Hello, you are listening to the secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 46. I am your host Noah Rosheta

and in this episode I'm excited to share the audio of an interview I had with New York Times best-selling author Robert Wright

about his newest book Why Buddhism is True, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with and to interview Robert Wright. He's the New York Times best-selling author of the Evolution of God,

a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Non-Zero, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton where he also created the popular online course Buddhism and Modern Psychology.

In 2009 foreign policy named him one of its top 100 global thinkers alongside Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Ann Marie Slotter.

He has written for a variety of publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, and The New Republic.

This interview with Robert was the first interview I've done for the podcast and I'm honored to have started out this new format of interviews with someone like him.

I plan on doing roughly one interview episode per month while I continue to maintain the original format of the podcast as well as adding the occasional question and answer format like last week's episode.

And I want to quickly share the description of his book from the Amazon listing before I go right into the audio of the interview itself.

So it says, from one of America's greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.

Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain.

The mind is designed to often dilute us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world, and it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain.

But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do?

Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only now discovering.

Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly and proposes that seeing the world more clearly through meditation will make us better, happier people.

In why Buddhism is true, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age.

At once, excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy.

With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true, which is to say a way out of our delusion, but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves as individuals and as a species.

I really enjoyed this new book and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Here's the audio of the interview.

Great. Well, first of all, I do want to mention how excited I was to get to interview you after reading your book because I had mentioned before I had heard about your course.

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