Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast. I am Brett Weinstein, your host, and I have

the privilege of sitting with Sam Harris, cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher. I actually

feel like, although he needs no introduction, there is a thing that I wish showed up in his bio

that I'm having trouble figuring out how to phrase something like,

Sam is an important node in our collective conscious architecture. Not everybody agrees with Sam,

but what he thinks matters. I'll take it and I'll take it. That's great.

Awesome. Yeah. I'm not sure I can apply it to myself, but I will take it from you in this.

That's great. I don't see why I should apply any less to you than anybody else.

All right, so thank you for doing this, Sam. I really appreciate your willingness to engage

arguments that I know must feel like people run you through all the time and at some level. Maybe

they should just read your books to find out what the answers to the questions that they would pose to

you are. I should say that in preparation for today, I have done a fair amount of reading of your

material just to refresh my memory as to what you believe and to figure out whether or not there

is indeed a gap worth discussing. Sure. Yeah. Well, I find that certainly for some of these topics,

conversation is much more flexible than just volleys of pros, right? So email or blog post or

article or book, it's just too rigid because you really, you can't interact with anyone's real-time

response to what you've written there. So it's, you know, people just bounce off the arguments

more often than not. So you know, I'm happy to talk about it. Well, there's that. I also think

that the hidden magic of human nature actually involves active discussion about what we disagree

over and that we have learned to think in a very different way because school trains us to

function differently, but that in essence, a podcast discussion is the resurrection of a very

ancient and vitally important human form, something that might once have taken place over a campfire,

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