Welcome to Untangle. I'm Patricia Carbus. I listened to Ezra Klein's New York Times

Opinion podcast the other day as Ezra interviewed one of my favorite Buddhist author, Stephen Batchelor.

It reminded me that I interviewed Stephen in 2016 and loved chatting with him. His philosophy is timeless,

so I thought I'd encore today.

Stephen is a Scottish Buddhist teacher and author known for his secular or agnostic approach to Buddhism.

His focus is on experience, ethics, and human flourishing over traditional doctrines like karma and

rebirth. He was previously a monk in the Tibetan and Zen traditions before developing a more

skeptical and pragmatic Buddhist approach detailed in his earlier books like Buddhism

without beliefs and confessions of a Buddhist atheist. His current book

is called Buddha, Socrates, and Us, Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. We don't cover this here

since our interview is from 2016, but I am looking forward to reading his new book. As always,

we're on Tangle, the podcast from Muse, the brain-sensing headband.

Go to choosemuse.com to get your 15% discount using code Untangle 15.

Now on to Stephen.

Stephen, it is such a pleasure to have you here today.

Thank you so much for coming in.

Thank you, Patricia.

Yeah, I know you're a scholar and an author and a teacher of Buddhism.

You say that you're a skeptical Buddhist, and I think that ties into how some people think about meditation.

So I'd love for you to talk about what a skeptical Buddhist is.

Okay. I'm a skeptic in some senses, but I take the word not in the trivial sense that it's often used.

In other words, I can't trust this.

...