Decoding the Gurus - Sam Harris: Transcending it All?

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

Sam Harris is the subject today and a man who needs no introduction. Although he's come up and he's come on, we've never actually (technically) decoded him. There is no Gurometer score! A glaring omission and one that needs correcting. It would have been easy for us to cherry-pick Sam being extremely good on conspiracy theories, or extremely controversial on politics, but we felt that neither would be fair. So we opted for a general and broad-ranging recent interview he did with Chris Williamson. Love him or loathe him, it's a representative piece of Sam Harris content, and therefore good material for us.Sam talks about leaving Twitter, and how transformative that was for his life, then gets into his favourite topic: Buddhism, consciousness, and living in the moment. That's the kind of spiritual kumbaya topics that Sam reports causing him little pain online but Chris and Matt- the soulless physicalists and p-zombies that they are- seek to destroy even that refuge. On the other hand, they find themselves determined by the very forces of the universe to nod their meat puppet heads in furious agreement as Sam discusses the problems with free speech absolutism and reactionary conspiracism. That's just a taste of what's to come in this extra-ordinarily long episode to finish off the year. What's the DTG take? You'll have to listen to find out all the details, but we do think there is some selective interpretation of religions at hand and some gut reactions to wokeness that leads to some significant blindspots. So is Sam Harris an enlightened genius, a neo-conservative warmonger, a manipulative secular guru? Or is he, in the immortal words of Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod Beeblebrox's head specialist, "just zis guy, you know?".Sam was DTG's white whale of 2023, but we'll let you be the judge as to whether or not we harpooned him, or whether he's swimming off contentedly, unscathed, into the open ocean.LinksSam Harris - Take Back Control Of Your Mind (4K) | Modern Wisdom 661DTG Special Episode: Sam Harris & Meditation is all you needDTG Special: Interview with Sam Harris on Gurus, Tribalism & the Culture WarDTG Special Episode: Interview with Evan Thompson on Buddhist ExceptionalismDTG Interview with Worobey, Andersen & Holmes: The Lab LeakMaking Sense 311: Did SARS-CoV-2 Escape from a Lab? A Conversation with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan

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 what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown. With me is my partner in crime, in defeating crime, Chris Kavanagh, the Robin to my Batman, a young mind himself that I'm trying to cultivate and educate. Welcome, Chris. Some would say grooming. In a good way, in the best of senses. In the way that you groom a...

Horse? I was going to say a bush. I meant like a plant, you know. Good, good, good. Yeah, so with that auspicious start, hello, Matt. Hello. Audio listeners cannot say that Matt is rocking cat burglar chic today. He's got a kind of hype bandana, sunglasses, a floral pattern shirt.

He's like an 80s drug dealer. Or maybe that's just in my mind, Matt. Don't listen to him, fellas. This is like when you're telling people that I say all kinds of mean and nasty things off air. an idiot drug dealer or maybe that's just in my mind not don't listen to him fellas this is this is like when you're telling people that i say all kinds of mean and nasty things all fair we all know that's untrue is that you're just trying to cover up for the fact that you're the mean one i'm as nice as apple pie yeah i know you like scott adams i don't like scott adams it's we've got differences of opinions this is true and actually it's gonna be worse on the episode today i know

i can feel it in my bones no it'll be fine it'll be fine don't worry about it so we have a three hour episode just on tau lynn's self-biography no that's not true we don't get a three episode about his cat just to start to really let's just in on the cat, find out what's going on there. Yeah, we didn't. Actually, the interesting thing with the Red Scare episode is that we did get quite a lot of feedback from it. But mostly the feedback was this was one of our hardest episodes to get through because the three people involved, the hosts and Talyn, the guest, greeted on a great many people matt so it was something of a dysphoric experience to be subjected to that for multiple hours so yeah there you go that's good as long as the disparaging comments were directed at them and not at us then that's fine i didn't mind it chris i mean some episodes are really hard for me you thought that takes

no no i just said subconsciously on some level like i don't want to be insulting but subconsciously on some level my brain just decided okay these are idiots and it's same as being at a party you're trapped in a conversation and they're just blathering away but you know you just sort of switch off and you don't it doesn't impinge the eagle-eared listeners amongst us will have noted that Mark called them idiots, but he said it in a nice tone. So I just want to flag that for people. I said I didn't want to be mean just before I was mean. Yeah.

So it's fine. I'm just decoding you for people's help because they can't seem to realize the relative distribution of meanness on the podcast. I just have an overnourished accent okay not the same thing you just sound like a terrorist or someone who's after other terrorists who have stolen his child or something you know you have a very special set of skills that's right one or the other neither of them sound particularly friendly true there's a there's a funny clip with isn't that liam neeson for some maybe it was for Children in Need or whatever, but trying to... Oh, be nice.

Yeah. Yeah, that was, I enjoyed that. I saw that recently, actually. The one that he did for Ricky Gervais, where he is trying to do comedy, but he keeps improvising that he's riddled with cancer and stuff, like going very dark places. That's also good. It's from Extras. He realized he was typecast right with that first blockbuster movie what was it called taken taken of course and he just he just rolled with it didn't he yeah he went with it yeah the surprising thing i think was that he became an action star so late in life i guess he was in star wars so that was actiony but he wasn't known no as a action hero there's a particular variety of male actor not all men get better in age i certainly haven't but like mads mickelson

for instance like he was built later in life you know it just suits them is he later in life who's he he's pretty old you don't know mads mickelson oh my god maybe i do is he the guy that was in succession no not even close okay no well that's a scandinavian or some variety close nearby that we usually get that wrong so yeah so oh yeah the the other one other thing to say before i forget about the red scare though, was I was thinking that their audience wouldn't take kindly to us, right? And our particular brand of deconstruction. They like deconstruction. They wouldn't like that kind of deconstruction.

But I think I didn't fully anticipate that their audience is like them, right? So they're not going to listen to something that is like a critical dissection of something because it's too cringe why would they bother yeah it's so Liam yeah so that was the funny thing is they have a very active subreddit and stuff but they're just the you know too busy posting memes or commenting on Dash's Instagram or whatever yeah to pay attention to any of that so that was funny it can be surprising a little bit, the internet subcultures that are most reactive or that will

cause you the most grief. And I shouldn't have been surprised, I guess. But an example of the kind of community that's not like that is the lab leak community, right? Like you say anything, even vaguely critical of the idea that the COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab then they will do deep research on you as you and I have been the subject of when I say deep it's the most deep somebody pinned me down as they did this read saying that I was moonlighting in Reading I think they pinpointed my address to Reading and thought I was some account talking about taking drugs at these raves but i was like one no and two i'm clearly in japan like from the very basic just look at my twitter feed for the past 24 hours and you'll probably see some food or something but they hadn't done that

they managed to decide you know i was secretly on the like living in reading and promoting drugs and they tried to get me in trouble yeah you know with the university by saying look at this isn't this professor promoted drugs so it's like it's not me and also it's such a strange light of attack and it was because of lab leak stuff right uh so well it makes sense i guess the kind of people that fancy themselves as these you know internet sleuths getting to the bottom of things and whatever they're totally shithouse at it on yeah they're very bad but they overestimate themselves completely i'm imagine them doing like a geolocating video you know those geolocating videos we've figured out he's living in a hole

in the northern territoryritory of Australia. His real name is Jack. Yeah, there was that. And then there was also somebody claimed that they worked out, I think because I received comments or something from Peter Daszak, one of the virologists, that I was on the pay of EcoHealth Alliance. I think you were too. Of course. Apparently.

But yeah, so, you know, and they were like, I don't see any other reason why they would be critical of the love just like use your imagination that also i really wish people paid me money to criticize conspiracy i mean well i guess they do with the you know that but i mean yep i take it i take it gladly i won. I won't take money from the gambling industry, but I'd take money from some public health official. I take money from Anthony Fauci. I'll say specifically. He turned up in my house with a briefcase full of unmarked bills. We're done.

We're done. Well, that's that. That's the feedback from Rest Care. And that's us shilling. We've done our own shilling. Nobody is hunting us. So come on. Where's your dark money? Get us on side. We're doing pro bono shilling we've done our own shilling nobody is hunting us so come on where's your dark money get us on side we're doing pro bono shilling well i will i will say because it's it's relevant

to the episode that we are going to record today which is on sam harris right now we've had sam harris before people will say you've decoded him multiple times he was on he argued with you for multiple hours uh-uh we never did a full-length episode despite saying that we would on sam he has never been entered into the grometer he's only hovered around it we did a special episode a small segment he did about meditation and it's come up he has come up in conversation from time to time but we haven't done a full length decoding and really we should have he's one of the big fish in the secular guru pond that we should have pulled out smacked him with the head roasted with thyme and garlic yeah yeah i was thinking way how much you know oh oh i see yeah no, no. Hold him up and take a photo. Yeah.

No, no. Yeah, that's true. You're technically correct, Chris, which is the best kind of correct. Sam Harris, you know, a polarizing figure. He has his fans, has his detractors. And in our audience on the subreddit, whenever people do little polls, he's always polarizing. You know, there's kind of 50% like him and 50% hate him. And then they

fight in the comments over how bad he is and famously i've disagreed with him on a couple occasions but i also agree with him on a bunch of stuff and this is why it made covering him a little bit difficult because could pick an episode where i strongly disagree with him and just use that to highlight where we diverge or could choose an episode where we mostly agree and then it would be an artificial presentation of similarity he helpfully did an interview with chris williamson a couple of months ago where i think he showcased different aspects of his interest and many people commented that it was not a particularly scintillating piece of interview content because they knew everything that Sam was going to say,

like it covered topics that he often covers. But for us, that's good, Matt, because that's not being unrepresentative, right? Yes, it's a representative sample. Indeed. It wasn't scintillating to listen to. I think I've heard all of those things in various shapes and forms a hundred times or more but you're quite correct so yep it needs to be done let's do it and chris williamson this is the young podcaster the up-and-coming roganite in a way the british roganite who hosts modern wisdom on youtube full disclosure, he has sent you. Yeah, I've been bought in advance. I'm disclosing this, Matt, because it's important. Part of the reason that I'm going to be so sharp on this episode is that I'm consuming new tonic, Chris Williams' productivity drink, which he sent over to me in Japan, a case of them, whenever I was making disparaging comments about the amount of science

or various things that had went into it. And I have to say, I have to report that I was rather skeptical. I'm not endorsing all the health claims or these kind of things. All I'm saying is I was trying to stop drinking my sweet coffee, as everybody that listens knows. And I have succeeded by replacing it with this new tonic productivity drink. And the key element, I think, which might have been lacking in my other substitution attempts is the 120 milligrams of caffeine, which is in. There's also cognoscent, panics, ginseng, some other ingredients, but I think it's the caffeine. I think it's the caffeine that it's a caffeine that doesn't but i owe him a personal debt of gratitude but i have to say might be more positively

disposed because yeah i've been trying to get off that damn sweet coffee for two years so okay there you go if chris seems like he's going easy on chris then you'll know why it's gonna be annoying isn't it yeah thank you yeah god's sake i mean just drink whiskey and black coffee like a normal person but listen you should do a controlled test you need to drink some red bull i tried that it didn't work no so this is why it's better matt because it's a bigger can or more caffeine or whatever but the kick is war red bull was my substitute of choice, but what I would do was I'd buy the Red Bull

and then I'd take the coffee as well. But this time it feels like the right mix. So look at that. Okay, Chris, if you're listening, you got a big infomercial at the start of the podcast before we go in to cover what you and Sam have said, but I do appreciate signing over. And it's a very nice little cam with a big eye on it and stuff so it'll probably make him a gazillionaire so there you

go fair enough yeah hey side note um a few days ago i tried a vape that had been mixed up by someone with what mixed up with what with flavors you know by an enthusiast like all artificial flavors they're all basically the same right the same flavors wink wink are you hinting at unless it's something that says no there's no winking there's no winking there's no winking oh okay okay you actually mean flavors okay okay i wasn't sure i was like is this vape speak for the wacky wacky no no but he made a recipe which i tried which is a red bull recipe i swear to god chris williamson no chris williamson made a recipe, which I tried, which is a Red Bull recipe. I swear to God, Chris. Chris Williamson? No.

Chris Williamson made a Red Bull? No, he's got nothing to do with it. Somebody I know made a vape. Oh, someone you know. Okay. I was like, what? He's saying you. He's playing us off.

He can do everything, man. He can make energy drinks. He's got a beer recipe and his own podcast. What can't he do? I just wanted to say it's spooky. It's spooky to vape a vape that tastes exactly like like red bull it's really weird was it good that's pretty good i mean you know i liked it as much as i like red bull which is you know moderately okay so we're going to get into the episode there is something i wasn't sure when to play this at the start or

the end because i feel that it might prejudice people towards a certain appreciation of this content but given that i just gave such a ringing endorsement of new tonic i feel i have to even it out so this is a small sound file that a listener played in advance because you know we told people we're going to cover this episode so they listened and they made this little clip that i'll play for you this is my house take your fucking shoes off. Right. Right. Right. So she just slapped me. Yeah. Three and a half hour treatise on caffeine.

Yeah. Yeah. I wrote this on a beach. And I have my shoes. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote this on a beach. And I have my shoes.

Nice soft pads there. Nice soft pads there. Nice soft pads. Sorry, Chris, did Bad Stats do this? No, he didn't. It wasn't him. It's an anonymous clip donator. And it wasn't me because we know my ability to make musical clips from the tech broker season. So, yeah, anonymous, Matt.

They shall remain unnamed that's fair well to chris williamson or sam harris if you're listening we've played people making ridiculous supercut songs from our voices on the show too so you know fair's fair that wasn't bad i thought that was like nice yeah it was just like clips yeah the one we played of ourselves might have sounded like complete freaks yeah that's how it works all right so now sam harris who's he why don't i introduce him for you matt he is a podcaster primarily now but previously an author, public intellectual, pundit, writes articles, writes books, gets in scrapes online and in writings with different people. Originally famous for writing The End of Faith, a kind of new atheist treatise that came out

shortly after 9-11. And then after that, various books, mainly criticizing religion, but in particular, Islam at the start. And then moving on to look at culture war topics, but also stuff about consciousness and meditation and all that. We'll get into it. A lot of it is covered in this. And it's possible that he may come on after the episode to highlight where he disagrees or not we have a right to reply and also we were talking to sam about coming on beforehand so no just flag that up and advance so we are aware that's a possibility so yeah yeah are you going

to give an introduction to chris williamson? I mean, we've covered him before, but his career has progressed in leaps and bounds, I think, since we first covered him. Any updates to give there? You can do it. Well, I don't really know. I mean, I know he's doing very well. He gets lots of big names and he's moved to, has he moved to Austin, Texas? I'm pretty sure he has definitely moved to the US and his podcast channel currently has 1.5 million

subscribers so he's getting up there it's getting bigger nipping at the heels of the big boys and he does these videos now on occasion where there's kind of very high production values actually the sam harris video is recorded in this warehouse it looks a bit like a Fight Club setting with, you know, extremely high production quality. You listened to the audio, so you won't have heard any of that. No, I saw the set. Yeah, yeah. All very nice.

That's the new chic for this kind of interview. You get yourself a library or an abandoned warehouse or somewhere cool. Set up some spotlighting. And although we have more than a few bones to pick with Chris, I think, Chris, you're on record, at least privately, I'm going to out you, as saying that if he did knock off old Joe Rogan off the top perch, it would be no bad thing. No bad thing.

Well, yeah, because he's not anti-vaxxing and he's not like someone cheering when a state goes like Republican or something like that. Like Rogan, every week you can see some inane clip of Rogan spouting conspiracy nonsense and just right wing polemical rhetoric, right? Dressed up in his faux centrist stuff. And it's, I mean, he's terrible, right? Like he was such a strong outlet for anti-vaccine. So from there, it's not like, there's very few people that, you know, with the exceptions of your Alex Jones or Dave Rubin or whatever, that I would not prefer to see like the from Joe Rogan. But Chris Williamson, he exists in, well, he would say that he doesn't exist in the manosphere because the people in the manosphere criticize him for being too cuck blue pill like normie, right? He's not giving the kind of red meat that the manosphere wants, right? But if you look at a bunch of the podcasts like The Dark Side of Casual Relationships,

Louise Perry, Are Women Actually Happy with Modern Dating? a podcast like the dark side of casual relationships louise perry are women actually happy with modern dating how can men take charge of their lives man up and get your life together what is wrong with modern women so there is something of a theme there and i think the way that he would say it is it's about self-improvement and you know advice for men primarily men though his audience has both yeah so it's it's like that but you know you do also get people like i'm just having a look here the last that are there. There's Jocko Willink as well. But a lot of the other people are health and fitness people or psychologists or this kind

of thing. So he's in that space, like maybe closer to the hooberman side of the field but yeah he deals with culture war topics and he and he i would say there's a rather clear skew to the right but it's not as bad as trigonometry and i think his content is not overtly political as the trigonometry stuff but it depends on the episode, to be honest. Sure. Okay, a fair summary. What's next, Chris? What's next? Well, why don't we go with a little intro thing? My guest today is Sam Harris.

He's a best-selling author, moral philosopher, neuroscientist, and a podcaster. The entire world seems to be at each other's throats, and finding peace in the chaos is becoming increasingly difficult. But there are tools at our disposal to improve the quality of our lives. As Sam says on this episode, wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend.

Expect to learn what Sam's life is like after Twitter, Sam's reflections on his famous talk on death and the present moment, how to live a life full of meaning, how to take your mindfulness off the cushion and into the real world, Sam's thoughts on Tucker Carlson's move, his opinion on Andrew tate rfk jr andrew hubeman and jordan peterson whether we have reached peak woke sam's take on young western men converting to islam and much more he did our job quite well and you can hear there he's got a very good broadcast of always much more polished than us he's a pro yeah if it was

from us it would have a lot of stuff in it so well at least me you maybe not so many but i'm just saying the delivery is pretty good right and sam sam harris as well has a pretty good delivery when you hear him talk so you know these are pros yeah mark these are pros yeah i think that's probably the best way to understand Chris Whittamson, following on from your introduction to him there, which is I think first and foremost, he's a pro. He's looking to make a career as an interviewer on the podcasting scene, and he's making one, and he's very focused on doing that.

And, you know, I think that's probably the key thing more than anything else. Now, that first thing, they talked a little bit about social media, various things there. And Sam has a famously fractious relationship with social media sites. So here we go a bit chat about that. And it's not just anonymity. Anonymity is part of it. But it's also people, you know, who are captured by their echo chamber, which you're not seeing, right? Like it's this illusion that you're inhabiting the same space with the people you're in conversation with.

But in reality, they're talking to their fans. You're talking to your fans. You have weaponized your fans against their fans and vice versa. Without even necessarily thinking in those terms, those are the network dynamics of what's happening. At one point, I recognized that barring some bad health outcomes among friends and family over the years,

objectively, the worst things that had happened to me in a decade were the result of my engagement with Twitter. And in many cases, the only bad things that had happened to me in a decade of any significance at all was born of Twitter. Fair to say not a big fan of the Twitter. This comes up quite a lot in Sam's own episodes and in all our conversations. He takes the leaving of Twitter to be highly significant and he regards social media as hugely deranging of his priorities and other people's priorities and that kind of thing. I think for Sam, it's symbolic or illustrates a broader theme. We could say more about that. Has Sam got more to say about this?

Yes, he does. Here's what life after Twitter is like. What is life like after Twitter? It is immensely improved to a degree that I find actually embarrassing in retrospect, because it's proof that I was needlessly degrading the quality of my life for 12 years, technically. I think it was probably five years where it was actually degrading the quality of my life. But it was, I mean, in retrospect, it was a psychological experiment that we all got enrolled in and no one read the consent form,

much less signed it. And it has given, for me, if you're someone who has a significant platform and you're at all controversial, I think it gives you a sense of what the world is, which is basically false and destructive to your feeling, the feelings you have for the rest of humanity. I mean, it was sort of incrementally like a slow ratchet, but never to be reversed, often undetectable, but still nevertheless always in one direction, changing me into a misanthrope. Again, it's fair to say that he regards this as very important, right? 12 years of his life,

essentially, is balance thrown out of whack because of a social experiment that he didn't read the terms and conditions for i know a lot of people matt some people might say that you and i have the same pathology right of twitter addictions and i might lend credence to that but i can't help at times when people are talking about social media in this way thinking you know at times i just stopped using twitter for media in this way, thinking, you know, at times I just stopped using Twitter for a couple of weeks or whatever when it annoyed me too much. The issue is when you're at that scale, you can end up trending or something like that.

But I guess the issue for me is just exercise self-will and don't use it if you don't like it. I know a lot of people are wringing their hands about what social media has wrought on society i'm not saying it doesn't have all these damaging impacts but i just feel like stop doing that it's i guess it's the same as me with like coffee just don't drink it yeah yeah i have thoughts do you have any more clips though chris to illustrate this i do so uh here is well one of the last on this theme about, you know, is social media overall harmful for society? Do you think about how far it's set us back? Is it a net negative, net positive overall, do you think? Well, I think it's a net negative. I think it's a massive

opportunity cost for almost everybody. I just think where, you know, you look at what you're doing and not doing based on your engagement with these platforms. I mean, you're not tending to read good, long books anymore. At minimum, even if it's your job to read those books, it's become harder to do that. And I wasn't certainly noticing that for myself. It has served to fragment our attention and our lives in ways that just can't be good. Even if, again, even if your diet of information is almost entirely positive, there's this fragmentation effect. You know, it's like you're just, I mean, I notice people, certainly I notice young people now who are, who appear almost neurologically incapable of watching a great movie from

beginning to end without interruption he's sort of going a bit broader there in terms of not just about twitter but about internet media more generally kids today yeah kids today and i've got kids of various ages and there is truth in everything that sam is alluding to. And, you know, I know people a bit like Sam who have noticed that being on Twitter or other social media has really affected the quality of life. And it's invariably the case, I don't know about Sam, but it's invariably the case of the other people that they are unable to exercise self-control in terms of not reacting to things and, you know, not sort of, I guess, censoring themselves in a way and say, hey, maybe I don't need to broadcast this controversial

political opinion about whatever, trans issues, Israel and Hamas. You know, maybe I don't need to voice that because I don't want to deal with all of the blowback it'll attract. You know, if I look at my Twitter, I guess I'm one of those people that Sam was thinking of who use it in a relatively innocuous way. The last one was, I love Indian food with a photo of my cooking. I was promoting a survey

for getting a baseline for one of my students who are testing people's cognitive abilities against GPT-4. Another one was about the theme song to Monkey Magic. before another one was about the theme song to monkey magic and none of that caused me any hassles i think i made three or four tweets over 48 hours so you can use twitter in a way i think that doesn't really bother you is that because you're just

not popular enough that nobody cares well that's definitely part definitely part of it. I do have, Chris, I have 10,000 followers now. I think, hang on, let me check. I do. I've got 10,000 followers. How about that? I'm not knocking your following. That's not Sam Harris territory. Sam Harris has a million or however many.

Exactly. That's right. So, you know, that's a fair point. Your experience will differ depending on that. I also have notifications turned off for people that I don't follow. So it's fun. I mean, I definitely appreciate and sympathize with Sam's experience. But I'm just pointing out that you can use social media in a way that doesn't affect your life in a negative way. I mean, I have opinions

about controversial things. I sometimes choose discretion in terms of voicing them on social media. I mean, I think there's wisdom there. But I also think that Sam would argue that he won't choose silence because he thinks it's important that he issues his perspective, right? So even if it's going to bring him pain, he would be able to avoid it by not talking about the issue, but he thinks they should. And he often communicates this on the podcast, right? And I'll play a clip that refers to this in a minute. But the other point that I would make here is like my theory of social media, my revolutionary theory of social media is the big boy pants theory, right? Which is if you use it as an adult, right? I'm not talking about teenagers or whatever. I think there are issues about,

you know, deranging attention spans or whatever, or following Twitch streamers, about you know deranging attention spans or whatever or following twitch streamers whatever the case might be but if you're using it as an adult i feel just like drinking smoking substances or whatever it's up to you to use the thing responsibly and if you use it to exercise your demons right or to engage in arguments to fight endlessly with lab leak people in threads that are hugely long if you want to ding lex friedman for his full centrist stance or whatever the case might be you just have to know what you're doing and be okay with it right and i feel that in most respects i can take that stance that like what annoys me is when people present themselves as doing something and then they're not doing that.

They're saying they're centrist people and they're not, right? Or they're kind of not acknowledging their role in making their online experience the way it is. Because you can make your social media experience a whole different variety. And it is true to say though that the platforms make a difference like elon musk's changes to twitter have made a difference to my experience and yes you can cultivate your feeds in different ways that make a difference so it is true like i don't think there's nothing to what sam is saying i'm just saying personal responsibility right yeah

yeah i think he's speaking to real things like you know you've seen the destructive or unhealthy dynamics that social media can create and the effects on younger people with their twitching and their instagramming or whatever obviously there's a lot of negative things there but yeah the truth is it is what you make of it that's all i wanted to say can i just point out one thing like it is true that okay maybe young people don't read as many books right sit down and read books through to the end, right? But if you looked at the knowledge chart that was audiobook consumption, I bet you'd see an exponential increase, right? And similarly, people go on streams for hours, right?

Now, I'm not saying that's a good thing to consume, but people are watching streamers or whatever for multiple hours, right, per day in some cases. So I think it is possible that the attention is just being reorientated and not completely fragmented that people can't. But, you know, I'm not saying there isn't an aspect of that because I get that people now check their phones or they're doing multiple things at once i think that's a part but i'm just saying in some respect i do feel that older people are always saying if younger people were doing the kind of things i was doing yeah it would be much better for them when i was their age at a gut level i do sympathize with sam about the kids today like they don't seem all right they are all right but i have noticed that my kids have read i mean the older ones like when i was their age i'd read a lot more books than they had for pleasure and they're smart

kids one of them particular just got her report card it's all straight a's she won like all these you know i'm bragging but she won all these awards and stuff my point is is that these kids are smart they're smarter than me i didn't get grades like that when I was their age, but I was reading a lot more books. And this is me being an old fuddy-duddy, but I guess I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Well, Chris Williamson has a nice little term for it, which he may have picked up from somewhere else, but listen to this. David Perel has this idea called the never ending now. And if you look at the content that you've consumed,

maybe not you after your exit, but most people, almost all of the content that you have consumed today has been made in the last 24 hours. It's never ending now. Terrifying. So the ironic thing here, Chris, is that Chris Williamson and Sam Harris

and you, Chris Kavanagh and me, we're all contributing to this terrible phenomenon. Never ending now. Yeah. I spent three hours today listening to that podcast. Chris Kavanagh and me, we're all contributing to this terrible phenomena. Never ending night. Yeah. I spent three hours today listening to that podcast. Sam Harris and Chris Williamson. Yeah.

Where I could have been reading a book, but instead I was listening to some, you know, off the cuff conversation. Now you and I are contributing to the problem by having another off the cuff conversation about that conversation. And maybe everyone involved should be reading a book. Well, maybe. Or, Matt, this will stand the test of time and people will be referring to this document, this digital document, in centuries to come.

I'll stay with James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past, and us, and Chris, and Sam. Yeah, this episode of Decoding the Gurus, that sounds likely, don't you think? No. Well, that's unfortunate. So in any case, one thing to mention, which will come up again, I feel it would be impossible

not to address it on this episode, is the claim that the reason Sam receives so much here is he has no tribe. Sam receives so much here is he has no tribe. Given that I was violating the blasphemy tests of both the left and the right on more or less on a weekly basis, I'm not aligned politically with the left or the right. It was just pain on both sides. And I had no tribe. If you're just on the right, or some segment of the right, if you're Ben Shapiro, you have a tribe that is going to just incessantly defend you against the left. And at a certain point, you learn to discount the attacks of the left, because you don't care what the left thinks about you. You've priced that in.

You're on the right. And so it is with the left. If you're in the middle and you're actually not even an especially political person, you don't care about politics. Politics is just an ugly necessity that you continually have to touch. But it's just you view it as an opportunity cost getting in the way of the things you actually care about. It's just you view it as an opportunity cost getting in the way of the things you actually care about. And you're not tribal and you're not reflexively aligned with the bullet points on one side of the aisle or the other. You have offended everyone on both sides at some point. You're getting ideologically spit-roasted here.

Yeah, and you don't have, you don't have the people who will defend you blindly. Yeah, Chris, let's keep, talk about tribes to a minimum, shall we? I look, I was actually going to agree with him mostly. They're not, I obviously don't agree with that he's completely non-tribal, but I do believe that he gets

it from both sides, at least recently. Yeah. Because, you know, he had that clip about Hunter Biden on Trigonometry that got in roasted in the right-wing media and then he regularly has comments especially recently around israel angering the left so it is true yes that he does draw attacks from both sides i would say more so recently, that is correct. Well, Chris, let me Harrisplain to you, because this is what he means by non-tribal. He means that he's not a hyper-partisan figure on the conventional left or the conventional right of American politics in terms of towing the line of whatever it is that is the orthodoxy on those sides. He has these independent takes, which

sometimes gets, you know, blowback from both sides sides and the same could be said of you and me you know you can have a go at it for being this sort of enlightened centrism thing where you're kind of above all that political stuff you're thinking about higher things or whatever but you know i understand where he's coming from i think you can make too much of it like it's not some privileged place you know i think that's what he means when he says non-tribal i understand what he means i'm not gonna rekindle that endless debate but like i do think he aligns with certain sections more so than others but nonetheless i think that issue about you know if we do an episode on chomsky we're gonna get negative response from the people that like chomsky if we do an episode on red scare

the people are too tired and lazy, so they don't say anything. But, you know, if we did a very negative thing about Sam Harris, we'll get Sam Harris fans being critical or people saying we're not critical enough. Right. So it's a little bit like that. You know, it depends what you're commenting on, but there is political shelter in being a down the line right winger or left winger that is true there is a degree of comforter but there's also a degree of comfort in enlightened centrism and that kind of thing so you know i just have to point it out and did you notice the spit roast analogy right there i did interjected by young christopher a little bit gauche and chris williamson that is referring

to if you're listening to this a little bit gauche mate but you know it's good to keep things grounded i suppose what is a speck rosemary isn't that just like a pig yes it's just like a hawaiian barbecue on the beach chris that's what it's that's what it is getting stuff from both sides right that's the pig the pig in the analogy that That's right. That's right. A juicy, succulent pig. Okay. Yes. So I mentioned that because this may occur again from time to time. But there is a section where they're talking about people looking for social media guidance or guidance on social media from guru type figures, right? So I've got a couple of

clips of Chris Williamson introducing this and then Sam's response to a particular person that's mentioned. I've got Jordan coming on the show again at some point later this year. And it's something that I think I'll speak to him about that he's onto big things with this arc which is kind of his competitor I think to the WEF that he's doing later this year I haven't I haven't followed that yeah no um but I do think that Jordan's relative abandonment of the conversation directly to young men to move on to other things whether it be climate change or the trans issue or pick your poison about whatever he's got interested in recently uh i think that that has left a vacuum and you can't expect young you can't expect

anybody to go through life without insights coming from somewhere so that point about you know that you need insights coming from somewhere right and chris is a fan of jordan peterson right and they're having them back on and this might be a little bit of my privilege but i didn't spend my life looking for follower figures you know i find them i find people that admire in literature in the world in your co-host for instance yeah mentors there's my own father it's all right we had our differences but you know he's okay now because he's kind of saying jordan by going into becoming a political partisan has a little bit abandoned the online follower figure he was playing yeah you know this could be privileged but this could be my privilege about my personality

or or not having you know terribly abusive family life or something like that. But Jordan Peterson, you know, I get why people look up to him as a follower figure, but can you not go through life without having someone like him telling you to tie your shoelaces and stand up straight? You know? Yeah. Well, I think broadly speaking, this is a topic upon which the manosphere and jordan peterson and the idw construed very broadly finds agreement on which is that people are crying out for meaning people are looking for somebody to sense make and to provide some structure to their lives and while sam harris has a lot of divergences with a lot of those people i think you'd agree too with that and yeah i'm sort of

with you which is that i don't think that's something the internet should provide or internet personalities should provide to anyone maybe we're asking too much of the media it's probably because we're like middle-aged right but you know i i liked eric kantona when i was a kid eric kantona was like a manchester united footballer like this cool French guy, right? And he fly kicked the fan and got banned for a year or suspended for a year and stuff. But, you know, I thought it was cool. I admired him and that kind of thing. But I wasn't looking for Eric Cantona's guide to life. In fact, when he spoke, he just said mental things at interviews and whatnot.

So, you know, like a cool figure or celebrities or whatever, I didn't regard them as repositories of a life philosophy. Like I became interested in Buddhism and stuff like that. And I met charismatic people in my time, but I, I guess we are living a little bit in a golden age of online gurus where you're a dissatisfied young person. You're feeling a little bit uncomfortable. Why aren't you getting partners? Why aren't you popular or whatever? And you're a dissatisfied young person, you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable. Why aren't you getting partners? Why aren't you popular or whatever? And you're not happy with your low paying job.

And then there's this whole ecosystem of people that will give you philosophies and life advice and how to deal with things. And I guess I can see the appeal to that, but it's just, I'm so strong spirited. I didn't have that issue but i guess it's hard to say if we grew up now it's easy to look back and say well i wouldn't have bought into any of that crap right and i don't think i did buy into much of that crap when i was a teenager

but i'm not a teenager now yeah well i'll just say this i mean i think it's totally natural for young people young adults to find figures that they would like to emulate. If you're lucky, that person could be your own mother or father or both. It could be another friend, you know, somebody in your thing. Or it could be someone who's written books and things like that or someone you've even watched YouTube videos of. Those are natural tendencies. But I'm very suspicious of anybody who presents themselves as a father figure, presents themselves. A substitute follower.

Yeah. Or as being somebody. I am somebody to emulate. And, you know, they talk about that terrible person. What's his name? The guy with the baguette. Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate.

He's someone who broadcasts himself in a weird way as being not a father figure, but somebody to emulate. Somebody that you want to be. Yeah. Top G. Yeah. And that's a classic example of how people who do that are probably the last people you should be emulating like it i'm just

saying it's a natural thing that happens organically but it should happen organically and just be very suspicious on somebody on broadcast media internet or otherwise that is saying hey i'm your father figure you You know, that's not good. The thing for me is, Matt, right, like when I went through my rebellious teenage streak, which I think most people do, right, and had various conflicts with my parents or whatever, and look outside for other things, interested in Buddhist philosophy or all this kind of stuff, you know, I saw various figures that I regarded as admirable. I saw Thai boxers when I was doing Thai boxing that I thought, well, that guy's really tough.

Look at that. But I liked them for the thing that they did. Yeah. I liked Anthony DeMello for like the philosophy that he had. I liked Thich Nhat Hanh for the kind of presentation of Buddhism he had. And I liked Eric Cantona

for his sassy footballer attitude. Ramon Decker for his good but i never was like you know looking to them to be my father no right you know that's the bit that i get yeah i think there's an emotional component to it and a sort of intellectual component to it right and yeah the emotional side of things it just seems totally parasocially unhealthy you know you just it just naturally happens like you don't consciously think about it. Like I read Richard Dawkins. I read George Orwell.

Yeah, like them, right? Like a whole bunch of random people. I won't list them all. But, you know, on an intellectual level, I kind of went, this is good writing. These are big ideas. It was like a demonstration more than anything else that you could be thinking about stuff more than I was

as a young person. Yeah, but that's the kind of thing. You have an affection to someone like Richard Dawkins because of the intellectual ideas that they introduced you to. Yes. But it doesn't extend to a kind of interpersonal. No. That's the bit that I think is, you know,

particularly common in the modern era, this crossing of the streams. And perhaps because of the way, you know, social media 2.0 and all that kind of stuff. But I guess this is, we're just commenting on parasocial relationships and whatnot. But in any case, there's a reference that comes up to Andrew Tate, which follows on from this. So maybe that's good to hop to. Andrew Tate's a perfect example of somebody who, again, he's not, he's radioactive for obvious

reasons. I haven't met him. I haven't done an especially deep dive on, he's not, he's radioactive for obvious reasons. I haven't met him. I haven't done an especially deep dive on what he's guilty of or, you know, I mean, obviously he's got issues, but I just feel like we're at a moment now where there is such a thirst for wisdom that, you know, it can come from so many different places, and those places can be more or less contaminated with young men are getting addicted to his content and thinking that he's their life guru. And I've also watched enough to think thatliness and success than what he's putting out. Yeah, I'm on board with that. I mean, if it was me, I'd probably put it more emphatically about what a toxic, horrible figure Tate is. But clearly, Sam's right that this is the wrong kind of person that young

men in particular should be emulating yeah now there was one thing there and like when I heard this actually titled this clip relatively soft on Tate because I felt like it was right but he does go harder in a little bit of which I'll play a clip after. But one point there, Matt, this is a personal trigger that I have. He says, Andrew Tate's a perfect example of somebody who, again, he's radioactive for obvious reasons. I haven't met him. I haven't done an especially deep dive on what he's guilty of or, you know, I mean, blah, blah, blah. Right now, just that point about not doing a deep dive. So he then goes on to explain that he has heard some of his stuff and what he's seen isn't good, right?

This comes up quite a lot with Sam that he, when he's commenting on a topic, he says, you know, I haven't really checked out. I don't really know what that person's done. Like when I talked to him about Tucker Carlson, he said that, like I haven't really looked into his content.

I don't know if he's said white nationalist things or that kind of stuff. And the same happened with Stephen Molyneux. The same happened with the Christchurch shooter. And I do often feel like, you know, you don't have to do hour-long deep dive dissecting the content, but like spend an evening looking at some documentaries or whatever about Andrew T. And you've got more than enough there to tell you what a terrible person he is. It often surprises me that people

haven't looked into these issues in any depth at this stage. You know, I've seen Vice documentaries on Andrew Tate. I've listened to his content. I've listened to the takedowns of his content. That might be my pathology map, but I'm not really unfamiliar with Andrew Teat's shtick. So yeah, just when people note that,

it sounds like something Michael Sharma would say. I don't really know Andrew Teat. I haven't really looked into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is refrain of people in the online commentary, especially IDW's fear, which is any of those things you just mentioned that you don't

know much about it, but here's your opinion anyway. Look, I think partly it's due to the fact that we're all incredibly lazy and all of this content is based on the idea of having this broad ranging conversation. We're going to touch on all of these different concepts, politics, right and wrong, how to live a good life the meaning of life how to experience the world you name it it's touched on so as a result people know very little about any of the specific things they're talking about like if you contrast this say with the this week in virology podcast just as a random example of people who don't know what they're talking about that's right with specialist knowledge in a very specific field

that are talking about things that they really do know a lot about, it's entirely different content. And, you know, I put myself in the same category as Sam Harris and the rest here in that we cover broad ranging content. And I haven't watched multiple hours of documentaries about Andrew Tate either. Yeah, but you've been forced to listen to me. The difference there, I think, Matt, is are you confused about like Andrew Tate, you know, have you not looked at his content and you wouldn't feel comfortable diagnosing? Because

you said, you know, when Sam described that you would be more emphatic, right? But on what basis then if you don't know his content? I suspect my basis is a little bit insufficient. A lot of it is secondhand yes i have seen original content but i haven't done like super deep dives because i don't want to do deep dives on ugly figures like andrew tate i've got better things to be spending my time on as i expect sam harris does so i think it's a tricky thing and i think it's inherent to this being a general purpose commentator on life the universe and everything you know and it's not good i'm think it's inherent to this being a general purpose commentator on life the universe and everything you know and it's not good i'm saying it's not good i'm just pleading guilty

along with i gotta say i i don't think i can apply inconsistent standards here that i think it actually is reasonable for people to say they don't know about someone's content when they don't right but my issue is usually when you are asked your opinion on somebody a lot or you're commenting on an issue a lot and you could know with one night's research. If you want to know what Tucker Carlson's content is like, I genuinely think you could do one night of research and get a good idea about what the terrible things he said are and why he gets criticism. If Tucker Carlson or say Alex Jones is coming up a lot, I don't give people a pass for not looking into the details about the Sandy Hook case. Because if you want to talk about him as an example of free speech, you need to know what he's done, right? What his free speech entails and why he got a billion and a half judgment against him.

Right. So I guess that's the issue. And if you are commenting on somebody that you're admittedly not familiar with, think is a bit of a waste of space. I don't think there's that much of an issue with it. It's just a bit of a repeated topic. But let me give some credit to Sam in response to that, because we mentioned that like that might have been him going seemingly a bit soft on Andrew Tate.

But there was this segment following that. I don't include Jordan there, but like Andrew Tate, Trump, there's like a I've got a fucking Bugatti and, you know, you want one. And I've got no apologies. Right. I've got no fucks to give. I know you want to be like me, you know, and if you don't if you're not good enough to be like me, I'll sleep with your girlfriend.

Right. Like that's that's the that's not an ethically wise person on any fucking level. Even if he can say even if he can string together a few sentences that seem actionable and useful to get you to clean your room and get in shape and and meet a girl. Right. We should be asking more of our elders than that, right? And so where I part ways with Jordan, again, I do not put Jordan in the same category, He has a very different view of the status of objective empirical truth in relation to the stories we tell about ourselves and our place in the world and what makes life worth living, what will allow for a society to really cohere around shared values. And he thinks that there's a layer of storytelling and, you know, what I would call myth and fiction, really, in a way that is kind of somewhat derogatory, right? Not to say that I don't see the power in it, but it's just what I want to do is be able to distinguish between the layer of wishful thinking and a layer of delusion and a layer of ancient confusion that is still has good standing among millions of people. So there's two things there, Chris.

First, he was talking about Andrew Tate. Then he was talking about Jordan Peterson. things there chris first he was talking about andrew tate then he was talking about jordan peterson i think he's on the money there with andrew tate which is the appeal is that sense of authenticity right yeah so it's the same kind of authenticity that people perceive in donald trump yeah but because he's saying such anti-social things that he must be, you know, shooting from the hip. And so therefore, this kind of awful, selfish, narcissistic-ness is perceived as a genuineness. So yeah, I think that's a correct diagnosis of the appeal there. On the subject of Trump and honest assholes, before we get to the Jordan Peterson bit, there was this part where he kind of reels against Trump. And I think Sam is

very good at pointing out a lot of the issues with Trump. Here's him kind of raising similar points, relating them to Trump. Yeah. Except the thing that surprises me is that it should be more obvious than it is to more people that someone's an asshole. Right. It's like that. Like, it doesn't matter how fluent you are. You're, you're only just declaring your assholery in, in more concise form. Right. And so it's kind of a Trumpian moment. Like Trump is obviously an asshole. He's obviously a selfish person, but nobody, none of his fans care. Right.

He's like, he's not a compassionate person. He's he can't's not a compassionate person. He's, he can't even pretend to care about people really, right? He's, but his, his shamelessness around his selfishness has become a kind of superpower for a certain audience because he's, he's conveying the message. I will never, I will never judge you because I'm incapable of judging myself. I'm not holding myself to any kind of standard apart from the gratification of my own desires. So in some sense, I have a real integrity because I know I'm selfish. Yeah, good illustration. And it's interesting contradiction, isn't it? Which is that absolute selfishness self-centered narcissistic assholery sans words is is itself the kind of appeal which is that this is the

signal that you are being genuine and authentic and giving it to you straight not like one of these buttoned up political types or anthony fauci whoever is saying the things that they are supposed to say so yeah yeah, I get the appeal. And these characters do speak to the worst parts of ourselves. And therefore, you have the appeal. Given all that, there was a statement that Sam made, not in this episode, but in a different one, where he indicated that he agreed with around 70% of Trump's policies.

agreed with around 70 percent of trump's policies and i think he was speaking in regards to his stance on radical islam or something like that but generally speaking like if you agree with 70 percent of a populist right-wing administration's policies that you know that and the douglas murray prayers and that kind of thing like perhaps sam is more to the right than he acknowledges yeah well no objections there um regarding jordan peterson i think sam's being polite but i mean if you put aside the politeness a bit i do feel on board with sam when he's putting on his new atheist trappings and saying that you know someone like jordan peterson is speaking to this you you know, he's got this religious Christian worldview, sees that as fundamental to everything, including science,

including any kind of appreciation of the world. And it's fundamentally about stories we tell ourselves. So on that aspect, too, I guess I'm pretty much on board with Sam. Chris, how about you? I agree with him. You know famously jordan peterson and sam had a debate about truth right it wasn't supposed to be about that it was supposed to be about the differing worldviews but they couldn't get past the topic of truth kind of like if you couldn't get past the topic of tribalism but jordan wouldn't accept that truth relates to what is correct like closeness to objective reality or observable reality no yeah sorry thank you matt ruth has got something to do with the word of god and then there's the word and then things flow

from that right and myth and legend and stuff and they went back and back about this so i'm completely on sam's side he just wanted to kneel down that basic fact before they could move on and in all our discussions he has highlighted the same things about Jordan being very wishy-washy with his definitions and that kind of thing. But notice Matt, when he referenced Jordan, he said, like, I haven't been paying attention to what he's doing again, right? Like he said at the start of that,

I haven't been keeping up with what Jordan's doing. And Jordan has completely become a polemical conspiracy theorist, right? It's not even subtle. You could just go on his Twitter feed, I'm sure, today, and there'll be a hundred tweets just waffling about the most Indian partisan conspiracy theories. Again, I just have that little issue about, like, why not check?

And then he also says this. I'd heard this conversation heard this conversation and i remember thinking who's this canadian fuck having a pop at sam harris yeah uh at the time and then later on went on to to really sort of fall in love with jordan's work as well i think there's an awful lot of people who want to see that um public relationship between you and him rekindled. Well, it hasn't, to my eye, it has not been broken. I mean, I like Jordan. I mean, I think this is just, this is what I imagine because I have not had any dialogue with him in a couple of years.

But, I mean, Jordan and I disagree fundamentally about religion, I think, and we've debated that, you know, ad nauseum. I mean, we've probably got like 12 hours, you know, on the mic in various venues debating that. And that was fun. And I'm always happy to talk to him. And I think he, while we disagree, I think he has really helped millions of people. I mean, I think he I think there's no question. I take your point there, Chris, which is that, I mean, should Chris Williamson or Sam Harris decide to come on our show and talk to us, then I think it's fair to assign them a reading list or a listening list before they come on. Just listen to a couple of hours of Jordan Peterson's

recent content. I'd be really curious to know what Chris Williamson sees in his in his work. Like, is that just a throwaway statement as being being nice? Or like, what is it exactly? Is it 12 Reels for Life? Or is it his more recent work? That is the insane diatribes? No, it's not as more I can answer that for you that it is the you know, the kind of psychologist version of Jordan Peterson that emerges when he talks to like Franz de Waal or Joe Henrich or something like that, right? Because you can see Jordan be a relatively normal academic style interlocutor in certain conversations, like that's not completely gone. But primarily, he's a polemical right wing narcissistic conspiracy

theorist. That's what he is most of the days, especially when he's in the right company. And a lot of the other times he's a religious apologist slash polemicist. He's the kind of person, you know, that, lest we forget, said that you cannot do science without being religious, that all the atheists are actually religious and this kind of thing. Like he is a strong religious polemicist and in a very irritating way, because he has so many doubts clearly within himself. I could do Jungian Freudian analysis on him that he's basically projecting onto the rest of the world,

this deep obsession with religion and metaphor and myth and that he has, that he assumes that is the foundation of all intellectual life and goodness. But maybe not. Let me play another clip just to round off this bit about the Salmon Jordan interpersonal drama. But I think the final, the thing I wanted to say was that,

so you seem to allude to some sort of breach between us, which I certainly don't feel and haven't experienced. I can only imagine, though, that in his world, given what was happening to me on Twitter when I left, he perceives me as somebody who has just gone off the rails in some way, right? Because like he, he, in his world, and this, this is what was so amazing to see. Um, when I was looking at Twitter, when I, when I, I mean, this to, if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation where I commented on the Hunter Biden laptop thing, uh, on a podcast. a clip from that podcast got exported to, you know, apparently every planet in the solar system. And, um, it had an enormous effect right of center, right? So, so right of center, I had just destroyed my career, right? I'm hearing from people like, oh my God, are you okay? Right. And in my world and in every channel I care about,

literally nothing had happened. Right. And so, but in, but Jordan lives in the world where I just kind of torched everything. So I can only imagine that he has some view of my, I mean, he, the truth is I would expect him to be genuinely confused about what I believe about things like free speech or any of the relevant variables there, unless he happens to listen to my podcast, which, you know, I don't know whether or not he does. The intellectual dark web arena from which Sam has withdrawn, a lot of it is the hyper focus. You know, I brought this up with Sam and bring it up again with like the interpersonal aspect, right? Like Jordan's been nice to me. I don't perceive a breach, you know, I'd be perfectly happy to talk to him and all these kinds of things, but like,

doesn't it actually matter what Jordan has been promoting for the past couple of years? Like, isn't that the more salient thing than if he likes you or you like him? There's a lot of focus done on how nice people are to each other and how much charity they extend. But like, to me, I put a lot less value on, can I have a nice conversation with this person if I think that that person is like promoting anti-vaccine material or so on? Could I have a nice dinner with Andrew Wakefield? Sure. Would that be any difference to what he's putting out in the world

or like make his material any less condemnable? Yeah. Like I'm sure RFK Jr. is a lovely guy. You steer away from conspiracies and vaccines and you'll have a perfectly nice evening. I mean, it doesn't seem really relevant unless the point is that you're best buddies and you're talking publicly in order to show that people can talk across divides. Yeah. Then really what they say matters. And yeah, Jordan Peterson is what he is. He's a reactionary,

conspiratorial, religious fanatic. And yes, he's multifaceted. Like you said, Chris, he can do somewhat academic-y talk as well. But, you know, that's who he is. And the question is, why are you talking? What's the point? I think this is all connected to the point I made before, which is I think that the issue with all of these online figures is that everyone is touching on all bases. It's politics. It's religion.

It's how to live a good life. It's all of these things. And that's not the correct frame in which to be a public figure. It's better to actually have some expertise in something specific and to talk to that specific expertise. This is why I don't feel obliged to, you know, ping out my hot takes on every controversial topic under the sun on Twitter. I'll use Twitter for personal reasons and talk about cooking and talk about the theme

song to Monkey Magic. I might use it for professional reasons as well, but I have a clear idea about where my specialities lie. And one of them is not Middle Eastern politics. There's no obligation for me to be engaged with that and to be putting that out there. Well, Matt, you know, this might be us in our little online silo because Chris Williamson talks about that there are people that are quite invested in Jordan and Sam having another conversation and maybe we're not considering their point of view enough. The potential breach that I was talking about was more just that there is a hunger for you and him to speak.

I think that you've both been formative to a lot of people's intellectual journeys in one form or another. And I think people are hoping that there is yet more juice to squeeze from your conjoined lemons and however way that happens. Well, I'm always happy to talk to him. I think the thing that got into my head is someone sent me a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe were talking about me. And Jordan seemed to be talking about me as like a cautionary tale, like, look what can happen to somebody. And Joe said something like, oh, I still have hope for Sam. And they're, in my view, they are in this contrarian echo chamber, right, where, you know, mRNA vaccines are terrifying, COVID was no big

deal, January 6th was maybe a non-event, right, the libtards are trying to ruin everything, and there's a whole picture of sort of audience capture and information skewing there, which I understand. I mean, that's sort of how, like if i look to my left i can see all that uh but if you're only there there's just a lot of half truths kind of ricocheting around that echo chamber which um yeah i mean i'm happy to talk to both those guys but it's just they're not in the in the lane i'm in and trying to maintain, you know, despite crosswinds, I'm trying to maintain a straight course in. That's only half the story. On one hand, Sam's right. conspiratorial bubble where someone like Sam, who's vaguely normal in the respects that they are not, is perceived as having a problem when in fact it speaks to Rogan and Peterson having

a problem. I agree with his diagnosis there about Rogan and Peterson, but I would hope if Sam was the appear would be the one of them that he might challenge them on some of that, the anti-vaccine stuff, rather than, you know, talk about how we're all in silos and we all have half-truths and stuff like this. No, they're wrong. Joe Rogan was wrong. Jordan Peterson is wrong about climate change

and those kinds of things. And sure, that might make you sound more argumentative, but I think Sam does take that position, but I don't think that he's envisioning hashing that out in a, you know, an appearance on Rogan. Yeah, I mentioned this last episode, which was that one of the features of the online world is it puts us, research was done on this, it puts us in contact with wildly divergent worldviews and perspectives. And one way to kind of handle that is to just elevate things to this layer of abstraction and find this common ground. But I

think in many ways, there just is no common ground. With the conspiracy theorists, they are in their own world. And you can't really have a nice conversation with them that is also honest, because if you challenge them on their stuff, they won't be happy. So it's not going to end well. Yeah, an appearance on Rogan where you accurately discussed the evidence around vaccines is not going to go well unless, you know, you're deferential to him in some respects. So the hardest I think you can go is Josh Zepp's level, right? And retaining a friendly interaction. So just to finish off this point matt so what we

were talking about you know looking for gurus and all this i do feel like chris should put these two things together chris williamson i mean because they're talking about the perils of online gurus and people looking in the wrong space but what chris at least is kind of advocating here is like but you two guys are like you know follower guru figures wouldn't it be great for some people to get you together and like shouldn't the point be that people don't need that right they need something better but this part before they get into that discussion does show an awareness of that issue and whether that insight is for young men or young women or old men or old women whether it's andrew tate or you know whoopi goldberg or whoever happens to

have the hot take of the week and trend sufficiently highly on twitter uh people are going to look for someone they're going to look for answers and in a world where we are chronically mismatched our evolved psychology and the world that we find ourselves in has never really been further apart people are going to find answers. And sometimes fluency is a really brilliant proxy for truthfulness or insight. And if you can say things with a sufficiently well-rounded, compelling delivery, regardless of who you are,

whether it be Whoopi Goldberg or anybody else, people will say, that sounds true. It sounds fluent. Chris makes a good point there, Chris, one that we've made often ourselves on our podcast, which is... I might even have heard it from me. I don't know. That could have been incepted. But you know, any number of people have me at that point, but I have certainly me at that point multiple times. So there's sometimes when we listen to content that, you know, I know people are having a conversation and some points contradict later points and so on. Right. But I do think that the Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris

over affection of their audience is a symptom of that thing that he's discussing, you know, and the same thing as Twitch streamersers just pirate social relationships that get too invested in personalities that's a very common thing so i agree with chris that it's a problem and that verbal fluency is mistaken for insight yes all too often matt all too often so what you should look for is the people who are verbally not fluent, but very insightful. I go, ah, all the time. Yeah. They're the people that you want to hear more from. Another point to finish off here, because I think it kind of relates to the Jordan Peterson thing before we get on to the next, is Sam's take on religion.

A lot of this in the popular views of Sam revolve around his criticisms of Islam, right? And he's being presented as Islamophobic. Other people say that he's criticizing the Islamist ideology, not Muslims as a whole, and that people are misrepresenting his critiques. But in any case, we'll get to some of that. But here is him talking about,

in general, taking the good from religion and perhaps discarding the supernatural. The idea that it's necessary, that more people can't be like us, right, just seems like a failure of imagination to me. I think that everyone could have a truly 21st century non-sectarian relationship to all ideas, all possible projects, all invitations to collaboration. We could just deal with everything on its merits, and we could avail ourselves of all the world's literature, all the legacy code, everything that's still serviceable, everything that's good. And if part of that is the golden rule, well, yeah, sure, it is. Yeah, the golden rule is great. But you don't have to believe Jesus was the Son of God or born of a virgin to think the golden rule is great. First, you just recognize the golden rule came from Jesus, but it also came in in the old testament it came in other contexts i

mean it's just it's like the golden rule is just an ethical jewel that that many people have have stumbled upon he's right he's right yeah saying something very sensible there which is that you can get some inspiration i guess from ancient texts religious religious or otherwise, and pull out some nuggets of wisdom there. They're probably not 100% original. You should probably put aside the supernatural elements, but there could be some good rules for life there. I also like this point that he made when he was talking about, you know, the people who say, well, there's various people who need religion to be good and ethical, right?

Even if we don't believe in it, it's important to keep the myths. I find many people will argue that other people need X, right? They need mythology, they need religion, they need whatever. Other people do. You and I don't. You and I are smart enough, successful enough. We got our heads screwed on straight. We can get along fine without X, but other people, obviously millions and millions of people need X. I think that just shows a lack of imagination. And I mean, it's patronizing. And I fear it's actually just not accurate for many, many people. It's basically saying that, you know, the people like Jordan Peterson or others who argue, Douglas Murray, that we need these religious myths, well or not, they're true,

right? Because they provide the skeleton, the backbone for civilization and society, and that maybe public intellectuals, atheist philosophers can get by, right, by constructing their own meaning system or whatever, but the majority of people can't do that so you should be wary of removing these foundational pillars of society and he's saying he finds that a rather patronizing view of people which presents it like there are the people that can't handle the truth who need religion and we need to keep it in order to keep them you know satisfied whereas yeah if his philosophers and whatnot can handle the nihilist universe but most people couldn't so and he just says you know he finds that a bit

patronizing because surely people could still make meaning and whatnot and i i think a lot of secular countries show that that is the case yeah and i agree with that i've mentioned before to you chris that i had an iranian colleague who I don't think in metaphysical ways was very religious, but he was relatively conservative in a slightly religious sense. And he had that exact view, which is that people and societies need this kind of guidance, these kinds of rules. Otherwise, things will implode and you'll have cats and dogs living together and i couldn't disagree more my friend having someone like even my grandparents

aren't religious so i've lived you know without any religion impinging on my life in a country that is pretty damn irreligious and you don't need it. I don't know how moral and upstanding and ethical Iranians are, but I suspect they're not that much better than Australians, maybe similar. Who knows? I'm with Sam in that I don't think people need it. And I think it's a myth and it's, you could call it patronizing to think that people do. I would point out that Japan is a hugely secularized society and technically doesn't have religious instruction in education. And yeah, it's often recommended as, you know, a society with extremely polite and upstanding

people. And sure, you can make reference to the shrines and temples. I study all this thing, but ask my son about the myths of the Kojiki or, you know, the Buddhist stories. He doesn't know. So yeah, this isn't to say Buddhism and Shintoism and other things don't have an influence on the culture, but I do think you can mistake correlation for causation in various respects, right? In most of the studies, whenever people are talking about the positive aspects of religiosity, for example, on generosity or whatever, they're

qualified to a large extent by the targets of generosity being other in-group members or charities associated with your religion. And it turns out that in most occasions, whenever you're invoking secular comparisons, you know, like welfare states or courts of law or whatever, that you can often see similar kinds of effect that you will when making references to religion. So those claims are often overstated. And in any case, Sam makes a comparison to this being essentially saying that for some people, we need to give them placebo pills. Because you could do that with anything. Millions of people need to be confused about human health. They need to have superstitions about how to be healthy.

You and I, we can deal with biology and real medicine, but these people need to believe that these bogus pills really work. It's just, why would we think that? So same point again, right? It's lucky that the placebo effect exists, but you shouldn't just lie to people, give them something that you absolutely know has no effect and tell them it has an effect even because ethically in modern medicine, we don't do that. I'm not saying doctors never make use of that effect, like giving pills that they don't think are going to do any good, but not do any harm. I'm just saying a fundamental underlying principle of modern medicine is the medicine is supposed to work. That's one of the distinguishing features. Yeah, I basically agree that there's no need for benevolent fictions. There's no need for little lies that will somehow help people. You can have a relatively

accurate view of the world as best you can manage. And it's not going to make you a good person, but it's not going to make you a worse person. So may as well go for it. Now on the subject of Islam. So this gets us a little bit to similar territory we covered, you know, in that Christopher Hitchens debate, what makes Islam particularly bad, because Sam is saying all religions are bad but he often says you know but he famously said the mother load of all bad ideas is like islam right and what singles that out for him tends to be like martyrdom narratives and these kind of things right but you might note that martyrdom narratives existed christianity and still exist in christianity

but he's going to talk about some of these factors and this trend amongst influencers like Andrew Tate to ostensibly adopt Islam. So commenting on that trend. I haven't seen those Vox Pop conversions, but I saw Andrew Tate's conversion. Well, I mean, Islam is just memetically, it's perfect for a specific audience.

You know, it's a explicitly macho religion, right? It's a no Like, with Christianity, you have to pretend... All pussies? Yeah, well, you have to pretend to be happy to be losing for the longest time, and you're basically just waiting for Jesus to come back and rectify this

grave injustice. Like, the meek shall inherit the earth. You're just... You know, there's no putting this place right. We're not going to win until we see Jesus arrive on trailing clouds of glory. So it's all going to be fucked up for the longest time. And there's no imperative that we really do anything. There's no expectation that we're going to win before anything good happens. Do you buy that distinction? What's the distinction?

Islam promotes the muscular, expansionist, religious warriors, whereas Christianity promotes the meek will inherit the earth. Don't take action. Wait until the second coming of Jesus. I don't know. I guess it depends, doesn't it? There's so many interpretations of both religions. It doesn't accord with history entirely. Christians that were quite pro-expanding Christendom to the four corners of the earth.

So if that was a fundamental feature of the ideology, it's strange that for hundreds of years they seem to miss that memo. Yeah, there's a militant version of Christianity and there's the turn the other cheek, go mildly and get sacrificed to lions. Yeah, Church of England, like Christian nationalism, you know, now you can talk about is it overstated in some cases by people, but there clearly is a robust Christian nationalism in the US. And there's a robust prosperity gospel. There's a robust following amongst evangelicals for millennial preachers and stuff. So like, I feel that Sam is somewhat overstating the extent to which a very moderate form of Christianity that's completely content with saying, we don't want any political power, you know, we'll just wait until Jesus comes, is the dominant form of Christianity around the world, or even in the US, like evangelical Christian stuff in

the US. It's not particularly sanguine about abortion, just for an example. You're the religious scholar. Well, you're the scholar of things relating to religion. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. And maybe Sam knows more about it than me too. But I mean, isn't the problem that all of these monotheistic texts are just chooser and adventures? You can look in the Bible or the Quran and find anything you want, basically. So it's a pre-packaged ideology. If you're angry and upset, and the world's been treating you badly, and you want a rationale to do things, then it'll give it to you. If you want a rationale to put up with your it'll give it to you. If you want a rationale

to put up with your lot in life and your reward will be in heaven and not make a fuss, then it's there for you as well. Interesting, Matt. Well, here's a counter to that point from Sam, which gets onto a topic that we'll discuss after, but I think this is a good rejoinder to you. So here's some rebutting you in advance. I'm a fan of other Eastern traditions as well, but again, not in a religious sense, but just taking you know, I'm very eclectic taking what I think is useful and leaving the rest.

But, you know, if you had to just go to one shelf in the bookstore to find, you know, to Pareto optimize the whole spiritual journey, you really can't do better than Buddhism, in my view. I mean, there's just, there's, yes, there's some, there's certainly some bullshit that should be ignored, or at least some stuff that's unjustifiable that shouldn't be, you know, not too much faith should be placed in. But you could almost pick at random.

You go to a 10,000-page corpus and just open it at random, and you're not going to get a treatise on how to sacrifice a goat, right, or why you should kill homosexuals. You're going to get something absolutely clear and totally serviceable in the 21st century about the nature of consciousness.

Now, Chris, I know this is very much in your wheelhouse, so I'm standing ready for my naive opinion here to get totally lambasted. But I mean, isn't there some truth in that? Like the monotheistic texts from the Levant are full of these weird injunctions, right? Many of which are unpleasant about stoning people or subjugating your wife or whatever. And I know that Buddhism has been the foundation for all kinds of things that we might not approve of. It's not all sweetness and light. But if you take, for example, Monkey Magic. I was a big fan of that show as a kid. And I subsequently read the translation of the Chinese texts, the storybooks, which were

sort of intended for kids, I think. And they were not really much to do with Buddhism. They were more like, you know, don't be like monkey, you know, or you'll get trapped under a mountain, you know, do what you're told, be responsible, exercise some self-control, that kind of stuff. It's sermonizing, it's moralizing, it's storytelling in the same way as most religiously inspired texts are. But it doesn't seem as bad to me in as much as I'm aware of it as the religions that came from westward. Am I wrong? Tell me how I'm wrong. Well, the issue here, and Evan Thompson, the Buddhist scholar who we spoke to, raised this point with Sam, that his analogy about you go into any bookstore and you randomly select

the Buddhist text from the wall and you'll find, you know, injunctions about the mind and all these kinds of things that relies on going into a bookstore with Buddhist material in English. Because if you did that in using the canon in Buddhism, you're just as likely to get obscure treatises about Abhidharma philosophy and the various skandhas, the aggregate forms that make up individual things, just long lists or references to hungry ghosts

or the different realms that people are in. Or in many cases in later Buddhism, long, long sutras about the value of copying sutras for your merit. So you're going to be reborn. You can't get enlightened in your lifetime. So you need to accumulate the merit to be born in the heaven realm.

So all of that is to say that Sam is taking a Western Buddhist perspective of what is the primary content, right? But you are correct. That's right. I was going to say, sorry, let me leap in. Okay, you go. I'm fully aware of the filtering that goes on in terms of the Western or English translations

of things, very selective. And I mentioned Monkey Magic because it's definitely something that is not sort of ready made for the academic Western Buddhist. It's just, it's story tales, which have got relatively little to do with religion. Yeah, well, my question in response was, Journey to the West is a Chinese novel from the 16th century, right? Monkey Magic is a take on that story.

So what's your argument? My gut feeling, my impression is that even if you put aside that selective filtering that goes on with the Orientalist filtering of Buddhist texts, if you just go to the actual text, then yes, I take your point that it's full of all kinds of really kind of weird moralizing sort of like destroy the outgroup, you know, destroy the Canaanites because they failed because they made graven idols or something? Isn't it a bit less on the nose? Yeah, my assumption is there would be less of it overall, although I would compare it to the Olo movements associated with that region, right? it to the other movements associated with that region, right? The sort of mana movements that were in India at the time, the other Vedic religions, how much in those is there these injunctions toward conquering and that kind of thing. And then if you're going to talk about

all the later developments, right, from canons, because Buddhism spreads all over the place, then you do have issues. Because say you go to Sri Lanka and you look at the Mahavamsa, which is like an epic poem detailing the history of Ceylon, but it's a lot about how Buddhism came to Ceylon, right? And in there, you get various accounts about the Buddhist warrior king dealing with Tamil kings. And there's some stories in there where the Buddhist king kills all these Tamils, right? And he's feeling, uh-oh, I'm in trouble. And the eight Arhats, the Buddha's enlightened disciples, console to him that there's no real sin because you've only killed Tamil unbelievers and they're no better than beasts, right? That does sound a little bit Old Testament.

And there is this concept in various Buddhist traditions that killing someone, if they're sufficiently an obstacle for the spread of the Dharma, is actually doing them a kindness because they're accumulating bad merit by getting in the way of the spread of Buddhism. So as long as you're approaching that from the position of, you know, not hating them, but you want to liberate them from their mistaken mindset, then it can be perfectly fine, like a more emeritus act to remove them. So most Buddhist traditions do have justifications. It's not murder because you're just removing

the future bad karma that they will accumulate. Now, I'm not saying it's of equal proportion to other religions, but I feel like these bits and the magic poetry and the discussion around the sexual impropriety and what that entails for various followers and believers, which is not really discussed. And the way that Buddhism is treated is like, well, it's not actually that interested in like saying that homosexuality is sinful is it not look at the instructions around you know what is right sexual conduct not only is like homosexuality usually prohibited

so is oral sex oh dear yeah imagine that matt so now you've changed your opinion i'm out i'm out i'm not saying therefore everything is equally easily translatable to endorsing violence or that kind of thing but like Sri Lankan nationalism Burmese ethno-nationalism right around the treatment of the right-wing Buddhist monks towards the Rohingya that should give people at least some notion that yeah these things can and indeed are used to endorse extremism so So that's all I would want to say. I take your point. And it dovetails with what I said before, which is that, I mean,

the fundamental problem with any of these things, Buddhism included, is that they are a choose-your-own-adventure that you can elaborate on and use to justify whatever it is you like. Maybe it's the case that some of the general vibe or the original ideas and something like Buddhism is a little bit more groovy

than the monotheistic religions of the West. Maybe that's the case. Maybe that's the case. It could be. It probably is, relatively speaking. But, you know, these are all inevitably social constructions that change and transmogrify as you go from India to Sri Lanka to China to Japan to whatever. Japan to whatever. The Zen Buddhists that you reference, quite famously, many extolling extreme nationalism during World War II, in part because of Imperial Japan's favoring of state Shinto, right? So the Buddhist temples and the monks needed to, or priests need to appeal that they

are supporters of the state as well. So there's some books by Brian Victoria on the role that like Buddhist monasteries and Zen priests in particular played in promoting nationalism in World War II. Not the happy image of the Zen monk at the top of the temple, right? But that's the reality. No, but I can totally see that something like Zen Buddhism, which, you know, preaches being detached from reality and not caring about what happens next and having that perfect state of centered enlightenment or whatever, that can put you in a state to say, well, I'm going to subjugate my own personal interests and do something for the glory. But it's not even that. Like I was talking to a Buddhist monk at a temple that will remain nameless in Japan. And they told me that the firewalking festival

that they hold at the temple, that the Japanese people respond to it more because their DNA is genetically like encoded with Buddhism. So it resonates more, right? Now, is that in the Buddhist text? No, but that's like an essentialist, you know, Nihon Jinron, like the Japanese are a special people

that, you know, resonate with Buddhism kind of view. And I'm not saying that, you know, Nihon Jinron, like the Japanese are a special people that, you know, resonate with Buddhism kind of view. And I'm not saying that, you know, Buddhist monks and priests are not influenced by doctrines of detachment and that kind of thing. But I think a lot of the history is just more grounded. I get that. I think my point is, is that this is a problem with very abstract philosophies. Generally, the underlying philosophy of any of these religions is very malleable and can be bent towards all kinds of interpretations i mean the same is true of secular philosophies like romanticism or classicism yeah classicism has been blamed for things like colonialism romanticism has been blamed for things like totalitarianism

if you look into them, you can find justification for those things if you wish. You could find justification for good things as well. They're a blank slate upon which you can write whatever you like. Yeah, agreed. We'll round the corner on this religious point. So just the last clip or two here is comparing Muslims with spiritual James Bond. With Islam, there's an expectation that they're going to conquer the world, right? And there's an imperative to conquer the world for serious Muslims.

It's like, you don't have to be impatient necessarily. You can take as long as you want, but we all know this is moving in one direction and you need to be a spiritual warrior. And if you take this really far, if you become a jihadist, right, you're an especially doctrinaire, militant, you take this really far, if you become a jihadist, right, you're an especially doctrinaire, militant, you know, true believer, well, then you're a kind of spiritual James Bond.

That, again, is kind of emphasizing that, you know, there's this unique aspect of Islam, which is that they want to take over the world and create a global caliphate. But again, want to take over the world and create a global caliphate. But again, like Christian socialism, I feel that a lot of religions have this utopian vision as the end game. The end game of all religions is for everyone to accept the word of God, the word of Jesus, or to achieve enlightenment. Everyone is dancing in a circle like that Simpsons meme with the rainbow behind them. I mean, that's the end game. I mean, the Catholic Church and other Christian churches have got missions all throughout Africa and South America for the exact same purpose,

because you've got the goal to convert the whole world to your doctrine, right? It's the goal of all proselytizing religions, world religions with like salvational end games, which is not all religions, but yeah. Yeah, not all of them. I just thought that's more caveat. That's true. I don'taism is a proselytizing

religion is it i don't think so but i was thinking more about like born worship in tibet or you know uh shinto yes or those more local the little focus religious anyway sorry let's not get bogged down chris yeah i'm not going to disagree with sam that definitely the jihadist extremists can look to Islamic texts and find the justifications there they seek for their political aims. But like you were saying, extreme right-wing Americans seem to be able to look into the Bible and find justifications there. there. And without knowing a lot about religions, I'm skeptical that you need to look for some especially terrible things that the Prophet said that were so much worse than what you can find in the Old Testament to explain that. Yeah. And I think the counter argument by Sam would be that, you know, if you look around the world today, there are various states which are strongly promoting a kind of hardline form of Islam, which lines up with, you know,

Wahhabist doctrine or this kind of thing, which is a lot more malleable to support extremist movements. And you can make that argument. But the question is, is that because of an inherent component of the religion, like that's more what the religion is about than Sufism, for example. Or is it that in this particular historic moment that there are states that are promoting a particularly... There are political and social forces that have led to those extremist states arising. Yeah. And I think the counter argument to Sam's counter argument there is to just look at the history of Christianity. I mean, historically, you have had Christian nations that have been extremely extreme. England fought a civil war that was particularly nasty. I mean, they burned people. They burned people. They went on crusades. They fought the 30 years war. They did a whole bunch of things and were heavily influenced by their

religion. And now they're not like that. And even though they're still nominally in the thrall of the same text, right? So clearly, you can have the same religion and different social outcomes. And the difference is explained by the differing historical and social circumstances, surely. I know that Sam focuses on the issue of martyrdom and whatnot to explain extremism. But I'd be happy to have that conversation with him because I've actually done research on the motivations for extremism. And ideology is important, but it is not the single overriding factor in all circumstances.

In any case, Matt, let's move on to another topic. It's still related to religion, but it's more about Sam's philosophy and approach to self. So here's a diagnosis of the problem, Matt. Everything is, in fact, a mirage. If you think that your satisfaction is going to be a matter of finally putting all of the most important features of your life in the correct place, right? important features of your life in the correct place, right? Like you finally have the job you want, the relationship you want,

the house you want, you know, you're fit, you're healthy, you're like, you've just, you've executed on the perfect to-do list and you finally arrived. Well, at a minimum, you're going to notice that all of that has to be maintained at great energy. Entropy is such that you can't stay fit, you can't stay healthy, you can't stay rich, your relationship's not going to maintain itself. And what's more, most people's minds are out of control anyway,

and they're not satisfied anyway, even having everything. The moment you have everything, your sense of what you want, I mean, you just move the goalposts, or they got moved for you by some hand that you could never see. And so like, you take all of this for granted, and now you want other things, and you want them just as much as you wanted the last things. As an insight into the human condition, it's correct, right, that people are always looking forward to the future or backwards to the past and not dwelling on the present moment, not appreciating where they are currently, letting life pass them by. This very common discussion about the problem, especially with the modern existence where there's so much stimulation and all the things driving our attention. And actually, just to follow up on

that, Chris Williamson brings it down to earth with a kind of an example referencing Andrew Tate, but that's not the salient point here. Someone that you might not have been expecting to give you mindful wisdom that you might agree with.rew tate has a quote where he says uh having things isn't fun getting things is fun and i think that what he's referring to there is the the hedonic treadmill that we're talking about the fact that it's in the anticipation of an event that we think it's going to happen as a club promoter for forever and we would be creating anticipation for this next new dj this next new whatever that would happen but the protracted nature of the build-up was what people looked forward to yeah look forward to the advance of it when the event happened in fact they did a study where they got

people to track they pinged their phones and got them to track how their happiness was throughout the entirety of a night out and the most fun part of a night out is getting ready with your friends before you head out of the door life's a process chris it's not a destination take it down to the level of the club matt think about going to the club and what part you most enjoy yeah drinking with your friends at the house so you don't have to spend as much money on the alcohol in the club isn't that the Yeah. I just rebel against taking any advice from Andrew Tate. I don't care if it could be crafted as wholesome wisdom. I do agree with Sam's point of view. He's right. I mean, that's good advice to give anyone. Life is a process of

doing stuff. And most of the time you're trying to accomplish something, whether it's sailing a boat from A to B or learning how to program code or something, whatever the case may be, recreational or work-related or socializing. And yeah, it's the journey, man. You need to have goals of some kind or you can't really function, but you also need to appreciate that it's the doing of the things, which is a more important thing. Well, it's the present moment you need to focus on. There's this fundamental truth that you never truly arrive if your attention is always purposed toward looking for the next thing, anticipating the next thing. If even

in the presence of that very thing that was the next thing and now it's now you are busy telling yourself a story about it. If your engagement with it is mediated by thought in each moment, and you can't actually make contact, whether you can't, you can't, there's this dissatisfaction even in satisfaction, right? You get the thing you were longing for, and you're so distractible, you're so burdened by this automaticity of thought, this conversation you're having with yourself,

that the present moment isn't even salient enough to you, right? Yes, no objections there. That's a Buddhist thing, isn't it, Chris? It is. A lot of this is a fairly standard presentation of Buddhist philosophy. Yes, it is represented in other introspective practices and traditions that you can find in most forms of mysticism, Sufism, the Jewish equivalent Kabbalah, or whatever the case might be. I think Kabbalah is a bit more case might be. I think Kabbalah is a bit more esoteric. But in any case, you have these kind of introspective things. And the argument here is that people are too wrapped up in their mental processes. They're focusing

on the reaction to the thing, what they're going to post online, and not savoring the moment now. And some equates this with insight that spiritual leaders have had in the past, some that we might also notice. What I mean by spirituality has in fact nothing to do with the amazement that you feel when you look up at the Milky Way, right? It's like, that's great, but that's just not the real opportunity on offer. And that's not what's going to prepare us to die, and that's not what's going to really console you at four in the morning when you wake up feeling bad about your life and not sure how you can be happy in this world.

Um, so I'm much more, so I, I'm convinced that at the core of every religion, there was, there, there were real transformative and, and transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature and traditions, who had this effect on the people around him and said something like what he is purported to have said in the Bible. And I can understand all of that as an absolutely predictable result of certain ways of paying attention that are available to every human being now, then, now, then and now. That's the distinction, isn't it, between Sam Harris's perspective and Richard Dawkins and some of the other very science-oriented atheists, probably myself included, I think. People like Richard Dawkins do dismiss that stuff, which is like, what's your philosophy of life? Oh, I just, I marvel at the wonder of the universe very good yeah i don't do that it depends how

much you've had to drink yeah so while i don't subscribe to any spiritualism or spirituality i do appreciate you know i think sam's point of view there is valid sam harside of the four horsemen was of new atheism was the one who left some space for positive aspects of religion. And in particular, he emphasized introspective traditions as part of that. But this actually echoes a little bit of a criticism that we had with Sam before, whenever we were talking about his meditation app and the kind of way that they framed that. Because this presentation that you're, what you are arguing for is the essential core insight of all religions. And it's the actual important teaching of people like Jesus, the Buddha, all these different spiritual leaders throughout history. They've all been grasping the

elephant at different parts, but at the core, there's a united set of teachings or insights that are universal and timeless. That's a very, very common trope in comparative religion of the Joseph Campbell style approach to things, right? doesn't seem like he's had much contact with people that have pointed out how that approach tends to rely on a very contextualized view of religion and a presentation of them, which is highly related to how they were promoted to Western audiences, right? And kind of contemporary tastes. So this notion that Buddhism and other Eastern religions, including forms of Hinduism, did have these important insights, but they've all been obscured under these thousands of years of cultural baggage where supernaturalism was introduced and it kind of muddied the pure teachings, which now contemporary audiences, often through Western practitioners, have rediscovered, right? They've channeled the actual teachings of these ancient teachers. And I hope the issue there

is clear that rather than cutting through the illusion, I think in a lot of this, you're just looking into the mirror and saying like, you know, what Jesus was teaching, what the Buddha was teaching is what jives with me in the 21st century as an introspective person who's not into supernatural stuff. But the more likely thing is that they were teaching things that were very specific to their time periods, contextually there. And there are elements that you can take out and emphasize or de-emphasize, but it doesn't actually mean that's the core true meaning. The early Buddhist communities, early other communities were doing lots of stuff and it

doesn't resemble in general what people take today as contemporary, introspective, secularized insights. I don't disagree. So let's take that for granted that it's historically inaccurate to describe this like a modern secular western take on buddhism as being the true version and original you know pure version of it you're representing the teaching of jesus accurately sure everyone else got it wrong yeah yeah i get that i get that so let's take it for granted that people like sam because he's certainly not alone here have picked and chosen and constructed and formulated their own thing and essentially created a new spiritual philosophy that might be inspired by ancient Buddhism. Yeah, like a secularized form of various religions.

So let's take it for granted that you're right, that it's historically inaccurate. That's fine, isn't it? Yeah, it's fine in the sense that you can argue for whatever you want, right? Introspective practices can be very useful. But I feel that if you're patting yourself on the back for not engaging in supernaturalism, but you still appear to be basking in the reflected glory of various well-known established religious figures, that's the bit. I think I raised this before, but like a lot of the appeal comes from people making reference to this being ancient insight provided by meditation masters and the insights of the world's spiritual leaders. It loses its punch somewhat if it is the

musings of 20th century wealthy Western people or various religious people who are presenting a particular image of the religion for Western and secular audiences. If people were just like, well, if that's true, that's fine. Like, you know, I don't care if the insight comes from the ancient traditions or if it's a product of the 20th century marketing of religions to Western seekers. But they don't say that, Matt. It's very few people who acknowledge that. They'll argue that they know the spiritual seeking type, and they are not that. That's the kind of gullible people. Here's the next step of this, which is related to the concept of there being no self.

Here's the starting point for 99.9% of humanity. People feel like a self. People feel like they're a subject in the middle of their experience, right? They feel like they're having an experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience in some sense. They don't feel identical to experience, right?

So an experience is, you know, your five sensory channels and your experience, right? So I'm, so an experience is, you know, your five sensory channels and your mind, right? So you've got, you're seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, feeling emotions, and you've got this whole cacophony of what it's like to be you in each moment. And sometimes it's very, very pleasant, and sometimes it's very unpleasant, and sometimes it's just, you know, normal, and there's nothing really especially salient about it. And the default sense is to feel like a self in the middle of that, right? And it's that starting point that is actually the basis for all of our dissatisfaction and psychological suffering. I mean, that is the knot that has to

be untied that really allows for a recognition of what the mind is like prior to identification with thought and prior to this, this, this capture by this, this automatic, this reflexive seeking and not finding operation that we're, we're constantly engaged with. Uh, yeah. So Chris, I mean, I recognize a lot of the language there from the Buddhist trappings. There is no self, You're a being that is experiencing and so on. And if you let go of that, then you're whatever. It's the source of all suffering. So I recognize the material superficially, but what does it mean in plain

language? The general idea of this is that people are mistaken in perceiving themselves to be this consistent self that exists throughout time. Subjective experience gives us this false illusion of a cohesive individual acting through time. And if we introspectively interrogate that, a lot of the things that we see break down. You are not your emotional state. You are not your thoughts. These are things which happen to you or which you experience, but you do not selectively generate them. And who is the you that you're talking about experiencing all of these transient states? Where is this core that people feel that you try to focus on what that is, the more you realize it's transient and it is not

consistent, but rather an illusion, right, is the way that it's presented. And that underneath that illusion is a core which is unperturbed by the fleeting emotions or thoughts that travel across and which is eternal, unchanging, a wellspring of altruistic love unbounded by personal concerns that if you tap into and you are able to more consistently recognize that is your true nature, that you will act compassionately, less egoistically, and not that you won't experience emotions and these kind of things, but they will be like clouds traveling across the sky,

not altering the sky, but sometimes obscuring the sun or moon behind it. That's the philosophy here. Okay. Well. So I say this as well to mention, I know this in terms of I'm very familiar with this framing of things. And it is a framing. This is the thing that I want to emphasize here, that the way that Sam and other advocates for Western Buddhism, including Robert Wright, presented is that it is a validated claim about the nature of existence.

And I would dispute that. And in particular, one point, and it's going to come up in some of the other clips, but this notion, Matt, that when you realize that the self, you know, that it's hard to identify the moment to moment self, which is consistent, right? There's no little man behind the head. I feel that that's a little bit of a straw man because autobiographical identity, for example, like when you see patients who are suffering from Alzheimer's or that kind of thing, and they lose details about their relationships and their history, we do recognize them as losing fundamental components of who they are. In their moment-to-moment experience afterwards, whenever the disease has taken its course, they can lose that, right? But it's an indication to me that identity isn't

necessarily this illusionary concept, unless you're giving it some supernatural transcendental thing where you're talking about a self, which exists completely independent. And that's not the way that I think of the self. I think about it as like a cognitive experience that people have because of our cognitive architecture. Just in the same way, you can't show me the white bear. When I think of a white bear, you can't take it out of my brain. But it doesn't mean that it's fundamentally an illusion that there's an image of a white bear that I'm making with the connections in my brain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I understand what you're saying. I'm with you. Like there's two ways to take what Sam is saying. You can take it in the kind of homespun wisdom type approach which is not a dig there's nothing wrong with that you know you get a bit older you realize that you're just grumpy at the moment maybe there isn't something terribly wrong with the state in which your daughter left the kitchen it's actually just you right so a little bit of wisdom there understanding that your mind is a transient

phenomena and so and you can use a lot of flowery language to describe those sorts of bits of wisdom there understanding that your mind is a transient phenomena and so and you can use a lot of flowery language to describe those sorts of bits of wisdom which which you accrue over the years and probably help you be you know to use the fancy language less egoistic less trapped in your own little bubble and being able to step outside yourself a little bit i think that sort of stuff is you know true in a sense and helpful in terms of the sort of more technical or the more formal way to think about it, I'm with you. I mean, I don't know that there's any need for any recourse to any spirituality or philosophy. You know, I'm very much influenced by the physicalist point of view about how minds emerge. It is useful to talk about things that exist at the systems level in the sense of not being a reductionist and saying, okay, it's all just chemicals and so on.

Yes, there were meaningful things you could talk about. And the sense of there being a persistent self, like, you know, you feel kind of the same person today, mostly as the way you did yesterday is because of the biological substrate, the physical substrate upon which this dynamic process is occurring. So, you know, I'm on board with that philosophical or spiritual way of describing things, which is, you know, you're not a thing, you're not a persistent sort of object that exists in the world. Rather, you are literally an ongoing process, which can get modified by being tired or being drunk or whatever. And you're a process rather than a thing. So I

think all of that could be described using perfectly dry, non-spiritual scientific language. I keep referencing the philosopher Evan Thompson, but there's always those researchers of identity. What they argue with the way to perceive self is as a constructed concept. I think it relates to, I know the forbidden word of consciousness should not be uttered on this podcast, but we both are enjoying Kevin Mitchell's book about the development of consciousness and potential for free will and all this.

But thing is, you can agree or disagree with the way that he presents it, but he is not advocating for a supernatural worldview. He's arguing that the emergent properties of meaning, not like in a Jordan Peterson sense, but in terms of like higher order, things which emerge from the reductionist part, it's actually wrong to break them down

and see them as only going in a one-way thing, but actually you can have the products of the emergent things go back down and are the level at which the analysis makes sense so that if you try to reduce it just to the biological processes, it actually loses a lot of what's going on. And I think there's value to that, but I feel that Sam and Uller's approach to this kind of presents it that there's two positions. One is a hard-nosed look at the psychological and biological reality of the self, which

completely aligns with his interpretation around determinism, around Buddhist introspective views about the illusion of self. And then there's a spiritual common sense experience where people haven't really interrogated it or they believe in like supernatural things. interrogated it, or they believe in like supernatural things. And there is not a space for people that have recognized most of the things that Sam would point to and not arrive at his broader conclusions. That's a bit that I feel a little bit lacking. I actually have a clip of Chris Williamson pulling him out of it. So this is Chris engaging in Buddhist dialectics with Sam. That's making you angry.

And so you're feeling anger. And then you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry. And that motherfucker, I can't believe, what was he thinking? And that's the voice in your head. And that feels like you, right? Like you have no perspective. Is that not you? No, it's no more than these sounds are you when you hear them, right?

Like literally it is like being asleep and dreaming. I mean, that's why many people, I've titled my book and my app Waking Up, and this is an ancient analogy, which is all too literal. Breaking the spell of thought is very much like waking up from a dream when you just didn't know you were having,

like you were you're asleep and dreaming you heard chris right he's kind of making the point that because sam is saying you know your emotions flow through you but they're not really you and then chris says but your anger it is you and he's right he's absolutely right because that emotional reaction it's not out there in the universe right it's a mental state arising from your reaction and yes, to vibrations and the state of your brain and how it interprets those vibrations and what they mean or what you've seen and so on. But the transitory emotional reaction is a component of you and your self experience.

Sam wants to say it's not because he wants to say it's just a very transitory thing, which is not impacting the unchanging self. But that's actually the more supernaturally inclined interpretation, I feel. Yeah, so I guess that's where the spirituality comes in to Sam's worldview and where it just doesn't come into ours and apparently Chris Whittamson's. Yeah, well, I think Sam would argue that that's not right. Like he's kind of pointing out that, you know, you wouldn't say feeling cold is you, the sensation of being in a cold place. But actually, again, I would say that I would say that, you know, the self experience, if your physiological setting is buck naked in the winter, getting cold water splashed on you, that that will be a very salient component of the self at that particular moment and not more fundamental to your nature

than certain other parts that you might emphasize, which are less affected by temperature. But Chris, isn't this where the sort of Buddhist influence on Sam is made obvious, which is that my fuzzy understanding is that on one hand, Buddhism emphasizes that experience is transitory and there is no self in the normal sense. But at the same time, it does promise a transcendental revelatory state that you can work towards where you can connect with an unchanging, pure nothingness, which is the sort of true self, which is where it's at its most spiritual slash religious, right? Tathagata Garba, the Buddha nature, the seed of the Buddha, that is the real true nature of all humans, of everything underneath, right?

Yes, it is, Matt. But Sam doesn't really agree with that. So listen to this. That failure of reality testing is something we are guilty of in every moment that a thought seems to be what we are, where it seems like our mind becomes identical to this voice in our head, where the self, where you just feel like, again, you're listening to me. You're not grokking what I'm saying. The voice in your head says, what is he talking about? Is this Buddhism or like what's this guy banging on about? That is just arising out of you know not where.

There's a total fucking mystery at your back. And then you've got this language and in many cases imagery getting piped in from, you know, stage right and stage left. And you can't figure out how to turn to see where any of this is coming from. Where are thoughts coming from? It's utterly, subjectively speaking, as a matter of experience, it's utterly mysterious. So your problem, you said, isn't that just Buddhism? That was you he was talking about. You're getting caught up. You're doing mental games. You're not getting hit by the lightning bolt of insight that would make you realize this isn't Buddhism, Matt. This is the truth, right? It's the way maya yeah yeah we're anyway we're in mapo we're in

the dark ages we're very far removed from the buddhist insight so it's not that surprising and actually even worse in sam's worldview the completely deterministic variety that lacks free will we can do no other given all the previous settings of the universe we are simply impossible to convince of any other position because if we were to be convinced of it it would already have happened so yeah well can we get off this because i gotta say spirituality is not my bag man i'm profoundly uninterested in it maybe that makes me a bad person but i feel like i've led my life up till now quite contentedly without any of it and i expect to do so forever no but the issue I take with that there

is that you're seeding the grind, I feel, because you are accepting that this is for people that are spiritually inclined and would see this as insightful. And you're not that type, right? Like this doesn't jive. I've had to accept that they exist. I've had to accept that the rest of the world

is different for me, Chris. See, this is my homespun wisdom. I don't mind people being this way inclined, but I wish the bit that gets me is like the knife never cuts far enough. Why does Sam not understand that the language that he's using is derived from like a Buddhist philosophy? The words that he's using, he didn't create them, right? That's a lexicon of a language that he didn't invent. You know, you can always just go back to saying that the other people are trapped and the true wisdom is beyond those paradigms that they're operating in. But a lot of what Sam is saying is deriving from a very clear lineage and philosophical tradition with a very clear perspective about self and the

nature of reality and what is truth and so on. And it does not rest, I would argue, on like a scientific approach to those topics. It's a philosophical, spiritual approach of you if you want. But at its core, it's very strongly an approach from a particular strand of Buddhism. And there are other traditions that have similar things, but I guess you don't find it as frustrating as I do when it's presented like the people just don't grasp this or they would agree with it. Because, you know, in my case, I did study of religions at university. I was interested in introspective practices. I went on Buddhist retreats. I still study religion and I have interests in all these things. And I don't think these concepts are beyond me.

And I don't agree with Sam, right? But that possibility seems to be constantly presented as impossible. And we'll move off this very shortly. But just to highlight the lumping that goes on here. So here's poor old Richard Dawkins being thrown under the introspective bus. I wouldn't have had the aptitude for it such that I would have immediately noticed there was a there there. I would have bounced off. I would have got the sense that it didn't work for me. Most people, someone like Richard Dawkins is a perfect example. I ambushed him on my podcast with five minutes of meditation.

I thought you were going to say spiked the drink with a heavy dose of psilocybin. I told Richard he should do psychedelics. But most people who are, and this is especially true of hard-headed, rationalist, skeptic scientist types. They're so enamored of thought. Thought is the only appendage they have ever found by which to interface with reality, such that they can't imagine a mind prior to thought. They can't imagine a non-conceptual engagement with reality that reveals anything.

You know, it sounds like brain damage, right? I mean, I'm one of those people that Sam describes, but I don't think I approach everything in a sort of analytical, in terms of my personal life. I do go with my gut feelings and intuitions and so on. But do you grapple with the fundamental lack of reality of yourself? I do not. Do you really get it? No, I do not. I'm very much guilty of being the non-reflective, at least in a spiritual sense, thing that Sam's talking about.

But I just know many other people who are like me, like my wife is like me. She doesn't get into spirituality. It's not that unusual and it's okay. I mean, we do all right. I see why we might arrive at different points here because you might maybe, you know, you had your interest in these kinds of things, but like you, Sam describes of himself, you know, he points it off. He didn't see it as that important. And he kind of argues that, you know, the people that haven't got it, they're just not ready yet. There are stages of your life where you're not ready. But in my case, this is perhaps more frustrating to me because I didn't bounce off. I engaged with these kind of introspective things. They're still of interest to me. I still am fascinated by Buddhism and whatnot. But what bounced off for me was a lot of the misconceptions I developed

from Western Buddhism. I came across Buddhism in a way that's similar to Sam. But then I went to university and studied about the history of Buddhism and Buddhist traditions. And I ended up recognizing that I had perceived, you know, a very particular type of Buddhism, and I perceived it to be what Sam is presenting. So to me, he comes across as somebody that's got stuck in this phase of feeling that they've discovered the true religion at the heart of everything. And then everybody else, all the actual religious people in the world, they've kind of misapprehended things unless they buy into this particular non-denominational form of Buddhism. And I think that, to me, is very egocentric in a sense. And so when somebody is lecturing other people about how they're not really reflective enough on their experience, it grates.

That's why I find this grating. I don't begrudge people having their own introspective practice or insights, but I begrudge it when it's presented that the fundamental nature of reality would make everybody agree, if only they understood properly. But there's something wrong with you because you're not on board. I've met several people throughout my life who, as young people, got super into a very similar kind of abstracted philosophical Buddhism or spirituality of a different flavor. Actually, quite a few people, those people more like Sam are much more common than people like me, I think, not that we don't exist. And I don't begrudge them it because it's an undecidable question.

They feel that this is better. I feel like my way is fine. But yeah, I hear you. I've been patronized and talked down to by people because I did not appreciate the better life philosophy that they'd discovered and embraced and all the benefits that they've enjoyed, which had made them, in their mind, a better person. From my view, looking from the outside, I don't think it did. I understand why they might think that. But as you said, I think it can be a little bit egocentric. This is not to say Sam is a bad person. I'm not saying that. I am just saying that people recognize the myopic nature of Jordan Peterson's view around religion, right? That he very much projects his obsessions and thinks that if you understood religion in the

way he did, you would see that it's at the core of everything, right? It's more fundamental, the Bible, than science or any of those things, which are really just outgrowths of the mystical poetry of reality. But a lot of people recognize that as a particular religiously inclined perspective, which Jordan Peterson also fundamentally believes is the correct interpretation of the world. I'm just arguing that Sam has a similar confidence and there's a similar metaphysical component to it, which he doesn't recognize in the same way that Jordan Peterson doesn't recognize that there's a healthy dose of Jordan Peterson's hangups and Sam Harris's particular trajectory through life that influences why he's taking this perspective rather than apprehending the fundamental core nature of reality. That would be my argument.

Is this true of almost everyone though, isn't it? It is true of everyone. It's true of you. It's true of me. That's my point. Yeah. And it's often not necessarily got anything to do with religion or spirituality. It could be about politics. Your politics are completely a hundred percent right. Anyone who doesn't see that, there's just something fundamentally wrong with them. Yeah. So anyway, we're all dumb monkeys. That's okay. mentally wrong with them yeah so anyway we're all dumb monkeys that's okay that is exactly true we're all dumb monkeys dealing with the shadows and ghosts created by our cognitive architecture i'm sorry you can't turn your eyes around and look into your head don't even try just have a drink we'll get there with vr don't worry now for a break, to slam us back down to reality, let's go to Chris Williamson, because he's got a knack for interjections that have a particular quality to them.

And I wonder if you will recognize them. So here's one clip. Meanwhile, you've got this despondent, horrible voice that you give yourself and a kick in the dick on the way out of the door. Kick in the dick on the way out the door. So he's got a way with words here let me play another one about some difficulties matt and let's see what analogy he reaches for why this to me feels like a perpetual challenge a perpetual difficulty because

the drive to do more often not always but often is driven from a sense of insufficiency it's driven from a lack i will be happy when so on and so forth but the thought of going through life and just leaving it all on the table because i'm just in this state of sort of constant orgasmic bliss and i i don't fucking need to do anything anymore because i'm i'm just blissed out man yeah orgasmic bliss kicking the dick and how about this one taking it from an abstract wishy-washy this is something that's gonna maybe my anxiety will be a little bit better maybe i won't feel my anger anymore to uh as david fuller says does it grow corn like show me if it grows any fucking corn right like what does this do for me to me to my life to the relationships i have to fundamentally

the things that i care about the most chris's font of sort of random insertion of a bit of swearing a bit of swearing but also i'd say there's there's often a reference to sex or something like that right we had spit roast earlier it turns out matt that's a sexual act as well as the way that you can cook a pig oh dear and one more clip just to highlight what i'm talking about i think in a different podcast about how as soon as you exit social media you realize just how little of the world kind of does take their cues about the world from social media i think it's maybe in the uk 10 or 20 percent between 10 and 20 percent of people have got a twitter account but then when you get on there i think almost all of the content is created by some ungodly small proportion of the number of users so everybody else for functionally is sort of

wanking in the corner and observing this this thing go off and not contributing or maybe signal boosting or or whatever but it's it's the same culprits that are talking about everything on all sides you know it's earning a bit of vulgarity a bit of rough language is an interesting thing like there are podcasts that you and i've listened to chris where they have a bit of vulgarity, a bit of rough language is an interesting thing. Like there are podcasts that you and I listen to, Chris, where they have a bit more of an emphasis on sexual illusions and jerking off. Yeah. That kind of thing. No bad wizard.

No bad wizard. Yeah. And, you know, they find for them it's funny and for some people it's funny. And there's nothing wrong with that. We do a similar kind of thing occasionally. We go blue. We go blue on the TV. We go blue. We're not not above it and our style of using it is a bit different so i think there's a bit of an art to swearing and poor old chris williamson we've played a super cut of him

going blue i've got more i've got many more so this is there's about half of them play one more if you want play one more this one is actually him, but he picks up on a particular detail. I think it's in maybe the death in the present moment talk that you gave or something else that a lot of what we're doing externally with the way that we try and show up in the world, the way that we construct our exterior lives and our experience is to give us a good enough reason

to just be here now. And people find this through staring at the night sky people find this through going to raves and collective effervescence they find it through and paul gave me this reason i interviewed a dominatrix for one book the one in pain maybe and um she'd said nothing captures attention like a whip right which means that if you get slapped hard by a lady presumably in bicep length gauntlet leather gloves high knee boots and stuff if you get slapped by her for the next three seconds you're thinking about nothing apart from the fact she just slapped me yeah and you're just hearing that ringing in your

ears and that's it very clear presentation he seems to know the paraphernalia involved explicit detail that was referencing paul bloom giving that example but that particular detail appealed for the reason that we are highlighting here yeah there's an art to it i think and it's totally personal taste but my advice to chris might be just maybe be a little bit less random about it. I think it serves a purpose. It can be funny. It can be ridiculous. It can ground and otherwise, you know, when you start getting a bit carried away, it's

a good way to express emotion and so on. But yeah, my personal philosophy is that it serves a function rather than being just randomly dropped in at various spots. a function rather than being just randomly dropped in at various spots on the one hand making references to wanking in the corner you know kicking the dick whatever the case might be it has an earthiness right and it kind of reflects that you might be talking about philosophical wibble wobble but you're a man of the people. You're kind of the crazy wisdom guys, right? You're still able to make it relatable to the people. And I think that could help if you're having a conversation like the one with Sam

Harris to bring along some segments of the audience that might find it otherwise a bit too intellectualized. So there's the one point about, you know, kind of showing your earthiness, right? Another possibility could be the case that Chris Williamson's background in club promoting and general interests mean that these analogies come more readily to mind. It's like a punch in the balls.

It's like a fist up the arse, whatever the case might be might be right just those are more readily to mind because that's just you know people have different references i make reference the weird stuff from the 80s and 90s related to northern ireland and that could be it as well right you make a fucking good point chris yeah well it's better than a kick in the dick. So now, Matt, another point, and this is one that I think in some respects, I'm going to give Sam more credit for. He does talk about conspiracy theories, right? And institutions.

There's quite a significant discussion around this. And this is the thing which has got him in trouble in various respects, because he does recognize the need for experts and institutions. And here's a clip from around the end of the episode where he makes this rather clear. Regardless of how we clean house with respect to basic information, we need institutions with real experts who really capture our best thinking and decision-making on hard problems. And we need a population in every democracy that most of the time can trust those institutions. Like when the State Department says, listen, this is what's happening in Ukraine.

This is what Putin's up to. This is why we have the policy we have. This is why we shipped the arms we shipped. We can't have a society where 90% of the people are calling bullshit 90% of the time because no one trusts anyone in charge. That is the end of democracy. But that's where we are. Thank God that we're not quite there, except in these online circles where the conspiratorial anti-establishment stuff is really, really strong. Most of the people that Chris Williamson talks to are in that camp. And I appreciate that Sam Harris is kind of on our side of the fence there, Chris. He's disgruntled and unhappy with a lot of the people that we criticize for the same reasons and saying, you know, you need to trust institutions. You need to have a society that works like that, that where you trust experts and so on. To me, at least it sounded a little

bit implicit that the institutions were to blame to some degree for this. And while I'll attribute a little bit, they're certainly not perfect. If you want to apportion blame for the lack of confidence in vaccines, for instance, in the United States, I would attribute a very small percentage to the bad conduct of Anthony Fauci or some other public health official, and almost all of it to the exact kind of influences that Chris tends to interview. Yes. And like I can give an example related to this with COVID, right? So here's a little bit more of that sentiment being expressed. I just think people are genuinely confused now because two things are true.

We have lost trust in the normal channels of information and normal institutions during COVID and post-COVID for obvious reasons, but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust, right? And we're not going to navigate this moment by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters, right? It's just not good enough. As much as we might try. Yeah. And so that's a seeming paradox because, yes, you can point to the moments where our institutions have become untrustworthy. But, you know, RFK Jr. is not the messiah we need at this moment. Hear, hear. Well said, Sam. Agree with that, Chris?

Yeah, pretty much. I'd agree with almost everything he said. But you did hear that slipping into the institutions of field in various respects. And we need institutions that we can trust. So on the one hand, like RFK Jr. is not the messiah. On the other hand, we need institutions to be reliable and they've kind of failed, right? In that respect is the implication that you get. So like when you hear him talking about RFK or Alex Jones, Sam is actually very good and very different from most of the other in the guru space, especially the folks in the intellectual dark web. But again, I just want to highlight this distinction. Someone like RFK Jr. likes all the conspiracies, like every one of them.

He likes the, you know, cell phones cause glioblastoma idea, which, again, it's totally possible, right? It's not that it's not worth looking into, but if you like that one, and you like the Bill Gates microchipping one, and you like the Wuhan one, and you like that COVID itself was just a pandemic, and you like all of these, and you like the Ashkenazi Jews don't get have, it's a characterological problem. You have this appetite for, I mean, you see this, the true avatar of this way of thinking is someone like Alex Jones, right? Sam, actually, it's important to give him 100% credit here, because if you compare him to any of the other people that we've covered, at best, they tend to be equivocal when it comes to these various conspiratorial and anti-institutional anti-expert stuff even someone like michael sharma who's meant to be an expert

on conspiracy theories falls pretty far short there and you know if you look at people like andrew huberman or peter adia you know adi is better adi is better and they're both among the best the best so it's really the bar is just extraordinarily low in the guru sphere and sam manages to be i'm sure people listening will say ah but he did this or did that in relative terms he is probably the best light light years ahead of the rest and we will get you know douglas murray and all that stuff but this needs to be highlighted as a difference i'm taking Huberman, just as an illustration, he tweeted out about, you know, that he meets RFK Jr. at the gym, and he finds him a lovely guy and he wants to hear more, like he's very thoughtful or whatever. Never tweeted anything in support of vaccines. That's different. Sam was very clear on the

benefit of vaccines. And I actually think he's ended up buying into some of the stuff about boosters being, you know, like they're not being a benefit overall to them. But nonetheless, he's better and much clearer than Huberman was in advocating that vaccination is well supported. So that's the difference. And Huberman's meant to be a health expert. Yeah, it's even worse for Huberman in that way. So this is just digs at Huberman. And there actually is one mention of Huberman and Adia in this podcast, Matt. You know, probably just washed over you, but it's a funny reference. So just listen to this since we're mentioning that.

Like, if you live to be 120 in perfect health, you know, you're Peter Attia. And you've, you know, you're still doing kettlebells at 120, which I yeah i hope you are peter and andrew um then you're just going to be getting you know voicemails and texts and whatever else exists at that point hearing that all all these people you loved have disappeared right so no one gets out of here without real a real encounter with with greek level tragedy sorry you said that was gonna be funny no i'm just pointing out that there's the the kind of acknowledgement there about what their game is about right which is like living to 120 and oh yeah yeah oh yeah yeah i didn't mean the philosophy but you'll still die there's another aspect of it which is a little bit funny

which is that sam's view of those health optimizers is exactly the same as mine which is more power to you but i think you're a bit obsessed and taking it much too seriously than you know most of us need to but i i feel the same way about sam's quest for spiritual enlightenment right like you've transcended. You're beyond you, thank him. Well, he's got his own hobbies, right? And that's good from my point of view. I've got my own thing.

We all have our own things, right? This is the insight that people need. But again, we might be dwelling on this a bit, but credit where credit's due. Listen to him talk about podcasts and substacks and their limitations. And what's happening out here in podcastistan and over there in substackistan is people find a... an appetite for a certain style of conversation about a specific narrow band of topics. And they just go all in on that for obvious reasons.

And, you know And it's understandable, but I think it's shattering our society. I mean, we have a society where increasingly, and again, this is a near-term risk of AI, leaving existential risk aside, we have a society where it's becoming increasingly difficult, and in many cases impossible, to have a conversation about facts that are just crucial to understand for the maintenance of democracy, for public health, on myriad fronts. We can't have a real-time conversation that converges on agreement, it seems, and it's just getting harder and harder to do it. You share Sam's concern there. Yeah, podcastistan and substakistan. I like those terms, by the way.

Yeah. That's right. That's right. These online spaces, this talkosphere with all of these talking heads and their hot takes, there is this sort of consensus reality emerging, which is like living in some strange little village in some isolated part of the world. And I don't think people realize just how idiosyncratic and disconnected from the consensus it is. While anti-vax and conspiracy theories are lamentably prevalent in the general population, they're far more prevalent in the circles

that someone like Chris moves in, these online influencers. So yeah, I'm with Sam. It's like Subsakistan. Yeah. So before we do a left turn, there's a couple of other points I'll just ding. One is that Sam also recognizes the issues

around misinformation, right? The kind of stuff that Matt Taibbi and all would present as the information censorship network or whatever they call it. Sam, on the other hand, has had Rene DiResta on to talk about the issues like we have. And here's him talking about those issues. Unlike many of the people we just spoke about, I'm convinced that we have an enormous problem with misinformation that is held in tension with our desire for free speech on every topic, you know, 24 hours a day, that we have to take seriously.

We have to say, and it's not that we should ever write a law which says people have to go to jail for saying crazy things. I think the First Amendment truly is sacred and the right, it's just beyond sacred, it's just the right algorithm to have for it to run a democracy. And, you know, we have it in America and almost no one else has it. But that's not the same thing as having a right to the gamification algorithm that boosts the craziest stuff preferentially to the ends of the earth and maintains it forever, right? Sam and Chris go on to talk a fair bit about the online discourse or the sources of information that people are getting and the degree to which there needs to be some sort of moderation and so on. And my recollection is that he spoke pretty well, I thought. Yeah. So this is a point that you've echo well, I thought. Yeah. And so this is a point that you've echoed, Matt, when it comes to issues around free speech absolutism. So here's him

laying out one of the issues with this. Yeah. Well, and that's where I've parted company with many of our fellow podcasters and many of my friends, and in some cases, former friends in, again, this concern around misinformation is the way I would tend to frame it. over misinformation because they're so concerned about the infringements or perceived infringements of freedom of speech, right? So the deplatforming of people from YouTube, like that is the earth-crossing object that we have to prioritize. Under no circumstances can that happen. Even with Alex Jones, that's just, we need to hold the line here. We need to be free speech absolutists of a sort. And that's more or less all they talk about. Yeah, I'm totally with Sam on this.

I've had the same ongoing low-level feuds with good friends on Twitter who take the free speech thing super, super seriously. I think they've been scarred or something by the censorious woke culture or something. And it's the primary thing that worries them. And, you know, I'm a good liberal as much as anyone else like Sam is. But you just have to understand that in this online interconnected world where you have thousands of millions of different sort of voices at once, there is this huge scope for pernicious misinformation. And the dynamics of that can be extraordinarily unhealthy. And so it's not a matter of saying, oh, we need to send the

police around to someone's house because they made a bad tweet. It's about just recognizing that there's got to be some level of moderation involved. And in fact, Chris, our last guest, Helen Lewis, reiterated something very similar, talking about this sort of shift away from these super broad scale social networks like Twitter, which are very subject to those dynamics and people retreating to smaller scale communication groupings. And, you know, that's one way in which I guess nature is healing, which people are kind of organically responding to to the problems there's a lot of hypocrisy here because like as renee duress that pointed out

when we interviewed her it was her and her group i think they came up with the slogan freedom of speech but not of reach right or something like that to that effect saying that platforms shouldn't necessarily apply these very harsh bans but they already do algorithmically preferentially promote some things and down promote others and the hypocrisy is very clear because with people like elon remember he recently said i don't know if it's enforced but he said any decolonialization or like any mention of it is going to result in a ban right otherwise he said in in different places that it's only things which infringe the law that will be penalized, but there's no law against talking about

decolonization, right? So he's very inconsistent. And Sam makes this point, I think, quite well. Also, if you call the bluff of the free speech absolutist, you recognize that there's no there there. It's just impossible to be a free speech absolutist because not even 4chan is a circumstance of free speech absolutism, right? I mean, free speech absolutism is everything, right? Every awful thing all the time. And you just can't, nobody wants to be there. And it's just too much noise to that signal.

And so the moment you admit that you have to curate sometimes, you're going to be making judgment calls. And so you have, the moment you admit that you have to curate, sometimes you're going to be making judgment calls. And so then, and then you just have to, whatever principles you have by which you do that. And if your principle is no Nazis, well, then that's your principle and people understand that. And then someone can start a Nazi forum, you know, Stormfront or some other spot. Great. I think that should be legal, right? You should be able to have a Nazi social media platform. I just don't have to be there or support it. Like he says, some moderation is always required. Even really, really strong free speech rights

acknowledge that there are certain circumstances where it's just not okay. But those are kind of arbitrary. But actually, that's where the important discussion is. Free speech absolutism is untenable. It's not a position that anyone actually has. The interesting conversation is, how does the moderation happen? At what scale does it happen? Does it happen in a kind of an organic kind of way? Or do big tech moguls get to have their thumb on the scales? The only additional point that I'd make there is that in addition to what you said about the hypocrisy and so on of the various platforms in arbitrarily boosting some speech and de-boosting other speech, as well as that there's this natural human nature. YouTube and every other platform discovered this, which is that bad is stronger than good, right?

And every Reddit forum moderator has discovered the same thing, which is some bomb thrower jumps in, some video or thread is made, and people can't help themselves. It's human nature. And what happens is that the discourse gets derailed. What was a positive place full of things that people enjoyed, just because of our own nature, even without the moderators or the tech moguls' thumbs on the scales, the people who are a bad influence have an exceptional influence. So there are reasons why, as Sam says, we need moderation of some kind at some scale. And the interesting discussion to be had is how exactly should that look like? So anyway, sorry, I'll get off my soapbox. I just... No, I agree. And I think Sam

is pretty good on this, especially when he knows about the cases that he's referencing. And on the subject, Chris Williamson asks about Tucker Carlson. Have you reflected much on Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter from Fox News? Is this the beginning of some legacy to alternative media breakwater event or is it just a nothing to you? media breakwater event, or is it just a nothing to you? Well, I think Tucker Carlson himself is worth considering. I mean, we know he's someone who has shilled for Trump rather avidly for years, and yet we now have his behind-the-scenes commentary on the Trump phenomenon, describing him as a demonic force and somebody who he hates with a passion. Now, there was someone that once suggested to Sam that it was important to pay attention to what Tucker Carlson was up to. And Sam may have expressed that he can't really say what Tucker Carlson is doing because he hasn't paid attention to him. He knows people are slandered,

but like generally just doesn't trust Fox. So what's the big deal? Seems like he's changed his tune a little bit. So there's some more on Tucker Carlson. He's very good at what he does. He's a very good demagogue and he's very facile. I don't think there's an ethical core there, but there's a political one, you know, or certainly an opportunist one in the political space. And there's an immense appetite to have someone call bullshit on the powers that be, the so-called elites, the institutions, again and again and again, whether they're right or wrong. You know, it's just like, this is how it sort of opens the door to conspiracy thinking of every flavor. It's not that these

contrarian takes are always wrong, because they're not, right? I mean, we're living through a time where many of our institutions have lost trust for good reason, right? But what gets layered on top of that are just, you know, lies and misinformation and half-truths and a crazy sort of, you know, John Nash-style connect-the-dots with everything. And you can find, if you're just searching for anomalies

and you're not actually held to any sort of coherent standard of having a basic theory as to what's going on, you just can find the next anomaly. Well, then you'll find anomalies everywhere and they don't have to add up to anything except a kind of pornography of doubt, right? And that's what's being spread by people like Tucker, in my view. mostly agree with that of course but to my ears sam puts a little bit more of the responsibility of the on the institutions for having lost trust rather than people like tucker they drum up mistrust when there's no basis in it at all like in the so-called stolen american election like there doesn't have to be something wrong with an institution for these people to be aggressively undermining it

on the other hand i think someone like me talking to chris williamson's audience wouldn't get very something wrong with an institution for these people to be aggressively undermining it. On the other hand, I think someone like me talking to Chris Williamson's audience wouldn't get very far. I think the way that Sam framed it, which is to sort of throw them a bit of a bone, is actually probably more effective. But I do wish there was a little bit more reflection because like what he's talking about, Tucker Carlson is correct. And now he's analyzing the way that he promotes misinformation, right? And seems to regard this as an important force that's acting on the world. Many people were talking to that issue, to Sam, and he downplayed it or advocated that there was too much focus being put on that versus, you know, the excesses of the woke or that kind of thing.

And I like the freest pornography of doubt, but you're definitely right about him spotting issues with the institution. So here's more about that. It's going to lead to our favorite topic, Matt, the lab leak. I'm hopeful that if he keeps expounding upon how, you know, COVID was targeted to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. And I mean, it's like if you give him a mic enough, he will put his foot, you know,

he'll put both feet in his mouth and in your mouth and in any mouth that's available. I mean, it's just, it's, but again, it's not that he's wrong about everything. He's, it's harder than that, right? He is right about many things. And the fact that people love what he's saying is totally understandable. That's,

it's just not, you know, half truths are harder to deal with and, or, or statements which are riddled with truths, but the cut, the general shape of them is wrong and aiming in the wrong direction. Like that is just,

it's hard for people to parse that stuff. And it's especially hard when occasionally the conspiracy theory turns out to be true or very likely to be true. It's like if you're a person who has an appetite for every conspiracy theory, right? So JFK couldn't have been a single shooter. And you just bought everyone since then. Then you're going to be then when, you know, COVID likely escaped a lab in Wuhan. If you're the first person to sign up to that in an environment where everyone's being called racist for signing up to that, you're going to look like this contrarian genius who just like they couldn't fool me, right? I knew that it likely came out of a lab. Whereas the rational

position to have had, I mean, you have to take all of these things a la carte, right? Like you just have to honestly investigate, you know, within the confines of opportunity costs and bandwidth. The part that he's right there is like, if you're always crying conspiracy, you might get something right, like a broken clock, right? Alex Jones could say, this looks like a false flag, this looks like a false flag. And eventually, if there's a false flag, he can say, I called it before anyone else, right? But it wouldn't mean that anything that he said was right.

It would just mean that he's a conspiracy guy that calls everything a conspiracy. And some conspiracies exist. That's true. But his example there, COVID likely escaped from a lab in Wuhan. So he mentions that. I think here he's also making a reference to Brett Weinstein and the fact that like Brett takes victory laps about, you know, that he was saying this early on. And Sam is saying, well, look, but you can't actually take that as a signal. He's right, but he's wrong about the evidence now existing

that supports that as being more likely. And just to make it clear that that is what he's talking about, listen to this. And I mean, with that one in particular, it was always obvious that it was at the very least plausible that COVID could have escaped a lab. We just know we have a problem with lab leaks. And there was the Wuhan Institute for Virology right there working on coronaviruses. That was a woke shibboleth bullshit to call that racist, to worry that it had come out of a lab. Should have spoken to Rob Reed. That would have made it easier. I find that stuff incredibly frustrating because on one hand,

I appreciate the discourse being what it is. You will get some overwrought claims about such and such being racist, right? But at the same time, it's very true that there were people like Donald Trump and people scoring political points, throwing the responsibility for the problem at some foreign evildoers, right? Yeah. That was also happening.

And I think it's more accurate to call rhetoric relying on a bit of xenophobia more than anything else. But just because that's happening, there's some overwrought woke voices and that other thing. The idea that it just wasn't allowed to investigate the lab leak is just totally not true. And the idea that that stuff happening at the edges of the discourse should be affecting a rational person's evaluation

of the evidence is really annoying to me. I mean, similarly, you will find people saying anyone who doesn't want action on climate change is a racist, right, because it disproportionately affects people in developing countries and so on. I don't think that's particularly helpful for getting people to grasp the reality of the science and the practicalities around climate change as a rhetorical device, because it leads to exactly this thing. That's also wrong. Yeah, but at base,

there's a scientific reality there. And if you're allowing yourself getting pushed around in terms of reacting to discourse that annoys you, then you're going to make the mistake that I think Sam has made, which is putting far too much credence in the plausibility of the lab leak. So Sam felt that, you know, there was woke shibboleths around even discussing the possibility of the lab. Like we had on scientists who are vilified by right-wing media, like Tucker Carlson and the people that Sam was just reeling against and podcastistan and substakistan assigned as villains but they actually published papers looking at the evidence for lab leak talking about areas that would be good to gather additional evidence for michael warby one of the guests was initially thinking that the evidence was more

strongly weighed towards the lab leak signed an open letter calling for more investigations and then he published papers which indicated the evidence didn't support it. And the general consensus of virologists and evidence continued to go in that fashion. Now, Sam, long after those currents were apparent, had on Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, two of the prime figures in the lab leak community, who published a popular book, which very strongly suggests that there was a cover-up, that the overwhelming amount of evidence leans towards lab leak. And yes, they don't claim that they definitely know. But as you will see, if you listen to the episode we had with those experts, we explicitly framed that as a reaction to Sam's podcast. We took the points

that he raised, and then we let the experts respond to them. It's been months, maybe a year since we did that. I sent that episode to Sam. I actually initially suggested to Sam that he host those experts, not us, after he had Alina and Matt Ridley on. And he didn't, right? And I would be very surprised

if he had, in the intervening time, listened to our episode with Michael Warbe, Christian Anderson and Eddie Holmes. Right. Despite the fact, Matt, that it's explicitly about the topic that he's saying people aren't, you know, investigating enough. They're too stuck with their woke like shibboleths. But there was a podcast made in response to claims that he promoted on his podcast. And I think it's very clear that he hasn't listened to those rebuttals. And he's still in the mindset that is focused around the discourse. He's basically Nate Silver when it comes to it. And he understands the issue with Joe Rogan hosting Robert Malone,

with Joe Rogan hosting Robert Malone, Peter McCulloch, and Pierre Corey and Brett Weinstein as the experts that we need to hear from on ivermectin and vaccines, right? But he is unable to notice issues around Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. And Matt Ridley, just to point out, Matt, is somebody that was a climate change contrarian, promoted alternative theories of HIV, AIDS, right, the origins. So this is someone that fits Sam's model of a labile conspiracist, somebody that it's not just one conspiracy he's bought into, has a whole host of them, but Sam doesn't recognize it. And that to me is a significant limitation, which could be resolved by engaging in more research rather than less discourse surfing. I think that's fair.

So if Sam comes on, I'll be happy to discuss with him what the difference exactly is there in the selection of Matt and Alina as authorities and no mainstream virologists, right, to discuss this issue. In any case, I think our position on that is clear. So there is one more point to make, Matt, just before we finish. And I think it does give Sam a bit more credit because people point out that he's often praising Douglas Murray. He does it in this episode as well. Here's a clip of him talking about his views on Douglas Murray.

It was a discussion around, is the new alternative media, is this where we're getting the most truth from, that unencumbered, the audience capture incentives are there, but also you are liberated to not be tamped down by whoever the bigwigs are that have got some nefarious agenda. And then the other side is saying it's this freewheeling Wild West where people can just make all manner of these sorts of claims. What did you make of that landscape? Well, I mean, so I'm very biased for that particular debate.

I love Douglas. Douglas is a friend and he's obviously brilliant and just a joy to listen to. And I get a lot of his hate mail because, again, he's somebody who's happily on the right or right of center who doesn't have to worry about what the left thinks about him. But, you know, every time I have him on the podcast, I get nothing but pain from half my audience. If there is anything that is worth the pain of half of your audience,

it's bringing Douglas Murray. Yeah, yeah. No, he's fantastic. So we disagree, I think, with both Sam and Chris's evaluation of the quality. Douglas Murray's contributions. Yes. You know, Douglas Murray, as we've done an episode on him, he's basically a powerful polemicist for the right.

That means that he is good at scaring the left. I mean, some of the hypocr is good at scaring the left and then some of the hypocrisies that occur in the left, but he's generally not very good at critiquing issues when they come to the right. And most of his positions basically just fall in line with standard, very mainline right-wing conservative take, which he himself would sort of acknowledge, because he does present himself as a conservative pundit. But I referenced that to say, I'm aware of that. But I think that one of the reasons

that Sam gets more leeway towards being regarded as more centrist, potentially more left-leaning is because of positions like this. I think it's 92% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%. And I think it's like 50% by the top 1%, right? So, you know, it's just 90% of people aren't in the game

and not reaping the benefits of modernity in an economic sense, right? And they feel the obvious dissatisfaction and, you know, one could argue unfairness of that. I mean, our system is not tuned to wisely cause all boats or even most boats to rise with this particular tide, right? He may be very friendly and respect Douglas Murray quite a bit. He's adjacent, but he's very different. On certain topics. On certain topics. That's true.

I mean, this is just my opinion, but Sam often comes across very well to my ears. The common theme though, where the weaknesses are, is it all revolves around wokeness. So he likes Douglas Murray, not for his right-wing economic opinions, but because he's anti-woke, right? He, in my opinion, miscalibrates his take on the chinese lab leak thing because he was sort of triggered by the woke injunctions against it that he perceived as being a you know racist and yeah i think it's not that i'm a lover of edgelord left-wing politics i am not but in my opinion i think reacting against it can lead people australian sand's not the only person i've seen this trait in yeah but just to extend a

little bit more about recognizing issues with inequality and you know relative unequal distribution of wealth we should recognize that we there's certain degree certain disparities of luck that we find ethically intolerable right like Like it's just how, given that currently and for the longest time, there is a zero sum tension between a dollar spent over here and a dollar not spent over here. Just how comfortable should each of us be with, you know, a Gini coefficient in our own society that just goes, you know, goes asymptotic, right? Like, you know, like we're at one, right? Like, yes, I've got a trillion dollars, but now my main preoccupation is trying to figure out how my compound in New Zealand is going to be staffed with, you know, bodyguards I can really trust not to kill me. You know, you recognize the point, Matt, about the distribution of concern around topics and perhaps like a semi-reactionary response to stuff on the left. In his more thoughtful moments, though, he does, especially in this conversation, voice these sentiments.

Lots of people we've dragged into the conversation here, but like all of these people who I've criticized to some degree, Tate or RFK, or you could add Elon to this, all these people are living out the consequences of their dissatisfaction with the present on the public stage and winning a lot of followers as a result. They just like the way these guys are complaining about the obvious excesses of the left for the most part. I have several problems with this. One is that most of these guys, most of the time,

some of them all of the time, are ignoring the obvious problems and in many cases quite a bit scarier problems on the time. Some of them all of the time are ignoring the obvious problems and in many cases, quite a bit scarier problems on the right. Right. Like you say, it needs more reflective moments. He's talking about other people. So am I, Chris. I'm talking about other people as well. Yeah. Other people had these issues, but I think this is accurate. I think we'd both sign off on this take. So listen to this about keeping things in perspective. They really care that the government tried to micromanage the messaging about COVID on Twitter, right? That's the biggest story of the decade, right? I've got 100 podcasts in me and 100 newsletters in addition to that on that topic. But they don't really much care about what happened on January 6th, where we had a sitting president who for months had been declining to support a peaceful transfer of power.

And for the first time in our history, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power. And we had a sitting president visibly trying to steal an election, all the while claiming an election had been stolen from him. And everyone around him knew that was bullshit. We were poised on the verge of a constitutional crisis, which may yet return in 2024. And yet we have these guys more worried about you know trans overreach with respect to bathrooms the little winding point he puts on that is this much i get all that i get how infuriating so much of the the the woke identitarian nonsense is but you have to have some proportion and you have you have to keep both problems in view well this is great chris because if sam does come on and if he wants to dispute earlier criticism we tell him to take his own advice because he says it he says it very well there i'd give him exactly his own advice but

here's where i think sam goes a little awry but not entirely right because i actually think he is correct that he's willing to criticize stuff on the left, woke, identitarian nonsense, as he puts it, right? And unlike his IDW chums, he is recognizing the genuine threat to democracy and whatnot that Trump represents. But whenever he is talking about the flaws of the left wing or the people fighting against misinformation, he says stuff like this. And on the other side, we have people who are focused on the misinformation problem. They're focused on the real calamity we just witnessed, where you have public health information that just cannot get through because there's so much misinformation, there's so many conspiracy theories,

and there's so many pratfalls on the part of the actual establishment that it's understandable that no one is... And the fuck am I going to listen to? Yeah, right. So it's... But they're still... They're taking the one...

They can't afford to admit any of that because they're so terrified around about this erosion of trust in our institutions so you can't admit that there's any problems like that's the issue right i feel here that sam has this view of a cnn watching guy with a pfizer t-shirt who's got a Fauci altar set up in his house or something like that versus the right-wing MAGA reactionary person who's chugging down ivermectin and saying there's no one you know that's willing to call the files on both sides yeah that's not an accurate description of people like Renee DiResta yeah you know they don't have these rose-tinted glasses and think that every word that comes out of a public health official is sacrosanct.

You and I like to emphasize all the things that we think are wrong with the institutions. I think the difference is that, you know, you can just have a realistic view that we live in a society that sometimes the scientific consensus isn't 100% accurate. Sometimes when it gets translated into public advisories, some nuances and things are rounded off and it's approximately right, but it isn't exactly right. I mean, all of that, people like you and me, that was baked in. Like we assumed all that. We didn't think we lived in a perfect society where every bit of information that came out of a place like the White House or CNN, a chief medical officer, would always be 100%

accurate and correct. That it would have no, there would be no influence of politics on that stuff whatsoever. So I don't know, it's just weird. I see this isn't really aimed at Sam in particular, I think, but I just think more generally, the people that talk about this loss of trust at institutions might have had a childish degree of trust in institutions to begin with. In so many occasions, I also feel like the people are, again, relying on the discourse to be, when they're talking about Fauci, they're not talking about what he actually said, right, in interviews.

And it's not that he didn't say anything that is wrong. And you are able to critique what public health authorities have said. That's perfectly reasonable to do. But there's a way where you do that, where you acknowledge that messaging isn't going to be perfect and that people have to make decisions about trade-offs. And maybe the messaging around masking or certain aspects about the vaccines or whatever could have been done better in various locations. But overall, it was very consistent. Social distancing for public health, be hygienic,

don't gather in large groups. And then when vaccines come, they will be beneficial and they've been safety tested so you can take them. Those are all correct. They're all fundamentally correct. And where they veer on the side of caution, that's what public health officials by and large tried to do. But you have to contrast that with the lurid, conspiratorial, anti-vax rhetoric that they're fighting against, because that's what they are fighting against. And I've got a clip of Sam talking about Fauci that maybe will provide a clear illustration of this and this tendency in effect. Take someone like, there's a few lenses we could look at this. You take a character like Anthony Fauci, right? I don't know Fauci. I don't know what's true of him. I don't know. But I just know that on one side, he is utterly maligned, right? He's just

this goblin who is as corrupt as you could possibly imagine. He lied about everything. He was wrong about everything. He is the antithesis of an authority on COVID or anything else, right? On another side, you can still just bring him on CNN as just the most top-shelf authority on public health we could hope to have. And the only thing worth thinking about is just how awful his life has become as a result of how he's been maligned over here, right? He's just inundated with death threats. He needs a secret service detail because all of these crazy people from Trump on down have vilified him with lies, right? Now, I am totally prepared to imagine that the truth is

quite a bit more nuanced, that he could have been a great scientist. Maybe he is a great scientist. Maybe he did many great things, but maybe he's conflicted in all these other ways, which have been discovered by people like RFK Jr. or other people. Some people might've been total crackpots, but they're right about this thing that Fauci did or didn't do. Right. And that if we're, if we were going to parse it in the middle here, we would find, oh yeah, you know what? As Sam had said, he hasn't looked into this in detail. Akeem, why not, man? I'm sorry. That's so frustrating. We had a pandemic for years. Fauci was a big figure in the US. I've listened to extended interviews with him. And I'm not just talking about the ones on CNN that get clipped. I'm talking about this week in virology,

where he's talking to virologists about a whole bunch of things and interviews from before, because I was interested. I'm not saying everyone has to do that, but why someone like Sam hasn't done that, why they haven't looked into the claims made, it's somewhat baffling to me

because the truth isn't down the middle of course he's not a saint he's a human he's a public health official in america that's been at the top for a long time but actually the bigger thing is that the vilification is inaccurate and that he is just somebody that was you know working on the aids then on COVID, is just somebody that has been doing a job trying to promote public health for decades. Yeah, very boring. And a public health official doing his job. Just like with the election interference, the stolen election, the truth isn't necessarily halfway between the lurid claims and not. And like you said before, the relative importance of these things is crazy. Even if you accepted, made a great big list of all of the ways in which public health

messaging around COVID was inaccurate, right? Mistakes were made, right? That being so, you could have done every single thing that your GP, that your local government, public health advisory people told you, and you would have been mildly inconvenienced or greatly inconvenienced. But it was fundamentally pretty close with 20-20 hindsight to what would have been a good idea. On the other hand, if you'd taken the advice of the online influencers and the conspiracy theorists from Brett Weinstein onwards, then you would be putting yourself at very great risk for absolutely no reason. So the relative importance of these two issues,

it's not even close, right? Yeah. And just to play one more clip about it, which I think suggests that he actually has a little bit of a perspective on this, and it might relate to sympathy for lob-lick community or theory. So listen to this. This Wuhan thing was always going to go haywire. He should have known it. He's culpable and was lying about his culpability. And that exchange with this rabbinical definition of gain of function, which we all knew was bullshit, and we shouldn't be doing this research. And it's Fauci, for whatever reason, can't admit that he participated in something that was awful, right? I don't know if any of that's true, whether Fauci's involved with that, but I do have a lot of time for anyone who worries about gain-of-function research and worries about what is happening in labs all over this world. Well, he doesn't know whether any of it's true, and it's in fact

not true. Unfortunately, there's no way to find out. You couldn't look into these topics and find out if the lurid claims made about Fauci are accurate or not. There's no way to tell, Matt. It's all just discourse. That's all we have to operate on, conflicting articles. Oh, well, that's a not. There's no way to tell, Matt. It's all just discourse. That's all we have to operate on, conflicting articles. Oh, well, that's a shame. That's a shame. Or, you know, you could look into it and see whether the scientific community thinks that he was accurately representing things

or what the issues involved there. And spoiler, Matt, I would say that Rand Paul is the person that comes out much worse and much more rhetorically focused than Fauci in those exchanges. But yeah, and you will be able to find a handful of experts that will sign off on Fauci being the worst thing in the world. But this again comes down to the issue about, you know, being able to assess consensus views. You can find climate change scientists who will decry

climate change as an absolute farce and just all to do with discourse. So, yeah. So I think this issue about seeing yourself as being the one who's taking account of both sides' failures. And with Sam, it's all linked into that stuff that he was talking about, his detachment from identity, his non-tribalism. I think that he has too much confidence that that is what he's coming from. And he's, you know, he's getting pain because he's calling it accurately and nobody else is willing to do that. When, if he took a critical look at his history, he would see that he missed people,

that others were long warning him about their conspiratorial nature. In this case, with the lab leak, he hasn't done research and he hasn't looked into what Fauci is doing, but he's commenting on it here. And that's part of the problem. So I just find that's a very self-serving framing. Although I do agree, he is a subject of criticism and he is not tribal in the sense of being all in on some right-wing political agenda or all in on the left-wing political agenda he is on specific subjects but overall not but that should be normal I think what you're saying is you just like people to do their homework before having very strong public opinions when you've got such a great big audience.

That would be nice. That would be helpful. Yes, that would be nice. I agree on that, Matt. So there we go. Some issues, some not when it comes to Sam. Maybe it's worth winding off here and approaching the big thoughts,

the big ideas where we land. We like to finish on something nice or positive or whatever. And I'm going to give Chris Williamson a little thing where he's kind of attacking us, Matt. He's pointing about the issues with us. And he says the reason that rationalists get the piss taken out of them so much,

one of the many reasons that they get the piss taken out of them so much is it's rare to find anybody that loves anything now for anybody to have a degree of passion. And if you find someone who stumbles upon the book of rationality and thinks this gives me answers to a lot of the cognitive bias problems that I've been facing in my life, it's just easy to mock them. It's easy to mock passion in that regard. In some circles, I think specifically being Britishish this is sort of genealogically something that we've got right uh the tall poppy piss-taking mocking uh yeah undertone that could be us that's what we do we see a tall poppy we want to take him down take the safe to the stalk map it's the people that are trying to create chris it's the people

who are trying to build it just makes me seet seeds with anger when i see people doing research oh my god contributing to cumulative research on a topic or building a theory matt oh god that makes my blood boil but you know i also think it's diagnosis of the reason that the rationalist community gets marked as slightly off but nonetheless you know we are part of pistic in culture aren't we we have a particular background and cultural affinity i can can admit that. That's part of what I am, but not because I'm British. I mean, be clear about that. It's because I'm Northern Irish in my soul. And there we have it. So a pretty significant one today. Matt, would you like to offer your overall thoughts or do you want me to tee you up? How would you like

to play it? My thoughts are pretty brief and not particularly interesting, I think. To be honest, I enjoyed talking to you just now about Sam Harris and his various opinions and outtakes. I did find the original material quite tedious to listen to. Most of it is stuff that I'm just not that interested in, spirituality and so on. Yeah, Sam Harris says a lot of good things, stuff that I might say word for word on things like free speech absolutism. And he's just plain wrong on some other things.

And I think more because he hasn't really put the effort in than any other reason. Would you say that he's a secular guru? Yeah I'd say he is a secular guru not even close to being more toxic types but we've talked about this before but the spiritual side to his outlook the way it does feed into a lot of his things the way he does have broad ranging communiques to his audience across pretty much every topic in life, society, personal well-being and politics. And a lot of the sort of grounding for it is based on that personal interpretation of Buddhism. So I think he is, whether or not he's a toxic one in the way that our gurumata tends to probe,

you'll have to listen to that decoding episode to find out. Well, I definitely would put him in the secular guru sphere. In the same way as you, I think that he lights up a lot of the things that we talk about. And the philosophy is although it draws on religious ideas and stuff that is mainstream in Western Buddhism, I still would put him as like primarily secular, straddling the public intellectual space. He does have a lot of broad interests. People tend to ignore the parts of his output that they don't find that objectionable. They'll focus on the political commentary and ignore the meditation and introspective stuff or his stuff about determinism, right? Kind of seeing that as a sideshow from the fact that he's going to promote Douglas Murray's content, or he's going to issue apologetics for some right-wing

figure or something like that. And that's part of the reason that people end up with different positions on him, because they're emphasizing different parts of his output, or they're further or closer to his broad politics. And I also have to put into favorable impacts on the world that he has raised a huge amount for charities because of his promotion of effective altruism. Now, whatever you think about effective altruistic charities, Sam's done episodes on it and he's talked about the feedback that he's received about, you know, donations that have been given. And this isn't donations for like, you know, preventing the AI Moloch from taking over. It's from, you know, providing malaria nets in developing countries and that kind of stuff.

And it's in the tens of millions range, perhaps because he's regarded as a secular guru figure worth listening to by a whole bunch in the tech sphere. And I think that does matter. You know, if Alex Jones earned a ton for charity, I wouldn't say that undoes all the other stuff that he promotes. But I do think it matters. You have to put it into the equation if somebody has generated millions for good charitable causes. I wanted to emphasize that because it is something that perhaps doesn't get referenced when people are being critical of them in the way that we have been. That said, I would reiterate the points that I've made before that it's not

that I think Sam is a polemicist, right? I think the main issue is that he's not as objective as he believes himself to be. He doesn't do enough research on certain topics. He doesn't have a tendency to look back and recognize that he was mistaken on various things that other people highlight. I'm not talking about me here. I mean, there's various people throughout the ages who have highlighted figures to him that they've said are very right wing skewed and he's argued against it. Dave Rubin, notably, right? They're always conspiracy prone or whatever the case might be. So I don't know. Maybe there is a ticking of stock there. The fact that so many of his ex-colleagues have become more conspiratorial. But in the conversation with Chris Williamson, it's a lot more about how he's been unfairly criticized by the left and right, right?

And because they're all tribal, but he's not. So that's why the criticism doesn't land. I think some more self-reflection would be helpful and more tolerance for the fact that he finds his philosophy and the Buddhist kind of introspective aspects of it and the evidence for determinism to be absolutely compelling, irrefutable. There are many intelligent people that disagree and it's not because they feel to grasp the complexities of the issue or they haven't really thought about the nature of self

in a sufficiently complex way. I feel like there could be more room for acknowledging that there are different perspectives and that it's not that they all belong to the crazy camps where people haven't really thought about the issues. But in terms of the gurus that we've covered, I would put him in a much higher

in terms of positive impacts than a whole host of them. And I would say that there is value in his output. I get value from listening to him talk about things. He can be extremely effective when criticizing. You know, he's got a nice turn of three as a good way of speaking. And that's for good and bad in that he presents things in a very persuasive manner. If he comes on, that would be nice to discuss some of these issues with him and see what he thinks. And he may do, or he may think that we're too bad faith and our criticism is, you know, low quality. Whatever the case, that's fine.

He's now being decoded in a very full length episode. Now people can stop asking us for our take on Sam Harrison. If you hate him, that's fine. If you like him, that's fine. Just do your thing, okay? You've heard our opinions. It just occurred to me that, not inviting, but giving people the opportunity to come on the podcast

to defend themselves is kind of putting them on the back foot, you know what I mean? As if they need to or something. I mean, people are Sam since he was on and did invite him to, I did warn him that we were going to do an episode on him. And I mentioned, you know, that if you wanted to, there is a right to reply. And then I suggested discussing some stuff, including his coverage of the lab leak independently from that. And he said, well, what about, you know, the episode that you were going to do? And I think that's a fair point. So he isn't obliged to respond to any of our takes or things like that but should he want to the option is there so that's that's it you know and it's always there for everyone that we cover god forbid that they all exercise that

but we will allow that except if we're covering nazis or something like that but um yeah but sam's not a nazi that's one thing i just want to make clear he's not a nazi we're not going to do review reviews no time no it's too long sam's too big of a personality his mind is too great so wait but matt let me do one thing patrons i'm going to go through these in a rather haphazard way matt but let's do it all together do Do it all at once. Okay. So we have conspiracy hypothesizers. Daniel Beale, Melancholic Trout, Klaus Bergholtz, Jeannie Leons, Alexander Burns, Tor Olaf Nybro, Bob Anley Ellis-Armley, Rob W., Ryan Jensen, Christy Coates, Robert L., Sean Kerwin, Zara Holiday, Tarun Iyer, Annika Kurtz, Gibbs, John Postel, good old John, Matt Graham, Susan Fasig, Jackie Isaacson, Ruth Kauskas and Christopher Harris. Those are conspiracy hypothesizers and we thank them all. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories,

he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Now, revolutionary thinkers, we have Kit zoulison john corey jesse rimler poimena jensen roscoe 111 kristin pole lucas nolting charlie allen protagonist science and abigail khan thank you one and all i'm usually running i, 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, and it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. So, Galaxy Brain Gurus, the leading lights in the guru night sky. Marianne Campbell, Tolkien Bagchi, Kyle Kawagoa. Go away. And that's all for this week. So thank you all.

We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what 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. Now, what's your message to them after hearing all those names? Lex Friedman-esque. I love you all. Just radiating pure love for the lovely, lovely, but very small amounts of money that you give to us. I'm very thankful nonetheless. How's that? Did that strike a good tone? That was great. That was great. I love you all too. Slings and arrows will come to try and take us down down but we know that you know our hearts and will defend us and that's what matters thank you for that and uh we won't be in the harris sphere for a long time i foresee after this so you know enjoy it while it's here and uh well next time we're gonna we're gonna have a look at somebody i don't know

probably out of culture war spaces would be nice so let's do that matt you enjoy yourself old man and i'll i'll see you soon enough okay good luck Monkey Magic Monkey Magic Monkey Magic Monkey Magic Monkey Magic Monkey Magic Monkey Magic Getting ideologically spit roasted here

than a kick in the dick on the way out of the door