The Taboo Topic Sam Harris Won't Touch

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this episode, I revisit my podcast with Sam Harris. At the end of our discussion, Harris abruptly cut things short after we debated the meaning of slavery in the Bible and Talmud. Was this an honest philosophical disagreement, or an example of intellectual overstatement and rhetorical sleight-of-hand? Sam Harris is widely regarded as a leading public intellectual, yet during our 3.5-hour dialogue, I encountered a curious blind spot he consistently sidesteps. We cover: Sam Harris fleeing the 2025 LA Fires with a 'jar of MDMA and a gun" (02:00) Harris’s controversial claim that slavery disproves a benevolent God (09:12) The Hebrew word *“eved”* and its deeper meaning (09:30–11:51) Why Biblical servitude is not the same as American chattel slavery Sam’s dismissal of centuries of rabbinic scholarship (15:39–16:17) His argument about the optic blind spot as a “design flaw” (12:59–14:36) The role of psychedelics in Harris’s worldview (18:45–20:43) How confidence without expertise can turn into intellectual bad faith This isn’t about attacking Sam Harris — it’s about testing the limits of rationalism, confronting blind spots, and asking whether even the most brilliant thinkers can fall into ideological echo chambers. Watch the full original conversation here: • Sam Harris: The TRUTH About Consciousness ... 👉 Subscribe for more debates with leading scientists, philosophers, and iconoclasts. - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: / @drbriankeating 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating #NikolayKukushkin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:59Speaker 02

  Neuroscientist and author and host of the Waking Up podcast, my friend Sam Harris. Sam Harris, one of the world's great thinkers.

• 1:06Brian Keating?

  Dr. Sam Harris.

• 1:07Speaker 04

  What people seem to mean by free will makes no sense. Depending on the context, these, the AIs we have either pass the Turing test or they pass it so well that they fail it. At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are.

• 1:23Brian Keating?

  Sam is a neuroscience philosopher and New York Times bestselling author. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and he's the creator of the Waking Up app. His work touches on a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from rationality to religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.

• 2:07Brian Keating?

  Uh, here we go. Hey friends, I've been getting a lot of feedback on the short videos I've been posting from my conversation with Sam Harris last year. I've invited Sam back on the podcast and he's declined for some reason that I think I can explain after going over some of the statements he's made in public about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, but also about the conversation and how it ended with us. Now, this little mini-episode is going to be about Sam's really incredulous opinions about religion and its purpose. And it came towards the end, actually at the very end of our three and a half hour conversation. It was supposed to only be one hour, but I view that as a positive when somebody says they can only spend an hour with me and then they go for three and a half hours.

• 2:52Brian Keating?

  But this was the end of it, and I think this is the reason that he's not so interested in coming back on. And I don't have any ill will towards Sam. In fact, during the recent fires in Los Angeles that affected his very neighborhood and forced him out of his house, as he's talked about, right after the Palisades fire, which impacted and actually didn't destroy Sam's house, but he famously left town with a revolver and a supply of MDMA, I think he said, or DMT, I'm not really sure. I invited Sam to come to stay with us here in San Diego and he politely declined the offer. But I think it's sort of instructive to deconstruct when an intellect such as Sam Harris has blind

• 3:34Brian Keating?

  spots that really don't comport well with his otherwise fairly sensible positions that he's taken on many, many different fronts. And he is making the news lately a lot. He's obviously upped his game in terms of his own Making Sense podcast and his Waking Up app. And I know that there's a lot of you out there that are going to say, "I'm just defending religion, or God, or Judaism," which I practice and Sam does not practice, but that's missing the point. What I'm really trying to do is have a serious sober conversation about the motivations behind someone's worldview. And someone who is incredibly brilliant can have incredible blind spots. Einstein made many blunders, I'm sure I made many blunders and will continue to do so.

• 4:17Brian Keating?

  And so it's been a year since we had this conversation. And it's, as I said, it's our, it was our first conversation on the podcast and likely the last. Sam Harris is perhaps the poster child for the rational skeptic movement. He's a famous Buddhist who doesn't believe in the supernatural abilities of the Buddha, but does obviously subscribe to the meditative properties that Buddha espoused. But I want to talk about the conversation that we had when we turned to the subject of religion. And at the very end of the conversation, which lasted three hours, I literally got to a point where Sam said, let's cut this short.

• 4:56Brian Keating?

  And I felt it was revealing because it was almost embarrassing to be a part of where you have someone who's so brilliant in many ways, but is so ignorant about the topic and the subject matter that we were actually discussing. The conversation revolved around the intellectual case and the rational secular case for slavery. Sam claims that slavery disproves, the very existence of slavery disproves the existence of a good God or even God.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  The Creator. And when you think about how good a book could be if it were written by an omniscient being, I mean, I just how like, just, just, just think, I mean, it wouldn't, you don't even have to pretend omniscience. You and I could write a page of text right now. It would take us no more than 15 minutes, really. It'd been just, this is not an exaggeration, which if this page were in the Bible or the Quran, it would prove beyond any possibility of doubt that no human being of that period could have written those books. It would prove the supernatural origin of the books. Trivially easy to do that.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  We could write about, you know, we would just get some very condensed paragraphs that point to truths of mathematics that we understand now, but were not understood then. We could talk about, you know, information in a sophisticated way. It gave, it gave the basis of computation, et cetera, et cetera. Right? The fact that there's nothing like that in these books.

• 6:26Brian Keating?

  Actually, I actually don't believe that. I'm sorry to interrupt.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  There's nothing, no, no, but there's nothing like that that is incontestable. Right? If you're gonna go to some weird Bible code and look at the Hebrew without the vowels, whatever. But there should be, there should be. A compassionate God would have written a book like that. Right? And not spend so much time telling us how we should murder our neighbors for thought crimes or keep slaves. Right? It would have gotten slavery. This moral genius that wrote these books would have anticipated that we were smart enough at that point to recognize that slavery was not the greatest thing.

• 7:01Brian Keating?

  All right. Now, Sam, I love you, and I have to say this with respect, but. And I'm interested to see what Sam has to say if he does hear this. He obviously listened to the podcast from last year, where he was dismayed, perhaps, by the turn to religion. And again, cutting this short involved a variety of different intellectual rhetorical techniques, which I thought was sort of, you know, beyond what Sam would be. I thought that was, it was inconsistent with Sam's otherwise intellectual bona fides. This included things like moving the goalposts and ignoring corrections. And when cornered, doubling down when he's wrong, when the evidence is right in front of him.

• 7:43Brian Keating?

  And I think it's useful to kind of do this. A lot of people seem to think that I'm a Sam Harris supporter in every single thing that he says. And because I put clips out on the YouTube channel recently from him where he criticized Elon Musk as being perhaps one of the biggest psychopaths on earth, certainly the most dangerous, with Donald Trump being a close second, that's actually, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, many people have accused me of being woke Sam Harris wannabe. So this is kind of, kind of ridiculous. But nevertheless, I think it's instructive to use the pushback that I gave to him for many, many moments in this conversation, but particularly around slavery in the, in the Torah, in the Old Testament, the Bible.

• 8:26Brian Keating?

  And as I said, I have no ill will to Sam. I wanted to support him and his family during the LA fires, and I would still do so. I think I have great respect for him. But I think we need to encounter where Sam deviates from the intellectual rational discourse image that he's cultivated to perhaps pure theater for its own sake. So in many ways, his performance at the end of the conversation wasn't just disappointing. In some ways, I feel like it's disqualifying for his, for taking him seriously, at least on the basic facts about subjects that billions of people have studied literally for thousands of years. And those impact morality in this very day. Again, I'm not saying this to defend religion. I'm saying this as a critique of the way that Sam Harris approaches rational

• 9:08Brian Keating?

  discourse when it comes to things that he is not an unabashed authority on, and where he does not say that he is not an expert on. So he will defy, you know, he will not talk about, you know, quantum physics in the multiverse without caveatting and by saying that he's not an expert in that field. But he feels more than qualified to talk about things involving, say, religion, the Old Testament, the Bible, et cetera. So this is quite troubling. And so I think it's important for us to analyze this. So I'd love to talk about what happened during that conversation with Sam. And let's go back to where it was. Most of the podcast, just to review, was about consciousness, was about the nature of reality, was about neuroscience, which is the subject he has his PhD in. He's often

• 9:50Brian Keating?

  called a neuroscientist. I don't think he even thinks of himself as a neuroscientist. He hasn't done an experiment or written a paper in 20 years or so, since he got his PhD. But he was trained in that. He has one or two relatively important citations. But let's start with the real impetus for this particular episode, reaction video to my own interview with Sam. And it's something that was fascinating to see, which is that the The confidence with which Sam asserted the interpretations of the biblical texts that he freely admitted he can't read in Hebrew or hasn't really fully studied, but it was clearly pontificating about, without actually having any comprehension or dedicating any study to, suggesting that it's trivial and easy and it could be dismissed.

• 10:34Brian Keating?

  As I've had the same kinds of conversations with Lawrence Krauss, who's also a militant atheist, self-declared militant atheist. But where Sam differs is that he speaks with such confidence about matters that he has zero expertise on. He would never speak about French literature, for example, without acknowledging that he couldn't speak French. And I think there is an example of expertise, as he pointed out in the recent Douglas Murray and Dave Smith debate.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  You say about Sam Harris kind of like criticized me a little bit for not having the credentials to talk about some of this stuff, which, you know, like I even said, okay, he's got a point.

• 11:06Brian Keating?

  Where expertise is still to be respected, even though experts have led us astray in certain ways and scientists have been gatekeepers. Look, we need gatekeepers. And some of the same right-wing folks that I am friends with will complain about scientists being gatekeepers and having thoroughly humiliated and be clowned ourselves during the COVID epoch. I believe absolve from that. I had on the foremost advocate against lockdowns, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of my best friends, who's now the head of the NIH. So I had him on during the height of COVID pandemic and the lockdowns and so forth, and I stand behind my behavior during that period.

• 11:47Brian Keating?

  But I think it's important to realize that there is a need for gatekeepers. Many of the same people on the right have no problem with gates around our country, called the border, nor do I. I think we do need borders and any sensible country should have borders. So we do appreciate gates and we do need gatekeepers. They're called ICE, they're called Customs and Border Patrol. So I think it's nonsensical when people say, oh, you're just being a gatekeeper, Keating. No, in this case, I'm not being a gatekeeper. I'm pointing out that Sam is ignorant and was ignorant, at least, and shows no intellectual curiosity of the basics of the nature of slavery, as discussed.

• 12:23Brian Keating?

  In the Old Testament, but not only the Old Testament, in the 2,700-page-long Talmud, which is the codification of many of the early Jewish laws and thinking and philosophy and stories. So when I pointed out to Sam that the word "evid," which is the word that means slavery, which he translated as slave, is the same word that was used to describe Moses's relationship to God. That made him very uncomfortable. He, I think, realized the trap that he had been fallen into, where he immediately said, "Let's cut this short." And so I think this is exactly the kind of intellectual bad faith he spent decades criticizing in others. The utter cognitive dissonance was shocking to me. And it was quite striking that when he realized that you couldn't say

• 13:08Brian Keating?

  that the type of slavery that was practiced, the chattel slavery practiced in the South in the United States and ended also in the United States through a bloody civil war, that type of slavery had anything to do with what was mandated by God. For example, if you believe in God, I'm not even saying, "I believe in God," quote-unquote, whatever that means. I always say, "I think that's ridiculous." I also don't believe in gravity. If I take this piece of dark matter and I drop it, I know it's going to fall because I have evidence that it's going to fall. I don't need to have belief in it the way that I have faith or amuna or trust in, say, a higher power if I profess as such. But in this case, the fact that Moses is called a slave, if you translate the word slavery, the exact same word used

• 13:51Brian Keating?

  for the type of indentured servitude, which I claim was actually a good thing. So remember, Sam's trying to say that if God exists, he wouldn't create something as stupid as slavery and says evil. He would have known what would happen in the South in America. Slavery described in the Torah is not the chattel slavery that we ascribe to the African diaspora that came to America. It's extremely different from that. And even in those times, it was recognized as such. For example, the Torah forbids your slave from working on the Sabbath. I don't know how many Southerners in the Deep South in 1846 were giving their slaves time off. It also forbids stealing as one of the Eighth Commandment. Stealing is what was done to these Africans, it's still done to this day, as you've spoken about, in Africa and many parts of the Islamic world to this day.

• 14:35Brian Keating?

  Slavery, it was said that when you acquired a slave, and I can't say it in the Aramaic, but when you acquired a slave, you acquired a master. That person had to have, if you had one pillow, it had to go to the slave. If the slave wanted to, look, Sam, when the slave wanted to leave, slaves were free every seven years. I think we can cut this short, because none of this is summated into what you think, I have a response to this that doesn't require, you read the litany of pirouettes that people have done for thousands of years around, obviously barbaric passages that people think better of, and they create this armature by which they can say, "Oh, there's some, you know, there's some reason to view this differently."

• 15:17Brian Keating?

  If we squint our, that's, I think, completely ridiculous. As again, the purpose of slavery in the Torah, in the Bible, and in the Talmud, where it's explicated, is to allow people that have debts that they can't pay to act as indentured servitude, indentured servants. For example, you're mandated to treat your slave at least as well as you would treat, say, a child, and that if you have one pillow in your house, the Talmud says, you have to give that to your slave, not yourself. You have to feed your slave, clothe your slave, and in fact, the slaves, in many instances, there's a law that if your slave doesn't want to leave, you have to drive an awl, a tool, through his ear, and give him a permanent cymbal in his ear that he was unwilling to exercise the liberty, the freedom that God had given him.

• 16:02Brian Keating?

  Again, this is if you believe in God, but it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not, because the fact is, and we're describing the relationship of the word slavery, or slave, or servant, God's servant is what Moses is called, and the notion of chattel slavery in the United States, and Sam is trying to make the case that because the Torah, because the Torah specifies and the Talmud specifies, although he hasn't read either one, it's clear to me he hasn't read either one, knows nothing about the biblical reading and literature, the commentary on this at all. He's the type of person that might say, "An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, perhaps", or not even realizing that, even the Talmud suggested that an eye for an eye would leave people dead, not giving them reciprocal justice.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 17:13Brian Keating?

  In any case, he cut off the conversation when it was clear that, obviously, this Torah is not talking about Moses as a chattel slave. And so I think that made him extremely uncomfortable. And I don't think that's intellectually a very... I don't think we should take him as seriously intellectually on this facet alone. Maybe we take him in seriously on others. My friend Gad Sam calls him the Malibu Meditator. Tim Dillon has made fun of him for his waking up app amidst other claims against Sam. I'm not talking about any of that. I'm just saying, is there a type of intellectual bad faith when you criticize others and sort of have this cognitive dissonance that you know that you're wrong, or have been proven that you're wrong, and then you cut it off completely?

• 17:57Brian Keating?

  I think this is oddly ironically related to what Sam is most known for, which is the optic blind spot, which we talked about at length in the episode. I even have a short about that on the channel. And Sam made this confident assertion that an omnipotent God wouldn't design humans with such an obvious flaw. But I think, you know, Sam's no optical engineer. Neither am I, but I have a lot of more experience in optics and technology and data processing than Sam does, but he has a fundamental misunderstanding of both evolution and functional design. The blind spot is actually an elegant solution to a specific engineering constraint. It's not a design flaw. To get signals out of our cryostats, we also have to have blind spots where the cables come out

• 18:39Brian Keating?

  and they penetrate from a 0.1 Kelvin system to a 300 Kelvin system. We have to let light in from the early universe, the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. But we also were letting in excess heat, which warms up the detectors. We have to filter out and have blind spots ourself in order to satisfy the engineering constraints. It's brilliantly done in cryostat engineering and mechanical and cryogenic engineering. I think that's beautifully and brilliantly done. But it's even more so in wet, squishy matter that's evolved over billions of years, in some cases with simple light sensing devices and cuttlefish and other objects. Maybe not billions, but at least tens of millions of years. And so I think that that is a claim that is arrogant. Again, stating that you know better than God. Again, you don't have to believe in God

• 19:24Brian Keating?

  to assess his argument's weakness. He's trying to say that God doesn't exist because he made an obvious engineering blunder. But that's ridiculous. Our technology, our engineering, there's simply no other way to get a two-dimensional retinal image out in a three-dimensional system without having some part of the system either... So let's say you moved it off of the optic axis and the macula, where it is. And I've done videos about this, featuring Andrew Huberman and my conversation with Andrew. But when you have the macula and you have the optic blind spot, there is some part. So you could move it off to the side, but that would introduce an evolutionary disadvantage because you'd lengthen the amount of time. You would have less sensitivity and less resolution, and that would make you more susceptible to predators. So in fact, the way that it's oriented right now

• 20:09Brian Keating?

  is somehow optimal for most living creatures that have the optic blind spot, as we do. Now, other creatures don't, but they don't have anywhere near the optic sensitivity and performance that we have. Incredible liquid lenses, effectively, that change shape and last for decades. We see in color, unlike almost any of the animals, most of the animal kingdom is colorblind. So I think this, again, it's ironic, it's another blind spot. And Sam didn't stop there. There's the question about the Talmud, the 2,700-page document of legal commentary, which is developed over centuries by some of the finest legal minds in human history. And Sam's response is, "Well, we shouldn't have to spend thousands of years getting God off the hook." That's literally what he says. But this isn't about engagement with scholarship.

• 20:54Brian Keating?

  It's about dismissal without understanding and arrogance that you can sort of intuit what all these things said. But you would never say that about peer-reviewed scientific literature. We shouldn't have to spend decades studying scientific literature. Now, again, ironic because Sam is rightfully appalled by such statements, even though he is not, as I said, an active researcher. He's had a body of scholarship which is quite minimal compared to practicing neuroscientists, for example, that would say, or a neuroanatomist, or evolutionary biologist. So I think the slavery mischaracterization, though, is really the argument where Sam felt weakest, and as evidenced by the fact that he's essentially unwilling to engage anymore,

• 21:35Brian Keating?

  even though he spent three and a half hours and took multiple, you know, biological breaks. And he, again, this is a man who gave me an hour at the start, or actually his assistant told me, "Oh, he only has one hour. Three hours go by, I take that as a good sign that he's enjoying himself." He could have gotten out at the hour, but he didn't. So up until that point, everything was going swimmingly, until he brought up chattel slavery and how his theory of, and how he said that the two of us could come up with a better system of moral and societal regulation than the Torah in 15 minutes. So when I laid out the specific protections in Jewish law, the mandatory freedom after seven years, remember, how many slaves in the American South would refuse, to the point

• 22:16Brian Keating?

  of having this all drilled through their ear, and remaining in their owner's house? I mean, this is ridiculous. There's no comparison between the type of slavery, the vivid... Slavery, avoda, slavery, servant, which is what it means, indentured servitude. All the things that these servants would have rights that they were mandated to give, or else they'd be taken away by the local courts. These individuals had to have rest on the Sabbath. I mean, they made it into the Ten Commandments. Provisions on release, they have to be given a wife if needed, if wanted, if desired. It's a fascinating thing from a psychological perspective to see Sam, who's built an identity around being intellectually honest, when he's confronted with evidence that contradicts his narrative.

• 23:00Brian Keating?

  And his response is essentially evasion and termination of this long and quite enjoyable conversation.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:07Brian Keating?

  Right, but we also don't have to do those Gedanken experiments because we know based on case law, for example, a famous one that even Obama made fun of, you know, stoning your child. So there's a rebellious son who is going to be a drunkard and he's going to be a murderer, and you take him to the elders of the town, and the elders of the town shall stone him to death. That's barbaric, right, Sam? That's awful. But, A, there's no record of that ever having been done, and these people are meticulous record-keeper.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  That's a dodge. It's the book.

• 23:37Brian Keating?

  I know, but, okay, fine.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  We could spend a long time on this, but let me short-circuit it with the real point, which is, it could be such a better book, right? We shouldn't have to spend thousands of years trying to get God off the hook for writing these barbarous passages.

• 23:51Brian Keating?

  So it's obvious after this conversation, we'll never talk again unless we happen to, you know, meet up in person in Arawan Market in Malibu. But it's like watching a real-time, you know, study and confirmation bias, and it kind of serves as a cautionary tale for those. I know there's many more fans of Sam than there are of me, and that's fine, and we differ on many things, but I can hold my own when it comes to discussing the ancient texts, if you will, and you may dismiss them, I don't give a crap if you dismiss them and think they're a superstitious fantasy of a supernatural sky daddy and blah, blah, blah, the idiots like Scott Galloway and people that dismiss things. Again, with zero knowledge whatsoever, they just think they can intuit it without ever studying it.

• 24:33Brian Keating?

  And it's ironic because in other ways, you know, Sam is quite perspicacious. I think another blind spot he has is about drug enhancement. So I want to address something that's become increasingly more apparent in that he has built much of his recent philosophy and insights on what he has experienced through psychedelic experiences. We talked about that in the interview. MDMA, DMT, psilocybin, he's tried it all. He's essentially augmented the traditional purely spiritual Vipassana practices. Now, I subscribe to both his paid podcast and his paid app. So again, this is not coming from a place of purely wanting to take him down. It's just grappling with someone who is intellectually honest selectively. And I want to explore this and say, look,

• 25:17Brian Keating?

  I'm not opposed to consciousness research. But when I asked him basic historical facts about these experiments and the relative lack of knowledge in double-blind studies, etc., with psychedelics, I know that's a controversial subject, but that he's talking about a regular encountering with Schedule I substances. It raises some interesting questions. I think you have to at least look into that. It's not irrelevant to the reverence that we should or should not have in a person who puts himself out there as a champion of neuroscientific rational discourse. So it's quite striking to me that he, again,

• 25:58Brian Keating?

  when he was forced at fire point as the houses around him cascaded into flames, tragically so, billions of damage done in Los Angeles, that he took a gun, which I don't fault him for, I would take a gun too, but that he also grabbed some Schedule I substances as well. Those, not the photographs, not the wife's wedding ring or whatever, just teasing there. But the point is, this kind of pronouncements from people that put at the same level of importance, say, as your family heirlooms when facing an existential crisis. He didn't know if his house would survive or not. In fact, at one point, he thought it wouldn't and was told that it wouldn't. So

• 26:40Brian Keating?

  I think there's a pattern here. You know, in some ways, Sam is one of the foremost courageous, outspoken champions of rationalism. But in other ways, he's become quite the opposite of what he set out to be, making claims and confident assertions that he is an expert in something or can speak about stuff and dismiss scholarship or thought processes, either because he thinks it's too primitive, or because he thinks that it's outdated and that he could do better. Remember, he's saying that he and I could do better than the God of Moses and the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity, without doing any kind

• 27:21Brian Keating?

  of rigorous analysis. Has he studied anything about the Old Testament, etymology of words, the grammar, Hebrew? No, he doesn't care, because it's simple, it's trivial, it's a sky daddy, and so it's not worth really thinking about. I'm not saying, you know, we should cancel him. I mean, he's uncancelable, as he says, because he's self-supported, and he's rightfully so. You've got to give it to him. He's got a great industry going with the Waking Up app and the Making Sense podcast. He's got, he said something like 100,000 paid subscribers at $100 a pop per year, 129, I think I pay for it, plus the podcast, another 100 bucks. So he's making a lot of money, and I don't fault him at all for that. Capitalism is a wonderful thing. But I think, you know, the intellectual, ethical vacuum that he

• 28:06Brian Keating?

  exhibits, in some ways, in his thought processes, was disappointing to me. And of course, I am not a substance user. I think it should be reserved for very, very limited cases when it's medically necessary. And I think it's incredibly intriguing on an intellectual level, for someone that's rejected moral systems, traditional moral systems, to be operating on pure intuition through his psychedelic experiences. So I think as a framework for this thought process, I found it lacking. So what I observed in this three-and-a-half-hour conversation, as someone who's Becoming intellectually isolated. He's increasingly getting entrenched in a echo chamber of his own making,

• 28:49Brian Keating?

  where he chooses to criticize Donald Trump and Elon Musk at every chance that he can get, famously saying he didn't care.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared, right? It's like, there's nothing.

• 29:07Brian Keating?

  He still doesn't care about it. He says that anything that Pete Hegseth did is a thousand times worse than what they did. Now, again, I listen to Sam, I respect Sam, but he's in an echo chamber, an intellectual echo chamber, and I think he needs an intervention, and maybe this is part of that way of going about it. To say that someone like Donald Trump is, you know, destroyed the planet almost as much as Elon Musk, who's destroyed it even more. He mentioned a bet that he made with Elon about COVID deaths, and this is where their relationship broke down. And Elon, as he said, literally, if you look at the More with Sam segment of the Making Sense podcast, which I think is free, it's not just for subscribers like me, it shows the level of, yeah, what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome,

• 29:51Brian Keating?

  and now Elon Derangement Syndrome. It's quite hyperbolic, and I think it reveals his own intellectual blind spot. And this is what he accuses religious fundamentalists of doing. So it's very shocking to me that Sam is becoming kind of a secular fundamentalist. I mean, we have religious fundamentalists, I agree with Sam in that, it's one of the most dangerous forces in nature. But where do you get your morality from, Sam? Where does this come from? You could say you're smarter than me, maybe you are. Maybe you're much smarter than me, Sam. And you don't need some book to tell me what to do, or tell you what to do, and you'll just divine it and derive it from, you know, drug-enhanced spirituality, meditation, sitting on a couch somewhere in silent contemplation. But I still don't think I would dismiss it without serious engagement.

• 30:33Brian Keating?

  I think that you present yourself as a rational skeptic with an artistic level of incredulity about the topics that you don't know anything about. And that's, you know, everyone has limits to their education. So, again, this is said maybe as an intellectual intervention, and hopefully it can lead to greater engagement, or at least maybe having some closure, and some closure with precision. I don't take any... Pleasure in this. I actually admire much of Sam's work. And many of you are out there saying, "Keating, you're just a shill. You're just a Zionist. You're just, you know, an idiot supporter of religion." Look, I've talked to all these great... And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm an idiot.

• 31:14Brian Keating?

  You know, I haven't been at this podcasting game as long as Sam has or other people have. But intellectual honesty is something I pride myself on. I can steel man the opposition's case. I don't think Sam could steel man the case that Elon has done some good for the country, for the world, or Trump has done some good for... He even said he's a horrible father and he uses his kids. You'll see it in the clips that I put out. And you watch the three-hour long episode. It was actually the most popular one I did on all of Spotify in 2024. The conversation really revealed something important. And it's really the danger of becoming so convinced of your own rationality that you don't see your own biases. This is something that Sam has warned others about for decades.

• 31:57Brian Keating?

  And ironically, he's fallen into his own trap. It's a cautionary tale about the limits of self-awareness and the corrosive effects of ideological certainty and of ideological self-capture. The solipsistic nature and tendency to really get high on your own supply, not the M T or the M D M A. But even the most sophisticated thinkers can become prisoners of their own intellectual frameworks. The question I think you have to ask yourself, are you courageous enough to examine your hero's beliefs with the same rigor that we apply to other people? And I think that is the magic question that I want to leave you with today.

• 33:11Speaker 06

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