Decoding the Gurus - Sam Harris: Right to Reply

Episode Date: February 17, 2024

Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, public intellectual, ex-New Atheist, card-returning IDWer, and someone who likely needs no introduction. This is especially the case if you are a DTG listener as we recently released a full-length decoding episode on Sam.Following that episode, Sam generously agreed to come on to address some of the points we raised in the Decoding and a few other select topics. As you will hear we get into some discussions of the lab leak, what you can establish from introspection and the nature of self, motivations for extremism, coverage of the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and selective application of criticism.Also covered in the episode are Andrew Huberman's dog and his thanking eyes, Joe Rogan's condensed conspiracism, and the value of AI protocol searches.LinksOur Decoding Episode on SamOur interview with three virologists on the Lab LeakKevin Drum's blog. 'I read the entire Slack archive about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. There is no evidence of improper behaviour'New York Magazine article by Eric Levitz 'Sam Harris’s Fairy-Tale Account of the Israel-Hamas Conflict' Making Sense Podcast Episode 351: 5 Myths about Israel and the War in GazaMaking Sense Podcast Episode 352: Hubris & Chaos- A Conversation with Rory StewartGlobal Catastrophic Risk Institute: The Origin and Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Expert Survey. The Israel Democracy Institute. War in Gaza Public Opinion Survey (2): See Question 15. Atran, S. (2016). The devoted actor: Unconditional commitment and intractable conflict across cultures. Current Anthropology, 57(S13), S192-S203.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand why they're talking about what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh. How are you doing today, Chris? Good, dude, I'm doing well. InsideSmart from the realm of psychology the world of anthropology that's where we bring the expertise from we've we gather you know insights from these disciplines and we apply them critically to guru material that's what we do matt that's what we're here for yeah yeah and you know a bit about psychology as well you're not just an anthropologist i'm a professor of psychology uh oh yeah an associate professor but yes i i do i'm published in many psychology journals so take that i'm published in one

philosophy journal take that philosophers and it's a german philosophy journal at that so yeah i remember when i published that article a couple of articles in vaccine yeah it's obviously a vaccine and i thought yeah you know i'm a medical researcher you're a vaccine scientist if we were gurus we could just be like you know well i'm a neuroscientist now i'm published in cognition like you know that's that's it, yeah, that's what we are up to. We're working hard like the little busy beaver academics that we are. We're back now from our winter retreat, and we are going to have a special guest on this episode. But before that, Matt, there's a couple of goings on in the guru sphere.

I need to raise your attention. yes you you like to do this don't you is it something nice something nice happened somebody well the puppy i'll let you be the judge of that why don't you listen to this it's just a short segment that's just over a minute long how much badness can be in one minute. Let's listen. How many people were promoters of the vaccine and died suddenly? It's crazy how many fucking young people just died in their sleep after they took it. And everybody's like, nothing to see here. Sudden adult death syndrome. Yeah.

Just died suddenly. You ever go to the died suddenly Instagram page? Like, holy shit. There's so many and so many people like talking about people who are you know anti Darwin anti vaxxers, and then then you're dead Sorry, you bought you bought into the wrong bullshit, but that's You know if you really want to get cruel that's Darwinism. Do you not know they lie by now? Do you not are you not aware of the opioid crisis? Are you not aware of Vioxx?

Are you not aware of the various, like, 25% of all FDA-approved drugs that get pulled? It's one out of four. And you're like, really, you're an anti-vaxxer? What are you, a conspiracy theorist? You fool. Darwin's going to do its work with you. You're modifying your genes, you fucking you fucking idiot like what are you doing what are you doing you're just gonna trust pfizer well they do support anderson cooper brought to you by pfizer so that's joe ragan was it

yeah that that was it yeah old old joseph Joseph displaying his keen insight on a range of topics, but mostly circulating around the vaccines and the sudden deaths that they've caused. Have you not noticed that all the vaccinated people, they're just dropping dead? Like there was an Instagram, there's an Instagram page called sudden deaths. Yeah, died suddenly. page called sudden deaths you know suddenly suddenly yeah that's it so there's a movie of the same name which which has actually included people in that movie that are claims that have died who are still alive so you know they they died suddenly and returned to life equally as suddenly but yeah so you know it's anti-vax rhetoric stupid stuff but it's it's how much he crams into one minute which is quite impressive like he demonstrates that he thinks the vaccines are killing lots of people right and that is source of information from this is boomer posts

you know anti-vax instagram accounts that he saw and he does the the funny voice you know like the my critics will say oh trust the science that marking thing and he manages at the end to mention that you're all being credulous you're all just you know accepting the corporate things and it's changing your dna yeah like if he believes that vaccines are actually rewriting your dna then you know he's pretty far gone like he's he's in the extreme level and i know that he um he divides like a lot of time to anti-vax stuff now and has been doing for for yeah or a long time talking about that yeah like. Like every week. Yeah. And like he's the biggest podcast in the world. And in terms of the impact, Joe Rogan's impact in terms of actual medical misinformation,

it's got to dwarf some of the other influences out there, like your John Campbell's and your Brett Weinstein's, just the sheer magnitude with Joe Rogan, like how much anti-vax drivel he spews multiplied by his reach. He's got to be responsible for, yeah, a lot of deaths. I gotta say. Yeah. And you do also get from that clip that he's,

he's still very afraid. Like, you know, his whole thing is, you know, making fun of the people that are getting vaccinated and boosted. And, you know, his whole thing is, you know, making fun of the people that are getting vaccinated and boosted. And, you know, they're just too afraid to go outside. But you can see that, like, actually, he's really afraid of the vaccine.

Like, he thinks that if he gets it, the side effects are very likely to kill them. He talks about, you know, how he's dodged a bullet by not getting the Pfizer vaccine when the UFC was kind of mandating that and yeah like it's it's just this funny thing because back at the start of the pandemic like a lot of people Joe was also a very very concerned about catching the virus he talked on the show about waking up at the night like sweating about the danger that he was in and this is a common thing that you see in the anti-vax arena that they have like a hyper concern about the sanctity of their body and while at the same time presenting everyone else as being these scared sheeple but like rogan is probably out of a lot of public figures, the one that is most still focused on vaccines

and the dangers they pose and the virus and all that, long after most people that are vaccinated have stopped thinking about it. Yeah, we've talked about this before, which is it almost seems like existential fears with someone like Joe Rogan. He's afraid of contamination. He's afraid of getting sick. He's afraid of taking the medicine. He's afraid of getting old. He's afraid of getting weak and hence the testosterone and things like that. I mean, I think it goes to one of the things that's

always interested me, which is why do some topics attract a high degree of conspiracism and misinformation and delusional beliefs and not others. So, for instance, why, I don't know, pick something random, like how you mow the grass in your backyard or something. Like that doesn't attract the same level of delusional beliefs as health-related issues like COVID. And it's because, you know, these are existential concerns, things to do with your health, things associated with potentially getting sick, getting old and dying. And that's why the

wellness industry and the diet industry and the optimizers and stuff like that, that's why it's so weird because we're squishy biological creatures and we're all terrified. Well, just to one degree or another i know you and i have repressed it effectively but um people express it differently um we're all you know unable to deal with the existential facts of our own mortality we're all managing the existential dread the terror in different ways and some are just more unhealthy than others but speaking of which matt the other movement in the guru bodies that i i wanted to raise their attention it's actually related or maybe it's related let's see what you think there was an instagram comment under a post by

peter adia about and neutering dogs and whether or not it's good or not. But our good friend Andrew Huberman responded, and I'll just read what he wrote, okay? I put Costello, my bulldog mastiff, on TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, when he was nine years old, and it dramatically reduced his shedding, joint pain, and boosted his mood. And no, he did not mind more often after that. He just looked at me with thanking eyes. I have a close relative who is a veterinarian and said this is becoming more common practice. I regret I neutered him, but I'm sure that I'll catch a lot of flack for saying it. He lived to be 11, which is a good age for his breed. So Huberman believes so much in the importance of testosterone and TRT as this very beneficial

thing for virility and various other things that his old pup, his dog of nine years old, had to go on TRT. So the point that I want to make there is, one, it illustrates that if you're injecting your dog with testosterone, you're really, you know, at true believer levels of that. And secondly, that Huberman mentions, you know, these positive outcomes, he shed less and had less joint pain. of outcomes he shared less and had less joint pain but really i think the crucial criteria that he he was working from is that he mentions it boosted this dog's mood and that the dog looked at him with thanking eyes and i i think that speaks to the level of evidence that you know it takes to get a human to regard some treatment as a success i'm kind of

imagining scooby-doo i mean i mean even if you assume grant that this testosterone is doing wonderful things for the dog right it's the best thing for him the idea that the dog could somehow be aware that these benefits were attributed to the injection um yeah dogs famously good with their long duration causal reasoning yeah they they know what's going on chris they know they know yeah so because i'm i'm sure that dog was jabbed famously dogs enjoy injections or you know however you give it maybe you just give it in the food i don't know how you do trt i know when we take our dog to the vet and you know he's got to have the injections he's looks at me with thanking eyes afterwards because he knows they're good for him he doesn't he hates it he hates the entire experience he doesn't understand why we've been so mean to him yeah because actually i was thinking

though well if it's not an injection if it's food then you know the dog maybe but but that's even worse because then how would the dog even know unless the woman told them? Because it's not like, oh, my food tastes a bit different. What did Andrew put in there? And then, you know, later, oh, I'm feeling more muscular. And then, oh, thank you, Andrew. And communicate it with his eyes. Yeah. And also on Hooperman News, he developed an AI which lets you, you know, ask questions so that you can search his protocols. I think it goes through transcripts of his show. So I went on and asked the questions about

what's he said about grinding? But the ones that I was most curious about is what has Andrew Huberman said about vaccines? And has he ever recommended COVID vaccines? And I already knew the answers, but with vaccines it was like, oh, Andrew has never discussed vaccines. He did highlight the issue about autism and vaccines and that the evidence is not strong there. So it kind of says he's never covered it. And with COVID vaccines, it again kind of emphasizes that he hasn't made any strong statements about it. And he decided not to talk about it because it's outside his area of expertise. Very responsible. That's a stance that

he doesn't seem to apply consistently. But the AI, you know, when it was given the answer, it did mention that he has on a couple of occasions discussed COVID vaccines in different contexts. And invariably, the context is that he's raising the need for empathy about alternative points of view and about that there are side effects that we have to consider. So it's just all of it is kind of, he hasn't said anything, but what he has said has emphasized that there's two sides to every story so um so thank him for that service that was a a useful thing that he's developed there you can search his protocols oh yeah that is good that is good um i won't be searching his protocols but it's good to know it's it's there um okay huberman and rogan both both testosterone-addled oddballs.

With perfectly healthy attitudes towards their approaching senescence and mortality. But let's leave them floating out there in the guru galaxy and turn to the episode that we have for people today. have for people today so today matt we have a right to reply slash discussion slight debate with one sam harris right i i don't think we need to introduce him to many people in our audience but he is a public intellectual has written books on atheism, on free will, on the nature of self, on telling the truth, on various things. And he has a successful podcast and a successful app for meditation and introspective practices. So we have talked to him previously previously we covered his material recently on a podcast and he agreed to come on and you know discuss with us some of the things that we said and some broader topics yeah he exercised his right to reply uh since we formally covered him on decoding the gurus and look he gave a little introduction to him there but honestly if you're

listening to decoding the gurus and you don't know who sam harris is then you might be lost i don't know yeah this is this is true and um so you know we we already know what's happened by the magic of podcasting it's already occurred so i did want to take this opportunity just to mention that there's one point during the discussion as you might anticipate there's you know back and forth and and whatnot and i will say this time i don't mention tribalism not even once i didn't say it okay i was tempted to to clarify but if you go back and listen to the original episode where that came up i actually did at the introduction of that episode explain you know where part of the divergence of perspectives were so if you want to hear that go there and we tried not to cover

the same ground as before but there were some restrictions about the time and whatnot so at the end it ends up a little bit rushed and condensed but that's the nature of people being busy and having schedules and whatnot so but i deserve the credit because i didn't mention tribalism so you all can't complain. Yeah. I mean, tribalism is one of our banned topics. There'll be no talk of tribalism on our podcast ever again. The other thing that we never have to write again is that we're not going

to talk about the nature of consciousness and whether it's a mystery or not. No, that's banned. You keep saying that. I'm certain. Let's wait until Kevin Mitchell comes on and let's see what happens. No, I don't want to. Okay. But that's not what I wanted to mention, Matt.

That was me just giving myself credit. But I wanted just one very quick thing to note. At the end, we're talking about somewhat sensitive topics about the far right and rising authoritarianism in various European states. And Sam is giving his thoughts there. authoritarianism in various European states. And Sam is giving his thoughts there. And during that, he ends up characterizing the UK and London in particular, almost as if it has fallen to a stealth Islamist empire. And I'm not sure that I would agree with that characterization, but as you will see in that period, we were kind of pressed for time. So this is just to say that us not leaping in with objections should not be taken at that point or any other part of the interview as us endorsing the characterization.

Because I do not think it is fair to present London as having fallen to the jihadis nor do i think that all the protesters at the various anti-war marches or critical of israel marches are all supporting hamas there are segments of that audience that at least have a rather ambivalent or selective position on that. But I think a lot of people are just, you know, lefty anti-war types. Sure, sure. Yep. Okay, so that's unvoiced disagreement. Duly noted there, Chris. I obviously was nodding along furiously.

I agreed with every word, but, you know. That's all right. It only applies to me. Where you don't hear my object, that means that he signs off. That's how it is. Yep, yep. So just keep that in mind and send your correspondence his way. Yep. Okay. That's all good. So let's move on.

Yeah. So anyway, let's get to the interview and I'll see you after for a little debrief. Okay. And so here we have with us, Sam Harris. Thanks very much for joining us, Sam, and exercising your right to reply and hopefully having an interesting chat with us Sam Harris. Thanks very much for joining us, Sam, and exercising your right to reply and hopefully having an interesting chat with Chris as well. Yeah, good to see you, gentlemen. I believe, Sam, that you listened to the episode that we did on you,

which must have been a joy, a great entertaining moment, and have some points that you'd like to raise with us or push back on. And then assuming we end up with time, there's some other topics that we might cover that we have different opinions on, but I think some of them might come up in the points that you might raise. So let's see. But thanks for coming on. Yeah. Happy to do it. It's interesting when people do. So the floor is yours. Yeah, happy to do it.

It's interesting when people do. So the floor is yours. Yeah, well, I seem to remember, again, I did listen to the audio, but it's been a while. I seem to remember two things stood out. One is that you faulted me for my lab leak episode with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. Pat Ridley and Alina Chan, you seem to wish that I had done much more adversarial research and was far less credulous on the point of the lab leak hypothesis. And you seem to suggest that I had some commitment to believing in a lab leak as opposed to a zoonotic origin, which really I don't. in a lab leak as opposed to a zoonotic origin, which really, which really I don't. I mean,

my only, um, hobby horse to ride into that conversation was that I, the, the lab leak hypothesis always struck me as totally plausible and not at all racist. And as you know, it was immediately condemned as a, as you know, as a racist symptom of bigotry, um, largely because, you know, it's some version of it had come out of Trump's mouth. Um, but it was always plausible and it is in fact still plausible. I mean, I, you know, I I've since listened to your episode, which followed mine, you know, where you, you know, you, um, brought on your, you, you had your experts on. Um, and yes, if I had heard that before I recorded with Matt and Alina, I might have asked a few more skeptical questions. But the truth is, even in the aftermath of hearing your episode, the jury's still out. It's still totally respectable to believe that a lab leak

is at least still possible. And as you know, the intelligence community is split on it. I think the FBI and the DOE still claim that it's likely of lab origin based on evidence that is not publicly available, if I'm not mistaken. And as for trusting the community of virologists, there are reasons to, you know, this also came out a little bit in my episode with Matt and Alina, there are reasons to worry that the world's leading virologists were not altogether forthcoming, both around what happened and around what they actually suspected. Donald McNeil, the New York Times writer who has covered pandemics for 25

years for the Times until he was defenestrated for woke reasons, as you might know. He just came out with a book talking about how he knows that some of the leading virologists in America really lied to him. I mean, they kind of circled the wagons and he, I think through a Freedom of Information Act, he got their slack communication and they were collaborating to lead him astray when he was reporting on the possibility of a lab leak early on, again, working for The New York Times. And he's talked about that in his book. Again, this has come out since I recorded my podcast. So, you know, again, if I were going to do that interview again with Matt and Alina, I would plow in a few of your skeptical points from your episode, certainly, but it's still sort of in coin toss zone for me, whether it's zoonotic or

lab leak. And we certainly can't trust the CCP to be forthcoming and transparent on this subject. I mean, they have not been good collaborators at all in this. They've just been stark adversaries as far as I know. So, you know, I don't trust the virologists entirely. I mean, I've done other episodes on my concern around virus hunting and, you know, the deep vision program that has since been abandoned for the United States was, in my mind, a total scandal intellectually and ethically. I think a lot of that work is deeply suspect. And the fact that there are any virologists who don't see that now is of great concern to me. So, yeah, I mean, that's just, you know, that's kind of my vomiting

up my memory of what my reaction was when I heard your, your criticism. There's a, there's a couple of points there, Sam, that I think like one thing that we would definitely agree on is that it's not often able to reasonable scientists, non-scientists to consider the possibility of a lab leak. And I, I think all of the experts that we discussed with also made that point. And also that even that it's perfectly reasonable that people would be skeptical when they hear various details and that we are right to not trust the CCP account, which to be clear, they were also denying

that there were any relevant animals being sold in markets initially and so on. So the CCP not being forthcoming seems like a given that most actors in this space would agree on. Actually, the one point I would add there, which I forgot to say, is that it's always struck me as strange that there is this preference for the zoonotic wet market story, because that actually strikes me as politically the more invidious and, you know, not to say racist account. I mean, it's just I just think it's a worse look for the Chinese to be maintaining these atrocious wet markets at, you know, and imperiling all of humanity because they can't figure out how to stop eating raccoon dogs and pangolins and all the other crap they have in these markets piled on top of each other. It's just that looks more barbaric and insane than a lab leak. Lab leaks happen to everyone. The most civilized, most careful societies have lab leaks. We know that. And it's a great concern. but the idea that there would be this passionate bias

uh as a as a hedge against so-called racism uh and xenophobia for a a zoonotic origin makes absolutely no sense to me yeah of course you're talking about like political narratives and preferences and right but that is the preference I detect in the reaction to anyone who has speculated about a lab leak. Yeah. I mean, the other lens to look at it, I mean, this is how we try to approach it, is that you focus on the scientific evidence rather than the spin either way.

And, you know, as far as I understand, the scientific consensus has only firmed up since the interviews that you had and we had. You know, the discourse is always there. There's always political stuff going on. Trump was definitely using the issue as a political football. There was definitely a reaction against that, claiming about xenophobia and racism, whatever. But that's all on the surface of the discourse, right? Underneath that, you either believe that all the scientists are corrupt

and they're all in the pocket of somebody, or you believe that there is actually a community of career virologists, experts and specialists who don't really care much about Trump or the CCP or anything like that, and are actually beavering away to figure out, you know, the evidence on where the virus actually came from. And I would say, some that the like the experts we spoke to one of them michael warby for example was on a paper originally arguing for more

efforts to be put into investigating the lab leak origins but he subsequently changed his position based on you know investigations and evidence and all the experts that we talked to in that episode they weren't saying it's racist to ever consider it. They were saying the overwhelming weight of evidence continues to point to this being likely, you know, they were talking about the genetic evidence and the epidemiological evidence and so on. And on the counter side, and this is kind of the criticism, I think the main criticism that at least I was levying is that very recently, there was an expert survey on the general weight that you attach a probability to a lab leak versus

a natural zoonosis origin. And the results show from epidemiologists and virologists, overwhelmingly, the consensus is that a lab leak is less likely, right? It's something like 80% in relevant virologists were on the side of natural zoonosis being more likely. But that's still saying that there's scope for disagreement. But Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, in this case, when you spoke to them, they presented the case that there was a very strong implication that virologists are potentially conspiring to hide their own culpability. And in the case of a lot of the people that we're talking to,

that clearly doesn't seem to be the motivation. Whereas on the lab leak side, there are people who now have profiles purely about promoting the lab leak as a possibility. And in the case of Matt Ridley, who I know is a respected science writer, and I know that many people are fond of him, Richard Dawkins reads him and so on. But he also does have a history of advocating various fringe positions, including non-climate contrarianism, alternative origins, the HIV, AIDS. Well, to be clear, that I knew nothing about. But again, you have to take people's views as they come. I mean, obviously, some people can entertain sufficiently crazy ideas that I would never want to talk to them. But, and RFK Jr. is one of those people. But

yeah, I mean, Matt is a totally respected science writer about biology. And he's written a bunch of books that many people have found valuable. And as you say, Dawkins is one of them. And yeah, I can't, you know, I can't be held responsible for views of his that I'm not aware of. I know he's been somewhat contrarian with respect to climate, but there's a bunch of people in that bin who we can't cancel. You know, you talked about, usually in the context of the rampant conspiracism that you see all over the place, but including, I don't know, the Brett Weinstein side of the aisle,

wherever that is, right? Or Alex Jones or Elon Musk. and they show a tendency to endorse a wide variety of conspiracies. It isn't just one. It's, you know, that there is a history of conspiracism that it should lower your assessment when they're alleging another conspiracy, right? Like, at least, not that the conspiracy is true, but the fact that they are alleging it means something significant because they are prone to allege conspiracies. So in that case, I heard you very eloquently talk about with Joe Rogan or Brett Weinstein that they're selecting experts on COVID, you know, people like Pierre Corey or Robert Malone, Peter McCulloch, who have genuine credentials, and they then give their audience the impression that because there's no respectable figure to kind of like to beat back the following week, that the fringe position is much more firm and convincing than it is.

So there seemed a potential parallel there from if your podcast has on like Alina Chan and Matt Ridley and then leaves the lab leak issue alone. I would imagine that a lot of your audience would come away thinking that a lot of the criticisms that they put are convincing because they pushed them in a very convincing way. So like the experts that we had on, if you think those questions are worth answering, why not seek out to raise them with them? Well, again, I would have had I known them again, you had your you did your podcast after I did mine, right? So I didn't have the bell, I need a time machine to be fully informed. And it is true that I didn't, you know, I didn't do much more than read their book to prepare for that interview. So it's not like I, um, I went into this having preloaded my brain with lots of reasons to be skeptical of, of their thesis. And, but, but actually the, the,

the, the line we took in that interview was was i thought fairly balanced i mean anyone listening to that interview would come out feeling like well the lab leak certainly seems very likely or or or more likely than not perhaps i mean but it's still it was still sort of in coin toss zone it wasn't like this is 99 you know uh we were not we have%. We have a 99% confidence that it was of lab origin. And neither Matt nor Alina were claiming that. I mean, I think I've probably, hearing your interviews, I probably became a little more skeptical of the lab leak origin, but still now, I mean, again, it's still not a decided question. You still have the Department of Energy and the FBI saying it's likely based on evidence that we can't see. And again, you should listen to Donald McNeil's account of,

or read his account in his recent book of what it was like to deal with the virologist, right? I mean, there was a circling of the wagons. There was a pretending to be settled on zoonotic origin when behind closed doors, they were saying, oh shit, this looks like a lab leak, right? So, you know, that doesn't answer the basic scientific charge that your guess made, which I think is very interesting. I forget some of the details, but if memory serves, perhaps the most interesting was that it looks like there were two origin stories that suggest more of a zoonotic origin as opposed to a lab leak origin. But in any case, it's, yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know that we can extract much more wisdom from this. I realized I didn't do the interview you wished I had done, but it is just true that I, you know, I did not have much prior bias one way or the other going in it just my my really strong bias was

everyone who was claiming that the lab leak thesis was racism was a moron right and and should be chastised uh as such until the end of the world so um yeah that's that's still where i stand okay i think i think chris disputes some of the minor points in some of that but we're not gonna let him uh respond we can we can let the lab leak lie i think for now so um sam was there anything else you wanted to respond to from that episode well i think i remember you i forget how you um what your focus was in the conversation, but you seem to be saying that many of my claims about what one can realize through meditation, I think in particular that the illusoriness of, of the self, um, that those were kind of merely subjective claims that I was kind of,

uh, trumping up into some greater than rational status as objective claims, right? Like there's a path by which I'm seeking to make credible claims about the nature of human subjectivity credible claims about the nature of human subjectivity is not one that can actually be walked because all it really is is a matter of personal experience or personal opinion down that path. I mean, introspection on some level can't bear objective fruit. And I would just challenge that. I mean, what's happening, what I heard happening in your description, you might want to just give your criticism again so that our listeners can hear it. But what seemed to be happening for me is that you were confusing the linguistic claims for the reality indicated, right? Like, yes, when talked about, it is just language, right? These are just,

you know, small mouth noises that I'm making now. And anything I say about the nature of mind is just going to be a string of sentences. But what I'm talking about isn't just at bottom a string of sentences. And there are features of the mind that we can only experience directly from a first-person side, about which we can nevertheless make objective claims, right? These are not merely subjective claims, not merely biased, not merely personal. There's a functionally infinite number of things you can say about the mind from a first-person point of view, which are nonetheless objective not you know epistemologically objective while ontologically subjective i think i got lost somewhere there chris i'm sorry um and it's partly that i'm a little bit vague about the the actual let me just sharpen that up with a couple of claims so for

instance um i mean i could again i it may sound um sound hyperbolic for me to say, you can make an infinite number of claims about the mind, the subjectivity of people that are nevertheless objective, but yeah, but you obviously can, right? So for instance, I can, I can say, you know, what was John F. Kennedy thinking the moment he got assassinated, right? Well, we don't know, but there's an infinite number of things he wasn't thinking and we can rule those out. Absolutely. Right. He was not attempting to factor the largest prime number human beings have discovered in the years since, right? He wasn't thinking about string theory. He wasn't thinking about what a genius Edward

Witten is, right? Just add your propositions that he was not entertaining, you know, ad libitum. It's just, making claims about what wasn't there, right, in his conscious mind. And so that's just one way to see that you can make objective claims about subjective states of mind without any doubt. Engaging in introspective practices, I would concede that there are there are basic experiences that the the nature of the way that human minds operate that if somebody is to engage in you know introspective practices in a certain way that they will very likely have those experiences right and i think that accords with what you're saying about you know being able to make statements that are objectively true or that you can introspect and see for yourself if it's easy to not make thoughts about the future and past

arise in your mind when you just sit. It would be very strange if somebody sat down and said, oh, I had no problem doing that, that you'd met a quite interesting person in that case. But from there, there are plenty of different introspective traditions and spiritual, religious, philosophical practices that investigate mind using introspective practices and arrive at rather different conclusions about the nature of mind. Now, there are mystics and comparative religious people who have tried to argue that they're essentially just grasping the elephant from all different points. But the

conclusions of a transcendental meditation practitioner and a Dzogchen Buddhist are often different because in part of the framing that those traditions have provided to help interpret those experiences. And our argument, I think, is that you, like all people who engage in those practices, have inherited a particular interpretive framework, which you tend to present as reflecting a kind of universal insight that people from any tradition could have. No, it's universal. Just be like, it's universal if it's true, right? So I fully agree with you that there are different traditions and they don't totally agree.

And from my point of view, the various traditions are more or less cluttered with concepts. Some concepts are more useful than others. Some teachings, you know, I do somewhat take the Buddhist view that some teachings are more appropriate for different sorts of people. So there's kind of a skillful means argument that, so some of these differences, seeming differences of opinion can be reconciled with a different skillful, differences of skillful means depending on the audience. But I think, yes, I think there are maps that fit the territory better than others. But there is a territory, right?

And there are certain, you know, you're talking at the leading edge. Yes, there might be differences of opinion. And there's certainly differences with respect to the metaphysical picture suggested by the experiences that practitioners have. And I'm very slow to draw any metaphysical conclusions from any experience. I'm fairly skeptical about all of that. So I don't tend to talk like Deepak Chopra and say that because you experience this thing in the darkness of your closed eyes, you now know something about cosmology, right? So these are, what I claim is that we can make objective claims about the nature of experience, not about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of meditation. And there are many claims that there would be no disagreement

about really, no matter how different the traditions are. Like, for instance, that thoughts arise and pass away, right? Your thoughts are not permanent. There's this experience of, first, that particular thought of what you ate for lunch yesterday wasn't there a moment ago and now it's there and there it's gone, right? So it's, there's a transitory quality to the flow of thought, right? To each increment of thought that you can think about distinctly or experience distinctly. So anyone who's claiming that that doesn't happen and thoughts are permanent, that would be an odd person to have a conversation with, right?

It's almost like saying that sounds are permanent, right? Or sentences are permanent. All right, this sentence eventually comes to an end, period, full so does so does the analogous thought uh but that's again that's there's certain things follow from that right i mean so if you can be if you can notice the transitory nature of of mental objects you know thoughts included um any and emotions right you know that the states of the state of anger it can't be permanent, right? Because it wasn't there a moment ago. Whatever physiology that constitutes it in this moment, by the sheer fact that it arose, it will prove impermanent. It's not going to be there for a week and a half, right? It's not even going to be there for an hour.

It's not even going to be there. So here we get closer to an objective claim that's kind of interesting and certainly psychologically useful. The claim is that it's not going to be there for even minutes unless you get lost in thought in a very dreamlike way, identified with thought about why you're angry. Right. And so that is, you know, this is the first useful thing I've said from a meditative point of view. That is, you know, this is the first useful thing I've said from a meditative point of view. That offers a key to how you can become free of anger if you want to be. You can notice the linkage between thought and emotion and break the connection. You can notice thoughts as thought and how they're impermanent.

You can notice the physiology of anger and how it's impermanent and you can, you can continually break the spell of identification with thought and notice that the half-life that, that, that an emotion like anger has a certain half-life and is very, very brief, right? Astoundingly brief. And, and there's liberation from anger to be found in that. Again, this is anyone adequate to be, to, to the task of, of observing this, right? And, right? And not everybody is, and it takes a little training to become so, can converge on an agreement about the nature of this experience, right? And anyone who says,

oh no, that's complete bullshit. Whenever I get angry, it lasts for 17 hours and I'm not thinking at all at that time. I know that person is unable to witness certain things about them about the about what it's like to be them um based on just a lack of facility or a lack of training and you can know that every bit as much as you can know um you know that somebody you know claiming to run a three minute mile is just his guy, he's got a broken stopwatch, right? It's just, it's just not happening. Sam, I might jump in and reply. I'm a little bit vague on exactly what my issue was too. I think

it partly could be the idea of pointing to subjective experience and like, for instance, the benefits you experience from meditation as, as kind of evidence for the a particular way of looking at things and i don't dispute that that may well be true i've got nothing against meditation i'm all for self-reflection i'm all for taking a pause practicing a bit of self-awareness especially the way you just phrased it then it's kind of it's just good advice right it's homes's homespun wisdom, perhaps in some ways, but that's the kind of advice I'd give to like a young person, for instance, who is a bit emotional and not practicing a bit of self-reflection. The problem is, is when we point to our own subjective experiences, right? Like the immense calmness and groundedness that we're experiencing

by doing X, then ultimately other people have to take it on faith a little bit, right? Unless they do the thing that we're telling them to do. So in terms of epistemology or whatever, it's not fundamentally that different from the revealed truth that a mystic doing any other kind of thing, saying that he's getting messages from God or pulling them out of a hat or something like that. I know it's more elegant. It's quite different because, again, I'm not making that the lurch into metaphysics, right? If you're claiming to be hearing the voice of God, right? Now, you might be claiming to be hearing the voice of God, right? Now you might be claiming to hear voices, and that can be an honest claim about which I really wouldn't doubt. If someone said to me, you know, listen, I hear a voice and it's not my own. Well, you know, then we're talking about

schizophrenia or we're talking about, you know, something, but the claim that this is the voice of God is a metaphysical claim. It's a claim about the relationship between this person's subjectivity and other entities in the cosmos. And it's testable, right? So if I wanted to test whether someone was actually hearing the voice of an omniscient being, I would ask that voice a few questions, right? And that is provable. The person could give me answers of a sort that would prove that they're in contact with some kind of superhuman intelligence, right? I could, I, you know, I have a, a, I could write down a, on a piece of paper, a, you know, a 15 digit number and known only to

me, not even known to me, cause I can't even remember it. I just wrote it down and I've forgotten it. Right. And it's in my desk. Tell me what that number is, right? If the person can tell me what that number is based on this voice they're hearing, okay, I'm all ears. Let's, let's talk about the, the, the miraculous situation we're in, right? So all of this is amenable to testing. The claim I'm making, and I think the claim that you were most uncomfortable with was not so much like the impermanence of thought or the impermanence of emotion, which seems kind of this remedial self-help technique. But the more, the spookier claim that the ego is an illusion, right? The sense of there being a subject in the center of consciousness is an illusion. And I will admit that is a, that's a claim I'm making

that is not just for me. And it's not just for people who agree with me. It's for you, whether you realize it or not. Right. So it's, it's, it's, there's a kind of, um, you know, um, it's an intrusive claim. It purports to be objective. And the analogy I would give, which I've given before, and perhaps even on your podcast, is to the optic blind spot, right? So like I have a story as to why the optic blind spot is there to be noticed. I also have a story as to why it's hard to notice and why most people don't notice it. And it requires a little training to notice it. And some people also notice it and it's not even interesting. And it's like, so what, right? All of that maps on to the territory of

so-called self-transcendence or noticing the illusoriness of the self rather faithfully, right? It's neuroanatomically plausible that this would be true. And it's, as is the case with the optic blind spot, it's hard to notice, you know, arguably harder to notice with respect to meditating on the illusoriness of the self. And it can be noticed and then overlooked again, right? And it's in the same way that the blind spot can. But it's an objective claim in the same way. The only difference is it's a little bit harder, in some cases maybe a lot harder to confirm.

And I can't easily say, can't you know we can't use a piece of paper and a pencil to do it in a way that is is super reliable because it is harder right and that's just an accident of of you know the just what it takes to notice this thing. I think something that might tighten up the disagreement here is that when I've heard you present this, you know, you tend to frame it that people, they don't like the thought of not having a permanent self, right? It's a kind of challenge to most people's notions of identity. Some people, yeah. Yeah. But if they engage in practice, they'll come to see that. And I had and have an interest in introspective practices. I focused on Buddhist traditions for my initial studies because of an interest in that, which I think mirrors a lot of the interest that you had when younger as well, and you've retained

the interest. But whenever I engaged in introspective practices, whenever I use your app as well, most of the things about the self that you point out about that, when people try to grasp that idea of a little homunculus, it falls apart on observation, right? But I agree with pretty much all of the kind of insights that you can gain from introspective practices about the way that the minds are operating and the narratives that they're constructing and so on. But I haven't reached the same conclusion as you or a lot of Buddhists in regard to the notion that like

self is non-existent, except to say that the popular conception of self is non-existent but there are aspects because like you can focus on an individual moment and go down the layers of analysis until you get the level of atoms and you and then say well where's the actual person right it's just vibrating forces around and in the same way you can go through thought processes down to the individual thoughts and you know reactions in the individual arising moments in consciousness but the patterns in the brain and like the way that it's structured life experiences are consistent patterns over time right that's why we have personalities that's why we have autobiographical memories. And to me, saying that the sense or autobiographical sense is a complete illusion is, it sounds more...

That's not what I'm saying, though. Part of the confusion might be on what self are we talking about, right? So there are many ways we can use the term self. And there's really only one that I'm claiming is illusory, right? I mean, the others are, you might say, are constructed. They might not be what they seem either, any object closely enough, it resolves into its constituent parts. And, you know, the object itself is not in any of the parts. Right. And so there's this sort of mirage like quality to everything that we we decompose. And so, you know, everything is just a and a this is this is a Buddhist trope. I mean, just going back to a famous sutta, the questions of King Melinda, where he was asking, Nagasena, the monk was asking, is a chariot in the wheel, in the axle, in the rope, in the carriage, in the. And you know, you can't find a chariot

in any of the chariot parts and you bring all the parts together and you have a chariot. And the question is like, at what point do we actually get a chariot? I mean, you can talk about a chariot without an axle, but you really can't talk about a chariot without a wheel, an axle, a carriage, you know, every other chariot part. And so it is with any aggregate thing, you can imagine a person missing a hand, but you can't really imagine a person missing, you know, a hundred different parts and still be a person. I'm not saying that people are illusions, right? And I'm not saying that it's mysterious that you have your memories and I have my memories and I, you know, that, you know,

why don't I wake up tomorrow with all of your memories, right? Like that's not, so that like, there's no, there's no mystery about personal identity of that sort. The self that is illusory, you know, that is in fact spurious, that doesn't survive analysis, and that you can actually experience to be absent is the self as the presumed subject of experience, right? So again, most, and forgive me, I feel like we must've had this almost an identical conversation of this sort last time, but I mean, just to, to remind you and your listeners, the claim is that most of us, certainly most of us, perhaps not all of us, but most of us certainly most of us perhaps not all of us but most of us most of the time feel like certainly prior to any real experience with meditation feel like

there is we don't feel identical to our experience, right? We feel like we're having experience from almost from someplace outside of experience or on the edge of experience, right? There's this feeling of being a subject, a locus of consciousness, an aimer of attention. And if you're talking about action, a willer of will, this entity that has free will, right? The whole free will conversation is just the other side of this coin, right? The feeling of agency. It's me here doing these things. I'm pushing these sentences out, right? I'm having thoughts. I'm the thinker of my thoughts and I'm the doer of my doings, right? And I'm, you know, if I'm going to reach for something, I'm the mode of force, I'm the, as the subject. And so there's this sense that there's an observer, right? It's almost like

you're looking over your own shoulder into the theater of your experience. And then there's, and then there's the things you experience. You have sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions, and it's all changing. And yet there's this something static about the, the experience, the subject, right? There's almost a sense that there's an unchanging subject that gets carried through moment to moment. That subject, the feeling that there's a man in the boat, right? Or that you're on the bank of the river, you know, watching the river of consciousness flow by, that is the illusion. And when you look for that subject clearly enough, precisely enough, if you're attentive enough to what it's actually like to look for the one who is looking,

right, you can kind of, there's a, subjectively speaking, there's a needle to thread here. And it is, again, somewhat analogous to looking for the optic blind spot under the right conditions. You can confirm for yourself the absence of data. Just as if I give you the piece of paper with the two marks on it and you stare at one, you stare at the fixation cross, and you move the dot in and out of existence in your visual field, you can confirm for yourself that there's this area in the retina where you're getting no data, right? Where there's just an absence of visual experience. You can do meditation, you know, this kind of meditation on the nature of the self, Meditation, you know, this kind of meditation on the nature of the self, or in Buddhist terms, on anatta, selflessness, or shunyata, emptiness, depending on how you want to think about it. and no self in a refined enough way and in a meticulous enough way so as to confirm for yourself that this feeling of subject, the feeling that you are divided from your experience

in the subject-object way is spurious, right? And that there really is, as a matter of experience, only experience, right? And you're not on the edge of it. You're not in the middle of it. You're identical to it, right? There is this, there is this totality of, of, of energy, sight, sound, sensation, everything in your sensorium, including your mind and its, and its objects. And there's no boundary between you and any of it that there is no you to be you and any of it, that there is no you to be aiming the spotlight of attention into it or onto it. Right. Um, and there's a, there are many things that follow from that insight. The more you can explore it, the more you can sort of unpack its significance psychologically. Um,

but so there's a lot to be said about that. And there, as Chris pointed out, there are differences of opinion about the metaphysics of all of that and what, you know, and, and what any of that means and what we, what we should think on the basis of, of that experience. But this is a, you know, if there, if there is an experience that exists at the heart of the perennial philosophy that unites all of these mystical traditions to some degree, um, it's this, it's the intimation of this experience that, again, in certain contexts immediately gets layered with what I consider to be bogus, you know, religious concepts and metaphysics. But there is this ground truth. I mean, it really is the ground of being by another name that can be discovered. And that's, again, it's an objective claim, but it's a very simple

claim. And it takes, you know, in my, again, in my case, I probably spent a year on silent retreat and still couldn't reliably notice this about my mind. Right. So it's like I was, you know, and by silent retreat, I meant, I mean, like, you know, really doing nothing, but meditate for 12 to 18 hours a day. You know, I, I did that, you know, the longest I ever did was three months, but I did that twice. And I did two months, many times in one month. And I'd probably done at least a year before I got enough. And I got kind of the crucial instruction for me that allowed me to notice this just very directly without any real effort. And that was, as Chris said, that was in a Zogchen context. So there's a role for precise information here. I think it matters to have,

if you have a confusing map, it's not going to be surprising that you're confused about the territory. And I view some maps as intrinsically confusing. But anyway, it's an experiment you can run on yourself. And yes, it can be frustrating. It can sound grandiose. It can sound, um, certainly adjacent to mystical and religious claims that, that do not have good scientific bona fides, but there's nothing unscientific about this. It really is. You, you can, you can tackle this very much in the spirit of scientific hypothesis and ultimately confirm it or not. I mean, it's, you know, granted it is somewhat, I mean, it's confusing what to make of one's failure to confirm it, right? Like if you go, if you went on a 10 day retreat and you didn't experience anything like this and you came away thinking, well, there's no there there, you know, I would, I, you know, I would have nothing to say but try harder, right? But the problem is

this insight can't be physically demonstrated in a way that some things can. If I was telling you, well, it's possible to hit a golf ball 300 yards, right? And here's how to do it. And then you have someone like Tiger Woods who can do it, just go up and do it right then it doesn't matter how much you struggle and fail to do it you still know it can be done right you know like you've just saw someone else do it um and there's some i'm saying i think we might have to can't be demonstrated in that way yeah yeah i take that point i'm sorry to jump in and cut you off but i i think we've we're not going to get to the bottom of metaphysics in 25 minutes, but we've definitely given it a good go. Just because you have to go shortly, I thought we might move on to some other topics. Sam, maybe this I can tie together that I think related.

And I can't remember if it came up in the past content, but I know you've thought about it quite a bit. So you've done a number of episodes on the Palestine and Israel conflict, understandably, and took quite a strong line in presenting it as the forces of civilization fighting the kind of jihadism, extremism and there's a couple of points i'd like to raise there but one is that you very strongly emphasize the role of jihadism as like a core component that that goes kind of under acknowledged and that that is part of what is very much driving the conflict and which makes it into an asymmetric warfare because one side is not playing by the same rules, right? Because they are pining for an everlasting second life, right? So stop me if there's anything that I've said wrong there in terms of framing jihadism as the central component of that conflict, motivating it. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure I know where you're going here. Let me just perhaps save you some time. I fully acknowledge that in many of these conflicts, and certainly in the conflict with the Palestinians between Israel and the Palestinians, if you were going to ask, you know, what is the difference between a group like Hamas and a group like the Islamic State, that the variable of nationalism like the Islamic State would view Hamas as a kind of, you know, an apostate organization, right? And the fact that they have the goal of a nation state is anathema, right? So it's not just jihadism.

But the thing that worries me most about this conflict and about many of these other conflicts is the fanatical religious layer of it. That's the thing that makes it truly insoluble from my point of view. If it was just ordinary nationalism, even if you add a layer of terrorism onto nationalism, as you did in the so-called troubles in Ireland, right? you know, in the so-called troubles in Ireland, right? It's like that's, the troubles would be, would have been much more troublesome, you know, granted they were awful, but they would be, they would have been much worse if you added a layer

of fanatical commitment to martyrdom and jihad, right? Like that's, that makes things worse. And that's always the point I want to bang on about that, that if you're not going to acknowledge that piece of jihadism and extremist ideologies would be absolutely incomplete. Like you can't deal with Islamic whenever you are talking about the need to take into account what the extremists say, right, and to look at what they are telling us, right, the issue of Tabiq for, you know, why we hate you, you've commented on it and that kind of thing. There are various statements from Hamas and other groups active in that area, which come across as motivated by jihadist ideology, and they want to wipe Israel out, and it's a holy war.

But at the same time, there are also statements which very clearly link it to political grievances, it to political grievances, especially national grievances. And in the oft-referenced Hamas charter that they started with, they did produce a more moderate one. Now, I'm not saying you've got to hand it to Hamas for doing that or take them at the word, but I'm saying that the fact that they would remove the section that specifically is openly anti-Semitic, openly stating that they're going to wipe Israel out. Doesn't that contradict the image that you're suggesting that if these are people that are purely motivated by going to heaven, why don't you see so many more martyrs? Why would you find things like them trying to moderate language in a new charter? Why not double down?

Doesn't that somewhat contradict the notion that it's purely about the religious ideology from their own lives? It's not purely. Again, it's not purely. I think it's purely the problem is more or less purely religion. Right. I mean, if everyone were a Sunni Muslim in the region, we'd have no problem, right? So religious tribalism is the major variable here, but jihadism itself is an additional problem. And yeah, I mean, I can, I think, be forgiven for not trusting Hamas. I think that their original charter is far closer to what they really believe and really want than their subsequent refinement of it, which is still, you know, not good. It's only just good by comparison.

comparison. I just think they're, you know, they're politically, you know, perhaps a little savvier than they used to be. They realize they have to export this, you know, their product to the rest of the world and use the rest of the world as leverage against Israel. But I mean, still, I mean, just look at how carefree they are with respect to their atrocities. I mean, just look at how carefree they are with respect to their atrocities. I mean, they're not really trying to seem like rational actors to the rest of the world. shoot it on your GoPros and then drag, you know, dismembered bodies through the streets and, and, you know, bloodied hostages and, you know, kidnapped babies. And, and it's just the, the idea that they're, they're moderated in a way that I should care about is, is, you know, fairly absurd.

Yeah. I'm not saying you should care for that. It's more that, as you mentioned, the terror that they unleashed on October 7th is very well documented. Yet, you have lots of their supporters and maybe actually a majority doubting many of the things that happened, right? You have the Hamas stating that they didn't target civilians, right? In various statements, like Hamas officials make different kinds of statements. But the point is that if you are right, and it is just about a holy war and paradise, why even pretend in that case? Because if it's good to kill Jews as many as you can, why cast doubts that there's a conspiracy? Why not say that you are just about targeting the infidels? But in most cases, they're not. I mean, most cases, you know,

the leaders of Hamas in the immediate aftermath, I don't know what they've said since, but they said they would do this as many times as they could, right? They were not... But until... They're splitting it differently than I think you until but until they're just they're they're splitting it differently than you i think you're suggesting they're just saying that there are no non-combatants in israel they're all combatants because they're occupying land that's not theirs right all these they're all settlers they're all they're all uh you know colonists i mean it's all it's all it's all illegitimate, right? From the river to the sea.

So it's not, so like if they're killing teenagers at a rave, they're not disposed to distinguish between them and soldiers carrying guns, right? It's just, that's, they're all combatants.

I'm not, I'm certainly not claiming like Hamas is an ethical organization that is making those. I'm saying that various members of their leadership and supporters make appeal to that, which suggests that they aren't occupying the kind of justification space that you're suggesting the majority of them are. Listen, I would agree. And I've said this before. I think it's a distinction that doesn't make much of a difference in the present case. But Hamas, certainly historically, I mean, prior to October 7th, if you had asked me to compare Hamas and the Islamic State, I would have said the Islamic State was much scarier than Hamas, much more of a real jihadist organization than Hamas is. And I would still say that to some considerable degree. And yet Hamas, even with all of its sort of quasi-terrestrial goals, was still capable of

medieval barbarism, which they seem committed to replicating whenever they're given the chance. Yes, the Islamic State is the much purer case of where jihadism leads and it's what it looks like in the pure, you know, in a petri dish, right? I mean, that's the unadulterated strain, you know, in a petri dish, right? I mean, that's the unadulterated strain, the Islamic State. So I guess the flip side, and it relates to that, is that whenever discussing Israel, that yourself, and I would say Douglas Murray as well, who you've had on the channel, are rightly pushing back at the equivalence that we see on the far left, right? Or the kind of anti-Semitism that is clearly there in the reaction to the October 7th attack. But in so doing, there's often a loss of nuance that on the Israel side, you have also religious extremists and not just fringe extremists with no influence right you have a

member of the government ben gevier who had the poster of the goldstein massacre guy right the person who went in and gone down that's somebody in the israeli government who had a poster on the wall of a terrorist and one netanyahu kind of supporting the increasing settlement movement, according the far right, the religious right. So my kind of point there is, if you present that conflict as being purely about the forces of civilization versus like a religious fanatical cult, and don't mention that there is a fanatical religious cult that is in the government of Israel and has made various statements which are similarly talking about the promised land and reclaiming it, that it seems like you're being selective. And it doesn't mean

that you have to say they're both equal in that respect. You can still completely condemn Hamas and all the things. You can still argue condemn Hamas and all the things. You can still argue that Israel has a right to defend itself, but it doesn't require serving as their kind of propaganda wing because lots of Israelis were very unhappy with Netanyahu and his government. It is a very right-wing government. And the last thing I'll say, and I'll give you a chance to respond, Sam, is like the ex-Israeli prime minister who was assassinated, Rabin, he wasn't assassinated by Islamic extremists. He was assassinated by a Jewish extremist who derailed the peace negotiations that were

going on. And the legacy of which was that Netanyahu, who was in opposition to Rabin, you know, ended up in power. So the history over there is very complex in that, but I'm arguing, isn't there a case that the presentation yourself and Douglas Murray have done kind of whitewashes those concerns, which are legitimate? I mean, I raised those points a fair amount. It's just in proportion to the problem on the Islamic side, they're quite small. I mean, they're very unhelpful. I fully grant you that Netanyahu has been a disaster. His support

for the settlements has been provocative. He's to some degree culpable for what happened on October 7th, if for no other reason that he, you know, his attention was split, you know, and he was, he was propping up the settlements in the West bank and leaving the border with Gaza, you know, fairly undefended. Right. So, but yeah, all the mad work that the settlers are doing in the West bank and the religious extremists who support them, all of that is incredibly unhelpful and I don'tists who support them.

All of that is incredibly unhelpful, and I don't support it at all. I mean, I've said in other contexts, I thought that the settlers should be dragged off contested land by their beards, right? I mean, that's not optically a great thing to say in the aftermath of October 7th, but I'm Jewish and I can say whatever I want on the topic. I think those people are religious imbeciles and they're creating immense harm, right? And their imagined claims upon real estate based on where they think Abraham walked shouldn't be supported because, you know, I think it's very unlikely Abraham even existed at this point. So religious maniacs in every context are, you know, are people I would, you know, these are views and behaviors I would condemn. people I would, you know, these are views and behaviors I would condemn. But again, we have to be alert to the differences, the differences both with respect to the sheer numbers of people

and their influence, but also with respect to the specific beliefs that they're maniacally adhering to and the logical and behavioral consequences of those beliefs. I mean, the differences really do matter. And it matters that Judaism does not have a clear conception of the afterlife, much less one that could really motivate a carefree attitude toward martyrdom, right, and the martyrdom of one's children. I'm not saying that there aren't Jews who aren't willing to die for their beliefs. I mean, there are people who are willing to die for their beliefs.

You know, they're all flavors of those sorts of people. But there's something about the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad that are especially unhelpful. Right. And when you look at just the sheer numbers, there are 15 million Jews on Earth and most Jews don't believe anything that I care about. on earth and most Jews don't believe anything that I care about. There's very little commitment to otherworldly propositions and the supernatural among Jews generally. They're just an overwhelmingly secular and even agnostic group of people. And then you have the ultra-Orthodox who, yes, believe whole rafts of divisive nonsense that I don't support. And I think they should be politically disenfranchised insofar as that's possible in Israel. And yeah, when you can find one of them who's saying idiotic things about some kind of counter

genocide, you know, or talking about, you know, the Amalekites in the Bible that needed to get, you know, wiped out down to the last child. Let's kill their livestock as well, right? It's, you know, sheer religious barbarism, you know, Taliban style that I, you know, would never support. But again, there's so few of these people. Yes, a few of them are in the wrong places. A few of them are in, you know, too close to power in Netanyahu's government. But there really isn't much of an analogy to draw between the two sides. And if the Jews in Israel were behaving like the Palestinians, if 80, if they were committing analogous atrocities, going into music festivals in the West Bank and raping and burning teenagers, and then supporting it to the

tune of 80%. Once you export these details to the rest of Israeli society, you had Jews dancing in the streets over these moral victories. And when you poll them, 80% claim to support the atrocity just committed, right? Or they're just riddled with conspiracy theories about how it never happened, right? And there's just no way to have a reality-based discussion with these people because they're so addled by their religious mania, right? If that were true of the Jews of Israel, I would condemn them in precisely the same terms that I condemn jihadism and its influence in the Palestinian community. There was a poll done recently, Sam, and it was discussed by Rory Stewart,

who you recently had on the podcast, where they poraeli public about how concerned they should be about the suffering of civilians in gaza and there was it was a similar percentage something like 80 percent that said it shouldn't be a concern right the the priority should be the wiping out of of hamas and i think for a lot of people they do see see an equivalence, not, they don't see the equivalence in terms of like that the Israel IDF is just going in and mowing down civilians at a rave. But they do look at the fact that there's huge amounts of people starving with no access to water now in Gaza, right? And that there is a huge death toll, no matter whether you think the war is justified or not, it is absolutely the case that there is a huge death toll, no matter whether you think the war is justified

or not, it is absolutely the case that there's huge amounts of unjustified suffering there. And so you pointed to the kind of Islamist and jihadism, but I would say that is creating really fertile ground for, in general, just a psychology of justified grievance and if you have a proud people that is going to be remembered it will lead to support for more extreme groups if you remove hamas i would hope there's a chance for like more moderate things but it doesn't seem that the most punitive response possible targeting civilian populations and i'm not saying like targeting civilian populations. And I'm not saying like targeting civilian populations on purpose, right? I am talking about it being a collateral of attempting to remove Hamas from civilian populations. But in that respect, whenever you have organizations like the Tamil Tigers, right? That was a Marxist organization with Hindu members that was

pioneering suicide attacks. There you don't have a very strong reference. They learned it from Hezbollah, but yes, they were pioneering it after they learned it from Hezbollah. But in that respect of being able to motivate people for it, you know, Rory Stewart raised the point as well, that if people are very strongly wedded to a particular ideology, be it Marxism, be it whatever the case might be, you don't always need a paradise in order to motivate people. And so I'm kind of layering in two points. One is that what is happening in Gaza now is undoubtedly a humanitarian crisis with huge suffering. And that will motivate, it seems certainly possible to motivate more extremism in response. And related to that, that it isn't just the jihadist and

afterlife narratives that enable people to end up like being willing to sacrifice themselves for causes. You see it all the time in nationalist causes in World War II for different reasons with, you know, Japan and so on. So those two points that there is a level of huge suffering going on at the minute, and it's in Gaza, the innocent victims of bombing, so-called collateral damage, which was the euphemism we tend to use here. And the, let's take the, you know, the teenagers massacred at the music festival by Hamas, right? There's a very important difference between those two groups of people. The first are being victimized. However surely they're being victimized, it is inadvertent. It is not desired on the Israeli side. Leave aside the sociopathic fanatic who wants to kill Palestinian children.

Generally speaking, if the IDF could go in there and kill only Hamas, if you gave them magical weapons, what would they do with them? They would kill only Hamas, right? And they would turn Gaza into, you know, the south of France, right? I mean, it's clarifying to ask, what would people do if you gave them the power to do anything they want? What would they do? What would members of Hamas do? They would kill all the Jews on earth. no question, right? And many other people, right? And what would the

Islamic State do? They would turn the whole world into the hellhole that they created in Syria and Iraq, right? That's exactly the way they like it. Crucifying apostates and blasphemers, you know, taking sex slaves, all of it, right? None of that was an aberration. That's exactly what they wanted, right? What would Dick Cheney have done, you know, in the invasion of Iraq? Would he have killed everybody? No, he would have turned Iraq into Oklahoma, right? So it's important to track people's actual motives. What kind of world do they want to build? Like, what do they want for other people? Just how zero-sum are they, right? Wait, Sam, I got to jump in there because, I mean, I'm not sure if that analogy is helpful. I mean- Well, let me just give you one aspect. Before you jump in,

let me just give you the one real-world variant of it, which you really can't argue with. What, what, what did we do to Germany and Japan? We, the allies do to Germany and Japan after world war two, what, what really, what revealed our motives with respect to the German people and the Japanese people? And we killed a whole lot of innocent people right i mean the firebombing of dresden and tokyo i mean just you know to say nothing of the nuclear bombs we dropped i mean indiscriminate violence of a sort that is israel is not simply not practicing now at all right it doesn't matter how many kids die in Gaza. Israel is not doing what we did in World War II at all. Yeah. No, I think those points.

I just want to say. But our revealed preference, our preference was revealed with respect to what we did after we won. Did we just take them all, all the pretty girls as sex slaves? Is that what we did in Germany and Japan? Did we kill all the fighting age males? No, we helped build those two societies, right? We wanted sane collaborators in Germany and Japan, and we got them. Amazing, right?

You've made that point well. right no you've you've made that point well one of your points was about the stated intentions right and and right versus um unpleasant side effects okay so those but that's that's why you can't use body count to resolve this issue you're right it's like it doesn't matter that these iranians have killed more palestinians than hamas killed in israel right that's not the way to think about it it's just collateral damage and like sort of um unpleasant necessities is is not always such a clear thing like the the the limit to that thought experiment i think is illustrated by say communism in southeast asia take the karmirouge pol pot like their stated goal is to build a utopian communist society if they had the power to do anything they want they wouldn't just massacre a bunch of people. They would turn them into very good politically aligned communists. But

unfortunately, they had to kill an awful lot of people because out of necessity. But there are, yes, there are Orwellian projects. There are situations where words don't mean what they seem to mean. You can't just track these superficial sentences so as to get to the moral core of what someone is attempting to do. I mean, what are people's real intentions with respect to other people? I mean, whatever Kim Jong-un says about North Korea, we know what his intentions are, right? He's turned that into a prison state because he's a total sociopath, right? It's not like he wants everyone to be happy and well-fed and prosperous. He wants to rule like a sadist over a prison population. And that's what he's doing.

Would that mean that we don't take into account that there are various statements made by senior figures in Israel, which suggest that, like, for example, well or not, they want to do it. If the Gaza population relocated to Egypt, that wouldn't be a terrible thing, right? And so if Ben-Gavir or so on have made various extreme statements, which in the same respect- Honestly, it's not all that extreme. I mean, I don't know how, I mean, he's just running, I'm not supporting him, but, you know, it's hard to see how Israel survives. In the long term, it's hard to see how Israel

is a viable project on this, with the current assumptions of a so-called two-state solution. I don't know how it works. Either they're not really states or something has radically changed about the cultures, but there's no one-state solution given what most Islamists and jihadists and you know conservatives among the palestinians actually want right i mean that's that's a recipe for for uh at the minimum just a demographic change that is is not compatible with the endurance of the jewish state a demographic change where the entire our population of gaza is relocated to a different country, and that country is then subsumed into part of Israel, that would be like genocide, right? At least cultural genocide.

No, no, it's not genocide. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Genocide has a specific meaning. At the very least, then, it is a forced relocation of a population. You mean ethnic cleansing, right? Which is a forced relocation of a population. You mean ethnic cleansing, right? Which is a word, which is a phrase that's often used along with genocide, and they are worlds apart with respect to their moral implications. The history is just full of ethnic cleansing, which means people moving, right? People who can't get along wind up moving apart, right? That happens a hell of a lot and it's you know it can

be awful in terms of you know when when done at the point of a sword which happened uh which happened in under under islam again and again and again i mean nobody's losing sleep over the jews that got run out of syria Yemen and Iraq and Egypt and Morocco. And all after 1948, right? No one's talking about their right of return. What happened to their homes? The UN's not worried about that, right? And yet everyone is worried about the Palestinians as this perpetual refugee population.

What about all the people who left Syria in in 2015 and went to to sweden right okay they've been but then do they have a refugee status or there are they just now in sweden so sam just to clarify so you are saying that like ethnic cleansing of the gaza street isn't extreme position two million people in the current it's totally extreme it is totally extreme in in that it's a non-starter i mean no like no one no one in the palestinian world wants that right and the arab and you know the if you look at the arab state's contribution to the status quo over the last 50 years it has been very deliberately to hold the Palestinians in perpetual refugee status so as to put the existence of Israel in question perpetually.

And when you look at how the Jordanians and the Egyptians treat the Palestinians, you know, they're just as culpable for, I mean, takegypt you know which which cover which uh governs the board one of the borders of gaza right it is just as culpable for keeping gaza i quote open air prison as israel is right um because they're maintaining one of their borders and they don't want the palestinians in their society either um But it's a- But we do recognize the desire for self-determination and like, you know, I'm not talking about from the river to the sea, like recapturing the land.

I mean, purely a people regarding their homeland as being occupied or taken or that they've been moved, that that is hugely fertile ground for breeding conflict and extremism and that kind of thing. I just like, maybe I'm a little bit more sensitive to this as somebody from Northern Ireland, right? And there, just, I know the situation is not as comparable in terms of the level of suffering involved in that kind of thing. But there you have, for example, of suffering involved in that kind of thing. But there you have, for example, a Republican party, Sinn Féin, that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of British control of the Northern

Irish state, right, but still gets elected into power. They were associated with a terrorist group, the IRA. They're now, I think, the biggest party in the Republic of Ireland as well. And their overall long-term plan is to see Ireland reunited, right, into a unified thing. But they are a political party that people have to deal with. And they have renounced violence. And, you know, it's a different situation. I'm not drawing the parallel in terms of like saying, well, Hamas is just, you know, the IRA in waiting. No, no, no.

I'm saying, though, that those kind of very strong feelings about the right to self-determination, if you relocated the population out of Gaza, that would be the second Nakba, wouldn't it? And the first Nakba led to a conflict that's lasted for longer than any of us have been alive well the analogy to ireland you to make it a real analogy i mean the reasons why it doesn't work great but you also have to imagine you know a dozen other irish-speaking states with irish culture surrounding this whole problem that those the the the northern irish would be displaced to if they had their Nakba of ethnic cleansing, right? Like it's a different situation where you would have to wonder why. It's a completely different situation

because I've had people say, you know, like, well, you wouldn't just allow the British to bomb Belfast, right, to get rid of the IRA during the troubles. And that's true. But if the IRA had launched a raid on a city in the UK and killed a bunch of people and stolen babies, I think you actually would have seen

significant military action in wherever they took the children away to. So there are not parallels one-to-one. But in the notion of like, you know, the British arranged plantations, moved populations over, and the Northern Ireland ended up with like a demographic. I'm not disagreeing with you.

I completely understand the nationalistic and aspirations of the Palestinians. And there is an analogy to any other group of people that want their own nation. any other group of people that want their own nation. But the moral core of this problem and the asymmetry of it should be unignorable. And it's this. And this is a statement that you've probably heard me make and you've probably heard Douglas Murray make it. But it's nonetheless true, which is if the Palestinians put down their weapons, if they were peaceful, right, and even if they were peaceful protesters of a Gandhian sort, right, this problem would be solved and the two societies could live happily together. There would be a two-state solution. There would have been a two-state solution decades ago.

If the Jews of Israel... Just to point there... Well, let me just land the obverse statement. The obverse statement is if the Jews of Israel put down their weapons, there would be a genocide, right? That is... October 7th reveals that to be as objectively true a statement as we can make in these in these in this sort of area so the the only point i was going to raise though is like you've had netanyahu come out and say there won't be a two-state solution we can't that's because of who the palestinians are and because of what is how islam is informing their worldview right if islam were a peaceful religion if is Islam was Jainism,

and there was no notion of jihad, we would have a completely different situation, right? If they were producing leaders like Gandhi, right, or Martin Luther King Jr., right, it would be a completely different situation. So Netanyahu, and again, Netanyahu is awful and again, culpable for the disaster he's presiding over, right? So Israel needs better leaders, right? But he is reacting to the ongoing reality of what the Palestinians and even the surrounding Muslim states have wanted since Israel was born 70 some odd years ago, right? And so much of the conversation, it has been explicitly genocidal as to make anything other than a very strong defensive posture unthinkable for the Israelis. strong defensive posture unthinkable for the Israelis. Wouldn't that imply that when there was a much greater chance of a two-state solution, when the negotiations were going on, and they,

in part, there were people on the Palestinian side who tried to scupper that, right, who were doing suicide attacks and atrocities. But you also did have atrocities committed by extremists on the right who are now people involved with those movements are in the government. So it isn't fair to say that there's just a one. It's a tiny number. I mean, it's ridiculous when you focus on it. It's like Biden just passed an executive order that focused on four Israelis in the West Bank.

Like literally the president of the United States created an executive order that dealt with the destructive behavior of four people on the Israeli side. Right. I mean, it's like in order order to give somewhat semblance of balance to the situation it's just not an analogous problem i i'll create me i'll stipulate everything of that sort you know the the the uh the the massacre at a mosque that kills 25 people once in a generation right is awful and and decidedly unhelpful right and yes And yes, a religious extremist on the Jewish side is who assassinated Rabin, right? And it was a religious extremist on the Hindu side who killed Gandhi, right? There are those people, but there's just not the analogous problem, you know, there or anywhere else. I mean, we have not had to deal with crazy security concerns getting on

airplanes for the last 25 years because so many Jews want to blow themselves up on airplanes. It's just not, it just has not been the problem. And if it were, that's the problem I would be focusing on. Well, I think we might disagree in the degree to which the far right in Israel has a significant presence in the government. But there's one more- I'm not disagreeing. I'm saying that's terrible and should change. And I think it will change. I mean, the reason why it hasn't changed yet is because, again, they're in the middle of this emergency and this war. And Netanyahu is a very Trumpian figure, is using this emergency to prolong his life as a political figure.

But I think at the first opportunity, Netanyahu will be out of office. I just think that is the general sentiment among Israelis. I mean, most Israelis, I don't know what the recent polls say, but I have to think something close to 80% of Israelis are furious with Netanyahu. Yeah, I think I've actually heard really good stuff from moderate progressive Israelis and also really good stuff from moderate people in Gaza, Palestinians. And they don't sound that different to be honest and I think I think most reasonable people have a lot of sympathy with obviously the victims of terrorist attacks and and also the the civilians who are killed by indiscriminate bombing I guess look I'm just

going to make one but it is it is different it's just again we can't lose sight of i mean body count just does not get at the moral difference between the two sides yeah but that's a point that like again people forget it whenever it's just it can't be i it can't maintain its salience in the face of of images from of dead children being pulled out of rubble in gaza right it's just like there's just no there's you have to you have to sort of rerun the the argument again so as to to gain some perspective on what's happening and so i think i think we all get that motivations matter right there there is a difference between a child who is killed by a bomb that wasn't targeted at them and a child who was executed by a terrorist. To give a very anodyne example. They have children.

To give a very anodyne example, but this makes the point from the other side. The three of us live in societies where there's some ambient level of carnage due to car accidents every year, and it's totally predictable. In the United States, there will be something like 40,000 people killed this year on our highways. It's just because people are bad drivers and, you know, eventually self-driving cars will solve this problem, but not yet. Right. Now we know with it to a moral certainty that we could reduce all this death and suffering if we just lowered the speed limit, right. Just made it like wherever it's, wherever you can drive 60 miles an hour,

let's, let's cap that at 30 miles an hour. We would save thousands of lives, probably tens of thousands of lives in America. We don't do it. Are we just sociopathic murderers for not doing that? Is that like every day of our lives? Are we like saddam hussein level evil bastards for not doing that no we're not even thinking about it right it's like it's not even and and when you bring it up it's just kind of a curiosity it's like well yeah but that would be so boring to drive a maximum of 30 miles an hour it would take forever there'd be some other it'd be economic costs we totally get it with The point is well made. And likewise, if there was an equivalent number of car deaths, but they were being caused by murderers, right, then there would be an outcry and extreme measures would be taken to stop it. Yes. So, all those details really do matter. that i'll inject into this and i don't think it's too controversial it's just that perhaps the reason why i don't attribute all of the responsibility for the terrorist attacks to religion specifically

right and and the pernicious ideas that are in religion and all three of us are atheists right none of none of us like religion um is just that i recognize that one, the social and political context matters and there's a big driver for why people do the things they do, why they're attracted to an ideology, right? There's a reason why, you know, even though you have fundamentalist Christians in the United States, they're not blowing stuff up because they're relatively comfortable. No one's taken away their farms and things like that. And the second thing is just that I have to acknowledge that there is an asymmetry, right? In Northern Ireland, the Irish were blowing up bombs, right?

And they were doing that, I don't think, because they were contaminated by worse ideas than the British. There was a power asymmetry there, right? They didn't have the option to send in regiments of armoured cars and things like that. Like that was the only tactic they had. And I think we just have to acknowledge that there are asymmetries there of different kinds.

You pointed to one legitimate one, which is one of motivations and stated intentions and so on. But there's also asymmetries in terms of the relative power differential, and that defines what tactics are even available to you. One side has planes and can drop guided bombs. The other side doesn't. They send in guys on bloody motorbikes and paragliders or whatever. So that's just my point there.

Sam, I might have a last topic before we let you skip. you escape you have time you have time you have time for one last thing yeah i mean i i'm actually uh past my cutoff but what's the topic let's see how quickly can we touch it okay let's see if we can clear it um give me so what it is and then i'll see if it's possible i wanted to talk you know, pornography of doubt and conspiracism, taking account of it on the left and right, and in particular, the kind of growth of people who are very selective in their criticism of it, right? That they are documentarians of the opposing side, but not on their own side. And some questions about that. Okay. Yeah. I mean, just let's do it briefly because I do have to jump.

But yeah, I mean, I think I know where you're going, but feel free to sharpen it up with a specific example. Okay. So like I said, you know, you've raised the point quite articulately about the pornography of doubt and the various people, you know, that institutions aren't perfect and that,

you know, there are plenty of things that you can criticize in institutions. There are ideological things in various institutions that should be criticized and are criticized, but that we need institutions and that we should try to be fair in calling out whenever people are engaging in selective condemnation. And in that respect, I'm wondering about currently, for example, just to give one illustrative example for you to deal with. Douglas Murray has been very strong condemning all of the equivalents around the October 7th and the rise of anti-Semitism. Very, very vocal opponent of that, arguing with various people in a passionate way. On the other hand, he was a defender, him and various other people in that sphere, Jordan Peterson and so on, of Orban's government, which made use of anti-Semitic

tropes and rolled back various democratic things, the independence of the judiciary, and so on. And Ann Applebaum has kind of made this point talking about intellectual clerics who defend authoritarianism, right? And I'm not talking about people who are MAGA, Trump, right-wing maniacs, right? I'm more talking about that kind of selective application. And that if you were concerned, for example, about anti-Semitism and rising authoritarianism and ideologies that are anti-liberal, you should be very concerned about things like what is happening in Hungary or Turkey, just as much as you are with things going on in the broader Muslim world. Yes. Yeah, I agree. Except emergencies make strange bedfellows, right?

And Douglas has been focused much more on the erosion of basic sanity in Europe than I have been, right? So I have much more of an American perspective on a lot of these questions. So the refugee crisis in 2015 that hit Europe to an extraordinary degree hit America much less. And Douglas was all over that. And I think that's probably when he had some entanglement with Orban. But I really don't know the details there. I know Douglass to be an incredibly sane and courageous voice on the specific issues we've been talking about, voice on the specific issues we've been talking about, specifically Islamism, jihadism, the identitarian politics of the left that has blinded so many people to the threat of jihadism and Islamism in the West. I mean, the fact that you have 300,000 people, uh, coming out in essentially in support of Hamas after October 7th in the streets of London. Um, I think that's unsustainable.

I mean, that's, I, you know, I share Douglas's alarm about that. I mean, Douglas, you know, you have people, you have MPs, you know, stepping down from parliament who, because they're, they're, they perceive their security concerns to be too difficult around these issues in the UK. I just, you know, I mean, the truth is, I don't even think Douglas can spend much time in the UK and, and be safe at this point. And it's not because he's a bigot who's antagonized otherwise rational people. No, there's a stealth Islamist jihadist takeover of the public space in the UK at these moments.

And the authorities, the institutions don't quite know what to do about it, right? I mean, they're completely ineffectual with respect to policing this problem and getting rid of imams who are actually preaching for the destruction of the UK, right? I mean, the barbarians have been let inside the gates. There's no question of that. And it's a much bigger problem in the UK than it is in the United States. And, you know, at this point, it's important that the people in the US figure out how not to make the mistakes that many Western European countries have made with respect to the spread of Islamism. I'm not talking about all Muslims. I'm talking about Islamists and jihadists.

In fact, the first people I would want to see immigrate to my society are actual secular Muslims or, you know, better yet, ex-Muslims. Right. I mean, those are the ex-Muslims are the most valuable people on Earth as far as I'm concerned with respect to this issue. Right. You know, give me give me, you know, a hundred million people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Yasmeen Mohamed or Sarah Hader. These people are exactly the people you want in your society, right? And then after them, you want actual liberal Muslims, right? So this is not a Muslim ban on immigration, but this idiotic idea that you can absorb an endless number of people who have zero interest in assimilating. And what's more, they're importing a triumphal vision of Islamic supremacy into your society and anti-Semitism and misogyny. end misogyny right and douglas is living on the front line of that clash of civilizations in an extraordinarily brave way right and his security can you you know you you you his security security concerns are not security because you would want and they're coming from only one group

of people right predictably right yeah i can imagine that so i maybe i can tune it up the point sam a bit which is that granted various concerning tendencies on the social justice left and you you can there are different opinions about the degree to which you know that has captured all scientific institutions all educational media but given the people that we cover in this podcast, right, the most kind of unhinged guru types who are constantly setting themselves up as the solution to this problem, right? They're saying, don't trust academics. They lied about COVID. They lie about, you know, men and women, all of it. It's all bullshit.

Don't trust the government, the CDC, everything. It's all corrupt. And then as an alternative, present themselves, their podcast, which you've talked about, you know, the problems with podcast to stand. But in that, there's a kind of, you know, what you talked about a pornography of doubt where you have people that are then posing populist right wing alternatives. Douglas Murray was at the National Conservatism Conference in the UK and the Art Conference. Those are not the moderate right-wing

groups like Rory Stewart. Orban is not moderate right. That's populist right-wing quite extreme right. Let me just short-circuit this because I am truly out of time, but I've never spoken with Douglas about any of that but I've never spoken with Douglas about

any of that. I have not spoken with Douglas all that much. I would certainly be eager to talk to him about all of that and see what he was thinking and what he thinks going forward. There might be some genuine daylight between us on those issues, but I can see in extremists, I can see the impulse to, I mean, you sort of have to pick the allies you can find, right? And in certain contexts, there are inconvenient alliances, right? I mean, and I could imagine if things were quite a bit worse in the US with respect to the derangement of the left and the threat of, the real threat of Islamism subverting much of what I care about in American society, which is where we are in the UK, honestly. When I saw those protests after October 7th, I thought, okay, London is ruined,

right? That's just an awful situation that this is the number of people you can get out in support of atrocity, right? If that were the situation in the US, I might find myself on stage with, you know, quasi-theocratic Christians, right, who are like the last people who I could find to see eye to eye with me on this particular subject, right? Honestly, the only reliable people in the United States for the longest time on this subject, and to some degree, to a first approximation, it's still true, are fundamentalist Christians. They're the only people who don't, you don't have to burn endless amounts of gas trying to convince that jihadists actually believe in paradise, right? I mean, when I'm in an academic conference talking to anthropologists i can't get anyone to agree that anyone believes in paradise right it's just they they think it's all economics it's all politics it's all it's all propaganda it's all posturing you have to find a christian you have to kind of find a christianist in the crowd to, to, to who knows what it's like to believe in heaven.

Right. I know, I know. I know you got it. I know you got to disappear, but I have this, I have to push back at that because I'm, I'm involved in the area about extremism research and I've met,

uh, like you, I know you say that often, but do you know, do you know Scott, a Tran? I do know Scott, a Tran. And I, you... Do you know Scottie Tran? I do know Scottie Tran.

Do you know Richard Schwader? Yes. Both of them, face to face, have denied that anyone believes in paradise to me. Right, yes, but there's a much bigger... On Scottie Tran's trans count it's all just bonding among fictive kin you know male male bonding among among fictive kin it's all just like you know soccer players bonding it's got nothing to do with paradise it's got nothing to do with the expectation martyrdom and commitment to secret values is his model so if your secret value is that there's a particular religious one,

he would also put that in the thing. But in general, I would just say- Pure delusion. This is pure delusion. But Aryeh Kruglansky, for example, or various others, there's a lot of models and a lot of them have prominent positions for ideology and take seriously. The probably, you know, quest for significance is one of the most well-known and that can slot in very easily, religious quest for significance. So I just want to push back now because i would encourage you to go to those conferences and see i will have been i mean unfortunately it sounds like i i just had the misfortune of of arguing with the dumb anthropologists but yeah um honestly this is what i've encountered and the very very last thing sam is, is just that, you know, so I know your democracies and stuff, it is not right to

like side with the far right people who are rolling back democratic institutions. And there is a strong moderate left and right, you know, like the next leader in the UK is likely to be Keir Starmer. That's not Jeremy Corbyn. The leader in the Democrats is Joe Biden. Compared to Trump, compared to figures like Nigel Farage, I don't see them in any more sense. I will agree with Anne Applebaum all day long about anything that happens in Eastern Europe. I mean, she's a national treasure as far as I can tell.

So that would be a great conversation. I mean, I will try to get a, I'll try to put Anne Applebaum on a podcast with Douglas Murray and see where we get to, right? That could be fun. Yeah, on Hungary, on Hungary. That would be a pleasure. So I know we're over the allotted time and uh as as predictable uh you know

we had some points of disagreement but really appreciate you coming back sam and uh yeah the discussing thanks for the opportunity to browbeat both of you and your audience yeah like you said good to be proud of you. Yeah, take care, you guys. Till next time. That was a conversation. That was

thanks to Sam for coming on and I think he outlined his perspective on various points and yep and then some and then some yes indeed indeed and we didn't cover everything that we wanted to I didn't speak as you know well as I would have hoped that at certain points and whatnot but you know that's the nature of the beast that's yeah that's We're not interviewers. We're not professional interviewers, okay?

We're just academics. We're just men, Chris. We're just men. We're just normal, normal men. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, we had our chance to say what we thought when we covered, when Sam wasn't present, when we covered him in our thing.

We had all the time in the world to say all the things we wanted then. This is our thing where we let the person we're talking about say their piece. And Sam did, and fair play to him. Oh, yeah. There was one thing that I wanted to mention, and it's probably better to put it at the end of the podcast when only the hardcores are left, Matt. Because early in the interview, I kind of pulled Sam up about not having on experts in regards to his discussion of the lab

and he mentioned that after he heard our episode he did think that you know that might have been useful but he he doesn't have a time machine so he wouldn't be aware of those experts in advance of hearing our episode right but i did think i remembered but i i didn't you know want to say because i wasn't sure but i went back and checked i did email sam and suggest the specific experts that we interviewed. And let me just read it. Given your recent comments on responsible use of platforms for the potential issues of elevating outdoor perspectives without sufficient pushback,

it seems a good opportunity to demonstrate healthy practices, and you can even put the criticisms raised to the relevant experts. Matt and Alina's portrayal is that scientists have misrepresented things, in some cases lied, and that their emails revealed that they were hiding their true opinions, likely due to being in favor of risky research or having conflicts of interest. This strikes me as very similar to how Joe Brett and Heller and their anti-vax guests talk about mainstream doctors. They're a bunch of good, relevant experts who could explain the reasons that Alina and Matt

have an outlier perspective in this topic and why their portrayal events are skewed. I'd recommend Stuart Neal, Christian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, or Michael Rorway. All of them are people who have careers dedicated to virus, have published on the evidence for COVID origins, are supportive of investigations, and have had experiences of being targeted personally by the more extreme elements of the online lab-led community. Your guest presented virologists as sometimes seeking to intimidate those who are just seeking the truth i think any of them or really any publicly known virologist could offer you an alternative perspective on that um and there we go right and i i said i'm sure you're not keen to dedicate another episode on the topic but i do think it's worth considering and if you want to see some detailed articles blah blah blah and uh sam basically responded saying that he might look

at it again but you know thought that they were fairly balanced in their coverage and then i responded explaining that okay well i disagree but we will then uh speak to relevant experts and attempt to address it so i'm i'm just saying this because it would be unfair for me to level that charge a little bit but i think given that context that i wasn't being unfair to sam in suggesting that the responsible thing would have been you know for him to do the podcast that we did because i did suggest that at the time i'm just saying mark just saying yes i remember that i remember that you don't need it yeah so time machine not necessary just listening to chris yeah i don't think we ever like like made a big deal out of that at the time but when we had those

three scientists on your initial idea was basically hoping that Sam would have them on to talk to him to provide the alternative point of view. Yeah, because he's got a much bigger audience. Yeah, and that's where Alina Chan and Ridley made their thing, so that's what made sense. But he wasn't up for that, so we had them on our little show as a second um choice yeah a fallback correct so just i'm just correcting the record so yeah i checked that after we had the

discussion and yeah you have the receipts i've got the receipts the very long-winded emails that I sent. That was just a section of the log eval. So yeah, that's the way the cookie crumbles. But in any case, you know, I think now, Matt, we move on. We look to the future, to all the gurus that we're going to cover. But we should also consider what other people have said about us and just have a little quick gander at the reviews that we've received if you don't object all good i assume all good well actually they are because we haven't received very many recently so so everyone can get

on hey i'm not saying filled up with bad ones you know good ones okay as well funny ones appreciate it humorously bad ones. Like, really over the top ones. We've already established five stars, write whatever you want. That's all. And so I'm going to read maybe just one so as not to be indulgent because they're all so nice. This one is from xylophilum792, and it's titled Preposterous.

Five stars. A truly remarkable cacophony of brogue and schwa i have encountered something profound in this pair of polymaths no they are not the kings of seal manning nor the kings of straw manning in truth i believe they are the kings of mud manning and each mud man has become a brick and each brick placed on the disgustingly splendid novo novo tower of nouveau tower of guru babel the fact that it's even plausible is stunning that's really good i like that this guy gets it this guy gets it yeah that's it i'm not going to attempt to pronounce his username again. Pick an easier username.

But Matt, speaking of people with easy usernames, we have Patreon shoutouts to give. We do need to give those out. We have to thank the lovely people that support us. There's lots of good things on our Patreon. There's bonus material. There's the Coding Academia series, 25, 30 episodes. Who who knows there's all the videos we recorded in japan there's just just general discussions there's lots of stuff there and get behind the scenes peaks advanced releases it's all there it's all there what can you not get

by joining the patreon um you can't get you can't get milk good point matt you can't get milk can't get access to the meditation app we haven't developed one so there are many things you can't get that was a lie you can get you can get parasocial experiences and a small amount of additional content right you get more more of us that's what you i'm sorry about that but that is what you get now conspiracy hypothesizers i'm going to shout them out first matt okay here we go mabui austin dr badmouth martin nagy praise be to linda flick chuck podcast fanatic iris Linda, Fake Chuck, Podcast Fanatic, Iris Zezedlej, Johnny Marengo, shit like that, Dew Tran, Privateer, Michael Hoops, Johan Swan, Michael Delaney, Marco Rafjan, Werner Lotz, John Kuzma, Sam Kandler, Sean, Sean Dawson, Anthony B, Emma

Chant, Freya Winter and Gwen Boyle. Thank you all. You know, the charming thing about the way you read out those names is that you have trouble with the difficult names, but you also have trouble with the simple names. Like, I swear to God, if we had someone called John, you'd go, we have John. It's just, I just like to keep people on their toes. That's all there is. It's just for their amusement.

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 when you hear these george soros stories well he's trying to destroy the country from within we are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses no way brett you lying son of a bitch you're advancing conspiracy theories all the time sorry yeah he's just been on the wrong page lately so now matt are revolutionary thinkers hayden bruce thomas tigger ben mitchell sebastian john Ben Mitchell, Sebastian, John Hand, maker of memes, Neil Hornsbury, Chris from the Rewired Soul podcast, n n purha starfish pancake david rutland patrick garfer jason odar jared farrell simon houghton and yogi jaeger good names yeah very good names so these are the ones that have

leveled up from mere hypothesizing to getting a theory together of some kind they did they dig it in there. They can get into the code in academia. Lucky bastards. 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. Yo, by the way, what's his face? Jordan Hall has converted to Christianity.

Oh, has he? Yeah. Seems like something he? Yeah. Seems like something he would do. It does, yeah. It's not really that shocking whenever a sense maker comes out as religious, kind of like, yeah, that's what I thought. So now the last one, Matt, the galaxy brain gurus, the big dogs,

they're a rare breed as they often are. And we've got Zach Katopodis. That's one of them. Okay. And apart from that, maybe this is one. I can't really tell, but there's someone jane that could be it's it's it's hard to tell because the amounts are just a little bit weird in the way they're presented in different currencies how sad is that only one new or no it's that's not possibly true it's just in this sheet that i'm looking at the way i'm searching that there's

only one that's easy to see so that's okay well we have day jobs anyway so it's fine it's fine either pablo gonzalez maybe if not he's he's been upgraded in his fangs thank him anyway thank you yeah thank you yeah we tried to warn people yeah like was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine.

Yeah. So that's it, Matt. We're done. I had an existential moment. Just, well, where are we what's happened yeah well we're at the end that's what's happened we've come to the end yeah we have come to the end i'm gonna go i think and stare at the sun in the morning as the dew drops off the leaves. Well, you do that. I'm going to go find a moving body of water and stand by that.

Get your negative ions topped up. Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, if you see any dogs, just make sure they're fully topped up on their testosterone. And they'll thank you for it, Matt. They'll thank you for it later. I don't want any weak womanly dogs in my life chris i don't have time for it no shouldn't have

neutered them really but what can do can't go back in time just top up their testosterone now that's right you can't tack it back on you have to just give them testosterone yeah you're like santa claus for dogs returning to testosterone levels. They're still in T. All right. Well, we've gone mad. So we'll end it here and see you next time for Sean Carroll. Sean Carroll. Sean Carroll.

That'll be good. Okay. Ciao. Bye. Thank you.