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Today I'm speaking with David Benatar. David is a professor of philosophy at the University of

Cape Town in South Africa. He's the author of a few books, better never to have been the harm

of coming into existence, and most recently the human predicament, a candid guide to life's biggest

questions. And he's a philosopher who many of you have wanted me to speak with. I've been getting

emails and tweets about him for quite some time. He is perhaps the most prominent exponent of a

philosophy called anti-natalism. And you will hear much more about that in today's episode.

The question for David really is whether or not existence is worth the trouble.

And he answers that question with an emphatic no. And this makes for an interesting conversation.

As you'll hear, there are a couple of places where our intuition is diverged, and I think you just

have to pick which intuition you find most compelling there. But we talk about many interesting things.

We talk about the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential

risk, the difference between starting and continuing a life. He sees those as very different.

Our built-in bias towards existence and how that may confuse us. The relationship between

anti-natalism and another position called pro-mortalism, the idea that would be a good thing if we all

died in our sleep tonight. I talk for a few minutes about my notion of the moral landscape.

...