In this episode I sat down with philosopher Simon Critchley, professor at the New School for Social Research and author of Mysticism, alongside my co-host Denis Calos. We got into what it means to live a mystical life, why growing up is the abdication of ecstasy, whether AI-generated music can be art, why suffering might be the precondition for making anything good, and why everyone wants to be the type of person who reads Nietzsche without actually reading Nietzsche. Also soccer, Suno, the Beatles, and me attempting German.

If you like this kind of thing, I write longer essays on philosophy and consciousness on my Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin

Subscribe for more long-form conversations with philosophers, scientists, and people thinking seriously about hard problems.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intros
01:05 Mysticism
07:29 The abdication of ecstasy
15:46 Is thinking play?
18:06 Songwriting
24:21 AI music
40:05 Reality privilege
46:59 Suffering
52:26 Analytic vs continental
1:02:24 Overthinking
1:18:10 LARPing
1:32:33 Advice

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00:00 What makes something creative
00:42 Intros
01:51 Can anything be truly novel? (psychological vs historical creativity)
05:05 Influence vs originality, and music lawsuits
09:34 Originality isn't enough
11:01 Discovery vs creativity
15:04 Combinatorial vs transformational creativity
19:14 Can AI be creative?
25:19 Word salad
30:28 Does a painting have value if no one ever sees it?
31:32 Is Baby Shark better than Beethoven?
37:31 Creativity and culture
42:27 Philosophy
49:51 Is anything in the world without creativity?
54:38 Is translation a creative act?
1:00:07 Adaptation vs inspiration
1:03:36 Life advice

Karl Friston — the world’s most-cited neuroscientist and architect of the Free Energy Principle — joins me for a conversation about how brains make sense of reality, why we seek uncertainty, what beauty is, why psychedelics dissolve our usual models of the world, etc

We talk about predictive processing, active inference, surprise, Bayesian belief updating, jokes, curiosity, trauma, beauty, psychedelics, and the strange possibility that life itself is a kind of controlled hallucination.

Read my Substack essay that frames part of this conversation: Beauty is a Loophole https://micahzarin.substack.com/p/bea...

0:00 — Karl Friston cold open
0:36 — Intro
1:04 — The Free Energy Principle, briefly
7:20 — Technical neuroscience
27:10 —jokes
33:33 — Curiosity
38:19 — uncertainty
48:24 — Goblins
52:40 — Psychedelics
1:13:31 — Awe, beauty, trauma, and dissolving old models
1:38:10 — Curiosity
1:41:29 — Karl Friston’s life advice

good video. subscribe and like if u enjoyed. dislike if u disenjoyed.

lance:‪@lanceindependent‬
lance substack: https://substack.com/@lanceindependent

00:00 Cold open & intro
00:38 Why moral realists annoy him
06:56 Arguments for moral realism

15:04 Philosophy
38:22 Why anti-realists get misrepresented
45:55 “So slavery isn’t wrong?”
50:43 The magic beans fallacy
54:49 Moral reasoning and reality
57:24 Authenticity, cancellation, and tribalism
1:03:05 Productive disagreement in real life
1:06:01 Why care about philosophy?
1:17:19 Advice for studying philosophy
1:20:46 Life advice
1:24:29 Closing

828 views May 31, 2026 Interviews

Mathematical physicist John Baez (This Week's Finds, the n-Category Café) on whether human thought still means anything

One of the most wide-ranging conversations I've had.

Read my writing: https://substack.com/@micahzarin

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:19 Chords
04:10 Doubt
07:26 Teaching
09:23 Categories
16:32 Antimatter
22:08 Meaning
29:03 AI
47:21 Tate
49:25 Heroes
51:39 Chess
57:05 Sycophancy
1:00:03 Consciousness
1:04:42 E8
1:07:13 Advice
1:10:36 Origins

yeah

In this conversation, I talk with philosopher Richard Chappell about moral realism, suffering, moral responsibility, effective altruism, AI consciousness, digital sentience, and why our intuitions about machines may change once the machines actually arrive.

Richard’s blog: https://www.goodthoughts.blog
My Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin

Timestamps
0:00 Consciousness
0:53 Realism
3:36 Reflection
9:23 Mathematics
24:41 Suffering
31:05 Consequences
41:33 Responsibility
49:29 AI
58:02 Advice

Robin Hanson is an economist at George Mason University, the inventor of prediction markets, and the author of The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain. In this conversation he argues that our civilization is failing because we broke the engine of cultural evolution, and that the only way out is to let capitalism run more things, which I pushed back on, badly.
We also got into prediction markets, why we don't actually want accurate information, authenticity as hidden performance, foragers vs farmers, falling fertility, insider trading, and what young people should do with their lives.

📚 Robin's work:
Overcoming Bias: https://www.overcomingbias.com
The Age of Em: https://ageofem.com
The Elephant in the Brain: https://www.elephantinthebrain.com

🎧 More from me:
Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin

⏱️ Chapters:
00:00 — Hook
00:11 — Intro
01:27 — Philosophy
05:04 — Kalshi & Polymarket
13:56 — Group loyalty, and implausible beliefs
21:15 — Cultural evolution
27:14 — Why civilization is collapsing
51:41 — The incoherence of utopia
57:22 — Where I tried to defend anti-capitalism
1:16:21 — Life advice for me

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

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