The So, Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's. The podcast, when anthropologist and

a psychologist, listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.

I'm Matt Brown, and with me is Chris Kavanaugh and today we have a guest with us to talk about some spiritual and Buddhist related things to our gurus.

Hey Chris, yeah that's right we are joined by Evan Thompson who's a professor of

philosophy at the University of British Columbia and for our purposes is probably most relevant for a book that he wrote called Why I am not a Buddhist and he's also had some recent conversations

with Sam Harris on the nature of Buddhist modernism and no self and the relation to like kind of

cognitive science and also the offer Robert Wright who wrote the book why Buddhism is True. Quite a provocative title. So thanks for coming

on Evan. There's quite a lot of ground I think we'd like the cover with you.

Welcome. Great thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

I can legitimately say, Evan, that I only came across your work after the two psychologist for

beers interview that you did, but you're now up in my pantheon of academics that I greatly admire.

So I'll try to still be critical but your work is really up my alley so to speak.

Oh, thanks. That's very nice to hear. That's great. So we should ask Evan, why isn't he a Buddhist what's wrong with Buddhism?

Great great great for that. Yeah so I mean so this is one of the things about the title of my

last book why I'm not a Buddhist you know there's

different ways you might hear that title and the way that the title actually

came to be is that people thought I was a Buddhist because you know I've been very

active in the in the science Buddhism dialogue, especially through the Mind and Life Institute,

which organizes meetings between the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan teachers and scholars and Western scientists, especially, you know,

neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and I've been involved in a number of those meetings and

had participated in other kinds of Buddhism science discussions in other places.

And so people in those forums generally would assume that, oh, well, you know, you're a philosopher and you're engaged in this dialogue,

...