Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you.

I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be

an extensive Q&A and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot

takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to see you there.

Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. Oh, thank you. Great to see you, Alex.

Do you think that spirituality is still a dirty word

in the sort of secular community? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think it's even a dirty word in my brain,

though I tried to rehabilitate it for my book on the topic. I think i uh yeah i'm i burnt a fair number of words

trying to um uh take the the shades of at least abrahamic religion off of it and you know

in greek mysticism etc i mean it's it's um it has uh unfortunate associations

but we the problem is we don't really have a good secular alternative that is um that captures

the the depth that is there and that is that is rightly promised by pointing in that direction.

But it doesn't immediately haul into the conversation, all the spooky stuff of the new age

and all of the dogmatic stuff of organized religion.

I wonder if there is a better word.

I mean, your book waking up is more than 10 years old now, and the first chapter is called spirituality. And the subtitle is something like spirituality without religion. Yeah. I took a good whack at rehabilitating the word, but I don't think I was successful even for myself. No.

That's what I was wondering is if in the 10 years since then, I imagine at the time you raised a few eyebrows of people being like, hold on, aren't you the atheist guy, the really atheist guy?

But I wanted if over the past sort of 10 years you've noticed any kind of shift or if people in the context in which you otherwise speak still sort of look at that part of your work with a bit of suspicion.

Well, I don't, I think there are probably some people who look at that whole area of interest

as being suspect, you know, meditation and the contemplative life and just the very notion that introspection can

deliver anything of interest about the nature of the mind. I mean, that is, there's a bias in science

around that, although that I think has eroded a fair amount in recent decades. But, yeah,

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