Rethinking the Good Life | Sam Harris and Vinod Khosla

Good evening. Hope everybody had a great dinner. Now for something different, a conversation with one of my favorite authors, Sam Harris. Now I have to tell you, I fell in love with your works when I read The End of Faith, because I've been an atheist since age 12, because religion never made rational sense to me. But then when I read Lying, another one of my favorite books, it really changed my philosophy, and many people here have felt the brunt of my Attempt to not lie by being brutally honest, not hypocritically polite.

How much responsibility should I take for the brutality?

A lot, a lot. I've been way direct since I read that book, 'cause I thought it'd be intellectually dishonest to not do that. Anyway, let's start in a different place. I was very intrigued when you picked a title for our conversation, Rethinking the Good Life. So explain why you picked that title, what you mean by it.

Yeah, well, first, excuse me, I seem to be losing my voice having shouted at people in the preceding hours. Thank you for the invitation, Vinod. It's an honor to be here. So I just think this is the central problem of— for anyone who has the free attention to think about it. I mean, we're all incredibly lucky, obviously. And even being as lucky as we are, we continually have to solve this problem of how to navigate in the space of all possible experience so as to live a good life. And we're, you know, if you're living an examined life, if you're in dialogue with smart people, if you're waking up at 4 in the morning and wondering whether you have anything to regret, you're continually refining your answer to that question. What constitutes a good life? And I think there are, I've been surprised to discover that there are two levels at which we have to answer this question, and they strike me as orthogonal to one another in a way that's inconvenient. I think we can answer it personally, psychologically, for ourselves, and that we have to do that. And again, it's something that you can do regardless of your level of luck. I mean, I think the human mind is such and the opportunities for understanding the mechanics of unhappiness and well-being are such that it is in fact possible to be happy with more or less nothing good happening in your life. I mean, the extreme case is you could be happy in a cave. You know, I mean, there are yogis who prove that. There are people— you know, I have run that experiment on myself to some degree. In my 20s, I spent about 2 years on silent meditation retreats, which are, you know, it's a very nice cave, but still you're alone in a room. And it's possible to be happy just in the company of your mind, even though we are deeply social creatures and we want, you know, we want much more from life than that.

But—

and it's also— and conversely, it's also possible to be profoundly unhappy even when you have everything, when you're surrounded by people who love you, your career is going fantastically well, you're famous, you're rich, you know, just open any newspaper or you can think about a few people you might know, the— there's no guarantee that you're going to be happy with all the luck in the world. And so— but the— The two levels at which I think we have to solve this problem for ourselves is one, the personal, the psychological, the ethical. I mean, what is within your reach as a person to affect moment to moment? But then there's the societal level. There's the systems level. There's the, you know, how do you design an economy that incentivizes normal people, normal self-conflicted, unenlightened people to be better and better rather than worse and worse? And what I see more and more is that we are all living within systems where occasionally you basically have to be a saint to function as just a normal decent person given the nature of the incentives. And perfectly normal people psychologically wind up effectively behaving like psychopaths given the incentives. So I worry a lot about the system level and how it fails to actually track the personal. And I think we have to solve on both levels.

So, you know, another phrase you've used, and I happen to have lost my glasses so I can't read my notes, but that's okay.

You've lost your glasses, I've lost my voice.

We'll do well. You also use the phrase living the examined life. The examined life.

No one wants you to It doesn't work for me, Samir.

That's good. I'm good. But talk about what you mean by the examined life, and you know, it relates to the ideas you were just talking about.

Well, this is a phrase that I believe comes to us courtesy of Socrates in some translation. The unexamined life is not worth living. I don't know if I would go that far, but it's certainly less interesting. And what I mean by it is a— I mean, there's so many— we have such a wealth of literature East and West to inform the conversation on this point. Stoicism is now very much in vogue as a product of Western philosophy, and there's a lot to teach there. And one of the things you learn from the Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, is to take responsibility for your reactions to life. I mean, there's what happens in the world, there's what other people do, and You begin to notice that you can control very little of that, but what you can control once you become somewhat aware of how you operate is your reaction to all of that. I mean, you're like— no one really makes you angry. In order for you to become angry, you have to do something. And all of our emotionality, our reaction to life, is a kind of— I mean, just neurologically, this is the case. It's a kind of COVID behavior, you know. I mean, it's a kind of— it's like it's a glandular behavior. It is a— it is something you're doing as a nervous system. And you can cease to do it, you know. You can cease— I mean, it's something— when you see how a negative emo— a classically negative emotion like anger or shame or anxiety arises, you can become sensitive to the mechanics of that. I mean, meditation and mindfulness specifically is something I often recommend as a way of doing that. But you can become sensitive to this process in yourself and notice that it's your entanglement with thought, you know, this kind of— this automaticity of thinking about the reasons why you should be angry or have every right to be angry. What you should have said to that person, or what you will say next time. And so it is with any other emotion like anxiety or shame. It's in the layer of thinking without knowing that you're thinking, moment by moment, that this— that the physiology of the emotion gets kindled. And this is an insight we've had in Western psychology for at least since William James, that the physiology of a negative emotion like, let's say, anxiety is more or less indistinguishable from the physiology of an emotion like excitement, right? What is different is the cognitive frame we put around it, the reasons why you're feeling it, your interpretation of it. And it's in that kind of the at the level of thinking about it that those interpretations are enforced. And you, you know, as you become sensitive to this, as you, like, you know, if anxiety is a problem for you and you become sensitive to the fact that it's actually quite similar to the way you feel before you get on a roller coaster and you paid to do that, right, you wanted to do that, And if you— once you can break the spell of, you know, of just thinking about the reasons why you're anxious or this thing you're— it's coming up in the future, you can begin— you can relax in the presence of the physiology in a way that just actually releases it. So you can take ownership of your reactivity in ways that are quite surprising. And ultimately, it becomes a kind of— superpower in that you can just decide how long you want to stay anxious or angry or impatient or, you know, filled with regret or disappointment. You can— it's not that— I'm not suggesting that anyone should be completely without these emotions, right? Because for me, these are salience cues, right? Something has happened in the world that requires your attention or seems to require your attention. But it's almost never the case that solving that problem is best done in the grip of that negative emotion. So even if your anger is warranted because something outrageous has just happened, anger is rarely the state you want to be in to then mitigate this emergency, right? And so, yeah, so I mean, living an examined life is— I mean, there are many aspects to that, but mindfulness, moral philosophy, Understanding what has been replicated in— the few things that have been replicated in psychology that can be used. It's all very useful.

And I do want to come back to some of these ideas, especially since you've talked about meditation and brain rewiring and things like that. We'll come back to that. But I want to go to another place, probably the most surprising thing to me was reading about how morality can be based on science and rational thinking. Maybe talk about that, because one's subjective facts and the other is much more factual stuff. So how do you derive morality? Because If you're gonna live the good life, in some sense, morals matter. And whenever I hear of things like a bioethicist, I always ask the question, so whose ethics are you using? I've never gotten a good answer from any bioethicist on whose ethics are they using. But, Science and reason as derived from morality? Talk about that.

Yeah, well, I should preface this by saying this is a very controversial opinion. I think—

No, that's why I bring it up.

I don't think it should be, but it is. And it's, I think, courtesy of Hume, we have drawn the lesson in Western philosophy and science that facts and values are two different classes of thing, and there's no way to get from one to the other. I mean, Hume famously wrote in a very short section of his book that was, you know, didn't go into much detail. He wrote that you can't derive an ought from an is. Right? You can't derive a statement of what you should do from a statement of the way things are, the way— a statement about facts. The way I would come at this is I think that the concept of should, the linking of morality and questions of right and wrong and good and evil to questions about should and ought is a language game I don't think we have to play. Right? So I think if you just leave that aside, and even just leave talk of morality aside, let's say we haven't invented the concept of morality yet. But we find ourselves in a universe which, as I said, offers a wide range of experiences. And we have this navigation problem. We have this continuous question of what to do next. And morality is largely a story of what to do next in social space, in particular. I mean, if you're alone, if you're in a moral solitude, if you're alone on a desert island, you know, your behavior doesn't have any implication for anyone else, so morality and ethics tend to drop away. But there's still this question of your own well-being, right? So there's still a navigation problem. There's a range of experience on offer. We know we don't see the totality of this range. It can get— you know, the horizons of the good and the bad exceed our view. But we know within the purview of human life as we have experienced it, things can get quite awful both personally and collectively, and they can get quite beautiful. So there are experiences of just pointless misery, you know, where there's no silver lining. And everybody dies too soon and nothing good comes of it. And then there are experiences of just enormous beauty and joy and creativity and ethical reward. So we have this space. Forget about concepts of should and ought and what— and moral obligation and forget all the moral philosophy you may have learned. We still have this navigation problem. We know that— we know that experience can get— we know that there's a way to move from the worst possible misery for everyone to better states of being. And I think— I think on my account, the only thing you have to accept is that if the word, if the concept of bad means anything, or if you wanna use should, if we should do anything, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and we should avoid it, right? If should, and what I would argue, and again, I don't wanna belabor this too much, but there's a fair amount to say here. I mean, I would argue there's no place to stand where you could have other priorities. You can't say, well, I mean, I would have avoided the worst possible misery for everyone, but I had other priorities, right? I had other interests. There were other things that were more important, you know. You're not— you're just failing to imagine what is entailed by the— in the phrase, the worst possible misery for everyone. So just imagine a universe that is a perfect hell, right? Like every mind that can experience anything is tuned to experience as much possible suffering as it can experience for as long as it can experience it. And again, no silver lining. I'm— I would say that the only thing you have to accept is any other state of consciousness is better than that. And if you accept that, then objective morality falls out of that, because then there are right and wrong answers. With respect to how to navigate. And the book in which I discuss this is called The Moral Landscape. And what I imagine is a landscape of peaks and valleys where there may be— I'm not saying there's one right answer to every moral question. There may be multiple incompatible peaks, right? There may be a way for beings quite different from ourselves to be very, very happy and creative and live wonderful lives in ways that are totally counterintuitive to us because they're over here on a peak and they have very different minds, that it's all very far away from us and we just can't figure out how to— we have no empathic understanding of what that would be like. But we know, in our case, as, you know, social primates, there's a lot we understand about human well-being at every level, and there's a lot— there's much more we'll understand in, you know, generations hence, at every level at which it can be influenced, from the level of genes on up to economic systems. And what I'm saying is that there— we know now that there are right and wrong answers to how to—

Let me challenge that.

Go for it.

Right? There's right and wrong answers when everybody's worse off. I think the morality question becomes most relevant when the consequences are ambiguous in good for some people, not so good for or others, it's that ambiguity domain where morality, I think, becomes a real—

So that is— what I would ask you to distinguish there is between answers in principle and answers in practice. There are many, many questions, scientific questions, empirical questions, where there are obviously answers in principle, and it's just as obvious that there are no answers in practice. And that can be very— in the moral domain, I would agree, it's very frustrating. Constantly faced with trade-offs. And it's very hard to do the math. We can't even imagine how we would do the math. How do you compare the harm of a dozen broken legs to the harm of— how many broken fingers equals a dozen broken legs? Is that math possible? Who knows? So it seems impossible, and yet that doesn't mean there aren't answers in principle. And so I would just ask you to think of this example that there's some number— if I asked you how many birds are in flight over the surface of the Earth at this moment, that has an answer. Right now the answer just changed because we just know we're not going to get the data. We don't have access to the data, but there's an integer answer to to that question. There are many questions like that, and yet we are living— the current consensus in much of philosophy and the relevant sciences of mind is that the domain of values, questions of right and wrong and good and evil, are questions about which we can have no scientific answers in principle, not just practice. And I would argue that that's been quite destabilizing. And it's quite a— it's quite a dark view of the utility of science and the ultimate utility of science, because what it's saying is that we know so little about human well-being, and we will ultimately know so little about human well-being and the well-being of conscious systems generally, that scientific thinking has no relevance to questions of right and wrong and good and evil.

One of the things that was most surprising to me in my travels, as a family we were traveling in Papua New Guinea, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and the road was blocked by two warring tribes. And they were in negotiation because somebody from one tribe had killed somebody else. And the specific question they were negotiating that held us, our little bus up for over an hour or two was how many cows they had to pay in payback, or they would have payback in human lives. It sort of brings the question of morality in real focus, like whose morals and what—

I think we can be sure— again, there are many problems that are unsolved for us morally, and many may be just insoluble. But I think we can be sure that when you're negotiating between numbers of cows and murder, as though those things are fungible, that's not a peak on the moral landscape. There are higher places yet to reach. And the problem we have on the topic of morality in intellectual circles is that people interpret diversity of opinion on this topic in ways that they never interpret diversity of opinion on other topics. So the fact that there are diversities— there's a wide diversity of views on questions of physics, say, never convinces any physicist or even anyone adjacent to physics that there are no right answers to physical questions. But on the question of right and wrong and good and evil and moral norms, because we have this diversity of opinion, because the Taliban want to live this way and we find that repugnant, and we want to live this way and they find that repugnant, we basically throw up our hands and say, well, there's no right answer here. All we have is our preferences. And I just think that's obviously untrue. Again, the moment you admit that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, because then we have a landscape of possible experience, and then we have right and wrong answers with respect to how to navigate on that landscape.

I want to go into another esoteric idea, one on which there's much disagreement. And I personally find most of the discussion pretty academic and unsubstantive, which is the issue of consciousness. And you've talked about how understanding the nature of consciousness might be key to solving other problems in philosophy and science.

Um, first, that almost sounds like what ChatGPT said of what I said about consciousness. Not to denigrate anyone on your staff.

But—

But no, unfortunately—

There is a whole debate in your recent book on Making Sense, which is a series of podcasts that are enlightening. You talk a whole lot about consciousness.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think consciousness is the most interesting and consequential thing in the universe, and I think it's the— I mean, it's the one thing about which we can be certain. Contrary to what is often said in scientific and philosophical circles, consciousness is the one thing that simply can't be an illusion, right? Because any illusion is itself an elaboration of consciousness. I mean, so even if we're completely confused about our situation, even if we are you know, in the Matrix, you know, we're running as a simulation on some alien supercomputer and nothing is as it seems, right? Like all of our physics is wrong, we're not in touch with the base layer of reality, we're completely psychotic effectively. Still, there's this seeming, there's this— something seems to be happening, right? And it's that seeming that fully demonstrates the reality of consciousness. Consciousness, you know, in— as most people would define it, again, it's hard to define it without it being a circular definition, but consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be what you are in this moment. Again, however confused you might be, this might be a dream, you know, it's presupposing nothing except that something seems to be happening. And it's that seeming that is fundamentally mysterious because we— the only evidence of consciousness in the universe is consciousness, is the fact that it is like something to be what you are. Because if you look at a human brain, there's absolutely no sign that the 20 watts of information processing being executed in that porridge is the basis of conscious life apart from the fact that we know it is in our own case. We are importing consciousness into the conversation by virtue of having first-person access to it. Now, we may in fact one day come to understand how consciousness arises out of the physics of things. We're not there yet. There are people who have ideas about that. But it's been called the hard problem of consciousness for a reason. I'm sorry, I would look over there, but every time I turn my head, the mic— I lose the mic, so. It's called the hard— this is courtesy of David Chalmers. We have this phrase, the hard problem of consciousness, because it seems that whatever the right answer is for how consciousness arises, you know, let's just say we knew that a certain pattern of information processing in, you know, a minimum of 10,000 units was the requisite substrate for the emergence of consciousness. I mean, you have 9,999 units and there's nothing that it's like to be that thing, but you add one more and the lights come on. If that is in fact the case, that sounds like the mere statement of a miracle, right? Like that doesn't become an explanation of the sort that we're used to in science where we where our intuitions run through, where we get a proper reduction, where we think that the micro-level events make sense of the macro-level emergent properties. And so it is a hard problem, but it is the— it is what makes anything matter, right? Like it is— I mean, to talk about morality without consciousness is to talk about pure fiction or anything else.

I'd love to, over dinner, debate consciousness with you because I think it's way overcomplicated a problem. It's overcomplicated. Personally, I think it's very similar to the analogy around large language models, like how does it seem to know things you didn't teach it?

But you think it emerges, it comes along, I think it's a common for the ride with intelligence. So a certain level of intelligence would be—

my view is all the possible pieces of consciousness have to be assigned a probability of being right. You know, there's a higher probability of X thesis versus Y thesis versus Z thesis. And emergent behavior is probably the most likely thesis. But I don't want to go into the rat hole of discussing that because the hard problem seems like not so hard to me. There's a higher probability It's quantum computing in the brain because we know biology does quantum computing in various ways.

Have you been talking to Roger Penrose? Is that—

I'm more talking from the science of quantum biology, which intrigues me a lot. And I could go into some level of depth on some of the quantum biology things that say it's likely, or more likely than other definitions of consciousness. But I do want to go to a more practical side. You're a huge advocate of meditation, and how does your views of consciousness inform your views on meditation, brain rewiring? Talk about that, because you've— and I know we are moving on in time, and I want to keep it short.

Well, I mean, so just if you take a moment, you can notice that there's not that many things to notice about experience in this moment to notice everything. I mean, you have these 5 sensory channels. You see and hear and smell and taste and touch. And you have this 6th channel we might call the mind and its contents, right? So you have mental— you have thoughts and mental objects, emotions. You might have a background mood, right? But there's not 1,000 channels in which to notice things. There's arguably 6 if we're fairly elastic with what we're calling the mind and its objects. Everything about yourself and your experience of the world is being delivered into that space. And meditation, I mean, there are other— there are many practices that go by the name of meditation and they— some of them have a slightly different logic, but I think that the meditation that's most interesting is simply to become aware. And I would call this mindfulness. In its various guises, is simply to become aware of what you notice in each moment. Right, everything— you're already noticing things, right? Everything is happening all by itself. You don't have to get behind yourself and push here. Like, you're just— you can hear the sound of my voice. You see this display of color and shadow that's your visual field. You can feel your body resting in space. You feel the pull of gravity. You feel the feelings of pressure and temperature and movement. So that's the entire theater of, you know, your conscious mind in this moment. Now again, how that relates to information process— processing in your brain is an open question. It does seem that there— that your brain is doing a lot of things that are not associated with this theater of experience, right? That much of what you're experiencing now is being delivered into consciousness by events that are mental events that you can't inspect, right? So for instance, I'm making these small mouth noises and you are, you know, insofar as I'm making any kind of sense, you are effortlessly decoding these sounds into words, right? And you can't actually not do that, and you can't inspect how you're doing that, right? You can't cease to do it. You notice when I depart from normal English grammar, as happens on occasion, and you notice when I follow the rules of English grammar, and you don't necessarily even know these rules. Consciously, right? You're like, there's something happening in the background of— arguably in the dark that is producing what you in fact can be conscious of. But meditation is just a clear awareness of everything that is arising in consciousness, sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, and even thoughts themselves in each moment. And here's the crucial difference between meditation and everything else. Is with respect to this variable of thought, because what's mostly happening for most people most of the time is that they're thinking without knowing that they're thinking, right? You're having a conversation with yourself, and that conversation, that flow of discursivity, it's not noticed as an appearance in consciousness. In fact, it feels like a self. It feels like me, right? So I say something that doesn't track with your intuitions, you know, the voice in your head says, "Well, what does that mean?" Right? Well, and that voice, that— it's a kind of COVID speech. It feels like me. It feels like I. It feels like a subject. It feels like there's a thinker of— in addition to the flow of thought. And meditation is a way of inspecting that closely enough so that you discover that that's not the case, right? I mean, the default sense that everyone starts with is there's a— it feels like there's a subject in the head, right? People don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're passengers of a sort inside their bodies. Even if you know conceptually that you're identical to your body and your nervous system, subjectively, as a point of view in each moment, most people feel like subjects interior to the body and somehow appropriating the body as though it were a kind of possession. And, and the world is out there. And so there's this kind of threefold representation neurologically. We represent a world to ourselves, we represent a body in the world, and we represent a subject interior to the body, a thinker of thoughts. And an experiencer of experience. And that final position is what's, you know, when I tell you how to meditate, that's where you start. And so you might close your eyes and I might say pay attention to the breath as a first object. And so you pay attention to the breath and maybe sounds. And then the moment you get lost in thought, you come, you notice you're thinking, you come back to the breath. But it still feels like there's a subject that's aiming the light of consciousness onto the breath and strategically, and then gets captured by thought and then comes back. And that dualistic point of view of subject-object attention can be inspected and it breaks down. It actually— it's a false view. And there really— because there really is just experience subjectively. It's not that you're on the edge of experience appropriating it from outside. You're not in the center of it, having it. No, all of the sense that there is this center, the sense that there's an I in the center of your life, navigating your life subjectively, is itself an experience, right? So there is just this totality of experience that can be recognized. And so ultimately, meditation is the tool by which you would do that. And then you just enjoy that experience. As meditation.

And given your neuroscience background, do you believe you're really rewiring the brain? And coming full circle, does that help you live a good life or a better life?

Yeah, it does because it— I mean, as a friend and colleague put it, at minimum, it helps you be less of an asshole more of the time. I mean, you just— you can decide— again, you can decide how long you want to be angry for, because a moment ago you got angry, and you got angry because, again, a thought arose, uninspected, and you were borne away by it and by all its implications, right? Like, you were— it's very much— our relationship to thought is, neurologically speaking and psychologically speaking, quite similar to our relationship to dreams when we're asleep. Leaving aside lucid dreaming, which is its own interesting phenomenon. But a normal dream is you've gone to sleep, you know, you're safely in your bed, and then you start having a completely different experience And you're doing so little reality testing that you accept it as your new station in life, right? So like you're in your bed in Menlo Park or wherever. And then a moment later, subjectively speaking, you are in a war zone somewhere, being chased by a maniac. You have so little purchase on the reality of your life that you're completely unsurprised by the transformation of everything, right? And I would say that the most surprising thing about dreams is how unsurprising we find them when we're experiencing them. I mean, we just are not reality testing. So we are effectively psychotic when we're dreaming, again, leaving aside lucid dreaming. There's some aspect to that happening all the time when we're thinking in normal ways, right? When you're thinking, when you're replaying a conversation you had with somebody and it's making you angry, and you're just driving your car, you're alone in your car, and you're replaying that conversation, and you're getting angry, and now you're in your head, you're talking to someone, who isn't there, right? There is a touch of psychosis there. I mean, it's completely normal. Everyone in this room and everyone you've ever met has done this. And the bright line for us socially that divides normal unhappiness from frank psychosis is most of the time we know enough to just keep our mouths shut, right? We're not externalizing this inner conversation. But we're having this conversation nonetheless. And it's going uninspected almost all the time. And we're just— we're the mere hostages of whatever we're talking about in the silence of our own minds. And meditation is one way to break that spell and realize just how much unnecessary misery is being manufactured that way. And again, it's not about never feeling fear again or anger again or shame again. But it's a matter of punctuating these experiences with moments of clear relief. I mean, you can wake up from the dream, even if you're going to fall back asleep again and be deluded again, you know, in the next moment or a minute from now. Those moments of freedom really matter. I mean, they give you degrees of freedom with respect to behavior. That otherwise wouldn't exist. I mean, if you— until you learn this skill, you're going to be angry for as long as you're going to be angry. You're completely at the whim of that emotion. You're going to say all of the life-deranging things you're going to say or not, or tweet all of the life-deranging things you're going to tweet or not while in the grip of that emotion. And so it is with every other negative emotion. And so it really is— I mean, it's an enormously valuable thing to learn.

So that leads to my— and time is moving on, so I want to make this my final question to you. You've talked about free will and related to this concept of the illusion of self, and to most entrepreneurs here, the concept of the self-made person. I think your thoughts are pretty interesting. I'd love, as a final gift here, to have people hear your thoughts on that. A couple of related concepts.

Yeah, well, it's actually— this is a nice intersection of many of the threads we've been exploring, because it captures the insight into selflessness and many of its ethical and societal implications. I think that the— if you pay attention, again, meditation is simply a mode of paying attention to what it's like to be you moment to moment. I think you'll see that everything is simply happening, you know, including your thoughts and impulses and desires and intentions and your counter impulses and counter thoughts and— you know, so your desire to go on a diet, your sense of willpower to stay on the diet, the countervailing desire to have dessert that you then overcome with yet more willpower, all of this is simply— I mean, you are— in your corner of the universe, that's simply what's happening, right? It's not— you don't have any magic stuff that is other than what the universe is doing. So all of that's totally compatible with determinism or determinism plus some dash of randomness, but still neither determinism or randomness gives you what most people mean by free will. I mean, what most people mean by free will is widely denigrated within philosophy now as libertarian free will, and many philosophers will offer you another version of free will that purports to be something worth wanting, but it's not the libertarian free will people think they have. What most people think they have is that if you could rewind the movie of your life in this moment and return your brain and the world to precisely the state it was in minutes ago or hours ago or days ago, that movie could play out differently. You could do something different. You could say something different. You could feel something different. There's no evidence that's the case. And I would argue— and again, this is a longer argument— but I would argue that there's just— there's no description of how causes could arise in this universe that makes sense of that intuition. So if you rewound the universe to the way it was a moment ago, I'm gonna speak this sentence exactly as is a trillion times in a row. I mean, you could rerun that experiment again and again and again, and if things change due to randomness, that's still not what anyone means by free will, right? So I would argue that our experience is totally compatible with determinism. And if you take the larger implications of this, first of all, let me just say that many people find that punchline depressing. They think that psychologically that would be an unhappy state, to live from that place would be unhappy. But on the contrary, it's enormously freeing to feel that way and it's possible to feel that way. And it becomes a kind of wellspring for compassion because there are a lot of things that don't make sense when you view other people in— from this and yourself from this point of view. And shame and hatred don't make a lot of sense. And yet, again, there's a larger argument here philosophically. And yet, as if by magic, love and gratitude do make a lot of sense. And compassion make a lot of sense through this frame.

So what would you say to all the entrepreneurs who feel like this self-made?

So the connection to the notion of the self-made man or woman is that even if you don't accept anything I just said, or even if you don't count its possibility, it should be obvious that no one in this room picked their parents. No one in this room, therefore, is responsible for their genes or any of the genetic contributions to who they are and what what our capacities are in this moment. No one picked, no one is responsible for the fact that they weren't born in Syria in the middle of a civil war, right? No one gets credit for having been born in a, at this moment in history in a stable society, right? No one, none of us are in control of the environmental influences that have played upon our nervous systems since the moment we were born and sculpted our brain and biology into its present state, right? You can't take responsibility for any of this. And all of this, you know, all genetic, environmental, I mean, even if you believe in an immortal soul that is somehow integrated with this clockwork, you didn't pick your soul, right? You're not responsible for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath, right? So what you— what this should indicate to you is a vast lottery that we have all been born into where luck is everything, right? And what you do with that luck is yet more luck, right? The fact that you're intelligent enough to make use of your good luck is luck. The fact that you have a capacity for grit and resilience or don't, and then you do, and then you don't, and then you do, all of that is luck, right? The fact that you meet someone who performs an intervention on you and gives you good advice and that matters to you and you can make use of it. All of that is luck. No one here can account for the fact that they weren't born with brain damage, right? No one. So, and yet there's someone being born with brain damage right now, right? So the question is, what do we do? So the biggest ethical question for us collectively, not personally, but I think collectively, especially us, I mean, if you're in this room, whatever your hardships in life, you're an extraordinarily lucky person and you're surrounded by lucky people. The ethical question is, how do we spread the luck around? Right? I mean, how do we cancel some of the most galling disparities in luck, both locally and globally? And how do we build a civilization that does that more and more effortlessly, right? And to come back to where we started, how do we build systems of incentives where mediocre people like ourselves don't even have to think about this because the incentives are just so good and the system is so streamlined and it's so rationally designed that we're effort— in prosecuting our ordinary selfishness, we are spreading good luck around, right? And engineering a tide that raises all the possible boats that can be raised.

That's a whole new topic. But I do want to finish up. I'll take just a couple of questions. Maybe start on this side and then go to that side. Anybody with a question, raise your hand.

Yes. You allude to engineering almost some kind of incentive system that I presume is very different than our current capitalistic system here that promotes the types of incentive to spread luck and create more equality in the world. Are there examples of that or ideas of that in philosophy or literature that you appreciate? Sorry, did you ask about an economic system? Did you— An economic system or other type of incentive system, whatever you're alluding to. Yeah, so I'm agnostic as to— I mean, I think capitalism is the best we've got. I mean, first, I'm not an economist, so my understanding of all of the alternatives here is not as deep as it should be. But I mean, I think— there are obvious negative externalities that capitalism, as we have it currently implemented, just doesn't correct for. So we have to— the market is not solving all the problems we want to solve. And there are things that it clearly can't see that we want to correct for. I'm certainly default a capitalist and hoping we can just refine it so that it gets better and better. I think there are cartoon cases where the incentives get so bad that you can see the problem in a crystalline form. The best example for me is something like a maximum security prison. If we were all thrown into Folsom or some other prison now, we would find it almost impossible to be good people, because the incentives are such, the institution is such that it's like, as far as I understand, you basically have to join a gang based on the color of your skin, whether you want to be a racist or not. Everyone's going to victimize you unless you're aligned with the gang that is of the appropriate skin color. Let's just say that cartoon version of a maximum security prison is true. That's a situation in which even if you don't have a racist bone in your body, you have to function as a racist. Otherwise, you're going to be as miserable as you can possibly be in that circumstance. We want to notice throughout our society and throughout our institutions where we have incentives that are making it hard to be good and where you really have to be some kind of moral hero to be good. And we want to figure out how to flip those. And we want to make it very easy for selfish people to be good. And part of that is just Articulating— Do you have examples of that? Do you have the inverse of the bad scenario? Sorry, I didn't get— The inverse of that horrible scenario where the incentives are all wrong, do you have an example of one where it's really great? Well, I just think, just take— I mean, so much in our society is mediated by status concerns, right? I mean, norms around status. And so the thing— The place where we are kind of effortlessly attracted is to figure out how to play the status game. We're all trying to figure out how to play the best status game we can get access to and figure out how to thrive in that context. And so insofar as we can leverage status concerns to doing good in the world and helping people and being more and more compassionate, and really caring about the consequences of our actions, right? And we— obviously there have been efforts to do that, and you know, there's philanthropy, there's effective altruism, there's— there— and there obviously there are cynical takes on those kinds of efforts for this very reason, but I just think that there's a lot of room for innovation in linking human desire to systems that gratify it in ways that actually just do good. I mean, to take a very basic case, it's like, you know, the advent of electric cars. I mean, what Elon managed to do with Tesla is build a car that wasn't some kind of punishment car. It was a car you actually wanted, right? And it's an electric car. Now, there's obviously, there's supply chain issues with batteries, and we know that Nothing's perfect, but it's— that was a case of not telling people to take their medicine so as to promote the adoption of this technology. It was leveraging human desire and cool factor in a direction that I think we think is still worth going, right? And so there are many examples of that sort of thing where you can take the friction out if you just figure out how to give people what they want under a new framing, or make them want new things because different ideas are attached to those things.

Sam. Last question there. Thank you.

So first of all, I'll acknowledge I am a very lucky person, and I'm very lucky to be here.

And you mentioned that the ethical question is how you spread that luck around.

So I feel like I have an ethical— ethical obligation to use that luck to solve big problems. Now, there's the flip side of the ethics, right? Or the ethical question is, we're dealing with some very powerful technologies in this room too— fusion energy, artificial intelligence, quantum computing. So is, uh, the— what's the ethical question on those from your perspective? And is there an ethical obligation from your belief system? Yeah, well, I think my My thoughts here will not surprise you. I think we have more responsibility than probably anyone in human history to see that the future is better than the past, right? I mean, we have, because we have more leverage, right? And it's really not that many people that have this amount of leverage. I mean, it's like, it's almost like, what, there's maybe 5,000 or 10,000 people on Earth right now who, if they change their minds about something fundamental, that fundamental thing would change, right? It's like, we don't need 8 billion people to change their minds all at once. We're standing very close to the lever of this thing that can— really determine whether the career of our species is, you know, viable, much less beautiful, right? I mean, the possibility is, and I think this is probably true, is that, you know, for virtually every time point in human history up until the present, it was just mere hubris to think that your generation held the fate of the species in its hands, right? And it's— I mean, there may be some way to squint your eyes now and feel like, okay, it's hubris even now. But when you look at the technology you're all building and, you know, and you look at the— just the compounding of it, you know, and the pace of change. It seems like this is just a very different period in history. And compounding means a lot. I mean, like, we don't have to deflect the angle of auspiciousness all that much to land in a very different place 50 years from now than we otherwise would. And so, yeah, I think we have an immense responsibility to get our heads straight. And, you know, with respect to things like AI, I think we, you know, I'm concerned that the incentives are such that we can't quite get our heads screwed on straight here. I mean, we have something like an arms race and a gold rush, you know, braided together, you know, speaking even locally but certainly globally. And I think that's probably not a system of incentives that optimizes for solving the alignment problem and perhaps other problems that we really should want to solve before we get into the end zone there. So yeah, I mean, I, but I mean, this is the, I mean, this could have been said of every prior generation too, but it seems just much more pressing now that, you know, we have— it really rests with us to decide whether this next century is some pitches our species into oblivion, or we realize basically the dreams of our species. Things are happening that fast.

Sam, I just want to quantify that and then finish. I did a simple calculation. Because we have the tools in our hands, basically this kind of a room, and I would say no more than 10,000 people. If we change GDP growth for the next 50 years to 2%, the per capita income in the United States would go from $65,000 per capita to about $175,000. If because of technology, climate transformation, which we need to do, AI and others, we change it to 4% GDP growth for the next 50 years, the per capita income in this country would be $475,000. We can make that larger difference with the choices we make. Thank you everybody, and thank you very much for coming.