Micah Zarin Podcast

By Micah Zarin

Teenager asks smart people dumb questions. Formerly titled Elite Ball Knowledge Philosophy (EBKP).

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FAQs about Micah Zarin Podcast:

How many episodes does Micah Zarin Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.

Micah Zarin Podcast episodes:

May 10, 2026 Does Fine-Tuning Prove God? (w/ Bentham's Bulldog)
I sat down with Matthew Adelstein (Bentham's Bulldog) to debate one of the most popular arguments for God's existence: the fine-tuning argument.

🔗 Bentham's Bulldog: https://benthams.substack.com
🔗 My Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin

0:00 - Hook
0:14 - Intros
6:11 - Fine-Tuning Explained
9:10 - Independent Constants?
21:33 - Bill Gates Analogy
40:51 - Islands and Continents
1:02:06 - Why God?
1:04:06 - Advice
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1h 6min
May 06, 2026 She Paints Brain Cells Without Realizing (w/ Haleh Fotowat)
Haleh Fotowat is a senior scientist at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, where she leads neuroscience work on a DARPA-funded program developing novel anesthetics. She trained as an electrical engineer in Tehran and Houston before getting her PhD in neuroscience at Baylor, with postdocs at McGill, Ottawa, and Harvard studying locust escape behavior, weakly electric fish, and zebrafish navigation. She is also a working abstract painter whose pieces have shown in Harvard art exhibitions.
https://www.halehfotowat.com
I realized "Sleepwalkers" is an essay I never posted on my Substack, but it was an assignment for a class. Here's the Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/micahzarin
00:00 — Intro 00:21 — Art & Spontaneity 16:06 — The Brain 17:40 — Electric Fish & Serotonin 29:00 — Anesthesia & Consciousness 39:05 — AI & Attention 55:04 — What Makes Art Human 01:03:53 — The Secretary Problem 01:09:51 — Advice
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1h 6min
May 06, 2026 Arguing With a Logician About Reality (w/ Graham Priest)
Graham Priest
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1h 7min
April 22, 2026 Why Gen Z Can’t Connect (w/ Max Lippmann)
00:00 Intro + phone ban and distraction
02:30 Why Gen Z feels lonely
06:15 Emotional intelligence and gender
09:58 Micro-communities and loss of shared culture
12:19 Third spaces disappearing
15:58 Doomscrolling and addiction
24:32 Why you don’t do what you want (self-sabotage)
48:07 Thinking, AI, and pure math
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55min
April 16, 2026 Is Culture Fake? (w/ Todd McGowan)
Recommended watch - https://youtu.be/K1kxCBvExsU?si=nQbYKDq1n0X_-mDf
Todd McGowan returns to the podcast for a conversation about Lacan, language, desire, culture, AI, and the mental health crisis. We talk about the master signifier, the sinthome, why subjectivity emerges where language fails, why people desire things that do not make them happy, and why social media seems engineered to intensify anxiety, guilt, and psychic fragmentation. We also get into race, culture, identity, purity politics, trans subjectivity, domestication, and whether large language models could ever truly desire anything or become subjects in the psychoanalytic sense. Somewhere in there, we also discuss Hegel, Star Wars, Michael Phelps, and more.
00:00 – Intro / Todd McGowan returns
00:52 – What is the sinthome? (Lacan + Joyce)
04:50 – What is the master signifier?
07:01 – Cultural appropriation and instability of culture
09:19 – Why culture isn’t “owned” (and why it’s always oppressive)
12:27 – Is all culture oppressive?
13:40 – Race, pride, and why race doesn’t “exist” biologically
16:58 – Should you be proud of intelligence?
17:39 – Language, abstraction, and why clarity can confuse
19:20 – Israel, Zionism, and what people actually mean
22:06 – Why race is a product of racism
23:00 – Signifier vs signified vs referent
27:15 – Naming, identity, and why your name isn’t “you”
30:34 – Subjectivity = where language fails
32:27 – What is the subject? (Kant, Hegel, Freud)
35:05 – How desire forms (and why it resists authority)
37:35 – Why you can’t know your own unconscious
38:45 – LLMs, language, and meaning
40:22 – Can AI be a subject?
43:40 – Does AI have desire?
46:39 – Can anything exist without desire? (animals vs humans)
48:54 – Domestication and “neuroticizing” pets
49:02 – Trans identity, biology, and desire
52:17 – Desire as collision between body and language
55:21 – Why desire ≠ what you want
57:24 – Michael Phelps, success, and emptiness
58:23 – The mental health crisis (social media + superego)
1:00:00 – Attention spans and students post-social media
1:02:21 – Purity culture, canceling, and moral signaling
1:03:08 – Hegel’s “beautiful soul”
1:04:27 – Is politics replacing religion?
1:04:58 – Loss of public space / third spaces
1:06:24 – When should you push back vs ignore people?
1:07:33 – Life advice: thinking dialectically
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1h 9min
April 10, 2026 Can Science Explain Consciousness (w/ Grace Lindsay)
Could a computer simulation be conscious? I sat down with Grace Lindsay, professor of psychology and data science at NYU and computational neuroscientist, to talk about modeling the brain, free will, emergence, the hard problem of consciousness, and whether uploading your mind to a computer would actually be you.
We cover:
• The fruit fly connectome and what’s still missing
• Is the brain deterministic or probabilistic?
• Why randomness doesn’t save free will
• What the “self” actually is
• Whether a self-modeling system could be conscious
• The line between science and philosophy
Subscribe for more conversations on philosophy, neuroscience, and the biggest questions.
Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin
Instagram: @ebkphilosophy
X: @micahzarin
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46min
April 04, 2026 Is Looksmaxing Rational? (w/ Dan Demetriou)
My Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin
Dan's website: https://www.dandemetriou.com/
Dan's paper "Virgin vs. Chad: On Enforced Monogamy as a Solution to the Incel Problem": https://philpapers.org/rec/DEMVVC
Dan's ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-Demetriou
References mentioned:
Bowling Alone — Robert Putnam
Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiment (1950s)
William Costello's research on cross-sex mind reading (UT Austin / David Buss lab)
Malcolm & Simone Collins, Basecamp Podcast
Nick Fuentes "Jester Maxxing" clip
0:00 Intro
0:24 What do you make of looksmaxing?
2:30 The loss of third spaces (Bowling Alone)
4:37 Why guys lack emotional literacy
6:15 Charisma vs. looks on dating apps
8:07 The proxy-vs-goal trap (deadlift maxing)
11:00 The PSI scale and sexual market value
12:35 Who is Clavicular?
13:35 "Dating girls is gay" — courtship as simping
15:32 Jester maxing and the simp problem
17:48 Validation without sex
19:53 Situationships vs. relationships
21:41 Trading richness for convenience
23:33 Short-term vs. long-term mating strategies
27:27 The Mouse Utopia and the Beautiful Ones
30:33 The peacock alpha vs. the patriarch alpha
32:03 Why discomfort around the opposite sex has spiked
34:53 Competing with the entire city
37:50 Why guys actually are being creepy
39:11 What courtship used to look like
43:08 Playing hard to get meets harassment culture
47:49 The male over-perception bias
52:40 25% of women think asking for coffee is harassment
54:20 Is cultural fragmentation the real problem?
58:46 Incel violence and the limits of "let them die out"
59:51 The political divide between young men and women
1:01:34 The Scandinavian paradox — more freedom, more divergence
1:03:48 Redistribution and the male loneliness problem
1:07:31 "Monogamy was the socialism of women"
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1h 10min
March 26, 2026 Can You Choose Your Beliefs? (w/ Mike Titelbaum)
Mike Titelbaum is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose work focuses on epistemology, especially Bayesian epistemology, probability, and how we form rational beliefs under uncertainty. His research explores how evidence should guide belief, how confidence levels change over time, and how people should respond to disagreement. He’s also the author of Quitting Certainties, a book that examines the limits of certainty and how rational thinking actually works in real life.
00:00 Introduction to Belief and Evidence
01:32 The Nature of Belief and Evidence
04:40 Philosophical Perspectives on Evidence
07:14 Induction vs. Deduction in Reasoning
09:57 Navigating Uncertainty in Life
13:03 Bayesian Epistemology Explained
15:48 Confidence and Self-Perception
18:27 The Role of Higher Order Confidence
21:26 Disagreement and Epistemic Bubbles
31:37 Exploring Astrology and Epistemic Bubbles
33:50 The Role of Experience in Evidence
36:34 The Uniqueness Thesis in Philosophy
39:12 Challenges to the Uniqueness Thesis
43:20 AI and Bayesian Epistemology
51:41 The Future of Philosophy in the Age of AI
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1h 6min
March 19, 2026 Should a Vampire Starve to Death? (w/ Spencer Case)
Spencer Case is a philosopher specializing in moral realism, ethics, and political philosophy. He’s the author of Why It’s OK to Be Patriotic and has published extensively on the relationship between epistemic and moral reasons.
We talked about whether morality is something real or something we made up, his argument that if we have reasons to believe things then we have moral reasons too, why the error theorist position collapses under its own logic, whether ethical veganism is as airtight as philosophers claim, Peter Singer’s drowning child argument and why Singer himself softened his conclusion, whether doing philosophy is morally justified when you could be doing something more directly useful, mathematical realism and what the trillionth digit of pi tells us about discovery, moving from Mormonism to atheism to hopeful agnosticism, and why you should see your own views as a lifelong draft you never stop revising.
0:00 Hook
0:24 From Epistemic Reasons to Moral Reasons
6:34 Are Moral Truths the Same Type of Thing as Factual Truths?
7:36 Mathematical Realism and the Language of Discovery
15:34 The Case for Ethical Veganism
22:45 Vampires, Puppies, and Weird Thought Experiments
31:55 Are Philosophers Intellectually Honest?
37:12 Is Doing Philosophy Morally Wrong?
40:30 Life Isn’t Meant to Be Minmaxed
43:45 Mormon to Atheist to Hopeful Agnostic
46:29 Spencer’s Advice
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49min
March 15, 2026 Neurodiversity, Abstraction, and Predictive Minds | Anders Sandberg Conversation
Why do some people think so differently from everyone else? In this conversation, I talk with Anders Sandberg about how the brain learns to see, why abstraction comes more naturally to some people than others, how attention and inhibition shape personality, what neurodiversity actually changes, and why insight so often fails to transform a life. We also get into predictive processing, psychedelics, mysticism, creativity, academia, and the strange process of becoming yourself.
Anders is a researcher, futurist, and one of the most genuinely wide ranging thinkers I’ve spoken with. This ended up being a conversation about minds, learning, temperament, and what it means to explore the world without getting trapped in a single framework.
0:00 Ideas
2:28 Neuroscience
15:36 Development
23:18 Impulsivity
25:30 Neurodivergence
31:02 Optimism
46:28 Toddlers
49:54 Psychedelics & Mysticisim
1:20:00 Life
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1h 34min

FAQs about Micah Zarin Podcast:

How many episodes does Micah Zarin Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.