Decoding the Gurus - Special: Guru Right to Reply with Robert Wright

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

As per Section 7, paragraph 3, item 2 in the Gurometer Constitution and User Manual states, "All covered gurus shall have a Right to Reply" and Robert Wright has taken us up on this invitation!Now, this provision is generally intended to allow the poor dears we cover a rejoinder to all the insults, smears, and canards we routinely employ in our 'take-downs'. But our coverage of Bob was almost entirely positive. As Bob says in this episode, "You liked me, you really liked me!". So, this was actually more of an excuse to catch up and tie off a few bows. Bob clarifies a few points on the more speculative frontiers of his worldview, and exactly what he means when he talks about potential teleologies in evolution.But the warm fuzzies and mutual back-patting in this interview quickly devolve into yet another bitter intra-podcast internecine feud about consciousness and whether it's 'spooky' or not. Matt accuses Chris of being a p-zombie, which he's done before, but since it's an ad-hominem par excellence, we can all agree it deserves more than one shake of the sauce bottle. Bob does his best to walk (Chris) Matt back from the precipice of madness but to no avail. Although we might possibly have failed, once again, to solve the ultimate mystery of the human condition, at least a good waffley time was had by all.In the original episode, we made only passing reference to our disagreements with Bob over international relations, and Syria in particular. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has happened in the interim, and this has been a big focus of Bob's output since then. So, we have at-it a bit on that, on the benefits and limits of deploying cognitive empathy, and we touch on Grayzone and Bellingcat and who's dis-informing whom.It's no secret we earnestly disagree with Bob on geopolitics. But it's most definitely one of those topics where decent people can disagree. Since he's a frood who Really Knows Where His Towel is, we always appreciate the chance to talk to him. And who knows, one day Matt and Chris might even be wrong about something!? If so, I'm sure the subreddit will let us know.Enjoy!LinksThe original DTG decoding episode on Robert WrightBob's interview with us on his channelOur interview with Bob on DTGThe Monocle 24 piece on the 'evolution' of PutinBellingcat's articles on the Douma chemical weapons issueBob's Non-Zero SubstackYour Gurometer Ratings!If you want to play along you can add your own scores for Jordan or any of our previous gurus here:Rate the Gurus websiteAnd if you want to check the collected results:Gurometer Results

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Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to The Code of the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listens to the greatest minds the world has to offer. We try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh. Chris, tell us why we're here today. We are here apart from just to enlighten the general followers of the coding the guru with our insights because we are having i guess technically it's a guru right to respond episode like we did with chris williams but i i think a bit different because we uh fair to say we were nicer in the episode so really it's more of a catch-up chat with robert wright of blogging heads tv now rebranded as the non-zero empire as you've

described on your episodes as well bob everything is under the non-zero heading. Is that right? I'm welcome. I prefer media juggernaut to empire because, as you know, I'm very anti-imperialist. But yeah, yeah, you've got it. You've got it. And thank you for having me. It's very nice. Yeah, we tried to do this a while back, and it's mainly our terrible scheduling that postponed it. But we did, for anybody who hasn't heard, we did do a full decoding episode with Bob after we did an interview discussing gurus and the kind of things that we usually discuss. So both of those things, should people be interested, they can go back and listen to. And today, thought that we would how we would structure things is that we can talk a little bit about the the episode that we did on you bob any parts that

you might you know take issue with or that you may want to wholeheartedly endorse and then also one thing that is almost certain to come up is consciousness, because that, Matt, you might have forgotten, but it was a sticking point on the episode. And I was accused of being a bee zombie and so on. what is currently perhaps your most controversial stance or topic, the Ukraine and Russia conflict? Because I think we probably do see things differently there, and it might be good to have a discussion about that, even though that wasn't really in the episode. But we're modeling good intellectual dark war discourse.

We're going to have important conversations about areas of disagreement. Yeah, now that the IDW has imploded, I think it falls upon us to carry forth the ideals that it originally rested on. Well, if we don't, civilization will crumble. They were carrying the torch, didn't work out well. Now we're carrying the torch, right? I was amazed, amazed bob just before we started into this i i am a pnr subscriber of some sort to uh your parrot room extra content with uh

with mickey cow i forgot to say mickey cow yeah mickey cows yeah. Yeah, and I've heard your recent episodes going over the history of Blogging Heads TV. And we remarked in previous episodes that we kind of think you are a little bit what the IDW has sold itself as. have discussions with people of very different ideological stripes and disagree, but remain relatively civil in doing so. And I was more amused that blogging heads TV, you were like pioneering the talking heads debating issues, but that you had to locally record the videos. It was like an artificial interactive video because you actually didn't record the videos. Oh, yeah. So it was like an artificial interactive video because you actually didn't see each other. And then afterwards, you sent it and pieced it together. That's impressive.

Well, this was before broadband. It was 2005 when we started it. And so I realized in principle, even though you couldn't see each other, if you each recorded a local video of yourself, you could then in principle splice those together on a server and it would look like you were having a conversation. Now, you know, laptops didn't come with webcams. And in fact, I just taped one of these with Jonah Goldberg where we kind of reminisce. It hasn't gone public yet. Jonah Goldberg, where we kind of reminisce.

It hasn't gone public yet, but at the end, I said, Jonah, by the way, I think I, at the beginning of this whole thing, in 2005, I think I actually gave you a used camcorder that you used. And the thing was like, you know, bigger than a brick. I mean, and he actually, he pulled it out. He still had it. And he refused to return it. But that's another story. But but yeah so we were talking by

phone you couldn't see the other person we were most people were using dial-up modems uh so there was no point in using that for any kind of video connection so we weren't connected via internet at all by by and large when we were having the conversation but then you upload the audio video file each of them did at the end and splice them together on the server yeah yeah i actually had that experience just last week i was having a meeting with a prospective phd student and these are always a little bit fraught because you're sort of sounding each other out to try to figure out if you're crazy and going to be difficult to work with or whatever and there's something wrong with her video where it was just a black screen and i didn't say anything i just thought okay maybe she does not comfortable with that

whatever so i thought she was just on like a phone and couldn't see me i couldn't see her but she thought her video was on so for the first like 30 minutes i wasn't making eye contact obviously and i was often just sort of talking and staring at the ceiling or something and then we finally worked it out she was like oh, oh my God, thank goodness. I thought there was something wrong with you. She thought I had some. So she could see you. She could see me. That's right. It was just watching me talk like this and anyway, vaping away. And she thought I was very strange, maybe neurologically divergent. Anyway, it was all sort of that. I realize, Bob, we're tangenting, but I do have to mention that just quickly,

one of the strangest experiences like that I had was during a Zoom meeting with a student who was wanting to come to a lab in Japan, or I can't remember. They were kind of somehow, they were trying to promote themselves. And during the meeting, introducing themselves, they said, do you mind if I eat something? I didn't get lunch. And everyone said, no, no, fine, go ahead. And all of every one of them who said fine, thinking, what is this, right? Well, we were thinking, you know, they're going to pick up a sandwich or something. But from the bottom of the screen emerged a bowl of noodles. And, you know, there's not as silent a pair, but it was also, I was like, is this an attempt to kind of show that you're okay with Japanese culture or something? Because if it is, this

is not the way to do it. But yeah, that was the wonders of video conferencing with students. The rules of Zoom etiquette are still being worked out. But I think we should all agree that one of them should be noodles. No noodles. No. And I'm guessing, Chris, I haven't been in Japan for years, but I'm guessing that the Japanese approach to etiquette on Zoom is just a trifle more restrictive than Westerners.

There is not much udon consumption going on at that time so yeah but um but forgetting udons for the minute so bob i like i i said off air i listened back to the episode and so i have some things that i'd like to ask you about. But I wonder, from your side, as the subject of a decoding episode, how was that? And, you know, were there any parts that were particularly cringeworthy? Well, I mean, you know, overall, it was obviously very charitable and favorable. In fact, I was listening to it. I was walking down the street and it occurred to me that maybe part of your business model should be guru kickbacks. Because I was thinking, like, I'd pay for this.

Like, you know, just name a number. But, you know, I actually was. I really, I really, you know, it was kind of like, do know, the famous Sally Field segment at the Academy Awards where she wins the award. And she got ridiculed for it. But I thought, you know, it's a perfectly I know what she meant. And that's the way I felt. I was going to, you know, get misty eyed and say you like me. I didn't, but I could have.

But I could have. Anyway, I guess I thought, well, there is the consciousness issue, which maybe we'll we'll get to eventually. Not so soon that we that we lose all of our listeners immediately. But but I guess the only. The main reservation would be that I hope people didn't get the idea that the weirder parts of my worldview are kind of central to it or essential to it or that, um, or, or that I, uh, that these are even that all of the weird things are even super firm convictions of mine. Like the question of whether there is a larger purpose unfolding in the universe through evolution and so on, it's something I

think there's some reason to believe. It's something I think you can actually argue about, and I think you can view in principle, as I emphasize, without departing from a Darwinian framework or even a materialist framework, you can see kind of biological evolution, subsequent human cultural evolution as a kind of directional unfolding that could be part of a larger purpose. At the same time, you know, if you ask me, like, what is the message I'm most trying to drive home to people right now, I would say, and this is partly because I'm about to start writing a book on this, but I would say this anyway, probably, is that if people don't get better at cognitive empathy, which is just, by which I just mean perspective taking, understanding

what people are thinking, especially people in different circumstances across, you know, tribal lines and so on, then the chances will be higher that the whole planet will go up in smoke or catastrophe will ensue. That's a really, that's something I really try to argue to people. And it doesn't matter for purposes of trying to persuade them of this. It doesn't matter whether the moment we're at in history is some kind of culmination of some purpose of unfolding or anything. It just doesn't matter whether the moment we're at in history is some kind of culmination of some purpose of unfolding or anything. It just doesn't. I don't care if they believe that. I'm not sure of it myself. But in the conversation that you were focusing on, I did, you know, I did talk a lot about the kind of more out there parts of my worldview.

So it's natural that you focused on them. And I thought you were you were fair about them. You know, there's things we disagree about about but that was the only i guess i hope i didn't sound yeah yeah even yeah no that definitely came through in the material we listened to i remember that that you were very clear about stuff that you were concrete convicted about like evolution and you know there's this it trails off into the metaphysics which is you know is it just a mysterious sort of empty black box for everybody and some people are happier to sort of shade in some of that and some of us like me and chris just sort of happy to leave it as a black box and yeah so but we may not have i can't remember did we Chris, make that clear in our thing that Robert did?

Oh, you certainly made clear that I was careful to distinguish between things I said that were conjectural or hypothetical or I'm just kind of saying that you can set aside some of the more conjectural metaphysical stuff. And the part of what I try to persuade people of that's most important to me stands independent of that, really. I mean, some people would like, you know, it's funny when you mentioned Mickey Kaus, when he read my book, Non-Zero and Draft. And the last chapter gets into the speculation about the possibility of larger purpose. And he said, like, why don't you just get just take that away, get rid of that. And other people felt that way, too. And some people are put off by that and some aren't. Maybe I should have left it out. But it certainly is the case that the book would have still stood, you know, it would have still made sense without that. And the arguments up to that point don't depend on that kind of metaphysical level. Interesting point, because actually some of the back or before we did the episode on you was that,

you know, that basically there were not a large amount of people paying for your blood. Bob, you'll be glad to know. But there were a couple of people who that seemed to be primarily the issue. They were like, don't let them off with the teleology. Look at the last chapter of Non-Zero or this interview. And when I listened to the episode and some of the other content i had the feeling more of what you're saying now which was that you weren't you were quite clear in saying this is this is a possible reading of how things are and i acknowledge that it's speculative and actually even if you strongly disagree with my reading of it, it doesn't, all of the stuff that comes prior to this is kind of, you can take it or leave it without this

part, without that. So for me, I didn't find that objectionable because I'm kind of like, yeah, that's, everyone's entitled to interpret things like that. I'm kind of like, yeah, everyone's entitled to interpret things like that. And as long as this is a difference than I see when I see figures like Brett Weinstein or Jordan Peterson, for example, because sometimes Jordan Peterson in particular will highlight that they're going into speculative territory. Like most recently, he did it with Dawkins when he was discussing this DNA helix and the, you know, represented in classical literature and what that might reference about human consciousness. And like, despite his disclaimers, he essentially comes down very clearly that like human consciousness can extend the ability to visualize the structure of DNA. And that's why you see it in classical literature.

And that very much like although you could say, well, you can, you know, that's just like a speculative thing. It's just a random point that he makes. I actually think it speaks to the way that he approaches other topics and the way he reasons about other topics and i do think that is a distinction from the like the stuff that you were talking about with black holes which was like the logic holds but it isn't to say that you infuse a mystical nature like when you're talking about evolution the way you talked about evolution to me just read as, you know, a well-written account of the standard modern evolutionary frame. Yeah. Yeah. And the black hole thing is a good example of something that's that's actually pretty tangential from my point of view. That's this idea. It starts with Lee Smolin's idea that maybe universes replicate through black holes and are thus themselves subject to natural selection and they're selected for having more black holes or something.

I only get into that because, you know, after I if I'm arguing about the teleology, like could natural selection itself have a purpose? I want to emphasize there are various ways that could have happened. It could be there's a God. It could be it's like a simulation hypothesis and there's a hacker. Could be aliens came and planted the seed, having genetically engineered the seed or something. And it could be even not an intelligent force at all that imbued the system with purpose, but this weird metanatural selection among universes. And so I'm just using that to illustrate that even if you concluded that, yes, evolution is probably purposive, teleological, that would leave open a lot of possibilities ranging from conventionally theological to not at all theological. So, again, it's not like I believe that black holes, that there's a very high probability that black holes are the means by which universes replicate or anything. But I will say, like, I don't want

to dodge the teleology issue. I'd love to argue about it. And if people are interested, they might just go to YouTube and search for the full length version of the conversation between me and Daniel Dennett, because we get into it. And I personally thought he had actually at one point conceded that there is some evidence. It doesn't need not overwhelming, but at least something you could you can cite as evidence of teleology. He later claimed he hadn't. But anyway, that makes it kind of an interesting conversation if you're interested in that. Yeah, I might be throwing shade here, but I listened yesterday to Lex Friedman was interviewing Bishop Barron, a Catholic bishop, apparently well known for public speaking about matters of faith and whatnot. And I only got through the first 15 minutes because Lex's opening question was about what is God, right?

And the answer was, to me, like, you know, I was raised Catholic. And actually, Catholics tend not to be that interested in the theology of my experience, but for those that are, there's a massive well of deeply thoughtful theology and apologetics that you can get into. And that opening thing, the answer framed it that the mistake people is to see God as a being, a thing which exists or is a being like any other, whereas the reality is that God is not a being a thing which exists or is a being like any other whereas the reality is that god is not a being he's not in the universe he's the you know he is the cause of all things and therefore cannot be discussed like a being so he both is and is not and all this stuff it's it kind of bob ended up going into gojuna is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, Narjuna, I think.

The Buddhist philosopher about being and not being and all these things. But I find my patience for that kind of discussion is extremely short because I hear

the people start elaborating on those points. And to me, it sounds like a huge dodge of the reality, which is like the vast majority of people who understand religion, who engage with religion, like even the way the Bible portrays God, it is not as like an abstract cosmic principle. It is very much as an intervening person with anger and personality and so on. And so with the teleology issue, I sometimes feel like the beats around that do that slight double step where people will invoke a very depersonalized teleology when it's convenient.

But in other times, like if they're with a receptive person, they move more towards intelligent design level stuff. And that's something I'm wary of, but I haven't picked up in your content. But have you been accused of that? Just out of curiosity. I know. I actually wrote one of, I think, the first takedowns of intelligent design in Slate, like very long ago. It surfaced in the New York Times as like a thing. And I had already thought about it a little. And I was aware of some of the people in intelligent design. So definitely,

I'm not that. But yeah, that's, I do get, yeah, there are people who hear the word teleology and assume you're talking about a version of that that's not compatible with straight Darwinian natural selection, that thinks there are mystical forces influencing evolution or something like that, which is not. You know, I probably would have been better off if I never brought this up, given the amount of time I've spent explaining what I don't believe. But, you know, like you, I was brought up religiously, and that may be why I'm interested in questions of larger purpose. Now, were you actually religious for a while, or did you from the get-go think it was bullshit? As far as I can remember, like, I thought it was i thought it was stories and i mean for me this is probably partly why i'm more interested in the ritual aspect of religion because like going to mass every week you know repeating the prayers our follower and hill mary endlessly and the catechism i i feel that that has a very significant impact on just, you know, culture and personality features and also an embodied understanding of a kind of approach to the world, whether or not you believe it.

But I never, as early as I can remember, I didn't have any belief in like the actual teachings of Catholicism. So yeah, and then I had the rebellious streak in my teenage years. So no, I was interested more in mystics, like Anthony de Mello and Thomas Martin, and the kind of comparative religion approach, you know, like introspective practices but not the mainstream christian their catholicism i think same for you right matt oh i come i come from a long line of atheists so i don't even think that would have been my guess yeah even my grandparents were atheists as for really wow early adopters yeah yeah but um but the background is catholic and like chris says i think the main influence is cultural like i can still see that that sort of cultural influence in my parents say yeah yeah catholic guilt is real that's true yeah definitely

every religion thinks that they're like, have this unique claim to guilt. I mean, Catholics say it. I was brought a Baptist. A lot of guilt there. You know, Jewish guilt and so on. Everyone thinks they have a special claim on guilt with a possible exception of Episcopalian. What about the polytheists back in the Norse or the Romans or whatever? They didn't seem to feel much guilt about things.

Is it a monotheistic thing? You know, it's interesting. I mean, in the development of religion, at least as I, you know, I wrote a book about this called The Evolution of God, and an argument that's not original to me but that I buy is that back in kind of hunter gatherer days, religion didn't have a moral component. It wasn't because moral behavior wasn't a problem. If you're living, you know, within a village with 50 other people, you don't have to worry about somebody like stealing your stuff and running away or something. There's a lot of problems that don't

arise that arise in larger societies. So it's only with, you know, more large scale, like after the invention of agriculture, that you even get gods that are trying to shame people about their behavior toward other people. Now that, you know, in hunter-gatherer religions, you do see people trying to appease the gods, like the whole saying well maybe if we do this there won't be a storm that destroys everything uh but the moral the moral element uh and hence the guilt i guess in that sense enters yeah yeah like there's certainly be like all sorts of punishments and ostracisms in traditional hunter-gatherer groups and so on but i think i guess the special thing is the internalization of the punishment that yeah i'd be remiss if i didn't mention because it's kind of like my field of research that there's so look bob like what you're talking about morally concerned

high gods and the standard position has been that they're later developing and like that the earlier smaller scale society gods are less morally inclined but there has been some recent research looking at local gods versus like high god societies and they've indicated that there there does seem to be a surprising amount of moralistic concern there when they started looking at it empirically but obviously in the modern world all of these things have interacted right to a large extent so you mean these these societies aren't so-called pristine societies they've been yeah they've been they have had contact with western yeah yeah there is that problem but it's an interesting area to look at. And in general, I think the bigger problem is people extrapolating out from the monotheistic Abrahamic traditions to all of human history and all religious expression across the world, which is inaccurate even in the modern world, but definitely throughout history.

So, yeah, it's like a bugbear of mine as well. So, Chris, I think we would be – well, we can't resist the temptation. I think we have to get Bob to adjudicate on the things that divided our podcast, these issues that caused a surprising amount of disharmony. One of them was the mystery or not of consciousness. Yeah. And what was the other one there's another one well the a lot spiraled out from the consciousness issue and i i don't know what is a useful way to

but i i guess bob probably i can very nutshell my summary of my view of consciousness and you to explain why I'm wrong. Yeah, I have a question about your view of consciousness, actually. I thought I spotted a kind of internal contradiction, but maybe I'm wrong. Okay, well, this might be a good time to point it out. So like you in that interview that we covered and in all our content of yours that I've consumed, nuller content of yours that I've consumed, treat consciousness as many philosophers and scientists of consciousness do as an extremely mysterious phenomenon, like something which is in need of explanation and which the intuitive explanations actually fall down the more that you dig into it. And when you are outlining the possible positions that people could take on the kind of so-called

compatibilist approach of people like Dana and the epiphenomenal approach of, say, people like Sam Harris, I think I felt that there was a gap that you didn't outline, which was the position which I would go for. And that is that the way that our brains are cognitively kind of arranged, the way that they function, that it's, to me, highly plausible that the inner sense of self and subjective consciousness is a necessary component of how they do what they do in the actual world. Like allow us to think about the future, allow us to project ourselves into the future and recreate experiences in the path. So kind of like agent simulation modeling.

And that if you didn't have that kind of sensation, that the brains could not do what they're supposed to do. And my kind of point there is when people are discussing this topic, they almost always insert the hypothetical, well, what about when we make a computer that can do the exact same thing without the subjective sense of consciousness? And my kind of pushback there is that has never been done. It's a complete hypothetical. So we can't is that has never been done. It's a complete hypothetical.

So we can't say that this can be done. We can only hypothetically say it is true that it can be done. Doesn't that call into question? And my first point would be, well, first prove that it can be done. Like you have to first get to something which exactly replicates consciousness. But as far as we can tell, there is no inner subjective experience. So I'm wondering where you think that goes wrong. Yeah.

First, maybe I'll go ahead and bring up what I thought was the internal contradiction in your view of consciousness. And maybe you can explain to me how I'm wrong and then I'll and then I'll answer the question. But you did seem to posit this explanation that there are these things that human beings do that couldn't be done without subjective experience. Right. The planning ahead and so on. OK. But then later it became apparent that you agree with me that non-human animals also have subjective experience. And probably we'll never know for sure. We don't strictly speaking, we don't know that each other has consciousness. That's one of the strange. And by the way, he's on.

Yeah. Fight your tangents, Bob. Fight your tangents. yeah fight your tangents bob fight your tangents but uh so why you tell me i mean are if this is an explanation for subjective experience and you think that dogs have that and i really think my dogs have it then the explanation has to apply to dogs are my dogs doing some kind of planning they don't seem to be doing a lot of planning you should meet my dogs chris they might totally destroy your view of consciousness yeah chris deal with that though well so i i also had dogs as a child so i'm also convinced that they are conscious purely for subjective selfish reasons but yeah so like for me i am of the school that you are, Bob, that consciousness exists on a spectrum, that there are degrees of it and dogs and like social primates, which are even closer to us.

I don't have any issue with extending experiences of consciousness to them or to the other people that I encounter in my daily life. And I can go like to mosquito consciousness. I cannot go to rock consciousness. This was a point of contention that me and Matt had. But this doesn't strike me as an issue from my perspective because I think like that human self-reflexive consciousness and the level of cognitive complexity,

which allows us, for example example to have cumulative culture is off a like we are clearly on the same spectrum but have reached a level of complexity which nothing else on the planet has i certainly agree yes yeah yeah so look chris let me summarize for you because i know what you're saying but i think chris is is saying that, you know, he doesn't dispute dogs have consciousness. He would also, but they have like a lesser degree of consciousness perhaps than us. They also have a lesser degree of planning and the kind of, you know, elaborate functionality. And he's suggesting maybe those two things rise and fall together. Well, okay. But I guess I thought I understood him to be saying the reason consciousness exists is because there's these sophisticated cognitive things that humans do that couldn't be done without it.

If you believe that consciousness, by which I think we just mean subjective experience or, you know, to put it in Nagel's terms, the fact that it is like something to be alive. it entered the lineage way before humans and way before our sophisticated planning, then it seems you have to have an explanation for its existence that would apply to those animals. So, you know, are they doing something that requires consciousness? And of course, then you first have to decide, well, when do I think it entered the lineage? Bacterium, you know, mammals? I think there's a distinction that's important there that like again it's not a categorical distinction like if we had the other hominid species still alive a lot of them would be you know on spectrums to us or right beside us as the case might be but in in any case i think that this distinction between like subjective experiences, like

an internal subjective of what it is like to be something, I think that that is different in an important way from a level of consciousness that can engage in self-reflective processes, self-awareness. And like... Because we are self-awareness and like, because we are self-aware for, and that's different, but still to me, the big question is not how did self-awareness happen? I mean, that is a big question, but to me, the consciousness question is on this planet, the first time it was ever like anything to be anything, whether it was a rock or a bacterium or a bird or a mammal,

whether it was a rock or a bacterium or a bird or a mammal, why was that? Because according to science, you shouldn't need that. I mean, the mainstream scientific worldview starts out with, you know, DNA, just physical, and you can explain why it evolves without departing from a sheerly physical description of it. And really, according to mainstream science, that same attitude should prevail for the rest of evolutionary history. It's just genetic mutations creating more elaborate physical machinery. And to understand the behavior of the organism completely, all you need is a complete mapping of all the physical machinery. That's just kind of an article of faith in science. Now, it could be wrong, but my point is that this is why subjective experience is one reason that it is a challenge to the scientific worldview, because according to the scientific worldview,

I wouldn't say all scientists spell this out or anything, but if you look at the kind of explicit and or implicit premises of of science the idea is that everything should be physically explicable explicable in physical terms so there shouldn't be any non-material stuff that is essential to the workings of any organism now chris before you reply because your reply will probably be long. Don't give him time to think. He'll come up with something good. Okay, go ahead. No, I just need to plant my flag in the sand and distance myself from my co-host and say that I completely agree with Bob.

This is my view as well. A materialistic account of everything that humans do. I've said this before. This is a surprise to you, Chris. that humans do does i mean i've said this before this is a surprise to you chris is doesn't you know doesn't have a place for the subjective experience of being you it's a different category of thing and it is therefore a mystery that science doesn't really have the tools to address not least because we deal in science with observable phenomena. Yes. Another, in some ways, separate point, but an important point, that in order for, well, again, I'll fight that tangent, Bob.

I'll shut up. But let the record show that while Matt was talking, Chris was shaking his head vigorously, and I would say defensively, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. I feel you two need to get your own broadcast together. There's too much sympathpatico reasoning. Well, we did have a three or four hour conversation yesterday about how we were going to handle this part. Well, it was.

So where I depart from both of you, I think, is that to me, if you take like a kind of behaviorist view that there's aversive stimuli and there are attractive stimuli that and you have a biological machine right that tries to avoid the things that are aversive to its nervous system and seek out the things that allow it to produce more of itself and so on that to me when you're working in the kind of mucky realm of cells and biological things mixed together and sending chemicals across, as these systems become more complex and nucleus combine into primitive brains or whatever way, I'm doing a terrible job butchering the science of that. But like, as you go up in complexity, there isn't a mystery to me, like why it would be that some central processing unit

might actually be more effective at doing that kind of calculus by giving a kind of vibe, right? About like that, the thing which you want to avoid, the pain thing. I take the point that like, you don't need a subjective experience of pain in order to just have an aversive response to something, right?

But yet it does seem it's increasingly, as we become more sophisticated in our ability to detect them and increasingly innovative in the experiments that people use, that things which we thought weren't capable of having a subjective sensation of pain appear to be capable of it. And that suggests to me that actually it's very early in the system that there might be this kind of reaction where it is something which the biological entity wants to avoid and that that is negatively violenced in some way, even in a very proto-istic way.

So you think there's a primitive subjective experience at that point? Yeah. But see, this is, seems to me this is a problem for you because you earlier were saying, okay, your reply is that you could build a machine that will do this. Well, tell me when you build your machine that can act exactly like Chris Kavanaugh. Now you're saying very primitive organisms may have subjective experience. Well, we can build a machine that will emulate a primitive aversive response, right? I mean, so that's not speculative that you don't need subjective experience. You know, robot, just look at robot, the behavior of robots. You can make it aversive and they can

approach, they can avoid. And we're assuming that it's not like anything to be a robot, but in any event, we know it doesn't have to be like, there doesn't have to be subjective experience in principle because we understand everything about how a robot works. think we're very far away from being able to properly artificially create like even a fruit fly that behaves in all of the ways that a fruit fly would. We could do it in like a modeling simulation where we really simplify the world. But like, you know, even just getting computers to be able to visually categorize things the way that very simple organisms is a huge processing task that they seem to do much more efficiently. And I think biological systems that we can create

and it may turn out as future technology develops that there is no barrier. We can just keep going up and up and simulating the world. And that wouldn't necessarily disprove that for the biological version, that it's unavoidable as you create these things that you result in like sensations that, you know, are on the spectrum of consciousness. But we could do it where we don't need to have it in the system if we indeed can do it mechanically through things that don't have any inner subjective experience to produce the behavior. But my kind of counterpoint to that is like the reason that I'm focusing more on the upper end and the human side of things is when

people are talking about consciousness, usually a lot of the things that cause people like hand wringing and occupy a lot of time. It's not like what's the conscious awareness of a fruit fly. It is the ability for humans to self interrogate their own minds. And right. This is like things which have occupied entire traditions for millennia. like things which have occupied entire traditions for millennia. And that seems like we are using a human brain to look at the processes of cognition. And there are inherent things which are limiting and strange about that, because it's using this, you know, it's not designed to interrogate that,

like trying to turn a camera around to see its own lens, the analogy might be. Yeah, I think that's a huge threshold, certainly. Self-consciousness, self-awareness, you know, but if your argument is, well, subjective experience entered the lineage well before us, but it's only with our species that it becomes functionally significant, then you're steering toward a kind of a teleological view of evolution because it suggests that evolution was set up, you know, in some sense. And by the way, there's, you know, another tangent I'm fighting is there is a kind of interesting scenario that might involve black holes, according to which you could see. What I would say is this is the only epiphenomenal view of consciousness that also has a functional

role for consciousness, which sounds like a paradox, is one involving a teleological view of evolution. I'll leave it there. Matt, you were, sounds like you wanted to, or you look like you wanted to say something. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe. sounds like you wanted to or you look like you wanted to say something um yeah maybe yeah maybe i'm trying to pin pin chris down a little bit and just just reduce this to where the disagreement is i mean if i if i try to steal man what he's saying um try to find some common ground it's that yes

there are emergent phenomena that you can't atomize and reduce to its constituent components right so it's trivial to say that oh oh, we're all just chemicals, sure, but we're not just chemicals, right? We're chemicals doing very complicated and interesting things, but, you know, there are other emergent phenomena in the natural world, whirlpools and hurricanes and things cannot be reduced to their individual components. So I guess the closest I can get myself to what Chris is saying

is that I could say, yes, things like consciousness are clearly an emergent phenomena of a complex system involving neurons and all the way down. But where I get stuck is that I can't like fundamentally, it's still my account of how humans work is exactly the same as my account of how frogs work. And it is exactly my account of how stones work is exactly the same as my account of how frogs work and it is exactly my account of how stones work which is material right and and fundamentally even though it's a complex phenomena yeah it it is nothing but the interaction of particles right so i don't see why the subjective experience is a necessary part of that emergent phenomena i i can't see any role in which a non-physical property like subjective experience can interact with the material world and yeah chris is chris is upset very expression on his face this is this is this is a yeah let it out sticking the needles into my own self-reflective consciousness but yeah the issue

for me ma is when you say i'm sorry bob i've switched the argument but you can go now bob we'll just yeah i really enjoyed talking to you guys and getting my rebuttal sorry i failed as a as a counselor the non-materialist part which I don't get that because like you're talking to me when you're saying what you're describing. I'm all on board with it. But then you say, yeah, obviously like consciousness is, you know, non-material and spooky. And I'm like, well, why? Like, what's it all spooky about that? If it is correct that those products of the way that the brain is organized into those structures, that they lead to conscious experience, like if I'm right, and it is kind of a component

of agent modeling that you create these processes that give like a subjective, an experience of let's stick with humans for the minute. But if that's a component of it in order for it to function even if it's an epiphenome of it it just generates this sensation for the biological unit that is doing that then like where is the spooky element of that for anyone because so so this is the part of the conversation bob where i accuse chris of being a p zombie because what is a p zombie oh a philosophical zombie you know it's the thought experiment yeah so in the chalmers yeah yeah okay that's it so so well but so you you're saying he believes what implicitly that uh i mean the zombie thought experiment is generally used, I think, to support kind of my view of this, right?

Like, if you imagine a planet with these beings that were built just like us, but it wasn't like anything to be them, they would act, they could, in theory, act exactly like us. Now, by the way, the one thing they couldn't do is discuss consciousness. And that's an interesting fact that I think could lead us back to something. I'm fighting the tangent. But anyway, you're saying Chris's view is where on that? Oh, yeah. No, I think he captured it, which is that, yeah, I think the P-Zombie thought experiment supports my view and your view, which is that there is something mysterious about it, because you can have the emergent phenomena, you have the complex system i don't see any reason why there should be a subjective view that is somehow

involved with that so matt just to remind you how many p zombies have you met in your life so far at least one because he won't name names because that's that's my issue is like sure you can have a thought experiment where there's another world in which it's perfectly possible to have the consciousness without the inner experience that humans have the the kind of complex behavior that humans have without the inner experience okay show me them like build me the computer that does that and not a chatbot not a chatbot chris i'll happily grant you that like if we built a computer right and it appeared to become conscious it told us hey i'm unconscious and all that stuff and whatever and and we were totally on chatbot recently yeah that's right that's right he convinced at least one guy um at google um

uh now i mean and convinced us to the same degree that i'm convinced that you're conscious right because i don't really think europeans i'll be i do think you're conscious like that would be still mysterious right like even if it even if it is a necessary component like if it is an inevitable rather byproduct or or phenomenon that arises with really sophisticated behavior, it would still be mysterious. Like why, why is that computer subjectively experiencing the world? It's. Can I, can I perhaps gratify you both by disagreeing with both of you a little bit? And, but this is ultimately a response to this, your question, Chris, I think, which is

why should we think of consciousness as this immaterial weird stuff is that kind of your question yeah you know okay so i would have where i would have given matt pushback in the first place is is where he says uh well okay consciousness is an emergent phenomenon like a whirlpool and and so on i would have said actually no it's it's different from a whirlpool and it's different in a way said, actually, no, it's different from a whirlpool. And it's different in a way that, Matt, actually, you alluded to earlier, which is that a whirlpool is publicly observable. Like you and I and Chris can all stand around and look at it and agree on its properties. Consciousness, the distinctive thing about consciousness, one distinctive thing

is it's only observable by one person. It is not publicly observable. And two things seem to follow from it. One is it isn't amenable to scientific investigation in the sense that the rest of the world is. Because science depends on two different scientists looking at the result and comparing notes. It's like, oh, you predicted that the thermometer would read X. Oh, there it is. It's X. We agree. Subjective experience can never be publicly observed. And then, Chris, the way I would relate that to what you're saying is, if you ask what do

we mean by material or physical, well, actually philosophers spend a lot of time pointing out what a complicated question that is. But it seems to me, one thing we actually generally mean by that is that in principle, you could show to everybody and they'd compare notes on it. Everything we talk about as material is in some sense, in principle, observable by more than one observer. They can compare notes. That's just not true of consciousness. So one way of answering the question of why we should think of it as immaterial is it's not publicly observable. answering the question of why we should think of it as immaterial is it's not publicly observable. In any event, that is a very distinctive and strange feature of it. It's not publicly observable and it's a problematic feature from a scientific point of view. I have a sci-fi scenario then, and I admit entirely this is like me setting up the world, but I'm curious about the implications if you could do this like so say science reaches such

a level that it can artificially simulate take a scan of a person and and simulate them in in some online environment or vr thing right and you strap yourself in and you are able to experience that person's consciousness and not just in the way of seeing through like a recording but see i can't imagine that well i can't imagine that that's what i'm saying can you okay so hold on well like how would you visualize the consciousness like would it be a graphical representation no no no so this is this is what i mean like so maybe i think this might actually get the distinction because for me what i'm talking about there would be okay so, so you've got this recording, right? And you plug yourself into this system, however you do it, right? And then all of the outputs that you have now in your life, the, you know, the, the

emotional state, the memories, the so on, all gone. And you are now in another body with a different set of memories and a different experience of the world, a different set of memories and a different experience of the world, a different personality. But to me, there's no reason to believe that it's fundamentally different, right? Like in terms of there would be different sensations, but bodily we're very similar beings. So if that were possible, that you could be transplanted and experienced through someone else's eyes and feelings and sensations.

Would that to you then remove the mystery? If science were able to reach a part where it can show you what it is like to be someone else, you can experience that and you can remember the experience when you come back. Would that solve the issue? First of all, it seems to me on the one hand, you're suggesting that we'll never have a robot that can do a good imitation of a dog. On the other hand, you're positing that it's in principle possible

to have this machine that magically transports me into the consciousness, the subjective experience of another person. The other thing I'd say is, I mean, this has been a subject of discussion. I think even in Thomas Nagel's famous essay, What Is It Like To Be About?, I think he kind of makes the point that what you're describing, I may be wrong about this, certainly philosophers have made this, the argument, the way you're describing is kind of in principle impossible, because to fully share in their experience, you will have to totally lose your own frame of reference. You'll have no memory of

being Chris. They have no memory of being Chris. And so what you're saying is, could I become them? Well, maybe, but if you became them, it wouldn't be you observing what it's like to be them. Yeah. So I completely grant that this is like a science fiction future. I'm just using that as a thought experiment to try and work out where where the differences on our perceptions of consciousness like because I do think that is probably ultimately unlikely and we are nowhere near that. And we're nowhere near simulating the dog. that person but if you could come back to your body and you could in in some way retain that experience or memory of that experience that it would so you're saying that the thing which makes consciousness fundamentally unlike anything else is that we can never interrogate it or experience someone else's version of it and i'm just asking so if if it turned out that that was not true like

if there was a way for us to technologically experience someone else's consciousness would that remove the mysteriousness no no i think bob's saying is that that's sort of in principle not possible because of because of what we understand consciousness to be and i agree i think what we i think where we're getting to is that the mysterious part for me is that we talk about consciousness. We feel like we're conscious. It feels like a meaningful concept, right? But just because it feels like a sensible word that describes something doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And for me, that's where the mystery comes in. It's almost like a definitional thing. At a gut level, we feel like it is a real thing right i think all four of us do right three i looked at the three screens in front of me because i could see myself that i added myself

my god look at that anyway that's that's meta and yeah but you know like because it's just it's you can't define it in a in a scientific way it's just, you can't define it in a scientific way. It's almost like you can't define it in a logical way. Thought experiments like that always break down because they just don't work. We all agree it's like something to be us. But, yeah, beyond that, it gets kind of hard. I mean, sure, if you showed me a machine that could do what sounds like it's in principle impossible, I'd have to accept that there is such a machine. But right now, it seems in principle impossible.

I just want to add, Bob, that the position that you're in there with my thought experiment, that like, yeah, if you can create this wonderful machine that proves you're correct, then fine. that position that you're in is the one that I'm in when everyone keeps saying, well, but if we make a machine that can replicate consciousness and doesn't need any of the subjective inner world, because for me, I'm like, okay, build that machine, show me that machine. No, it would still be a mystery because you build the machine, great, it's conscious, right? But we know exactly how that machine works. And we know that it doesn't need consciousness to do what it does. So then it would be a different kind of mystery. I mean, either. And this is what I would if I had to crisply summarize my view of consciousness, it's like, OK, there's three possibilities. Either consciousness doesn't exist. Some people believe this or they say it's an illusion or something doesn't make any sense to me, but they say it or they implicitly believe it. They say it's an illusion or something.

Doesn't make any sense to me, but they say it. Or they implicitly believe it. Or consciousness exists but doesn't do anything. That is to say it's epiphenomenal. It bears the relationship to the physical thing that a shadow of my hand bears to my hand. My hand influences the shadow. The shadow doesn't influence my hand. Okay, so either it doesn't exist or it doesn't do anything. It exists but doesn't do anything.

Or it exists but does something. Well, if it exists but does something, that is one kind of challenge to science. Because it's this immaterial stuff that intervenes in a way we can't even conceptualize. We can't even think about clearly. It's not kind of mechanistic. Or it exists and doesn't do anything. In which case, science doesn't seem to come up with an explanation for why it exists if it has no function. Okay, so there are two different

kinds of challenges that consciousness can pose to science. And I submit that whatever happens in the future with the robot, one of those kinds of challenges will be posed. Either that robot won't have consciousness and will say to scientists, well, then why does consciousness exist in humans? Or it will have consciousness and will be able to say to scientists, see, it's not just physical. There's this stuff we can't observe that is influencing the physical machine. Science is screwed, whatever happens. Yes. Okay? Unless consciousness doesn't exist, which we all deny. I see that Matt nodded along.

And for me, everything you said, Bob, is like I'm on board, except for that one part, which is quite crucial, where you say science needs to explain how an immaterial thing is so important. And, like, to me, it's the same as matt saying it's spooky and it like i just to me it's not immaterial in the same way that it's not immaterial when you say okay crowd psychology or something like that it is an emergent property of a bunch of physical things getting together and behaving. But if that's the case, then there's no need for a subjective experience of that phenomena.

You keep saying that. Like, there isn't one. Because by the way you've defined it, it is literally the physical phenomena. No. Right? No. Not if it's a necessary component in order to get that outcome. How can it be?

How can it be? It's a physical system. Anyway, I realize we're relitigating in a half-assed, amateurish way topics that smarter people than us, including Bob. I appreciate, Bob, your attempt. I still feel there is a P zombie world between us. But I think that we will have angered equally the larger majority of the audience who probably agree with you, Matt, and the smaller minority who will have enjoyed my point of view. They do exist. There are some of them. We hear from them. Well, one thing about the issue of consciousness is it often happens that people

don't just disagree they can't even understand what the other person is saying this is what i don't think there's any issue that's truer of where you just reach these these impasses and it isn't in a certain sense it's not a question of disagreeing. It's like you can't wrap your mind around what the other person is saying. And, again, that's a distinctive thing about consciousness. It reflects a distinction. Like we said before, which is how that in a world of P-zombies, they wouldn't be talking about consciousness. They wouldn't be having conversations

about it so that that is a difference isn't it right i mean don't get me started on the tangent i wisely refrain from exploring but but but you you could you could if you play out this teleological scenario let's say universes replicate and uh and so evolution itself has a purpose and you could argue well the universe is so in this scenario stop me stop me i i want to encourage you both to stop me right now i'm gonna pause and you can just say stop if you want we're an hour in and we should probably move on from consciousness because it is a bottomless well. It's very spooky, right. So I would say Google me, New York Times and Purpose, Evolution and Purpose, get to that piece and then follow a link at the bottom of the piece to this far out argument about teleology and so on. But Matt, can I return to my role as a rebutter of outrageous things said about me during the podcast? There's one thing about getting back to cognitive empathy, just perspective taking.

At one point, you said, well, yeah, I can do cognitive empathy with dictators, but that doesn't lead me to agree with them. And I just want to emphasize the point of cognitive empathy isn't so that you'll agree with people or you'll sympathize with them or you'll care about their welfare. It's that you'll get better predicting their behavior. So like right now you're in a war, it would be good to be able to predict Putin's behavior. Is it true that if we push him all the way out of Ukraine, he'll go nuclear? That would be useful to know. And I would argue that if we had done a better job, and I've argued that if we had done a better job of cognitive empathy for the last 25 years with a Russia policy, this war might well not have happened. That's, of course, a whole other question. But my point is, the goal of

perspective taking, from my point of view, is not about, it's not feeling their pain. That's emotional empathy. And it does lead to kind of caring about them maybe. That's not the goal. It's not agreeing with them. It's just predicting their behavior. Yeah. No, I understand about that.

Psychologists are very clear on that distinction about empathy versus sympathy. I guess it can be a slippery slope though, because when you take the point of view of understanding where the other point of person is coming from, right, just from the point of view of not judging it, but rather predicting their behavior, then it leads one to quite a pragmatic kind of thing, almost a relativist kind of point of view where they have their interests, they have their goals, right? For good or for bad, right? We have our interests and our goals. And then in a very tactical and strategic kind of way, we work to, you know, have them interact such that it works for a good outcome for us, right? So, this is very similar to the diplomacy and stuff that's associated with real politic and great power politics where leaders and powers have interests.

You know, the Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn't judging whether the interests of the Tsarist Empire was good or bad or whatever. They only cared about maximising their self-interest and avoiding, you know, a war that would be mutually destructive. But that also led to a lot of very immoral decisions. You can definitely make immoral decisions after exercising cognitive empathy. I mean, I would also kind of concede something I think you alluded to, maybe, or would if I gave you enough time probably, which is that

understanding the person's perspective can, as a matter of fact, lead people to a more forgiving stance toward them. That can happen. That is just a feature of human psychology that I think in some circumstances we should fight. And ultimately, if I followed this long enough, I would I would get, you know, to my view that, you know. Punishment should be a strictly pragmatic thing, if if if if it will serve the interest of the world to give Putin negative feedback for violating international law by invading Ukraine, which I think it would, all other things being equal, then that has a kind of value. And it shouldn't be less, the question of whether you do that shouldn't be affected by your conclusion that, well, if I were in his shoes,

I would have done what he did. I mean, yeah, in one view of the world, you would have done what everybody did if you were in their shoes, because they're, you know, that's they were born with their genes into their environment. And, you know, this kind of gets back to consciousness and the free will implication of it, if there is one. I concede there, it often does happen, first of all, that people, when they're trying to get you to understand somebody's perspective, they want you to be more forgiving. That's why they're doing it. And it can work. It can work. But I still think you should understand that some people are encouraging cognitive empathy without that goal. That's really not why I want us to understand Russia's perspective and think we should have

been thinking that way all along. Yeah. I mean, I think Chris and I definitely agree that it's always smart to understand the motive. I mean, that's an easy thing to agree with, right? It's always smart to understand how your adversary or even competitor or just another actor or ally is motivated. That makes perfect sense. But from my point of view, there's no great mystery to the motivations of someone like Putin. I mean, history is replete with examples of autocrats and militaristic expansionistic empires that have acted in exactly the same way i mean yes i'm sure there's some interesting details and so on but do you think there's something that people are missing about what's motivating putin yeah but i mean first i'd

say i think although you said yes we all agree it always makes sense to try to understand someone's perspective. The fact is that once you're in a wartime environment, if you do that and you have a certain view of the person's perspective and say, well, maybe if we hadn't done NATO expansion, this wouldn't have happened. You get accused of being of reciting Putin talking points, being a Putin apologist. And I know, Chris, you may want to jump in here and complain that I've had people from the gray zone on my podcast because you consider them Assad apologists. But I personally have kind of an allergy to that whole, that whole line of attack. You are a such and such apologist or this and that. I think it's used as a real debate constrainor. And in any event, yeah, my view of Putin is, look, you know, I'm not alone in thinking that if you'd done a good job of cognitive CIA in 2008, I mean, first of all, it's interesting to me that I just listened to his book, his kind of autobiography, and he talks about cognitive empathy. And he thinks he humbly submits that he's better at it than the average person and thinks it was because he moved around a lot as a kid. I moved around a lot as a kid, and I think maybe it does help.

But that's just another tangent. What he said in 2008, he sends a memo to Condi Rice, and he says, you got to understand, you know, that was right when Bush was about to propose letting Ukraine into NATO. Byrne says, you got to understand, it isn't just Putin. Everyone in the national security establishment in Russia considers Ukraine a complete red line. Okay. And, and, and he, he separately sent a memo aside from that, uh, private email to Condi who was secretary of state then, uh, he was at this point ambassador to Russia. Okay. Bill Burns, this is before Michael McFaul. And, uh, he separately sent a memo about, uh, summarizing his conversations with Russian elites about admitting Ukraine to NATO. And the title of the memo was Nyet Means Nyet.

OK, so a very many very smart observers from way back said this is a mistake. He even I mean, Burns even predicted this, this will lead them to screw around in Eastern Ukraine. And there were lots of people doing that. So I don't think it's an outlandish perspective. But I guess my larger point is, I think you should be able to talk about that without being accused of reciting Putin talking points. I was against NATO and the NATO expansion in the 90s. So you can't say I'm saying it because Putin says it. He wasn't in charge then. Bob, actually, I watched an hour-long interview with William Burns yesterday talking about Putin,

because I know that you've referenced him previously, and the fact that he recognized Ukraine as a red line for Russia. And this actually, Grayzone and stuff we can talk about, but a point that I would make here is I heard this interview on Hard Talk. I think this was before Crimea, where it was some Russian official, I think the foreign minister or something, and he was talking about Ukraine. And he was discussing ongoing events and so on. And maybe it was after the Maidan revolution. But in any case, I listened to that interview. And I remember I hadn't paid that much attention before this event, you know, the geopolitics are. And what struck me was essentially the Russian official is saying what William Burns describes and what you have discussed, like the view that, well,

we regard Ukraine as a very important part of our sphere of influence. And, you know, from the Russian perspective, the West is trying to take the strategic ally and pull them into their orbit. And they had a leader which was more pro-Russian who was ousted, and they want to draw closer ties with the EU. And all through that conversation, the thing that struck me, and I think I'm more sensitive to it as somebody from Ireland, was this sense that what right do you have to tell another country which way they orientate their foreign policy, what group or society they want to be closer to?

So what Russia thinks that they don't like Ukraine getting closer to the EU? Tough luck. You're not the rulers. You can put pressure on them. You can, you know, withdraw economic support and stuff. What you can't do is send people into the country and just deny that you're doing it. Militarily annex parts of the country. And that's what they did, right? And the way that the person spoke about it was like, Ukraine doesn't have the right

to decide that they don't want to be within Russia's sphere of influence, or they want to be closer to NATO, or indeed seek NATO membership. And when it comes to NATO membership, I'm always stuck with the feeling that it's talked about as if, you know, Ukraine was on the precipice of entering NATO. And that wasn't the case, right? Like, so whatever way that Putin perceived, it wasn't that, you know, in six months time, Russia, Ukraine was about to be admitted to NATO. But if they were, that is the right of countries to decide. It's the same way that that little, I forget which country it is, but like Australia was upset, right, because another country was starting to cozy up to China and potentially allowing China to build military bases. But again, Australia doesn't have the right then to, you know, just unilaterally decide.

They can put political pressure. it to me like with cognitive empathy, where is the cognitive empathy for Ukraine and for Finland and for these countries which are bordering Russia, which are menaced by Russia and that are understandably seeking out to, you know, they want to join NATO, Sweden and Finland or the recent countries that are joining. This is a predictable outcome when you invade countries neighboring. And if a NATO expansion is the geopolitical goal, you know, Putin's cognitive empathy is lacking because he's basically united Europe in a way that it wasn't. What I'm saying, what I'm saying, I mean, a few things. I mean, first of all, you said NATO membership was far away. Well, what Putin was explicit in complaining about was the kind of de facto NATOization of Ukraine. We were sending more and more weapons in, NATO

advisors, joint NATO-Ukrainian exercises. That was real. And he said very explicitly it bothered him. Leave that aside. The way the person you described it was talking about, NATO doesn't, Ukraine doesn't have the right to decide to join NATO or the EU. I would never put it that way. I wouldn't say NATO and the EU have a right to decide who joins them. Of course, they're membership organizations. They're selective. And as for, of course, Putin doesn't have the right to do the various things he's done, seize Crimea. I have been a total stickler for international law for decades. And I have complained when the U.S. violates it. And by the way, I think that complicates our position as sermonizer about violations of international law. Our troops in Syria right now violate international law. The invasion of Iraq violated international law. People complain that's

whataboutism. I would say whataboutism is a critical part of any moral system. You're allowed to complain about when people don't practice what they preach, A. And I would also say the fact that we ourselves have been so hypocritical in international law reduces the value of now standing up and trying to reinforce the principle of that invasion is bad, although I certainly believe it is, because much of the world isn't going to take that seriously because they see this as just a proxy war. They see us as imperialistic, as Russia and so on. But the question I would ask you, Chris, to get back to prediction. Okay. Right now, we're in a war that's killed tens of thousands of people, has displaced millions.

And there is no end in sight. I taped a podcast with a guy today. We agreed, man, the politics on both sides, Ukraine and Russia, suggests this is going to go on a long time. A lot of dead people destroy the country of Ukraine, possibly. So I would ask you, just as a thought experiment, if my deployment of cognitive empathy allowed me to predict with some confidence that inviting Ukraine to join NATO in 2008, this is a very simplified thought experiment. I'm not saying this alone would have done it. Okay. I think our policy would have had to been wiser for 25 years to avoid this maybe. But just let's stipulate in the thought experiment, if you hadn't issued that invitation, you wouldn't have this horrible situation. Would you still say, no, you got to go ahead because Ukraine has some right to

be invited to NATO or something? I mean, would you not say, you know, you're right. Like there's all these, these Ukrainians don't deserve to die and suffer like this. And for that matter, neither do the hapless Russian soldiers. What would be your, your call? So I think there's an issue about, you know, knowing at that point, cause like the whole point of it is that you don't know that. So you can't. Sure. It's a thought experiment. It's a thought experiment meant to clarify your position. Yeah. But that's part of the issue for me is like, like, if you go back in time and say that, you know, you can undo World War Two by doing this intervention, which is just like, don't offer some treaty at some place. And it leads to World War Two not happening. Should you not do that because of the cost of human lives?

And like, obviously, the consequentialist calculation is, yeah, because in the grand screamer thing, what does an offer of a treaty make versus, you know, the 10s of millions of people that died in World War Two. But in the case of like, so if the outcome was foreseeable and predictable, that this was likely the outcome. I think for me, the issue there is what's the causal agent that makes that likely? Who is the person that is doing the invasion? that is doing the invasion. And to me, Ukraine is the one that has to tiptoe to avoid incurring the wrath of Russia. That is basically saying that if they't the kind of choice that they want to make. Basically, that they are not allowed to make decisions or that they get invaded and face a brutal war.

Because surely there will be other things in the future that they might want to do economically or politically that will, in the future, annoy Russia and would lead to the same outcome. So you're basically constraining their future progress along a set route, which is set by Russia. And I'm basically saying that the geopolitics are always something that people have to negotiate and exist within, and there will always be compromises made just to those realities. But I think that there has to be consideration towards the feelings of people in countries that are less militarily powerful, that are less geopolitically powerful, and their desire for self-determination and independence. And I feel that I genuinely do think it's part of

being in Ireland that I'm very keenly aware when people treat your country like a geopolitical football or that another country has them. But you're aware that America has done that. I'm not saying this is or isn't relevant. You're aware that America has sponsored coups all over the world and denied the agency of countries all over the world in a much worse way than just saying we're not going to extend NATO membership to you. We, you know, we invade, you know, we do it all the time. And I'm again, I'm, you know, that's. So the U.S. does and has done like it has spheres of influence. It's it's got a very well documented

history. And you can take Cuba, right? In that sense, they didn't tolerate that Cuba had the right to decide to ally itself with Russia. So I grant that, but I also think it is important, like when

we're discussing NATO and interventions, military interventions and invasions and so on, it seems to me there's a qualitative difference in what Russia has done over the past 20 years versus what NATO has done over the past 20 years. And NATO hasn't been annexing territory to recreate an empire or threatening the sovereignty of bordering countries, right? Like there is a difference. And even if you take the Iraq war as an occupation, like there was all sides in America basically getting to the point that we want to get our troops out of there. We want the government functioning now. And yes, we want it to be the kind that we want, but now they've withdrawn. And I think what Russia's goal is for the Ukraine is

not that. It is expansionism. And I mean, Putin said it in speeches, and it's on the Russian state media that they want to restore the glory of Russia. And that to me makes it more akin to the kind of things that we would be wary of from the mid 20th century than the modern American. There are things I might say in response to this, but Matt's got this. How do I get these guys to wrap it up? Look on his face. Can I make one point that just kind of takes us back to the beginning that's related to this? point that just kind of takes us back to the beginning that's related to this is the reason I obsess over cognitive empathy is because I think if we don't get better at avoiding needless hot wars, and I think this was needless, I don't think we would have had to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of Russian imperialism. That's not what I'm advocating. I think Ukraine could, in principle,

be a sovereign nation that had some kind of relationship to the EU and some kind of economic relationship to Russia and so on. I think that's doable. But anyway, the reason I think it's it's so critical, aside from the obvious reason you'd like to avoid big cold wars with people like China is I have this background belief that the planet is approaching a point where there's so many problems we have to solve. keep creating exactly the kind of strife and tension that prevents countries from getting together and solving their common problems. That's kind of my motivating belief. And again, it stands independent of all these cosmic questions, as I said at the beginning. Fair enough. I mean, look, just to clarify a couple of things, we don't think that you're unique or even that much of an outlier in your position, actually. I've been obsessing over

Ukraine and I've been listening to a great number of lectures and things from... Mearsheimer is kind of at the one end of the spectrum, but there's a bunch of policy people. They all seem to be in the United States, funnily enough, but they have quite a similar view, right? That strategic miscalculations were made. NATO expansionism was putting this pressure on Russia and there was a refusal to acknowledge Russia's legitimate interests, right? Now, that's fine. That's a reasonable position to take, I guess, but it's very different in terms of allocating blame. I've also been listening to interviews with former leaders, prime ministers and presidents from Eastern European countries, all of whom have had personal experience in talking with Russia. In

fact, we'll link to it in the show notes. Monocle 24 is the thing. And they all say the same thing. Like, it's very different from the policy wonks over in the US. It's very similar to what Chris is saying, essentially, which is that actually, there's an underestimation of the degree of agency in the degree to which Putin's regime, and I agree with you that it's not just Putin, it's the entire administration, the regime, and the state-controlled media and the propaganda, which I'm sure you've heard coming out of Russia, is extreme. And it's been extreme for a long time. So it's not surprising that there's a high degree of consensus in the upper echelons in Russia aligning with Putin's point of view. So the way they see it is pretty much how Chris and I see it, which is that this is a dangerous,

exceptional regime, which is acting not in a defensive way, but in an aggressive way. I mean, there is no sense in which NATO is threatening Russia. Like, nobody believes, not even Putin, right, that Finland joining NATO, you know, there's not even going to be any American bases or anything like that. There's going to be no nuclear weapons or whatever based in Finland. There's not going to be any tank divisions poised to capture Moscow. Nobody believes that's ever going to happen.

Now, if Finland joining NATO isn't a threat to Russia, then how is another bordering country like an existential threat to Russia? Rather, isn't it more reasonable to say that a country bordering country like an existential threat to russia rather isn't it more reasonable to say that that a country bordering russia whether it's baltic states or ukraine or finland is is actually a threat to russia expansionism i i understand i have the cognitive empathy that putin doesn't like it but he doesn't like it because it interferes with his objectives. I guess I'd say a couple of things. I mean, first of all, the U.S. has historically acted as if all these things that are in fact, at most, that obviously aren't threats by any objective reckoning, that we act as if they are. We sponsor the coups and so on, and we invade Iraq and have to kick out the inspectors who were looking, who were there

inspecting, searching for what we claimed was there. You know, we, I think powers, great powers have a history of reacting to things that don't objectively seem threat, or don't seem threatening from the other side. And political scientists have written about this thing called the security dilemma, which explains why they do both because people are paranoid and because sometimes they're not worried about the intentions of the current administration, but they think, well, yeah, once you've got all these weapons in Ukraine, suppose the next president wants to. There's all these reasons. There's a literature on this. It's well established that miss what you're calling a misperception on Putin's point, which version of it. What are you saying? I'd agree with, you know, is what got World War One started because all these countries were reading aggressive intent into into things that weren't there because that's what countries do.

And we should have understood that about Putin. Now, having said that, I'll say one place I depart from the pure Mearsheimer realist assessment is he speaks only in terms, John speaks only in terms of kind of national security calculation. I think it's much more complicated than that. So I think, for example, to the extent that Putin perceived things we did as signs of disrespect toward him and Russia, as signs that we thought they were of lower stature, I think that can also be a motivating factor and can lead

to the kinds of behaviors that we'd rather not see on his part. I think human psychology is complex. There's a bunch of stuff going on. I just think that when you're dealing with a nuclear power, you know, a certain amount of caution is in order. And the world being the imperfect place it is, it may be that you can't stand up for every single principle at every point if you want to avoid things like the tragedy that's unfolding in Ukraine. And it's going to get a lot worse, I think. And I think you can really argue that there were negotiated deals that maybe could have been had that Biden wasn't willing to offer, which would have been way better than this. And again, even then, if you had argued for them, you might have gotten accused of reciting Putin talking points.

But I don't know. Yeah, look, there's points of common ground, which is, I mean, first of all, I think it is fair to make analogies to World War I and the kind of miscalculations and misperceptions that played a role in kicking something off that nobody really intended to happen that was cataclysmic. But there's also good parallels to World War II, right, where appeasement, you know, was a bad idea, right? And one, what... Well, when did the appeasement happen in this case? With... I mean, appeasement seems to have been a bad idea in World War II.

But I mean, you're saying that appeasement led to this aggression? Well, yeah, I'm saying that appeasement. I think we were sitting there refusing to negotiate when he. No, I'm saying that appeasement would be, in my opinion, a poor approach with someone like Putin. Yeah. I mean, like Ukraine is not an isolated example of... Well, I'm not even saying we should have accepted the actual invasion without supporting Ukraine. I'm not in the camp that says we shouldn't be providing any arms. I think we should be more

careful in calibrating it and steer Ukraine more forcefully toward a negotiated settlement. But I'm not like, you know, I'm not going gray zone on you. Look, I mean, I appreciate that. And I think that that gels with an important thing that Chris and I think, which is that, you know, Ukraine is approximately a democracy, right? Zelensky, the leader, has the support of the people. And I don't think that they're brainwashed by propaganda or the puppets of the United States, right? I think they have agency and they are very reasonably resisting an invasion which has genocidal aspects, right? Any people would, right? So, to some degree, the decision is not in anyone's hands, right? Like, it's not up to the United

States or NATO or you or me or anyone else whether or not they choose to resist or not. We only have the decision of do we support providing aid to them in resisting that invasion. So I think that's just an important point, that they get to decide whether or not they resist or not, and we are left with the choice of helping them or not helping them. Sure. Yeah, no, my arguments are all about what we might have done to keep the invasion from happening. Yeah, and on that point, I think we do disagree.

And for that matter, to keep the trouble from happening in 2014, which I think may also have been doable. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, look, I mean, on that point, I think reasonable people can disagree. It's not something that means you're a Putin apologist or anything like that. It's just I would argue that if we imagine a factual, right, historical counterfactual like we did before where there was no countries in Eastern Europe joining NATO, right, all the little countries, all the Baltic states

and the ex-Soviet republics and so on, all maintained total independence from NATO, engaged in no collective defensive security operations, and then just went on to coexist with Russia. And then Russia wouldn't have done any of the things that it's done, not just in Ukraine, but in Georgia and other places. not just in Ukraine, but in Georgia and other places. Now, I find that counterfactual a little bit unlikely, but these are alternative history.

It's hard. Counterfactual is hard. But none of this stuff you're talking about had happened before that 2008 threshold and before we'd done, you know, various other things that maybe we didn't have to do. But, you know, Putin gave a speech in 2007 complaining about how much the U.S. was violating international law and invading countries. And so at that point, it wasn't hypocritical. He hadn't invaded any countries. And then and he also warned against NATO expansion. And then in 2008, George Bush and his neocon friend said, screw you. We've heard your warning and we don't care. We are going to invite Ukraine to avoid NATO after you gave this've heard your warning and we don't care. We are going to invite Ukraine to avoid NATO after you gave this very dramatic speech warning. It's exactly this kind of thing.

And I just want to point out that you find implausible that he wouldn't have invaded based. And then all the examples you cite of the things that characterize his tendencies to do things like that are after that point. Now, he's a bad guy. I mean, look, there's evidence that he staged a false flag attack in Russia in the 90s that got a bunch of Russians killed, actually bombed apartment buildings full of Russians because it would like help him with respect to support for the war in Chechnya or something. I mean, he's probably a psychopath. I mean, you know, there's no, I don't have a positive view of the guy. It just seems to me like Russia was at one point a manageable problem.

And the same George Bush who invaded Iraq and did a bunch of other stuff made a really bad decision. And it didn't start with him because there were bad decisions under Clinton, I think, and there have been bad decisions since. But even psychopaths are manageable sometimes, you know. And I am not attributing any kind of altruistic tendencies to Putin or any kind of deep sensitivity to human suffering when I suggest that maybe this war could have been avoided. when I suggest that maybe this war could have been avoided. I'm recommending a very hard, cold look at his tendencies and the tendencies of leaders of great powers. I guess, Bob, one thing I would say about that, though, is like the Georgia invasion, even in the way that you framed it there, it very much sounds like a fairly petulant response to a perceived provocation, which involved

invading another country and which was went by a very muted response internationally. Nothing like what the Ukraine crisis resulted in, right? But that didn't result in Putin toning down the rhetoric or not doing it again like it kind of feels like if if a country invades a neighboring country and the reaction is to like sue for peace and and send sanctions that you are sending a different kind of message and there are historical precedents as well okay but i But I'm not saying the Georgia thing was provoked only by what George Bush did about Ukraine and Georgia and NATO, what he said about future membership. If you look at what actually happened in Georgia, again, I'm not defending it. It was,

but it's important to be clear. And this is a side of the story you often don't get in Western media. There were already troops by, I think, Russian troops, I think by agreement with Europe, some kind of peacekeeping deal, in this separatist enclave of Georgia. The Georgian president, as I understand it, actually did the initial, the Georgian troops fired first, okay?

It's kind of, maybe it's lost in the fog of war, but I think the conventional understanding of this is that the Georgian president thought we were going to support him and he got a little out over his skis. It is not the case that the way this started is Russian troops stormed into Georgia in retaliation for Bush's decision on NATO. No, there were shorter term things going on. And I'm pretty sure, I could be wrong, you know, but I'm pretty

sure the record will bear me out that actually Georgia fired the first shot. But didn't it all start in 2006, where Georgia's parliament voted unanimously for that integration with nato so i understand that that it's those kinds of um ambitions like western west oriented ambitions of these former soviet republics that is annoying and aggravating to i'm sure that annoyed him and increased the chances of it happening probably. So did our bombing of Serbia in 99 and a lot of things did. Yeah, but it's not about the US, is it? It's not about us.

It's about Georgia or it's about the Baltic states or it's about Finland or it's about Ukraine. No, as an American, it is about my country's policy. That's what I think about and try to improve. If I think my country's policy could have led to a better world. And by the way, I don't oppose all interventions. The Bosnia intervention I supported, it was legal, had the support of the Security Council. There was a true massacre that had happened in a large scale sense, but it was legal, which a lot of things we've done haven't been. But American policy is what I'm concerned about. Well, yeah, I mean, looking backwards, like over the last 20 years, and as you said, asking whether or not smarter, cleverer, more strategic decisions could have been made without

conceding anything about Russia's ambitions or Putin's ambitions being legitimate or fine or understandable or reasonable. And, you know, that's an easy thing to agree with. I'm sure smarter decisions can always be made, right? But I think maybe we just weigh things a little bit differently in the sense that I think the states, the approximately democratic states, right, and what they want of these countries around Russia, what they want is legitimate, right? And they are being oppressed by something that is functionally acting

like an empire and treating them as colonies. And I think, you know, we don't get to decide what those smaller countries bordering Russia want and aspire to. But the only thing we kind of get to decide what those smaller countries bordering Russia want and aspire to. But the only thing we kind of get to decide is whether or not we say yes or no in terms of support or help. Yeah, we don't get to tell them what to do. I mean, we have exerted very forceful leverage on countries in our sphere of influence, but I'm not in favor of that either. I mean, so we do push nations around, but I'm not in favor of it. And let me just say, like, I am of the belief. So, you know, the policies, you say it's always easy to look

backward. I mean, the policies that people like me think increase the chances of catastrophe here, I've been complaining about all along without even saying Ukraine is where they'll cause trouble. I just think our foreign policy is systematically misguided and unjustifiable. We talk about the rule of law and pay no respect for it. I think that's a dangerous attitude. And the reason I feel compelled to look back and talk about mistakes that I think were made is because if I think if we go forward from this without having examined our past behavior, we're going to continue to screw up the world. Now, I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong. But you have to understand, that's my motivation. I'm not in this to excuse Putin or anything. I think American foreign policy has just been a walking disaster for 25 years. And I've posed a lot. I have opposed things that really didn't work out well, like the Iraq

war. And I believe it's existential for the whole planet. If we don't get better, a lot of things, including the ability to understand the way other people look at America and other people look at the world. One thing that I would, I think both Matt and I would completely like sign off on is that we don't, neither of us has the impression that like you're, you're secretly harboring a deep love for Putin and you're a secret tankie who has just been waiting all this time to find any reason to excuse Putin. I guess our counterpoint would be more along the lines of, you know, so Grayzone have come up a couple of times in this conversation and in the previous

conversation. And regardless of our disagreement of Gray zone, I'm sure that we both would acknowledge that there are people who play the role of apologists for repressive regimes, right? Whether it's because they actually know that and they're doing it consciously, or whether it just happens to accord with their particular ideology that it's easier for them to overlook and to, you know, interpret things in a charitable way for North Korea, right, for example. And I, to be clear, I don't in any sense put you into that category. But I guess what the position of Matt and I would argue is that because of your deep cynicism, the American foreign policy has been, and concern about the blob and the kind of, you know, the neoliberal perspective and how far it dominates things in America and maybe the West in general, that it might make you more sympathetic in, you know, a Sam Harris kind of way towards people that have arguments or to...

Now you've gone too far. Now you've gone too far. You've compared me to Sam Harris. Go ahead. Unfortunately, you have already, in your own writing, acknowledged, you know, Fortunately, you have already in your own writing acknowledged, you know, the universal nature of tribal instincts and our badness at noticing our own ones. But so my kind of criticism would be it isn't that I think nobody can talk to the gray zone journalists, Max Mlemental and Ben Norton and so on. I'm actually in favor in general that people do talk the controversial people when they're prepared to do so like when you know if you have like a critical cross-examination of of people i think that's justified but i i do think there's a danger in like presenting a figure like max blumenthal as essentially being well cnn misrepresent things to a certain extent.

And he just has a different worldview because, to me, there's a large amount of documentation of them downplaying atrocities, endorsing conspiracy theories and kind of misrepresenting things in a way which is like massively ideologically skewed. misrepresenting things in a way which is like massively ideologically skewed. And there will be people in the, you know, the other aspects, like war hawks, and so on, that have an ideological skew. But to me, there is something towards, like, platforming somebody who's going to engage in Holocaust denial, or who's going to engage in likeocaust denial or who's going to engage in like hiv aids denialism i'm presenting that as just an alternative viewpoint and i would worry that like to me the gray zone falls close to that kind of thing like hiv denialism like the same level of distortion of the evidence but it and my argument isn't nobody should ever talk to somebody that's a HIV is denialist. It's like if you are going to talk to them, you shouldn't present them as simply somebody who has no kind of take on things. consider them any more extreme than people I've had on from the other side, neocons,

hardcore neocons, hardcore Trump supporters. You know, it's what I do on my podcast. Now, you know, and I don't think you probably want to get into a long debate over whether they are they are, you know, more extreme than extreme than that on their side. And look, I don't follow everything they say. And I've thought about maybe having Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal on my podcast to address the issue of whether I should de-platform them, kind of. And when I've imagined doing that, and I may, I don't know, there are criticisms I would have of things they've done or said on Twitter. And I would say, look, I think you're hurting your own cause. You weren't

critical. You weren't self-critical enough. You weren't skeptical enough. You bought something too uncritically. You know, so I would have those kinds of things, even given the fact that I only really have a limited conversancy in their oeuvre. I don't follow them closely, but even following them casually on Twitter, they've done things. Same with Glenn Greenwald. I just saw that he's going to have some conversation with Alex Jones or something. I mean, I would argue against that. And, and, uh, you know, so, uh, and I, the last thing I'd say is I know of, uh, at least one specific case that we talked about this last time I was on, or one of our several conversations we've had on either your podcast or mine, that at least one case where Aaron Maté has made a big deal of one thing, the Duma chemical weapons attack, and people reflexively dismiss his claims that it wasn't what it seems. internal OPCW documents. And I think at a minimum, you can say that if our mainstream media were functioning properly, they would have at least covered this story. There are questions that need to be answered. I'll stop there. But that, when I've seen how viciously people have attacked him for raising that set of questions, which to me are clearly valid questions to be raised, even if he states the concerns more confidently

than I might, or more dramatically when I've seen how uncritically people have attacked him for that, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not just going to accept at face value people's claims that if I looked at everything they did, I'd see this constant mindless, you know, constant indefensible stuff. I don't know. Maybe I would. But, you know, when you have a podcast, you can't vet every single guest comprehensively. You know, look, you guys had me on. You have no idea. You have no idea about the skeletons in this closet. I would, you know, we sometimes run up on this when we're discussing this kind of topic with people.

up on this when we're discussing this kind of topic with people of and i i want to like emphasize that you know everybody makes their own editorial choices for what they'll accept and how they'll interrogate and it's not matt and i's place or anyone's really to to like everybody has different lines and everybody has different assessments and i i think you, for some people, things are beyond the appeal. And for other people, they draw the lines differently. But I guess for me, even setting aside that discussion about, you know, whether people should be hosted or not and where individual lines should be drawn, I think that, like, take something like the Syrian conflict and for all the various unknowns that are there, it's beyond dispute to me in any legitimate sense that when you look at the international NGOs and the human rights organizations active there, that there is a disproportionate distribution for the sides that are willing to do things like attack

health facilities, target civilian populations, use indiscriminate weapons that are designed to terrorize. And that does document it very clearly. You can stay well away from the neocon area, just towards the human rights side. And if you find that there are people presenting that very inaccurately and representing it, that doesn't happen. That is at the level of minimizing war crimes of regimes that you're ideologically, for whatever reason, more inclined towards. And that, like, the chemical weapons question, to me, strikes me as a piece of that. Because I think Bellingcat has, like, very, very clearly dealt with the kinds of questions that Grayzone is. I think they have dealt with Duma, so far as I can tell, pretty facilely, actually, Bellingcat. And by the way, one thing

Grayson will point out, it's not totally irrelevant. Bellingcat gets funding from the U.S. government. And of course, the U.S. government, the accusation made by the OPCW chemical weapons inspector who was charged with writing the report summarizing what they found in Duma. You know, I don't know if you know the backstory, but he submitted this report casting serious doubt on the claim that this was a chlorine attack and a chlorine chemical weapons attack. And the OPCW, when he saw that they were about to issue an interim report that basically denied everything,

all these key points are minimized or submerged and recast. And he might say whitewashed this. He complained. And so there's this like huge controversy about that. And that's a case, I've actually forgotten what point I originally set out to make. I mean, my main point is this, in this one case, at least, I know there are questions to be asked. And given the fact that in the scenario that deserves at least investigation, the allegation that deserves at least investigation, the U.S. government was complicit in,

because the U.S. government had attacked based on the assumption that it was a Syrian chemical weapons attack. In this scenario, the U.S. government is complicit in helping to cover up what the inspectors had actually found on the scene. Then you might view with some skepticism the claims being made by an institution that receives U.S. government funding. I don't think that's a crazy thing to say. Again, I haven't looked at this comprehensively, but to my mind, Bellingcat has largely just repeated what the OPCW itself said, which is, oh, these guys raising these objections or these dubious actors, who would believe them? Well, you're the institution that appointed this guy to write the report on the scene. Okay. And now you're saying

we shouldn't listen to him. Well, I don't know. Again, I have not looked into this enough to say anything confident about it, except that people aren't crazy to raise questions about it. And Bellingcat, so far as I know, has not issued some kind of killer response. I could be wrong, but... I think there's like a four-piece, four articles on Bill and Kat addressing that. And then there is a follow-up talking about the whistleblower, Alex, who I think is Brendan Whelan, the guy that you're citing.

There are two kind of whistleblowers, but he's one of them. I would disagree with that representation because a lot of the details in particular, Bob, it kind that disagree with the conclusions and can often be disgruntled about their position not being the one that was represented in the document. But that is often given an outsized kind of credence by people that are predisposed to agree with the conclusion that they reached. And I think the reason that the report and that the much broader weight of evidence doesn't fall into the kind of gray zone direction is because the weight of evidence wasn't in line with the assessment of that.

So it isn't to say that nobody could reach that conclusion, but there actually is a truth in that circumstance, right? And it is also the case that even if it were that all of the objections to this individual case turned out that my assessment is wrong and Gray's own and yourself are right. And that it's, there are very serious. Now I want to emphasize, I'm not taking their position on this. Okay. I'm saying that, that this is a, this is a case where I've seen enough of the evidence to know that a, they wouldn't have to be crazy to make the argument they're making or have some extreme bias to make the argument they're making. And B, there are definitely people who have said things about them based on this who themselves clearly are not fully

in touch with the evidence. And in that sense, the accusations are unfair. That's all I'm saying. I have not looked into this deeply enough to have some kind of confident position about what happened so i guess the the like my my point there is like and i agree it's a good clarification with that you know you are not setting out a strong position on it um but in in that case like a you would have have to take the grey zone position kind of seriously, because their broader argument is basically that that's what they do when every accusation of chemical attacks come. And unless the claim is that the Syrian government doesn't do that and there's no evidence that it has, I think that you would have to be like appropriately skeptical when they are making those claims because that's what they do.

And, you know, in the way that we all would recognize if Alex Jones was claiming something as a false flag, that yes, of course he would. Because that's what he does. And that to me, so that to me strikes like whether you judge them as being an outlet along those lines, or you judge them as somebody who are like responsible and kind of look critically into things, but just make a couple of mistakes is a significant difference. And you can reach different assessments on that. But I definitely put them much closer to the like conspiracist and strongly ideological fringe. Like I said, I'm not not i don't have a comprehensive

familiarity with their stuff i i duma happens to be something i looked into uh because it seemed interesting and uh maybe if i looked into a bunch of other claims i'd have a different view uh but you know i'm i'm just you know when I'm when I'm deciding who to have on my podcast, it's like I want I'd rule out the people who are clearly dishonest, as Alex Jones has clearly been. On that, I would try to have a diversity of views. And, you know, and I've just part of it is I am very sensitive to the whole business of trying to exclude people debate from debate by calling them apologists for this person or that person because they're saying things that this person or that person would accuse of, would approve of. You know, maybe I did my senior thesis on Joseph McCarthy. Maybe that's where all this starts. You know, maybe maybe I'm just too like phobic about this rhetorical technique of trying to marginalize people based because they're saying some things that some bad people agree with that are something. I don't know.

But it's a kind of bias. fall legitimately into that category and that we should be like skeptical of and and not just skeptical but like it would be a bad idea if they if people were apologists to kind of uh promote their point of view uncritically right like so we might disagree where the people fall in that yeah but um yeah and and look and look i'm sure'm sure lefties, maybe including the people at Gray Zone, you know, on the left, there's long been a tendency to kind of be more sympathetic to the Russian or back then Soviet view than an objective person might have been. And you see the same thing on the right. You see the same thing all over. You see these biases all over. And none of us are objective. And so, yeah, there could be systematic bias. The question is, when is the bias so bad that you should start saying things about people that could lead Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to deplatform them?

I'm among those who believe that you should err on the side of inclusion. Hey, Bob, can I ask you a more general question to pull you guys out of the weeds a little bit? Because talking about that bias and the left and right wing bias, I mean, one thing that I feel like I've noticed is an increasing degree of horseshoe where there's a hyper skeptical, hyper cynical that is of of you know western stuff you know capitalist stuff etc on the left and and then but the right is you know it's no longer the party of you know hawks going off and having military adventures especially on the fringes it's it's coming to a very similar point of view where there's this, this hyper skepticism and well, it comes across more as conspiracism on the right. And in a weird way,

it feels like they're coming to the same place. I mean, that's just like a gut feeling I have. And I feel like I'm, I am that boring person at the other end of the horseshoe. That's the moderate, moderate people would say that I'm naive and so on, but I see the extremes of both ends coming together.

Well, yeah, I mean, look, Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson are good friends, apparently. And so it's a real thing. And in some cases, well, I mean, I think it's largely kind of intelligible in the sense that there are zones of actual agreement, uh, on foreign policy on the, uh, you know, the, if you look at the coalition of so-called restrainers, people like me who agree that the U S should exercise a lot more military restraint, you've got some people on the far left who agree with you. You've got Pat Buchanan type conservatives, uh, who agree with you you've got pat buchanan type conservatives uh who agree you've got libertarian conservatives um so some cases there's just uh and there's been a long history of isolationism of course in the united states politically you know and i mean i think that

term is often an overstatement but but even if you take it at face value, I'd say this is something that, in a way, one thing distinguishes me from a lot of these people that I do agree with on the restraint thing is the emphasis I put Prevention of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW, might have been corrupted by American influence? It's because I lobbied for the creation of that. OK, I wrote in support of the Chemical Weapons Convention that led to the creation of the OPCW. And by the way, the very first executive director of the OPCW, who was pushed out by John under pressure from John Bolton, says there should be an investigation of the possibility of an OPCW, who was pushed out by John under pressure from John Bolton, says there should be an investigation of the possibility of an OPCW cover up on Duma. The first guy who ran the OPCW says that. Now, that's a tangent, but I just want to say, you know, there are zones of real agreement on foreign policy on the far left and far right. I'm neither, I think. I'm kind of your average left of center progressive in a lot of respects. but you know with with the cognitive empathy and stuff like that and and you know i know there's legitimate grounds for skepticism and cynicism about the western order or whatever you want to

call it but you know in practical terms it seems to me to to lead you to be ending up in the same place as those people at that other end of the horseshoe um on certain things, yes. Uh, I guess I try to, well, I try to distinguish myself, myself from them by being, uh, by being as skeptical of Russia as I am of America, at least, you know, like, I don't know, I don't know how to put it. It's, it's, yeah, I mean, on foreign policy, I also have to say that, you know, I've become more radical as I got older. I think it's supposed to work in the other direction. I mean, you're supposed to become more politically conservative or something or, or more a defender of the establishment. I haven't. And it's partly because I've become, I think, just genuinely more aware of how bad U.S. foreign policy has been.

I mean, it's you should read some things. You should read this book, The Brothers, about Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles and the shit we did in the 50s. I've become more critical, and I hope it's not for illegitimate reasons, but I have. I don't know i uh there was i i can certainly i guess i would just say i can point to things that distinguish me from all these other people who agree with me about important foreign policy issues um but yeah no that's that that's fair i guess speaking as you know, just as someone who's just really an audience member, not anything else, it would be nice to hear more of those things that you mentioned which distinguish you from that other set, you know what I mean?

Like, for instance, like when I would listen to you talking, you know, in discussions recently about Ukraine, I didn't hear all of them i just i heard a couple but the discussion very quickly just glided over the things that russia is doing in ukraine right and it's not far short of genocide right we all acknowledge that you don't think it's disinformation or something like that i don't think it's and very quickly and very quickly and very quick i mean i mean i personally have a conservative old-fashioned definition of genocide so i'm not making that's fine but go ahead it's sure it's just a word so i was referring to the destruction of cities um indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers a lot of um so

would you call uh hiroshima genocide i would certainly call it totally immoral and a mistake yeah i don't think it was necessary but you know again counterfactual but no i don't want to get hung up on genocide right i'm just saying that you agree i think that all these very very bad things are happening it's just in the discussions that i've heard you've just you've just moved over that stuff very quickly and i'm not saying you're denying it or pretending it doesn't exist it's just not talking about it and and and indeed moving over you know you talk about being even-handed and dealing with you know what what distinguishes you or what you think is a is a is a positive thing is about being

even-handed perhaps and in in being critical of the united states and equally critical of china or russia or whatever it's just it moves very quickly to the introspection about the U.S. And just that different emphasis. I mean, you know, part of it is, I mean, for example, I thought the Biden administration should have worked harder to avoid the war, reach an accommodation as they were massing the troops. You can disagree about that. But one reason I thought that is because war is always like this. OK, it's it's there's no pretty war civilians always this was a predictable consequence you know if you say well no we're not going to

negotiate with putin we realize he may invade you're you're sentencing a bunch of ukrainian civilians to death because this always happens and and so i'm not sitting here in shock i mean and also we knew that that this is the way russia does war very artillery heavy uh whether or not they're trying to kill civilians you know civilians are going to get killed in a war involving russia as again they get killed in all wars um so maybe that's part of it and and also, you know, part of it is I'm kind of frustrated by how and, you know, coverage is always biased in wars. Right. It's like the Ukrainian media is going to look well, the media in two countries, even if they're both liberal democracies, if they're at war, it's going to look very different, their presentation of the war. And the U.S. media is in that sense behaving predictably now, I think. There are things the Ukrainians have done that may qualify as atrocities that don't get very much attention. And this always in war you know the atrocities uh happen and it's it's do you think that do you think they're anywhere near on the same scale as the russian

atrocities no no because i mean ukraine is not the country that invaded i mean uh for one thing uh no i don't think they are uh yeah all right it's just little important points because because you're right that very bad things always happen in war recently australian special forces right where well they're currently under investigation but there's extremely credible pretty much confirmed cases of them just um indiscriminately executing civilians on those missions on missions in afghanistan right absolutely disgusting and shocking and as bad as what a Russian soldier might be doing in Ukraine at the moment. But, you know, the matter of scale, the matter of scale is really important. So, you know, it can be a bit of a trick to say, oh, you know, wars are always bad. Bad things

always happen in war. Well, they're not all the same. No, they're not all the same. And again, the same. No, they're not all the same. And again, I don't want to be accused of whataboutism, but you know, when the U.S. has been involved in wars, now, recently it has developed surgical capabilities in terms of armament that have allowed it to reduce civilian suffering. But America's track record is we've killed a lot of civilians. I mean, you know, before the Hiroshima bombing, we bombed Tokyo with conventional bombs and we selected the area we were going to bomb because the analysis was which part of Tokyo will burn the fastest. And naturally, it's a low income area. Right. With that kind of housing. So in the course of 48 hours, we killed over 100000 civilians intentionally.

That was the plan. Now, granted, that was a long time ago. And you'd like to think things have gotten better. But I just and I'm sorry if I just seem to reflexively do what people dismiss as whataboutism. But I just I just think all great powers are screwed up. And, you know, and and Russia's worse. Putin is worse than Joe Biden. Right. Putin is worse than Zelensky. He's like a worse person. Joe Biden, right? Putin is worse than Zelensky. He's like a worse person. And the Russian way of war is particularly brutal and increasingly indiscriminate, partly as they run out of

these high precision weapons. But I don't know. I guess you can. I don't know what to say. I guess you can, I don't know what to say. I guess I've kind of lost track of the question. I'm just, I am just, and it partly gets back to the fact that, as I said, I'm American. I worry, you know, I don't have much influence on Russian policy. I like to think that I have a little over American as a member of an American democracy, as a citizen, and also because I write about this stuff. So maybe I think about that too much. And I do – I try to always say, of course, I disapprove of the invasion.

It was wrong. Ideally, we will leave Putin with no positive reinforcement for it and only negative reinforcement, if that's doable. And I don't know. It's a tough environment in which to have my view, I guess. So there's just a couple of things, Bob, and maybe there's a unifying point that I think, again, that we probably agree on. But one thing was, and I know it's a point you made a while back,

but the figure at the OPCW or the X head having reservations, I'm always very wary of that kind of thing because, for example, Pfizer's former global head of respiratory diseases was recently on with Majid Nawaz, claiming that, you know, the vaccines haven't been safety tested, they're dangerous to people. And you can usually find some figures who have genuine credentials and expertise, who will take a position and lend it credibility.

And it doesn't mean that their past experience is irrelevant or their expertise is irrelevant, but it does mean that there can often be, that gives a misleading perspective about how convincing the evidence that's being presented is. But setting that objection aside, I think that you are someone who's keenly aware of what American following policy has done in the past. And there are countless atrocities that people can point to, and not just things like my lie. You know, like you say, the bombings in World War II.

And I think there's a lot of legitimacy there and a lot that can be criticized. I think there's a lot of legitimacy there and a lot that can be criticized. There's some sensitivity that we want to ideally be comparing nations in 22 directions within the similar timeframe. But I think one thing it might be interesting to see is I'm not that... You interviewing Max Blumenthal critically is not high on my list of things that I need to see, but I would be interested to see you in discussion with people from Bellingcat or that kind of thing, like putting the critical questions to them, but engaging in that kind of way.

And one of the things that we saw in the content of yours that we looked at and that we really liked and that I think comes across even in your willingness to have this discussion and entertain us for this long is that you are someone who genuinely is willing to entertain alternative perspectives and does not state with certainty that your perspective or take on the thing is correct. And that is part of what we noted that made you distinctive from other gurus that we've looked at, because there is a degree of uncertainty and a degree of tolerance for alternative perspectives. And the last thing I would say is, you know, on cognitive empathy, like you said, you and William Burns both extend cognitive empathy to Putin. You both look at things from his perspective, but the conclusions that you reach are quite distinctive in 2022. So I think that's a good illustration that like, you could engage in cognitive empathy and

still end up with different positions about what the appropriate policy is. Yeah. I mean, I would say, look, he is an official in the government. There are constraints on what he can say. He can't go around saying NATO expansion was a mistake, even though he clearly warned against it in 2008. You're not going to hear the head of the US CIA going around saying NATO expansionism is a mistake. There are constraints on what he can say. And I mean, I don't know. I'm actually not aware of things he said lately that I'd radically disagree with. There may be some, but I don't, you know, and I don't even, I don't deny, for example, that Putin now has this conception of himself as someone who wants to restore Russian greatness by his definition.

I just don't think he always was that to the same extent. I think this is something that's kind of evolved. And we actually had some things we did had some influence over that. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that i would disagree all that sharply with whatever burns his current assessment of putin is yeah just judging from the interview that i i watched i i think he's maybe more in the camp of that although agreeing with you basically on the way that putin perceived things but also kind of saying that his perception of r Russia is that it should be a great power with spheres of influence and that that is independent of whatever is going on with the, like...

Let me be clear, I think that has pretty much always been his view. Russia, you know, they have a ton of nuclear weapons. They had historically been a part of this great power. I think he definitely wanted to hang on to that. And that was so predictable that we should have taken that into account in ways that I don't think we did. But I agree. Yeah. He feels he should be able to conduct himself the way the U.S. feels it should be, you know, in his view, has conducted itself in terms of its neighborhood.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess the issue is, isn't it, like how he's exerting influence in the neighborhood. Like as Chris mentioned at the beginning, geopolitics and real politics is a thing. Like it's real, right? Countries are not always operating according to good principles or internet. I mean, I think all of us here would like it if countries operated according to the international order where the rule of what's called the rules-based order thank you but but in practice of course most countries

are looking after their self-interest and australia is is well known for having an extremely pragmatic and instrumental foreign policy and you know as chris mentioned the beginning a good example of that is as china is progressively increasing its influence in the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand has traditionally had a fair bit of influence for geopolitical reasons, right? But there's a difference in how both Australia and China, to their credit, is operating in that they're basically love bombing the smaller countries in the Pacific to build influence. So Australia and New Zealand have been offering a lot of international aid and various types of economic support and so on. And China is coming in with a better deal in some cases, most recently in the Solomon Islands, right? And so this is the kind of geopolitical thing. Now, that's just so different from how Russia is currently exerting its influence over the region.

Like, it isn't beyond the pale to imagine that Russia could have organized a European Union, even NATO-esque kind of regional multilateral organization, which countries wanted to be a part of in the same way that they want to be a part of NATO and the EU, but they don't. And the reason why is because of how they've been conducting themselves. They haven't shown the restraint of China or indeed most other countries. Well, they're also not a prosperous, they're also not, you know, the kind of picture of prosperity that Europe is comparatively. I mean, there's some big differences. They're also not, you know, the kind of picture of prosperity that Europe is comparatively. I mean, there's a lot of reasons Ukraine would have preferred to be part of the EU. I mean, I will say that Putin tried to, you know, well, I don't know that we need to get into these. Have you ever had this long a conversation with anybody?

Should I be flattered or insulted or what? No, no, no. We are going to let you go. And I do apologize to both of you for bringing up yet another, no. We are going to let you go. And I do apologize to both of you for bringing up yet another point, but I should have just let it go. But look, Russia would have liked to have developed its own economic block. And in 2014, before the revolution, when Ukraine showed signs of wanting to do a kind of provisional move toward a provisional membership of the EU.

Putin offered Ukraine a bunch of subsidies to not do it. And the president accepted that. And then he was ousted. And that's a whole nother story where whether America's role in that was wise is another question. But yeah, he definitely wanted his economic block and he definitely didn't have a winning hand because Russia was not a picture of prosperity and you're right. Uh, there, uh, he, it was a good bet that he was going to be more coercive along dimensions that the EU was not going to be coercive along. I'd rather be in the EU than in Putin's, you know, be coercive along. I'd rather be in the EU than in Putin's economic block.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, Bob, you asked if that's the longest, but I would say you're a good hour and a half behind our mutual acquaintance, Sam. No. I listened to that whole thing. It wasn't longer than this, was it?

You didn't listen. We're beyond two and a half hours, aren't're beyond we're beyond two and a half hours aren't we we're at two and a half hours yeah and by the way my caffeine ran out like i don't know an hour ago so if you're asking why am i so agitated it must be that you guys are getting under my skin no it's not the caffeine it would be another 60 minutes to to reach that wait Wait, that was three? Well, I heard an edited version. Correct. So you're going to edit out everything intelligent, I say?

Is that what's going to happen? Is that why it sounded like you had held your own against Sam? That's exactly. No, no, we edited it to make Sam sound better. I believe that was my, that's how I looked at it. We definitely. You shouldn't have. You shouldn't have.

We edited over talking and that kind of thing. I want to see, I want the director's cut. And I want to be the director. Be careful what you wish for. Unless you guarantee me you'll run the whole thing and let the public decide. No, actually, if you'll edit to protect me, really, really. Yeah. I approve of that.

Editing out the last 90 minutes yeah well i mean i think we've we've managed to solve the mystery of consciousness we've basically resolved the ukrainian crisis and how people should deal with it and we managed to convince bob that puddin is actually a bad guy yeah it was something there he was on he came around he was hard he was hard to convince but we we talked i think bob one of the things that like i would just finish on is that the original thing that we covered on the episode knew you've been a very good sport here you know entertaining the geopolitical talk and that kind of thing, which isn't, it's not our wheelhouse, but it definitely is something that we should discuss

because that's almost all the feedback we got on when we asked people about what we should talk to you about. But I do want to say that on that episode as well, as when we were discussing it, we were saying, you know, that a lot of the qualities that we admire, and if we're going to recommend someone a secular guru, that we would point them in your direction, that although, you know, on these political debates, and even things like, you know, the OPCW reports and that kind of thing, we land on quite different parts. I still do think that one, that a lot of your stuff that would be considered, you know, the topic for our guru things is independent of that. There's some connections, but it's like people can engage entirely with your work, even if they strongly disagree with

you. And secondly, that you are somebody willing to have these kinds of conversations, no matter how insufficiently caffeinated you are. And in terms of your disagreeableness, I saw the interview that you did with Christopher Hitchens many years ago, and you're, you're much more chilled now. Yeah. You won,

but just to be clear, like I was very impressed. Most people didn't think so. I think, I think most people didn't think so. But they weren't watching the same thing then because he. Well, there were actually kind of two debates. There was a there was a foreign policy debate.

They actually ran separately. And then there was the debate on his book was easy because it was such a stupid book. I mean, I'm sorry. That was ridiculous. Well, that's the one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That is not great book. I mean, that is. Don't get me started. But yeah, one. Yeah, yeah. That's what I think. The God is not great book. I mean, that is, don't get me started. But yeah, that, yeah. Yeah, so this wasn't contentious by those standards. Like if you want to see a contentious wild hub, Bob, I think go listen to you. Oh, there's plenty of that online. Look, you know, I don't know if I've told you.

Chris, I have a fair amount of Irish blood. So with all the pros and cons that that brings, and I am capable of losing my temper. I actually haven't seen signs that you have the Irish temper, but maybe people would agree with that assessment. But I agree, Bob. I'm usually pretty chilled despite my reputation. You both seem very likable that that's uh well bob to

to wrap it up i will say that we do like you your impression at the beginning was correct despite being terribly terribly terribly terribly wrong about both syria and ukraine you don't even know my view on you on syria per se on what i think the policy should have been but i don't think we want to go there i'm just assuming it's not good. I'm just assuming you need to be forgiven for it. Okay. Well, I appreciate the forgiveness, whether or not it's warranted. That's the kinds of guys you are.

And let me say, I'm not sure I'll listen to this. Yeah, I'll probably listen to this. But anyway, I listened to the first one, the one where you evaluated me a second time. And it was, again, a real pleasure to be described that charitably. It did lead me to decide that I'm going to join your Patreon. And you should consider that a kickback. And you should consider that as a business model. The guru tier, $1,000 a month.

Yes. You may speak highly of people who join at that level you never know yeah this is like this is like the new video game model you know pay to win yeah um yeah yeah think about it yeah we'll consider it we'll look into it yep well all right thank you thank you for coming on bob thank you for taking my side against chris as well unconsciousness unconsciousness you probably you probably want this for sfi definitely let don't let chris edit it yeah you're on the side of the angels there um and we'll let you either drink more coffee or go to bed which is probably a smart yeah we'll see i don't know you got me

pretty riled up maybe a while before i sleep it's a it is a pleasure bob on that yeah thank you for disagreeing agreeably good night night, farewell, good luck. You too. Sayonara. Ciao. Thank you.