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

Sam Harris is a neuroscience Ph. D. and the author of the bestselling books, The End of Faith http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Faith-Religion-Terror/dp/0393327655/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, The Moral Landscape http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine/dp/143917122X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Free Will http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Lying http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Sam-Harris/dp/1940051002/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and Waking Up http://www.samharris.org/. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek,Rolling Stone, and many other journals. In this episode we discuss: -Five books he thinks everyone should read -Why have he stopped doing public debates -Morning rituals and meditation -The one tip for better brain health outside meditation or exercise Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 1980's, or as sleek as a black panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that's where MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim comes in. I've spent the last 2-3 weeks wearing underwear from these guys http://meundies.com/tim 24/7, and they are the most comfortable and colorful underwear I've ever owned. Their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim http://meundies.com/tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you're at it, don't miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/. Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic – now worth more than a billion dollars) first incorporated his company on LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/. LegalZoom, which I've used myself, can help you with almost anything legal, including setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a non-profit, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/ is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract review, and otherwise help you run your business. Use the code "Tim" at checkout to get $10 off your next order. Take a gander at everything you can get for a fraction of what you'd expect — LegalZoom.com http://www.legalzoom.com/ Enjoy!

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:08Speaker 01

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• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I interview and deconstruct world-class performers. This episode is a special episode. It is a round two with Sam Harris, H-A-R-R-I-S, who is a neuroscience PhD and the author of many bestselling books, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Waking Up, and Lying. His work has been discussed in many different places, ranging from The New York Times to Scientific American, Nature, many journals, Rolling Stone, etc. In the last episode together, we explored the science of lying, the uses in different types of meditation, psychedelic drug use, spiritual experiences, and much more. But it's really broadly a discussion of the human experience.

• 5:10Tim Ferriss?

  In this round two, we dig even deeper into all sorts of fascinating topics, because you all submitted questions and voted nearly 19,000 times on almost 700 questions. And Sam is going to answer your top questions. So before we get to that, just want to tell you where to find more on Sam. It's samharris.org. He has some great guided meditations and other essays. He's also @samharrisorg on Twitter, so please say hello. Let him know what you thought of this episode. And without further ado, please enjoy round two with Sam Harris.

• 5:48Sam Harris?

  Hey, Tim, and Tim's many fans. This is Sam Harris. I'm very happy to be doing this Q&A for my buddy, Tim Ferriss, who, among other things, has inspired me to do my own podcast. So, thank you, brother. Now, Tim has sent me to a Google Doc file, or actually, Google Moderator, which ominously says that it will disappear on June 30. I think the entire piece of software looks like it's going to disappear. So, I will answer your questions now. There have been almost 19,000 votes on almost 700 questions from over 1,000 people, 1,168 people.

• 6:25Sam Harris?

  So that's a nice response. I've looked this over a little bit. There's some good questions here. There are, I think there's probably a founder's effect where the early questions to get voted up are the ones that everyone reads and seems to like and they get voted on. And the questions that got added to the mix much later have far fewer eyes on them. So it's a bit of an illusion, I think, to say that these are the most popular. But I will start with the most popular and maybe dig around in at the bottom of the list at some point. What are five books you think everyone should read? This is from Matt in Houston. This is a hard question. I just went to my shelves to get some ideas, but there are

• 7:08Sam Harris?

  just so many good books in all my areas of interest. I'll probably name more than five. One book I recommend in philosophy, just to get your bearings, is Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. Bertrand Russell, as you surely know, is one of the great philosophers of his time and just remarkably clear thinker and writer, just a great example of how English should be written and just a great voice to have in your head as a result. And being a philosopher himself, he was quite opinionated about the various schools and traditions in philosophy. So it's a fun read, provided you care about the history of Western philosophy. I also recommend Derek Parfit's book Reasons and Persons, which is just brilliant and

• 7:53Sam Harris?

  written as though by an alien intelligence. It's a deeply strange book, filled with thought experiments that bend your intuitions left and right. And it's just a truly strange and unique document and incredibly insightful about morality and questions of identity and well worth reading if you are of a philosophical cast of mind.

• 8:19Sam Harris?

  I also am a big fan of Thomas Nagel's earlier work. Thomas Nagel is a philosopher of mind and a moral philosopher. Of late, unfortunately, he's made some slightly crazy noises about evolution and some annoying defenses of religion, and he wrote a review of my book, The Moral Landscape, that I thought was fairly wrong-headed, but his earlier stuff is great. And I actually align with him on questions related to consciousness and the philosophy of mind in general, more than I align with people like Dan Dennett, with whom I have more of a relationship. And Nagel's a very fine writer, a very clear writer, and it's just, as a style of communication, I think he's worth going to school on.

• 9:04Sam Harris?

  I would recommend you read his little book, The Last Word, which champions rationality in a very compelling way. Also, he has a book called Mortal Questions, which is a collection of essays, and there's some very good essays in there that were very influential in philosophy and should be more influential in the culture generally. He introduces a concept of moral luck, for instance, which very few people think about. I think it's very important ethically, and it boils down to this. If you imagine someone texting while driving and killing some pedestrians, what should happen to that person? Well, this person is very likely doing something that you, or your best friend, or your sister,

• 9:48Sam Harris?

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

• 10:28Sam Harris?

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

• 11:09Sam Harris?

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

• 11:49Sam Harris?

  Actually, there's another work of philosophy here, sort of philosophy slash science, that I've been greatly influenced by of late. The philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a book called Superintelligence, which has impressed many people for the thoroughness with which he has argued that we have a serious problem looming with respect to the birth of intelligent machines. There have been many books on this topic, and there are other good books. Our Final Invention by James Barrett is also good. But Superintelligence is really the clearest book I've come across that makes the case that the so-called control problem, the problem of building human-level and beyond

• 12:32Sam Harris?

  artificial intelligence that we can control, that we can know in advance we'll converge with our interests, that that's truly a difficult and important task because we will wind up building this stuff by happenstance if we simply keep going in the direction we're headed. And unless we have solved this problem in advance and have good reason to believe that the machines we are building are benign and their behavior predictable, even when they exceed us in intelligence a thousand, a million, or a billion-fold, this is going to be a catastrophic intrusion into our lives that we may not survive.

• 13:14Sam Harris?

  Very interesting topic. I've been getting more and more into it. Actually, in the middle of writing a short book myself with a collaborator on it, and I'll say more about that when that book is further along. So yeah, read Bostrom's book. It's a little dense for the uninitiated, but it really repays study. There's a writer, William Ian Miller, who I think is unfairly neglected. He writes some fascinating books. Several have been on negative emotions. One book is entitled Humiliation, which was a great read, just on the phenomenon of being humiliated and differentiating it from embarrassment and other similar emotions. And he also wrote a book on disgust called The Anatomy of Disgust, which is also fun.

• 13:56Sam Harris?

  These are very interdisciplinary books. He is a lawyer, I believe, or professor of law, but he goes deep into the relevant sociology, and these are cool books. I suspect many of you want recommendations on books about meditation and spiritual experience. You know, there's no book out there that is free of the superstition and religiosity you tend to get with books about Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, the Hindu teachings of nonduality. And so I can't really recommend those books without caveat. I wrote the book

• 14:36Sam Harris?

  that I think needed to exist, Waking Up, which was my last book. I am reluctant to include my own book in a list of books everyone should read, however. But there was a reason why I wrote that book, because there was really no book I could point rational people, students of science, critics of religious mumbo jumbo with a clear conscience. There are certainly books written by wiser yogis and meditators and more experienced ones than I am or am ever likely to be, but they are, as I said, mingled with a fair amount of woo. So with that caveat in mind, I will recommend in the Zogchen tradition, which if you've read Waking Up, you know, is, I think, is the center of the bullseye as far

• 15:21Sam Harris?

  as meditative wisdom. There's one book called The Flight of the Garuda, which I think is especially beautiful and wise. And among the Hindus who teach Advaita Vedanta, the nondual teachings of yogic meditation, that really just talks about pure consciousness and the illusion of the self. Don't be confused by the assertion of the existence of the big self, capital S. They're just talking about awareness in that case. But the book, I Am That, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who was a guru in Bombay in the 60s, 70s, and

• 16:02Sam Harris?

  I think he died in the mid 80s, I believe, around 87. I never met him. I studied with one of his students. And he was an incredibly clear and amusingly irascible guru.

• 16:15Sam Harris?

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

• 17:00Sam Harris?

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

• 17:43Sam Harris?

  I believe they were called Interhamway, forgive me if that pronunciation is terrible. And this is a fascinating and harrowing book, because these were, at least the people they chose to interview, were rather disconcertingly smart, introspective guys who have totally clear consciences with respect to what they did. It is amazing to get into their heads, and they invite you in there, and they give you the full tour. It's just, it is uncanny that circumstances can come together culturally, neurophysiologically...

• 18:20Sam Harris?

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

• 19:02Sam Harris?

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

• 19:47Sam Harris?

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

• 20:29Sam Harris?

  of suffering that we wouldn't otherwise know. And we've certainly given hostages to fortune, as someone, I think it was Francis Bacon, said. You worry about the future, you worry about all sorts of things that you would be quite insuasioned about if you were just on your own, living out your adulthood productively. So it's not without its downsides, but even the downsides have a silver lining, or many of them do. I think being concerned about the future because you have kids is good ethically, and it does lead to a kind of productivity that might not otherwise be available. In fact, I was just at this conference on artificial intelligence, where the main agenda was to try to get a handle on its

• 21:14Sam Harris?

  dangers and on the pressing issue of the control problem that I just mentioned. And one of the organizers, in fact, the main funder of the conference, Jan Tallin, who one of the founders of Skype, said that when he talks to people about this issue, he asks only two questions to sort of get an understanding of whether the person he's talking to is going to be able to grok just how pressing a concern artificial intelligence is. And the first is, are you a programmer, the relevance of which is obvious? And the second is, do you have children? And he claims to have found that if people don't have children, they just can't, their concern about the future isn't sufficiently well-calibrated

• 21:54Sam Harris?

  so as to get just how terrifying the prospect of building superintelligent machines is in the absence of having figured out the control problem. And I think there's something to that, just it's not limited, of course, to artificial intelligence. It spreads to every topic of concern. Just to worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future, and in a future that hopefully extends beyond your own. You can certainly tell a story about all the work you're not able to accomplish because you're busy changing diapers or pushing your kids on the swings.

• 22:38Sam Harris?

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

• 23:23Sam Harris?

  Well, I haven't so much as stopped as I haven't been offered one that has made any sense of late. And I've also, I haven't been doing much public speaking. This goes back to all the work I'm not doing because I'm a father. I just don't like leaving my family at this point. And so it really, there has to be a good reason for me to get on a plane and go somewhere to stand at a lectern and argue with someone about God or anything else. And so it really has to be a debate that is compelling, where I'm not merely going to repeat myself with someone against whom I feel like I'm going to make points that make a difference. It really has to be worth it.

• 24:06Sam Harris?

  So I don't actually know who I would debate in the usual vein. If you're talking about debating religion versus science, or religion versus atheism, a little of those debates goes a long way at this point. And so it just has to be worth it. I would debate people on other topics and have tried to engineer debates that seemed worth it, and those often fall through. Often, I'm trying to do that in writing, just because it allows for more precision and doesn't require travel. And so I have a few of those on my blog and quite an ill-fated attempt with Noam Chomsky recently. But I am trying to have difficult conversations that I now don't tend to think

• 24:45Sam Harris?

  of as debates, and the debate format is not really a good context in which to make progress on these issues. It's a foregone conclusion that the participants in the debate are not going to have their mind changed, and it really is not about even having a semblance of a conversation. You are colliding and deliberately not changing your mind, and in many cases deliberately not even noticing the other person's point, if you're a dishonest debater, in the presence of others who can be swayed one way or another. So it's really not, it's all, it's all about the audience experience. It's not about having an honest conversation, at least, most people approach it that way. I've never really approached it that way.

• 25:29Sam Harris?

  I've just known the kinds of things I've been debating are not the kinds of things that I'm likely to be swayed on. So, standing up there with William Lane Craig, you know, what were the chances that he was going to say something that was going to convince me that I should fall on my knees and give myself over to Jesus Christ as my savior? It wasn't likely, so it's not that it's impossible, but it's setting the bar pretty high. On other topics where I've had a debate, I really have approached it as a circumstance where I may very well change my mind in real time in front of the audience, and I would be thrilled to be able to do that. And to some degree, that, that did happen in this exchange I wrote with Majid Nawaz, which is coming out under the title Islam and the Future of Tolerance.

• 26:13Sam Harris?

  It's a book coming out in the fall. And that is a circumstance where, yeah, it's much more of a conversation, though many people will view it as something of a debate. So I think that debate is, is the wrong frame, but I, I'm into having difficult conversations. But again, I try to have them more and more remotely, and at some point that'll change, and it'll certainly change on any given weekend if I have the right interlocutor. And as far as anyone I would like to debate, you know, there are people who I've challenged to debate on these issues and they haven't accepted the challenge, or they've accepted it only to then disappear.

• 26:55Sam Harris?

  Francis Collins is someone who I've gone after before. He's declined to debate me for understandable reasons. There's no percentage in it for him. He's the head of the NIH. Why does he want to be on stage with me, having his totally illegitimate commitment to evangelical Christianity exposed as unscientific in all the ways that he wants to pretend it's scientific? It's just, there's no reason for him to do that. So, I don't take it personally, and I, you know, I think it's, there are many people who don't want to be in that situation for understandable reasons. Many people have urged me to debate Robert Pape, who is a scholar, or is often believed

• 27:39Sam Harris?

  to be a scholar of terrorism, and he's looked at all the terrorist incidents in recent history and categorized them in various ways that has made it seem like terrorism has nothing to do with Islam or religion, and has everything to do with politics and nationalism. And many people have thrown Pape's work at me as a rejoinder to everything I've said about the link between Islamic extremism and Muslim violence, Muslim terrorism. So I offered to debate Pape. He agreed. I announced it publicly. We were going to do this in writing, and then he disappeared, and disappeared in such a way that he, you know, is he alive? I don't know. I mean, I'm sorry if he's dead, and I've just castigated the man's ghost, but I, I

• 28:23Sam Harris?

  think he's very much alive, and he just disappeared. And that happened with David Eagleman, the neuroscientist. He does very interesting work scientifically. He's a very nice writer. He's said some deeply silly things about religion and atheism, and so many readers wanted the two of us to get together and debate those things. He agreed to debate, and then, at some point, declined. So it's not, it's not the easiest thing in the world to find the right people to debate, but I'm certainly open to it, and I'm open to suggestions. The goal is to not bore myself and everyone else, so not every suggestion makes sense. Could you talk about one of your differences with Hitch?

• 29:07Sam Harris?

  That is Christopher Hitchens. Specifically, his pro-life stance. Do you believe he was mistaken? Now Hitch, it could be that I'm unaware of everything Hitch said about abortion. But from what I recall, I don't think it's fair to call him pro-life. I think he said that he found abortion, depending on the stage at which it occurs in a pregnancy, to be a serious ethical concern and not to be entered into lightly. And I certainly agree with that. I would never call myself pro-life. I'm certainly pro-choice in the conventional sense. But I don't think anyone should be eager to have a late-term abortion, and I can't imagine anyone is.

• 29:52Sam Harris?

  I know where one draws the line between it being a trivial loss of a few dozen cells and something more akin to a murder of an infant. That's not obvious. And the convention of breaking a pregnancy into three trimesters and considering the first 12 weeks to be more or less a time at which one is free, without any ethical concern, to choose to terminate a pregnancy. I don't know that there is a neurologically principled stand to take there. I'm not close to this developmental literature at this point.

• 30:30Sam Harris?

  I don't know what we know about the possibility of suffering at each week past conception. I mean, any line you draw is going to seem arbitrary if you're a day on either side of that line. So there's no way to escape the sense of these landmarks being arbitrary. But I'm certainly pro-choice, and I think if a woman really wants to terminate her pregnancy, more often than not, there's a very good reason why she would. And that's not a child you want to bring into the world. And a woman can't be forced to have a child and put it up for adoption. So the ethical ballast is all on the side of the freedom for a woman to choose what to do with her body. But at a certain point...

• 31:15Sam Harris?

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

• 32:00Sam Harris?

  So a third trimester abortion is problematic ethically, and I don't know how someone finds himself in that situation. So I think that's the kind of salad of concerns I just served you is what Hitch was thinking about, if I'm not mistaken, and I think I share his view. More book recommendations. If you haven't read Christopher Hitchens, you should. He was a brilliant writer and also a brilliant speaker. You should watch him on YouTube. And you can get the benefit of both his voice and his writing if you listen to his audiobooks, the ones he read himself. And God is Not Great and Hitch 22 are two of those.

• 32:43Sam Harris?

  I don't know if he read any of the others, but that's great listening. Next question. Oh, sorry. That last question was from Gentry in Austin, Texas. Next question. What fact slash event has made you change your mind about a topic recently? And that's from, forgive me for this pronunciation, they spelled H R O, HRO. Is that actually a name from Sweden? HRO, HU, HU. I don't know how to pronounce your name, but you've come from Sweden. What have I changed my mind about recently? Well, sorry to go back to this tractor, but artificial intelligence is something that I... Never thought much about, and when I did think about it, I had more or less bought

• 33:28Sam Harris?

  the line that either hadn't panned out, or wasn't likely to, in any timeframe, that should motivate us to think about its dangers. I now have gotten religion on that topic. I'm not a conventional fan of the singularity. I'm not somebody who's awaiting these changes with Kurtzweilian glee. I'm referring to Ray Kurtzweil, whose work most of you probably know. If we can do this well, the obviously huge benefits will come from building artificial general intelligence. Everything that's good in our lives, more or less, is the result of human intelligence. So, intelligence is almost an intrinsic good.

• 34:13Sam Harris?

  We want more of it if we can have it. But, the question is, how do you get there without inadvertently building a angry little god in a box that takes no more concern over your interests than we take over the interests of snails, and cockroaches, and ants? It sounds like pure science fiction, but when you get into the details, you see that not only is this a plausible set of concerns, we are on collision course with this reality, unless we destroy ourselves some other way. It's like we stand in front of two doors. Door number one, you open that, and you find that we have destroyed ourselves for some reason, and not invented artificial general intelligence.

• 34:58Sam Harris?

  You know, we had a global nuclear war, we had an incident of bioterrorism that created a global pandemic that set civilization back 300 years, or we had an economic catastrophe that did the same thing, and we just now no longer know how to build computers, or improve their software. But, absent that, door number two is, we continue to make progress on hardware and software, and at a certain point, this progress gets into the end zone of superhuman-level intelligence. And then, then those intelligence systems themselves make the further progress, and then you get what's called an intelligence explosion, or the singularity.

• 35:41Sam Harris?

  There's again, a lot to say about this, but I was convinced until somewhere around New Year's of this year, that all of that either may not happen, or it's likely some species of techno-religious bullshit that I didn't have to pay attention to. And my mind has totally changed on that point.

• 36:03Sam Harris?

  Okay, next question. This is from Urban Nomad in Portugal. "I've never heard Sam Harris explain his morning ritual." Usually you ask this question, Tim, but on your podcast, you didn't ask Sam. "I would especially love to know what his meditation ritual is. Is it daily? How long? And at what time does he wake up?" Okay, well, I think I'm gonna have an embarrassingly sloppy response to this. What I do is I get up in the morning and then I more or less break all of the wise and helpful rules that Tim has laid out for us. I check my email. I get from time to time perturbed and derailed by it, which is to say I get handed something that is not on my to-do

• 36:48Sam Harris?

  list, but it's on someone else's to-do list, and then I do that thing for the better part of the morning. I break all the rules. But I think Tim's advice is good, and I take it when I have my wits about me. And the piece of advice I now take more often than not is, when I get to my desk, to do the one thing that, if done, would make the day truly productive. So I'm often focused on the one most important thing when I hit my desk now. So that's part of the ritual, and that often comes early, and it often comes before I would meditate. So I would get up at six, or seven, or eight. It's probably

• 37:33Sam Harris?

  the latest, depending on how late I've gone to sleep the night before. I'm not a great sleeper. Then I, sometimes we'll just make a cup of tea or coffee and just go straight to my desk. Sometimes I'll meditate first, but again, there's no ritual.

• 37:48Sam Harris?

  What you should have in your mind is a picture of controlled chaos. These are not the smoothly oiled gears of a well-calibrated machine. This is somebody staggering out of his bedroom in search of caffeine, and he may or may not have checked his email before the whistle on the kettle blew. But I do meditate frequently and certainly try to make that every day. I've been in various modes. It's another influence of having kids. Depending on how old your kids are and how many you have of them, it can be hard to hold to any real structure. But I do sit for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, somewhat reliably, every day.

• 38:32Sam Harris?

  There have been periods in my life when I've dropped that. I think probably the longest has been a few months where I stopped meditating in the last going on 30 years. But for the most part, I've been a daily meditator for 30 years, and this has taken various forms. There were periods where I did a lot of retreat, so then I would come back into daily life, and meditating for an hour or two or even more a day was just a very easy thing to do, having come from a context of weeks and months where I was meditating 12 to 18 hours a day and not having the same kinds of responsibilities that I have now. I would say that meditating regularly every day is, I think, a very important thing to do.

• 39:17Sam Harris?

  In my case, it didn't really become useful, which is to say, it really didn't become true meditation until after I had sat my first one or two intensive retreats. I just, I remember the experience clearly. I don't remember if it came after the first, I think it came after the first 10-day Vipassana retreat. I think I'd been very disciplined and been sitting an hour every day in the morning for a year before I sat my first 10-day retreat. And I remember looking back over that year at some point, somewhere around the middle of my first Vipassana retreat, and realizing that I had just been more or less thinking with my legs crossed every hour that I had practiced that year.

• 40:00Sam Harris?

  This is not to say that that's true of all of you who are practicing meditation without ever having gone on a retreat, but it's very likely true of many of you. It's hard to build enough concentration in your daily life to really connect with mindfulness or with whatever other practice you're doing. And every silent retreat is a crucible where you can develop enough energy and attention to break through to another level of where you can see what the practice really is about and what you need to be noticing to be paying attention. And that experience of breaking through to deeper levels continues to happen.

• 40:42Sam Harris?

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

• 41:23Sam Harris?

  And it is being noticed effortlessly by consciousness itself without a center. And so for me now mindfulness is a matter of cutting through the illusion of a center, cutting through the illusion of the self. And when you have that insight, then daily practice does have a different character. It's not as dependent upon concentration and therefore it's not as dependent upon building up enough concentration to have sustained attention so that you can feel that your mindfulness is really connecting with experience in a deep and sustained way. You're then able to The moment you look, see the deepest and most profound thing you were ever going

• 42:06Sam Harris?

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

• 42:51Sam Harris?

  I find myself essentially doing that without having a timer or any kind of mechanism that enforces it, but there are experiences I have where I'm essentially enforcing a kind of meditative clarity, you know, whether I'm pushing my daughters on the swing, or whatever it is, and, you know, there's no difficulty in doing that. So I view practice as not being very separate from life at this point, but it's also true to say that most of my life is too distracting, most of my work is too distracting, most of what I'm doing with my attention is too distracting for me to have any pretense of calling that meditation. I am lost in thought most of the time, but an ability to cut through the illusion really

• 43:35Sam Harris?

  is available, and it punctuates my day, more or less, no matter what I'm doing. So, I hope that wasn't a totally confusing answer to this question. The picture you should get is of somebody who does not have quite as much structure in his various enterprises as he should, but I'm still managing to get most of what I want to get done, done, and I am not miserable.

• 44:01Sam Harris?

  Other things that fall into the pattern of ritual might be exercise. I think that's probably of interest to Tim's audience to an unusual degree. I try to do something more or less every day, probably I do that at least five, maybe six days a week, whether it's going to the gym and lifting weights, or doing martial arts, or climbing stairs. I have a few different things I do to keep fit, and half of them also injure me, so this is diminishing returns here. But usually sometime in the afternoon, I work out, and often my meditation is in the afternoon as well, and I often try to do it outside.

• 44:42Sam Harris?

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

• 45:25Sam Harris?

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

• 46:03Sam Harris?

  rational to worry that focusing on it too much could make it louder, in some real sense, which is to say, actually increase the activity of those misfiring neurons.

• 46:18Sam Harris?

  There are a bunch of questions on brain health and smart drugs and related matters. There's one question here, "If you had to recommend one thing for brain health and you couldn't say meditation or exercise, what would you recommend?" And that's from Ronan Filmer in Southern California. I haven't spent much time trying to separate the hype from the real science here. The one thing that I have heard about and take with some regularity, not every day, but occasionally, is concentrated turmeric, curcumin, I think is what it's called. And I take that rather often, and that has been shown to have some protective effect against dementia.

• 47:02Sam Harris?

  But again, I spend very little time reading about any of this and have assumed that most of what people take in this area, ginkgo biloba and all the rest, there's either no science behind it or the science has shown no effect. When I have looked, I have often found that's the case. And then we have these recent stories where you can't even rely on the manufacturers to put the supposedly important agent in the pills. So you're eating sawdust or some other crap that has been put in gelatin capsules. So these recent reports of testing what's on the shelves at GNC and elsewhere have been pretty alarming.

• 47:45Sam Harris?

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

• 48:29Sam Harris?

  So I'm certainly open, as you, I think, know, I'm a big booster of science and I'm waiting for science to deliver all of the things we want to bathe our brains and bodies in so as to live the best possible lives, but I'm not aware of... Much in that area that has obvious benefits. I think probably getting enough sleep should be on the short list of good things to do for your brain. And again, there I also fail. You know, on one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It's actually, it's very easy to give people good advice. It's very hard to follow the advice you know that is good.

• 49:10Sam Harris?

  If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily. And, you know, one recommendation would be, be a little more disciplined about how you protect your sleep. So I will struggle to follow that. Merely having to answer these questions, I have a feeling it's going to impose far greater wisdom and rigor on my life. I think I will answer these questions very differently a year from now. I'll be scheduled down to five-minute increments and doing everything I think I should do upfront. Okay, so I'm, now I'm gonna go deeper into these pages, trying to get some questions that have been perhaps unfairly ignored. "Your first book, The End of Faith, featured a blistering attack on religious moderates.

• 49:53Sam Harris?

  Now, however, you strive to encourage religious moderation in the Islamic world. Have you therefore changed your mind about religious moderation?" This is from Jeff back in Toronto. Well, that's a good question. It's, I can see a basis for confusion there. Religious moderation has always been better in some sense than religious fundamentalism. I've never denied that. It's just that I've argued that religious moderates, because they insist that we respect religious faith and respect the claim that certain books were inspired by omniscient deities, et cetera, that they provide shelter for religious fundamentalism and religious extremism.

• 50:35Sam Harris?

  They provide a context in which we can't adequately criticize really dangerous religious dogmatism. And it's the religious moderates who, because they're, they're, they are religious in this very elastic and non-committal way, they are the ones who deny the link between real religious commitment and... Certain forms of terrible misbehavior. So it's the religious moderates who say that, "Oh, that's not the real Islam. The real Islam is a religion of peace, Al Qaeda and ISIS. This is not Islam. This is a perversion of the faith. They've hijacked the faith." Well, that's actually not an honest analysis of why jihadists do what they do.

• 51:19Sam Harris?

  Jihadists are as religious as it gets, and they are motivated explicitly by the Quran and the Hadith. And so it is among religious demagogues in other contexts. The people who are behaving badly for religious reasons, in most cases, really believe what they say they believe. And so the moderate respect for faith and the moderate confusion about what it's like to really believe in paradise just gives cover to fundamentalism. But if I could turn all fundamentalists into moderates, of course, I would do that, because

• 51:59Sam Harris?

  moderation by definition is a lack of commitment to the most retrograde and repellent and divisive doctrines in any faith. It's the moderate who looks at the Bible and sees all the stuff in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that is more or less synonymous with the most extreme form of theocracy and intolerance. And he or she says, "Well, I don't want to live that way. There's no reason to live that way. I'm just not going to pay attention to any of that. I'm not worried that God is going to send me to hell for not believing in it.

• 52:38Sam Harris?

  I've got many other concerns beyond what this book says that I take as foundational. So I'm just going to pick and choose the wisdom I find in this book, and I'm not going to spend any time worrying about whether I have to kill my neighbor for working on the Sabbath or stone his daughter to death if she turns out not to be a virgin on her wedding night." But the religious moderate tends not to honestly acknowledge that those changes in his or her worldview have come from outside the faith. This is what science and secular politics and a notion of human rights and just a larger conversation about what is good in life and how we should order our world. This is what all that has done to religion.

• 53:23Sam Harris?

  It has moderated it from the outside, and that's a good thing. So I view moderation in the Muslim world as a transitional form of religious commitment, as it has been in the West. It's we need moderation in some sense, but what we need even more than moderation is a commitment to secularism, which is a specific commitment. And so I don't argue so much for Muslim moderation. I argue that we need a genuine and viable tradition of secularism in the Muslim world. And secularism is simply a commitment to keeping religion out of politics and public policy. So you can be as crazy as you want in the privacy of your own mind or in the privacy

• 54:08Sam Harris?

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

• 54:52Sam Harris?

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

• 55:27Sam Harris?

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

• 56:08Sam Harris?

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

• 56:50Sam Harris?

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

• 57:35Sam Harris?

  And you can push this man onto the track, into the path of the oncoming trolley, and killing him, obviously, but saving the five workmen below.

• 57:46Sam Harris?

  Now, when people imagine this, they get a very different feeling about what is entailed. And something like 95% of people say, "No, no, you can't push this guy to his death." They consider it a kind of monstrous act of evil to push this person to his death, even if the intention and the effect is to save five lives. And there are various explanations for this, certain kinds of reasoning and intuition come online here. You actually imagine touching a person up close and personal as opposed to throwing a switch, and that seems to change things. And the question is, what is morally normative here?

• 58:27Sam Harris?

  Should you want to be able to push the fat man without caring, or with as clear a conscience as you would throw that switch? I happen to think there are certain artifacts here where people, if only unconsciously, worry that the mechanism isn't the same here, so that there's maybe some uncertainty about the physics and whether a fat man is in fact fat enough to stop a trolley. And even if you stipulate that, "Oh, no, no, he will stop the trolley," our intuitive physics don't track through it in the same way when we imagine diverting it onto another path. But even if you overcome that, I think there probably is just a difference between the

• 59:05Sam Harris?

  idea of touching a person and physically initiating his death in that way, and throwing a switch and initiating death at some distance. And this obviously opens to other problems we have to think about, and the way we fight wars remotely with drones now, is that making it much easier to kill people? Or even dropping bombs from airplanes? I think the jury is probably not out on that any longer. It must be easier to kill people. It is in fact easier to kill people by dropping bombs than it is by stabbing them over and over again with a bayonet, but it's also morally easier to do it.

• 59:46Sam Harris?

  You're less in touch with the details of the death and destruction you're causing. This is a very interesting area to think about, but the question is, if the right answer really is the consequentialist one, we should be committed to saving the most number of lives, all things considered, in each situation. So we should push the fat man if we would throw that switch, and we should throw that switch. So that's the spirit of the question. Would you push the fat man in the trolley scenario? And do you think a society could occupy a peak on the moral landscape? Which is to say, could a society be as good as it could possibly be? If its inhabitants would all push the fat man? Which is to say, if its inhabitants were all able to overcome the emotional bias

• 1:00:31Sam Harris?

  against causing this kind of death up close and personal? And that's a hard question to answer. The truth is, I think it may be good to feel differently about the two cases. And I think that those situations where you want to be callous for good reasons, don't extend to all of life. You know, I'm not a surgeon and I'm happy I'm not one, given my squeamishness in that area. But I can imagine that a surgeon has to have a very different attitude toward pain

• 1:01:11Sam Harris?

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

• 1:01:55Sam Harris?

  You table the empathy and just get the job done as effectively as possible. But I don't think you want a surgeon's level of clarity and lack of empathy all the time in your relations to people. So the situation isn't bounded in any principled way. We're often going to be in a situation where the difference between pushing the fat man and throwing the switch. Is the difference between the contexts we're in, in the world, and to normalize all of them to the same ethical standard would, I think, create a fair amount of harm,

• 1:02:36Sam Harris?

  or at least close the door to kinds of experiences that we want to have. So this goes to the question of the role of empathy in our relationships and in our life, and where it needs to be reined in in the governance of public institutions and society and in areas where we have to write laws and enforce them. It's a difficult question. I don't know that I can generalize apart from saying that we should be consequentialist across the board, but part of the consequences of actions of this sort is that there may in fact be a difference between pushing the fat man and throwing the switch

• 1:03:21Sam Harris?

  in many circumstances, and that's not a difference we can get rid of. So it just may cause more psychological suffering for the person involved. Even if you push the fat man for the best of reasons, knowing that it would work, in that sense, it's exactly like throwing a switch. The fact that you had the experience of running up to the guy and shoving him, and seeing the look on his face, etc., and you didn't just have the experience of throwing a switch, that may haunt you for the rest of your life, and there may be no way to correct for that. So it is in fact a different phenomenon, even though the body count at the end is the same. And I think there may be no way to correct for that, and maybe there should be no way to correct for that, given all the other moving parts. So therefore, your consequentialism

• 1:04:05Sam Harris?

  has to be broader than just looking at body count. It has to account for the psychological consequences and the lack of analogy between cases which do have the same body count.

• 1:04:20Sam Harris?

  So hopefully, some of that made sense.

• 1:04:24Sam Harris?

  Anyway, Tim, I think I will leave it there. It's been a pleasure to be on your podcast yet again. I am your worst student, but thanks again for everything you're doing. I love your podcast. I listen to it a lot, and it is an honor to be on it. And until I next see you, be well.

• 1:04:47Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:06:39Tim Ferriss?

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