Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Matt Johnson on Christopher Hitchens

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

We are back for an interview with the author and independent writer Matt Johnson discussing the New Atheist hero and legendary debater, Christopher Hitchens. The other Matt recently published a book called "How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment" and kindly agreed to come on and waffle with us about Hitchens and where he fits in comparison to the modern gurus. We cover a range of topics including whether Hitchens would have been in the IDW, if he was an extremophile, how far did he rely on rhetoric over substance and to what extent different labels apply to him. Matt Johnson offers a surprisingly nuanced take and provides us with lots of interesting tidbits regarding Hitchens. This can also be listened to as Part 1 of our Hitchens coverage, as we have a full decoding of a debate of his coming shortly.And what if you are not into Hitchens? Well, there are still some goodies for you! In this episode, we also cover: Guru magnetism & depressing crossovers, Sam Harris' recent appearance with Maajid Nawaz, Scandinavian geopolitics, Chris' review of the Super Mario Bros Movie, and whether we are actually in the pocket of Big Harris! So join us one and all! And don't forget to subscribe to Sam Harris' meditation app using the code 'GurusPodSentMe'.LinksMatt Johnson (2023) How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-EnlightenmentMatt Johnson's Article at the Bulwark: What Christopher Hitchens Can Teach Us About LiberalismMaajid Nawaz & Sam Harris Reunite for the First Time Since Covid to Debate the Politics of Covid-MandatesMatt Johnson's articles at Quillette primarily about coverage of the Ukraine conflict

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the the podcast where anthropologists and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer we try to understand what they talk about i'm professor matt brown i'm staring right at the beautiful mug of associate professor christopher cavanaugh g'day christopher welcome to this recording with you and me together. G'day, Matt. On most days in this online office that we have, one of us looks slightly healthier than the other. Mainly, I think, you know, just the Australian sun, that kind of effect. And my pale effervescence gives the inaccurate impression of, know impending death or or something like that but and now today i have a healthy spring in my step i slept well and you are recovering from an illness so you look a little bit you know your bones look weary your mind looks weak your hair your hair is tussled you're like in lord of the rings when the old king is

possessed by sauron that's after a bit you do you look well you you've got a rosy thing in your yeah yeah i slept more than six hours that's why that's what did it. Yeah. Once you get to my age, Chris, it doesn't matter how long you sleep. You just feel weary all the time. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not age. Maybe I just need to get some exercise, get some iron in my diet or something. I don't know. Maybe you should go see the Mario movie.

I went to see it with my son. I'll just say, Matt, if you don't't like that if you're too cool for school you know oh commercialism like go i think a long jump off a short pier because that was just pure fun and escapism as somebody that's played nintendo a lot i very much enjoyed it and enjoyed my son enjoying it so screw you all i think most people like it so i'm not really sure well there are i i've heard some like hipsterish reviews about it but yeah i enjoyed it oh really so what the hipsters were criticizing saying oh the turtles weren't quite right and they're just saying a commercialism come to nintendo god forbid imagine imagine that and you know all the

jokes they're just these kind of very straightforward jokes that we all heard 10 years ago and we're tired of now i'm like what do you want edgy mario what edgy mario where's the social commentary chris where's the social commentary does Chris? Where's the social commentary? Does it discuss injustice or something at all? Where's the racial politics in the Mushroom Kingdom? Well, there are some. There are some. There's interracial marriage discussed in it and so on.

But, you know, you just have to dig a bit deeper. A turtle and a mushroom princess getting together. It's beautiful. That's right. And also an inherited monarchy, but the nomination process by which the princess gained power, it's beautiful that's right and also an inherited monarchy but the nomination process by which the princess gained power it's not clear it's kind of like a you know hitler-esque rise unexpected that they would delve into that dark backstory but yeah it's a it's a totalitarian

mushroom what do you call that a monarchyarchy. Actually, that reminds me of Adventure Time. Adventure Time had social commentary and it had a princess in it. She was the ruler of a kingdom and it did deal with some issues, real issues. Wasn't that also trippy? Very trippy. You never watched it?

I watched a little bit of it, but I didn't like the art style. That annoyed me. My son watched a bit as well it's all right it's a bit like you know spongebob or those other cartoons that they i feel like they start to try too hard to be appealing to adults uh bluey got the balance right matt bluey's all right still on the right side of that so yeah was it me that recommended bluey to you it might have been it might have been yeah bluey's the the new pepper pig in my neck of the woods yeah i've been recommending it to a few people that's me australian cultural ambassador yeah it's your

greatest export i think in recent years so congratulations yeah well there hasn't been much competition so you're probably right well i'm not going to watch the the mario movie sorry i have no plans to do that but i'll take your word for it i'm sure it's good for children of a certain age and their fathers and people who enjoy fun as well that it's good for that demographic but those people yeah yeah yeah well we don't need to worry about that well Well, we've hit the five-minute mark. That's our allotted time for banter. That's it.

The internet killjoys. Yeah. You happy now, guys? That's it. Chris has got more in him. You'd like to banter more, but he won't. He won't do it now. I'm keeping it tight.

I'm not really, but, you know, we just, we throw, I don't know what metaphor to go with coins pennies bread to the ducks we throw them a bone throw them a bone that's what we do bread to the ducks that famous for us let them eat bread but we do have guru related goings-ons and commentary to offer. So this episode is not a decoding, but you do have a series of decodings coming up. This episode is going to be an interview with Matt Johnson about his book on Hitchens and a kind of discussion about Christopher Hitchens,

where he would fit in the guru ecosystem, where he alive now, his politics and rhetorical flair when he was alive. And yeah, is he an extremophile? Various topics that we'll get into and discuss. And we are going to have a separate decoding episode on Christopher Hitchens. We've got it all clipped and stuff

we're not sure when yeah but it's it's coming right it's so just just be prepared for that consider this the appetizer the aperitif yeah yeah we thought we'd do it too for do a decoding and the interview but that was you know our our eyes were bigger than our mouth and we couldn't fit it all in so um so yeah, we're just talking to Matt Johnson. He wrote that book. It sounds like, and it is boosting Christopher Hitchens a fair bit. He's written, it's called How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment.

So that sounded like pretty bullish to me. But Matt is pretty balanced. He can rattle off, you you know the pros and cons of hitchens pretty well i thought so it's a good listen yeah you guys yeah hitchens is a you know like a patron saint of the new atheist movement but i also think quite popular amongst the intellectual dark web set as well so that title makes it sound like it would be a kind of peon to hitchens but you'll see he has a more nuanced perspective i think than that and yeah so we will not spoil it no don't need this anymore because you'll hear it all very soon very soon enough about that you'll be hearing about that

but tell us more chris what is coming up what is laid out on the Guru's Pod, Shmorgas Pod? Ah, yeah. That's what you want to hear, isn't it, Matt? You want to know all the work that we have coming up ahead of us. And do I have material for you? We are going to have Eliezer Yudkowsky episode, which gave us a chance to talk about AI. That's with his appearance on Lex Friedman. So we're going to cover that. We're going to cover Matthew McConaughey's

new venture into self-help cults, which was an interesting development. So he did a five-hour YouTube video with a bunch of Tony Robbins types, and it's quite something. So we're going to look at that. Hitchens, we already mentioned and another guru figure that is equally as well established and influential but still alive

for now is a old chomsky mr chomsky people have asked us to do him for a long time and even some weirdos are like you'll never do you wouldn't be too scared to do Chomsky or whatever. I'm like, they don't get it. They just don't get it. So Chomsky, we're going to do him. And then, Matt, we are going back to Weinstein world into the UFO episodes because we've been waiting for it. So we got all these.

I'm not promising that's the order that they will arrive, but those are coming within probably the next one to two months. And we have interviews with Rene Duresta about disinformation and online ecosystems, all that kind of stuff. And Matthew Sheffield about? Talking about Trump and the kind of guru dynamics and the magosphere i think is what we'll be focusing on with him so yeah yeah got interviews we've got gurus what more do you want we've got everything we've got it all we've got ai

and you know for people that are into ai you know we don't often do this but we can boost the patreon feed i suppose which is we did do a bit of a deep dive into AI. Oh, yeah, we did do that. We have content in our Patreon. If you go there, we were doing a paper on AI and up like a two-hour conversation on AI. But, you know, actually, I think it's pretty interesting. So, you know, should you want to hear that,

it's on there along with, with i think 16 or so other episodes about research papers and and all the grometer episodes and various other bonus stuff which we put up including early release of episodes and whatnot so there's tons of nice stuff on the patreon there is absolutely okay so that's what's coming up anything else on our introductory agenda more banter maybe another installment of banter oh there were just two little things i want the message just too little things we're still you look at that it's only 11 minutes calm down hold your horses i i can hear you all complaining in my mind. So Matt, one thing that I noticed recently and that it would be good just to flag up is how often the people that we cover, like kind of magnetic forces,

seem to find each other, right? Like one of the things that we've noticed is the general trajectory of the people that we cover is downwards, spiraling ever, ever down the Guru dream with more hot takes and more polarization and more conspiracies. But the other one is that they kind of spiral into each other. So an example that I would give is Bill Maher, who we covered not so long ago, primarily focusing on this kind of anti-vaccine aspects. So yes, he's a talk show host. He will have various guests, but quite notable that he had on Constantine Kissin and Elon Musk for a 20 minute sit down metaphorically fellating interview couldn't have been more funny about how amazing

Elon is and getting all of his takes on the pressing issues of the day so yeah just like a lot of these people seem to just come together and you know i have to say the take that annoys me is when people go look isn't it fantastic you know you can see how terrible the establishment is when even a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like bill ma is going to be talking to someone on the right side of politics like that's how concerning things have become and another pairing up that was mentioned was rfk jr going on to tucker carlson's show i think it was before he got the boot and going well look at this you know these are good people that are just

concerned about that you know yes one of them's conservative and but the other one he's a doyen of the of the liberal you know blue blood liberal family all that stuff it's like come on can you not think of some other reasons why these people are coming together and it isn't necessarily a good thing yeah well i think that a lot of people know that you know are somewhat skeptical about Bill Maher's credentials at claiming to be a shining representation of the left. He's like a crotchety, where would you put Bill? Like I can see him before too long taking a little bit of a Rubin-esque turn, right? Like Rubin was trying to get him to pivot that way in the content that we looked at. And he was kind of resisting that.

trying to get him to pivot that way in the content that we looked at and he was kind of resisting that maybe he's too dyed in the wool to ever completely go that way but as he said if they made vaccines mandatory he'd be off the florida and voting for the santas in an instant right like yeah i think part of it i mean apart from the anti-vaxxery which is a big driving force but just with these people it's just generally them getting old isn't it like they just get old and crotchety and things don't make sense anymore and they get annoyed by everything oh yeah remember him talking about the twitch streaming when the computer games and the watching other people games so yeah it is like that. And Rogan, there's this clip of Rogan talking about how his eyes were opened about the pharmaceutical industry and the vaccines, what it was all about, because he read RFK Jr.'s book. Like, look at these fools taking this horse dewormer.

dewormer and it wasn't until I read Robert Kennedy's book the real Anthony Fauci that I got a sense that this is a playbook that they have used forever they offer one solution this one solution is patented this one solution is controlled by these pharmaceutical companies and it's very expensive and they make a fuckload of money from it whereas anything that's off-label anything that's generic is dismissed they rig the test to make it look like it like they'll give you far more in like what they did with hydroxychloroquine to me i don't even want to go into this you can read it in the book but my whole journey on this is like first of all how did i find myself in this right and andy was talking about epstein being uh you

know a secret agent of the intelligence agencies recently like it was a it was an intelligence operation whoever was running it whether it was uh the massad or whether it was the cia or whether it was a combination of both it was was an intelligence operation. They were bringing in people and compromising them. And then when they would compromise them, they would use whatever they had on them to influence their opinions and the way they expressed those opinions. Rogan's brain is just like a big sloppy stew of all the conspiracy theories bumping around on the internet and all the bobble-headed guru types that he talks to and he just absorbs it in and the good information from like scientists and stuff it just bounces off it like hits a shiny dome and it might go in for a minute but it just kind of filters out so it's that cross-pollination thing and it you know the people

we're talking about are understandable because the linkage tends to be like conspiracy theories and anti-woke stuff that connects them together but it but it is the case that you just find these surprising crossovers and like a lot of the people we cover i forget all the pairing because there's been so many of them but we've talked about it which is they seem to match up you know they're working in different areas but yeah a lot of the gurus we cover do seem to find each other and one special case of course is eric weinstein who if talking about cross-pollination he's he's the busy little bee that's visiting all the flowers he seems to pop up with like whoever comes on the scene and is it somehow doing guru-esque stuff eric is there he's there he's always there who am i thinking

oh he met constantine recently there you go yeah i think constantine was also on dave rubin's podcast because of course course, he was. But Eric and him were talking on Twitter about that they met up and they really appreciate what both of them do. And just like, of course you do. Of course you would. It's surprising that you haven't met already. And let's people forget, whenever Kanye West met Candace Owens back in the day, right,

whenever he was starting down the path where he's ended up. Eric was there in the shadows of those meetings. If you read Barry Weiss's article, she mentions that Eric was there when Kanye met Candace, like helping it along. And you just have to ask yourself, why? Why is he there? He's the man in the shadows like but just around a whole bunch of

bizarre weirdos with extreme opinions but chris let me ask you this to make it explicit because you said you know of course eric's there of course he's there and i i feel like i'm nodding my head yes of course he's there but can you spell it out like why why is eric always there like why would he attach himself to just literally anyone who seems to come on the scene how would in your own words what would you say well so if you wanted to take a popular critic online it would be that eric is funded by teal and he is casting his net to create networks to forward teal's agenda right now one i don't think eric works for teal anymore because that's removed from all his bios and it says he worked there till 2022 so i think he's out of the teal network but teal and him did see eye to eye. But to me, it's kind of obvious why. Because Thiel is this

mental libertarian type who pays people not to go to universities, right? The dropout of university and has a huge chip on his shoulder about anything to do with institutions. Eric, that's all he's about is complaining about institutions. And they both were saying, science is completely stuck. There's no progress being made in technology or science and criticizing institutions. And that's why Eric was like a useful person for Thiel to be supporting. I don't think that he thought that Eric was this fantastic physicist who was going to produce a theory of everything. And so like, what was Eric's actual job? What was he doing? He wasn't writing books, right? He wasn't really working on his theory.

He did have a podcast, but he stopped that. But he was basically like a what's i don't want to say a debutante a dilettante dilettante i think is the word yeah i think that's what he wants to be this person who knows lots of people can bring people together, can organize things. And he came up with the intellectual dark web. I think he was involved in bringing Brett to Tucker Carlson and all of these different aspects. So in some respect, it's just what his nature is as a conduit between people and to try and organize.

So, yeah. So he is about networking. He is about meeting people and just like people on LinkedIn,, yeah. So he is about networking. He is about meeting people and just like people on LinkedIn, you know, who are hyper into networking. I feel like he's, like, it's almost like a hobby at this point. Like, you know, these guys are kind of retired really and they're kind of dilettantes. They don't have like a day job.

This can be almost thought of as a bit of a hobby for them, which is to somehow be influential, somehow to be in the public eye and to be in the corridors of some kind of influence oh that's where that's kind of jackets matt that's where they wear the jackets that's right they wear the jackets yeah that's what i assumed yeah but who knows who knows well the last corollary to that, Matt, that I'll mention is our friend Sam Harris went on Majid Nawaz's platform to have a long conversation with him. And anybody hasn't noticed, Majid Nawaz has absolutely went down the conspiratorial rabbit hole and not in a subtle way. It's extreme.

ravitole and not in a subtle way it's extreme so one it was interesting to see sam go and have a conversation with him given some of the statements that have been been made but i actually do think it was an error of sorts because one of the things is that it was on majid's content paywall right so it's generating subscribers for Majid. So even if it was a knock down debate, Sam is giving Majid free publicity. And then secondly, the conversation. So it isn't that Sam completely agrees with everything that Majid says.

He pushes back at various parts and stuff, but he's fundamentally uninformed about, you know, Majid's position. No, no. I mean, in that email, I offered you a private apology, but I'm quite happy to offer you a public one. And to some degree, this apology may extend to a few other people in our circle. I mean, the people are in very different buckets, you know, with respect to many of the details we're going to talk about. But I should just say that I haven't followed you down the various rabbit holes you've gone down in the last three years, you know, with any depth at all, right?

He thinks he knows some things, but he doesn't know exactly, right? And they get hung up on various details. And Majid is relatively effective rhetorically at adjusting his statements to make it more palatable. And Sam does, to his credit, point out various inconsistencies and logical leaps and whatnot, and logical leaps and whatnot. But it comes across as a reconciliation of sorts. And then Sam and Majid talk a bit about what a shame it is, you know, that they didn't have these kinds of conversations earlier and that Sam, you know, expresses regret

about not discussing these things despite various efforts. Kind of lost the opportunity to actually just speak with you about what was going on and what you were thinking and why you were thinking it. So in any case, it's just to say that I'm sorry that I didn't as a friend just get connected with you before I was in a position to speak publicly about any of the things we see differently. And I feel that way about, frankly, I feel that way about several other people to various degrees. I mean, there are people who I have had some private, you know,

intercessions with, and then it's kind of spilled out in public. There are people who don't fall into this category, like, you know, like Dave Rubin, you know, I went round and round in private before it spilled out in public. And it's just a very different situation with him. And I haven't known, frankly, how to navigate this moment. And it just, it gives the impression that like, you know, isn't it good? We're all able to sit down and despite our disagreements, we fundamentally can stay friends. And Sam continuously talks about how it's a complicated thing to work out this issue about like friendships and, you know, where you disagree.

But, you know, loyalty and friendship has to count for something. And so, and I just noticed this weird dynamic where if you've met somebody and you've had dinner with them and you've laughed with them and you've had fun with them, even if only you've only done that once, then they do something spectacularly unwise in public, you feel differently about criticizing them. And maybe we should feel differently. So maybe the way the balance should swing is that we, you know, even strangers should be treated more like friends. I don't know. But I just, I'm just, you know, confessing that I'm not comfortable with the haphazard solution I appear to have found on this issue. You know, I feel like there are many people I've criticized

or not depending, and it often depends on just how many times we've been at dinner together. And Matt, I don't know, but to me, the fact that Brett Weinstein and Majid are vocal conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine advocates. It's not the kind of thing that you should try to paper over with. Friendly conversations or trying to, you know, find the common ground that you can find the best version of their position and just ignore the bits where they're going a bit crazy about Soros or that kind of thing. And it just, it strikes me as an illustration of the limitation about, you know, the IDW type approach, which is still remains very fixated on interpersonal relationships and all that kind of stuff, despite claims to the counter.

So I don't think we've resolved everything or perhaps even anything, but we have figured out that we can obviously have dinner as friends when we're next in the same city and we should do that. I look forward to it, man. Yeah, it does seem quite futile, doesn't it? Because someone like Maggio, he's just an example. There are hundreds of people like him. They're never going to change their mind. He's just an example. There are hundreds of people like him.

Like they're never going to change their mind. Like they're never going to have a chat with someone like Sam Harris and actually genuinely go, oh, yeah, maybe I lost the plot a bit. That's never going to happen. Like you say, they'll moderate the tone of their thing depending on who they're talking to. So it just feels fundamentally futile. And I'm not having a dig at Sam here. I mean, I come across this myself when you know you and

i get invited to have a debate with so-and-so or you know hash it out with so-and-so and i go if i think they're just fundamentally like a waste of space then i can't think of any reason why i should be talking to them it just feels like it's a pointless exercise. Well, I have a slightly more indulgent perspective, maybe about the potential benefits that can be had. But I think it relies on you having prepared and knowing the rhetoric of the person. And even if you do that, it doesn't mean you'll be successful, right? But if you haven't done that at all, you haven't spent even a night to go through the person's views and common arguments you're going in completely blind then and they can say i didn't say that or you know whatever and you don't know right and i like it is a constant amazement to me

how many people have these kind of confrontations or like debate things, but they don't do basic research about who the person is or what they've said on a topic. And it's really common. It's really common, including with people that come on the podcast. There was an example, a kind of an example recently where somebody was Googling the person interviewing them in the middle of the interview and just like why didn't you spend five minutes before that you know before the interview to do this what yeah anyway anyway anyway that's that's a win to the week this is my win to the week about that do some research stop treating having a nice conversation or dinner with someone like it's some magical fucking unbelievable like it's absolutely mundane it's normal to be able to sit down and not like spit all over someone's face and slap them around right that's what normal people do and it's not an

achievement that you manage that it's it's actually not great that you could sit down with alex jones and completely ignore all the terrible things he's done and have funny jokes over a beer like it's the reason people dislike him is all the horrible stuff that he's done and promotes and that's with magic it's not you can't have a nice chat or magic it's magic is a rank conspiracist promoting misinformation and anti-vax rhetoric that's the problem got it got it and you finished your winch that winch is over we're at 30 minutes now it's done it's it's it's filed filed for this week i get wind you're the week for this week that's it i win all right so well and maybe now is a good time to turn to a non-winger matt did you do your research on matt johnson did you check him out did you dig up any

find out any dirty dirt on him there chris i've got a dossier yeah but but actually yes i did do research beforehand. You know, it doesn't take that long. Just to check. Just to do cursory glance. I read his book, or most of it. I know he was interviewed by Schirmer. I know he's contributed.

Yeah, that's right. Don't throw that dead cat at our feet. It's fine. Someone could talk to Michael Schirmer to promote their book. It's fine. It's all right. Yeahmer to promote their book. It's fine. It's all right. Yeah, we won't hold it completely against them. So, okay.

Well, anyway, on that note, let's turn to Matt Johnson. Okay, Chris. So, with us today, we've joined by Matt Johnson. So, thanks for coming, Matt. Matt, you're a freelance writer, I think, is the best way to describe it. You write for a whole bunch of online publications, Colette, The Bulwark, Persuasion, a bunch of things. But, of course, most recently you've been working on a book about Christopher Hitchens, how Hitchens can save the left, I think,

is the title. Yeah, is there anything else about yourself you'd like to say? Nope, that pretty much covers it. Matt, can I just say that it's the bulwark. Bulwark, not the bulwark. What do you guys think? The bulwark. It's worse than the match.

I think I'm closer to bulwark than bulwark. It does sound more... Am I wrong? Well, pronunciation is not your belly week, Chris. This is true. I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah, it's not as bad as the matrix. So whoever's right, that's fine.

We can let the people decide. All right, the bulwark. The bulwark bulwark yeah so um so um matt too or johnson okay how about i'll call you johnson you can call me brown um what what made you decide you wanted to write this book about hitchens have you been interested in for a long time uh yeah so i've been reading Hitchens forever. I mean, since I was a freshman in college and I was, I was probably attracted to him for, um, his guru-ish tendencies. I mean, I just think he's, he's such a brilliant communicator and such an eloquent guy, you know, and there, there are many YouTube videos with titles like Hitchens slaps down opponent X or Y, or, um, you know, there's just this endless profusion of videos of him burning people. And I think that's why like somebody who's, is just getting into the college and just considering like the possibility of becoming a writer might be interested in Hitchens. Um, but yeah, as, as I grew older and as I started to develop some ideas of my own, I just noticed that

Hitchens is principles, um, especially like his commitment to universalism, I would say, really struck should be the anchor of, you know, an international system that, that can address human rights violations and that can sort of provide security and stability. Um, it, it seemed like a political correlate to that sort of universalist idea that, that, you know, we should, we should try to tear down national and tribal barriers to the extent possible. And, you know, know so it just it was just a series of things that that kind of came together and made me think that hitchens would be an interesting uh conduit to talk about a lot of stuff that that i really already cared about so your book matt came out at uh when the tail end of last year or more it came out in february on valentine's day strangely enough

and the year before ben burgess had a book right the philosopher ben burgess uh christopher hitchens what he got right what how he went wrong and why he still matters right it was yes so the how he went wrong that sort of sounds like a sounds like a british construction to me more than a yeah he's a wrong and how he became a wrong and but um so i'm just curious um were yourself and ben burgess in dialogue at all over the topic since it's you know a two books coming out in the space of a year on a thinker that um was was popular but you know has not been really focused on that that much in the past you know five to ten years since he passed um uh yeah just curious did you have any interactions with ben and and maybe your two books if you have read his book uh how

would you distinguish the approach um yeah they're very different books i actually reached out to ben and asked if i could take a look at his when i discovered that that he was working on it and he kindly sent me a copy we actually did a podcast together with Iona Natalia. So it was her two for tea, like area magazine podcast. And we actually did a trial run that went quite poorly. We just ended up yelling at each other about foreign policy for about two hours. So we did a, we did a redo and that's the version that you can actually find. Um, if you look at the library of two for tea episodes. Um, episodes. But yeah, we disagree very fundamentally. And I think we just approached it entirely differently.

He actually constructed the book around a series of debates that Hitchens did. Whereas I just sort of talked about him more generally. But I mean, Ben's a socialist. And he's one of those people who thinks that Hitchens' politics became increasingly deranged after the end of the Cold War. And then after September 11th, he just thinks he just kind of took this horrendous neoconservative imperialist turn. So, yeah, Ben and I don't agree on much. I think he's a really sharp guy. And I actually do like his brand of left wing politics in one sense, because I think it's very anti-identitarian.

I mean, I think he's really good on like free speech issues. You know, he wrote a book called Give Them an Argument about how like people on the left shouldn't try to silence people like Ben Shapiro. They should, they should actually, I think there's like a picture, a cartoon picture of Ben Shapiro on the cover of the book. So yeah, I think in that sense, he's sort of in Hitchens' tradition, you know, because Hitchens was a first amendment absolutist and all that but yeah we we definitely do not uh share many political positions well that's that's interesting maybe it's a fitting tribute that you know you would have a heated it did make a certain kind of sense yeah i think we just decided that the audience would tire of the uh because it kind of

got away from hitchens and just turned into an argument that's that's happened on our podcast before but we've never not released tribalism i did listen to that episode um that the one that made it to air um with with you and i enjoyed that so i mean when i think of hitchens i was the same i think you know i think there's a there's an aspect to his output at least the stuff that gets memed and youtube and stuff like that which is you know the sort of rhetorical flair and the hit slaps and the great one-liners but it seems like you're more interested in what underlies that rhetoric. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so how would you describe this universalism or this sort of political or philosophical stance that he's got? Yeah, it's one of those words that I probably use too often in the abstract,

and I think most people are probably wondering, like, what exactly I mean about it. I mean, they're just different. They're different lenses through which to view it. I mean, I think he was very committed to individual rights. So I cover identity politics pretty extensively in the book. The chapter is titled Sinister Bullshit. So it gives you some idea of what I think about it.

But he just he really didn't like the idea of speaking from a position of identity based authority. He didn't like it when people would say, you know, speaking as a gay man or speaking as a, you know, cause he always just thought that points should be universally intelligible to anyone. And that didn't mean I'm really at pains to point out, but it didn't mean he didn't think we should address, you know, systemic racism or like issues of inequality in society. I mean, he was actually in support of reparations. For example, there's a debate between him and Glenn Lowry that you can find in the C-SPAN archives where he's actually arguing in favor of reparations. So, um, yeah, that, that form of, you know,

universalism has always appealed to me. And then there's just the internationalism. I mean, he just thinks that the United States needs to be very heavily engaged in the world. And I, you know, coming off of Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously the United States needs to be very heavily engaged in the world. And I, you know, coming off of Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, the United States took a turn inward. And that's one of the reasons why Obama was elected, he ran against the Iraq war. But, you know, the invasion of Ukraine is a good reminder that you can't, you can't really get away from the rest of the world. So I've always just, I've always admired both of those elements of, of Hitchens's approach to politics and philosophy. And I do think that the underlying assumption is just that we should value everybody's life, you know, equally it's,

it's a one-to-one, you know, it doesn't matter if the suffering is taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa or if it's in Iraq or if it's in Detroit, you know, it should, it should matter to us equally. So that's, that's sort of, you know, and I know that those are really broad brushes, but that's, that's probably the best way to summarize it briefly. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Like obviously times have changed a fair bit since Hitchens was, was active and the kinds of hot topics has moved on in a way. I think when Hitchens was railing against that kind of identitarianism and I guess a kind of relativism, like that was in vogue, perhaps more on the left, but at least the

impression that I get amongst the people that are more left than me, Aaron Rabinowitz of A Breast of Void is our touchstone for this kind of thing i mean he describes himself as a what's the phrase chris a moral not absolutist what's what is he no realist realist yes he subscribes to moral realism and that seemed which it is kind of similar to how you describe that kind of universalism of hitchens so so the same sort of fish is very anti-relativistic yeah yeah yeah and it seems like that that actually describes the left more generally of Hitchens. So, so the same sort of fish is a bad. It's very anti-relativistic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems like that, that actually describes the left more generally now where there is less, oh, you know, you see it this way and I see it that way and who can say, whereas

there's much, it's much more, no, no, this is, this is absolutely the right thing to do. And if you don't agree with that, then you're just, you're just morally wrong. Then I guess the other way in which things have moved on a bit is that, like, you know, there was that great withdrawal, obviously, from American interventionism after the various happenings in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, you know, since then, of course, we've seen Russian imperialism and there's still debate. But it seems to me there's much more consensus now on the center left of uh yeah interventionist

policy that's a great that's a great point it's actually that's it's good to make that point just because i really don't want to generalize about the left too much i mean right now the german green party is more interventionist than you know many moderate democrats in the united states i mean they were pushing for the deployment of heavy weapons in Ukraine, certainly earlier than Olaf Scholz was and certainly earlier than a lot of leaders throughout Europe were. So, and then, yeah, the Democrats, I think,

they have a better record on Ukraine than the Republicans. Although there is a fair amount of bipartisanship in the United States around supporting Ukraine. But there's also just a really powerful sort of insular dynamic on the right. You know, you just have to look at Tucker Carlson's monologues, which have thankfully come to an end, at least for the time being on Fox News, to just see this this strain of sort of isolationism in American politics. to just see this, this strain of, of sort of isolationism in American politics. And that, that, that's something that's really become more prominent on the right since the Trump era began.

Cause it just used to be, you know, it used to be that the rights big problem, big political liability was probably like overextension or sort of sympathy with neoconservatism or, you know, however you want to describe it. So, um so yeah i i do think that the left has has a complicated record on some of these issues and you know i mean even figures like bernie sanders versus corbin um they demonstrate that the left has just always been dynamic like a lot of people would say you know corbin is the the is the British Sanders and vice versa. But Sanders actually supported the intervention in Libya initially. He supported the intervention in Kosovo. And that's the sort of thing that you just couldn't imagine Corbyn supporting. So, yeah. And this all gets back to the general principle that, you know, maybe I'm too sympathetic toward the Iraq war,

which there are very good arguments against, and there's no doubt. But I still think that even if you despise that war, and you think it was the biggest mistake of American statecraft, you know, in 50 years, it's pretty easy to see that Hitchens came at it from a liberal point of view. He came at it because he supported the Kurds, uh, because he recognized that Saddam had riveted this horrible tyranny on the Iraqi people, you know? So it's just, uh, yeah, I think these are, these are conceivably left-wing positions that a lot of people will regard as reactionary or right-wing positions, but you know, politics is kind of complicated. Things have changed a lot. It was kind of just that you guys guys you're the line you guys seem to take on some of this stuff is refreshing to me because you you you're you both know bob right um and and i really i really like his stuff i love the book non-zero had a huge influence on me but it annoys me when he has max blumenthal on his show and he just kind of uncritically chats with the guy and I think he does it because he sees that the people like me will run him down I mean not that Robert Wright

knows who I am but a lot of people will say oh this guy's an apologist for dictators this guy is an apologist for real imperialists in the world um you know and I think he sees that as like this effort to silence dissenting voices in the United States. If there's one thing Robert Wright hates, it's the blob. You know, it's like the American foreign policy consensus. But I just appreciate the fact that it seems like you guys don't have much patience for the Blumenthal's of the world, for the gray zones of the world. And I just think that's I think that's necessary like it's no matter what you think about u.s foreign policy you know going on media junket tours and and uh asad syria is just hideous and it's just the sort of thing that you know hitchens you can imagine him pillorying that sort of thing so anyway uh that's that's just something i noticed a while back when i was first getting into the uh dtg DTG content. Yeah, like you, we have a lot of time for Bob, but I think it's fair to say, as we've

addressed with him, that we strongly disagree with his take and approach on foreign policy issues. And as you highlight, the issue around figures, outlets like the gray zone loom large and i would also say the inverse of that of the kind of on uh unwarranted or not readily distributed what do you call that one like uh people distribute too much charity to one side and like the bellingcat on the other hand is treated with barely veal destein but yeah scorn absolutely yeah but bellingcat you know in terms of transparency or finances and all that kind of thing is a light year away from the gray zone and far less reprehensible to my mind but actually that might lead to a point which i'd be interested to hear so i know how i

think i know how hitchens would respond to um you know robert wright's view about you ukraine and and so on and indeed he had debates with robert wright mainly about religion but i um i don't think you need to uh stretch the imagination to imagine his reaction but i am more curious about how you think he would have reacted to the kind of guru ecosystem or the intellectual dark web had he have lived for that period because he was very friendly with many of the people that were would become central to that you know sam harris and douglas murray and those kind of people and as you noted he he certainly advocated a kind of free speech absolutism position which at least in theory many of those figures also champion i would take a strong issue that they actually are championing that in any way but at least they claim to and so it's interesting because you have a lot of people who claim that hitchens would have had no truck

with a figure like jordan peterson they would have called them out for the shallow charlatan that he is or something like that. And on the other hand, you have people who seem to suggest that no, he would have been there alongside the Weinsteins and Douglas Murray on stage. And so I'm curious where you think he would have landed? How do you have been around for the intellectual dark web and and and just the modern online ecosystem yeah well there's there's always sort of a standing caveat to everything i say regarding what's happening in the world today and i just i just can't speak for hitchens and he was a very unpredictable guy in many ways so um i you know i you have to take everything i say here with a big grain of salt but i will say when i look at some of the weird intersections um between the heterodox

folks and some of the people who i'm almost convinced hitchens would have absolutely despised i have to say that i i would imagine he would have been pretty ruthless and and either ridiculing or just outright condemning some of these people so just for example tucker carlson's out at fox news um i noticed there were there were a lot of like fox news obituaries for him you know like matt walsh came out and said you know you have to understand how decent how fundamentally decent this man is. You know, when I was just a wee blogger at the Daily Caller or wherever he was, I don't know where he was. You know, Tucker Carlson reached out to him and said, I love your work.

And that just that just demonstrates like how decent he was and how he was willing to take a fellow conservative writer under his wing. And then like Brett Weinstein said, you know, no matter what you think aboutucker carlson he had the power to unify americans around um some dangerous ideas like he tweeted this out after tucker lost his job at fox news and i i just thought yeah he's the most divisive figure imaginable i mean who he's unifying people around toxic xenophobia and and around nationalism of the most base and sort of like vintage Lindberghian kind. So it's just, if Hitchens saw Weinstein say that, or if he was on stage with him and he said something like that, I just can't imagine that Hitchens would say, oh yeah, absolutely, Tucker. He's a brilliant guy. It's funny because Hitchens actually was friends with Tucker Carlson. He apparently respected him as a writer and urged him not to go into television and told

there was an interview on C-SPAN where he talks about this and he he co-edited a book called um I think left hooks and and right crosses which is supposed it's like a left-wing writer and a right-wing writer tried to choose essays from the other side and choose like decide you know what are some of the best polemics out there and i guess hitchens chose some essay that tucker carlson wrote um but that's that's really pre uh tucker's turn i mean i i just think he's i just think he really has become a reactionary and and like hideously isolationist xenophobic figure so yeah i mean to the extent that there's crossover between the guru sphere and um people like carlson i think kitchens would have definitely condemned it

um tough to say what you'd have to say about somebody like douglas murray i think they were they were friends as well they obviously agreed um about the um excesses of radical islam and about the uh authoritarianism and much of the muslim world and and just the authoritarianism that can be found in the texts themselves so you know you look at something like charlie abdo and it's just not hard to imagine what hitchens would have had to say about it you know he wouldn't have taken the greenwald route which was to publish a series of anti-semitic cartoons and the intercept and and and declare that this is some kind of like challenging free speech exercise you know hey let's see let's see just how far you can push it in the western media

you know let's see if the same people defending charlie ebdo's islamophobia which is how he would have described it let's see if they're okay with this expression of free speech and here's a series of anti-semitic cartoons but of course nobody uh blew up the offices of the intercepts nobody showed up at his doorstep wielding a machine gun um so yeah it's just i i think hitchens was pretty consistent i i don't think he cared about stepping on people's toes i don't think he he would have um joined the intellectual dark web you know i i he was just he was too independent for that and he really kind of relished talking shit on his own side i mean there's a famous video of him flipping off the audience uh bill maher's audience you know and i just think it was something he loved to do so

yeah that's that's that's probably my best uh my best guess as to what he'd have to say about the guru sphere like you, it's difficult to imagine because we're stuck with Hitchens as he was. There's a lot of people that we cover who get progressively more insane or take strange turns. Even Nobel Prize winners are prone to it later in their career.

But on the other hand, there are people, and I suspect that Hitchens may have been one of them, who end up fairly well formed by the time they're in their 30s or 40s. And they, for better or worse, they don't really change. They have takes on different topics but you know Nassim Taleb he might be against GMOs and he might be you know against Ukraine apologetics but all of it comes from the basis of his like grumbly personality and like belief that he's the only one that understands statistics so I get the feeling that whatever Hitchens take take on COVID would have been that he wouldn't have had any truck with apologetics for Russia in the Ukraine war. Like that seems very unlikely. Yeah, you actually have just a direct record.

I mean, he was writing a lot about Putin's aggression and chauvinism and imperialism, you know, regarding Georgia, regarding things that had happened when he was still alive. So I think it's pretty obvious what line he would have taken on the invasion of Ukraine. And I just I do think that he would have had a lot of contempt for people who fancy themselves left wing, who seem to think that like a handshake deal at the uh end of the cold war between um gorbachev and and like james baker should permanently determine the geopolitical geopolitical makeup of europe you know like it's just like there's like this constant refrain on the left you know where people will say yeah um we agreed not to expand nato and we agreed that these countries would be neutral and they'd stay in russia's sphere of influence but it's just like what what kind of left winger doesn't care

about self-determination or the democratic aspirations of ukrainians um i mean even before the invasion uh if you like pew does global attitude surveys and they asked everybody in europe you know how much do you trust these world leaders and in ukraine an overwhelming majority majority did not trust vladimir putin you know so it's just it's just it doesn't seem it doesn't seem left-wing at all it doesn't seem liberal at all to apologize i mean even if you're not apologizing for putin and you know that that kind of language can be a little risky and it can sound a little McCarthyite. I understand that. That's where I'll give Glenn Greenwald the benefit of the doubt.

But I don't have to call somebody an apologist for Putin to say that they're emphasizing the wrong thing. They're obsessing over NATO expansion. They're obsessing over the West's crimes. They bring up Iraq when Russia invades Ukraine. It's bizarre. It's a deflection tactic. But yeah, I can see what line I think you would have taken.

There's some other lines I'd like to put on, but there's one where we might disagree on some aspects that might be interesting to cover. And you can correct me, Matt, if I characterize your position wrong, but you described yourself as like a free speech absolutist in some respects or like that the free speech is is central and that's part of what attracts you to Hitchens and in the same way like Brian Burgess for the various political

disagreements you would agree mostly with his kind of stance on lack of censorship right on on social media platforms so i think matt and i won't speak for matt but he can agree or disagree that we're i'm broadly in favor of freedom of speech of course the right to do things and i i actually do hold the slightly unfashionable position about it it being useful and productive to engage with people across political divides, but also in including people that are potentially outside the overtime window. But I think if you do that, you have to be very careful in what you're doing and consider it. I do think issues of platforming apply dependent on the size of your platform and all that kind of thing. Somebody with Joe Rogan's size of audience,

I think has much more responsibility than a random YouTuber with like a thousand followers or something like that. Yeah, for sure. But when I look at twitter now under elon right or when i dig into the alex jones case and all of the various horrors that unfold there i can't say that i find myself favoring any environment which wouldn't have moderation and which would not penalize people for causing harm and potentially those that would foment campaigns of hate. Like I think that all social media platforms end up grappling with those and all sort of public debates do as well so i'm i'm kind of curious would your principle

towards free speech extend to that alex jones should be freely accessible on all platforms would it extend that far or are there edge cases that you also would want to remove or limit access to well you i mean it's interesting that you use the example of alex jones because i actually wrote a piece recently for an online magazine called the free thinker i think it's called the free thinker sounds very heterodoxy but um it it was about hitchens and his position on free speech and i actually will say the concept of free speech absolutism probably isn't terribly useful. Um, I actually liked it when he would call himself a first amendment absolutist. I thought that was a really good distinction. Um, so if you, if you do take the

view that like, uh, the neo-Nazis should be allowed to march through Skokie, Illinois, because it's their first amendment right to do so, and we have a responsibility to uphold the Constitution, then that seems like an eminently defensible position. But Hitchens' attitude toward free speech was probably more radical than mine. For example, he always defended the right of David Irving to publish, and he's a Holocaust denier and kind of a monstrous figure. And I think it was St. Martin's Press that had agreed to publish a book he'd written. And then they rescinded that offer after agreeing to publish it. And Hitchens thought this was an outrage. And he said it was a disgrace

and that they should follow through with their original commitment. And his basic argument was just that, you know, readers should be treated treated like adults they should be allowed to make their own determinations about content you know it doesn't matter what the guy's political views are he still might have something to contribute which is sort of what i mean it's it's kind of sounds like mills argument for for free speech you know it's it's the right of the speaker to speak and the right of the audience to hear and and our civil oh matt sorry i hit the mute button by accident there i meant the head of mine could you unmute yourself i'm back sorry sorry i was i was breathing heavily so i went to a couple of you're censoring me it's the day yeah yeah that's

what you think about free speech isn't it chris Chris? Yeah, just not to speak that way. Just mid-speech, you know? Yeah. Please, please continue and just ignore that that occurred. Yeah. All right, no problem. But yeah, I actually, I did use the example of Alex Jones in the article I wrote about Hitchens. And I actually think he would likely say, yes, keep jones on twitter uh allow him to speak you know our society should be grown up enough to resist him but you know this is a guy who was actually

like sicking his mob on grieving parents who had lost children uh sandy hook i mean this guy's a monster and if i ran twitter if i was responsible for content moderation on Twitter, I'd kick him off. I'd have absolutely no problem doing so. So I actually wouldn't call myself a free speech absolutist. I just don't think an absolute position is terribly helpful. The chapter on free speech in the book, to the extent that I'm putting my view forward, the book to the extent that i'm i'm putting my view forward it's it's a concern that i have for self-censorship which seems much more pressing today than other forms of censorship i mean that's

what's so funny about like the is it weinsteins or weinsteins i think it's weinstein weinsteins but we say weinstein so it's why it's like einstein yeah einstein weinstein makes sense but anyway um they like when they talk about actual top-down censorship or people in power who are like uh contriving to silence them and you know prevent them from winning nobel prizes or whatever um like it does make me laugh just because we live in such an obviously free society i mean we don't live in the soviet union we don't live in iran Union. We don't live in Iran. We can express ourselves pretty readily. Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files expose notwithstanding, I don't think that there's a whole lot of terrifying government censorship, but I do think there's a lot of self-censorship. And, you know, Hitchens wrote about Islam frequently. He

was very heavily impacted by the Rushdied fatwa and i do think that what the fatwa revealed about western liberal civil society is pretty alarming i mean it's it's it's not possible to imagine a play like the book of mormon um ending up on broadway about islam like it's just it's really hard to imagine that happening. And it's not that I think that this is like something we should be obsessing over or it's, it's not that I think that we need to, um, make, make Islam like some major focus of our politics. I've actually witnessed how people like Donald Trump and, you know, populist authoritarians in Europe will use anti-Muslim bigotry and demagoguery to, you know, scare people and retain power.

So I recognize that there are massive pitfalls to making this point. But at the same time, you know, like when Yale University Press wanted to publish a book called The Cartoons That Shook the World about the Danish cartoon controversy, they weren't allowed to publish pictures of the cartoons. I just, you just see this over and over again. And it's, it's really worrying that we will silence ourselves at the drop of a hat. And it makes me think that we would be willing to do it in the future. And it's just, I think it was sort of like, it was like this test case for Hitchens and he, he just didn't like what he saw. So to that extent, I think his writing about free speech and self-censorship is still really salient.

And it still really matters. George Packer gave a speech about Hitchens when he won the Hitchens Prize. There's a Hitchens Prize. I don't know if you guys know. There's an organization called the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation. And they give out the Hitchens Prize every year. And his speech was really good. And it, it was called the enemies of writing. And he was basically saying that there's a lot of pressure to conform to certain groups.

There's a lot of tribalism in our society. And like, when you have tribalism, you'll say some things and you won't say other things. You don't want to step on people's toes. You don't want to be ostracized from your own group. Um, so yeah I just think I think that that's an issue worth focusing on. But, you know, does that mean I think everybody should have a platform all the time or that I think publishers should lend their imprimatur to monsters like Alex Jones? I mean, definitely not. So it's yeah, I actually do think that's probably something of a blind spot for Hitchens. Because, yeah, free speech absolutism is uh it's probably

just unworkable honestly i mean it would just become a jam twitter would become a jam very quickly if you allow them to just allow whoever to publish whatever you know but seems like it gradually is yeah yeah it does so a friend of a friend of mine a friend of mine's on twitter and he like it's since the musk era began he says he's just seen really strange stuff for one thing i see a lot of musk content i see a lot of people engaging with musk i see this weird musk reply guy all the time um who's also into dogecoin and he says crazy things about like epstein i don't know but um it's in my friend said he saw he starts like seeing these videos of people fighting

on twitter much more often just like physical fights and he's like where is this coming from i don't i don't remember ever like inserting myself into the algorithm to the extent where i'd get like this really weird content but you know i don't actually know how the algorithm works but yeah it's kind of alarming i've seen weird qualitatively i can report the same thing i now see tons of like vids that go hard fight yeah videos and and like uh yeah and elon musk's cadre of uh like you know favorite accounts seem to be high up in the algorithm and and there doesn't seem to be that much mystery about it because all the reports are that elon specifically asks for for you know particular accounts that he likes to be boosted and and himself primarily amongst it it's a it's one of those weird things that like there's a certain you know i i feel like

a lot of public intellectuals previously were probably just as shallow and narcissistic, but they at least had the decency to hide it publicly. But with the Elon era, the contemporary guru era, it feels like the kind of thin-skinned, superficial narcissism is really on display 24 7 but you know partly through twitter feeds but but other processes as well so yeah like jordan look at jordan peterson's feed right that's a that is a it's it's just like a chronicle of intellectual decay like it's it's crazy i've always disliked peterson the first article i ever wrote for quillette was about how impenetrable his arguments about god happen to be i mean it's just like i

listened to like this lecture series or this um series of conversations between him between him and sam harris and i just i just found it it was just downright impossible to understand what he was saying until he'd say something that was perfectly clear but terrible like atheism is responsible for all the crimes of the 20th century which is like the oldest most boring apologist canard you know so it's just yeah the appeal of peterson is almost entirely lost on me i i used to i used to kind of see like because you know i guess it's nice to have a male role model who cries all the time but but it's kind of weird that he, he leaves the crying in like in the audio book version of his book. It's like, that seems oddly strategic, you know?

And it's just like, and like, yeah, there'll be a little sign on a paper towel machine in the bathroom and he'll take a picture of it and it was a little safe, you know, please recycle and he'll take a picture of it and be'll say please recycle and he'll take a picture and be like fuck you woke to a telltale like you're not gonna get me like i'm just this just seems like such a weird neurosis and uh i don't i wrote one article for the daily beast which is about this it was a video oh i sent it to you matt uh on twitter uh he he it's like a video essay but i think it was also published

somewhere and he's basically talking about how deloitte is like this evil globalist octopus that's taking over the world and you know it's going to force all this like climate regulation down our throats and people will die and there will be revolutions and i was like this is unhinged this is absolutely unhinged this guy and he's he's just so, yeah, I don't know. He still kind of manages to be pretty mainstream, you know? Yeah. I just don't see, I don't see Stalinism in gender pronouns. I just don't.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, the world has changed a bit since Hitchens was poodling about. And like, I remember back when Charlie Hebdo was a thing, and I think the principles of free speech, to me anyway, felt a bit simpler then. Like it was easier for me to just be on board, full stop.

Yeah. It's quite simple. Free speech is good. Self-censorship is bad. Have an open exchange of ideas, and the good ideas will rise to the top because that's what a democratic free society is all about and in the current age where the various platforms and the algorithms make our reality then at least for me i've become a little bit less idealistic and perhaps a little bit more cynical about the fundamental presupposition

there right where someone like oriona retalialio would be a standard bearer for, right, which is that you have to respect people enough for them to be able to make their own decision about whether or not this is true or whether this is bullshit, holding on to those liberal absolutist ideas, you might say. And I just, I mean, we're seeing the impact of conspiracy theories in the broadest sense right um chris and i see it with decoding the gurus obviously all the time because these are these are basically lies and falsehoods and ideologically driven very strange ideas that are pushed by our gurus and they will all bang the free speech drum at any resistance, I suppose, from a platform or

whatever to just allow them to keep doing their thing. And I don't know, I guess if I look back at Hitchens and I think about where he generally stands, I feel like he's kind of, at least for me, still stands strong when it comes to those sort of principles of globalism and cosmopolitanism and the rule of law and things like that and try to be the best version of the western liberal democracies that we can imagine right but when it comes to the free speech such i feel like i feel like the technology and the has led us to a situation where maybe those old liberal ideals feel a little bit naive yep possibly i mean it it's kind of sad to hear you like summarize the argument really effectively but with a ton of voice that was like this is

what i used to think and it's very uh it's very naive and depressing now how things have degenerated i mean i mean you know if you could pump out like really compelling propaganda uh via gpt4 and just like distribute it a hundred thousands of times more rapidly than it can be distributed now is that free speech does that count i mean i just don't that's not what mill was envisioning when he was making the case for like unfettered free speech so yeah i think that's absolutely right i mean you just have to deal with the the reality as it confronts you um i i do think you know, to the extent that you see, like I'll find myself in interviews bringing up Milo Yiannopoulos,

which feels like it was a different lifetime. I mean, it feels like it was like a different century. But it did bother me to see people so willing to like shout him down or shout down like Kristina Offsummers or, you know, the sort of usual suspects. And it it did seem like cowardice and it seems like something hitchens would would condemn very readily you know um but i do recognize how those concerns probably start to seem sort of uh trivial i mean compared to just just like just the way people flood the zone with a garbage now and the way people are so cynically using arguments around free speech to just pump out propagandistic trash.

I mean, and then they're so they're so incredibly contradictory and hypocritical. free speech warriors who will decry the disc don't seem to have that much to say about DeSantis when he's telling schools what they can and can't teach in Florida. And when he's telling Disney that it has no right to express a political opinion, which is, I mean, make no mistake. Yeah, it's Disney, but it's still, it's still a question of free speech, you know? And I think, I think Disney is on really solid footing with its lawsuit. Um, I hope it wins, you know,, and you just see these weird guys like Chris Ruffo and they kind of talk like they're at the, you know, the head of the vanguard of some like new cultural phenomenon. It's actually kind of creepy. I mean, for the kinds of people who would say, you know, oh, the left is like neo Maoist or Marxist or what have you. Like they're like he had some exchange with stephen tinker on twitter

where he's like your time is over old man and the new guard is taking over and it's just like where is this where is this weird attitude coming from where people are um people on the right are sounding like these weird revolutionaries and they're saying like you know the old the old uh model of civil society and civil discourse doesn't work anymore we've got to legislate we kind of legislate crt out of existence because it's so evil you know so i yeah i mean you're we're definitely up against very opportunistic and dishonest and frankly authoritarian people and i mean one one just general point to make and i'm not sure if i would assume that with a title like mine readers probably assume

that it's going to be just a like endless broadside against the left i mean the whole point of the book is the fact that i think the authoritarian right is actually the biggest political threat on earth right now and i i think the left is ill-equipped to respond to it properly um and i i can see the ways in which the right will use the left's excesses and the left's authoritarianism against it. I mean, there's a reason why Trump came up with the 1776 commission or, you know, somebody in Trump's orbit came up with it and shoved it into his mouth and why he called for patriotic education and why, you know, it's because there is, there is a, there is an illiberal aspect to something like CRT or what have you and i just think it's really

easy for the right to instrumentalize it and use it against the left so i yeah i mean i i really enjoyed you guys's um your mini decoding of matthew goodwin uh a couple episodes back um because he's he's such a classic case of a guy who's presenting completely standard right-wing arguments in this weird cloak of heterogeneity and like heterodoxy. Like he's, he's, he's basically just saying like, I think his, his catchphrase for his sub stack is like politics analyzed differently or

something. And I'm like, I don't really see what's all that different about the analysis here. Like it's the classic, you're not listening to the will of the people. Brexit was the will of the people, you know, you,

you're like all these coastal elites, that would be Brexit was the will of the people. You know, you're like all these coastal elites. That would be the terminology in the United States. But, you know, the people who are part of the party of Davos to use Bannon's construction. This is like par for the course. There's nothing new about that. I haven't read his book, I'll admit. That was, yeah. yeah so with with goodwin i the the kind of two-step which which you see a lot is you know his thesis insofar as it's true is like mundane that oxford and cambridge and elite education

institutions are overrepresented in the halls of power in the uk and other countries yes definitely the case in fact pretty pretty much a left critique yeah for for decades right and and similarly that media in in certain respects you know has an over-representation of of like left-wing politics yes because a lot of the people in the media, creative types tend to lean that way. But similarly, all of those analyses tend to just, people are just very hand-waved towards the existence of the massive right-wing media ecosystem,

which they are on, extolling their thesis, right? And Goodwin is not censored he's invited onto plenty of right-wing platforms he's invited on the you know various a couple of left-wing platforms as well but you know in any case him and figures like him and it kind of follows up on the point that you uh were making when i listened to a recent episode of Sam Harris, and we were talking about the Twitter files or moderation on Twitter, that kind of topic, and you had Rene Durest,

and you had Michael Schellenberger and Barry Weiss, right? And actually, a relatively well-conducted, to be it, by those standards. Like, people did turn-taking, and, you know it uh it were able to express like uh quite strong differences of opinions but what came across very clearly to me was that barry weiss and michael schellenberger were very strong rhetorically on the reference to freedom of speech, on the marketplace of ideas,

against the repression of even voices they disagree with or whatever. But their facts, their grasp of facts, and their ability to apply those standards consistently across the political domain were really weak. And Renee DiResta, by comparison, she knew about the moderation policy. She could talk about the actual examples and highlight the inconsistencies and the claims which weren't accurate. But I think to some people that doesn't matter, right? It's more the strength of the rhetoric carries the force of the argument. And the fact that, you know, you saw Matt Taibbi embarrassed recently by Mehdi Hassan.

Mehdi Hassan, not somebody I'm hugely a fan of, but it didn't take much, right, for him to point out glaring issues in the way that Taibbi had covered the Twitter files. And yet, Taibbee's response to that was immediately on the Substack on thing to kind of start pointing out his kind of catalog of MSNBC errors

or this kind of thing, which doesn't actually excuse the mistakes that he made. Yeah, I just, I find this, and actually it does tie back into Hitchens, but I find this inconsistency of standards and extremely strong rhetoric over actual substance to be like a really unfortunate thing

and something that I see a lot of in a heterodox sphere. And to tie it the Hitchens. So Matt and I watched in preparation, um, uh, a talk by Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan. Um, and you know, I've consumed a bunch of Hitchens previous content as well, but, but I think one thing that struck Matt and I both, when we were talking about it is that while there's an undeniable depth to Hitchens, he knows about history, he knows about geopolitics, and he's classically educated, or it seems at least. But there also is, he's extremely rhetorically powerful,

and he doesn't mind relying on rhetorical style arguments like in our debate he talked about totalitarian like islam as a totalitarian religion and he said you know at our total religion with and he said what's the first start of totalitarianism total and you're like that's not that's that's a very weak argument, but it sounded good. So I'm curious about your broader thoughts on that, but in particular with Hitchens, he's famed for his debates and I think there is substance there, but he was undeniably like a rhetorical powerhouse.

So do you ever think he relied too much on that uh rather than you know addressing substantive points when when debating yeah for sure well i will say just really quickly um to tie off the point about mediasan and taibi i don't know if you saw the first post that the taibi threw up on his sub stack but he started i just thought the way he started it was so funny it was like medias on or i i decided to go on medias on's show if you're reading this now it didn't go well it was like this um this this really weird sort of like death note or uh yeah well seriously like like yeah i'm no longer with you if you happen to be reading this now like i just got blasted to shreds by medias on so before we move on from

medias and i just want to note that like there's plenty of stuff about medias that you can highlight but one thing rhetorically that i thought he did quite well is he infamously had a talk where he kind of lambasts atheists and he refers to non-believers as cattle and stuff. It's been memed plenty of times. He's responded to it and said, you know, one of his lines was, you know, I had

some views that I expressed in my 20s. And that speech was when he was 29. So technically you're in your 20s. that speech was when he was 29 so so technically you're 20s yes i was like ancient history yeah yeah well it's funny it's funny that you mentioned the mediasan thing and then led into hitchens's rhetorical flair because uh hassan's well known as a good debater and yeah somebody can cut quite a figure uh in front of the camera and um he just wrote a book about like how to win every argument or something um and he's clearly he's he does seem

to approach it like a sport i mean i really do think he went into the taib i almost i actually did feel slightly bad for taib because he just seemed like a more normal guy trying to have a conversation like like as if he was sitting next to him in a bar and many was just like armed to the teeth with like the numbers he had the receipts uh but anyway it didn't go well for tybee yeah so on on hitchens his i think his rhetoric can actually be a distraction a lot of the time i actually end the the book by saying i think a hunter s thompson effect has taken hold in the public imagination of hitchens. And you will encounter like countless stories about Hitchens that seem to follow the exact same script. I mean, this is so well attested that I have to imagine there is some truth to it, but it basically goes like this. They went out to dinner

and then turned into a long night of drinking. Then people went back to the apartment and a few more hours of drinking at 3am. He goes his uh bedroom and he pounds out a 2000 word essay and it's about oscar wilde and he rejoins the party and then he like ends up in the studio the next day so it's like this this weird like personality based story that it's just i've heard it so many times and read it so many times that it's just like people talking about the man and not really his ideas um but i i've definitely noticed times when hitchens's rhetoric clouds what could be a much uh simpler or perhaps like readier at hand point uh one debate i mentioned to you guys was um one he had with william lane craig uh who's this well-known

christian apologist and he's he's known as this quite a ferocious debater. And I've never thought he was all that compelling. But you know, same time, I've never sat on stage with the guy. I'm sure he's I'm sure it's a rough, it's a tall order to try to take him on. But Hitchens did seem to have a series of points he wanted to make in that debate. And they were very, very broad. I mean, they just dealt with religion, religion as a social phenomenon, religion as a harmful totalitarian phenomenon. And the actual subject of the debate was, I mean, it was, you know, the existence of God. It was it was an ontological debate. And this is like what Craig does.

He always he always sets up debates that serve him well. So when he debated Sam Harris, they debated like the objectivity of morals, like can you have objective morality without God? And if you're going to make the assumption that God exists, then it's a pretty effective locus of morality. And Harris had written this book called The Moral Landscape, where he was making a very difficult argument that there are such things as objective moral truths, but, but it's, it's just that there are many peaks, there are many different truths and many different ways to suffer. And it's like, it was kind of a hard, it's hard argument to make. I think it, it served Craig's purpose as well.

Um, but yeah, I, I, there were times in that debate with Craig where I just wanted Hitchens to, to just say something like, isn't there an infinite regress, you know, or isn't there like, like to just come up with some of the classics? I just feel like the atheistic arguments that have been advanced for the past few hundred years are generally pretty compelling on their own. Here's another example. He will say, you know, humans have been on the earth for, let's say, 100,000 years. And for 98,000 of those years, heaven watches with indifference. God sits there with folded arms and lets humans suffer and die and live out their lives. And then 2,000 years ago, in Bronze Age Middle East, you know, he sends his son to die. He says a human sacrifice saves us all.

And we're supposed to see the light. And we're supposed to, like, accept this vicarious redemption through Christ. And we're supposed to like accept this vicarious redemption through Christ. It's basically just this like really artfully put demonstration of the absurdity of religion, you know, but it doesn't it doesn't actually get at any of the core arguments in a way that you'll hear like Shelly Kagan or Bart Ehrman or like these other guys who debate religion, debate, um, atheism frequently we'll get at. And like, I've always found, found that sort of unsatisfying. I think like Hitchens, Hitchens is polemical power is, is really useful. I mean, I think God is not great. Is it is a wonderful book. I really do. Um, when he says how religion poisons everything in the subtitle, like that's something that really upset Robert, right. And, you know, I say, I mean, what does it poison poison literally everything is it poison chess and coffee and tea and he just

like but he's just basically saying that it's insulting people in our most basic integrity and capacities so you know i understand the point that he's making with with the subtitle but yeah the book's it's just a great read and it does demonstrate a lot of the horrors that have been brought by religion but yeah i he's not a full he wasn't a philosopher he was a polemicist it's you know and that's i don't think that detracts from the ideas he did have and the way he put them i wouldn't have written the book if i didn't think he was an extremely compelling uh thinker and writer but at the same time yeah i think he he would reach for for the rhetorical blow and the sort of like the sort of pre-prepared um argument a little too readily sometimes um and you know that's i think that's a

it's a habit a lot of guru-ish figures have yeah but yeah i might just before you jump in there chris i might go ahead something similar which is that that in the postscript of this interview, perhaps with your help, Matt, we will do a little bit of a decoding of this debate about whether or not Islam is a religion of peace. And, you know, I approached that, listened to it, sort of primed, I suppose, to watch out for guru-esque activity, which I, you know, my recollection of consuming Hitchens' content years ago, I certainly didn't do that. And, you know, I'm just curious as to your impression. I think you recommended that one as an example of where Hitchens perhaps wasn't at his best, was maybe at his more rhetorical. But I came away from that feeling that, like, I wasn't very much impressed with his interlocutor either. But I think it was a case of exactly what you described, which is Hitchens reaching for statements with a whole bunch of rhetorical flair, but without necessarily a lot of depth to it. And to be specific, I don't think at any point

in that debate, Hitchens really established that there was anything special about Islam being particularly unpeaceful, right? I don't think he established that. He made a bunch of points about religions in general being terrible, authoritarian, totalising belief systems. He cited a bunch of ways in which Islam is bad, but the counterpoints to each of those examples he cited, which are obvious if you think about it, which is that Islam is,

in modern history, has existed in, you know, relatively poorer, much more war-torn, socially disturbed parts of the world compared to middle England Anglicism, right? So the direction of causality there really isn't established. That was the impression I came away from there. Here's someone who's just a great orator, but he's pulling a whole bunch of great rhetorical points out of his pocket. But it didn't feel like it added up to a huge amount to me. Was that your impression with that particular debate? Well, with the Ramadan debate, I think he's on less firm footing when he's debating a philosopher like Craig, he'll mention that it's a younger faith, for example. He'll mention the fact that in, you know, the Quran is supposed to be printed in Arabic

and it's supposed to have like a parallel text in English or whatever language it's being translated into. And a lot of people will say, you know, you really can't understand the text unless you can speak Arabic. And Hitchens would say like, well, the idea that God is a monoglot strikes him as very tribal and dangerous. And I think I agree with Hitchens. It's difficult. But if you look at the way religious fundamentalism works in the world today, you look at the amount of suffering that's wrought by fundamentalism. There does seem to be a problem with Islam. I mean, it's just too widespread. You just have to look at Iran. You just have to look at Afghanistan. Because a lot

of people will say, oh, Hitchens sort of concocted a civilizational threat out of Islam where none existed. And look at what we're facing now. We're facing a rising China, you know, climate change, Putin invaded Ukraine. It's sort of easy to date Hitchens by looking at some of the arguments he made about Islam. And there's just no doubt that the Rushdie Fatwa and September 11th affected him really intensely and definitely like where he would direct a lot of his polemical fire um in the last couple decades of his life but i think what's overlooked in some of those arguments is just the sheer number of people who have been stultified by by a very reactionary interpretation of a religion in the middle east and you know the number of books that get translated into arabic versus other languages every year is kind of horrifyingly low and like you know, the number of books that get translated into Arabic versus other languages

every year is kind of horrifyingly low. And like, you know, so I think those are all fair political points to make. But what makes me wonder about Hitchens's approach is the fact that he didn't seem to care about the consequences of his political fury, because he had a lot of secular Muslim friends, or at least more secular Muslim friends. He had a lot of secular Muslim friends or at least more secular Muslim friends. He had a lot of liberal Muslim friends. He recognized that the only way to actually roll back theocracy and huge swathes of the world is to forge alliances with liberal-minded and progressive Muslims. And you have to wonder if he's not undermining his cause by being so brutal by saying it's a crude plagiarism of Christianity and Judaism and,

and by just ripping it to shreds at every available opportunity. It just seems like the wrong way to approach the process of building alliances with liberal Muslims. So I just think that he was so wedded to the idea that he was going to speak the truth as he saw it, come what may, that he wasn't desperately tactical. And that probably makes me sound like a weak-kneed liberal, you know, and I'm sure he'd say, it's not my job to coddle people. It's my job to just say what I view as the truth. But, you know, I mean, here's an area where to coddle people. It's my job to just say what I view as the truth. But, you know, I mean, here's an area where, since I've been running Robert Wright down, here's an area where I thought that Hitchens was very unfair to Wright.

During their conversation, Wright would just say, do you not think it's possible that a drone strike on a wedding in Yemen, this isn't the exact example he used, but this is like the essence of this point could drive people to, to, uh, you know, take up arms against the United States could drive people toward extremism could have very negative and, and, you know, horrifying political consequences. And Hitchens just never accepted that. He always said it was just, it was just the ideology of, um, fundamentalist Islam that you had to blame. And you shouldn't blame external factors, you know, because that's it's exculpatory. And it's forgiving people who deserve all the blame for their actions.

And I just don't think I don't think Robert Wright was being an apologist for Islamic extremism by pointing that out, you know, and I think the example he might have used was the major Hassan shooting on the military base several years ago. This is pretty old news, but I just think he was, Hitchens was too quick to accuse people of being apologists for, for really reactionary and authoritarian ideologies. And I think that was part of his rhetorical effect was just like, you know, I'm just going to rattle the saber. I'm just going to like slice these people up. You know, it's, it's not how I approach conversation. I feel like I'm pretty combative and pretty argumentative, but it just, it just seems too alienating. It seems like you're, you're going to foreclose on too many, um, healthy conversations. If you're always just saying like,

well, I mean, it's a revolting and crude plagiarism of Christianity. I mean, that's just, there's just too many people in the world who subscribe to it and who value it that i can't i can't imagine saying that to somebody you know and you know as i've gotten older because i used to be sort of the classic new atheist you know there's like the meme of like the kid with the shirt that says i'm an atheist debate me you know and i was like i was influenced by dawkins and hitchens and all those guys um but you know you get older and you meet a lot more religious people and you actually discover that many of them are more intelligent than you and like they're really thoughtful and kind and generous and

decent human beings and you're just like you can't imagine just just being like you know you you believe in a an idiotic delusion and you know it's it's it's embarrassing for you like i just can't like i have i have friends now who who you are some of my closest friends, and they're also pretty staunch believers. I just don't think Hitchens was willing to split that difference. In Hitchens' defense, I think if he was sitting next to somebody at the bar, I don't think he was just doing this on the stage.

If it was his best pal and he happened to be religious, I think Hitchens would say the exact same thing. That's my intuition about how he carried himself in the world. I don't think there was any like theatrics that weren't just like, didn't bleed into his personal life, but you know, I'm not really qualified to say that cause I don't know for a fact,

but you kind of get the sense. Most of the stories about him suggests that like, if he didn't agree with you about something, he'd, he'd just let you know. But yeah, that's, that's pretty long-winded um you know it's i think it's the way he's treated from the outside that made me think that he's got some there's a guru element to it i mean there is an unwillingness in many cases to interrogate uh the ideas themselves even the good ones i mean i just don't feel i don't feel like the case for hitchens uh has been made all that well by many of the people who like him.

And whenever I read remembrances of him, you know, like on the anniversary of his death every year, there's usually a spate of articles about Hitchens. And I just feel like they very rarely engage with any of the content of what he wrote. And I think that's just a consequence of his eloquence and his showmanship. But I think that's just a consequence of his eloquence and his showmanship. But I think that's actually a shame. You know, I mean, one thing that worries me about, like, approaching the subject, you know, through the guru lens is that listeners will come away with the impression that he was vapid or somehow like he didn't actually have good ideas. Obviously, I don't think that or I wouldn't have written the book. But yeah, long winded.

Obviously, I don't think that or I wouldn't have written the book. But yeah, long winded. I know, I think you covered a lot. But in the debate that he had with Robert Wright, I actually think that was one of his worst performances. Robert Wright, to me, like handily kind of addressed most of the points that he was making. kind of addressed most of the points that he was making and mainly because as you said robert wright was willing to make concessions about his position and to acknowledge the harms of religion but hitchens essentially wouldn't uh acknowledge any particularly positive aspect that was unique to religions right and and as right handily pointed out in that to be it but that's just like you're making your position way less defensible like you you could say religion is very bad overall

right and and make that argument but if you say it never does anything good in the world ever you're basically almost by definition wrong right and and like he treated right as if right was as you say like not necessarily an islamic apologist but more like a religious apologist and that's that's not his position really so yeah that was that i listened to that debate and um for find myself in large agreement with robert right and i felt like Hitchens was relying too much on rhetoric. It was less the case in the interview with Ramadan, or sorry, the debate with Ramadan, which like you mentioned, he does both. He's making substantive points and he's using, you know, rhetorical flourishes to make his points land. And there's some way in which you can't avoid that.

If you're doing public debates, and if you're a public speaker, there will always be elements of anything that you want to argue effectively that rely on rhetorical techniques. But the question which matters is, is there a substantive argument and support behind that and in the case of hitchens i think there was but i i was also very glad to hear you acknowledge him as a polemicist because to me like somebody who writes an article with the title why women aren't funny, right, is obviously somebody who's courting controversy. And Helen Lewis wrote about this. Maybe you'll think this is slightly unfair, but I'm interested to see if you think Hitchens fits this mold to some extent.

So Helen Lewis talked about when she was investigating, you know, kind of guru types, that there was a certain kind of people that were attracted to ideologies which were extreme right like they they might be attracted to hardcore marxism or they might be attracted to like uh strong atheism or you know pickup artistry whatever the case it was but like in some sense you can look at their ideological history and you see this dramatic journey right across the ideological ecosystem you can look at someone like stephen molyneux right going from like alternative psychology to anarcho-capitalist to hard right white nationalist right those are like they're through lines but at the same time it's it's kind of surprising especially in the space of about 10 years now i'm not comparing hitchens

to a stephan molyneux character i i don't think that's a fair comparison but famously hitchens you know was quite a strong marxist in his younger years of the revolutionary variety. And then towards later in life, people would have, you know, put him more towards the at least neoconservative line in geopolitics, right? During the Iraq war and that kind of thing. So you've argued, I think, that there's a consistency to his ideology underpinning those. But I'm curious about that journey. How does somebody go from a devout leftist Marxist type to somebody arguing what the Hitchens did later in life and remain consistent, it like is there an issue that his fervor was

attached to whatever political program that he currently believed in and that that was variable such that you know we can't see the last chapter of his life but if he had become a right-wing reactionary that he would have been like a very powerful orator for an ideology that fits that could fit into the right wing or conspiratorial ecosystem or is there something that you think that means that he could never i know again we're talking hypotheticals but just like i'm wondering how immune you think his approach is to those kind of issues and like the intellectual journey over his career yeah well i do think he was just just intrinsically attracted to radical politics and um the through lines are clear and i'll get to i'll get to them in just one second i will say that there were clear

contradictions i mean you just can't reconcile his support for the Iraq War with his really steadfast opposition to the Gulf War. I mean, any argument that you're going to make about the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein, would apply all the more extensively at the end of the Cold War and at the end of the Iranan-irak war and you know during the gulf war so yeah there was just there was an obvious shift in in many ways but i the commonalities to me are pretty clear if you go back and listen to um a debate that that he took part in in the 80s just about socialism i thought it was suggestive that he started his speech by sort of summarizing the universalist element of socialism. He basically just said, like, we're all part of one human family. International solidarity is the most important thing. And then he kind of got along, got on to the, you know, the more generic socialistic points, like from each according

to his ability to each according to his needs you know i do think that the argument he made against henry kissinger and his argument in favor of a really robust structure of international laws and norms um can be grafted onto his positions post 9-11 very easily um there was actually an interview he did pre- 9-11 when he was he was still out promoting his kissinger book um where saddam hussein came up a caller said something like uh we're just as bad as saddam hussein you know the sanctions that we've imposed on on iraq just make us these monsters and hitchin said no saddam hussein is everything that is said about him. And he mentioned the fact that he had sat on an unexploded chemical bomb in Halabja and that Saddam mean, people forget that, you know, he wanted to invade Kuwait again in the mid 90s, which horrified the international community and required the United States to sort of step in and say, yeah, you really don't want

to do that. The outcome will be similar to what you went through before. But I just think that that desire to have a universal set of standards that all countries are beholden to and that all countries have a responsibility to enforce was a pretty clear consistency. And that's why even when he still was a socialist, even when he still declared to be every bit as radical as he had been in the 80s and 70s, in the 90s, he was fully in support of NATO intervention in Bosnia. And he was fully in support of NATO intervention in Kosovo. And it's just because he thought that powerful countries had a responsibility to prevent egregious violations of human rights.

And, you know, I think you can draw a pretty clear line. Some of this stuff is lifted from the things Hitchens has written. You know, it's but it is true that he was on sort of a faction of the left early in his life. I mean, when he was very young, still a teenager that didn't support the Stalinist invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example. I mean, they thought that the Russians should get get out of Czechoslovakia. And that is a really horrifying moment for them. And I think he saw that the Soviet Union was this dilapidated and ossified system. It was just horrendously repressive. He was he wasn't some communist who had to lose all of his illusions, you know, and then find his reason. I think he was always anti authoritarian. I think he always despised religion. And he always thought of it as a totalitarian system of belief, you know, because there's this unalterable God whose judgments can't be appealed.

And, you know, and we're all just sort of we all have to submit to his authority, you know, till the end of time. So I just think all these things and, you know, some free speech. I mean, his response to the Rushdie thought, well, he sounded exactly like he did when the Danish cartoon controversy ripped through the world or however you want to describe it. And yeah, I think he would have done the same with Charlie Hebdo and he would have done the same with the Paris attacks. These are all positions that the left seems to struggle with, elements of the left, the sort of elements that we've talked about tonight. I mean, the people who fancy themselves anti fancy themselves anti imperialists, you know, they,

they find it very difficult to just roundly condemn the invasion of Ukraine or to roundly condemn some Hussein or the Taliban or Slobodan Blasevich. It's not that they're apologists. They're not all apologists for these people, but it's, it's just that the United States comes first, you know, like the,

the criticism of the United States and the West always comes first. And Hitchens started using the word masochism a lot in his last 10 years. And he thought there was this sort of general social and political masochism that led his former comrades to this position. It was just like always looking inward, always like condemning their own system, their own government. always like condemning their own system their own government um and i think i think he regarded that as the a transition away from socialism because socialism died as a viable political alternative in the world i think throughout the 90s hitchens was when it came to domestic politics when it came to you know his attitude toward clinton um he he was very discouraged by the fact that it seemed like this neoliberal consensus had just taken over. And I think a lot of his fellow left-wingers

saw the same phenomenon and thought to themselves like, this is just, there's no radical alternative in the world anymore. So they shifted their energy that they had devoted to socialism to this sort of crusade against the West, this crusade against imperialism and neoliberalism. And I think that was arrived at genuinely, that position. And I think it's a valuable shift. I think the left would do well to observe it and emulate it in many ways. I don't think he was just looking for radical ideas to hitch himself to. I don't think he was just a contrarian. I think he just changed his mind.

And he would admit that he used to regard, you know, liberalism as sort of this weak need, insipid form of politics. He actually cites a really interesting passage from, I think it's a book by Conor Cruz O'Brien. I think so. if that's wrong he changed his mind about the like utility of waterboarding right after infamously undergoing waterboarding so he was someone that was willing to reverse stances like i'm not sure if he was ever i don't think he was ever in support of waterboarding. I think he saw you could advance the argument if he got waterboarded. Oh, I thought he started out saying that it was not torture. And then he might have been sort of ambivalent about the extent to which it was torture. Yeah, that's actually...

He's quite clear afterwards. He's very clear afterwards he's very clear afterwards for sure yeah and well i mean he was you know during during the the bush wars you know he he was a plaintiff in an nsa lawsuit against the bush administration for warrantless wiretapping he had these flashes of just sort of like conventional left-wing politics that you know he still held until the end i mean he was you know universal healthcare. Um, he supported reparations for the descendants of slaves. I mean, these are like a lot of, a lot of positions that you're not going to see the, a lot of the heterodox people who found their way to the heterodox right holding. I mean, this is one theme of the book is the idea that, um, Hitchens didn't just clear his throat

with a couple of like couple of bromides about how equality is important before getting to his core points about the horrors of identitarianism, you know, and when you were when you guys were talking about Matthew Goodwin, I had I just had to think about Hitchens his attitude toward the rise of right wing authoritarianism in Europe, even in the 90s. I mean, he wrote about Jorg heider in austria and he wrote about these figures who he he regarded as people who were peddling very reactionary and old ideas but in this like slick new garb you know they were basically just saying like yeah we just really don't like the inefficiencies and bureaucracy of the eu we really just don't we just think

immigration needs to be uh controlled and sustainable and all this stuff. But I mean, there are often ugly ideas underpinning those sort of neutral sounding positions or, you know, at least inoffensive, deodorized positions. And I think a lot of that goes on today where you have people who are making fundamentally pretty ugly arguments and then sort of couching them in just common sense. Again, that's, it's long-winded, but basically what I think is that Hitchens had these core principles and he wouldn't have, I don't think he would have capitulated the heterodox sphere. I don't think he would have just like, I don't think it's fair to classify him as a neocon. Um, he had a lot of sympathy for neocons. I mean, he had a lot of sympathy for Paul Wolfowitz. He thought he'd been making good arguments for many years. He was certainly friends with some of them. But it's just, I just think it's too simple

to cram his politics into the classic conservative and left-wing binary. I mean, I just think that the idea that the United States should use its power to protect vulnerable populations wherever they are in the world, I think that's actually really radical. And there doesn't have to be an imperialist component to it. It's not like he thought, had the United States gotten more involved in Darfur, we should just stay there forever and mine their country. And, you know, the intervention in Bosnia was to Hitchens a pure humanitarian intervention, because there was no we weren't stealing their natural resources. And, you know, just a note for the Greenwalds of the world who say he was an anti-Muslim bigot.

You know, the Bosnian Muslims were the people who he was calling upon the West to defend in that case. So, yeah, I I'm glad I got to get some supportive words in, you know, just run the guy down. I think you should buy the book and check it out you know great yeah yeah well i was going to give you an opportunity to get some final words uh in defense of hitchens without any pushback whatsoever but i feel like you kind of did a pretty good job right there yeah i tried i tried me and my way through a sort of holistic defense of hitchens it's actually a really interesting question for the record i mean mean, it's, it's worth asking, you know, because you go from radical Trotskyism to sort of radical assertions of like the value of American power and you like you,

you radical atheism, like, like all of these positions are quite radical. Like it does seem like that was just his general, general approach. And I, you know, I think that's, I think that's just how he fashioned himself and saw himself and he thought it'd be too boring to just be a milquetoast liberal like me. You know, it's like making a hedging when it comes to Alex Jones and free speech and, you know. Yeah. Well, look, I mean,

given all of the characters that we've covered on Guru's Pod recently, it sets such a low bar for a decent public intellectual. You won't get much pushback from me if you want to make the point that Hitchens is a cut above or was a cut above. So, you know, very interesting points. Looking at the gurometer here, as you were talking, I was just asking myself to what degree might Hitchens fit that stuff. And look, to be honest, apart from the rhetorical flair

and the eloquence, I'm not seeing too many lights light up. The system isn't blinking. How is it compared to Oprah? Better. Yeah, well, he's not pushing natural health woos. That's a plus. Chris, any final thoughts from you? No, it'll be interesting to look at his specific content.

And then, as you say, anyway, he will go into the grometer so we can see how he scores. But, yeah, Matt, thanks for coming on and discussing Hitchens in depth. And we will have the link to your book, what not, in the show notes so people can check it out. But is there anywhere in general

that, you know, the standard podcast question, where do people find you on twitter i am on i am on twitter i think twitter is at like four chan levels of derangement now but it's probably trending toward eight chan anyway as long as i'm still on it yeah it's matt jj 89 on twitter and then i yeah just some of the publications you listed. Bulwark. Bulwark. Quillette. Quillette. I wrote it for Aereo.

That's Iona's outfit. And yeah, a few other places. Horowitz, you know. I've been focused on the book lately, so I haven't been churning out as many essays. But yeah, I wrote a piece about John Mearsheimer for Quillette recently. You guys might be interested in. It's an interesting combination to have the Dilly Beast and Quillette recently you guys might be interested in it's an interesting combination to have the Dilly Beast and Quillette

on your CV but I guess Ben Burgess probably can claim a similar thing I don't know if he's ever in Quillette but you know Jacobin and Colin so well Matt I will now disappear in a puff of smoke into the ether

because I have to pick up a young infant. But it was good to meet you, and thanks for the discussion, spirited exchange, and good to see that Hitchin's spirit lives on in all of us. Yeah. Just in terms of eloquence. Maybe that comment alone just gives him like a notch on my gyrometer or something i'm like picturing the gyrometer is uh just some machine that's

wearing away in the background it is it is vintage thing from like an old star trek episode big bulbs on top of it yeah that's how it works think steampunk it's it's a steampunk and it's yeah fashioning all right oh cool you'll have to let me know what the result is how he scores yeah but both of you don't go anywhere because this upload will need to happen now so bye-bye everyone else but you guys stay here and with that trumpet signed the interview is finished and is this is our new stinger yeah yeah it was bad chris it was bad i don't know if i had covid what the interview no you're so bad my infection my health my health the interview was good thank you matt johnson um for that chat thank you matt that was you it did

sound like you were talking to yourself thank you matt you did well yeah yeah yeah no i want to have i had a chance to complain about my health on this podcast yet i don't think so i don't know it's hard to tell the way these podcasts are put together matt who knows what happens when yeah but you were sick you You were sick. Genuinely sick. Genuinely sick. And now I'm still sick. It takes a while to get better from Influenza A and or COVID. I'm not sure which one I had. Maybe both. I'm thinking both.

Either that or I'm just older and more feeble than I thought I was. But it takes a little while. What you could have done when you were sick is read this book about how your immune system works. is read this book about how your immune system works. I'm holding this up by Philip Detmer, the creator of Kurzgesagt. Kurzgesagt, yeah.

Free advertisement. We're not sponsored by Kurzgesagt, no. We just have to, we're contractually obliged to mention it once per episode. It actually just makes me feel guilty when you talk about that book because that's exactly the kind of book i feel like i i should read but i would get a lot out of it it looks beautiful it looks very heavy looks very thick it looks daunting it's not a book that a kid should read it's like 40 chapters or whatever so uh i initially thought it would be good you know for my son but now it's just for me

but i haven't read any look just look at it i will get it i will get it though not now we're in the tail end of the podcast and we did have a minor grievance at the beginning that we dealt with you had a grievance but yeah yeah we both what there were grievances aired that's all that we that's all we can say whose grievance it's unclear it's a collective endeavor this podcast but i i did want to address a conspiracy theory that i saw on the subreddit about us because i think it's pretty good i like it all right so that's going to be our review of reviews. And to tie it up, I also have some feedback about your geopolitical analysis of Scandinavia feedback. So this is our review of review section today. I expect the feedback to be, he nailed it.

That was it. Yeah. And we'll see. Okay. All right. So let's get started. Tell me about this conspiracy theory. we'll see okay all right so let's get started tell me about this conspiracy theory so you know our subreddit is occasionally like all subreddits feuding amongst itself about various topics and

one which is a consistent source of disagreement is one sam harris um now there are people on the subreddit that remain fans or generally positively disposed. And there are people that think he's the spawn of Satan and destroying society, leading individuals one by one into the waiting hands of the Weinsteins and Jordan Peterson and worse folk, Tucker Carlson and so on. Now, that's fine. Everybody's allowed their own takes. carton and so on now that's fine everybody's allowed their own takes but somebody decided to do a poll to to settle the issue of whether sam harris was a racist and he won a landslide victory that he's not a racist according to that poll right so that settles the issue i think scientifically pretty much that that's how you run things and uncheck

you do subreddit polls but in the various discussions i think it's there or somewhere else anyway the topic came up and there were some people matt who suggested that you and i we pull our punches when it comes to criticizing sam. Like we'll say some things, you know, we'll take some critical comments, but we fundamentally cannot criticize him because we need to keep his fans sweet. We've got this overlap of audiences and we don't want to alienate the Sam Harris fans. So that's why I'm always praising him and why I'm never willing to say any strong criticism his way. So we are in the pocket of Big Harris. I don't know if you noticed that, but how is that for a conspiracy theory?

Yeah, well, that is a good conspiracy theory. Look, sorry to debunk it because it's it's fun to have conspiracy theories but there's simply nothing that sam harris fans could offer us that uh would really value i mean what about money do they give us money how much money do they give us well this is a question all sam harris fans please send emails with the exact amount of money that you give us just so i can tally it up like some people do have conspiratorial mindsets because like maybe if we wanted to make the podcast more profitable we might do something like search out advertisers rather than try to you know butter up the sam harris contingent yeah or mention the patreon consistently like that would be another tactic but you know just this notion that that's it that explains

why we don't have the exact same critique of sam as as someone else and i just i love it and you know the part that i really appreciate about it is that comes on the back of, you know, the Sam Harris episode where me and him had an enjoyable conversation was some time ago. But we released a specific episode that was a response to his coverage of the lab leak controversy. controversy right we we organized a panel of experts and we took clips from his show and unfriended very much as a response to the experts that he had just presented quite a critical response some might say some might say it was critical but no not critical enough chris not critical enough not critical enough i think it's because that's not what they want they want us to focus on you know his palling around with various people and his charity being unevenly applied all things which we've already said but in any case just so you know matt i won't be tolerating after this episode, any more criticism of Harris, because that's our

cash guy. Okay. Okay. All right. That's right. So if you're a Harris fan, this episode is an outlier. You're never going to hear him again on the show. We won't hear a bad word said against Sam again. You bring up Sam Harris like every episode. No, not enough, Matt. I don't say critically enough. That's the problem. According to not enough, Matt. I don't say critically enough. That's the problem. According to the people, I only bring them up positively to praise him. Well, I enjoy the subreddit. I appreciate you guys.

I like it. I like people are unhappy about my pronunciation. That's the only thing I remember. I don't say matrix correctly. Matrix. No, there's other things people are upset about i can give you a long list of things but you know we're not here to massage the the gripes of the the subreddit well no i do want to respond to one one more concern that's been raised on the

subreddit because i'm sympathetic to it i am sympathetic to it which is there's been a couple of uh threads and engagement about maybe us transitioning to becoming like a weinstein watch focusing more and more on the antics of eric and brett weinstein maybe have a hang as well and i'm sympathetic i'm sympathetic because they are extremely entertaining and i'm actually open to the idea of you know revisiting them semi-regularly play some clips i know what you're going to say chris we are returning to them we're going to be looking at eric and ufos it's going to be great people will love it so yeah and we'll do that we'll do that we'll do that okay okay that's a i wasn't i wasn't expecting you to go there but that's fine that's fine yeah i have no objection to that but no we will not become a dedicated eric and brett podcast but we will return to their world

my self-esteem could not handle it like if my role was to be like an obsessive wine star and watcher like that was my contribution to society i couldn't yeah i couldn't go on chris no i don't i don't think i could either to be honest so yes we won't do that but we will return on occasion they're just funny funny swords if it wasn't for the fact that they promote right-wing partisans and anti-vaccine lunacy and encourage people indeed to engage in conspiratorial style reasoning then that would be all great oh sorry and the alternative theories of evolution and physics that they promote that would also be you know apart from all these things all these things that they do they would be harmless yeah you know so matt I said, we're not here to talk about the subreddit.

That would be far too indulgent. So let me turn instead to feedback we received on our Patreon. Yeah, that's not indulgent. But this is good. This is taking you to task, which is what we want. So after chastising you for your fawning over Sam Harris, now I need to tell you about what you've been up to and what you've got wrong in regards to Norway, Scandinavia.

Here we go. I'm just going to read it, Matt. Hello, Norwegian listener answering request on more information on Scandinavians. For the Norwegian part, we don't like Swedes. Our culture has a joke category called Svenskivitser, translated Swede jokes, mostly centered on making fun of Swedes. But Norwegians love to go shopping in Sweden due to cheaper products, and many Swedes move to Norway for work due to better salaries in Norway.

Oh, also, Norwegians love Danes, adore Danes. I don't know why, as Denmark ruled over Norway for about 300 years and considered Norwegians a bunch of dumb farmers, maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe because Denmark signed over a piece of ocean territory to Norway in the 60s, where Norwegians found oil and made Norway one of the richest countries in the world, based on GDP per capita. And said, yes, probably the latter. Norwegians understand the Swedish and Danish language,

and Danes and Swedes pretend not to understand Norwegian. And Chris is right. There is a huge difference between the Scandinavians. Huge! No, sadly, there's not. But the stereotypes are Swedes are hip, politically correct boars,

Norwegians are jovial, outdoorsy and naive, Danes are alcoholic artists. And Scandinavians share a lot of sentiments with Irish and Brits. Norwegians perhaps are most like Scots. Too direct, bordering on rude, do not shy away

from profanities. We love dark humor and sarcasm. A sign of love is to take the piss out of someone. Maybe that's why you have a lot of Norwegian listeners. And by the way, Finland is not a part of Scandinavia. So that was... Wait, wait, use the last bit through me.

Finland isn't part of Scandinavia? That's out of the Norwegian's mouth. That's what they said. I think he should double check that. He? He not? Well, it looks like your misogyny has raised its ugly head again and this is not a he this is and they demanded that i tried to pronounce it phonetically sarah gunn hals you don't know whether it's a better or order, do you, based on that name? You have no idea. It's Sarah Boer.

How would you pronounce B-O-M-L-I-N-E? I simply wouldn't. Not M-L-I-N-E. It's got the line for it. B-O with the line for it and then an E. I think it's like a... Yep. That sounds about right.

I just wouldn't try to pronounce it. That would be my... Sarah Goon House B-O-E. No, that was a good letter. I think they need to double check about Finland. I'm not sure they're right about that. They might need to... No, I know Norwegians. I know Norwegians.

And I've got colleagues in Finland, in Helsinki. I knew most... I knew the gist of it. I knew the gist of it. I didn't know that. I've seen Frozen. I told you what I assumed. I assumed it was just like everywhere else

where it was the narcissism of small differences. Like, you know, between the Northern Irish and the English. No, no. There's a huge difference there, Matt. One is good, one is bad. It's like saying the Jedi are just like the Sith. I won't say which one, though. I'll leave that for people to decide on their own but

yes that was very good feedback from sarah good house boy so so thank you very much for that thank you for that thank you for educating me about your proud peoples and your different but equally valid cultures up there where the sun don't shine. Now, Matt, I'm going to thank our patrons. I'm going to do it so goddamn well that you're not even going to know it has happened. And yet it will have happened. So here we go, Matt. It's going to be the usual crapshoot as to who gets it

and it starts like this conspiracy hypothesizers Kat Barrett, Vanessa Parr Wheelgate, Pump and Nicky, Christian F Nicky Gray Nick Daly, James Melly Hedy Savard

David Walker David R Philip Tries Life, Oliver Church smelly hey these have added red david walker david r philip tries life oliver church eric spenson tristan bella frazier and andrews siliconio that's all our conspiracy hypothesizers great great people good names but you know what's a better name than the name of any of those patreons the guy on reddit whose handle is Tamla's Ghost. Oh, that's really good. Yeah. I like that.

I can't stop doing the Norwegian thing now. That's a pretty good. It's an ugly, ugly, ugly imitation there, Chris. I apologize to our Norwegian Scandinavian friends. Then we get told off, white accents, doing accents. Well, look, this is my natural accent, okay? It's just a dialect of Belfast. M.

Okay, so yeah, I play this clip now. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.

We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. You hear it from Joe. You hear it from Joe,e matt it's so annoying when you hear these conspiracy theories like yeah joe you you're the one that says that i know i know stop getting angry about the clips you should be worn off by now well you're gonna hear the peterson and weinstein interaction so let's see if it's worn off. Revolutionary Geniuses. James Reid.

Giovanni. Rebecca Christensen. You know her. Oh, yes. Hi, Rebecca. Al Keid. Greg Binder. Peter Alstrom.

Kerry Stout. I can't stop. You can't help yourself, can you? Jesse Hodges. Jordan Fernandez. Thomas Clarke. out i can't stop you can't help yourself jesse hodges jordan fernandez thomas clark and bob gower oh and shangibi again thank you thank you thank you one and all thank you one and all i'm usually running i don't know 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time and the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place.

But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess. And it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Chris, that reminded me with that clip from Jordan Hall there at the beginning. Like, not only would it be fun to return to the Weinsteins occasionally, just with some

choice, select little clips for everyone to enjoy. But there are so many other people in the gurusphere that we could return to just occasionally when a little treat comes along. catch up with our old friends yeah i know and there's a there was a thing again on the reddit where jordan hall uh i clipped with him talking about how he can teach you to play guitar in in one minute i sent that to you that was hilarious hilarious can he do that well we'll have to play the clip let Let's play the clip next time. Next episode. We'll play the clip and just a few fun clips.

These things come along. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So Galaxy Brain Gurus, though, Matt, the shining stars in the guru sky. Kyle Wilson, that's one of them. Now, you might be saying, where's the other ones? That's the question, question matt that we want

to know and we have answers we got brendan smith we've got couch just couch just an object that could be more that could be could be could be that could be my mate in sydney i know coach as in grass coach yeah grass coach is. Grass Cooch, is it? Well, okay. Cooch. Cheers, Cooch. Have a bong for me. It might be a guy.

He sounds, if his name is Cooch, he sounds like a guy. He's a middle-aged lawyer and he doesn't smoke bongs. His name is Cooch? Well, that's his handle. Come on. Let a man live. Let him live. Let him be.

Sounds like Stonefish or something. Anyway, yes. run let him live let him live let him be stone fish or something anyway yes well i appreciate his highest tier response or highest tier support for us so uh forget all that good couch cooch whatever all good all good yeah he put me down so mark curran him as well rob leslie jr not the senior unfortunately couldn't get the senior jennifer nelson karen urquhart urquhart urquhart oh god urquhart how would you pronounce that yeah okay yeah urquhart yes yes alex anderson chase chase and Matt. Last but certainly not least, two people we've heard before but have somehow popped up on the sheet. Dan Gilbert, bad stats himself and Matt Half.

Yeah. Oh, Sam Hart, photography. Oh, yeah. Look, as a token of appreciation to dan for being a gold to your patreon we should steal some of his jordan peterson clips and and weinstein clips as a token of respect indeed good work yeah thomas t as well matt deal morris good old deal i'm sure we've said thanks to him before but a wise man so thanks to him. He's got heart. He's got good heart. He's got heart.

No, I don't know if it's good or not but he's got heart. He knows a thing or two about Buddhism. I'd say that as well. Someone who may or may not know about Buddhism is Breen Nick Classen. I cannot vouch for the Dharma knowledge there, but that's the last Galaxy Brain Guru for this week, Matt. Well, that was a surprisingly large group, sorry. Because I just worked out a new way to find them. So yeah, that's why. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute.

Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. No, should you? No, should you? No. Keep your wits about you.

Well, so we'll be back, Matt. We'll be back soon enough for another exciting decoding and we'll include some nice clips of people doing nice things or silly things or teaching us how to play the guitar in one minute just for fun. We'll do it. We'll do it. More fun.

More fun in future episodes. So don't worry if this episode wasn't as fun as you might have hoped. There's more fun on the way. A roller coaster. A steamroller of fun. Poor old Ollermatt. That's more fun on the way. A roller coaster, a steamroller of fun. Poor old Ollermatt. That's throwing shit in the last one minute. I'm disappointed in you.

No, current Matt is not talking about Ollermatt, of course. He's just talking about, you know, the general things. I'm being too critical of our intro and outro. That's what I'm thinking of. That's all right. We'll edit it down, Matt. It'll be perfect. It'll be perfect.

All right. Any final thoughts for our listeners, Chris? Any advice? That's all right. We'll add it a time. It'll be perfect. It'll be perfect. All right. Any final thoughts for our listeners, Chris? Any advice? Anything they should be doing? Hold on. Hold on. I'm getting it.

I'm getting it. God, the tension is killing me. Pay attention to the distributed idea suppression complex and watch out for the good institution on narrative. Wow. Wow. Stunning, Chris. That went a bit from the Simpsons. No, I was thinking the guy from the Muppets, you know, the chef.

Oh, the Swedish chef? Okay, that's good. Yeah. That's not good. It's not good, but we'll let it be. We'll let it go. I apologize to everyone in Scandinavia, including the Finns. Hell, they're probably offended as well.

That's it. That's it. We've got them all. And as we always like to say, please subscribe to Sam Harris, Making Sense. He's got a good podcast yeah it's all good you know just tell him we sent you make sure you use our referral link just say the coding the gurus sent you um and and please don't mention any critical comments

and if you happen to be speaking to sam just put in a good word for us that's all we want um so yeah That's all we ask. That's all we want. So yeah, that's all for today. Bye-bye. Okay, ciao. Thank you.