Gahey humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. All of life's biggest

decisions tend to be the most uncomfortable ones. Should you have a baby? Should you quit your job?

Should you move to a new country? Should you drop acid? Any time you're faced with a decision that is likely to change who you

are, you're faced with a very unique conundrum. The person who you'll be, the person who will

judge whether or not you made the right call or the wrong call, is a future you. But there are

a different future you than the one who would be evaluating the decision if you've made a different call. So how are we supposed to decide how to lead a good

life if we can only ever know what we know right now, but the decisions we're making

are going to affect who will be in the future? Lorry Paul is a professor of philosophy

and cognitive science at Yale University. She's a world leading expert on the counterfactual

analysis of causation and what she calls transformative experiences, by which she means any experience

that's big and profound enough in your life that it's likely to kind of change who you are

after you've made it, things like starting a family or moving to a new country,

or enlisting in the army when there's a war. She joined me to discuss how we judge whether to

become a parent, how your preferences get scrambled by addiction, why atheists and religious people

are secretly terrified of each other's epiphanies, what cochlear implants tell us about our identity,

artificial intelligence, psychedelics, and what it means to make a choice in a state of

radical ignorance about the person who you'll be after you've made it. I hope you enjoy as much

as I did, the one the only, Laurie Paul.

I have eight-year-old twins, and I was talking to a friend of mine in London,

who I used to live with in New York City for throughout my 20s, and she and I were hard drinking, hard partying singles. And she has decided

not to have kids and was asking me whether or not I regret it. And it was such an interesting

conversation because I no longer drink and I now have kids and I have the mortgage. And I was like,

...