Micah Zarin Podcast

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 th...

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 Bab...

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, psyched...

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 rea...

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...

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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 Re...

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 market...

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 - W...

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 navig...

Graham Priest

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

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...

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 determin...

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...

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 Certai...

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...

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...

LINKS https://x.com/@micahzarin https://substack.com/@micahzarin 0:00 – Suffering 18:15 – Psychedelics 27:49 – Immortality and Eugenics 32:06 – Animals 42:40 – AI, QM, and The Brain

Michael Huemer is a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, author of The Problem of Political Authority and Skepticism and the Veil of Perception. We talk about phenomenal conservatism, anarcho-capitalism, whether AI could be conscious, what makes an experience belong to someone, and whether your dog has concepts. 0:00 How Huemer forms his beliefs 0:45 Phenomenal conservatism...

Paolo Aluffi, author of Algebra: Chapter 0 and professor at Florida State University, sits down to talk about what it actually means to do mathematics, and why most people have never seen the real thing. 00:00 — What does a mathematician actually do? 01:43 — How Algebra: Chapter 0 came to be 03:05 — The three types of students in every math class 07:39 — How Paolo got into mathematics 09:24 — If n...

In Episode 8 of EBKP I’m joined by theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson to explore one of the deepest questions at the intersection of philosophy, physics, and computation. We discuss whether the brain could, even in principle, be simulated by a digital computer, what the Church–Turing thesis actually says about minds, and how quantum mechanics complicates questions of free will, predicti...

Why does scrolling feel better than reading, thinking, or even resting? Why is scrolling addictive? If you’ve ever thought “I’m cooked” but couldn’t stop scrolling, this is why. Guest: Todd McGowan (Why Theory) Chapters 0:00 – Intro + who Todd is 2:33 – Why scrolling feels so good (jouissance) 5:00 – Brainrot, Gen Z/Gen Alpha, and desire 14:54 – What brainrot actually is 17:36 – Memes, repetition,...

Can Objective Truth Survive 2025? A leftist (Micah) and a conservative (Brandon Ilizarov) go head-to-head on faith, Gaza, capitalism, diets, college admissions, “cancel culture,” and whether logic still means anything in an algorithmic world. It’s raw, fast, and (sometimes) uncomfortable—exactly how grown-up conversations should be. Websites Mentioned: https://www.trackaipac.com/ https://www.theli...

In this conversation, Micah and Denis delve into various philosophical themes, exploring the nature of existence, the role of education in fostering creativity, and the impact of capitalism on society. They discuss the complexities of human experience, the implications of wealth and power, and the challenges posed by modern ideologies. The dialogue emphasizes the need for a more nuanced understand...