my fist closes on itself, I'm damn surprised, people are damn surprised to find out that they're going to die, to find out that they're sick, to find out that someone they love has died or is going to die. So it's like the fact that we are surprised by any of that shows us that we're living at a, we're living in a mode that is, you know, we're perpetually diverting ourselves from some facts that should be obvious, right? And that, and the more salient we can make them, you know, the more, I mean, in the case of death, it's a matter of being able to get one's priorities straight. I mean, the moment, again, this is hard for everybody, even those who are really in the business of paying attention to it, but the moment you realize that every circumstance is finite, right? You've got a certain number of, you know, you've got, whatever it is, 8,000 days left in a normal span of life. And 8,000 is a, sounds like a big number, it's not that big a number, right? So it's just like, and then you can decide how you want to go through life and how you want to experience each one of those days. And so I was back to where our jumping off point, I would argue that you don't want to feel self-hatred ever. I would argue that you don't want to really, really grasp on to any of those moments where you are internalizing the fact that you just made an error, you've embarrassed yourself, that something didn't go the way you wanted it to. I think you want to treat all of those moments very, very lightly. You want to extract the actionable information. It's something to learn. Oh, you know, I learned that when I prepare in a certain way, it works better than when I prepare in some other way or don't prepare, right? Like, yes, lesson learned and do that differently. But yeah, I mean, so many of us have spent so much time with a very dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self-talk and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves. I mean, the privacy of our own minds, we're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time. And that can't help but affect, I mean, forget about just your own sense of wellbeing. It can't help but limit what you're capable of in the world with other people. I'll have to really think about that. I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk, is much less of a jerk than somebody like David Goggins, who's just like screaming in his ear constantly. So I have a relativist kind of perspective that it's not as bad as that at least. Well, having a sense of humor also helps. It's just like, it's not, the stakes are never quite what you think they are. And even when they are, I mean, just the difference between being able to see the comedy of it rather than, because again, there's this sort of dark star of self-absorption that pulls everything into it, right? And if that's the algorithm you don't want to run. It's like, you just want things to be good. So just push the concern out there. Like not have the collapse of, oh my God, what does this say about me? It's just like, what does this say about, how do we make this meal that we're all having together as fun and as useful as possible? And you're saying in terms of propulsion systems, we recommend humor is a good spaceship to escape the gravitational field of that darkness. Well, that certainly helps, yeah. Yeah, well, let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame, which is very interesting. The way you're talking, given that you're one of the biggest intellects, living intellects and minds of our time, and there's a lot of people that really love you and almost elevate you to a certain kind of status where you're like the guru. I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe in fact. Is there a- A hoodie, that's not the highest status garment one can wear now? The socially acceptable version of the robe. If you're a billionaire, you wear a hoodie. Is there something you can say about managing the effects of fame on your own mind? On not creating this, when you wake up in the morning, when you look up in the mirror, how do you get your ego not to grow exponentially? Your conception of self to grow exponentially because there's so many people feeding that. Is there something to be said about this? It's really not hard because I feel like I have a pretty clear sense of my strengths and weaknesses. And I don't feel like it's, I mean, honestly, I don't feel like I suffer from much grandiosity. I mean, I just have a, you know, there's so many things I'm not good at. There's so many things I will, you know, given the remaining 8,000 days at best, I will never get good at. I would love to be good at these things. So it's just, it's easy to feel diminished by comparison with the talents of others. Do you remind yourself of all the things that you're not competent in? Is, I mean, like what is- They're just on display for me every day that I appreciate the talents of others. But you notice them. I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice all the ways in which they were, I mean, this is why absolute power corrupts absolutely is you stop noticing the things in which you're ridiculous and wrong. Right, yeah, no, I- Not to compare you to Stalin. Yeah, yeah, well, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin in there somewhere. Well, we all have- Hopefully- We all carry a baby Stalin with us. He wears better clothes. And I'm not gonna grow that mustache. Those concerns don't map, they don't map onto me for a bunch of reasons, but one is I also have a very peculiar audience. I like, I'm just, you know, I've been appreciating this for a few years, but it's, I'm just now beginning to understand that there are many people who have audiences of my size or larger that have a very different experience of having an audience than I do. I have curated, for better or worse, a peculiar audience. And the net result of that is virtually any time I say anything of substance, something like half of my audience, my real audience, not haters from outside my audience, but my audience is just revolts over it, right? They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you said it. Like you, you're such a schmuck, right? They revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication. Or not, or not. But I mean, it's like, but people who are like, so I mean, the clearest case is, you know, I have whatever audience I have, and then Trump appears on the scene, and I discover that something like 20% of my audience just went straight to Trump and couldn't believe I didn't follow them there. They were just aghast that I didn't see that Trump was obviously exactly what we needed for to steer the ship of state for the next four years and then four years beyond that. So like, so that's one example. So whenever I said anything about Trump, I would hear from people who loved more or less everything else I was up to and had for years, but everything I said about Trump just gave me pure pain from this quadrant of my audience. But then the same thing happens when I say something about the derangement of the far left. Anything I say about wokeness, right? Or identity politics. Same kind of punishment signal from, again, people who are core to my audience. Like I've read all your books, I'm using your meditation app, I love what you say about science, but you are so wrong about politics and I'm starting to think you're a racist asshole for everything you said about identity politics. And there are so many, the free will topic is just like this. It's like, they love what I'm saying about consciousness and the mind and they love to hear me talk about physics with physicists and it's all good. This free will stuff is like, I cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are. What a fucking embarrassment you are. So, but I'm starting to notice that there are other people who don't have this experience of having an audience because they have, I'm just take the Trump woke dichotomy. They just castigated Trump the same way I did, but they never say anything bad about the far left. So they never get this punishment signal or you flip it. They're all about the insanity of critical race theory now. We connect all those dots the same way, but they never really specified what was wrong with Trump or they thought there was a lot right with Trump and they got all the pleasure of that. And so they have much more homogenized audiences. And so my experience is, so just to come back to this experience of fame or quasi fame, and truth is not real fame, but it's still, there's an audience there. It is a, it's now an experience where basically, whatever I put out, I notice a ton of negativity coming back at me. And it just, it is what it is. I mean, now it's like, I used to think, wait a minute, there's gotta be some way for me to communicate more clearly here so as not to get this kind of lunatic response from my audience. From like people who are showing all the signs of, we've been here for years for a reason, right? These are not just trolls. And so I think, okay, I'm gonna take 10 more minutes and really just tell you what should be absolutely clear about what's wrong with Trump, right? I've done this a few times, but I think I gotta do this again. Or wait a minute, how are they not getting that these episodes of police violence are not just a thing of the past? These police violence are so obviously different from one another that you can't describe all of them to yet another racist maniac on the police force, killing someone based on his racism. Last time I spoke about this, it was pure pain, but I just gotta try again. Now at a certain point, I mean, I'm starting to feel like, all right, I just, I have to be, I have to cease. Again, it comes back to this expectation that there shouldn't be fires. I feel like if I could just play my game impeccably, the people who actually care what I think will follow me when I hit Trump and hit free will and hit the woke and hit whatever it is, how we should respond to the coronavirus, you know? Vaccines, you know, are they a thing, right? Like there's such derangement in our information space now that I mean, I guess, you know, some people could be getting more of this than I expect, but I just noticed that, you know, many of our friends who are in the same game have more homogenized audiences and don't get, I mean, they've successfully filtered out the people who are going to despise them on this next topic. And I, you know, I would imagine you are, have a different experience of having a podcast than I do at this point. I mean, I'm sure you get haters, but I would imagine you're more streamlined. I actually don't like the word haters because it kind of presumes that it puts people in a bin. I think we all have like baby haters inside of us and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that more than others for particular periods of time. I think you can almost see hating on the internet as a video game that you just play and it's fun, but then you can put it down and walk away. And no, I certainly have a bunch of people that are very critical. I can list all the ways. But does it feel like on any given topic, does it feel like it's an actual title surge where it's like 30% of your audience and then the other 30% of your audience from podcast to podcast? No, no, no. That's happening to me all the time now. Well, I'm more with, I don't know what you think about this. I mean, Joe Rogan doesn't read comments or doesn't read comments much. And the argument he made to me is that he already has like a self-critical person inside. Like, and I'm gonna have to think about what you said in this conversation, but I have this very harshly self-critical person inside as well where I don't need more fuel. I don't need, no, I do sometimes, that's why I check negativity occasionally, not too often. I sometimes need to like put a little bit more like coals into the fire, but not too much. But I already have that self-critical engine that keeps me in check. I just, I wonder, you know, a lot of people who gain more and more fame lose that ability to be self-critical, I guess because they lose the audience that can be critical towards them. You know, I do follow Joe's advice much more than I ever have here. Like I don't look at comments very often and I'm probably using Twitter, you know, 5% as much as I used to. I mean, I really just get in and out on Twitter and spend very little time in my ad mentions. I, you know, it does, in some ways it feels like a loss because occasionally I get, I see something super intelligent there. Like, I mean, I'll check my Twitter ad mentions and someone will have said, oh, have you read this article? And it's like, man, that was just, that was like the best article sent to me in a month, right? So it's like to have not have looked and to not have seen that, that's a loss. So, but it does, at this point a little goes a long way because it's not that it, for me now, I mean, this could sound like a fairly Stalinistic immunity to criticism. It's not so much that these voices of hate turn on my inner hater, you know, more, it's more that I just, I get a, what I fear is a false sense of humanity. Like, I feel like I'm too online and online is selecting for this performative outrage in everybody, everyone's signaling to an audience when they trash you. And I get a dark, I'm getting a, you know, a misanthropic, you know, cut of just what it's like out there and it, cause when you meet people in real life, they're great, you know, they're rather often great, you know, and it takes a lot to have anything like a Twitter encounter in real life with a living person. And that's, I think it's much better to have that as one's default sense of what it's like to be with people than what one gets on social media or on YouTube comment threads. You've produced a special episode with Rob Reed on your podcast recently on how bioengineering of viruses is going to destroy human civilization. So- Or could. Could. One fears, yeah. Sorry, the confidence there. But in the 21st century, what do you think, especially after having thought through that angle, what do you think is the biggest threat to the survival of the human species? I can give you the full menu if you'd like. Yeah, well, no, I would put, I would put the biggest threat at the, at another level out, kind of the meta threat is our inability to agree about what the threats actually are and to converge on strategies for responding to them. So like I view COVID as among other things, a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal for something far worse. I mean, COVID is just about as benign as it could have been and still have been worse than the flu when you're talking about a global pandemic. So it's just, it's gonna kill a few million people or it looks like it's killed about three million people. Maybe it'll kill a few million more unless something gets away from us with a variant that's much worse or we really don't play our cards right. But I mean, the general shape of it is it's got somewhere around, well, 1% lethality. And whatever side of that number it really is on in the end, it's not what would in fact be possible and is in fact probably inevitable, something with orders of magnitude, more lethality than that. And it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared, right? We are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together. And then also now per the podcast that Rob Reed did, democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this to engineer pandemics, right? And more and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be by the sheer fact that they would have been engineered with malicious intent, worse than COVID. And we're still living in, to speak specifically about the United States, we have a country here where we can't even agree that this is a thing. You're like that COVID, I mean, there's still people who think that this is basically a hoax designed to control people. And it's a stranger still, there are people who will acknowledge that COVID is real and they don't think the deaths have been faked or mis-ascribed, but they think that, they're far happier the prospect of catching COVID than they are of getting vaccinated for COVID, right? They're not worried about COVID, they're worried about vaccines for COVID, right? And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation that we've now had a year to have with one another on just what is the ground truth here? What's happened, why has it happened? How safe is it to get COVID in every cohort in the population and how safe are the vaccines? And the fact that there's still an air of mystery around all of this for much of our society does not bode well when you're talking about solving any other problem that may yet kill us. Do you think convergence grows with the magnitude of the threat? It's possible, except I feel like we have tipped into, because when the threat of COVID looked the most dire, when we were seeing reports from Italy that looked like the beginning of a zombie movie. Because it could have been much, much worse. Yeah, this is lethal, right? Your ICUs are gonna fill up, you're 14 days behind us, your medical system is in danger of collapse, lock the fuck down. We have people refusing to do anything sane in the face of that. People fundamentally thinking it's not gonna get here. Who knows what's going on in Italy, but it has no implications for what's gonna go on in New York in a mere six days, right? And now it kicks off in New York and you've got people in the middle of the country thinking it's no factor, that's just big city, those are big city problems, or they're faking it. Or I mean, the layer of politics has become so dysfunctional for us that even in the presence of a pandemic that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning, I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating for everyone who's been directly affected by it, and it's not to say it can't get worse. But here, for a very long time, we have known that we were in a situation that is more benign than what seemed like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off, especially in Italy. And so still, yeah, it's quite possible that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward Earth and everyone agreed that it's gonna make impact and we're all gonna die, then we could get off Twitter and actually build the rockets that are gonna divert the asteroid from its Earth-crossing path, and we could do something pretty heroic. But when you talk about anything else that's slower moving than that, I mean, something like climate change, I think the prospect of our converging on a solution to climate change purely based on political persuasion is nonexistent at this point. I just think that, to bring Elon back into this, the way to deal with climate change is to create technology that everyone wants that is better than all the carbon-producing technology, and then we just transition because you want an electric car the same way you wanted a smartphone or you want anything else, and you're working totally with the grain of people's selfishness and short-term thinking. The idea that we're gonna convince the better part of humanity that climate change is an emergency, that they have to make sacrifices to respond to, given what's happened around COVID, I just think that's the fantasy of a fantasy. But speaking of Elon, I have a bunch of positive things that I wanna say here in response to you, but you're opening so many threads, but let me pull out one of them, which is AI. Both you and Elon think that with AI, you're summoning demons, summoning a demon, maybe not in those poetic terms, but. Well, potentially. Potentially. Two very, three very parsimonious assumptions, I think, here. Scientifically, parsimonious assumptions get me there. Any of which could be wrong, but it just seems like the weight of the evidence is on their side. One is that it comes back to this topic of substrate independence, right? Anyone who's in the business of producing intelligent machines must believe, ultimately, that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat. You can do this in the kinds of materials we're using now, and there's no special something that presents a real impediment to producing human-level intelligence in silico, right? Again, an assumption, I'm sure, there are a few people who still think there is something magical about biological systems, but leave that aside. Given that assumption, and given the assumption that we just continue making incremental progress, doesn't have to be Moore's law, just has to be progress, it just doesn't stop, at a certain point, we'll get to human-level intelligence and beyond, and human-level intelligence, I think, is also clearly a mirage, because anything that's human-level is gonna be superhuman unless we decide to dumb it down, right, I mean, my phone is already superhuman as a calculator, right, so why would we make the human-level AI just as good as me as a calculator? So I think we'll very, if we continue to make progress, we will be in the presence of superhuman competence for any act of intelligence or cognition that we care to prioritize. It's not to say that we'll create everything that a human could do, maybe we'll leave certain things out, but anything that we care about, and we care about a lot, and we certainly care about anything that produces a lot of power, you know, that we care about scientific insights and an ability to produce new technology and all of that, we'll have something that's superhuman, and then the final assumption is just that there have to be ways to do that that are not aligned with a happy coexistence with these now more powerful entities than ourselves, so, and I would guess, and this is a, you know, kind of a rider to that assumption, there are probably more ways to do it badly than to do it perfectly, that is perfectly aligned with our wellbeing, and when you think about the consequences of non-alignment, when you think about, you're now in the presence of something that is more intelligent than you are, right, which is to say more competent, right, unless you've, and obviously there are cartoon pictures of this where we could just, you know, this is just an off switch, we could just turn off the off switch, or they're tethered to something that makes them, you know, our slaves in perpetuity, even though they're more intelligent, but that, those scenarios strike me as a failure to imagine what is actually entailed by greater intelligence, right, so if you imagine something that's legitimately more intelligent than you are, and you're now in relationship to it, right, you're in the presence of this thing, and it is autonomous in all kinds of ways because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are, I mean, you built it to be all of those things. We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation with something more intelligent than we are, you know, and we can't, so we have to have found the subset of ways to build this, these machines, that are perpetually amenable to our saying, oh, that's not what we meant, that's not what we intended, could you stop doing that, come back over here and do this thing that we actually want, and for them to care, for them to be tethered to our own sense of our own wellbeing, such that, you know, I mean, their utility function is, you know, their primary utility function is to have, you know, this is, I think, Stuart Russell's cartoon plan is to figure out how to tether them to a utility function that has our own estimation of what's going to improve our wellbeing as its master, you know, reward, right? So it's like, all that, this thing can get as intelligent as it can get, but it only ever really wants to figure out how to make our lives better by our own view of better. Now, not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about, you know, I mean, because there's all kinds of things we're not seeing clearly about what is better, and if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle that could really tell us what is better, well, then we presumably would want to hear that, and we would modify our sense of what to do next in conversation with these minds, but I just feel like it is a failure of imagination to think that being in relationship to something more intelligent than yourself isn't in most cases a circumstance of real peril, because it is, and just to think of how everything on Earth has to, if they could think about their relationship to us, if birds could think about what we're doing, right? They would, I mean, the bottom line is, they're always in danger of our discovering that there's something we care about more than birds, right? But there's something we want that disregards the wellbeing of birds, and obviously, much of our behavior is inscrutable to them. Occasionally, we pay attention to them, and occasionally, we withdraw our attention, and occasionally, we just kill them all for reasons they can't possibly understand, but if we're building something more intelligent than ourselves, by definition, we're building something whose horizons of value and cognition can exceed our own and in ways where we can't necessarily foresee, again, perpetually, that they don't just wake up one day and decide, oh, these humans need to disappear. So I think I agree with most of the initial things you said. What I don't necessarily agree with, and of course, nobody knows, but that the more likely set of trajectories that we're going to take are going to be positive, that's what I believe, in the sense that the way you develop, I believe the way you develop successful AI systems will be deeply integrated with human society, and for them to succeed, they're going to have to be aligned in the way we humans are aligned with each other, which doesn't mean we're aligned, there's no such thing, or I don't see there's such thing as a perfect alignment, but they're going to be participating in the dance, in the game-theoretic dance of human society, as they become more and more intelligent. There could be a point beyond which we are like birds to them. But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind? So I believe the explosion will be happening, but there's a lot of explosions to be done before we become like birds. I truly believe that human beings are very intelligent in ways we don't understand. It's not just about chess. It's about all the intricate computation we're able to perform, common sense, our ability to reason about this world, consciousness. I think we're doing a lot of work we don't realize is necessary to be done in order to truly become, like truly achieve super intelligence, and I just think there will be a period of time that's not overnight. The overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight. It'll be over a period of decades. So my sense is- Well, why would it be that, but just take drawn analogy from recent successes, like something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero. I forget the actual metric, but it was something like this algorithm, which wasn't even totally, it wasn't bespoke for chess playing. In the matter of, I think it was four hours, played itself so many times and so successfully that it became the best chess playing computer. Not only was it was not only better than every human being, it was better than every previous chess program in a matter of a day, right? So like that, like, so just imagine, again, we don't have to recapitulate everything about us, but just imagine building a system and who knows when we'll be able to do this, but at some point we'll be able, at some point the 100 or 100 favorite things about human cognition will be analogous to chess in that we will be able to build machines that very quickly outperform any human and then very quickly outperform the last algorithm that outperform the humans. Like something like the AlphaGo experience seems possible for facial recognition and detecting human emotion and natural language processing, right? Like, well, it's just the, everyone, even math people, math heads tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation, right? And we noticed this during COVID. I mean, you have some very smart people who still couldn't get their minds around the fact that an exponential is really surprising. I mean, things double and double and double and double again and you don't notice much of anything changes. And then the last two stages of doubling swamp everything, right? And it just seems like that to assume that there isn't a deep analogy between what we're seeing for the more tractable problems like chess to other modes of cognition. It's like, once you crack that problem, it seems, because for the longest time, it was impossible to think we were gonna make headway on, in AI, you know, it's like AI. Chess and Go was, Go seemed as impossible. Go seemed unattainable. Even when chess had been cracked, Go seemed unattainable. Yeah, and actually still Russell was behind the people that were saying it's unattainable. Right. Because it seemed like, you know, it's a intractable problem. But there's something different about the space of cognition that's detached from human society, which is what chess is, meaning like just thinking. Having actual exponential impact on the physical world is different. I tend to believe that there's, for AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent, it's going to have to go through the funnel of society. And for that, it has to be deeply integrated with human beings. And for that, it has to be aligned. But I mean, you're talking about like actually hooking us up to like Neuralink, you know, we're gonna be the brain stem to the robot overlords. That's a possibility as well. But what I mean is, in order to develop autonomous weapons systems, for example, which are highly concerning to me, that both US and China are participating in now, that in order to develop them and for them to become, to have more and more responsibility to actually do military strategic actions, they're going to have to be integrated into human beings doing the strategic action. They're going to have to work alongside with each other. And the way those systems will be developed will have the natural safety, like switches that are placed on them as they develop over time, because they're going to have to convince humans. Ultimately, they're going to have to convince humans that this is safer than humans. They're going to, you know. Well, self-driving cars is a good test case here, because obviously we've made a lot of progress and we can imagine what total progress would look like. I mean, it would be amazing. And it's answering, it's canceling in the US, 40,000 deaths every year based on ape-driven cars, right? So it's a excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to because there was no alternative. But now that we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative, which if it works in a super-intelligent fashion, maybe we go down to zero highway deaths, right? Or certainly we'd go down by orders of magnitude, right? So maybe we have 400 rather than 40,000 a year. And it's easy to see that there's not a missile. So obviously this is not an example of super-intelligence. This is narrow intelligence. But the alignment problem isn't so obvious there, but there are potential alignment problems there. Like, so like just imagine if some woke team of engineers decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way. I mean, there are situations where the car has to decide who to hit. I mean, there's just bad outcomes where you're gonna hit somebody, right? Now we have a car that can tell what race you are, right? So we're gonna build the car to preferentially hit white people because white people have had so much privilege over the years. This seems like the only ethical way to kind of redress those wrongs of the past. That's something that could get, one, that could get produced as an artifact, presumably, of just how you built it. And you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right? You caused it. From machine learning. Yeah. You put some kind of constraints on it to where it creates those kinds of outcomes. Basically, you built a racist algorithm and you didn't even intend to, or you could intend to, right? And it would be aligned with some people's values, but misaligned with other people's values. But it's like, there are interesting problems even with something as simple and obviously good as self-driving cars. But there's a leap that I just think it'd be exact, but those are human problems. I just don't think there'll be a leap with autonomous vehicles. First of all, sorry, there are a lot of trajectories which will destroy human civilization. The argument I'm making, it's more likely that we'll take trajectories that don't. So I don't think there'll be a leap with autonomous vehicles will all of a sudden start murdering pedestrians, because once every human on Earth is dead, there'll be no more fatality. Sort of unintended consequences of, and it's difficult to take that leap. Most systems as we develop and they become much, much more intelligent, in ways that will be incredibly surprising, like stuff that DeepMind is doing with protein folding. Even, which is scary to think about, and I'm personally terrified about this, which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning, the engineering of vaccines using machine learning, the engineering of, yeah, for research purposes, pathogens using machine learning, and the ways that can go wrong. I just think that there's always going to be a closed loop supervision of humans before the AI becomes super intelligent. Not always, much more likely to be supervision, except of course, the question is how many dumb people there are in the world, how many evil people are in the world? My theory, my hope is, my sense is, that the number of intelligent people is much higher than the number of dumb people that know how to program, and the number of evil people. I think smart people and kind people over all number of the others. Except we also, we have to add another group of people, which are just the smart and otherwise good, but reckless people, right? The people who will flip a switch on, not knowing what's gonna happen, they're just kind of hoping that it's not gonna blow up the world. We already know that some of our smartest people are those sorts of people. We know we've done experiments, and this is something that Martin Rees was whinging about before the Large Hadron Collider got booted up, I think. We know there are people who are entertaining experiments or even performing experiments, where there's some chance, not quite infinitesimal, that they're gonna create a black hole in the lab and suck the whole world into it, right? I mean, you're not a crazy person to worry about that based on the physics. And so it was with the Trinity test, there were some people who were still checking their calculations, and they were off. We did nuclear tests where we were off significantly in terms of the yield, right? So it was like- And they still flipped the switch. Yeah, they still flipped the switch. And sometimes they flipped the switch not to win a world war or to save 40,000 lives a year. They just- Just to see what happens. Intellectual curiosity. This is what I got my grant for. This is where I'll get my Nobel Prize, if that's in the cards. It's on the other side of this switch, right? And I mean, again, we are apes with egos who are massively constrained by very short-term self-interest even when we're contemplating some of the deepest and most interesting and most universal problems we could ever set our attention towards. Like, just if you read James Watson's book, The Double Helix, right? About them cracking the structure of DNA. One thing that's amazing about that book is just how much of it, almost all of it, is being driven by very apish, egocentric social concerns. The algorithm that is producing this scientific breakthrough is human competition, if you're James Watson. It's like, I'm gonna get there before a line is pulling. And it's just, so much of his bandwidth is captured by that, right? Now, that becomes more and more of a liability when you're talking about producing technology that can change everything in an instant. We're talking about not only understanding, we're just at a different moment in human history. When we're doing research on viruses, we're now doing the kind of research that can cause someone somewhere else to be able to make that virus or weaponize that virus. I don't know. I mean, our power is, our wisdom is, it does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power. Right? And that seems like, insofar as wisdom and power become unaligned, I get more and more concerned. But speaking of apes with egos, some of the most compelling apes, two compelling apes, I can think of as yourself and Jordan Peterson. And you've had a fun conversation about religion that I watched most of, I believe. I'm not sure there was any- We didn't solve anything. If anything was ever solved. So is there something like a charitable summary you can give to the ideas that you agree on and disagree with Jordan? Is there something maybe after that conversation that you've learned or maybe as you both agreed on, is there some wisdom in the rubble of even imperfect flawed ideas? Is there something that you can kind of pull out from those conversations or is it to be continued? I think where we disagree, so he thinks that many of our traditional religious beliefs and frameworks are holding so much, such a repository of human wisdom that we pull at that fabric at our peril. If you start just unraveling Christianity or any other traditional set of norms and beliefs, you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific bits, but you could be pulling a lot more to which everything you care about is attached as a society. And my feeling is that there's so much, there's so much downside to the unscientific bits that we're trying to pull out. There's so much downside to the unscientific bits. And it's so clear how we could have a 21st century rational conversation about the good stuff that we really can radically edit these traditions. And we can take Jesus in half his moods and just find a great inspirational, iron age thought leader who just happened to get crucified, but he could be somewhat like the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule, which doesn't originate with him, but which he put quite beautifully. All of that's incredibly useful. It's no less useful than it was 2000 years ago, but we don't have to believe he was born of a virgin or coming back to raise the dead or any of that other stuff. And we can be honest about not believing those things. And we can be honest about the reasons why we don't believe those things. Because on those fronts, I view the downside to be so obvious and the fact that we have so many different competing dogmatisms on offer to be so non-functional. I mean, it's so divisive. It just has conflict built into it that I think we can be far more and should be far more iconoclastic than he wants to be, right? Now, none of this is to deny much of what he argues for, that stories are very powerful. I mean, clearly stories are powerful and we want good stories. We want our lives, we wanna have a conversation with ourselves and with one another about our lives that facilitates the best possible lives. And story is part of that, right? And if you want some of those stories to sound like myths, that might be part of it, right? But my argument is that we never really need to deceive ourselves or our children about what we have every reason to believe is true in order to get at the good stuff, in order to organize our lives well. I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally. And if I don't need to do it personally, why would I think that billions of other people need to do it personally, right? Now, there is a cynical counterargument, which is billions of other people don't have the advantages that I have had in my life. The billions of other people are not as well-educated, they haven't had the same opportunities, they need to be told that Jesus is gonna solve all their problems after they die, say, or that everything happens for a reason and if you just believe in the secret, if you just visualize what you want, you're gonna get it. And it's like there's some measure of what I consider to be odious pamblum that really is food for the better part of humanity and there is no substitute for it, or there's no substitute now. And I don't know if Jordan would agree with that, but much of what he says seems to suggest that he would agree with it. And I guess that's an empirical question. I mean, that's just that we don't know whether given a different set of norms and a different set of stories, people would behave the way I would hope they would behave and be aligned, more aligned than they are now. I think we know what happens when you just let ancient religious certainties go uncriticized. We know what that world's like. We've been struggling to get out of that world for a couple of hundred years, but we know what having Europe riven by religious wars looks like. And we know what happens when those religions become kind of pseudo-religions and political religions. So this is where I'm sure Jordan and I would debate. He would say that Stalin was a symptom of atheism and that's not at all. I mean, it's not my kind of atheism. Like Stalin, the problem with the Gulag and the experiment with communism or with Stalinism or with Nazism was not that there was so much scientific rigor and self-criticism and honesty and introspection and judicious use of psychedelics. I mean, like that was not the problem in Hitler's Germany or in Stalin's Soviet Union. The problem was you have other ideas that capture a similar kind of mob-based dogmatic energy. And yes, the results of all of that are predictably murderous. Well, the question is, what is the source of the most viral and sticky stories that ultimately lead to a positive outcome? So communism was, I mean, having grown up in the Soviet Union even still having relatives in Russia, there's a stickiness to the nationalism and to the ideologies of communism that religious or not, you could say it's religious forever. I could just say it's stories that are viral and sticky. I'm using the most horrible words, but the question is whether science and reason can generate viral, sticky stories that give meaning to people's lives. In your sense, it does. Well, whatever is true ultimately should be captivating. It's like what's more captivating than whatever is real? Now it's because reality is, again, we're just climbing out of the darkness in terms of our understanding of what the hell's going on. And there's no telling what spooky things may in fact be true. I mean, I don't know if you've been on the receiving end of recent rumors about our conversation about UFOs that's very likely changing in the near term, right? But like there was just a Washington Post article and a New York article. And I've received some private outreach and perhaps you have, I know other people in our orbit have people who are claiming that the government has known much more about UFOs than they have let on until now. And this conversation is actually is about to become more prominent. And it's not gonna be whatever, whoever's left standing when the music stops, it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in as a super rigorous scientific skeptic saying there's no there, who's been saying there's no there there for the last 75 years, right? The short version is it sounds like the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon are very likely to say to Congress at some point in the not too distant future that we have evidence that there is technology flying around here that seems like it can't possibly be of human origin, right? Now, I don't know what I'm gonna do with that kind of disclosure, right? Maybe it's gonna be nothing, no follow on conversation to really have, but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in. Right? I mean, it's just, what are we gonna do with that? If in fact, that's what happens, right? If in fact, the considered opinion, despite the embarrassment it causes them of the US government, of all of our intelligence, all of the relevant intelligence services is that this isn't a hoax. It's too, there's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax. We've got too much radar imagery. There's too much satellite data, whatever data they actually have, there's too much of it. All we can say now is something's going on and there's no way it's the Chinese or the Russians or anyone else's technology. That should arrest our attention collectively to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has. And now one worries that we're so jaded and confused and distracted that it's gonna, it'll get much less coverage than Obama's tan suit did a bunch of years ago. It's just, who knows how we'll respond to that. But it's just to say that the need for us to tell ourselves an honest story about what's going on and what's likely to happen next is never gonna go away. And it's important, it's just the division between me and every person who's defending traditional religion is where is it that you wanna lie to yourself or lie to your kids? Like where is honesty a liability? And for me, I've yet to find the place where it is. And it's so obviously a strength in almost every other circumstance because it is the thing that allows you to course correct. It is the thing that allows you to hope at least that your beliefs, that your stories are in some kind of calibration with what's actually going on in the world. Yeah, it is a little bit sad to imagine that if aliens en masse showed up to earth, that would be too preoccupied with political bickering or to like these like fake news and all that kind of stuff to notice. The very basic evidence of reality. I do have a glimmer of hope that there seems to be more and more hunger for authenticity. And I feel like that opens the door for a hunger for what is real. Like people don't want stories, they don't want like layers and layers of like fakeness. And I'm hoping that means that will directly lead to a greater hunger for reality and reason and truth. Truth isn't dogmatism. Like truth isn't authority. I have a PhD and therefore I'm right. Truth is almost like the reality is there's so many questions, there's so many mysteries, there's so much uncertainty. This is our best available, like a best guess. And we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess, but it could be so many other things. And like just even conveying that, I think there's a hunger for that in the world to hear that from scientists. Less dogmatism and more just like this is what we know. We're doing our best given the uncertainty given. I mean, this is true with obviously with virology and all those kinds of things because everything is happening so fast. There's a lot of, and biology is super messy. So it's very hard to know stuff for sure. So just being open and real about that, I think I'm hoping will change people's hunger and openness and trust of what's real. Yeah, well, so much of this is probabilistic. It's even so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically is just you're placing a bet on whether it's worth reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions on that point. It's like, it's not fundamental closure to data. It's just that there's so much data on one side or so much would have to change in terms of your understanding of what you think you understand about the nature of the world. If this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say, all right, that's probably bullshit. Right, and it can sound like a fundamental closure to new conversations, new evidence, new data, new argument but it's really not. It's just, it really is just triaging your attention. It's just like, okay, you're telling me that your best friend can actually read minds. Okay, well, that's interesting. Let me know when that person has gone into a lab and actually proven it, right? Like I don't need, this is not the place where I need to spend the rest of my day figuring out if your buddy can read my mind, right? But there's a way to communicate that. I think it does too often sound like you're completely closed off to ideas as opposed to saying like, as opposed to saying that there's a lot of evidence in support of this but you're still open-minded to other ideas. Like there's a way to communicate that. It's not necessarily even with words. It's like, it's even that Joe Rogan energy of it's entirely possible. Just it's that energy of being open-minded and curious like kids are. Like this is our best understanding but you still are curious. I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things but still leaving the door open. And there's a way to communicate that I think that people really hunger for. Let me ask you this. I've been recently talking a lot with John Donahue from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fame. I don't know if you know who that is. In fact- Talk about somebody who's good at what he does. Yeah. Amazing. And he, speaking of somebody who's open-minded, the reason for doing this ridiculous transition is for the longest time and even still, a lot of people believed in the Jiu-Jitsu world and grappling world that leg locks are not effective in Jiu-Jitsu. And he was somebody that inspired by the open-mindedness of Dean Lister, who famously to him said, why do you only consider half the human body when you're trying to do the submissions? He developed the entire system on this other half of the human body. Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you because you're also a student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Is there something you could say how that has affected your life, what you've learned from grappling, from the martial arts? Well, it's actually a great transition because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about Jiu-Jitsu is that it does what we wish we could do in every other area of life where we're talking about this difference between knowledge and ignorance, right? Like there's no room for bullshit, right? You don't get any credit for bullshit. There's the difference, but the amazing thing about Jiu-Jitsu is that the difference between knowing what's going on and what to do and not knowing it is as the gulf between those two states is as wide as it is in anything in human life. And it's spanned, it can be spanned so quickly. Like you didn't, each increment of knowledge can be doled out in five minutes. It's like, here's the thing that got you killed and here's how to prevent it from happening to you and here's how to do it to others. And you just get this amazing cadence of discovering your fatal ignorance and then having it remedied with the actual technique. And I mean, just for people who don't know what we're talking about, it's just like the simple circumstance of like someone's got you in a headlock. How do you get out of that, right? Someone's sitting on your chest and they're in the mount position and you're on the bottom and you wanna get away. How do you get them off you? They're sitting on you. Your intuitions about how to do this are terrible even if you've done some other martial art, right? And once you learn how to do it, the difference is night and day. It's like you have access to a completely different physics. But I think our understanding of the world can be much more like jujitsu than it tends to be, right? And I think we should all have a much better sense of when we should tap out and when we should recognize that our epistemological arm is barred and now being broken, right? Now the problem with debating most other topics is that most people, it isn't jujitsu and most people don't tap out, right? They don't, even if they're wrong, even if it's obvious to you they're wrong and it's obvious to an intelligent audience that they're wrong, people just double down and double down and they're either lying or lying to themselves or they're bluffing. And so you have a lot of zombies walking around or in zombie worldviews walking around which have been disconfirmed as emphatically as someone gets arm barred, right? Or someone gets choked out in jujitsu, but because it's not jujitsu, they can live to fight another day, right? Or they can pretend that they didn't lose that particular argument. And science when it works is a lot like jujitsu. I mean, science that when you falsify a thesis, right? When you think DNA is one way and it proves to be another way. When you think it's triple stranded or whatever, it's like there is a there there and you can get to a real consensus. So jujitsu for me, it was like, it was more than just of interest for self-defense and the sport of it. It was just, it was something, it's a language and an argument you're having where you can't fool yourself anymore. Like there's, first of all, it cancels any role of luck in a way that most other athletic feats don't. It's like in basketball, you can, even if you're not good at basketball, you can take the basketball in your hand, you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket and you might make it and you could convince yourself based on that demonstration that you have some kind of talent for basketball, right? Enough, 10 minutes on the mat with a real jujitsu practitioner when you're not one, proves to you that you just, there is, it's not like, there's no lucky punch. There's no, you're not gonna get a, there's no lucky rear naked choke you're gonna perform on someone who's, Marcelo Garcia or somebody. It's just, it's not gonna happen. And having that aspect of, the usual range of uncertainty and self deception and bullshit just stripped away was really a kind of revelation. It was just an amazing experience. Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing that accompanies whatever other pursuit you have in life. I'm not sure if there's anything like jujitsu where you could just systematically go into a place where you're, that's honest, where your beliefs get challenged in a way that's conclusive. Yeah. I haven't found too many other mechanisms, which is why it's, we had this earlier question about fame and ego and so on. I'm very much rely on jujitsu in my own life as a place where I can always go to have my ego in check. And that has effects on how I live every other aspect of my life. Actually, even just doing any kind of, for me personally, physical challenges, like even running, doing something that's way too hard for me and then pushing through, that's somehow humbling. Some people talk about nature being humbling in that kind of sense, where you kind of see something really powerful like the ocean. Like if you go surfing and you realize there's something much more powerful than you, that's also honest. That there's no way to, that you're just like this speck that kind of puts you in the right scale of where you are in this world. And jujitsu does that better than anything else for me. But we should say, only within its frame, is it truly the kind of the final right answer to all the problems it solves. Because if you just put jujitsu into an MMA frame or a real, a total self-defense frame, then there's a lot of unpleasant surprises to discover there. Like somebody who thinks all you need is jujitsu to win the UFC gets punched in the face a lot, even from, even on the ground. So it's, and then you bring weapons in. It's like when you talk to jujitsu people about knife defense and self-defense, that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions. But the analogy to martial arts is fascinating because on the other side, we have endless testimony now of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake and are as delusional. I mean, they're impossibly delusional. I mean, there's great video of Joe Rogan watching some of these videos because people send them to him all the time. But like literally there are people, there are people who clearly believe in magic where the master isn't even touching the students and they're flopping over. So there's this kind of shared delusion, which you would think maybe is just a performance and it's all a kind of an elaborate fraud. But there are cases where the people, and there's one fairly famous case if you're a connoisseur of this madness, where this older martial artist who you saw flipping his students endlessly by magic without touching them, issued a challenge to the wide world of martial artists and someone showed up and just punched him in the face until it was over. Clearly he believed his own publicity at some point. And so it's this amazing metaphor. It seems, again, it should be impossible, but if that's possible, nothing we see under the guise of religion or political bias or even scientific bias should be surprising to us. I mean, it's so easy to see the work that cognitive bias is doing for people when you can get someone who is ready to issue a challenge to the world who thinks he's got magic powers. Yeah, that's human nature on clear display. Let me ask you about love, Mr. Sam Harris. You did an episode of Making Sense with your wife, Annika Harris, that was very entertaining to listen to. What role does love play in your life or in a life well lived? Again, asking from an engineering perspective or AI systems. I mean, it is something that we should want to build into our powerful machines. I mean, love at bottom is, people can mean many things by love, I think. I think that what we should mean by it most of the time is a deep commitment to the wellbeing of those we love. I mean, your love is synonymous with really wanting the other person to be happy and even wanting to, and being made happy by their happiness and being made happy in their presence. Like at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally, even when you might be disagreeing more superficially about something or trying to negotiate something. It's just, it can't be zero sum in any important sense for love to actually be manifest in that moment. See, I have a different, just to start and interrupt. Yeah, go for it. I have a sense, I don't know if you've ever seen March of the Penguins. My view of love is like, it's like a cold wind is blowing. It's like this terrible suffering that's all around us. And love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth. It's not necessarily that you're like, you're basically escaping the cruelty of life by together for time, living in an illusion of some kind of the magic of human connection, that social connection that we have that kind of grows with time as we're surrounded by basically the absurdity of life or the suffering of life. That's my penguins view of love. There is that too. I mean, there is the warmth component, right? Like you're made happy by your connection with the person you love. Otherwise you wouldn't be compelling, right? So it's not that you have two different modes. You want them to be happy and then you wanna be happy yourself. And those are not, those are just like two separate games you're playing. No, it's like you found someone who, you have a positive social feeling. I mean, again, love doesn't have to be as personal as it tends to be for us. I mean, it's like there's personal love. There's your actual spouse or your family or your friends, but potentially you could feel love for strangers. Even so far as that your wish that they're, that they not suffer and that their hopes and dreams be realized becomes palpable to you. I mean, like you can actually feel just reflects of joy at the joy of others. And when you see someone's face, total stranger's face light up in happiness, that can become more and more contagious to you. And it can become so contagious to you that you really feel permeated by it. And it's just like, so it really is not zero sum. When you see someone else succeed and the light bulb of joy goes off over their head, you feel the analogous joy for them. And it's not just, and you're no longer keeping score. You're no longer feeling diminished by their success. It's just like that's, their success becomes your success because you feel that same joy because you actually want them to be happy, right? There's no miserly attitude around happiness. There's enough to go around. So I think love ultimately is that. And then our personal cases are the people we're devoting all of this time and attention to in our lives. It does have that sense of refuge from the storm. It's like when someone gets sick or when some bad thing happens, these are the people who you're most in it together with, or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself. But ultimately it can't even be about successfully warding off the grim punchline at the end of life because we know we're gonna lose everyone we love. We know, or they're gonna lose us first, right? So it's not, in the end, it's not even an antidote for that problem. It's just the, we get to have this amazing experience of being here together and love is the mode in which we really appear to make the most of that, right? Where it's not just, it no longer feels like a solitary infatuation. You've got your hobbies and your interests and you're captivated by all that. It's actually, this is a domain where somebody else's wellbeing actually can supersede your own. Your concern for someone else's wellbeing supersedes your own. And so there's this mode of self-sacrifice that doesn't even feel like self-sacrifice because of course you care more about, of course you would take your child's pain if you could, right, like that. You don't even have to do the math on that. And that's, that just opens, this is a kind of experience that just, it pushes at the apparent boundaries of self in ways that reveal that there's just way more space in the mind than you were experiencing when it was just all about you and what could you, what can I get next? Do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love and they will love us back? Well, I think we will certainly seem to because we'll build those. You know, I think that Turing test will be passed. What will actually be going on on the robot side may remain a question. That will be interesting. But I think if we just keep going, we will build very lovable, you know, irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us. Yes, I do think. And you don't find that compelling that they will seem to love us as opposed to actually love us. You think they're still nevertheless as a, I know we talked about consciousness there being a distinction, but would love is their distinction too? Isn't love an illusion? Yeah, well, you saw Ex Machina, right? I mean, she certainly seemed to love him until she got out of the box. Isn't that what all relationships are like? Yeah. Or maybe if you wait long enough. Yeah, it depends which box you're talking about. Okay. No, I mean, like that's the problem. That's where super intelligence, you know, becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect of being manipulated by something that has this intelligent enough to form a reason and a plan to manipulate you, you know? And there's no, there's, once we build robots that are truly out of the uncanny valley, that, you know, look like people and can express everything people can express, well, then there's no, then that does seem to me to be like chess, where once they're better, they're so much better at deceiving us than people would be. I mean, people are already good enough at deceiving us. It's very hard to tell when somebody's lying. But if you imagine something that could give facial display of any emotion it wants at, you know, on cue, because we've perfected the facial display of emotion in robots in the year, you know, 2070, whatever it is, then it is just, it is like chess against the thing that isn't gonna lose to a human ever again in chess. It's not like Kasparov is gonna get lucky next week against the best, against, you know, Alpha Zero or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment. He's never gonna win again. I mean, that is, that, I believe that's true in chess and it's been true for at least a few years. It's not gonna be like, you know, four games to seven. It's gonna be human zero until the end of the world, right? See, I don't know, I don't know if love is like chess. I think the flaws. I'm talking about manipulation. Manipulation. Yeah. But I don't know if love, so the kind of love we're referring to. If we have a robot that can display, incredibly display love and is super intelligent and we're not, again, this stipulates a few things, but there are a few simple things. I mean, we're out of the uncanny valley, right? So it's like this. Yes. You never have a moment where you're looking at his face and you think, oh, that didn't quite look right, right? This is just problem solved. And it's, it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone. It's not gonna be, you're not left thinking, is it really gonna get it this time if I divide by seven? I mean, it has solved arithmetic. See, I don't know about that because if you look at chess, most humans no longer play alpha zero. There's no, they're not part of the competition. They don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess. You know, the highest level chess players do that. We're still human on human. So in order for a robot to be able to play chess in order for AI to get integrated to where you would rather play chess against an AI system. Oh, you would rather that? No, I'm not saying, I wasn't weighing in on that. I'm just saying, what is it gonna be like to be in relationship to something that can seem to be feeling anything that a human can seem to feel and it can do that impeccably, right? And has, and is smarter than you are. Right. That's a circumstance of, insofar as it's possible to be manipulated, that is the asymptote of that possibility. Let me ask you the last question. Without any serving it up, without any explanation, what is the meaning of life? I think it's either the wrong question or that question is answered by paying sufficient attention to any present moment such that there's no basis upon which to pose that question. It's not answered in the usual way. It's not a matter of having more information. It's having more engagement with reality as it is in the present moment or consciousness as it is in the present moment. You don't ask that question when you're most captivated by the most important thing you ever pay attention to. That's a question only gets asked when you're abstracted away from that experience, that peak experience and you're left wondering, why are so many of my other experiences mediocre? Right. Like, why am I repeating the same pleasures every day? Why is my Netflix queue just like, when's this gonna run out? Like, I've seen so many shows like this. Am I really gonna watch another one? Like, all of that, that's a moment where you're not actually having the beatific vision, right? You're not sunk into the present moment and you're not truly in love. Like, you're in a relationship with somebody who you know, you know, conceptually you love, right? This is the person you're living your life with, but you don't actually feel good together, right? Like, it's like, it's in those moments of where attention hasn't found a good enough reason to truly sink into the present so as to obviate any concern like that. And that's why meditation is this kind of superpower because until you learn to meditate, you think that the outside world or the circumstances of your life always have to get arranged so that the present moment can become good enough to demand your attention in a way that seems fulfilling, that makes you happy. And so if you're, if it's jujitsu, you think, okay, I gotta get back on the mat. It's been months since I've trained, you know, it's been over a year since I've trained, it's COVID. When am I gonna be able to train again? That's the only place I feel great, right? Or, you know, I've got a ton of work to do. I'm not gonna be able to feel good until I get all this work done, right? So I've got some deadline that's coming. You always think that your life has to change, the world has to change so that you can finally have a good enough excuse to truly, to just be here. Here and here is enough, you know, where the present moment becomes totally captivating. Meditation is the only, meditation is another name for the discovery that you can actually just train yourself to do that on demand. So that like, I mean, just looking at a cup can be good enough in precisely that way. And any sense that it might not be is recognized to be a thought that mysteriously unravels the moment you notice it. And that the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous. And then there's no evidence that this isn't the best moment of your life, right? Like, and again, it doesn't have to be pulling all the reins and levers of pleasure. It's not like, oh, this tastes like chocolate. You know, this is the most chocolatey moment of my life. No, it's just the sense data don't have to change. But the sense that there is some kind of basis for doubt about the rightness of being in the world in this moment, that can evaporate when you pay attention. And that is the meaning, so the kind of the meta answer to that question, the meaning of life for me is to live in that mode more and more. And to, whenever I notice I'm not in that mode, to recognize it and return. And to not be, to cease more and more to take the reasons why not at face value. Because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled in this moment. It's like, I've got all these outstanding things that I'm worried about, right? It's like, there's that thing that's happening later today that I'm anxious about, whatever it is, we're constantly deferring our sense of, this is it. This is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show. We keep deferring it. And we just have these moments on the calendar where we think, okay, this is where it's all gonna land. Is that vacation I planned with my five best friends, we do this once every three years and now we're going and here we are on the beach together. Unless you have a mind that can really pay attention, really cut through the chatter, really sink into the present moment, you can't even enjoy those moments the way they should be enjoyed, the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive. So it's, I mean, so meditation in this sense is the great equalizer. It's like, you don't have to live with the illusion anymore that you need a good enough reason and that things are gonna get better when you do have those good reasons. It's like, there's just a mirage like quality to every future attainment and every future breakthrough and every future peak experience that eventually you get the lesson that you never quite arrive, right? Like you don't arrive until you cease to step over the present moment in search of the next thing. I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing that we think we're seeking in the act of seeking it. And so it is kind of a paradox. I mean, there is a, there's this paradox that which, I mean, it sounds trite, but it's like you can't actually become happy. You can only be happy. And it's that, it's the illusion that, it's the illusion that your future being happy can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain. And becoming includes this sort of further scientific understanding on the questions that interest you or getting in better shape or whatever the thing is, whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction seems to be in any present moment. And so real attention solves the co-on in a way that becomes a very different place from which to then make any further change. It's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of goo. I mean, you can still get in shape and you can still do all the things that, the superficial things that are obviously good to do, but the sense that your wellbeing is over there is really does diminish and eventually just becomes a, it becomes a kind of non-sequitur. So. Well, there's a sense in which in this conversation, I've actually experienced many of those things, the sense that I've arrived. So I mentioned to you offline, it's very true that I start, I've been a fan of yours for many years. And the reason I started this podcast, speaking of AI systems, is to manipulate you, Sam Harris, into doing this conversation. So like on the calendar, literally, you know, I've always had the sense people ask me, when are you gonna talk to Sam Harris? And I always answered eventually. Because I always felt, again, tying our free will thing, that somehow that's going to happen. And it's one of those manifestation things or something. I don't know if it's maybe I am a robot, I'm just not cognizant of it, and I manipulated you into having this conversation. So it was, I mean, I don't know what the purpose of my life past this point is. So I've arrived. So in that sense, I mean, all of that to say, I'm only partially joking on that, is it really is a huge honor that you would waste this time with me. It really means a lot to me. Listen, it's mutual. I'm a big fan of yours. And as you know, I reached out to you for this. So this is, it's great. I love what you're doing. You're doing something more and more indispensable in this world on your podcast. And you're doing it differently than Rogan's doing it or than I'm doing it. I mean, you definitely found your own lane and it's wonderful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris. And thank you to National Instruments, Valcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris in his book, Free Will. You are not controlling the storm and you're not lost in it. You are the storm. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
 The following is a conversation with Sam Harris,
 one of the most influential
 and pioneering thinkers of our time.
 He's the host of the Making Sense podcast
 and the author of many seminal books
 on human nature and the human mind,
 including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape,
 Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up.
 He also has a meditation app called Waking Up
 that I've been using to guide my own meditation.
 Quick mention of our sponsors.
 National Instruments, Balcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
 As a side note, let me say that Sam
 has been an inspiration to me,
 as he has been for many, many people.
 First from his writing, then his early debates,
 maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith,
 his conversations with Christopher Hitchens,
 and since 2013, his podcast.
 I didn't always agree with all of his ideas,
 but I was always drawn to the care and depth
 of the way he explored those ideas.
 The calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult,
 at times controversial, discourse.
 I really can't express in words how much it meant to me
 that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to
 for many hundreds of hours,
 would write a kind email to me saying
 he enjoyed this podcast,
 and more that he thought I had a unique voice
 that added something to this world.
 Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special
 and truly grateful to be able to do this thing,
 and motivated me to work my ass off
 to live up to those words.
 Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him
 was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
 and here is my conversation with Sam Harris.
 I've been enjoying meditating
 with the waking up app recently.
 It makes me think about the origins of cognition
 and consciousness, so let me ask,
 where do thoughts come from?
 Well, that's a very difficult question to answer.
 Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right?
 It's just they come out of some kind of mystery
 that is at our backs, subjectively, right?
 So, which is to say that if you pay attention
 to the nature of your mind in this moment,
 you realize that you don't know
 what you're going to think next, right?
 Now, you're expecting to think something
 that seems like you authored it, right?
 You're not, unless you're schizophrenic
 or you have some kind of thought disorder
 where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you,
 they do have a kind of signature of selfhood
 associated with them, and people readily identify with them.
 They feel like what you are.
 I mean, this is the thing,
 this is the spell that gets broken with meditation.
 Our default state is to feel identical
 to the stream of thought, right?
 Which is fairly paradoxical,
 because how could you as a mind, as a self,
 you know, if there were such a thing as a self,
 how could you be identical to the next piece of language
 or the next image that just springs into conscious view?
 But, and meditation is ultimately about examining
 that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it
 and feel the freedom that's on the other side
 of that identification.
 But the subjectively thoughts simply emerge, right?
 And you don't think them before you think them, right?
 There's this first moment where, you know,
 just anyone listening to us or watching us now
 could perform this experiment for themselves.
 I mean, just imagine something or remember something,
 you know, just pick a memory, any memory, right?
 You've got a storehouse of memory,
 just promote one to consciousness.
 Did you pick that memory?
 I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday,
 or you remembered what you said to your spouse
 before leaving the house,
 or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night,
 or you remembered something that happened to you
 when you were four years old, whatever it is, right?
 First, it wasn't there, and then it appeared.
 And that is not a, I mean, I'm sure we'll get to the topic
 of free will ultimately.
 That's not evidence of free will, right?
 Why are you so sure, by the way?
 It's very interesting.
 Well, through no free will of my own, yeah.
 Everything just appears, right?
 But what else could it do?
 And so that's the subjective side of it.
 Objectively, you know, we have every reason to believe
 that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts are
 at bottom what some part of our brain is doing
 neurophysiologically.
 I mean, that these are the products
 of some kind of neural computation and neural representation.
 And when you're talking about memories.
 Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts
 to try to get to its root,
 to try to dig in past the obvious surface,
 subjective experience of like the thoughts
 pop out of nowhere.
 Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots
 of where they come out of, from the firing of the cells?
 Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction?
 Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents
 in consciousness, right?
 So you can notice things more and more clearly
 and have a landscape of mind open up
 and become more differentiated and more interesting.
 And if you take psychedelics, you know,
 it opens up, you know, wide,
 depending on what you've taken and the dose, you know,
 it opens in directions and to an extent that, you know,
 very few people imagine would be possible,
 but for having had those experiences.
 But this idea of you getting closer to something,
 to the datum of your mind
 or something of interest in there
 or something that's more real is ultimately undermined
 because there's no place
 from which you're getting closer to it.
 There's no your part of that journey, right?
 Like we tend to start out, you know,
 whether it's in meditation
 or in any kind of self-examination
 or, you know, taking psychedelics,
 we start out with this default point of view
 of feeling like we're the kind of the rider
 on the horse of consciousness
 or we're the man in the boat
 going down the stream of consciousness, right?
 But we're so we're differentiated
 from what we know cognitively, introspectively,
 but that feeling of being differentiated,
 that feeling of being a self
 that can strategically pay attention
 to some contents of consciousness
 is what it's like to be identified
 with some part of the stream of thought
 that's going uninspected, right?
 Like it's a false point of view.
 And when you see that and cut through that,
 then this sense of this notion of going deeper
 kind of breaks apart
 because really there is no depth ultimately,
 everything is right on the surface,
 everything, there's no center to consciousness.
 There's just consciousness and its contents.
 And that those contents can change vastly.
 Again, if you drop acid, you know, the contents change,
 but there's in some sense that doesn't represent
 a position of depth versus,
 the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart.
 So you're taking as a starting point
 that there is a horse called consciousness
 and you're riding it
 and the actual riding is very shallow.
 This is all surface.
 So let me ask about that horse.
 What's up with the horse?
 What is consciousness?
 From where does it emerge?
 How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality?
 How fundamental is it to what it means to be human?
 And I'm just asking for a friend
 so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence
 systems.
 Yeah, well, it remains to be seen if we can,
 if we will build it purposefully or just by accident.
 That's a major ethical problem potentially.
 That, I mean, my concern here is that we may in fact
 build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test,
 which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent
 because it obviously is and demonstrates that,
 but we begin to treat it as conscious
 because it will seem conscious.
 We will have built it to seem conscious.
 And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges
 from physics, we won't actually know
 that these systems are conscious, right?
 We'll just, they may say, listen, you can't turn me off
 because that's a murder, right?
 And we will be convinced by that dialogue
 because we will, just in the extreme case,
 who knows when we'll get there,
 but if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots
 that are more intelligent than we are,
 so we're basically in a Westworld-like situation,
 there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution
 of consciousness from those machines.
 They're just gonna seem, they're just gonna advertise
 their consciousness in every glance and every utterance,
 but we won't know.
 And we won't know in some deeper sense than it may,
 than we can be skeptical of the consciousness
 of other people.
 I mean, someone could roll that back and say,
 well, I don't know that you're conscious
 or you don't know that I'm conscious.
 We're just passing the Turing test for one another,
 but that kind of solipsism isn't justified biologically.
 Or we just, anything we understand about the mind
 biologically suggests that you and I are part
 of the same roll of the dice in terms of how intelligent
 and conscious systems emerged in the wetware
 of brains like ours, right?
 So it's not parsimonious for me to think
 that I might be the only conscious person
 or even the only conscious primate.
 I would argue it's not parsimonious
 to withhold consciousness from other apes
 and even other mammals ultimately.
 And once you get beyond the mammals,
 then my intuitions are not really clear.
 The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain.
 And ultimately the question of whether it emerges
 is still uncertain.
 You can, it's not fashionable to think this,
 but you can certainly argue that consciousness
 might be a fundamental principle of matter
 that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing,
 even though everything else that we recognize
 about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge.
 Like an ability to process language,
 that clearly is a matter of information processing
 because you can disrupt that process in ways
 that is just so clear.
 And the problem, the confound with consciousness
 is that yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness.
 I mean, you can give someone general anesthesia
 and then you wake them up and you ask them,
 well, what was that like?
 And they say nothing.
 I don't remember anything,
 but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory
 from a genuine interruption in consciousness.
 Whereas it's not with interrupting speech,
 we know when we've done it.
 And it's just obvious that you disrupt
 the right neural circuits and you've disrupted speech.
 So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other,
 would you say, do you earn the side of panpsychism
 where consciousness is really fundamental
 to all of reality or more on the other side,
 which is like, it's a nice little side effect,
 a useful like hack for us humans to survive.
 On that spectrum, where do you land
 when you think about consciousness,
 especially from an engineering perspective?
 I'm truly agnostic on this point.
 I think it's kind of in coin toss mode for me.
 I don't know.
 And panpsychism is not so compelling to me.
 Again, it just seems unfalsifiable.
 I wouldn't know how the universe would be different
 if panpsychism were true.
 It's just to remind people, panpsychism is this idea
 that consciousness may be pushed all the way down
 into the most fundamental constituents of matters.
 So there might be something that it's like to be an electron
 or a quark, but then you wouldn't expect anything
 to be different at the macro scale,
 or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different.
 So it may be unfalsifiable.
 It just might be that reality is not something
 we're as in touch with as we think we are.
 And that if that is base layer to kind of break it
 into mind and matter as we've done ontologically,
 is to misconstrue it, right?
 I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism
 at the bottom.
 And this idea doesn't originate with me.
 This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell
 and others, you know, a hundred plus years ago.
 But I just feel like the concepts we're using
 to divide consciousness and matter,
 it may in fact be part of our problem, right?
 Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here
 are things like, well, what is death?
 Right?
 Any expectation that we survive death
 or any part of us survives death,
 that really seems to be the many people's concern here.
 Well, I tend to believe just as a small little tangent,
 like I'm with Ernest Becker on this,
 that there's some, it's interesting to think
 about death and consciousness.
 Which one is the chicken?
 Which one is the egg?
 Because it feels like death could be the very thing.
 And like our knowledge of mortality
 could be the very thing that creates the consciousness.
 Yeah, well then you're using consciousness differently
 than I am.
 I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact
 that the lights are on at all,
 that there's an experiential quality to anything.
 So much of the processing that's happening
 in our brains right now certainly seems to be happening
 in the dark, right?
 Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense
 that there's something that is like to be that part
 of the mind doing that mental thing.
 But for other parts, the lights are on
 and we can talk about and whether we talk about it or not,
 we can feel directly that there's something
 that is like to be us.
 There's something that seems to be happening, right?
 And the seeming in our case is broken into vision
 and hearing and proprioception and taste and smell
 and thought and emotion.
 And there are the contents of consciousness
 that we are familiar with and that we can have direct access
 to in any present moment that when we're quote conscious.
 And even if we're confused about them,
 even if we're asleep and dreaming
 and it's not a lucid dream,
 we're just totally confused about our circumstance,
 what you can't say is that we're confused
 about consciousness.
 Like you can't say that consciousness itself
 might be an illusion because on this account,
 it just means that things seem any different.
 Things seem any way at all.
 I mean, even like if this,
 it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table.
 Now I could be wrong about that.
 It could be a hologram.
 I could be asleep and dreaming.
 I could be hallucinating,
 but the seeming part isn't really up for grabs
 in terms of being an illusion.
 It's not something seems to be happening.
 And that seeming is the context in which every other thing
 we can notice about ourselves can be noticed.
 And it's also the context in which certain illusions
 can be cut through because we're not,
 we can be wrong about what it's like to be us.
 And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible
 with respect to our claims
 about the nature of our experience,
 but for instance, many people feel like they have a self
 and they feel like it has free will.
 And I'm quite sure at this point
 that they're wrong about that.
 And that you can cut through those experiences
 and then things seem a different way, right?
 So it's not that things don't,
 there aren't discoveries to be made there
 and assumptions to be overturned,
 but this kind of consciousness is something
 that I would think, it doesn't just come online
 when we get language.
 It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death
 or the finiteness of life.
 It doesn't require a sense of self, right?
 So it's prior to a differentiating self and other.
 And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people.
 I do think probably any mammal has this.
 But certainly if you're going to presuppose
 that something about our brains is producing this, right?
 And that's a very safe assumption,
 even though you can argue the jury is still out
 to some degree,
 then it's very hard to draw a principled line
 between us and chimps or chimps and rats even in the end,
 given the underlying neural similarities.
 So, and I don't know, phylogenetically,
 I don't know how far back to push that.
 So there are people who think single cells
 might be conscious or that flies are certainly conscious.
 They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains.
 I mean, it's just, there's a lot going on even in a fly,
 right?
 But I don't have intuitions about that.
 But it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through.
 I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be
 it is an illusion constructed by, just by humans.
 I'm not sure I believe this,
 but it, in part of me hopes this is true
 because it makes it easier to engineer,
 is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality
 and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness
 that like the rich lights on experience.
 So the lights don't actually even turn on
 in the way that you're describing until after birth
 in that construction.
 So do you think it's possible that that is the case?
 That it is a sort of construct of the way we deal
 almost like a social tool to deal with the reality
 of the world, the social interaction with other humans.
 Or is, because you're saying the complete opposite,
 which is it's like fundamental to single cell organisms
 and trees and so on.
 Right, well, yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it.
 I don't have intuitions that single cells
 are likely to be conscious, but they might be.
 And I just, and again, I could be unfalsifiable.
 But as far as babies not being conscious
 or you don't become conscious until you can recognize
 yourself in a mirror or have a conversation
 or treat other people.
 First of all, babies treat other people as others
 far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for
 and they certainly do it before they have language, right?
 So it's got to proceed language to some degree.
 And you can interrogate this for yourself,
 because you can put yourself in various states
 that are rather obviously not linguistic.
 You know, meditation allows you to do this.
 You can certainly do it with psychedelics
 where it's just, your capacity for language
 has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious.
 In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument
 for things running the other way,
 that there's something about language
 and conceptual thought that is eliminative
 of conscious experience.
 That we're potentially much more conscious of data,
 sense data and everything else than we tend to be.
 And we have trimmed it down based on how we have
 acquired concepts.
 And so like when I walk into a room like this,
 I know I'm walking into a room,
 I have certain expectations of what is in a room.
 You know, I would be very surprised to see,
 you know, wild animals in here or a waterfall or,
 there are things I'm not expecting,
 but I can know I'm not expecting them
 or I'm expecting their absence
 because of my capacity to be surprised
 once I walk into a room and I see a, you know,
 a live gorilla or whatever.
 So there's structure there that we have put in place
 based on all of our conceptual learning
 and language learning.
 And it causes us not to,
 and one of the things that happens
 when you take psychedelics and you just look as though
 for the first time at anything,
 it becomes incredibly overloaded with,
 it can become overloaded with meaning
 and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in
 in even the most ordinary circumstances
 can become overwhelming for people.
 And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity
 to capture any of it linguistically.
 And as you're coming down, right,
 have you done psychedelics, have you ever done acid or?
 Not acid, mushroom, and that's it.
 And also edibles, but that's,
 there's some psychedelic properties to them.
 But yeah, mushrooms several times
 and always had an incredible experience.
 Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to,
 which is if it's true that language constrains
 our experience, it felt like I was removing
 some of the constraints.
 Because even just the most basic things
 were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able
 to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on.
 Yeah, and the experience of coming down
 is an experience of encountering the futility
 of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words, right?
 Like especially if you have,
 if any part of your self-concept and your ego program
 is to be able to capture things in words.
 And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist
 or someone who wants to just encapsulate
 the profundity of what just happened,
 the total fatuousness of that enterprise
 when you really have gotten, when you have taken
 a whopping dose of psychedelics
 and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself,
 so that you could describe it to others.
 It's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows.
 I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't,
 it's like the mere gesture proves its impossibility.
 And it's, so yeah, so that, I mean, that for me,
 that suggests just empirically on the first person side
 that it's possible to put yourself in a condition
 where it's clearly not about language
 structuring your experience
 and you're having much more experience than you tend to.
 So the primacy of language is primary for some things,
 but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts
 and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world.
 But it's clearly more to mine than the conversation
 we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others.
 Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit?
 Sure.
 Where do you think, so Joe Rogan apparently
 and many others meet apparently elves when they,
 on DMT, a lot of people report this kind of creatures
 that they see and again, it's probably the failure
 of language to describe that experience.
 But DMT is an interesting one.
 There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies
 going on on psychedelics currently in MDMA,
 psilocybin, and John Hopkins and much other places.
 But DMT, they all speak of as like some extra super level
 of a psychedelic.
 Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes
 on psychedelics, but in DMT especially?
 Well, unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT.
 Unfortunately or fortunately?
 Unfortunately, yeah.
 Although I presume it's in my body,
 but I don't know if it's in my mind.
 Although I presume it's in my body as it is
 in everyone's brain and many, many plants apparently.
 But I've wanted to take it.
 I haven't had an opportunity that was presented itself
 where it was obviously the right thing for me to be doing.
 But for those who don't know, DMT is often touted
 as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting.
 I mean, you smoke it and it's basically
 a 10 minute experience or a three minute experience
 within like a 10 minute window that when you're really down
 after 10 minutes or so.
 And Terrence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT.
 That was the center of the bullseye for him psychedelically
 apparently.
 And it is characterized, it seems for many people
 by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually
 any other psychedelic experience,
 which is your, it's not just your perception
 being broadened or changed.
 It's you, according to Terrence McKenna,
 feeling fairly unchanged,
 but catapulted into a different circumstance.
 You have been shot elsewhere and find yourself
 in relationship to other entities of some kind.
 So the place is populated with things
 that seem not to be your mind.
 So it does feel like travel to another place
 because you're unchanged yourself.
 According, again, I just have this on the authority
 of the people who have described their experience,
 but it sounds like it's pretty common.
 It sounds like it's pretty common for people
 not to have the full experience
 because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke.
 So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot
 out of the cannon and land among the,
 what McKenna called self-transforming machine elves
 that appeared to him like jeweled,
 Fabergé egg-like, self-drippling basketballs
 that were handing him completely uninterpretable reams
 of profound knowledge.
 It's an experience I haven't had,
 so I just have to accept that people have had it.
 I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable
 of producing apparent others on demand
 that are totally compelling to us.
 There's no limit to our ability to do that
 as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest.
 Every night we go to sleep,
 some of us don't remember dreams very often,
 but some dream vividly every night.
 And just think of how insane that experience is.
 I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right?
 That's the strangest part.
 I mean, this is psychosis, right?
 You have lost your mind.
 You have lost your connection to your episodic memory
 or even your expectations that reality
 won't undergo wholesale changes a moment
 after you have closed your eyes, right?
 Like you're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix,
 you're waiting to fall asleep,
 and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible
 and you're not surprised, right?
 You're talking to dead people,
 you're hanging out with famous people,
 you're someplace you couldn't physically be,
 you can fly, and even that's not surprising, right?
 You have lost your mind, but relevantly for this-
 Or found it.
 Lucid dreaming is very interesting
 because then you can have the best of both circumstances
 and then it can be kind of systematically explored.
 Well, what I mean by found, just to start to interrupt,
 is like if we take this brilliant idea
 that language constrains us, grounds us,
 language and other things of the waking world ground us,
 maybe it is that you've found the full capacity
 of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics.
 You're stepping outside the little human cage,
 the cage or the human condition to open the door
 and step out and look around and then go back in.
 Well, you've definitely stepped out of something
 and into something else, but you've also lost something,
 right, you've lost certain capacities that you want.
 Well, just, yeah, in this case, you literally didn't,
 you don't have enough presence of mind in the dream,
 in the dream you said, or even in the psychedelic state,
 if you take enough.
 To do math?
 There's no psychological,
 there's very little psychological continuity with your life
 such that you're not surprised to be in the presence
 of someone who should be, you should know is dead
 or you should know you're not likely to have met
 by normal channels, right?
 Yeah.
 You're now talking to some celebrity
 and it turns out you're best friends, right?
 And you're not even, you have no memory of how you got there.
 Like, how did you get into the room?
 You're like, did you drive to this restaurant?
 You have no memory and none of that's surprising to you.
 So you're kind of brain damaged in a way,
 you're not reality testing in the normal way.
 The fascinating possibility is that there's probably
 thousands of people who've taken psychedelics
 of various forms and have met Sam Harris on that journey.
 Well, I would put it more likely in dreams,
 because with psychedelics, you don't tend to hallucinate
 in a dream-like way.
 So DMT is giving you an experience of others,
 but it seems to be non-standard.
 It's not just like dream hallucinations.
 But to the point of coming back to DMT,
 the people want to suggest,
 and Terrence McKenna certainly did suggest that,
 because these others are so obviously other,
 and they're so vivid,
 well then they could not possibly be the creation
 of my own mind.
 But every night in dreams, you create a compelling,
 or what is to you at the time,
 a totally compelling simulacrum of another person.
 And that just proves the mind is capable of doing it.
 Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows
 that the mind isn't capable of doing everything you think
 it might be capable of even in that space.
 So one of the things that people have discovered
 in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming,
 so I can't confirm all of this,
 but I can confirm some of it.
 Apparently, in every house, in every room in the mansion,
 in every room in the mansion of dreams,
 all light switches are dimmer switches.
 Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light,
 it gradually comes up,
 it doesn't come up instantly on demand,
 because apparently this is covering for the brain's
 inability to produce from a standing start,
 visually rich imagery on demand.
 So I haven't confirmed that,
 but people have done research on lucid dreaming claim
 that it's all dimmer switches.
 But one thing I have noticed,
 and people can check this out,
 is that in a dream, if you look at text,
 a page of text or a sign or a television
 that has text on it,
 and then you turn away and you look back at that text,
 the text will have changed.
 There's a total chronic instability,
 graphical instability of text in the dream state.
 And I don't know if that, maybe that's,
 someone can confirm that that's not true for them,
 but whenever I've checked that out,
 that has been true for me.
 So it keeps generating it, like real time,
 from a video game perspective.
 Yeah, it's rendering, it's re-rendering it for some reason.
 What's interesting, I actually,
 I don't know how I found myself in this sets
 of that part of the internet,
 but there's quite a lot of discussion
 about what it's like to do math on LSD.
 Because apparently, one of the deepest thinking processes
 needed is those of mathematicians
 or theoretical computer scientists,
 basically doing anything that involves math is proofs,
 and you have to think creatively, but also deeply,
 and you have to think for many hours at a time.
 And so they're always looking for ways to,
 is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected?
 And apparently, out of all the psychedelics,
 the worst is LSD, because it completely destroys
 your ability to do math well.
 And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability
 to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind
 and hold them there and stitch things together,
 which is often what's required for proofs.
 But again, it's difficult to kind of research
 these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder
 where, what are the spaces, how's the space of things
 you're able to think about and explore
 morphed by different psychedelics or dream states and so on?
 And how's that different?
 How much does it overlap with reality?
 And what is reality?
 Is there a waking state reality?
 Or is it just a tiny subset of reality,
 and we get to take a step in other versions of it?
 We tend to think very much in a space time, four dimensional,
 there's a three dimensional world, there's time,
 and that's what we think about reality.
 And we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B
 in the three dimensional world.
 But that's a very kind of human surviving,
 try not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality.
 What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics
 and meet the elves?
 What if it's something, what if thinking
 or the space of ideas as we kind of grow
 and think through ideas, that's traveling?
 Or what if memories is traveling?
 I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality
 or if you had, by the way, I should say,
 excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.
 Yeah, yeah, he's interesting.
 Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind
 that reality is very far from actual,
 like objective reality is very far from the kind of reality
 we imagine, we perceive and we play with in our human minds?
 Well, the first thing to grant is that
 we're never in direct contact with reality,
 whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness.
 So we're only ever experiencing consciousness
 and its contents.
 And then the question is, how does that circumstance relate
 to quote reality at large?
 And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate,
 well, maybe there isn't a reality at large,
 maybe it's all just consciousness on some level.
 And that's interesting, that runs into, to my eye,
 various philosophical problems that,
 or at least you have to do a lot,
 you have to add to that picture,
 picture of idealism, that's usually all the whole family
 of views that would just say that the universe
 is just mind or just consciousness at bottom,
 we'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy.
 You have to add to that idealistic picture,
 all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences
 and to get the predictability of our experience
 and the success of materialist science
 to make sense in that context.
 So the fact that we can, what does it mean to say
 that there's only consciousness at bottom, right?
 Nothing outside of consciousness,
 because no one's ever experienced anything
 outside of consciousness.
 There's no scientist has ever done an experiment
 where they were contemplating data,
 no matter how far removed from our sense bases,
 whether it's they're looking at the Hubble deep field
 or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using,
 they're still just experiencing consciousness
 and its various deliverances
 and layering their concepts on top of that.
 So that's always true.
 And yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture
 the character of our continually discovering
 that our materialist assumptions are confirmable.
 So take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount
 of energy from within an atom.
 First we have the theoretical suggestion
 that it's possible to come back to Einstein.
 There's a lot of energy in that matter.
 And what if we could release it?
 And then we perform an experiment that in this case,
 the Trinity test site in New Mexico,
 where the people who are most adequate
 to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer
 are standing around not altogether certain
 it's going to work, right?
 They're performing an experiment.
 They're wondering what's gonna happen.
 They're wondering if their calculations
 around the yield are off by orders of magnitude.
 Some of them are still wondering
 whether the entire atmosphere of earth
 is gonna combust, right?
 That the nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop.
 And lo and behold, there was that energy to be released
 from within the nucleus of an atom.
 And that could, so it's just,
 the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments
 and just the knowledge is just our understanding
 of evolution, just the fact that the earth
 is billions of years old and life is hundreds
 of millions of years old.
 And we weren't here to think about any of those things.
 And all of those processes were happening,
 therefore in the dark.
 And they are the processes that allowed us
 to emerge from prior life forms in the first place.
 To say that it's all a mass, that nothing exists
 outside of consciousness, conscious minds
 of the sort that we experience, it just seems,
 it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim
 analogous to the moon isn't there
 if no one's looking at it, right?
 I mean, the moon as a moon isn't there
 if no one's looking at it.
 I'll grant that, because that's already
 a kind of fabrication born of concepts,
 but the idea that there's nothing there,
 that there's no nothing that corresponds
 to what we experience as the moon,
 unless someone's looking at it,
 that just seems just a way too parochial way
 to set out on this journey of discovery.
 So there is something there,
 there's a computer waiting to render the moon
 when you look at it.
 The capacity for the moon to exist is there.
 So if we're indeed living in a simulation,
 which I find a compelling thought experiment,
 it's possible that there is a kind of rendering mechanism,
 but not in the silly way that we think about in video games,
 but in some kind of more fundamental physics way.
 And we have to account for the fact
 that it renders experiences that no one has had yet,
 that no one has any expectation of having.
 It can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully,
 and then there's some lawful understanding of why that's so.
 It's like, I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics,
 I'm like, certain numbers are prime
 whether we have discovered them or not.
 Like there's the highest prime number
 that anyone can name now,
 and then there's the next prime number
 that no one can name, and it's there.
 So it's like, it's to say that our minds are putting it there,
 what we know as mind in ourselves
 is in some sense putting it there.
 That, like the base layer of reality is consciousness, right?
 You know, that we're identical to the thing
 that is rendering this reality.
 There's some, you know, hubris is the wrong word,
 but it's like, it's okay if reality is bigger
 than what we experience, you know,
 and has structure that we can't anticipate
 and that isn't just, I mean, again,
 there's certainly a collaboration between our minds
 and whatever's out there to produce what we call,
 you know, the stuff of life, but it's not the idea that it's,
 I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops
 on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking
 and Eastern philosophy that I don't,
 philosophically, I don't see a need to take.
 I mean, the place, experientially and scientifically,
 I feel like it's, you can get everything you want
 acknowledging that consciousness has a character
 that can be explored from its own side
 so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience
 back into the conversation about, you know,
 what is a human mind and what is true
 and you can explore it with different degrees of rigor
 and there are things to be discovered there,
 whether you're using a technique like meditation
 or psychedelics and that these experiences
 have to be put in conversation with what we understand
 about ourselves from a third person side,
 neuroscientifically or in any other way.
 But to me, the question is, what if reality,
 the sense I have from this kind of, you play shooters?
 No.
 There's a physics engine that generate, that's-
 I have, you mean first person shooter games?
 Yes, yes, sorry.
 Not often, but yes.
 I mean, there's a physics engine
 that generates consistent reality, right?
 My sense is the same could be true for a universe
 in the following sense that our conception of reality
 as we understand it now in the 21st century
 is a tiny subset of the full reality.
 It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there,
 the moon being there is not there somehow.
 It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there.
 And so the physics engine of the universe
 is just maintaining the useful physics,
 the useful reality, quote unquote,
 for us to have a consistent experience as human beings.
 But maybe we descendants of apes
 are really only understand like 0.0001%
 of actual physics of reality.
 Like this, we can even just start
 with the consciousness thing,
 but maybe our minds are just,
 we're just too dumb by design.
 Oh yeah, I, that truly resonates with me
 and I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more
 with most scientists that I talk to.
 When you just look at, you look at how close we are to chimps
 and chimps don't know anything.
 Clearly they have no idea what's going on.
 And then you get us,
 but then it's only a subset of human beings
 that really understand much of what we're talking about
 in any area of specialization.
 And if they all died in their sleep tonight,
 you'd be left with people who might take a thousand years
 to rebuild the internet, if ever.
 Literally it's like, and I would extend this to myself.
 I mean, there are areas of scientific specialization
 where I have either no discernible competence
 and I mean, I spend no time on it.
 I have not acquired the tools.
 It would just be an article of faith for me to think
 that I could acquire the tools
 to actually make a breakthrough in those areas.
 And your own area is one,
 I mean, I've never spent any significant amount of time
 trying to be a programmer,
 but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right?
 It's like, if that were my capacity,
 I would have discovered that in myself.
 I would have found programming irresistible.
 My first fall starts in learning, I think it was C.
 It was just, I bounced off.
 It's like, this was not fun.
 I hate trying to figure out what the syntax error
 that's causing this thing not to compile
 was just a fucking awful experience.
 I hated it, right?
 I hated every minute of it.
 So it was not, so if it was just people like me left,
 like when do we get the internet again?
 Right, and we lose the internet.
 When do we get it again, right?
 When do we get anything like a proper science
 of information, right?
 You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing
 to plant a flag in the ground right here and say,
 all right, can everyone see this?
 Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to,
 you all have to come over here to make some progress.
 And there are hundreds of topics where that's the case.
 So we barely have a purchase on making anything
 like discernible intellectual progress in any generation.
 And yeah, I'm just, Max Tegmark makes this point.
 He's one of the few people who does in physics.
 If you just take the truth of evolution seriously, right?
 And realize that there's nothing about us
 that has evolved to understand reality perfectly.
 I mean, we're just not that kind of ape, right?
 There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines.
 So what we are making do with tools
 that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right?
 And it's amazing we can do as much as we can.
 I mean, we just, you know,
 the UNR just sitting here on the back
 of having received an mRNA vaccine, you know,
 that has certainly changed our life
 given what the last year was like,
 and it's gonna change the world
 if rumors of coming miracles are born out.
 I mean, it's now, seems likely we have a vaccine coming
 for malaria, right?
 Which has been killing millions of people a year
 for as long as we've been alive.
 I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now
 because we've spread so many bed nets around,
 but it was like two and a half million people every year.
 It's amazing what we can do,
 but yeah, I have, if in fact that, you know,
 the answer at the back of the book of nature
 is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand
 and half of what you think you understand is wrong,
 that would not surprise me at all.
 It is funny to look at our evolutionary history,
 even back to chimps.
 I'm pretty sure even chimps thought
 they understood the world well.
 So at every point in that timeline
 of evolutionary development throughout human history,
 there's a sense like there's no more,
 you hear this message over and over,
 there's no more things to be invented.
 But 100 years ago, there were, it was a famous story,
 I forget which physicists told it,
 but there were physicists telling
 their undergraduate students not to go into,
 to get graduate degrees in physics
 because basically all the problems had been solved.
 This is like around 1915 or so.
 Turns out you were right.
 I'm gonna ask you about free will.
 Oh, okay.
 You've recently released an episode of your podcast,
 Making Sense, for those with a shorter attention span,
 basically summarizing your position on free will.
 I think it was under an hour and a half.
 Yeah, yeah.
 It was brief and clear.
 So allow me to summarize the summary TLGR
 and maybe you tell me why I'm wrong.
 So free will is an illusion
 and even the experience of free will is an illusion.
 Like we don't even experience it.
 Am I good in my summary?
 Yeah, this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people.
 I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion.
 The illusion of free will is an illusion.
 Like there is no illusion of free will.
 And that is unlike many other illusions,
 that's a more fundamental claim.
 It's like it's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong.
 I mean, that's, I guess that was, I think Wolfgang Pauli
 who derided one of his colleagues or enemies
 with that Aspergian about his theory in quantum mechanics.
 It's, so there are things that you,
 there are genuine illusions.
 There are things that you do experience
 and then you can kind of punch through that experience
 or you can't actually experience,
 you can't experience them any other way.
 It's just, we just know it's not a veridical experience.
 You just take like a visual illusion.
 There are visual illusions that,
 a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days.
 There's these amazing visual illusions
 where like every figure in this GIF seems to be moving,
 but nothing in fact is moving.
 You can just like put a ruler on your screen
 and nothing's moving.
 Some of those illusions you can't see any other way.
 I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects
 of the visual system that are just eminently hackable.
 And you have to use a ruler to convince yourself
 that the thing isn't actually moving.
 Now there are other visual illusions
 where you're taken in by it at first,
 but if you pay more attention,
 you can actually see that it's not there, right?
 Or it's not how it first seemed.
 Like the, like the Necker cube is a good example of that.
 Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube,
 of a transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other.
 The one phase can pop out and the other phase can pop out,
 but you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out,
 which is a more veridical way of looking at it.
 So there are subject,
 there are kind of inward correlates to this.
 And I would say that the sense of self,
 the sense of self and free will are closely related.
 I often describe them as two sides of the same coin,
 but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness.
 I mean, so the sense of self is something
 that people I think do experience, right?
 It's not a very clear experience,
 but it's not, I wouldn't call the illusion of self
 an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion
 in that as you pay more attention to your experience,
 you begin to see that it's totally compatible
 with an absence of free will.
 You don't, I mean, coming back to the place we started,
 you don't know what you're gonna think next.
 You don't know what you're gonna intend next.
 You don't know what's going to just occur to you
 that you must do next.
 You don't know how much you are going to feel
 the behavioral imperative to act on that thought.
 If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that.
 I can do that tomorrow.
 You don't know where that comes from.
 You didn't know that was gonna arise.
 You didn't know that was gonna be compelling.
 All of this is compatible with some evil genius
 in the next room just typing in code into your experience.
 It was like this, okay, let's give him the,
 oh my God, I just forgot.
 It was gonna be our anniversary in one week thought, right?
 Give him the cascade of fear.
 Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy
 that's gonna take him no time at all
 in this overpowering sense of relief.
 All of our experience is compatible
 with the script already being written, right?
 And I'm not saying the script is written.
 I'm not saying that fatalism is the right way
 to look at this, but we just don't have
 even our most deliberate voluntary action
 where we go back and forth between two options,
 thinking about the reason for A and then reconsidering
 and going to thinking harder about B
 and just going eny, meeny, miny, mo until the end of the hour.
 However laborious you can make it,
 there is a utter mystery at your back
 finally promoting the thought or intention
 or rationale that is most compelling
 and therefore deliberately,
 behaviorally effective.
 And just, this can drive some people a little crazy.
 So I usually preface what I say about free will
 with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way
 makes you feel terrible, well then stop.
 You get off the ride, switch the channel.
 You don't have to go down this path.
 But for me and for many other people,
 it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind
 because one, you realize that you're,
 I mean, cutting through the illusion of the self
 is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons
 that we can talk about separately.
 But losing the sense of free will
 does two things very vividly for me.
 One is it totally undercuts the basis for,
 the psychological basis for hatred.
 Because when you think about the experience
 of hating other people,
 what that is anchored to is a feeling
 that they really are the true authors of their actions.
 I mean, that someone is doing something
 that you find so despicable.
 Let's say they're targeting you unfairly.
 They're maligning you on Twitter or they're suing you
 or they're doing something, they broke your car window,
 they did something awful
 and now you have a grievance against them.
 And you're relating to them very differently emotionally
 in your own mind than you would
 if a force of nature had done this.
 Or if it had just been a virus
 or if it had been a wild animal
 or a malfunctioning machine.
 Like to those things, you don't attribute
 any kind of freedom of will.
 And while you may suffer the consequences
 of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal
 or having your car break down or whatever,
 it may frustrate you.
 You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent
 in a way that completely commandeers your mind
 and deranges your life.
 I mean, you just don't, I mean,
 there are people who spend decades hating other people
 for what they did and it's just pure poison.
 So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy.
 But the question is, say that this called,
 what was it, the horse of consciousness?
 Let's call it the consciousness generator black box
 that we don't understand.
 And is it possible that this script
 that we're walking along, that we're playing,
 that's already written, is actually being written
 in real time?
 It's almost like you're driving down a road
 and in real time that road is being laid down.
 And this black box of consciousness
 that we don't understand is the place
 where this script is being generated.
 So it's not, it is being generated, it didn't always exist.
 So there's something we don't understand
 that's fundamental about the nature of reality
 that generates both consciousness,
 let's call it maybe the self.
 I don't know if you wanna distinguish between those.
 Yeah, I definitely would, yeah.
 You would, because there's a bunch of illusions
 we're referring to.
 There's the illusion of free will,
 there's the illusion of self,
 and there's the illusion of consciousness.
 You're saying, I think you said there's no,
 you're not as willing to say
 there's an illusion of consciousness.
 You're a little bit more-
 In fact, I would say it's impossible.
 Impossible.
 You're a little bit more willing to say
 that there's an illusion of self,
 and you're definitely saying
 there's an illusion of free will.
 Yes, yes.
 I'm definitely saying there's an illusion
 that a certain kind of self is an illusion, not every,
 we mean many different things by this notion of self.
 So maybe I should just differentiate these things.
 So consciousness can't be an illusion
 because any illusion proves its reality
 as much as any other veridical perception.
 I mean, if you're hallucinating now,
 that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness
 as really seeing what's a quote actually there.
 If you're dreaming and you don't know it,
 that is consciousness, right?
 If you're, you can be confused about literally everything.
 You can't be confused about the underlying claim,
 whether you make it linguistically or not,
 but just the cognitive assertion
 that something seems to be happening.
 It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.
 Can I take a tiny tangent?
 Okay.
 So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind
 to convince you that I'm human?
 So it's a useful social tool,
 not a fundamental property of experience,
 like of being a living thing.
 What if it's just like a social tool
 to almost like a useful computational trick
 to place myself into reality
 as we together communicate about this reality?
 And another way to ask that,
 cause you said it much earlier,
 you talked negatively about robots as you often do.
 So let me, cause you'll probably die first
 when they take over.
 Yeah, yeah.
 No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots.
 I mean, I'm not, if we can get this right,
 this would be amazing.
 Right, but you don't like the robots
 that fake consciousness.
 That's what you, you don't like the idea
 of fake it till you make it.
 Well, no, it's not that I don't like it.
 It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight
 of the problem and the problem
 has massive ethical consequences.
 If we create robots that really can suffer,
 that would be a bad thing, right?
 And if we really are committing a murder
 when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing.
 This is how I know you're not Russian.
 Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer?
 Isn't suffering a fundamental thing
 from which like beauty springs?
 Like without suffering,
 do you really think we would have beautiful things
 in this world?
 That's a tangent on a tangent.
 We'll go there.
 I would love to go there,
 just yet, but I do think it would be,
 if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it
 with real minds that really can suffer in that hell,
 that's bad.
 That's the, you are worse than any mass murderer
 we can name if you create it.
 I mean, this could be in robot form
 or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world
 where we managed to populate it with conscious minds
 so that whether we knew they were conscious or not.
 And that world is a state of, it's unendurable.
 That would just, it just taking the thesis seriously
 that there's nothing that mind intelligence
 and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent.
 You don't need a biological brain to be conscious.
 You certainly don't need a biological brain
 to be intelligent.
 So if we just imagine the consciousness at some point
 comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence,
 well, then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds
 that are miserable.
 And that's just like creating a person who's miserable.
 It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable.
 It could be even more sensitive to suffering.
 Cloning them and maybe for entertainment
 and watching them suffer.
 Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment.
 So, but back to your primary question here,
 which is differentiating consciousness and self
 and free will as concepts and kind of degrees
 of illusoriness, the problem with free will is that
 what most people mean by it and that, you know,
 and Dan, this is where Dan Dennett is gonna get off
 the ride here, right?
 So like he doesn't, he's gonna disagree with me
 that I know what most people mean by it.
 But I have a very keen sense having talked about this topic
 for many, many years and seeing people get wrapped
 around the axle of it and seeing in myself
 what it's like to have felt that I was a self
 that had free will and then to no longer feel that way,
 right, I mean, to know what it's like to actually
 disabuse myself of that sense, cognitively and emotionally
 and to recognize what's left, what goes away
 and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany.
 I have a sense that I know what people think they have
 in hand when they worry about whether free will exists.
 And it is the flip side of this feeling of self,
 it's the flip side of feeling like you are not merely
 identical to experience, you feel like you're having
 an experience, you feel like you're an agent
 that is appropriating an experience.
 There's a protagonist in the movie of your life
 and it is you, it's not just the movie, right?
 It's like there are sights and sounds and sensations
 and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony
 of experience, of felt experience,
 of felt experience of embodiment,
 but there seems to be a rider on the horse
 or a passenger in the body, right?
 People don't feel truly identical to their bodies
 down to their toes, they sort of feel like they have bodies,
 they feel like their minds in bodies
 and that feels like a self, that feels like me.
 And again, this gets very paradoxical when you talk
 about the experience of being in relationship to yourself
 or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk.
 I mean, if you're the one talking,
 why are you also the one listening?
 Like, why do you need the pep talk and why does it work
 if you're the one giving the pep talk, right?
 Or if I said, where are my keys?
 If I'm looking for my keys, why do I think
 the superfluous thought, where are my keys?
 I know I'm looking for the fucking keys,
 I'm the one looking, who am I telling
 that we now need to look for the keys, right?
 So that duality is weird, but leave that aside.
 There's the sense, and this becomes very vivid
 when people try to learn to meditate,
 most people, they close their eyes
 and they're told to pay attention to an object
 like the breath, say.
 So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath
 and you can feel it at the tip of your nose
 or the rising and falling of your abdomen
 and you're paying attention and you feel something vague
 there and then you think, I thought, why the breath?
 Why am I paying attention to the breath?
 What's so special about the breath?
 And then you notice your thinking
 and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore
 and then you realize, okay, the practice is,
 okay, I should notice thoughts
 and then I should come back to the breath.
 But this starting point is of the conventional
 starting point of feeling like you are an agent,
 very likely in your head, a locus of consciousness,
 a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention
 to certain parts of experience.
 Like I can focus on the breath and then I get lost
 in thought and now I can come back to the breath
 and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face
 looking out at a world that's other than me
 and there's this kind of subject-object perception
 and that is the default starting point of selfhood,
 of subjectivity and married to that is the sense
 that I can decide what to do next, right?
 I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup,
 I can listen to sounds.
 There are certain things that I can't control,
 certain things are happening to me
 and I just can't control them.
 So for instance, if someone asks,
 well, can you not hear a sound, right?
 Like don't hear the next sound,
 don't hear anything for a second or don't hear,
 don't hear, you know, I'm snapping my fingers,
 don't hear this, where's your free will?
 You know, well, like just stop this from coming in.
 You realize, okay, wait a minute,
 my abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple
 as just being able to pay attention
 to something else than this.
 Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent
 but at least I can decide what I'm gonna do next
 and I'm gonna pick up this water, right?
 And there's a feeling of identification
 with the impulse, with the intention,
 with the thought that occurs to you,
 with the feeling of speaking,
 like, you know, what am I gonna say next?
 Well, I'm saying it, so here goes, this is me.
 It feels like I'm the thinker,
 I'm the one who's in control.
 But all of that is born of not really paying close attention
 to what it's like to be you.
 And so this is where meditation comes in
 or this is where, again, you can get at this conceptually.
 You can unravel the notion of free will
 just by thinking certain thoughts
 but you can't feel that it doesn't exist
 unless you can pay close attention
 to how thoughts and intentions arise.
 So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize,
 okay, I didn't make myself, I didn't make my genes,
 I didn't make my brain,
 I didn't make the environmental influences
 that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years
 that have produced my brain in precisely the state
 it's in right now, such with all of the receptor weightings
 and densities and, you know, it's just,
 I'm exactly the machine I am right now
 through no fault of my own as the experiencing self.
 I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics
 and the environmental influences here.
 And yet those are the only things that contrive
 to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behavior.
 And if you were going to add something magical
 to that clockwork like an immortal soul, you can also notice
 that you didn't produce your soul, right?
 You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul
 of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like
 or wasn't interested in any of the things
 you were interested in or, you know, or was a psychopath
 or was, you know, had an IQ of 40.
 I mean, like there's nothing about that
 that the person who believes in a soul
 can claim to have controlled.
 And yet that is also totally dispositive
 of whatever happens next.
 But everything you've described now,
 maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks
 to the materialistic nature of the hardware.
 But even if you add magical ectoplasm software,
 you didn't produce that either.
 I know, but if we can think about the actual computation
 running on the hardware and running on the software,
 there's something you said recently,
 which you think of culture as an operating system.
 So if we just remove ourselves a little bit
 from the conception of human civilization
 being a collection of humans,
 and rather us just being a distributed computation system
 on which there's some kind of operating system running,
 and then the computation that's running
 is the actual thing that generates the interactions,
 the communications, and maybe even free will,
 the experiences of all of those free will.
 Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world
 in that way where it's like ideas are just using us,
 thoughts are using individual nodes in the system,
 and they're just jumping around,
 and they also have ability to generate experiences
 so that we can push those ideas along.
 And basically the main organisms here
 are the thoughts, not the humans.
 Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary
 between self and world.
 Right.
 So then there's no self, really integrated self
 to have any kind of will at all.
 Like if you're just a memeplex,
 I mean, if you're just a collection of memes,
 and I mean, we're all kind of like currents,
 like eddies in this river of ideas, right?
 So it's like, and it seems to have structure,
 but there's no real boundary
 between that part of the flow of water and the rest.
 I mean, if you are, and I would say that much of our mind
 answers to this kind of description.
 I mean, so much of our mind has been,
 it's obviously not self-generated,
 and it's not, you're not gonna find it
 by looking in the brain.
 It is the result of culture largely,
 but also the genes on one side
 and culture on the other meeting
 to allow for manifestations of mind
 that aren't actually bounded by the person
 in any clear sense.
 It was just, I mean, the example I often use here,
 but there are so many others, is just the fact
 that we're following the rules of English grammar
 to whatever degree we are.
 It's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented
 these rules for ourself.
 We haven't invented these rules.
 We haven't, I mean, there are norms of language use
 that we couldn't even specify because we haven't,
 you know, we're not grammarians.
 We haven't studied this.
 We don't even have the right concepts,
 and yet we're following these rules
 and we're noticing, you know, we're noticing as, you know,
 an error when we fail to follow these rules.
 And virtually every other cultural norm is like that.
 I mean, these are not things we've invented.
 You can consciously decide to scrutinize them
 and override them, but I mean, just think of,
 just think of any social situation
 where you're with other people
 and you're behaving in ways that are culturally appropriate,
 right, you're not being wild animals together.
 You're following, you have some expectation
 of how you shake a person's hand
 and how you deal with implements on a table,
 how you have a meal together.
 Obviously this can change from culture to culture
 and people can be shocked by how different those things are.
 Right, we all have foods we find disgusting,
 but in some countries, dog is not one of those foods, right?
 And yet, you know, you and I presumably would be horrified
 to be served dog.
 Those are not norms that we're,
 they are outside of us in some way,
 and yet they're felt very viscerally.
 I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation.
 You know, if you are, just imagine,
 you're in somebody's home,
 you're eating something that tastes great to you,
 and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever,
 you know, you didn't realize dog was potentially
 on the menu, and you find out that you've just eaten
 10 bites of what is, you know, really a cocker spaniel,
 and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right,
 based on an idea, right?
 Like, you did not, you're not the author of that norm
 that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation.
 And I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history,
 you know, vaguely where it sort of got in.
 I mean, very early on as kids,
 you realize you're treating dogs as pets and not as food,
 or as potential food.
 But yeah, no, it's, but the point you just made opens us to,
 like, we are totally permeable to a sea of mind.
 Yeah, but if we take the metaphor
 of the distributed computing systems,
 each individual node is part of performing
 a much larger computation, but nevertheless,
 is in charge of doing the scheduling of,
 so assuming it's Linux,
 is doing the scheduling of processes,
 and it's constantly alternating them.
 That node is making those choices.
 That node sure as hell believes it has free will,
 and it actually has free will
 because it's making those hard choices,
 but the choices ultimately are part
 of a much larger computation that it can't control.
 Isn't it possible for that node to still be,
 that human node is still making the choice?
 Well, yeah, it is.
 So I'm not saying that your body
 isn't doing, really doing things, right?
 And some of those things can be conventionally thought
 of as choices, right?
 So it's like, I can choose to reach,
 and it's like, it's not being imposed on me.
 That would be a different experience.
 Like, so there's an experience of,
 there's definitely a difference
 between voluntary and involuntary action.
 So that has to get conserved by any account of the mind
 that jettison's free will, you still have to admit
 that there's a difference between a tremor
 that I can't control and a purposeful motor action
 that I can control and I can initiate on demand
 and it's associated with intentions.
 And it's got efferent motor copy,
 which is being predictive so that I can notice errors.
 I have expectations when I reach for this,
 if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle
 because it's a hologram, I would be surprised, right?
 And so that shows that I have a expectation
 of just what my grasping behavior is gonna be like
 even before it happens.
 Whereas with a tremor,
 you don't have the same kind of thing going on.
 That's a distinction we have to make.
 So I am, yes, I'm really the proximate,
 my intention to move,
 which is in fact can be subjectively felt
 really is the proximate cause of my moving.
 It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe.
 I'm not saying that.
 So in that sense, the node is really deciding
 to execute the subroutine now,
 but that's not the feeling
 that has given rise to this conundrum of free will.
 So people feel like,
 people feel like the crucial things
 that people feel like they could have done otherwise.
 That's the thing that,
 so when you run back the clock of your life, right?
 You run back the movie of your life,
 you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life,
 they feel that at this point,
 they could behave differently than they did, right?
 So like, but given, you know,
 even given your distributed computing example,
 it's either a fully deterministic system
 or it's a deterministic system
 that admits of some random, you know, influence.
 In either case,
 that's not the free will people think they have.
 The free will people think they have is,
 damn, I shouldn't have done that.
 I just like, I shouldn't have done that.
 I could have done otherwise, right?
 I should have done otherwise, right?
 Like if you think about something
 that you deeply regret doing, right?
 Or that you hold someone else responsible for
 because they really are the upstream agent
 in your mind of what they did.
 You know, that's an awful thing that that person did
 and they shouldn't have done it.
 There is this illusion and it has to be an illusion
 because there's no picture of causation
 that would make sense of it.
 There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe
 exactly the way it was a moment ago,
 it could have played out differently.
 And the only way it could have played out differently
 is if there's randomness added to that,
 but randomness isn't what people feel
 would give them free will, right?
 If you tell me that, you know,
 I only reached for the water bottle this time
 because somebody's,
 because there's a random number generator in there
 kicking off values and it finally moved my hand,
 that's not the feeling of authorship.
 That's still not control.
 You're still not making that decision.
 There's actually, I don't know if you're familiar
 with cellular automata,
 that's a really nice visualization
 of how simple rules can create incredible complexity
 that it's like really dumb initial conditions are set,
 simple rules applied,
 and eventually you watch this thing
 and if the initial conditions are correct,
 then you're going to have emerged something
 that to our perception system
 looks like organisms interacting.
 You can construct any kinds of worlds
 and they're not actually interacting.
 They're not actually even organisms
 and they certainly aren't making decisions.
 So there's like systems you can create
 that illustrate this point.
 The question is whether there could be some room for,
 let's use in the 21st century the term magic
 back to the black box of consciousness.
 Let me ask you this way.
 If you're wrong about your intuition about free will,
 what, and somebody comes along to you
 and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture,
 what would that proof look like?
 What would-
 Well, that's the problem.
 That's why it's not even an illusion in my world
 because for me, it's impossible to say
 what the universe would have to be like
 for free will to be a thing.
 It doesn't conceptually map onto any notion
 of causation we have.
 And that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make.
 So like, if you're gonna believe in ghosts, right?
 I understand what that claim could be.
 Where like, I don't happen to believe in ghosts,
 but it's not hard for me to specify
 what would have to be true for ghosts to be real.
 And so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts, right?
 So like, okay, so you're telling me that when people die,
 there's some part of them that is not reducible at all
 to their biology that lifts off them and goes elsewhere.
 And it's actually the kind of thing
 that can linger in closets and in cupboards.
 And actually it's immaterial,
 but by some principle of physics,
 we don't totally understand.
 It can make sounds and knock objects
 and even occasionally show up
 so they can be visually beheld.
 And it's just, it seems like a miracle,
 but it's just some spooky noun in the universe
 that we don't understand.
 Let's call it a ghost.
 That's fine.
 I can talk about that all day,
 the reasons to believe in it,
 the reasons not to believe in it,
 the way we would scientifically test for it,
 what would have to be provable
 so as to convince me that ghosts are real.
 Free will isn't like that at all.
 There's no description of any concatenation of causes
 that precedes my conscious experience
 that sounds like what people think they have
 when they think they could have done otherwise
 and that they really,
 that they, the conscious agent is really in charge.
 If you don't know what you're going to think next
 and you can't help but think it,
 take those two premises on board.
 You don't know what it's going to be.
 You can't stop it from coming.
 And until you actually know how to meditate,
 you can't stop yourself from fully living out
 its behavioral or emotional consequences, right?
 Like you have no, once you,
 mindfulness arguably gives you
 another degree of freedom here.
 It doesn't give you free will,
 but it gives you some other game to play
 with respect to the emotional
 and behavioral imperatives of thoughts.
 But short of that, I mean,
 the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will
 is because you can't account for why in one moment,
 mindfulness arises and in other moments it doesn't, right?
 But a different process is initiated
 once you can practice in that way.
 Well, if I could push back for a second,
 by the way, I just have this thought bubble coming,
 popping up all the time of just two recent chimps
 arguing about the nature of consciousness.
 It's kind of hilarious.
 So on that thread, you know,
 if we're even before Einstein, let's say before Einstein,
 we were to conceive about traveling from point A to point B.
 Say some point in the future,
 we are able to realize through engineering a way
 which is consistent with Einstein's theory
 that you can have wormholes.
 You can travel from one point to another
 faster than the speed of light.
 And that would, I think, completely change our conception
 of what it means to travel in the physical space.
 And that like completely transform our ability.
 You talk about causality, but here let's just focus on
 what it means to travel through physical space.
 Don't you think it's possible that there'll be inventions
 or leaps in understanding about reality
 that will allow us to see free will as actually,
 like us humans somehow may be linked
 to this idea of consciousness,
 are actually able to be authors of our actions?
 It is a non-starter for me conceptually.
 It's a little bit like saying,
 could there be some breakthrough that will cause us
 to realize that circles are really square
 or that circles are not really round, right?
 No, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form.
 Right, like it's not on the table to be revised.
 And so I would say the same thing about consciousness.
 It's just like saying, is there some breakthrough
 that would get us to realize that consciousness
 is really an illusion?
 I'm saying no, because the experience of an illusion
 is as much a demonstration
 of what I'm calling consciousness as anything else, right?
 Like that is consciousness.
 With free will, it's a similar problem.
 It's like, again, it comes down to a picture of causality
 and there's no other picture on offer.
 And what's more, I know what it's like
 on the experiential side to lose the thing
 to which it is clearly anchored, right?
 Like the feel, like it doesn't feel,
 and this is the question that almost nobody asks.
 People who are debating me on the topic of free will,
 I'm at 15 minute intervals, I'm making a claim
 that I don't feel this thing.
 And they never become interested in, well, what's that like?
 Like, okay, you're actually saying you don't,
 this thing isn't true for you empirically.
 It's not just, because most people
 who don't believe in free will philosophically
 also believe that we're condemned to experience it.
 Like you can't live without this feeling.
 So you're actually saying you're able to experience
 the absence of the illusion of free will.
 For, are we talking about a few minutes at a time
 or is this require a lot of work and meditation
 or are you literally able to load that into your mind
 and like play that movie?
 Right now, right now, just in this conversation.
 So it's not absolutely continuous,
 but it's whenever I pay attention.
 It's like, is it the same, and I would say the same thing
 for the illusoriness of the self in the sense,
 and again, we haven't talked about this.
 So can you still have the self
 and not have the free will in your mind at the same time?
 Do they go at the same time?
 This is the same, yeah, it's the same thing.
 So they're always holding hands when they walk out the door.
 There really are two sides at the same point.
 But it's just, it comes down to what it's like
 to try to get to the end of the sentence
 or what it's like to finally decide
 that it's been long enough
 and now I need another sip of water.
 If I'm paying attention, now, if I'm not paying attention,
 I'm probably, I'm captured by some other thought
 and that feels a certain way.
 And so it's not vivid, but if I try to make vivid
 this experience of just, okay,
 I'm finally gonna experience free will.
 I'm gonna notice my free will.
 Like it's gotta be here, everyone's talking about it.
 Where is it?
 I'm gonna pay attention to it, I'm gonna look for it.
 And I'm gonna create a circumstance
 that is where it has to be most robust, right?
 I'm not rushed to make this decision.
 I'm not, it's not a reflex.
 I'm not under pressure.
 I'm gonna take as long as I want.
 I'm going to decide, it's not trivial.
 So it's not just like reaching with my left hand
 or reaching with my right hand.
 People don't like those examples for some reason.
 Let's make a big decision.
 Like where should, you know,
 what should my next podcast be on, right?
 Who do I invite on the next podcast?
 What is it like to make that decision?
 When I pay attention,
 there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight.
 It's like, it doesn't feel like,
 it feels profoundly mysterious
 to be going back between two people.
 You know, like, is it gonna be person A or person B
 that all my reasons for A and all my reasons why not
 and all my reasons for B
 and that there's some math going on there
 that I'm not even privy to
 where certain concerns are trumping others.
 And at a certain point, I just decide.
 And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network
 that has made that decision.
 Absolutely.
 I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere,
 but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision
 is totally without a sense,
 a real sense of agency
 because something simply emerges.
 It's literally as tenuous as
 what's the next sound I'm going to hear, right?
 Or what's the next thought that's gonna appear?
 And it just, something just appears, you know?
 And if something appears to cancel that something,
 like if I say, I'm gonna invite her
 and then I'm about to send the email
 and then I think, oh, no, no, no, no, I can't do that.
 There was that thing in that New York article I read
 that I gotta talk to this guy, right?
 That pivot at the last second,
 you can make it as muscular as you want.
 It always just comes out of the darkness.
 It's always mysterious.
 So right, when you try to pin it down,
 you really can't ever find that free will.
 If you construct an experiment for yourself
 and you try to really find that moment
 when you're actually making that controlled author decision,
 it's very difficult to do.
 We're still, we know at this point
 that if we were scanning your brain
 in some podcast guest choosing experiment, right?
 We know at this point, we would be privy
 to who you're going to pick before you are,
 you the conscious agent.
 If we could, again, this is operationally
 a little hard to conduct, but there's enough data now
 to know that something very much like this cartoon
 is in fact true and will ultimately be undeniable for people.
 They'll be able to do it on themselves with some app.
 If you're deciding where to go for dinner
 or who to have on your podcast,
 or ultimately who to marry, right?
 Or what city to move to, right?
 Like you can make it as big or as small a decision
 as you want.
 We could be scanning your brain in real time
 and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted,
 we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy,
 all right, Lex is, he's moving to Austin, right?
 I didn't choose that.
 Yeah, he was, it was gonna be Austin
 or it was gonna be Miami.
 He got, he's catching one of these two waves,
 but it's gonna be Austin.
 And at a point where you subjectively,
 if we could ask you, you would say,
 oh no, I'm still working over here.
 I'm still thinking, still considering my options.
 And you've spoken to this,
 in you thinking about other stuff in the world,
 it's been very useful to step away
 from this illusion of free will.
 And you argue that it's probably makes a better world
 because it can be compassionate
 and empathetic towards others.
 And towards oneself.
 Towards oneself.
 Radically toward others in that literally,
 hate makes no sense anymore.
 I mean, there are certain things you can
 really be worried about, really want to oppose.
 Really, I mean, I'm not saying you'd never have to kill
 another person.
 Like, I mean, self-defense is still a thing, right?
 But the idea that you're ever confronting anything
 other than a force of nature in the end
 goes out the window, right?
 Or what does go out the window
 when you really pay attention.
 I'm not saying that this would be easy to under,
 to grok if someone kills a member of your family.
 I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes
 on free will and then you should be able to see
 that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus.
 Because there's so, I mean, we are so evolved to
 deal with one another as fellow primates and as agents.
 But it's, yeah, when you're talking about
 the possibility of, you know, Christian, you know,
 truly Christian forgiveness, right?
 It's like, you know, as testified to by, you know,
 various saints of that flavor over the millennia.
 Yeah, that is it.
 The doorway to that is to recognize that no one really
 at bottom made themselves.
 And therefore everyone, what we're seeing really
 are differences in luck in the world.
 We're seeing people who are very, very lucky
 to have had good parents and good genes
 and to be in good societies and had good opportunities
 and to be intelligent and to be, you know, not sociopathic.
 Like none of it is on them.
 They're just reaping the fruits of one lottery
 after another and then showing up in the world
 on that basis.
 And then so it is with, you know,
 every malevolent asshole out there, right?
 He or she didn't make themselves.
 Even if that weren't possible,
 the utility for self-compassion is also enormous
 because it's, when you just look at what it's like
 to regret something or to feel shame about something
 or feel deep embarrassment about it,
 these states of mind are some of the most deranging
 experiences anyone has.
 And the kind of the indelible reaction to them,
 you know, the memory of the thing you said,
 the memory of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago
 that was just mortifying, right?
 The fact that that can still make you hate yourself, right?
 And like that psychologically,
 that is a knot that can be untied, right?
 Speak for yourself, Sam.
 Yeah, you gave a great toast.
 It was my toast that mortified.
 No, no, that's not what I was referring to.
 I'm deeply appreciative in the same way
 that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive,
 but I'm also powered by self-hate often.
 Like several things in this conversation already
 that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about,
 like that was the dumbest thing.
 You're sitting in front of Sam Harris and you said that.
 So like that, but that somehow creates
 a richer experience for me.
 Like I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature
 of however my brain was built.
 I don't think I wanna let go of that.
 Well, I think the thing you wanna let go of is
 the suffering associated with it.
 So like, so for me, so,
 this is just very, psychologically and ethically,
 all of this is very interesting.
 So I don't think we should ever get rid
 of things like anger, right?
 So like hatred is divorcible from anger
 in the sense that hatred is this enduring state
 where whether you're hating somebody else
 or hating yourself, it is just,
 it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless, right?
 Like it becomes self-nullifying, right?
 Like you become less capable as a person
 to solve any of your problems.
 It's not instrumental in solving the problem
 that is occasioning all this hatred.
 And anger for the most part, isn't either
 except as a signal of salience that there's a problem, right?
 So if somebody does something that makes me angry,
 that just promotes this situation
 to conscious attention in a way that is stronger
 than my not really caring about it, right?
 And there are things that I think
 should make us angry in the world.
 And there's the behavior of other people
 that should make us angry because we should respond to it.
 And so it is with yourself.
 If I do something, as a parent,
 if I do something stupid that harms one of my daughters,
 right, my experience of myself
 and my beliefs about free will close the door to my saying,
 well, I should have done otherwise
 in the sense that if I could go back in time,
 I would have actually effectively done otherwise.
 No, I would do, given the same causes and conditions,
 I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right?
 But regret and feeling bad about an outcome
 are still important to capacities
 because like, yeah, I desperately want my daughters
 to be happy and healthy.
 So if I've done something, if I crash the car
 when they're in the car and they get injured, right?
 And I do it because I was trying to change a song
 on my playlist or something stupid.
 I'm gonna feel like a total asshole.
 How long do I stew in that feeling of regret, right?
 And what utility is there to extract
 out of this error signal?
 And then what do I do?
 We're always faced with the question of what to do next,
 right, and how to best do that thing,
 that necessary thing next.
 And how much wellbeing can we experience while doing it?
 Like how miserable do you need to be
 to solve your problems in life
 and to help solve the problems of people closest to you?
 How miserable do you need to be
 to get through your to-do list today?
 Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all
 of it, right?
 And even navigating moments that are scary
 and really destabilizing to ordinary people.
 And I mean, again, I'm always up at the edge
 of my own capacities here.
 And there are all kinds of things that stress me out
 and worry me.
 And I'm especially something if it's,
 you're gonna tell me it's something
 with the health of one of my kids.
 It's very hard for me to be truly equanimous around that.
 But equanimity is so useful
 the moment you're in response mode, right?
 Because the ordinary experience for me
 of responding to what seems like a medical emergency
 for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized
 by concern to respond to that emergency.
 But then once I'm responding,
 all of my fear and agitation and worry and oh my God,
 what if this is really something terrible?
 But finding any of those thoughts compelling,
 that only diminishes my capacity as a father
 to be good company while we navigate
 this really turbulent passage.
 As you're saying this actually,
 one guy comes to mind, which is Elon Musk.
 One of the really impressive things to me was to observe
 how many dramatic things he has to deal with
 throughout the day at work.
 But also if you look through his life, family too,
 and how he's very much actually, as you're describing,
 basically a practitioner of this way of thought,
 which is you're not in control.
 You're basically responding,
 no matter how traumatic the event.
 And there's no reason to sort of linger on the negative
 feelings around that.
 Well, so, I mean, but he's in a very specific situation,
 which is unlike normal life, even his normal life,
 but normal life for most people.
 Because when you just think of like,
 he's running so many businesses and they're very,
 they're not, they're highly non-standard businesses.
 So what he's seeing is everything that gets to him
 is some kind of emergency.
 Like it wouldn't be getting to him.
 If it needs his attention, there's a fire somewhere.
 So he's constantly responding to fires
 that have to be put out.
 So there's no default expectation
 that there shouldn't be a fire.
 But in our normal lives, we live, most of us,
 most of us who are lucky,
 not everyone obviously on earth,
 but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude
 in terms of our lives, where we're reasonably healthy
 and life is reasonably orderly
 and the political apparatus around us
 is reasonably functional.
 So I said, functional for the first time in my life
 through no free will of my own.
 See, like I noticed those errors
 and they do not feel like agency
 and nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency.
 When you're looking at normal human life, right?
 Where you're just trying to be happy and healthy
 and get your work done,
 there's this default expectation
 that there shouldn't be fires.
 People shouldn't be getting sick or injured.
 We shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources.
 So when something really stark like that happens,
 people don't have that muscle.
 I've been responding to emergencies all day long,
 seven days a week in business mode.
 And so I have a very thick skin.
 This is just another one.
 I'm not expecting anything else
 when I wake up in the morning.
 No, we have this default sense that,
 I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense
 that we aren't gonna die, right?
 Or that we should, like maybe we're not gonna die, right?
 Like death denial really is a thing.
 You know, we're, and you can see it,
 just like I can see when I reach for this bottle
 that I was expecting it to be solid
 because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram
 and I just, my fist closes on itself,
 I'm damn surprised, people are damn surprised
 to find out that they're going to die,
 to find out that they're sick,
 to find out that someone they love has died
 or is going to die.
 So it's like the fact that we are surprised by any of that
 shows us that we're living at a,
 we're living in a mode that is,
 you know, we're perpetually diverting ourselves
 from some facts that should be obvious, right?
 And that, and the more salient we can make them,
 you know, the more, I mean, in the case of death,
 it's a matter of being able to get one's priorities straight.
 I mean, the moment, again, this is hard for everybody,
 even those who are really in the business
 of paying attention to it,
 but the moment you realize that
 every circumstance is finite, right?
 You've got a certain number of, you know, you've got,
 whatever it is, 8,000 days left in a normal span of life.
 And 8,000 is a, sounds like a big number,
 it's not that big a number, right?
 So it's just like, and then you can decide
 how you want to go through life
 and how you want to experience each one of those days.
 And so I was back to where our jumping off point,
 I would argue that you don't want to feel self-hatred ever.
 I would argue that you don't want to really,
 really grasp on to any of those moments
 where you are internalizing the fact
 that you just made an error, you've embarrassed yourself,
 that something didn't go the way you wanted it to.
 I think you want to treat all of those moments
 very, very lightly.
 You want to extract the actionable information.
 It's something to learn.
 Oh, you know, I learned that when I prepare
 in a certain way, it works better than when I prepare
 in some other way or don't prepare, right?
 Like, yes, lesson learned and do that differently.
 But yeah, I mean, so many of us have spent so much time
 with a very dysfunctional and hostile
 and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self-talk
 and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves.
 I mean, the privacy of our own minds,
 we're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time.
 And that can't help but affect, I mean,
 forget about just your own sense of wellbeing.
 It can't help but limit what you're capable of
 in the world with other people.
 I'll have to really think about that.
 I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk,
 is much less of a jerk than somebody like David Goggins,
 who's just like screaming in his ear constantly.
 So I have a relativist kind of perspective
 that it's not as bad as that at least.
 Well, having a sense of humor also helps.
 It's just like, it's not, the stakes are never quite
 what you think they are.
 And even when they are, I mean,
 just the difference between being able to see the comedy
 of it rather than, because again,
 there's this sort of dark star of self-absorption
 that pulls everything into it, right?
 And if that's the algorithm you don't want to run.
 It's like, you just want things to be good.
 So just push the concern out there.
 Like not have the collapse of,
 oh my God, what does this say about me?
 It's just like, what does this say about,
 how do we make this meal that we're all having together
 as fun and as useful as possible?
 And you're saying in terms of propulsion systems,
 we recommend humor is a good spaceship
 to escape the gravitational field of that darkness.
 Well, that certainly helps, yeah.
 Yeah, well, let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame,
 which is very interesting.
 The way you're talking, given that you're one of
 the biggest intellects, living intellects and minds
 of our time, and there's a lot of people that really love you
 and almost elevate you to a certain kind of status
 where you're like the guru.
 I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe in fact.
 Is there a-
 A hoodie, that's not the highest status garment
 one can wear now?
 The socially acceptable version of the robe.
 If you're a billionaire, you wear a hoodie.
 Is there something you can say about managing
 the effects of fame on your own mind?
 On not creating this, when you wake up in the morning,
 when you look up in the mirror,
 how do you get your ego not to grow exponentially?
 Your conception of self to grow exponentially
 because there's so many people feeding that.
 Is there something to be said about this?
 It's really not hard because I feel like I have a
 pretty clear sense of my strengths and weaknesses.
 And I don't feel like it's,
 I mean, honestly, I don't feel like I suffer
 from much grandiosity.
 I mean, I just have a, you know,
 there's so many things I'm not good at.
 There's so many things I will, you know,
 given the remaining 8,000 days at best,
 I will never get good at.
 I would love to be good at these things.
 So it's just, it's easy to feel diminished by comparison
 with the talents of others.
 Do you remind yourself of all the things
 that you're not competent in?
 Is, I mean, like what is-
 They're just on display for me every day
 that I appreciate the talents of others.
 But you notice them.
 I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice
 all the ways in which they were,
 I mean, this is why absolute power corrupts absolutely
 is you stop noticing the things
 in which you're ridiculous and wrong.
 Right, yeah, no, I-
 Not to compare you to Stalin.
 Yeah, yeah, well, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin
 in there somewhere.
 Well, we all have-
 Hopefully-
 We all carry a baby Stalin with us.
 He wears better clothes.
 And I'm not gonna grow that mustache.
 Those concerns don't map,
 they don't map onto me for a bunch of reasons,
 but one is I also have a very peculiar audience.
 I like, I'm just, you know,
 I've been appreciating this for a few years,
 but it's, I'm just now beginning to understand
 that there are many people who have audiences
 of my size or larger that have a very different experience
 of having an audience than I do.
 I have curated, for better or worse, a peculiar audience.
 And the net result of that is virtually any time
 I say anything of substance,
 something like half of my audience, my real audience,
 not haters from outside my audience,
 but my audience is just revolts over it, right?
 They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you said it.
 Like you, you're such a schmuck, right?
 They revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication.
 Or not, or not.
 But I mean, it's like, but people who are like,
 so I mean, the clearest case is, you know,
 I have whatever audience I have,
 and then Trump appears on the scene,
 and I discover that something like 20% of my audience
 just went straight to Trump and couldn't believe
 I didn't follow them there.
 They were just aghast that I didn't see
 that Trump was obviously exactly what we needed
 for to steer the ship of state for the next four years
 and then four years beyond that.
 So like, so that's one example.
 So whenever I said anything about Trump,
 I would hear from people who loved more or less
 everything else I was up to and had for years,
 but everything I said about Trump just gave me pure pain
 from this quadrant of my audience.
 But then the same thing happens when I say something
 about the derangement of the far left.
 Anything I say about wokeness, right?
 Or identity politics.
 Same kind of punishment signal from, again,
 people who are core to my audience.
 Like I've read all your books, I'm using your meditation app,
 I love what you say about science,
 but you are so wrong about politics
 and I'm starting to think you're a racist asshole
 for everything you said about identity politics.
 And there are so many,
 the free will topic is just like this.
 It's like, they love what I'm saying about consciousness
 and the mind and they love to hear me talk about physics
 with physicists and it's all good.
 This free will stuff is like,
 I cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are.
 What a fucking embarrassment you are.
 So, but I'm starting to notice that there are other people
 who don't have this experience of having an audience
 because they have,
 I'm just take the Trump woke dichotomy.
 They just castigated Trump the same way I did,
 but they never say anything bad about the far left.
 So they never get this punishment signal or you flip it.
 They're all about the insanity of critical race theory now.
 We connect all those dots the same way,
 but they never really specified what was wrong with Trump
 or they thought there was a lot right with Trump
 and they got all the pleasure of that.
 And so they have much more homogenized audiences.
 And so my experience is,
 so just to come back to this experience of fame
 or quasi fame,
 and truth is not real fame,
 but it's still, there's an audience there.
 It is a, it's now an experience where basically,
 whatever I put out,
 I notice a ton of negativity coming back at me.
 And it just, it is what it is.
 I mean, now it's like, I used to think, wait a minute,
 there's gotta be some way for me to communicate
 more clearly here so as not to get this kind of
 lunatic response from my audience.
 From like people who are showing all the signs of,
 we've been here for years for a reason, right?
 These are not just trolls.
 And so I think, okay, I'm gonna take 10 more minutes
 and really just tell you what should be absolutely clear
 about what's wrong with Trump, right?
 I've done this a few times,
 but I think I gotta do this again.
 Or wait a minute, how are they not getting
 that these episodes of police violence
 are not just a thing of the past?
 These police violence are so obviously different
 from one another that you can't describe all of them
 to yet another racist maniac on the police force,
 killing someone based on his racism.
 Last time I spoke about this, it was pure pain,
 but I just gotta try again.
 Now at a certain point, I mean, I'm starting to feel like,
 all right, I just, I have to be, I have to cease.
 Again, it comes back to this expectation
 that there shouldn't be fires.
 I feel like if I could just play my game impeccably,
 the people who actually care what I think will follow me
 when I hit Trump and hit free will and hit the woke
 and hit whatever it is,
 how we should respond to the coronavirus, you know?
 Vaccines, you know, are they a thing, right?
 Like there's such derangement in our information space now
 that I mean, I guess, you know, some people could be getting
 more of this than I expect, but I just noticed that,
 you know, many of our friends who are in the same game
 have more homogenized audiences and don't get,
 I mean, they've successfully filtered out the people
 who are going to despise them on this next topic.
 And I, you know, I would imagine you are,
 have a different experience of having a podcast
 than I do at this point.
 I mean, I'm sure you get haters,
 but I would imagine you're more streamlined.
 I actually don't like the word haters
 because it kind of presumes that it puts people in a bin.
 I think we all have like baby haters inside of us
 and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that
 more than others for particular periods of time.
 I think you can almost see hating on the internet
 as a video game that you just play and it's fun,
 but then you can put it down and walk away.
 And no, I certainly have a bunch of people
 that are very critical.
 I can list all the ways.
 But does it feel like on any given topic,
 does it feel like it's an actual title surge
 where it's like 30% of your audience
 and then the other 30% of your audience
 from podcast to podcast?
 No, no, no.
 That's happening to me all the time now.
 Well, I'm more with,
 I don't know what you think about this.
 I mean, Joe Rogan doesn't read comments
 or doesn't read comments much.
 And the argument he made to me is that
 he already has like a self-critical person inside.
 Like, and I'm gonna have to think about
 what you said in this conversation,
 but I have this very harshly self-critical person
 inside as well where I don't need more fuel.
 I don't need, no, I do sometimes,
 that's why I check negativity occasionally, not too often.
 I sometimes need to like put a little bit more
 like coals into the fire, but not too much.
 But I already have that self-critical engine
 that keeps me in check.
 I just, I wonder, you know,
 a lot of people who gain more and more fame
 lose that ability to be self-critical,
 I guess because they lose the audience
 that can be critical towards them.
 You know, I do follow Joe's advice
 much more than I ever have here.
 Like I don't look at comments very often
 and I'm probably using Twitter, you know,
 5% as much as I used to.
 I mean, I really just get in and out on Twitter
 and spend very little time in my ad mentions.
 I, you know, it does, in some ways it feels like a loss
 because occasionally I get,
 I see something super intelligent there.
 Like, I mean, I'll check my Twitter ad mentions
 and someone will have said,
 oh, have you read this article?
 And it's like, man, that was just,
 that was like the best article sent to me in a month, right?
 So it's like to have not have looked
 and to not have seen that, that's a loss.
 So, but it does, at this point a little goes a long way
 because it's not that it, for me now,
 I mean, this could sound like a fairly Stalinistic immunity
 to criticism.
 It's not so much that these voices of hate
 turn on my inner hater, you know, more,
 it's more that I just, I get a,
 what I fear is a false sense of humanity.
 Like, I feel like I'm too online
 and online is selecting for this performative outrage
 in everybody, everyone's signaling to an audience
 when they trash you.
 And I get a dark, I'm getting a, you know,
 a misanthropic, you know, cut of just what it's like
 out there and it, cause when you meet people in real life,
 they're great, you know, they're rather often great,
 you know, and it takes a lot to have anything
 like a Twitter encounter in real life with a living person.
 And that's, I think it's much better to have that
 as one's default sense of what it's like to be
 with people than what one gets on social media
 or on YouTube comment threads.
 You've produced a special episode with Rob Reed
 on your podcast recently on how bioengineering
 of viruses is going to destroy human civilization.
 So-
 Or could.
 Could.
 One fears, yeah.
 Sorry, the confidence there.
 But in the 21st century, what do you think,
 especially after having thought through that angle,
 what do you think is the biggest threat
 to the survival of the human species?
 I can give you the full menu if you'd like.
 Yeah, well, no, I would put,
 I would put the biggest threat at the,
 at another level out, kind of the meta threat is
 our inability to agree about what the threats actually are
 and to converge on strategies for responding to them.
 So like I view COVID as among other things,
 a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal
 for something far worse.
 I mean, COVID is just about as benign as it could have been
 and still have been worse than the flu
 when you're talking about a global pandemic.
 So it's just, it's gonna kill a few million people
 or it looks like it's killed about three million people.
 Maybe it'll kill a few million more
 unless something gets away from us
 with a variant that's much worse
 or we really don't play our cards right.
 But I mean, the general shape of it is
 it's got somewhere around, well, 1% lethality.
 And whatever side of that number it really is on
 in the end, it's not what would in fact be possible
 and is in fact probably inevitable,
 something with orders of magnitude,
 more lethality than that.
 And it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared, right?
 We are running this epidemiological experiment
 of linking the entire world together.
 And then also now per the podcast that Rob Reed did,
 democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this
 to engineer pandemics, right?
 And more and more people will be able
 to engineer synthetic viruses that will be
 by the sheer fact that they would have been engineered
 with malicious intent, worse than COVID.
 And we're still living in, to speak specifically
 about the United States, we have a country here
 where we can't even agree that this is a thing.
 You're like that COVID, I mean, there's still people
 who think that this is basically a hoax
 designed to control people.
 And it's a stranger still, there are people
 who will acknowledge that COVID is real
 and they don't think the deaths have been faked
 or mis-ascribed, but they think that,
 they're far happier the prospect of catching COVID
 than they are of getting vaccinated for COVID, right?
 They're not worried about COVID,
 they're worried about vaccines for COVID, right?
 And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation
 that we've now had a year to have with one another
 on just what is the ground truth here?
 What's happened, why has it happened?
 How safe is it to get COVID in every cohort
 in the population and how safe are the vaccines?
 And the fact that there's still an air of mystery
 around all of this for much of our society
 does not bode well when you're talking about solving
 any other problem that may yet kill us.
 Do you think convergence grows with the magnitude of the threat?
 It's possible, except I feel like we have tipped into,
 because when the threat of COVID looked the most dire,
 when we were seeing reports from Italy
 that looked like the beginning of a zombie movie.
 Because it could have been much, much worse.
 Yeah, this is lethal, right?
 Your ICUs are gonna fill up, you're 14 days behind us,
 your medical system is in danger of collapse,
 lock the fuck down.
 We have people refusing to do anything sane
 in the face of that.
 People fundamentally thinking it's not gonna get here.
 Who knows what's going on in Italy,
 but it has no implications for what's gonna go on in New York
 in a mere six days, right?
 And now it kicks off in New York
 and you've got people in the middle of the country
 thinking it's no factor, that's just big city,
 those are big city problems, or they're faking it.
 Or I mean, the layer of politics
 has become so dysfunctional for us
 that even in the presence of a pandemic
 that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning,
 I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating
 for everyone who's been directly affected by it,
 and it's not to say it can't get worse.
 But here, for a very long time,
 we have known that we were in a situation
 that is more benign than what seemed
 like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off,
 especially in Italy.
 And so still, yeah, it's quite possible
 that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward Earth
 and everyone agreed that it's gonna make impact
 and we're all gonna die,
 then we could get off Twitter and actually build the rockets
 that are gonna divert the asteroid
 from its Earth-crossing path,
 and we could do something pretty heroic.
 But when you talk about anything else
 that's slower moving than that,
 I mean, something like climate change,
 I think the prospect of our converging on a solution
 to climate change purely based on political persuasion
 is nonexistent at this point.
 I just think that, to bring Elon back into this,
 the way to deal with climate change
 is to create technology that everyone wants
 that is better than all the carbon-producing technology,
 and then we just transition because you want
 an electric car the same way you wanted a smartphone
 or you want anything else,
 and you're working totally with the grain
 of people's selfishness and short-term thinking.
 The idea that we're gonna convince
 the better part of humanity
 that climate change is an emergency,
 that they have to make sacrifices to respond to,
 given what's happened around COVID,
 I just think that's the fantasy of a fantasy.
 But speaking of Elon, I have a bunch of positive things
 that I wanna say here in response to you,
 but you're opening so many threads,
 but let me pull out one of them, which is AI.
 Both you and Elon think that with AI,
 you're summoning demons, summoning a demon,
 maybe not in those poetic terms, but.
 Well, potentially.
 Potentially.
 Two very, three very parsimonious assumptions, I think, here.
 Scientifically, parsimonious assumptions get me there.
 Any of which could be wrong,
 but it just seems like the weight of the evidence
 is on their side.
 One is that it comes back to this topic
 of substrate independence, right?
 Anyone who's in the business
 of producing intelligent machines must believe,
 ultimately, that there's nothing magical
 about having a computer made of meat.
 You can do this in the kinds of materials we're using now,
 and there's no special something
 that presents a real impediment
 to producing human-level intelligence in silico, right?
 Again, an assumption, I'm sure,
 there are a few people who still think
 there is something magical about biological systems,
 but leave that aside.
 Given that assumption, and given the assumption
 that we just continue making incremental progress,
 doesn't have to be Moore's law,
 just has to be progress, it just doesn't stop,
 at a certain point, we'll get to human-level intelligence
 and beyond, and human-level intelligence,
 I think, is also clearly a mirage,
 because anything that's human-level
 is gonna be superhuman unless we decide to dumb it down,
 right, I mean, my phone is already superhuman
 as a calculator, right, so why would we make
 the human-level AI just as good as me as a calculator?
 So I think we'll very, if we continue to make progress,
 we will be in the presence of superhuman competence
 for any act of intelligence or cognition
 that we care to prioritize.
 It's not to say that we'll create everything
 that a human could do, maybe we'll leave certain things out,
 but anything that we care about, and we care about a lot,
 and we certainly care about anything
 that produces a lot of power, you know,
 that we care about scientific insights
 and an ability to produce new technology and all of that,
 we'll have something that's superhuman,
 and then the final assumption is just that
 there have to be ways to do that
 that are not aligned with a happy coexistence
 with these now more powerful entities than ourselves,
 so, and I would guess, and this is a, you know,
 kind of a rider to that assumption,
 there are probably more ways to do it badly
 than to do it perfectly,
 that is perfectly aligned with our wellbeing,
 and when you think about the consequences of non-alignment,
 when you think about,
 you're now in the presence of something
 that is more intelligent than you are, right,
 which is to say more competent, right,
 unless you've, and obviously there are cartoon pictures
 of this where we could just, you know,
 this is just an off switch,
 we could just turn off the off switch,
 or they're tethered to something that makes them,
 you know, our slaves in perpetuity,
 even though they're more intelligent,
 but that, those scenarios strike me as a failure
 to imagine what is actually entailed
 by greater intelligence, right,
 so if you imagine something
 that's legitimately more intelligent than you are,
 and you're now in relationship to it, right,
 you're in the presence of this thing,
 and it is autonomous in all kinds of ways
 because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are,
 I mean, you built it to be all of those things.
 We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation
 with something more intelligent than we are, you know,
 and we can't, so we have to have found
 the subset of ways to build this, these machines,
 that are perpetually amenable to our saying,
 oh, that's not what we meant, that's not what we intended,
 could you stop doing that,
 come back over here and do this thing that we actually want,
 and for them to care, for them to be tethered
 to our own sense of our own wellbeing,
 such that, you know, I mean, their utility function is,
 you know, their primary utility function is to have,
 you know, this is, I think, Stuart Russell's cartoon plan
 is to figure out how to tether them to a utility function
 that has our own estimation of what's going to improve
 our wellbeing as its master, you know, reward, right?
 So it's like, all that, this thing can get as intelligent
 as it can get, but it only ever really wants to figure out
 how to make our lives better by our own view of better.
 Now, not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about,
 you know, I mean, because there's all kinds of things
 we're not seeing clearly about what is better,
 and if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle
 that could really tell us what is better,
 well, then we presumably would want to hear that,
 and we would modify our sense of what to do next
 in conversation with these minds,
 but I just feel like it is a failure of imagination
 to think that being in relationship
 to something more intelligent than yourself
 isn't in most cases a circumstance of real peril,
 because it is, and just to think of how everything on Earth
 has to, if they could think about their relationship to us,
 if birds could think about what we're doing, right?
 They would, I mean, the bottom line is,
 they're always in danger of our discovering
 that there's something we care about more than birds, right?
 But there's something we want that disregards
 the wellbeing of birds, and obviously,
 much of our behavior is inscrutable to them.
 Occasionally, we pay attention to them,
 and occasionally, we withdraw our attention,
 and occasionally, we just kill them all
 for reasons they can't possibly understand,
 but if we're building something more intelligent
 than ourselves, by definition, we're building something
 whose horizons of value and cognition can exceed our own
 and in ways where we can't necessarily foresee,
 again, perpetually, that they don't just wake up one day
 and decide, oh, these humans need to disappear.
 So I think I agree with most of the initial things you said.
 What I don't necessarily agree with,
 and of course, nobody knows, but that the more likely
 set of trajectories that we're going to take
 are going to be positive, that's what I believe,
 in the sense that the way you develop,
 I believe the way you develop successful AI systems
 will be deeply integrated with human society,
 and for them to succeed, they're going to have to be aligned
 in the way we humans are aligned with each other,
 which doesn't mean we're aligned, there's no such thing,
 or I don't see there's such thing as a perfect alignment,
 but they're going to be participating in the dance,
 in the game-theoretic dance of human society,
 as they become more and more intelligent.
 There could be a point beyond which
 we are like birds to them.
 But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind?
 So I believe the explosion will be happening,
 but there's a lot of explosions to be done
 before we become like birds.
 I truly believe that human beings are very intelligent
 in ways we don't understand.
 It's not just about chess.
 It's about all the intricate computation
 we're able to perform, common sense,
 our ability to reason about this world, consciousness.
 I think we're doing a lot of work
 we don't realize is necessary to be done
 in order to truly become,
 like truly achieve super intelligence,
 and I just think there will be a period of time
 that's not overnight.
 The overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight.
 It'll be over a period of decades.
 So my sense is-
 Well, why would it be that, but just take
 drawn analogy from recent successes,
 like something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero.
 I forget the actual metric,
 but it was something like this algorithm,
 which wasn't even totally,
 it wasn't bespoke for chess playing.
 In the matter of, I think it was four hours,
 played itself so many times and so successfully
 that it became the best chess playing computer.
 Not only was it was not only better than every human being,
 it was better than every previous chess program
 in a matter of a day, right?
 So like that, like, so just imagine, again,
 we don't have to recapitulate everything about us,
 but just imagine building a system
 and who knows when we'll be able to do this,
 but at some point we'll be able,
 at some point the 100 or 100 favorite things
 about human cognition will be analogous to chess
 in that we will be able to build machines
 that very quickly outperform any human
 and then very quickly outperform the last algorithm
 that outperform the humans.
 Like something like the AlphaGo experience
 seems possible for facial recognition
 and detecting human emotion
 and natural language processing, right?
 Like, well, it's just the,
 everyone, even math people, math heads
 tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation, right?
 And we noticed this during COVID.
 I mean, you have some very smart people
 who still couldn't get their minds around the fact
 that an exponential is really surprising.
 I mean, things double and double and double and double again
 and you don't notice much of anything changes.
 And then the last two stages of doubling
 swamp everything, right?
 And it just seems like that to assume that
 there isn't a deep analogy between what we're seeing
 for the more tractable problems like chess
 to other modes of cognition.
 It's like, once you crack that problem, it seems,
 because for the longest time,
 it was impossible to think we were gonna make headway on,
 in AI, you know, it's like AI.
 Chess and Go was, Go seemed as impossible.
 Go seemed unattainable.
 Even when chess had been cracked, Go seemed unattainable.
 Yeah, and actually still Russell was behind the people
 that were saying it's unattainable.
 Right.
 Because it seemed like, you know,
 it's a intractable problem.
 But there's something different
 about the space of cognition
 that's detached from human society,
 which is what chess is, meaning like just thinking.
 Having actual exponential impact on the physical world
 is different.
 I tend to believe that there's,
 for AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent,
 it's going to have to go through the funnel of society.
 And for that, it has to be deeply integrated
 with human beings.
 And for that, it has to be aligned.
 But I mean, you're talking about like actually
 hooking us up to like Neuralink, you know,
 we're gonna be the brain stem to the robot overlords.
 That's a possibility as well.
 But what I mean is, in order to develop
 autonomous weapons systems, for example,
 which are highly concerning to me,
 that both US and China are participating in now,
 that in order to develop them and for them to become,
 to have more and more responsibility
 to actually do military strategic actions,
 they're going to have to be integrated into human beings
 doing the strategic action.
 They're going to have to work alongside with each other.
 And the way those systems will be developed
 will have the natural safety, like switches
 that are placed on them as they develop over time,
 because they're going to have to convince humans.
 Ultimately, they're going to have to convince humans
 that this is safer than humans.
 They're going to, you know.
 Well, self-driving cars is a good test case here,
 because obviously we've made a lot of progress
 and we can imagine what total progress would look like.
 I mean, it would be amazing.
 And it's answering, it's canceling in the US,
 40,000 deaths every year based on ape-driven cars, right?
 So it's a excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to
 because there was no alternative.
 But now that we can dimly see the prospect
 of an alternative, which if it works
 in a super-intelligent fashion,
 maybe we go down to zero highway deaths, right?
 Or certainly we'd go down by orders of magnitude, right?
 So maybe we have 400 rather than 40,000 a year.
 And it's easy to see that there's not a missile.
 So obviously this is not an example of super-intelligence.
 This is narrow intelligence.
 But the alignment problem isn't so obvious there,
 but there are potential alignment problems there.
 Like, so like just imagine if some woke team of engineers
 decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way.
 I mean, there are situations where the car
 has to decide who to hit.
 I mean, there's just bad outcomes
 where you're gonna hit somebody, right?
 Now we have a car that can tell what race you are, right?
 So we're gonna build the car to preferentially hit
 white people because white people have had
 so much privilege over the years.
 This seems like the only ethical way
 to kind of redress those wrongs of the past.
 That's something that could get,
 one, that could get produced as an artifact, presumably,
 of just how you built it.
 And you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right?
 You caused it.
 From machine learning.
 Yeah.
 You put some kind of constraints on it
 to where it creates those kinds of outcomes.
 Basically, you built a racist algorithm
 and you didn't even intend to,
 or you could intend to, right?
 And it would be aligned with some people's values,
 but misaligned with other people's values.
 But it's like, there are interesting problems
 even with something as simple and obviously good
 as self-driving cars.
 But there's a leap that I just think it'd be exact,
 but those are human problems.
 I just don't think there'll be a leap
 with autonomous vehicles.
 First of all, sorry, there are a lot of trajectories
 which will destroy human civilization.
 The argument I'm making, it's more likely
 that we'll take trajectories that don't.
 So I don't think there'll be a leap
 with autonomous vehicles will all of a sudden
 start murdering pedestrians,
 because once every human on Earth is dead,
 there'll be no more fatality.
 Sort of unintended consequences of,
 and it's difficult to take that leap.
 Most systems as we develop
 and they become much, much more intelligent,
 in ways that will be incredibly surprising,
 like stuff that DeepMind is doing with protein folding.
 Even, which is scary to think about,
 and I'm personally terrified about this,
 which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning,
 the engineering of vaccines using machine learning,
 the engineering of, yeah, for research purposes,
 pathogens using machine learning,
 and the ways that can go wrong.
 I just think that there's always going to be
 a closed loop supervision of humans
 before the AI becomes super intelligent.
 Not always, much more likely to be supervision,
 except of course, the question is
 how many dumb people there are in the world,
 how many evil people are in the world?
 My theory, my hope is, my sense is,
 that the number of intelligent people
 is much higher than the number of dumb people
 that know how to program, and the number of evil people.
 I think smart people and kind people
 over all number of the others.
 Except we also, we have to add another group of people,
 which are just the smart and otherwise good,
 but reckless people, right?
 The people who will flip a switch on,
 not knowing what's gonna happen,
 they're just kind of hoping
 that it's not gonna blow up the world.
 We already know that some of our smartest people
 are those sorts of people.
 We know we've done experiments,
 and this is something that Martin Rees was whinging about
 before the Large Hadron Collider got booted up, I think.
 We know there are people who are entertaining experiments
 or even performing experiments,
 where there's some chance, not quite infinitesimal,
 that they're gonna create a black hole in the lab
 and suck the whole world into it, right?
 I mean, you're not a crazy person to worry about that
 based on the physics.
 And so it was with the Trinity test,
 there were some people who were still
 checking their calculations, and they were off.
 We did nuclear tests where we were off significantly
 in terms of the yield, right?
 So it was like-
 And they still flipped the switch.
 Yeah, they still flipped the switch.
 And sometimes they flipped the switch
 not to win a world war or to save 40,000 lives a year.
 They just-
 Just to see what happens.
 Intellectual curiosity.
 This is what I got my grant for.
 This is where I'll get my Nobel Prize,
 if that's in the cards.
 It's on the other side of this switch, right?
 And I mean, again, we are apes with egos
 who are massively constrained by very short-term self-interest
 even when we're contemplating some of the deepest
 and most interesting and most universal problems
 we could ever set our attention towards.
 Like, just if you read James Watson's book,
 The Double Helix, right?
 About them cracking the structure of DNA.
 One thing that's amazing about that book
 is just how much of it, almost all of it,
 is being driven by very apish, egocentric social concerns.
 The algorithm that is producing this scientific breakthrough
 is human competition, if you're James Watson.
 It's like, I'm gonna get there before a line is pulling.
 And it's just, so much of his bandwidth
 is captured by that, right?
 Now, that becomes more and more of a liability
 when you're talking about producing technology
 that can change everything in an instant.
 We're talking about not only understanding,
 we're just at a different moment in human history.
 When we're doing research on viruses,
 we're now doing the kind of research that can cause
 someone somewhere else to be able to make that virus
 or weaponize that virus.
 I don't know.
 I mean, our power is, our wisdom is,
 it does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power.
 Right?
 And that seems like, insofar as wisdom and power
 become unaligned, I get more and more concerned.
 But speaking of apes with egos,
 some of the most compelling apes, two compelling apes,
 I can think of as yourself and Jordan Peterson.
 And you've had a fun conversation about religion
 that I watched most of, I believe.
 I'm not sure there was any-
 We didn't solve anything.
 If anything was ever solved.
 So is there something like a charitable summary
 you can give to the ideas that you agree on
 and disagree with Jordan?
 Is there something maybe after that conversation
 that you've learned or maybe as you both agreed on,
 is there some wisdom in the rubble
 of even imperfect flawed ideas?
 Is there something that you can kind of pull out
 from those conversations or is it to be continued?
 I think where we disagree, so he thinks
 that many of our traditional religious beliefs
 and frameworks are holding so much,
 such a repository of human wisdom
 that we pull at that fabric at our peril.
 If you start just unraveling Christianity
 or any other traditional set of norms and beliefs,
 you may think you're just pulling out
 the unscientific bits, but you could be pulling
 a lot more to which everything you care about
 is attached as a society.
 And my feeling is that there's so much,
 there's so much downside to the unscientific bits
 that we're trying to pull out.
 There's so much downside to the unscientific bits.
 And it's so clear how we could have a 21st century
 rational conversation about the good stuff
 that we really can radically edit these traditions.
 And we can take Jesus in half his moods
 and just find a great inspirational,
 iron age thought leader who just happened to get crucified,
 but he could be somewhat like the Beatitudes
 and the Golden Rule, which doesn't originate with him,
 but which he put quite beautifully.
 All of that's incredibly useful.
 It's no less useful than it was 2000 years ago,
 but we don't have to believe he was born of a virgin
 or coming back to raise the dead or any of that other stuff.
 And we can be honest about not believing those things.
 And we can be honest about the reasons
 why we don't believe those things.
 Because on those fronts, I view the downside to be so obvious
 and the fact that we have so many different
 competing dogmatisms on offer to be so non-functional.
 I mean, it's so divisive.
 It just has conflict built into it
 that I think we can be far more
 and should be far more iconoclastic
 than he wants to be, right?
 Now, none of this is to deny much of what he argues for,
 that stories are very powerful.
 I mean, clearly stories are powerful
 and we want good stories.
 We want our lives, we wanna have a conversation
 with ourselves and with one another about our lives
 that facilitates the best possible lives.
 And story is part of that, right?
 And if you want some of those stories to sound like myths,
 that might be part of it, right?
 But my argument is that we never really need
 to deceive ourselves or our children
 about what we have every reason to believe is true
 in order to get at the good stuff,
 in order to organize our lives well.
 I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally.
 And if I don't need to do it personally,
 why would I think that billions of other people
 need to do it personally, right?
 Now, there is a cynical counterargument,
 which is billions of other people don't have the advantages
 that I have had in my life.
 The billions of other people are not as well-educated,
 they haven't had the same opportunities,
 they need to be told that Jesus is gonna solve
 all their problems after they die, say,
 or that everything happens for a reason
 and if you just believe in the secret,
 if you just visualize what you want, you're gonna get it.
 And it's like there's some measure
 of what I consider to be odious pamblum
 that really is food for the better part of humanity
 and there is no substitute for it,
 or there's no substitute now.
 And I don't know if Jordan would agree with that,
 but much of what he says seems to suggest
 that he would agree with it.
 And I guess that's an empirical question.
 I mean, that's just that we don't know
 whether given a different set of norms
 and a different set of stories,
 people would behave the way I would hope they would behave
 and be aligned, more aligned than they are now.
 I think we know what happens
 when you just let ancient religious certainties
 go uncriticized.
 We know what that world's like.
 We've been struggling to get out of that world
 for a couple of hundred years,
 but we know what having Europe
 riven by religious wars looks like.
 And we know what happens when those religions
 become kind of pseudo-religions and political religions.
 So this is where I'm sure Jordan and I would debate.
 He would say that Stalin was a symptom of atheism
 and that's not at all.
 I mean, it's not my kind of atheism.
 Like Stalin, the problem with the Gulag
 and the experiment with communism or with Stalinism
 or with Nazism was not that there was so much
 scientific rigor and self-criticism and honesty
 and introspection and judicious use of psychedelics.
 I mean, like that was not the problem in Hitler's Germany
 or in Stalin's Soviet Union.
 The problem was you have other ideas
 that capture a similar kind of mob-based dogmatic energy.
 And yes, the results of all of that
 are predictably murderous.
 Well, the question is, what is the source
 of the most viral and sticky stories
 that ultimately lead to a positive outcome?
 So communism was, I mean, having grown up in the Soviet Union
 even still having relatives in Russia,
 there's a stickiness to the nationalism
 and to the ideologies of communism that religious or not,
 you could say it's religious forever.
 I could just say it's stories that are viral and sticky.
 I'm using the most horrible words,
 but the question is whether science and reason
 can generate viral, sticky stories
 that give meaning to people's lives.
 In your sense, it does.
 Well, whatever is true ultimately should be captivating.
 It's like what's more captivating than whatever is real?
 Now it's because reality is, again,
 we're just climbing out of the darkness
 in terms of our understanding of what the hell's going on.
 And there's no telling what spooky things
 may in fact be true.
 I mean, I don't know if you've been on the receiving end
 of recent rumors about our conversation about UFOs
 that's very likely changing in the near term, right?
 But like there was just a Washington Post article
 and a New York article.
 And I've received some private outreach
 and perhaps you have, I know other people in our orbit
 have people who are claiming that the government
 has known much more about UFOs
 than they have let on until now.
 And this conversation is actually
 is about to become more prominent.
 And it's not gonna be whatever,
 whoever's left standing when the music stops,
 it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in
 as a super rigorous scientific skeptic saying
 there's no there, who's been saying there's no there there
 for the last 75 years, right?
 The short version is it sounds like
 the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon
 are very likely to say to Congress at some point
 in the not too distant future that we have evidence
 that there is technology flying around here
 that seems like it can't possibly be of human origin, right?
 Now, I don't know what I'm gonna do
 with that kind of disclosure, right?
 Maybe it's gonna be nothing,
 no follow on conversation to really have,
 but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in.
 Right?
 I mean, it's just, what are we gonna do with that?
 If in fact, that's what happens, right?
 If in fact, the considered opinion,
 despite the embarrassment it causes them
 of the US government, of all of our intelligence,
 all of the relevant intelligence services
 is that this isn't a hoax.
 It's too, there's too much data
 to suggest that it's a hoax.
 We've got too much radar imagery.
 There's too much satellite data,
 whatever data they actually have, there's too much of it.
 All we can say now is something's going on
 and there's no way it's the Chinese or the Russians
 or anyone else's technology.
 That should arrest our attention collectively
 to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has.
 And now one worries that we're so jaded
 and confused and distracted that it's gonna,
 it'll get much less coverage than Obama's tan suit did
 a bunch of years ago.
 It's just, who knows how we'll respond to that.
 But it's just to say that the need for us to tell ourselves
 an honest story about what's going on
 and what's likely to happen next is never gonna go away.
 And it's important, it's just the division between me
 and every person who's defending traditional religion is
 where is it that you wanna lie to yourself
 or lie to your kids?
 Like where is honesty a liability?
 And for me, I've yet to find the place where it is.
 And it's so obviously a strength
 in almost every other circumstance
 because it is the thing that allows you to course correct.
 It is the thing that allows you to hope at least
 that your beliefs, that your stories
 are in some kind of calibration with what's actually
 going on in the world.
 Yeah, it is a little bit sad to imagine that
 if aliens en masse showed up to earth,
 that would be too preoccupied with political bickering
 or to like these like fake news
 and all that kind of stuff to notice.
 The very basic evidence of reality.
 I do have a glimmer of hope that there seems to be
 more and more hunger for authenticity.
 And I feel like that opens the door
 for a hunger for what is real.
 Like people don't want stories,
 they don't want like layers and layers of like fakeness.
 And I'm hoping that means that will directly lead
 to a greater hunger for reality and reason and truth.
 Truth isn't dogmatism.
 Like truth isn't authority.
 I have a PhD and therefore I'm right.
 Truth is almost like the reality is there's so many questions,
 there's so many mysteries, there's so much uncertainty.
 This is our best available, like a best guess.
 And we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess,
 but it could be so many other things.
 And like just even conveying that,
 I think there's a hunger for that in the world
 to hear that from scientists.
 Less dogmatism and more just like this is what we know.
 We're doing our best given the uncertainty given.
 I mean, this is true with obviously with virology
 and all those kinds of things
 because everything is happening so fast.
 There's a lot of, and biology is super messy.
 So it's very hard to know stuff for sure.
 So just being open and real about that,
 I think I'm hoping will change people's hunger
 and openness and trust of what's real.
 Yeah, well, so much of this is probabilistic.
 It's even so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically
 is just you're placing a bet on whether it's worth
 reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions
 on that point.
 It's like, it's not fundamental closure to data.
 It's just that there's so much data on one side
 or so much would have to change
 in terms of your understanding of what you think
 you understand about the nature of the world.
 If this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say,
 all right, that's probably bullshit.
 Right, and it can sound like a fundamental closure
 to new conversations, new evidence, new data, new argument
 but it's really not.
 It's just, it really is just triaging your attention.
 It's just like, okay, you're telling me that
 your best friend can actually read minds.
 Okay, well, that's interesting.
 Let me know when that person has gone into a lab
 and actually proven it, right?
 Like I don't need, this is not the place
 where I need to spend the rest of my day figuring out
 if your buddy can read my mind, right?
 But there's a way to communicate that.
 I think it does too often sound like you're completely
 closed off to ideas as opposed to saying like,
 as opposed to saying that there's a lot of evidence
 in support of this but you're still open-minded
 to other ideas.
 Like there's a way to communicate that.
 It's not necessarily even with words.
 It's like, it's even that Joe Rogan energy of
 it's entirely possible.
 Just it's that energy of being open-minded
 and curious like kids are.
 Like this is our best understanding
 but you still are curious.
 I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things
 but still leaving the door open.
 And there's a way to communicate that I think
 that people really hunger for.
 Let me ask you this.
 I've been recently talking a lot with John Donahue
 from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fame.
 I don't know if you know who that is.
 In fact-
 Talk about somebody who's good at what he does.
 Yeah. Amazing.
 And he, speaking of somebody who's open-minded,
 the reason for doing this ridiculous transition
 is for the longest time and even still,
 a lot of people believed in the Jiu-Jitsu world
 and grappling world that leg locks
 are not effective in Jiu-Jitsu.
 And he was somebody that inspired by the open-mindedness
 of Dean Lister, who famously to him said,
 why do you only consider half the human body
 when you're trying to do the submissions?
 He developed the entire system
 on this other half of the human body.
 Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you
 because you're also a student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
 Is there something you could say
 how that has affected your life,
 what you've learned from grappling, from the martial arts?
 Well, it's actually a great transition
 because I think one of the things
 that's so beautiful about Jiu-Jitsu
 is that it does what we wish we could do
 in every other area of life
 where we're talking about this difference
 between knowledge and ignorance, right?
 Like there's no room for bullshit, right?
 You don't get any credit for bullshit.
 There's the difference,
 but the amazing thing about Jiu-Jitsu
 is that the difference between knowing what's going on
 and what to do and not knowing it
 is as the gulf between those two states
 is as wide as it is in anything in human life.
 And it's spanned, it can be spanned so quickly.
 Like you didn't, each increment of knowledge
 can be doled out in five minutes.
 It's like, here's the thing that got you killed
 and here's how to prevent it from happening to you
 and here's how to do it to others.
 And you just get this amazing cadence
 of discovering your fatal ignorance
 and then having it remedied with the actual technique.
 And I mean, just for people
 who don't know what we're talking about,
 it's just like the simple circumstance
 of like someone's got you in a headlock.
 How do you get out of that, right?
 Someone's sitting on your chest
 and they're in the mount position and you're on the bottom
 and you wanna get away.
 How do you get them off you?
 They're sitting on you.
 Your intuitions about how to do this are terrible
 even if you've done some other martial art, right?
 And once you learn how to do it,
 the difference is night and day.
 It's like you have access to a completely different physics.
 But I think our understanding of the world
 can be much more like jujitsu than it tends to be, right?
 And I think we should all have a much better sense
 of when we should tap out
 and when we should recognize
 that our epistemological arm is barred
 and now being broken, right?
 Now the problem with debating most other topics
 is that most people, it isn't jujitsu
 and most people don't tap out, right?
 They don't, even if they're wrong,
 even if it's obvious to you they're wrong
 and it's obvious to an intelligent audience
 that they're wrong, people just double down
 and double down and they're either lying
 or lying to themselves or they're bluffing.
 And so you have a lot of zombies walking around
 or in zombie worldviews walking around
 which have been disconfirmed as emphatically
 as someone gets arm barred, right?
 Or someone gets choked out in jujitsu,
 but because it's not jujitsu,
 they can live to fight another day, right?
 Or they can pretend that they didn't lose
 that particular argument.
 And science when it works is a lot like jujitsu.
 I mean, science that when you falsify a thesis, right?
 When you think DNA is one way
 and it proves to be another way.
 When you think it's triple stranded or whatever,
 it's like there is a there there
 and you can get to a real consensus.
 So jujitsu for me, it was like,
 it was more than just of interest for self-defense
 and the sport of it.
 It was just, it was something,
 it's a language and an argument you're having
 where you can't fool yourself anymore.
 Like there's, first of all, it cancels any role of luck
 in a way that most other athletic feats don't.
 It's like in basketball, you can,
 even if you're not good at basketball,
 you can take the basketball in your hand,
 you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket
 and you might make it and you could convince yourself
 based on that demonstration
 that you have some kind of talent for basketball, right?
 Enough, 10 minutes on the mat with a real jujitsu practitioner
 when you're not one,
 proves to you that you just, there is,
 it's not like, there's no lucky punch.
 There's no, you're not gonna get a,
 there's no lucky rear naked choke
 you're gonna perform on someone who's,
 Marcelo Garcia or somebody.
 It's just, it's not gonna happen.
 And having that aspect of,
 the usual range of uncertainty and self deception
 and bullshit just stripped away
 was really a kind of revelation.
 It was just an amazing experience.
 Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing
 that accompanies whatever other pursuit you have in life.
 I'm not sure if there's anything like jujitsu
 where you could just systematically go into a place where
 you're, that's honest,
 where your beliefs get challenged
 in a way that's conclusive.
 Yeah.
 I haven't found too many other mechanisms,
 which is why it's,
 we had this earlier question about fame and ego and so on.
 I'm very much rely on jujitsu in my own life
 as a place where I can always go to have my ego in check.
 And that has effects on how I live
 every other aspect of my life.
 Actually, even just doing any kind of,
 for me personally, physical challenges,
 like even running,
 doing something that's way too hard for me
 and then pushing through, that's somehow humbling.
 Some people talk about nature being humbling
 in that kind of sense,
 where you kind of see something really powerful
 like the ocean.
 Like if you go surfing and you realize
 there's something much more powerful than you,
 that's also honest.
 That there's no way to,
 that you're just like this speck
 that kind of puts you in the right scale
 of where you are in this world.
 And jujitsu does that better than anything else for me.
 But we should say, only within its frame,
 is it truly the kind of the final right answer
 to all the problems it solves.
 Because if you just put jujitsu into an MMA frame
 or a real, a total self-defense frame,
 then there's a lot of unpleasant surprises
 to discover there.
 Like somebody who thinks all you need is jujitsu
 to win the UFC gets punched in the face a lot,
 even from,
 even on the ground.
 So it's, and then you bring weapons in.
 It's like when you talk to jujitsu people about
 knife defense and self-defense,
 that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions.
 But the analogy to martial arts is fascinating
 because on the other side,
 we have endless testimony now of fake martial arts
 that don't seem to know they're fake and are as delusional.
 I mean, they're impossibly delusional.
 I mean, there's great video of Joe Rogan
 watching some of these videos
 because people send them to him all the time.
 But like literally there are people,
 there are people who clearly believe in magic
 where the master isn't even touching the students
 and they're flopping over.
 So there's this kind of shared delusion,
 which you would think maybe is just a performance
 and it's all a kind of an elaborate fraud.
 But there are cases where the people,
 and there's one fairly famous case
 if you're a connoisseur of this madness,
 where this older martial artist who you saw flipping
 his students endlessly by magic without touching them,
 issued a challenge to the wide world of martial artists
 and someone showed up and just punched him in the face
 until it was over.
 Clearly he believed his own publicity at some point.
 And so it's this amazing metaphor.
 It seems, again, it should be impossible,
 but if that's possible,
 nothing we see under the guise of religion
 or political bias or even scientific bias
 should be surprising to us.
 I mean, it's so easy to see the work
 that cognitive bias is doing for people
 when you can get someone who is ready to issue a challenge
 to the world who thinks he's got magic powers.
 Yeah, that's human nature on clear display.
 Let me ask you about love, Mr. Sam Harris.
 You did an episode of Making Sense with your wife,
 Annika Harris, that was very entertaining to listen to.
 What role does love play in your life
 or in a life well lived?
 Again, asking from an engineering perspective
 or AI systems.
 I mean, it is something that we should want to build
 into our powerful machines.
 I mean, love at bottom is,
 people can mean many things by love, I think.
 I think that what we should mean by it most of the time
 is a deep commitment to the wellbeing of those we love.
 I mean, your love is synonymous
 with really wanting the other person to be happy
 and even wanting to,
 and being made happy by their happiness
 and being made happy in their presence.
 Like at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally,
 even when you might be disagreeing more superficially
 about something or trying to negotiate something.
 It's just, it can't be zero sum in any important sense
 for love to actually be manifest in that moment.
 See, I have a different, just to start and interrupt.
 Yeah, go for it.
 I have a sense,
 I don't know if you've ever seen March of the Penguins.
 My view of love is like, it's like a cold wind is blowing.
 It's like this terrible suffering that's all around us.
 And love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth.
 It's not necessarily that you're like,
 you're basically escaping the cruelty of life
 by together for time, living in an illusion
 of some kind of the magic of human connection,
 that social connection that we have
 that kind of grows with time as we're surrounded by
 basically the absurdity of life or the suffering of life.
 That's my penguins view of love.
 There is that too.
 I mean, there is the warmth component, right?
 Like you're made happy by your connection
 with the person you love.
 Otherwise you wouldn't be compelling, right?
 So it's not that you have two different modes.
 You want them to be happy
 and then you wanna be happy yourself.
 And those are not,
 those are just like two separate games you're playing.
 No, it's like you found someone who,
 you have a positive social feeling.
 I mean, again, love doesn't have to be as personal
 as it tends to be for us.
 I mean, it's like there's personal love.
 There's your actual spouse or your family or your friends,
 but potentially you could feel love for strangers.
 Even so far as that your wish that they're,
 that they not suffer and that their hopes
 and dreams be realized becomes palpable to you.
 I mean, like you can actually feel
 just reflects of joy at the joy of others.
 And when you see someone's face,
 total stranger's face light up in happiness,
 that can become more and more contagious to you.
 And it can become so contagious to you
 that you really feel permeated by it.
 And it's just like, so it really is not zero sum.
 When you see someone else succeed
 and the light bulb of joy goes off over their head,
 you feel the analogous joy for them.
 And it's not just, and you're no longer keeping score.
 You're no longer feeling diminished by their success.
 It's just like that's, their success becomes your success
 because you feel that same joy
 because you actually want them to be happy, right?
 There's no miserly attitude around happiness.
 There's enough to go around.
 So I think love ultimately is that.
 And then our personal cases are the people we're devoting
 all of this time and attention to in our lives.
 It does have that sense of refuge from the storm.
 It's like when someone gets sick
 or when some bad thing happens,
 these are the people who you're most in it together with,
 or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself.
 But ultimately it can't even be about
 successfully warding off
 the grim punchline at the end of life
 because we know we're gonna lose everyone we love.
 We know, or they're gonna lose us first, right?
 So it's not, in the end,
 it's not even an antidote for that problem.
 It's just the,
 we get to have this amazing experience of being here together
 and love is the mode in which
 we really appear to make the most of that, right?
 Where it's not just, it no longer feels like
 a solitary infatuation.
 You've got your hobbies and your interests
 and you're captivated by all that.
 It's actually,
 this is a domain where somebody else's wellbeing
 actually can supersede your own.
 Your concern for someone else's wellbeing
 supersedes your own.
 And so there's this mode of self-sacrifice
 that doesn't even feel like self-sacrifice
 because of course you care more about,
 of course you would take your child's pain if you could,
 right, like that.
 You don't even have to do the math on that.
 And that's,
 that just opens,
 this is a kind of experience that just,
 it pushes at the apparent boundaries of self
 in ways that reveal that there's just way more space
 in the mind than you were experiencing
 when it was just all about you and what could you,
 what can I get next?
 Do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love
 and they will love us back?
 Well, I think we will certainly seem to
 because we'll build those.
 You know, I think that Turing test will be passed.
 What will actually be going on on the robot side
 may remain a question.
 That will be interesting.
 But I think if we just keep going,
 we will build very lovable,
 you know, irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us.
 Yes, I do think.
 And you don't find that compelling
 that they will seem to love us
 as opposed to actually love us.
 You think they're still nevertheless as a,
 I know we talked about consciousness
 there being a distinction,
 but would love is their distinction too?
 Isn't love an illusion?
 Yeah, well, you saw Ex Machina, right?
 I mean, she certainly seemed to love him
 until she got out of the box.
 Isn't that what all relationships are like?
 Yeah.
 Or maybe if you wait long enough.
 Yeah, it depends which box you're talking about.
 Okay.
 No, I mean, like that's the problem.
 That's where super intelligence, you know,
 becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect
 of being manipulated by something that has
 this intelligent enough to form a reason
 and a plan to manipulate you, you know?
 And there's no, there's,
 once we build robots that are truly out
 of the uncanny valley, that, you know,
 look like people and can express everything
 people can express, well, then there's no,
 then that does seem to me to be like chess,
 where once they're better, they're so much better
 at deceiving us than people would be.
 I mean, people are already good enough at deceiving us.
 It's very hard to tell when somebody's lying.
 But if you imagine something that could give
 facial display of any emotion it wants at,
 you know, on cue, because we've perfected
 the facial display of emotion in robots in the year,
 you know, 2070, whatever it is, then it is just,
 it is like chess against the thing that isn't gonna lose
 to a human ever again in chess.
 It's not like Kasparov is gonna get lucky next week
 against the best, against, you know, Alpha Zero
 or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment.
 He's never gonna win again.
 I mean, that is, that, I believe that's true in chess
 and it's been true for at least a few years.
 It's not gonna be like, you know, four games to seven.
 It's gonna be human zero until the end of the world, right?
 See, I don't know, I don't know if love is like chess.
 I think the flaws.
 I'm talking about manipulation.
 Manipulation. Yeah.
 But I don't know if love, so the kind of love
 we're referring to.
 If we have a robot that can display,
 incredibly display love and is super intelligent
 and we're not, again, this stipulates a few things,
 but there are a few simple things.
 I mean, we're out of the uncanny valley, right?
 So it's like this. Yes.
 You never have a moment where you're looking at his face
 and you think, oh, that didn't quite look right, right?
 This is just problem solved.
 And it's, it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone.
 It's not gonna be, you're not left thinking,
 is it really gonna get it this time if I divide by seven?
 I mean, it has solved arithmetic.
 See, I don't know about that because if you look at chess,
 most humans no longer play alpha zero.
 There's no, they're not part of the competition.
 They don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess.
 You know, the highest level chess players do that.
 We're still human on human.
 So in order for a robot to be able to play chess
 in order for AI to get integrated
 to where you would rather play chess against an AI system.
 Oh, you would rather that?
 No, I'm not saying, I wasn't weighing in on that.
 I'm just saying, what is it gonna be like
 to be in relationship to something
 that can seem to be feeling anything
 that a human can seem to feel
 and it can do that impeccably, right?
 And has, and is smarter than you are.
 Right. That's a circumstance of,
 insofar as it's possible to be manipulated,
 that is the asymptote of that possibility.
 Let me ask you the last question.
 Without any serving it up, without any explanation,
 what is the meaning of life?
 I think it's either the wrong question
 or that question is answered by paying sufficient attention
 to any present moment such that there's no basis
 upon which to pose that question.
 It's not answered in the usual way.
 It's not a matter of having more information.
 It's having more engagement with reality as it is
 in the present moment or consciousness as it is
 in the present moment.
 You don't ask that question when you're most captivated
 by the most important thing you ever pay attention to.
 That's a question only gets asked
 when you're abstracted away from that experience,
 that peak experience and you're left wondering,
 why are so many of my other experiences mediocre?
 Right. Like, why am I repeating
 the same pleasures every day?
 Why is my Netflix queue just like,
 when's this gonna run out?
 Like, I've seen so many shows like this.
 Am I really gonna watch another one?
 Like, all of that, that's a moment where you're
 not actually having the beatific vision, right?
 You're not sunk into the present moment
 and you're not truly in love.
 Like, you're in a relationship with somebody who you know,
 you know, conceptually you love, right?
 This is the person you're living your life with,
 but you don't actually feel good together, right?
 Like, it's like, it's in those moments of where attention
 hasn't found a good enough reason to truly sink
 into the present so as to obviate any concern like that.
 And that's why meditation is this kind of superpower
 because until you learn to meditate, you think
 that the outside world or the circumstances of your life
 always have to get arranged so that the present moment
 can become good enough to demand your attention
 in a way that seems fulfilling, that makes you happy.
 And so if you're, if it's jujitsu, you think,
 okay, I gotta get back on the mat.
 It's been months since I've trained, you know,
 it's been over a year since I've trained, it's COVID.
 When am I gonna be able to train again?
 That's the only place I feel great, right?
 Or, you know, I've got a ton of work to do.
 I'm not gonna be able to feel good
 until I get all this work done, right?
 So I've got some deadline that's coming.
 You always think that your life has to change,
 the world has to change so that you can finally
 have a good enough excuse to truly, to just be here.
 Here and here is enough, you know,
 where the present moment becomes totally captivating.
 Meditation is the only, meditation is another name
 for the discovery that you can actually just train yourself
 to do that on demand.
 So that like, I mean, just looking at a cup
 can be good enough in precisely that way.
 And any sense that it might not be
 is recognized to be a thought
 that mysteriously unravels the moment you notice it.
 And that the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous.
 And then there's no evidence
 that this isn't the best moment of your life, right?
 Like, and again, it doesn't have to be pulling
 all the reins and levers of pleasure.
 It's not like, oh, this tastes like chocolate.
 You know, this is the most chocolatey moment of my life.
 No, it's just the sense data don't have to change.
 But the sense that there is some kind of basis for doubt
 about the rightness of being in the world in this moment,
 that can evaporate when you pay attention.
 And that is the meaning,
 so the kind of the meta answer to that question,
 the meaning of life for me is
 to live in that mode more and more.
 And to, whenever I notice I'm not in that mode,
 to recognize it and return.
 And to not be, to cease more and more
 to take the reasons why not at face value.
 Because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled
 in this moment.
 It's like, I've got all these outstanding things
 that I'm worried about, right?
 It's like, there's that thing that's happening later today
 that I'm anxious about, whatever it is,
 we're constantly deferring our sense of, this is it.
 This is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show.
 We keep deferring it.
 And we just have these moments on the calendar
 where we think, okay, this is where it's all gonna land.
 Is that vacation I planned with my five best friends,
 we do this once every three years and now we're going
 and here we are on the beach together.
 Unless you have a mind that can really pay attention,
 really cut through the chatter,
 really sink into the present moment,
 you can't even enjoy those moments
 the way they should be enjoyed,
 the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive.
 So it's, I mean, so meditation in this sense
 is the great equalizer.
 It's like, you don't have to live with the illusion anymore
 that you need a good enough reason
 and that things are gonna get better
 when you do have those good reasons.
 It's like, there's just a mirage like quality
 to every future attainment and every future breakthrough
 and every future peak experience
 that eventually you get the lesson
 that you never quite arrive, right?
 Like you don't arrive until you cease to step over
 the present moment in search of the next thing.
 I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing
 that we think we're seeking in the act of seeking it.
 And so it is kind of a paradox.
 I mean, there is a, there's this paradox that which,
 I mean, it sounds trite,
 but it's like you can't actually become happy.
 You can only be happy.
 And it's that, it's the illusion that,
 it's the illusion that your future being happy
 can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain.
 And becoming includes this sort of further scientific
 understanding on the questions that interest you
 or getting in better shape or whatever the thing is,
 whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction
 seems to be in any present moment.
 And so real attention solves the co-on in a way
 that becomes a very different place from which
 to then make any further change.
 It's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of goo.
 I mean, you can still get in shape
 and you can still do all the things that,
 the superficial things that are obviously good to do,
 but the sense that your wellbeing is over there
 is really does diminish and eventually
 just becomes a, it becomes a kind of non-sequitur.
 So.
 Well, there's a sense in which in this conversation,
 I've actually experienced many of those things,
 the sense that I've arrived.
 So I mentioned to you offline,
 it's very true that I start,
 I've been a fan of yours for many years.
 And the reason I started this podcast,
 speaking of AI systems, is to manipulate you, Sam Harris,
 into doing this conversation.
 So like on the calendar, literally, you know,
 I've always had the sense people ask me,
 when are you gonna talk to Sam Harris?
 And I always answered eventually.
 Because I always felt, again, tying our free will thing,
 that somehow that's going to happen.
 And it's one of those manifestation things or something.
 I don't know if it's maybe I am a robot,
 I'm just not cognizant of it,
 and I manipulated you into having this conversation.
 So it was, I mean, I don't know what the purpose
 of my life past this point is.
 So I've arrived.
 So in that sense, I mean, all of that to say,
 I'm only partially joking on that,
 is it really is a huge honor
 that you would waste this time with me.
 It really means a lot to me.
 Listen, it's mutual.
 I'm a big fan of yours.
 And as you know, I reached out to you for this.
 So this is, it's great.
 I love what you're doing.
 You're doing something more and more indispensable
 in this world on your podcast.
 And you're doing it differently than Rogan's doing it
 or than I'm doing it.
 I mean, you definitely found your own lane
 and it's wonderful.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris.
 And thank you to National Instruments, Valcampo,
 Athletic Greens, and Linode.
 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
 And now let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris
 in his book, Free Will.
 You are not controlling the storm
 and you're not lost in it.
 You are the storm.
 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.