The Joe Rogan Experience - #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. Maajid Nawaz is a British activist, author, columnist, radio host and politician.

four three two one boom and we're live gentlemen Sam Majid how are you good thanks pleasure to meet you pleasure thanks for coming here yeah I'm very happy to get you guys together I mean that was I've been kind of looking to do this for at least two years and finally it's arrived what's been your ultimate goal like what was it well he I mean Majid is just a superstar that needs more exposure I mean he's like he should be running half of civilization i mean he's he's really that's one of those things you can put on the back of a book isn't it yeah it's a good one yeah but you shouldn't put that one it has to be in the back of the book for sure definitely not in the front people read it and go superstar

i can't blurb the book we wrote together, unfortunately. Yeah. That is an issue. You're too kind, Sam. Thank you. It's very generous of you. Are you suing the Southern Poverty Law Center? Is that what's going on? Yeah. In fact, I have an update for everybody because, you know, we crowdfunded a lot of the early costs for the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center. What did they do? What is it based on? Yeah, let me back up a bit. Please. the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

What did they do? What is it based on? Yeah, let me back up a bit. Please. Once upon a time, yours truly, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, was listed in the United Kingdom on the Thomson Reuters World Check database under a category red terrorism designation, while at the same time being listed across the Atlantic in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist. So I was both a Muslim terrorist and an anti-Muslim extremist, according to two separate lists. And of course, that speaks to some of the

polarization in our times in how irrational this conversation around extremism, Islam integration, Muslims in the West has become. I sued Thomson Reuters' WorldCheck, the database. This database is no joke. It's like HSBC and many, many other banks use this database for background checks on whether clients can have a bank account with them. So as a result of, for example, Thomson Reuters and their database, Quilliam, which is a counter extremism organization I founded 10 years ago, had its bank account shut down in the United States because of the Thomson Reuters World Check database system that HSBC subscribes to. Anyway, we sued them, they paid damages, they issued an apology, and they took my name off this terrorism designation

list they have on their World Check database. Maja, I think maybe you should back up further and just give your short form bio in terms of why would you ever be on a terrorist watch list? Sure, sure. I'll do that. But at the same time, the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed me as I said, as an anti-Muslim extremist. So we are also

taking legal action against them. And I will get to your point. But I think just want to say that the I've just held a law firm on retainer, Clare Locke, and they were the ones that sued the Rolling Stone magazine for that college rape scandal. Yeah, that's right. Successfully got one that case, Clare Locke, which is an announcement made here exclusively with you. No one else knows this yet. We have retained Clare Locke. They are writing to the Southern Poverty Law Center as we speak. I think they've got wind of it, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of, I think, either yesterday or the day before.

They've removed the entire list that's been up there for two years. They've removed the entire list, which also had Ayaan Hirsi Ali on it. And it's no longer available on their website. Hursiyali on it. And it's no longer available on their website. Now, is there logic that if you're a critic of Islam, of radical fundamentalist Islam, that you are somehow or another a racist extremist? So that's pretty much what they've said. If you criticize Islam, Ayaan, myself, who have come from within the community, who've had that experience, that somehow that makes us anti-Muslim. There are a number of logical errors involved in that logical leap that they've made. Do they have any distinction?

Is there anything that they write that sort of points to why they would say that? One of them, honestly, the reasons they listed, one of them was that I had a bachelor party in a strip club a year before I got married. That makes you an anti-muslim extremist that was one of the reasons listed what oh the 9-11 hijackers weren't a strip club on 9-10 right that was that that really they really listed that they actually listed that which is part of the

reason why we can prove malice because what has that got to do with anything that but that doesn't yeah that doesn't make any sense yeah so that was that was a primary reason it was one of the three main reasons they originally listed and another one was again false uh they claimed that i had called for the criminalization of the face veil for muslim women in the west which wasn't true i had called for a policy to be adopted where in banks and airports where you are not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet, you also shouldn't be allowed to cover your face in the name of religion, which is very different to calling for the criminalization per se of the face veil. That's like saying you're not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet in a bank. So I believe in the criminalization of motorcycle helmets. It's just absurd.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. So it was a mischaracterization of my opinion. So that's two. Yep. And the other one, the reason they – I can't even remember. Because they kept changing their reasons. The actual website has been – we've got the archive and it's been – they've been changing it each time people have been pointing out the stupidity of their allegations. So why do they – what is the Southern Poverty Law Center's – This is a painful irony because if you roll back the clock now 20 or some odd years, their reasons to exist were great.

I mean this was the flagship organization that was suing the KKK and sovereign citizens and just the far right white nationalist, Christian nationalist movements in the U.S. And in some cases to great effect. And their concern, obviously, about extremist hate groups in the U.S. was totally valid. And I mean, it became, I mean, now that we see how morally confused they are, people have been shining a light on them, and they're this bloated organization that's been taking in way too much money. And it suffers from other signs of corruption or conflicts of interest. But back in the day, Morris Dees was bringing the KKK to court and bankrupting their various chapters. And that looked fantastic. And now the social justice warrior, moral panic, moral stupidity virus has gotten into their brains. And they can't differentiate someone like Majid from a right-wing Christian neo-Nazi hater of Islam, right, or hater of people from the Middle East.

And so it is with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And now, ironically, you're off the website. Now I'm on it. people from the Middle East. And so it is with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ironically, you're off the website. Now I'm on it. I think I'm on it in a far more transitory way. But the article that was written about my podcast with Charles Murray by Vox hit the Southern Poverty Law Center hate watch page. And so there you had articles about neo-Nazi groups, articles about the Austin bomber, and then me and my podcast with Charles Murray.

I definitely want to talk about that. But I want to give people your background first. The reason why you were on the list in the UK in the first place had to do with your actual background. So I was born and raised in Essex in the United Kingdom. And I came of age in what I now refer to as the bad old days of racism in the United Kingdom. Much has changed since then for the good. But in those days, there were serious cases of violent racism that I faced, hammer attacks, machete attacks by actual neo-Nazis. I mean, I've grown up, this is the irony of this Southern Poverty Law Center listing.

I've grown up fighting neo-Nazis on the streets and they've been attacking me with hammers and machetes because of the color of my skin. And you've got a bunch of white guys in Alabama designating me in the same breath as they would designate these neo-Nazis. But that, when I grew up and having that experience, being falsely arrested by Essex police on a number of occasions, profiled while the genocide in Bosnia was unfolding against Muslims in Bosnia. I often say to an American audience when I'm speaking about this, we are now here with you on the West Coast in this beautiful new studio you have. Congratulations. Thank you. And imagine a genocide was unfolding on the East Coast against a group of people with whom you identified. And even if it's just on a human level human beings

but you know even within that a community identification would impact you in a way for example if you defined yourself as jewish and there was a genocide against jews on the other side of this very continent of this very country how it would impact you on on the west coast um well sarajevo sarajevo from london it takes us less time to fly from London to Bosnia than it does from New York to LA and so it really had a profound impact on Muslims across Europe when that genocide was unfolding and things were never the same again it radicalized an entire generation

of course ideology had a lot to do with that but the anger originally came from the genocide so at the age of 16 what with the domestic racism and the situation in Bosnia unfolding as it did, I joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is a non-terrorist, still legal in America and in Britain and across Europe, Islamist organization. It was the first of the global Islamist organizations that aspired to resurrect the notion of a caliphate, which we've subsequently seen to great damaging effect in the form of ISIS caliphate.

And their method of coming to power was by infiltrating militaries in Muslim-majority countries, recruiting army officers, and then instigating military coups, whether that be in Turkey, in Pakistan, in Egypt. These are the countries they targeted. And their aim would be to then, through the military coup, set up this caliphate, which would then be an expansionist caliphate and would conquer the world. I mean, it sounds crazy. That's what they believe. And that's what they're very,

very serious and intent on bringing about. And now people, when I say that, believe me, because they've seen the ISIS experiment unfold. But I joined a group that sought to do that through non-terroristic means at the age of 16. I ended up on the leadership of that organization in the UK, ended up co-founding that group in Pakistan in 1999, where I left the UK, went to Pakistan, was among the first, the vanguard of British Pakistani members that went out there to set the group up. There've been about three or four coup plots in Pakistan since, and army officers have been arrested for being members of this group, and many of them still in jail.

I spent a year in Pakistan, went back while studying for my degree in the University of London. I would fly on Saturdays and Sundays to Copenhagen in Denmark. I co-founded the Danish-Pakistani chapter of this group. And then the third year of my degree, because I was doing law and Arabic, resulted in me having to go to an Arab country for the language year. And so I chose Egypt. And a day before the 9-11 attacks in 2001, I ended up in Egypt. I went to Alexandria, enrolled in the University of Alexandria to study for the year of Arabic language, which was the third year of my degree. Of course, 9-11 happened and the climate changed.

The security climate changed all over the world, something we didn't know about nor predicted. And on the 1st of April 2002, my house in Alexandria was raided by the Egyptian state security. I was blindfolded. My hands were tied behind my back. I was then driven through the desert into Cairo to the dungeon of the state security headquarters in a building known as Al-Jihaz, which was the main headquarters of Amin Ad-Dawla, the internal state security. We were held in the dungeons there for four days, and they electrocuted most of the prisoners that they had there, tortured them, interrogated them. On the fourth day, I was taken to a prison known as Masra'a Tora in Cairo, put into solitary confinement for about three and a half months, then charged, eventually sentenced to five years as a political prisoner under the Egyptian emergency law and served my full sentence there in Egypt. Eventually left prison in 2006 and returned to the UK.

So did Amnesty International get you out at all? No, they only took an interest in you. So they campaigned for my release. Nobody got me out because I had to finish my full prison sentence. release and nobody got me out because i had to finish my full prison sentence um but what changed me and and led to me to be the man that sits before you today is you're right sam uh amnesty's uh adoption of me and and a few others in the case as prisoners of conscience and they took the very brave and bold step now looking back at it because keep in mind the context there this is bush was president tony

blair was prime minister and we were in the thick of the war on terror we were in the middle of it and amnesty comes along and says we disagree with everything this guy stands for but they don't believe in using violence to bring their caliphate about and so we will defend their right to say stupid things and they shouldn't be in prison they certainly shouldn't have been tortured for it so um amnesty adopted us as prisoners of conscience. And I was 24 years old at the time, by the way. So everything I've just described to you happened to me up until the age of 24 when I was imprisoned. And it was the first time in my relatively young life.

I'm 40 now, right? And I had never been defended by any mainstream, pillar of mainstream society in that way before. Nobody had spoken out for me. And that had a real huge kind of emotional impact on my psyche. I've said in my autobiography that where the heart leads, the mind can follow. And so I was now willing to consider alternatives because of Amnesty's work campaigning for me. And so I spent the next four years in prison reading, rereading Orwell, every one of his books, reading Tolkien, reading classic English literature, studying Islamic theology, really trying to understand the world around me. And I had four years to do so. And I spent four years debating

and discussing with pretty much the founders of Egypt's main jihadist organizations who were in jail with me in the same prison, including the assassins of the former president, Anwar Sadat, who had been killed in 1981 because of his peace deal with Israel. And his assassins were in jail with me. And they'd been in prison longer than I'd been alive. And so they had some collective years of wisdom between them. And most of those jihadist prisoners I was in jail with had over the course of those years, two decades and more, changed their views and reformed. They were still conservative religious Muslims, something which I'm not. And I never, I don't claim to be in my work at the moment. But they were still religious Muslims, but they were no

longer extremists. And they were no longer what I call Islamists, people that sought to implement their version of Islam over society. And so they, in four years of constant debate and discussion with them, people that I knew had more wisdom than me, they'd been in jail for longer than I'd been alive, my views began slowly changing. I read a lot of the books they wrote about changing their own views and why they changed. And upon my release, I eventually, a good few months after my release,

I had to leave the organization because I no longer believed in an ideology that I was once prepared to die for. That is fascinating that the shift came about in jail speaking with assassins. Yeah, among many others, yeah. That is really incredible. You would think that most people think that when someone goes to jail, usually whatever criminality that they have in them is cemented and hardened. Yeah. I don't know why mine is an exceptional case because most people, you're right. Whether you look at Saeed Qutb, who's known as the founding father of modern day jihadism, he started off like me, a non-terrorist Islamist, but in Egypt's jails, in fact, the very jail I was held in, he was tortured and he ended up becoming the godfather of modern day terrorism through his book Milestones or Ma'alim al-Tariq in Arabic. And yet that in my case, for whatever reason, you know, I kind of went that bit further to question everything I believed in.

But that's not normal. In most cases, when you torture people in jail, it ends up hardening and ossifying that ideology and people become as angry as, you know, they become the monster that they were seeking to defeat. So you get out of jail. What do you do then? So I left the group in 2007 and by 2008 in January. So I finished my degree. I had one year left of my undergraduate degree. I graduated. I did my master's at the London School of Economics in Political Theory, and while doing the master's, set up Quilliam. And Quilliam, we bill as the world's first counter-extremism organization. It was meant to be, we believe it is, bringing us back to the SPLC's allegation, a Muslim response to extremism from people that have lived it and been through it. My co-founders were Islamists themselves who changed like me. Muslims born and raised come from the community to have a

community-based response, a Muslim response to this growing problem of extremism. And this was 10 years ago. And of course, ISIS emerged since then, only demonstrating why this kind of response was needed. And so for the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate somebody with my background, with that trajectory, with somebody who was prepared to die for this cause, and somebody who wanted to address these problems as a Muslim, to call for reform for the good of my communities as opposed to against them. You know, at the end of the day, it can only benefit Muslim communities if extremism is put back in its box. For them to then list someone like me as an anti-Muslim extremist, it just really does, I think, shine a light on the true absurdity of the situation we find ourselves in. Absurdity and the lack of real investigation or backing up their claims with actual facts and information.

And that brings me to your story with Charles Murray and Vox and Ezra Klein. Well, let's linger here for a moment. Sure. It's the same problem. But not only is it a lack of investigation, but when it gets pointed out, I mean, I forgot the guy's name at the SPLC who was quarterbacking this, but it wasn't Morris Dees, but it was someone high up. Mark Podek?

The CEO, something Cohen, I think. I thought it was Mark Podek. Anyways, he's listed in the – he's named in the Atlantic article that first put this on our radar. But they just double down. I mean the error cannot be pointed out clearly enough to trigger – I mean much less an apology, any modulation of the claim. People just double down in the face of obvious counter evidence. And it's just not about a sincere engagement with the problem. And there's so many variables here that make it a really toxic environment. But one is that the locus of concern is never the individual. It is the group.

It's the tribe. And so it's like they'll sacrifice any number of individuals to make the political case they want to make. So they're completely unrepentant when they're shown to get it wrong. And in your case and in Ayan's case, it's just such a grievous moral lapse, because not only is the attack on you illegitimate, it actually raises your security concerns. And it becomes a reference point for journalists who are confused, who can't follow the plot or don't have the time to fact check everything, it makes you radioactive from the point of view of mainstream journalists because they go to the Southern Poverty Law Center site to figure out who's worth talking to. And they see a page where you're listed as an anti-Muslim extremist along with people

who bear very little resemblance to you ideologically because there are probably a few people on there who could be described as anti-Muslim extremists and here are the ten people you don't need to talk to about this problem, whereas you're actually one of the most valuable voices, I mean, objectively one of the most valuable voices

but probably, you know, I can probably count on two fingers, you know, anyone who would rival your voice on this topic. So it's just mind-boggling it's very difficult trying to keep this mic close yeah it's very difficult you can swing it toward you i can swing it so it's very difficult because um i can't i can't fully explain to anybody what it feels like to have lived an entire life from roughly the age of 14 being consumed by this issue of muslim Muslims in the West and this question and originally

getting it, answering it in one way and then still being consumed by the topic, answering it in a different way as I now do. I can't describe to anybody how much emotionally the toll that it takes to have your whole life, have defined your whole life by trying to answer this question. your whole life, have defined your whole life by trying to answer this question. And because you care for it, because this is a question that concerns you. When I joined the Islamist group I did, I was wrong and adopted some really nefarious ideas, but did so because I gave a damn and cared for a genocide that I saw unfolding and desperately wanted a solution. So even when I became an Islamist, I did so out of care and love and concern for what I believed was my community under attack.

So to have a bunch of people come along and say that I am anti the very community that I believe of, I have fought for all my life, you know, and my life has been consumed and defined by this. It really is taking the one thing away from somebody that they have. I mean, I went to jail for this thing. People have died in front of my eyes from their torture wounds in prison because of this thing. To have someone completely ignorant in that way to deprive me of being able to claim that I have stood for my community,

of being able to claim that I have stood for my community, but by instead saying that I'm anti that community, it really does kind of make you feel like crap, Joe. When did this start happening, the moral panic that you've constantly discussed and the flippant sort of accusations without any real solid objective reasoning behind calling someone like you or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's the victim of female genital mutilation, to say that she's an anti-Muslim, that she's Islamophobic,

it seems to me, it's almost insane, but it seems to me to be prevalent. This is something that is a common sentiment today that I don't recall ever seeing anything like this one or two decades ago. Yeah. I don't know. You might have a better sense than I do, but I don't. It's become increasingly salient to me just because I've been doing this work for better or worse and colliding with these people more and more. But it's definitely an export from some trends in intellectual life that go back, you know, 50 years or more. I mean, it was what postmodernism did. And I mean, you can go back further than that. It's just that there's a framework, a kind of pseudo-intellectual framework where facts can't be talked about

as facts. They're intrinsically political. They intrinsically convey power disparities. You know, science is just a tool of power sort of thinking. And this goes back a ways, but it's now seemingly ascendant on the left in a way that is just fairly bewildering. But it seems to be only two subjects, gender and race. Those are the ones that get – Those are the big ones. I think it's – I'm sure we could find more if we take a minute to think about it. But those are – those certainly dwarf every other subject.

Those are the ones where there's a wall. There's a wall that you can't get through with objective reason. Gender, but this isn't quite race. This is the, I mean, it's drawing a lot of energy from concerns about racism. Identity. Yes. The perception is that Muslims are a politically beleaguered minority that have to be. So it is like...

I mean, people think it's racist to criticize Islam as though that made any sense. I mean, Ben Affleck being one. But it is... You know, this is... They're a minority in Los Angeles. They're not a minority. They're the second biggest religion on Earth.

We're talking about 1.7 billion people. And the criticism of Muslim extremism, for the most part, is focused on societies where you have, in most cases, a majority Muslim population. You have women and gays and free thinkers treated terribly. And that is the center of the bullseye in terms of what one is criticizing when one talks about theocracy. what one is criticizing when one talks about theocracy.

So there was a lot of this stuff, this paranoia, this irrational approach to this conversation that Sam suffered from. And when I first met him, I met Sam in New York at the Intelligence Squared debate that he, so A. Arnherzeli and Douglas Murray, who I believe you've had on this podcast, were on one side of a debate. I was on the other side of this debate. And the motion that we were debating was Islam is a religion of peace. I was back then arguing what half of my true belief is because I actually don't believe it's a religion of peace or war. It's just a religion that is interpreted in different ways.

But I had to pick a side. And so I picked that side in defending the motion. And Aon and Douglas were on the other side. And there was a dinner afterwards for the speakers. And Sam was there. I imagine you were there as Aon's guest. Yeah, yeah. And so it's my fault.

I didn't know who he was. And Aon and I were locked in conversation post debate conversation. And I invited Sam to to have his say. And she said, I want to hear what Sam Harris has to say. And so. produced online. I don't know that they're televised anywhere, but they're online. They get a great theater in Manhattan, and it's an audience of maybe a thousand people, and John Donvan, the journalist, is the impresario. But then this was a dinner afterwards for the organizers and the participants,

and there may be 70 people in the back room of a restaurant, and Majid and I were not at the same table, thankfully. We were like 50 feet away from each other, but facing each other. And so he was at the table with Ayaan and the other speakers. And at one point, everyone's getting debriefed about how this went. And Ayaan says, well, Sam Harris is here.

I'd like to hear what he has to say about the debate. And so I look at Majid, and he's at least 50 feet away from me. And I mean, did you want me to say what I said? So he had made moves in this debate that I considered intellectually dishonest. And I mean, because he's playing a game. And this is not a real conversation. This is a formal academic style debate where, you know, his job is not to leave his view open to influence by the other discussants. He's making a case. And I didn't know it at the time, but he felt unnaturally constrained by the format of the debate. He had to argue that Islam is a religion of peace. And some of the moves he made there, I thought were dishonest.

And so I said, Majid, I remember this more or less verbatim, because we talked about it, and we've since transcribed it into a book. But I said, Majid, you know, everyone in this room recognizes that you have the hardest job in the world. And we're all very glad that you're doing it. You have to somehow convince the next generation of Muslims that Islam really is a religion of peace and that jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle and that martyrs don't get 72 virgins in paradise and all the rest. And so my question for you is, do you really believe that this is the case now? Or do you think that pretending that is the case is the method by which you will make it the case? If you just pretend long enough and hard enough, it'll become so.

And the extra line here was, and can you just be honest with us in the privacy of this room? My final sentence was, we're not televised now. Can you just be honest with us here? So I responded immediately and said are you calling me a liar and uh so now there's like 70 we have now 70 people and i'm like into my second gin and tonic and and and he's giving me the the sort of you know middle eastern stare down across you know and he repeated it he said no no i'm asking just here that where there's no cameras can you just be honest with us and i said are you calling me a liar and it didn't go too well at all the entire

everyone on the table kind of went quiet and uh and i didn't know who this guy was i'd i'd never met him and and i should have known who he was and uh and and then i think somebody uh very tactfully changed the conversation and just completely veered off this and i'd never and i never spoke to him again for another what was it a couple of years a couple of years i we'd never crossed paths since then the reason i bring this up is that i was one of those guys that didn't want to entertain a conversation with sam uh based upon the defensiveness when it came to this topic and and i think that actually it's important to say that to people that because you asked him a question about the charles murray situation a lot of people rather than actually wanting to engage with someone on

the substance of their ideas that I think in the climate we're in today they're engaging with people based upon their on their feelings and those feelings are valid of course everyone has the right to their feelings but we've got to try as hard as we can to detach those feelings from because that's clearly not what you know if the principle of charity means you lend the person that you're speaking to the best possible interpretation of what they're saying and and and allow them to clarify what they mean as opposed to you putting into their mouths what what they mean and telling them what they mean i learned that you know because then two years later he reaches out to me and he says i think we can try again.

Are you willing to have a conversation with me? And I hadn't originally remembered it was the same guy. Oh, that's funny. I got my foot in the door just because you didn't know who I was. And then we had this conversation, which it's a lesson for me. Because we had this conversation. It's called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. It's become a book, right?

Published by Harvard University Press. We had this conversation that became a book that's been made into a film, which I think any couple of weeks now we'll hear some news on that. Yeah, I don't know when that's coming out. So we did a lecture tour of Australia and the people who organized that made a documentary that we...

But therein lies this lesson to your question. And that is that I am somebody that didn't engage with him on the substance of his question, but actually fired a misfire, an emotional misfire on what was really questioning his motives for asking the question rather than actually addressing the points he was making. And I think that because I didn't remember who he was, I then started the conversation anew without the memory of my original judgment on him. And the conversation went really well. So we've got to somehow be able to divorce ourselves from that background.

That can happen. I mean, it can be done. It's just, it takes people of strong character to try to like abandon all preconceived notions from the past conversation, just start fresh. conceive notions from the past conversation just start fresh yeah unfortunately this example of of a kind of a signal success has has caused me to in the end kind of misspend a lot of energy just assuming that i can do this again i keep thinking i keep walking into another situation thinking this is possible is that why you deleted twitter well yeah it's off my phone. Yes. So you haven't deleted your account. No, I'm still on Twitter. But I will, based on this recent episode, I am fascinated by people and

their struggles with social media, with like, detaching from it, reattaching from it, getting addicted to it. I mean, I know so many people that will look at their Twitter at like one o'clock in the morning before they go to bed and something pisses them off and then they can't sleep. Yeah. to it. I mean, I know so many people that will look at their Twitter at like one o'clock in the morning before they go to bed and something pisses them off and then they can't sleep. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's really common. I was not, I don't consider myself someone who had a real pathology with it. I mean, I was, you know, I have, I don't know, 6,000 tweets or 7,000 tweets over the course of many years.

So I was not tweeting that much. I was not even looking that much. I was fairly disengaged, and I've never used Facebook as a – I just use Facebook as kind of a publishing channel. I never engage with comments. But I was looking enough, and it was – one, it was clearly making me a worse person. I mean, I was reacting to stuff that I didn't need to react to. And it was amplifying certain criticisms and voices, which need not have been amplified. And in this last case, it just turned a, I mean, it just created a huge kind of explosion in my life. I was in the middle of a vacation, which I basically torpedoed because of what I saw on Twitter.

I mean, it was just, it was like the perfect infomercial for why you don't want to be engaged with social media. You torpedoed your vacation how? Well, so I'm in the middle of, like, the first vacation I've taken with my family for a very long time. It was at least a year. Wow. And so, you know, we're on Hawaii, vacation I've taken with my family for a very long time. It was at least a year. And, and so

you know, we're on Hawaii and just like, I'm supposed to put everything down to be the best father and husband I can be. Right. And that was my intention. That's what was happening. It happened for a good solid 24 hours. And then I pick up my phone and I see that, that Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein had all attacked me in the space of an hour. Oh, no. It goes out to millions of people. And is this over what Joe was asking about the Charles Murray thing? Yeah.

Well, the truth is I can't even see what – I didn't look at what Greenwald had done. He was circulating somebody's video about me, how I'm, I think I'm a racist in that video. Rez Aslan blocks me, so I can't even see what, he attacks me by name, but he blocks me, so I can't even see his export. But I just saw the aftermath of that, you know, lots of stuff, you know, lots of notifications coming to me with both of us tagged. And then Ezra published this, I suppose I should back up, however painfully, to describe what happened here. So I had Charles Murray on my podcast a year ago. And Charles Murray is this social scientist who published The Bell Curve back in the 90s, which was a book

about IQ and success in Western societies like our own. And it's a book where he worries a lot about the cognitive stratification of society. We have a society that is selecting more and more for a narrow band of talents that is fairly well captured by what we call IQ. And it's a kind of winner-take-all situation where people are really, you know, 500 years ago, if you had a very high IQ and you're just pushing a plow next to your neighbor, you had no real advantage. But now you can start a hedge fund or you can start a software company, and we're seeing this real shocking disparity in good fortune really. So he wrote this book. It had a chapter on race, which

talked about the disparities in racial groups. Statistically observed disparities. And the claim about the source of those disparities was by even the standards of the time, but certainly

the standards of today, incredibly tepid, mealy-mouthed, just hand-waving. It was not this, you know, here comes the Third Reich declaration of white supremacy. It was undoubtedly there are environmental and genetic reasons for this, and we don't understand them. You know, it was just like, to think that it's one or the other, we're not in a position to know what the mix is of influences now. And that is virtually any honest scientist's take on the matter. And certainly today, I mean, it's only become more so.

But that went off like a nuclear bomb. I mean, that was such a... I mean, it's the most... And at the time, I never read the book. I just thought this had to be just racist poison. Of course, Charles Murray would be vilified for that observation. And he's been vilified ever since, and ever since, you know, I've ignored him. Wasn't he deplatformed and assaulted recently?

Yeah, so that's what happened. So he went to Middlebury to give a talk, you know, 20 some odd years, 25 years after he wrote this book. Oh, by the way, he's also listed by the Southern Bovsey Law Center. And so that's what contributed to the deplatforming and the violent protest against him at Middlebury. What's crazy is the whole thing is a propaganda for the superiority of the Asian race. And everyone's missing that. Yeah, that's the flip side of it. They're all talking about white supremacy.

Asians are actually the ones with- Far and above. I mean, that's basically what his book proved. And, you know, they're suing Harvard now. There's a group of Asian students that are suing Harvard because they're discriminated against, because they're required to have higher scores, because they're assumed to be smarter. So the standards for Asian students entering into Harvard is higher than white people. Wow.

Yes. Well, Asian privilege is a big problem. Yeah. Your grandfather was working on the railroads in California as an indentured servant, and all that privilege trickled down. There's obviously a lot of factors that lead to IQ, to high IQ, but to ignore what those are, to ignore it completely, to just burn your head in the sand. In the name of ideology, of course.

Yes, exactly. Only ideology. And this idea that you cannot look at statistics, you cannot look at facts. And in your conversation with Ezra Charles, or Ezra Klein, rather, that's what I got, is that this is an ideological issue. And that you, it's almost like an impossible subject to breach. Like, you can't even discuss the fact that certain races demonstrate low IQ. And then let's look at what could be the cause of those. Even discussing that somehow or another is so inherently racist that it must be ignored or must be silenced

and that you must first concentrate on all the various injustices that have been done to those people who have this lower IQ. Yeah. Well, let me just take a couple of minutes to close the various doors to hell that are now ajar based on what we've just said. So you were on your holiday and you get all these notes. Yeah. So just a little more context. So, yeah, as you said, Charles Murray went to Middlebury College and was deplatformed. And he was not only deplatformed. So the usual deplatforming with the students turning their back to the speaker and shouting and not letting anything happen. But the professor who invited him, who was a liberal professor who wanted to essentially debate him.

She was attacked. When they're leaving the hall, they both get physically attacked by a crowd of students. Charles was not hurt. His host, this female professor, got a concussion and a neck injury that still persists. And this is now more than a year later. So it's like she was actually harmed by this. I think she's a registered Democrat. No doubt.

And they're driving out in an SUV where that gets, I mean, someone pulls a stop sign out of the sidewalk and it's still got the concrete ball on the end of it. And that this SUV gets smashed with this, you know, concrete laden stop sign. I mean, this was, this is happening at one of the most liberal privileged colleges on earth. It's nuts. So anyway, that was the thing that put Murray on my radar after all these many years of my ignoring him and i had actually i felt guilty because i had declined to be a part of at least one project because his name was attached right because i just thought this guy's radioactive he's he's got some white supremacist agenda i had believed the the the lies about him

uh and then i saw this and i thought well, maybe he's the canary in the coal mine, or certainly one of the canaries in the coal mine that I had ignored, where, as you say, certain topics are considered so politically fraught that you cannot discuss them no matter what is true. There has to be a firewall between your conversation about reality and these sorts of facts. And so he's been suffering from having transgressed that boundary. agnostic about his actual social policy commitments and his political concerns, and just wanting to talk about the facts insofar as we touch them lightly. I mean, I had zero interest in intelligence as measured by IQ, although, I mean, it's an interesting subject, but I hadn't spent much time focused on that. And I had truly zero interest in establishing differences between populations with respect to intelligence or anything else.

But I see what's coming. I see the fact that the more we understand ourselves genetically and environmentally, the more we will – if we go looking or even if we're not looking, we will discover differences between groups. If we go looking or even if we're not looking, we will discover differences between groups. And the end game for us as a species is not to deny that those differences exist or could possibly exist. It's to deny that they have real political implication. The political framework we need is a commitment to equality across the board and a commitment to treating individuals as individuals. There's nobody who's, the average of a population is meaningless with respect to you. And that will always be so. And whatever diversity of talents there is statistically in various populations, we want societies that simply don't care politically about that. I mean, that's just – it's just not what – it's – our political tolerance of one another and support of one another is not predicated on denying individual differences or even statistical differences

across groups. It can't be because we know that there are people walking around like, you know, Elon Musk, who gets out of bed every morning and does the work of like 4,000 people, right? And people who just are struggling to work at Starbucks and hold down a job. just are struggling to work at Starbucks and hold down a job. And our political system, I mean, we don't say one person is more valuable politically and socially than another, even though one person is capable of doing massive things that most other people aren't. It's, you know, when it comes time to write laws and create institutions that support human flourishing, we have to engineer tides that raise all the boats. And there are legitimate debates about the social policies that will do that. And there are legitimate debates about facts.

debate scientific fact and the results of psychometric testing or behavioral genetics that are relevant to this question of intelligence. And we can have a good faith debate about the data. And then we can have a good faith debate about social policy that should follow from the data. But what's happening on the left now is on either of those tiers of conversation there are just straight up allegations of of racism that hit you the moment you touch certain certain facts can i say that that what he's just summarized there what i've heard um sounds to me as uh being more humane than the implications of the argument that the left who are opposing what sam has just said are because if you think about it the implications of their argument would be they they want to deny the facts because they're scared that those facts would from which there

would be derived a policy that would reflect those facts in other words in their minds they are marrying those two. They are marrying the notion that if in statistical observance there are variances in IQs between groups, in their minds, that means the policy

should follow from that. So it's why they're resisting what he's saying, whereas what he's saying is there is no connection between what the policy should be and what the facts may be because of the kind of world we want to live in should aspire to equality regardless of what the science is saying because one is policy and one is science.

I freely agree with you on that, but I don't think that's necessarily exactly what they're saying. so guilty that any discussion whatsoever about race can't be held unless you repeatedly bring up all the instances of racism and suppression and discrimination that that group has suffered from. It's like you can't, it doesn't exist as a statistic island. You have to bring everything in together. If you don't do that, that's where their protest comes from. And I think that was one of the things that I got from your conversation with Ezra Klein. He wasn't willing to just discuss what's the implication of these issues and completely dismiss this fact that Asian people score far better.

This is not an advocacy for white supremacy. By conceding on the data, it's almost as if they fear that the implication must necessarily follow that the policy will also be supremacist in that way. I wonder. I honestly think that what we talked about before is a big part of it. It's an ideological idea sport and that they're just volleying back. I don't think they're willing to take... I think one of the real strengths of character that you demonstrate in a debate or any discussion

of facts is when uncomfortable truths rear their ugly head that are counter to your personal position. You have to be able to go, you got a really good point. You've got a good point. There's something to that. I see what you're saying. Okay, this is what my concern would be. And this would be a rational, real conversation.

This is what I would worry about. And then you would, I'm sure, say, absolutely. I would worry about that as well. And then you would have this sort of a discussion. I didn't get that from that conversation you had. I got ping pong. I got bup-bup, bup-bup, bup-bup, bup-bup. I got this rallying back and forth of ideas rather than two human beings not digging their heels into the sand, just trying to look at the ideas and look at the statistics and look at these studies for what they are.

And look at Charles Murray and what he's gone through. And should we be able to examine these statistical anomalies? Should we be able to examine athletic superiority? Should we be able to examine superiority that Asians show in mathematics and a lot of the sciences? Should we? Should we be able to? Or should we just dig our heads in the sand? Should we just let things sort themselves out and quietly ignore all the reality?

Yeah. I don't know. motivated by something unethical or unsavory right so like like you could imagine you know white supremacists being being super enamored of this the possibility that these data exists yes and they are yes and so until they look at the asian statistics so so that's i i get that right and there is there's some things that and this is this was a question i had for Charles Murray on that podcast. I said, like, why pay attention to any of this? What is the upside? In the infinity of interesting problems we can tackle scientifically, why focus on population differences?

And, you know, frankly, I didn't get a great answer from him. What did he say? His answer is, well, I think the best version of his answer, which I agree with, but still it may not justify certain uses of attention. It's just that if you, there's this massive bias that basically we're all working with a blank slate genetically, and therefore any difference you see among people is a matter of environment. And so then you have people who have privileged environments and people who have environments where they're massively under-resourced.

And so therefore, any different representation at the higher echelons of success and achievement and power in our society, if there's 13% African Americans in the U.S., if you look at the top doctors in hospitals or the top academics or the Oscar winners or wherever you want to look for achievement, if there are less than 13% African Americans in any one of those bins, that has to be the result of racism or systemic racism. That is the leftward bias at this moment. And so it is with Jews for anti-Semitism. So it is for women. moment. And so it is with Jews for antisemitism. So it is for women. You know, there should be an equal representation of women, you know, computer software engineers at Google. And any lack of any disparity there must be the result of either just inequitable resources for,

you know, kids in schools or somewhere along the way, or kind of a selection pressure from the top that we don't like women at Google or blacks at the Oscars. And so Murray's concern is, if you believe that, and this is not exactly what he said, but this is what I believe he thinks, but I could be putting some words into his mouth here. But this is certainly what many other people on his side of the debate think. If you believe that, you will consistently find racial bias and anti-Semitism and misogyny where it doesn't exist. So if you go to a hospital, and this is a real problem, the academic departments in the medical schools, the best medical schools, are under massive pressure to find real diversity in representation at the highest level. You need to find a head of cardiology who's black. And the fact that you haven't done that is a sign that there's a problem with you and your organization and your process of hiring.

Now, if it's just the case, for whatever reason, that there are not many candidates, likely less than 13% for that field, or to take the James DeBoer memo at Google, right? If it just is the case that women – forget about it, this is beyond aptitude. This just goes to interest. If it's the case that women, for whatever reason, genetic or environmental, are less interested in being software engineers on average than men are, then having 20% women coding software at Google is not Google's problem. It's just the fact that this is what the population interests are. Now, we should – no doubt racism still exists.

No doubt misogyny and sexism still exists. There are – and there's proof of this to be found as well. proof of this to be found as well but if to assume an absolute uniformity of human of interest and aptitude in every population you could look at is just scientifically irrational that would be a miracle if that were the case so at this stage allow me to remind everybody that was sam summarizing what he thinks charles murray was saying as opposed to Sam. No, no, but that final point is just a true point. Genes, almost everything we care about are massively influenced by genes. Not 100%. Often what I've seen happen to you, though,

is that people have taken your summaries of other people's stances and attributed those views to you. But that wasn't even necessarily Charles Murray's position. It's your summary of his position in relationship to this fight against it. The thing that I would add and the thing where there's some daylight between the two of me and him on my podcast is this is so toxic to be trafficking in population differences with respect to IQ. And it's not absolutely clear what social policies turn on really nailing down these differences. I mean, so you could go, I mean, to take an even more toxic example, perhaps. It's like you could decide, you know, the Roma in Europe, the gypsies.

This is like a very isolated, beleaguered community. Who knows how inbred it is? I mean, I don't know. This is an outlier community. Anyone who's going to want to do massive IQ testing on the Roma, what's the point of doing that, right? It seems like just a kind of political time bomb to devote resources in that way because we know that the policy you want, whatever the mean IQ is of any group, the policy you want is to give everyone whatever opportunities they can avail themselves of. So we want people to have the best schools they can use. And then we'll find people who need to be in more remedial schools for whatever reason, or people who like, there'll be one population that has 10 times the amount of dyslexia than another population, say, and there'll be undoubtedly genetic reasons for that. You know, there may be environmental reasons for that as well, but there's, we need to be able to cater to all of those needs with just, there's this fundamental commitment to goodwill and equality

without being panicked that we'll find stuff that just blows everything up. But on the left, stuff that just blows everything up. But on the left, there's the sense that the only way to move forward toward equality is to lie about what is scientifically plausible and demonize anyone who won't lie with you. That's the ideological point there earlier. This is a new thing though, right? I mean, relatively speaking, this hard-nosed stance from the left of the equality of outcome and the only reason why there wouldn't be 50% women or 50% black or 50% any, you just pick any marginalized group,

the only reason why it wouldn't be even across the board with all other races is because of discrimination. This is a fairly new stance. Well, I mean, there were moments that were fairly well publicized that, I forget when Larry Summers got fired from Harvard. This is a fairly new stance. because once the wheels started to come off, he had alienated enough people that he didn't have friends to kind of prop him up. But the thing that pulled the wheels off was that he gave a speech and he said, we know there are differences in the bell curves

that describe mathematical aptitude between men and women. And this explains why there are many more top flight male mathematicians and engineers and women. And this explains why there are many more top flight male mathematicians and engineers than women. And it's not that the means of the bell curves are different. So the means could be the same, but there could be more variance so that the tails are thicker in the case of the male bell curve. So at the absolute ends, both the low end and the high end, you have many more people. So if you're going to ask, in the same size population,

how many people do you have at the 99.999 percentile of aptitude in math, say, it could be that you have, and there's a fair amount of data to show this, many more men at the tails than women, right? And that's true for grandmasters in chess, right? It's just, this is not a, and it may be true for something like, you know, playing pool, you know, I mean, they're just differences that may not be entirely environmental almost certainly are not entirely environmental uh that is one right it's a it's a big issue in the the world of pool men and women play separately and there's no reason physically why they should yeah they're not it's not a strength game right but women are allowed to play in men's tournaments but they never win right gene belucas was a woman who's uh she was like one of the only women to ever compete and beat men. She's like

an extreme outlier and this was like I want to say it was in the late 70s or the 80s and other than that there's been a few women that have done well in tournaments but when they come to major league professional pool tournaments they're almost always won by men and when I say almost I mean

like 99.9%. So there was a Commonwealth Games been happening as it was just over mean like 99.9 so there was a uh commonwealth games have been happening as it was just over the last couple of weeks and there was a male to female transgendered athlete in the weight lifting category that's a whole nother participated in the women's competition yes and the commonwealth games at the time of her joining hadn't yet put down a rule as to testosterone levels in the females competing. And so this male to female transgendered person qualified in the female games and was, as you'd expect, winning in all of the games and was the front runner and destined to win the competition as a male to female transgender person. And the only reason, and it would have led to a huge crisis in the Commonwealth Games because

there was some resistance to this notion. And of course, the questions that arise, is this fair? Men are born naturally with higher levels of testosterone, for example. The only reason it didn't lead to crunch time, and that was the huge scandal of her winning, is that she injured herself in the competition and by sheer accident yeah i saw that well i can expand on that a little bit because i've actually gone through this extensively because there was a woman who was uh used to be a man was competing in mixed martial arts against women and just beating the shit out of them and i and i was saying that saying that this is a mistake and that you're looking at whether

someone should be legally able to identify as a woman, portray themselves as a woman. Absolutely. Do you have the freedom to become a woman in quotes in our society? Yes. But you can't deny biological nature and there's physiological advantages to the male frame. There's specifically when it comes to combat sports, that's my wheelhouse. I'm an expert. I understand there's a giant difference between the amount of power that a man and a woman can generate.

And if you're telling me that a guy living 30 years of his life as a man, that's essentially like a woman being on steroids for 30 years, then getting off, and then having regular women being forced to compete with her and trying to pretend this is a level playing field. It is not.

There's a difference in the shape of the hips, the size of the shoulder, the density of the bones, the size of the fists. That's a giant factor. And your ability to generate power is the size of your fists. It's also an ethical problem. It's not just competition here. You have girls getting beaten up by someone who used to be a man. Yes.

But people came down on me harder than anything that I've ever stood up for in my life. Never in my life did I think there was going to be a situation where I said, hey, I don't think a guy should be able to get his penis removed and beat the shit out of women. And then people are like, you're out of line. But that's literally what happened. That's literally the summary of the situation. That's literally what happened. This is a conversation that I had with a woman uh online this one during this whole thing uh she said she this person who had turned into a woman has always been a woman and i said but she was a

man for 30 years she goes no she's always been a woman i go even when she had sex with a woman and fathered a kid and she she says, yes, even then. I go, well, we're done. Because you're just talking nonsense. That's ideology covering the facts, as they are. She had a male physique. This person who's arguing with me wants to claim this moral high ground of being the most progressive. And they're always looking to step on top of anybody who's less progressive than them and proclaim superiority.

And this is the ideological sport. This is the idea sport that you see when people are playing just ping pong with ideas. They're not listening. You need to listen to experts, especially when you're talking about martial arts. The difference is so profound and the results are so critical because you're talking about martial arts, there's a, the difference is so profound and the results are so critical because you're talking about a sport where the objective goal, the goal is clear. It's very clear.

Beat the fuck out of the other person in front of you. So anything that would give you an advantage in beating the fuck out of that person should be really looked at very carefully and not thrown through the lens of this progressive ideological filter that we're going through right now. Because that's what it is. I mean, that's how people are looking at it. It's with weightlifting as well. When transgendered athletes going to weightlifting competitions, the male to female transgender

athletes are overwhelmingly dominant. I mean, is this a coincidence? Or it's no. It's someone who had fucking testosterone pumping through their system and a Y chromosome their whole life. And now all of a sudden we're supposed to say, no, she's a woman, she's dainty.

She's got size 14 feet. She's got gorilla hands. Like, what in the fuck are we doing here? So I think, as you said earlier, she is a woman, but for the purposes of competition against other women, you know, legally she is a woman, but for the purposes of competition against other women, you know, legally, she's a woman at that stage. If she goes through that identity transition. But I think we have to recognize, and I think even many traditional feminists are making this point, much to the anger of the trans community.

They're saying, hold on, what you're doing in this way is actually, we fought so hard and so long for these female spaces where we have a space of our own. And now people that used to be men are coming into those spaces and actually quite literally beating the crap out of us in those spaces. Yes. You know, whether it's in boxing, whether it's in weightlifting and martial arts, they are, by definition, they're dominating all this. Of course they are for the reasons you said. By definition, they're dominating all this. Of course they are for the reasons you said. And the experts that they're calling upon are almost all transition doctors, surgeons, or people that have transitioned themselves.

When they speak to actual board-certified endocrinologists, some of them only do it off record. But one of them, I forget her name. She was in one of the big mixed martial arts publications. Ramona Krutzik, I believe is her name. She was in one of the big mixed martial arts publications. Ramona Krutzik, I believe is her name. She's saying, not only does it actually, doing this transition from male to female, you're forcing, you're putting estrogen into the system. So the bone density change that would ordinarily take place if you remove someone's testicles and stop the production of testosterone, estrogen preserves bone density. So you're actually retaining the male bone density.

There's so many problems with this. And one of the other things they say, well, oh, the Olympics, the Olympics allow it. The Olympics are very ideologically based. There's not a whole lot of science to this transition thing of allowing male to female athletes to compete in the Olympics. And there's an extreme amount of corruption in the Olympics as it is with the IOC being in

bed with WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the way they handle this Russian scandal. I mean, this Russian scandal that was highlighted in that fantastic documentary Icarus. Yeah, that was good. Fucking crazy. The Olympics are not to be trusted. That is a gigantic, multibillion-dollar business where the athletes get paid zero money.

It is inherently corrupt from the top down. No doubt about it. So to call upon them is to see who should be competing as a woman. Fuck off. They're not the experts. This is not something that's been examined. Fuck off. They're not the experts This is this is not something that's been examined and this is coming from someone who one of my jobs is Examining and commentating on fights. That is a big part of what I do I understand fights and I know what it looks like when a man's beating the shit out of a woman and that's what it

Looked like when this person was fighting women. It was there was a massive physical advantage massive and not a skill advantage What was the way you mentioned something about the reaction that you got to that. What was the trouble you got into? Oh, people were so mad at me. I mean, it was just so many. Not only that, they took my words out of context. They quoted all these different gender transition doctors saying that there's no science

behind this and the science behind it being totally fair and totally equal. It's just not. And people know it. Everyone knows it. They couldn't put Chris Cyborg against this guy and give him a run for his money? Wrong weight class? That's the other way.

That's the other thing. And we're dealing with a similar situation like that in Texas. I don't know if you know about the girl who was born a girl. She's transitioning to a boy in high school, taking testosterone. But in Texas, they only allow her to compete as a girl. So she's dominated the Texas State Wrestling Championship two years in a row. And it's horrific

because she's on steroids. She's on testosterone. And they usually test for this kind of stuff. Doesn't matter because they're testing chromosomal. Yeah, she's a woman.

She was born a woman, right? She's born a girl. So because the fact that she's transitioning to be a boy, they don't give a shit. You're a woman, you're not going to don't give a shit you're a woman you're not going to wrestle against men you're a girl you're not going to wrestle against boys so they have allowed her under extreme protest it's terrible she wants to compete or he i should say wants to compete as a boy they won't let him they say no you were

born a girl you have to compete as a girl so when he competes everybody booze it's awful it's fucking awful i mean it's it's it's really devastating that question for you that way around if it's female to male transition uh somebody that used to be a woman that transitions to a man and wants to compete with the men they don't have an advantage they don't if they're allowed to they're at a disadvantage so if they win in that context they've've actually done really good. Yes. Right. Look, women can beat men. Yeah. I mean, it happens all the time in jiu-jitsu.

Especially in jiu-jitsu in particular because it's such a technique-based art. But it is possible. There's also a woman named Jermaine Durandamy who's a world-class mixed martial artist who's multiple-time world Muay Thai champion who fought a man and knocked him out. It's a crazy video. She fought a real man, KO'd him with a straight right. It is possible for them to win if their skill level is so far superior that it overcomes the inherent strength advantages. But a woman to male transition would be at a severe disadvantage against a natural male.

So in that Texas case, they clearly have it wrong. They should allow him to to compete with yes and would you be whereas i can i think all three of us probably instinctively would resist the notion that a female uh that a male to female athlete competes with other females because they'd have an advantage that yes but would you be for a female to male athlete competing with men yes because i don't think there's yeah there's no event but here's the problem and the consent is sort of running in the other direction there yeah he is continually putting herself or he's putting her right in his way knowingly yeah and I'm

not opposed to a woman fighting a man if she so chooses like I'm not opposed to bull riding yeah if you want to I'm not you know lobbying to get bull riding outlawed but if you want to be I'm not, you know, lobbying to get bull riding outlawed, but if you want to be so fucking stupid that you climb on top of a 2000 pound angry animal, go for it. Yeah. You should be able to do whatever you want. I think you should be able to jump out of fairly good airplanes. You know, if you want to parachute, you should be able to risk your life parachuting.

Yeah. The difference lies in just massive advantages. Yeah. And there's a massive advantage in transitioning from male to female. Female to male, here's the other problem. Female to male, you have to take testosterone. You can't legally take testosterone and compete. It's been a giant issue in mixed martial arts because for the longest time, there was a loophole.

And the loophole was testosterone therapy. therapy and they were allowing testosterone replacement therapy for male athletes that were either older or it was a symptom of having pituitary gland damage, which comes from head trauma, which means really essentially your career should be over. Your body's not producing hormones correctly. And that's a very common issue with people that have been in war, people that have been blown up by IEDs, people that have been hit a lot, even soccer players a lot of times show diminished levels of testosterone and growth hormone because of pituitary gland damage. So you wouldn't even allow that. So a female to male would be in a whole other problem in combat sports because it's not legal for you to take testosterone and compete. in combat sports because it's not legal for you to take testosterone and compete.

Well, to bring this full circle back to me sitting at the pool about to destroy my vacation on Twitter. So how long did you spend working on this article? Well, no, the thing is – so again, this was – Your wife must have hated you, man. How much was she mad? Well, it was kind of the perfect storm, but there were a few things that relieved the pressure. One is there was another family from our school. So they're like, well, my there were a few things that relieved the pressure. One is there was another family from our school, so my daughter had a friend,

there was another couple that my wife could socialize with, and having another couple there forced me to sort of put on my social face at dinner. While you're itching to look at your tweet feed. But the thing is,

it's actually not... That feeling is horrible. I don't really want to be here. I want to look at my... That's actually not that feeling it's horrible i don't really want to be here i want to look at my that's so horrible but it's i mean it's not i mean just to say it to describe it that way he's putting on your social face it actually changes your psychology i mean like if you have if you if you have to drop your problem in order to be a normal sane person with people you don't know all that well you're actually a happier more normal person if it had just been me and my wife at dinner while I'm dealing with this blow-up, it just never would have,

the cloud wouldn't have left. So anyway, I was trying not to engage. And so I didn't want to have to write anything new to deal with this, what I viewed as just an egregious attack on my intellectual and moral integrity. And so when I saw this article from Klein, I realized I had this email exchange with him, at the end of which I said, listen, if you continue to slander me,

this had been like a year previously. Is this the exchange he released? I released this. You released it, yeah. So I said, but I said at the end of this exchange if you continue to slander me and if you misrepresent the reasons why we didn't do a podcast

because we we had talked publicly about maybe sorting this out on a podcast a year ago but I found the exchange with him

by email so in such bad faith I found him so evasive and dishonest and again just playing ideological ping pong

as you said and not actually engaging my points, that I said, listen, if you lie about this and you keep slandering me, I'm just going to publish this email because I think the world should see how you operate as a journalist and as an editor. He had declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion defending me and Murray in Vox. I mean, it was just, it was truly, you know, slanderous and misleading, everything he's published on this topic. And he has a huge platform by which to do it. Which I enjoy. I really like Vox.

Yeah, no, I mean, I've read Vox with pleasure as well. But it is, you know, once you see how the sausage gets made on many of these things, once you're the news item, you can see that there's very little journalistic scruple in the background there. So I didn't want to have to spend my time on vacation writing a retort to this thing, but I felt like I had to respond. And again, this is an illusion. This is like a sheer confection of looking at Twitter. If I hadn't been looking at Twitter, I wouldn't have felt I had to respond. And so I responded in the laziest possible way, which I just published the email exchange because it's already written.

I don't have to write anything. I just hit send essentially. And of course, the rest of the world didn't know you're actually meant to be on vacation right now. And so there's no context to them as to why you did this but this decision that decision we're still i i massively underestimated the amount of work even my own fans would have to do to understand why i was so angry in that email exchange so i came off like the angry bastard in the email exchange and he came off as this you know just open-minded, ready-to-dialogue guy, whereas if you follow the plot and you saw what he had published about me and Murray previously,

this thing that has hit is now on the hate watch page of SPLC, he was being totally disingenuous and evasive and just infuriating. His responses, if I remember, they didn't match to his article, did they? Not at all. That was the thing. So I just kept getting more tuned up. And so I published this thing not realizing – I mean, you know, it was definitely a mistake to publish the email exchange, just pragmatically. I don't think it was unethical because I told him I was going to do it in advance if he kept it up.

It was just – it was totally counterproductive because it was – Because he was far more reasonable in the E-mail exchange than the original article. Well, it seems like you had to do a lot of work to understand. Yeah. But the thing is he wasn't. It was – it was an appearance of reason, but it was not. And then – so we finally did this podcast a year hence. This is now, this is my last podcast. It was now two weeks ago. And it was basically as bad as I was expecting. And I feel that I met the person who I thought I was

dealing with in the email exchange. And he was fundamentally unresponsive to any of my points. And as you say, Joe, just trying to score political points toward his audience. And the thing is, there are many asymmetries here. But one crucial one is that he has an audience that doesn't care about whether or not he's responsive to the thing that his opponent or interlocutor just said, right? They're not tracking it by that metric. They're tracking it by are you making the political points that are echoing, that are massaging that, you know, outraged part of our brains? Like, do you have your hands on our amygdala, you know, and are you pushing the right buttons? And so he's talking about racism and, you know, just the white privilege. And I'm granting him all of that. I'm saying, listen, like,

let me tell you why that's not relevant to my concerns and what happened here with Murray. I'm going to, everything you're going to say about the history of lynching, I'm going to grant you, right? That's not the, we don't, there's no daylight between us there. And, but the thing is, I have an audience that is, that cares massively about following the logic of a conversation. And if somebody makes a point that is even close to being good in response to me, my audience is like, okay, Sam, what the fuck are you going to say to that? Yes. And if I drop that ball, I lose massive points, right?

Whereas I'm often finding myself in conversation with people who don't have to care about those kinds of audiences. I mean, that was the one I had with this Omar Aziz, the title of the best podcast ever. I mean, he knows his audience does not care about him honestly representing, in this case, the doctrine of Islam. But who was that guy even? I mean, at least Ezra Klein, you could say, okay, editor of Vox or whatever. Where did you even find that guy? On Twitter. On Twitter. That's, again, the Twitter is the ruination of me.

He's on his podcast. Until this day, I don't even know who this bloke is, who this guy is. He's some crazy guy. He called me an anti-mosque what did he call me it was because at one point he was going on about me being some form of enabler of your bigotry and yeah well i mean you're an uncle tom yeah yeah native informant or whatever it is but listen i could joe i could see this is that this is why it's so frustrating because i have pretty much memorized inside out back to front the islamist ideological narrative and i could sit here right now and play that game with you uh the game of ping pong yeah without conceding anything and this is where you know i feel our conversation went really well because it was stripped away from all of that bullshit and we had a genuine conversation it's still to

this day very easy for me to um to play the tune um of the islamist and score those points especially because some of what i've been through um and score those points and just get locked in a essentially it's ego but it's it's a it's it's it's not an intellectual conversation it's a it's it's a game of you know who who is who is basically checking the right boxes in their own little confirmation bias to their own audience. That doesn't interest me, but it's frustrating. You're also the best person on the other side of that conversation now. So there's a series of videos on YouTube.

I think it's called Merry Christmas, Mr. Islamist. Yeah, that's right. It's still up on YouTube. You can watch it. Him pitted against the people who are playing this game, Islamists and jihadists of various sorts. And Majid is meeting them on interview shows, mostly in the UK, where they're pretending to be more benign than they are. And Majid is finding the question that sort of pulls back the mask on the theocrat, and it's hilarious. It's very funny. Well, that one video that you published on your blog

I've sent to dozens of my friends. That one video where there's this guy and he's addressing this enormous group of people and he's talking about is this radical Islam or is this Islam? That was I think a conference in Norway that was just I mean these are just straight up Islamists

and jihadists addressing a crowd of seemingly mainstream Muslims in Norway. But he just, by a show of hands, you know, is it, you know, are we extremists if we think apostates should be killed? I've seen that video. It's pretty. It's stunning. It's an amazing document. And yeah, in respect to the way they want to treat homosexuals, apostates.

I mean, the whole thing is, this islam or is this radical islam talking of talking of ideology blinkering statistical data um on the subject of homosexuality so in the united kingdom a poll was done last year asking uh so there have been two polls gauging public muslim attitudes towards gays uh the first asked um how many muslims in the UK find homosexuality morally acceptable. And zero percent. This is, by the way, by a professional polling company. It's not just some student that's devised a poll on Twitter. A professional polling company found that zero percent of British Muslims responded to a poll saying that they found homosexuality morally acceptable.

And then a year later, which is now last year, another poll was conducted. And that was an ICM poll asking how many British Muslims believe that homosexuality should be criminalized or remain legal. And I think it was roughly 52%, 52% if my memory serves incorrectly, of British Muslims said that they would wish for homosexuality to be criminalized. And of course, what does criminalization of homosexuality mean under Sharia and traditional Islamic jurisprudence? We know that it's punished by death. So this is scientific data from gauging attitudes, British Muslim attitudes towards homosexuality. But the ideological blinkers will kick in and refuse to see that truth. And these aren't Islamists.

Unfortunately, in my dialogue with Sam, we talk about this, that there are the Islamists who want to, who actively want to take over a country and enforce their version of Islam. Then there's underneath that, there's a softer landing of very, very conservative stroke fundamentalist attitudes that unfortunately have become widespread. And here is an example of it that is being gauged by scientific polling methodology that tells us there's a problem. And unfortunately, if one were to speak in this way,

especially in Europe, one is received by my own political tribe, and that's liberals, center-left and further. One is met with denial and called a bigot simply for relaying these facts. A quarter of British Muslims, when asked about the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, a quarter said that those attacks are justifiable. They sympathize with the attackers as opposed to the victims who were the staff at the Charlie Hebdo offices.

So this is what led you to be put on the Southern Poverty Law Center? Speaking in these terms. And unfortunately, it's reporting polling data. And what it does for me is to say, this is why it's so important to address these issues, to have these conversations, to try and empower those Muslim voices

that are seeking to challenge these sorts, to try and empower those Muslim voices that are seeking to challenge these sorts of attitudes and carve out a space. And if one can do that with Catholicism in Europe and go through a reformation and end up with an enlightenment and end up with secularism in the West, what I often say is American liberals are very happy challenging their own Bible belt. And yet we have a Quran belt within our communities. And if I'm attempting to replicate the equivalent of challenging the Bible belt within Muslim communities, it means addressing these issues. And yet they grant to themselves the right to challenge the Bible belt within America.

And yet if we were to challenge what I call the Quran belt in Europe, we're suddenly called bigots, you know, and Islamophobes. Is this static? Has this been moving? Has it been adjusting and changing? Is there any sort of a recognition that there's an issue with this? for. And it really did quieten some of the voices. It also did increase the hysteria from the far left because they began panicking, thinking, actually, we're going to lose this debate. And that's where I noticed their labeling became even stronger. But the emergence of ISIS did wake up a lot of people to the challenges we're facing here, because so many European born and raised Muslims went over to join ISIS. And of course, think about it in this sense, the most infamous and notorious execution cell

that I think were erroneously called the jihadi Beatles in the press, because actually it really does, it's an insult to the Beatles, but it also diminishes the true horror of these guys. You know, they called him jihadi John. But the ISIS executioners, basically, that entire cell of the media face of ISIS executionis execution cell were all british muslims

and that should tell you something that we've got the worst terrorist group educated i mean the thing is at university graduate like every variable that the that the far left wants to marshal to explain this phenomenon like lack of educational opportunity lack of economic opportunity lack of social integration mental illness like. You can find people who had massive opportunity. I mean, you weren't a jihadist, but you were an Islamist. But you're a person who can basically play any game he wants. I mean, he's somebody who can run for political office. He hasn't been elected yet but he you know he should be i mean this is the quarterback of the

football team in the the this context is a candidate for recruitment well think think of it this way we've got the worst terrorist group in our lifetime it one can reasonably say is isis right the worst terrorist group at least in living memory is isis and the worst cell in ISIS, the execution cell, came from a fully developed, for want of a better term, first world country, and that was Britain. And Mohammed Amwazi, the leader of that execution cell, graduated from the University of Westminster, was given, as a young child, was given political asylum by Britain because his family were Kuwaiti, and they fled the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam hussein the country that the west liberated and he turned against that country so he had every reason to like britain britain gave him a home gave him a actually physically bricks and mortar house gave

his family on social costs they gave him social housing they educated him he graduated from university and they liberated his father's country from an aggressor and this man turned against this country that helped him and his family and his nation was he captured or did he oh he's dead one of them has been captured but uh he's currently being held in turkey it would it would be fascinating to listen to his rationale it's well it's not so that the the other one i forgot his name but he was just interviewed you don't get a lot out of him he was interviewed by a female arab journalist did you watch that yeah no that was very sullen and dismissive character yeah yeah he refused to talk about much he said uh you know these are accusations and allegations you're making and uh i will wait to trial uh in the end he kind of cut the interview short he seemed a little put out that she was a woman oh

yeah so as i'm looking at you now imagine she's the interviewer and and and she's asking me questions and i'm looking in this direction in your direction he literally never laid eyes on her bad nlp yeah it's so intense it's such such a, like, as you say, radioactive subject, too. It's just fascinating to watch white liberal progressives just scamper away from this. Well, but the flip side of the ISIS thing has been the refugee crisis, which has made, which has really empowered both extremes, frankly, the far left and the far right. So you have the far right, obviously, with the wind in their sails, worrying about this influx of people from the Middle East and beyond North Africa, and just the change of culture in their societies.

And a lot of these concerns are plausible, but because only the far right and a few other decent people like douglas murray will talk about the plausible concerns uh the space has just been vacated so you just have the far right far far right populist politics being enabled and then you have this delusional open borders left that won't uh about the dynamics of the problem. I told Sam about this, but it bears repeating. I was having a conversation with someone as an executive at YouTube, and I asked them why someone got a community guideline strike on their account because they posted up a video on their playlist that they enjoyed of Sam Harris and Douglas Murray engaged in

a conversation. I go, why would that get you a community guideline strike? And this woman said, because it's hate speech. I got a problem with the last name Murray, apparently. I got Charles Murray and Douglas Murray causing me problems. Is this somebody that worked at YouTube? Yes, she was a big executive at YouTube. She said, it's hate speech.

And I told her, I go, did you listen to it? I go, you didn't listen to it. I go, this is stunning that you would just say it's hate speech, that you would just be so's hate speech that you would just be so dismissive of it so quickly and she talked to me as if I was her employee like I was not allowed to question her and she was just going to say what she said

and I was going to shut up and it was a fascinating conversation. Was this here on your show? No this was in Hawaii on vacation No but it was I did a podcast with Douglas and apparently it got flagged someone else put it up on their account and it got flagged as hate speech. As a community guy. So it strikes. You can get your account removed. bias on social media um where because of and it's intellectually lazy because because social media

is essentially a californian invention right um and we're in the home state of where most of this came from um it's got a very californian based world view which cares a lot about white supremacy and doesn't care about many other forms of bigotry that exist out there in the rest of the world which by the way is the majority of the world so which, by the way, is the majority of the world. So on Twitter right now, of course, Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned. Tommy Robinson has been banned, as in taken off. Now, Twitter's a private company. Tommy Robinson?

He's the former leader of the British English Defense League, which was at one time Europe's largest anti-Muslim street protest group. I helped him leave that organization. He's still got many views I completely disagree with. But nevertheless, he doesn't support or nor advocate for terrorism. Why was he removed? Well, so Twitter is a private company. It can choose to remove whoever it wants for whatever reason, and we will judge it for its inconsistencies. But he was ostensibly removed for hate speech,

as was Milo Yiannopoulos. Now, the point being that still till this day and before people misquote me and completely say that I'm now defending hate speech and and it's and their right to speak with hateful views on Twitter. This is my actual point that till this day. Did you know that Hezbollah, which is a known and recognized terrorist organization. So forget hate speech for a moment a terrorist organization that believes in actually killing civilians um and hamas a known and recognized terrorist organization that believes in bombing babies on buses as a form of resistance they still have accounts on twitter um and and my point is this is this is the this is the blind spot you know that and and i've flagged twitter about this on many an occasion this is the cultural blind spot this is the blind spot, you know, and I flagged Twitter about this on many an occasion. This is the cultural blind spot.

This is the digital blind spot that the dude sitting in California in wherever who is monitoring this stuff. And it's probably more than one person. They don't give a shit that there's some brown person in the Gaza Strip that believes it's OK to kill Jewish babies. They don't give a shit because it's a brown person saying it in the name of Islam. What they care about is a non-violent yet says stupid things guy because he's white called Tommy Robinson in England

or Milo Yiannopoulos saying stuff that they, obviously that touches their sensitivities. And it's so intellectually lazy to flag that immediately and to bar it from social media because you're comfortable with it. You recognize white supremacy. It doesn't take any effort to recognize it. You don't have to invest in studying this stuff to know what white supremacy is. It takes a bit of

effort to study brown people's ideas that you're unfamiliar with and recognize here's a terrorist organization that's freely operating on social media. I know specifically on Twitter. I've actually pulled up their handles. I think one of the concerns that Twitter has, and I think this is a valid concern, is that when you have people that are saying hateful things and you have people that are saying, whether it's white supremacy or whatever,

even if it's stupid, the problem is there's a rallying cry of trolls that follow behind them and it builds up momentum and it gets pretty stunning. And that was what was happening with Milo and by silencing Milo off Twitter they have essentially removed him from the public discourse you don't hear about him that's right because of this because of these things but imagine what that does in Arabic with the terrorist groups yes but there's everything you've just said by the way I agree with and multiply that for groups that have infrastructure in multiple countries with actual organizational hierarchies and planned means of distributing their ideas across entire populations physically fighting in wars right now, such as Hezbollah in Syria, killing Sunni Muslim rebels.

And so imagine that and the way you're able to rally a mob in Pakistan on blasphemy as an example What it takes for some person on social media to accuse another person of blasphemy and they're probably gonna get killed the very next day And it happens all the time but but because these Californian based social media companies are unaware of Of the of the cultural implications of those sorts of organizations and groups and listed terrorist groups mind you they are there There's completely no no barring on any of their activity. There's also the same thing that you have with YouTube and with a lot of these other social media organizations and companies

is they don't have to respond or give you any reasons. They can say it violates our terms, but what are those terms? Those terms aren't even listed. It would be vague, like no hate speech. Okay, well what's hate speech? What are you saying? What is your clear policy? What are your guidelines?

How does someone avoid violating your guidelines? They don't say. Yeah, and how is the President of the United States not violating those terms? Yeah. Well, demonetization is another way that they do it. They'll remove the ability to put advertising on a conversation that they don't like. And it doesn't have to be like my conversation with Douglas Murray was demonetized. Without any explanation?

None. Zero. They don't have to. Douglas is – He's talking. So he's clearly flagged on their – Oh, 100%. Yeah. But if you listen to the actual context of our conversation, There was nothing even remotely hateful about it. Yeah. Look, I mean, these are private companies.

They've got the right to choose whatever policy. The only thing I would expect from a private company is show a consistent policy towards these things. If you don't like hate speech, then ban brown people who are also advocating more than just the hate speech but actually preaching violent terrorism. Right. the hate speech, but actually preaching violent terrorism. Right. Yeah, it's a strange time for this, man, because it's also a time where you can communicate so instantaneously. It's fantastic in that regard.

You can get ideas out so quickly. But these hubs of information, like where the information gets distributed, they're controlled by people that I don't think ever knew that they were going to have this sort of responsibility. I don't think, I think you're seeing that with Zuckerberg and these trials or the, the, the speeches that he's given in front of Congress.

Like when you see him on television talking about it, you get the sense that this is a guy that never prepared for this, had no idea this was going to happen. And then all of a sudden from this simple social media platform that was supposed to be friends sharing photos and just talking about girls yeah it was set up to pull women there was a lot of that you know but i mean and what was twitter i mean twitter was essentially just you know uh i mean do you remember the old days at twitter it would be you would use your name like is doing this,

like under Sam Harris, like Sam Harris is at the movies. You would say that almost if you were in a third person. That was the original form that people would use Twitter. I would have come after that. It was weird. It was a weird way of talking. And then people started just writing what they thought, and it just became – and then it became ideology,

and then it became uh sharing links sharing links and interesting articles is a big part of it but to me that's the only good part of it now like i like i've just discovered that and that was that's most of my attachment to it i mean i i genuinely use it to as a as a curated news feed because I follow interesting people. They tweet interesting stuff and I consume it that way. But noticing what's coming back at me in the ad manager, I put something out, a podcast, and then I look to see how it's being received on Twitter. And I don't tend to do that in other forums. I don't really look at Facebook comments much. I don't look at YouTube.

YouTube is just a cesspool, right? So even if they're for you, the comments are horrible. Why is that? It's a strange phenomenon. It started on YouTube, I think, by the way. Nastiness started on the YouTube comment threads and then spread everywhere else. It's very strange. But one thing I found that you can change your settings in Twitter where you screen out people who don't have – who just have Twitter egg photos. They don't have a real photo. You can screen out people who haven't had their email confirmed. And I think I just did those two things and like 90% of the hate went away.

It was amazing. Just doing that was an amazing filter. That's what I should do, Sam. Thank you for that. You should do that. Except I'm, I think it's better to not actually even look at, at what's coming back at you. Well, you've taken it off your phone now. I think so too. I think looking, looking at it,

my wife, Rachel would be very happy with that. I think she'd probably wish that I did the same. Do you tweak on it too? Do you read things? I don't react sometime. I like to think I don't you read things and get angry? Well, I don't react sometimes. I like to think I don't react in this way, but I mean, I can't say that because actually probably I have sometimes. But, you know, I get all that same kind of,

it's interesting because I took a stance on the Syria strikes. What was your stance? Well, I just think that, especially now in hindsight where there are no casualties involved at all, there are only three injuries. I think we had to take a stance that succeeded where Obama failed

in making sure that red line was maintained, that the use of chemical weapons cannot be tolerated, even if it was symbolic, even if it was highly symbolic. I think sometimes symbolism is important. So I took that stance. Got a lot of love on Twitter? Well, yeah, of course, because actually that's against the grain. Public opinion at the moment was against the strikes, and I fully acknowledged that when I took that stance and it was... Got a lot of love on Twitter? Well, yeah, of course, because actually that's against the grain. Public opinion at the moment was against the strikes.

And I fully acknowledged that when I took the stance. Right. But I argued a case and I set the case out. And both on my Sky News show, I have a show, a co-host on The Pledge, and also on my radio show on LBC. I repeatedly argued for why I think it's important that we don't allow for chemical weapons and they're used to become normalized in our world. why I think is important that we don't allow for chemical weapons and they used to become normalized in our world. And so it was interesting because I posted the Sky News clip of me sort of talking to camera about my reasons for this.

And I have this screen grab of the reaction. It's actually hilarious. It's just a puddle of blood. So it is the two extremes. They actually started fighting with each other about who's right about that. So I've said, look, here's a clip why we must intervene in Syria after that chemical attack blah blah first one is a guy with an actual swastika

Nazi symbol on his profile and it says you know at Nordic Scott there's his handle Thomas James he says Majid wants Britain to intervene in Syria because Putin and Assad are kicking his ISIS buddies asses end of story right so there's a guy who's basically saying my real reason for calling for that

is because I'm supporting ISIS against the Assad regime. The guy immediately after responds to him, and it's called At-Las-Do, right? And he says, what do you want about you Nazi dumbass? Majid is funded by your lot. He's a far-right Uncle Tom. So they're fighting with each other. They're actually, you know, this is,

is that on your, I don't know if that captures that, but they're arguing with each other over whether i'm in their his camp or his camp oh and it's the far right and the far left basically you either have the worst publicist in the world or the best one so i should i think i should take myself out of that equation let them fight each other would be even better really that's the move to set something like that up set the far right and the far left against each other, and you could just sneak away while they're fighting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's how nuts it is. That's Twitsif.

It's kind of horseshoes. That was on Twitsif, yeah. The extremes are, I mean, they're equally irrational, and the fact that you could be at the epicenter of both of their problems, that you're a covert jihadist and you're an anti-Muslim bigot. It seems like there's more conspiracy theories in terms of what's someone's actual motivation for what they're saying now than ever before too because it's so easy to express them.

So someone could say, no, he's far right, or no, you're just trying to support ISIS. This ability to find some nefarious reason for your actions. Well, again, it's reducing one's opinion to the lowest base, you know, dodgy motive as opposed to applying the principle of charity. So if Joe says something now, I can either sit here and actually think, no, I don't trust this guy. I don't respect him.

And therefore, I'm going to reduce his opinion to the worst possible interpretation that he could possibly mean and then use that against him or i could continue to ask what you mean by that because i'm assuming you're a good decent human being in origin and perhaps you mean something that i haven't yet quite grasped and then ask you to clarify your own opinion in your own words and i think it's unfortunate that many of our conversations today in the far left is as guilty of it as the far right and they like to think they're not which is part of that righteousness that blinds them from actually committing this very same injustice they accuse the far right of committing and that is a it's the same bigotry in in a mirror image i call it the bigotry of low expectations the low expectations they have that muslims are somehow unable to adhere to common decent liberal

secular democratic values and so it's actually plaguing our conversations today if only we were able to strip away our ideological baggage in entering conversations and and allow for you know that honest honest conversation but of course we say that and then you try to replicate our success on a number of occasions and found yourself incredibly frustrated well Well, you're a reasonable guy. Well, it's, you know. Unfortunately, I found the one reasonable person to have a fight with. Well, it just seems like this is a side effect of this increased ability to communicate and that just there's so much noise and there's so much going on. I mean, this is the most fantastic time for the distribution of information.

There's never been a time where it's so easy to distribute information in human history. It's really crazy, but I don't think we know what to do with it. And I think that when you deal with people who have such rigid ideologies, and they find this incredibly easy ability to express these ideologies, there's just so much clashing. It's just so much noise and nonsense. And when someone says something that they know that they don't have to back up with facts because they know that their people who are on their position will support it. You say the right keywords, you know, right privilege, whatever you want to say. And then, boom, you're going to get a whole slew of people like those two people in your mentions battling it out with each other. You're just like kind of picking fights and starting these little fires and letting other people go to war. You know what I think we've done? And it's again, the advent of social media is that we, I was speaking with my friend Mark about this, and

we've democratized truth. And when you democratize truth in that way, the earlier thing you mentioned about sports, combat sports, and your expertise in that field, if i had come back at you and spoke at you with as much authority as you claim in your expertise with having absolutely no history in that expertise whatsoever and assumed that i have as equal right to an unresearched claim to truth in my opinion as you do and who has a lifetime of experience in that field therein lies a problem that i am arrogating to myself this notion this this this kind of belief that my opinion though of course i have an equally legal right to express it but it doesn't mean it carries the same weight as your opinion when it comes to combat sports and it shouldn't unfortunately i think what's

happened with the advent and worse still you could, you're expressing that opinion as a person of color, as a Pakistani or... As if that somehow, you know, yeah. So therefore it's uncriticizable by you because it's his truth. Otherwise you're a racist. And that's the key word there. It's my truth.

And so the problem with that is when you relativize truth in that way, then I can speak to you on an equal footing about combat sports, which only a mad person who hasn't had that history in combat sport would think would arrogate to themselves the right to do so but social media i think has allowed for that to happen i gave a ted talk in about i think it was roughly 2011 about the the dangers of this happening and and social media dividing us all but i i'd say now that that if i were to pitch

that ted talk today i did it at ted uh global if i were to pitch that TED Talk today, I did it at TED Global. If I were to pitch that TED Talk today, it wouldn't be accepted because it's not something new now. It's now people know that how social media has divided us. But back then, it was new and innovative enough as an idea for TED Global to say, we want you to speak about this. And it's still up online. But if people watched it today, they think, how on earth did that become a TED Talk? online but if people watched it today they think how on earth did that become a ted talk um because there was this heady day uh back in you know five six seven years ago this kind of hope-filled moment where everyone thought google facebook and twitter and generally social media and also

tech companies were like the good guys that these companies weren't actually companies that they were on our side against the corporate world right and it turns out i think we've just hit this moment you mentioned zuckerberg we i think we've culturally come to this moment now where you know i think symbolized by his testimony at congress that uh those that that honeymoon period is over people now view him i think quite firmly and squarely as a ceo of a very rich company as opposed to a guy in my club that I'm friends with who's on my side against the world, you know? And that's how, you know, Google used to have that slogan, don't do evil. Don't do evil.

Presumably they still have it. But I mean, the problem is the incentives are all wrong. And so actually I was just at TED and well, to give you a sense of how far the rot has spread here. So I was, I found myself at a dinner sitting next to a neuroscientist who thought that, and this Ezra Klein thing followed me around to Ted, because many people had listened to the podcast, and he thought Charles Murray should have been physically attacked at Middlebury. This is a neuroscientist, academic, impeccable person. Otherwise,

I think he was, after we wound up having a fight at dinner over it, I think he was somewhat chagrined by having expressed that opinion. But I mean, that's how emotionally hijacked people are by this issue. But it's a- That's incredible. I mean, it was just, yeah, it That's the other thing that's new. This is the other thing that's new. The left advocating for violence. This is very new. I mean, I always felt like the left was nonviolent.

The whole idea behind being progressive, like nonviolence, was a genuine aspect of that. And free speech was. Two things, yes. Those are two things that have been sort of that. And free speech was. Two things, yes. Those are two things that have been sort of stopped. Free speech is fine as long as you're not saying speech that I disagree with.

And nonviolence, sure, unless we need to use violence. Which is like, and the people that are saying it, like if you watch these Antifa people, like Jesus Christ, the most incompetent, violent people you've ever seen in your life.

It offends your sensibilities as an MMA guy. For a person who's an expert in violence, this is fucking, you guys are terrible at it. There's videos of these guys practicing. There's videos of Antifa. They got together and decided to train and prepare for violence. And so they're doing these martial arts classes. They have people teach them. Like, holy shit.

Like, the average high school kid could fuck you guys up. Like this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. But it's almost like they realize that there's not that much danger in what they're doing. And they can kind of play with danger. They can play with violence. They can put the masks on. You know, they're not in Israel. They're not at the Gaza Strip.

Joe, they're a bunch of cowards. There's a guy who went to my old university. I graduated from SOAS before I did my master's at the LSE. SOAS has been embroiled in a strike at the moment. The Students' Union has been supporting professors who are on strike, and it's over pension and pension rights and government refusing to raise their pension rights and whatever. And some of the students came out in strike, far left students, defending the professors. And they put forward a ring preventing students from attending their classes. And a female black lecturer

wanted to cross the strike lines to go in to teach her students. A white male, public school educated, very, very middle class protester, far left, physically attacked her. He physically attacked a female black professor. So gone is suddenly, gone is the white privilege. Gone is the male attacking a female. You know, gone is all of that. Gone is nonviolence, all the above. In the name of ideology, he legitimized and allowed himself to attack a black female.

By the way, oh, and she was also Muslim. So she went to the press. It's hilarious. I would have thought she would have had the right spell to cast on her. She actually said that in her interview. She said, I'm a black Muslim female and this white kid has just attacked me

for wanting to teach my class. This is crazy. This is a crazy world we're in, man. Are you optimistic about the future? Yeah. I say that because it's going to take a lifetime's work. And I don't think that in our lifetime much is going to change. I think maybe for the next generation.

What is the picture of – how do you conceive of your job at the moment and what is the picture of, I mean, how do you conceive of your job at the moment? And what, what is the status quo? I mean, so for instance, ISIS, the Islamic state is sort of fading from most people's memory. Now,

I mean, there's, you know, even mine, I'm spending much less time thinking about it because it seems to have been beaten into submission. I can answer this question with a story. So radical,

which is my autobiography has a U S publication, right? Um, in the UK, it's random house Penguin. It's published by the biggest publishing house. When I came to publish in the U.S., I approached publishing houses, but it was after bin Laden was killed. And so when we approached 10, 20, whatever, publishing houses. The problem solved? They all said no. They said the problem solved. They said, we think, you know, we wish you'd come to us five years earlier, but problem solved now. There's not a problem anymore. And a bit like what you mentioned is sort of your expertise. And I have been consumed by this subject all my life. And there are a few people on this planet that I would take seriously on this subject. Outside especially of Quilliam. And there are other organizations.

They have some really good people, but I know them all. And we regularly speak. So I would say to all these publishing houses, I can assure you 100% this problem not only has not been solved, it's going to come back around in a far worse way than you can ever have imagined. This is before ISIS came along. None of them believed me. Of course, what then happened?

My book eventually got published by some very small publishing house in the u.s and has done quite well for them but the point of the story was this isis came around and people were suddenly like oh my god where did this come from of course those of us who had been monitoring the situation knew this was going to come back around very very heavy now that isis has been pushed back and this is where this story is sort of the point of the story is we've got to resist the temptation to believe the problem has been solved because the the organization known as isis which is an a bureaucracy has been fought back but the ideology upon which that organization was built um is still very much alive and it's still strong

um what al-qaeda did while the whole world was focused on ISIS, was exploit that opportunity to rebuild and regroup. And they've been rebuilding in Syria. Now they are stronger than they have ever been, even under bin Laden, because for the first time in the history of that organization, they are firmly embedded within the Syrian population as a genuinely kind of viewed by the people that they were fighting on behalf of as a grassroots resistance organization whereas

before that they were seen as a terrorist group that was like a you know just like a vanguard they've embedded themselves in the syrian population in the yemeni uh civil war they've embedded themselves in north africa east africa and in Pakistan. And they are resurgent, and they are grooming Hamza bin Laden, who is bin Laden's son, and they're grooming him for leadership. And a time will come, maybe in a couple of months, maybe in a couple of years, where they announce Hamza bin Laden as the new leader of al-Qaeda. Currently, it's Ayman Zawahiri. When they do that, once their grooming has been complete, and assuming Hamza isn't killed up until then, all of the fragments of

what remains of ISIS will probably rejoin al-Qaeda under Hamza bin Laden and you'll have a stronger than ever before al-Qaeda organization and we've got to remember that we never expected ISIS to emerge. Al-Qaeda will come back with a vengeance. Jesus. What is the

politics between the remnants of isa isis and al-qaeda well hamza bin laden succession to the leadership solves that problem of the because the isis guys um were originally all al-qaeda isis was al-qaeda in syria and they broke away after bin laden died because they didn't they had pledged allegiance to bin laden and the new leader of al-qaeda amon zwahiri is by all accounts a rather uncharismatic. And, you know, he's a pediatrician. He's not really a kind of – bin Laden had the charisma. He's a pediatrician.

Yeah, he's Egyptian. He's an Egyptian pediatrician from a very well-off Egyptian family, by the way. Wow. I think his grandfather was the Egyptian ambassador to the UN. Doctors and judges and pharmacists. That's right. Bin Laden clearly had the charisma, the wealth, the presence,

the looks. He had all of it that Zawahiri doesn't. Zawahiri is, you know, compared to Bin Laden, he just doesn't, you know.

So if the guys that broke away from Al-Qaeda to form ISIS said to Zawahiri, the current leader, we pledged allegiance to Bin Laden. We owe you nothing.

You're not our Amir, our leader. If Hamza bin Laden comes back as the leader of Al-Qaeda, it solves that problem. Because those remnants of ISIS have a loyalty to the bin Laden name

and the bin Laden family, and they remember what they consider their glory days fighting under bin Laden. That's not nice to hear. No, no, the problem has not gone away. I can tell you that. The problem is the ideology and it will not be dealt with until we deal

with this ideology. And it's why it's so dangerous to, you know, there was this awful term that I railed against. It was so frustrating to see under Obama's presidency. The US State Department officially adopted as their name for challenging this problem, they adopted the term

Al-Qaeda inspiredinspired extremism. Of course, it isn't Al-Qaeda that inspired extremism, it's extremism that inspired Al-Qaeda. And for the purposes of political correctness, you adopt this term in the State Department, officially, that we're fighting, across the world, we are fighting Al-Qaeda-inspired extremism. My former organization, Hizb ut-tahrir

a caliphate espousing organization that believes in their ideal caliphate that gay should be killed adulterous should be stoned to death um they were there before al-qaeda and this ideology has been there before al-qaeda al-qaeda was one of a long line of groups that came as a result of the islamist ideology and we've got to start focusing on the ideology itself, not the physical groups that spring up from it. Because they can change their name. As you point out, there's another layer to the ideology that is even more well-subscribed that presents social and political problems. So, as you said, there are conservative Muslims who don't support al-Qaeda. They're not jihadists.

They would honestly say bin Laden doesn't support Al-Qaeda. They're not jihadists. They would honestly say, bin Laden doesn't represent my brand of Islam, but these are still people who will say that homosexuals should be killed. So it's like there's apparent allies against, quote, extremism, can still be people with religiously mandated social attitudes that just cannot be assimilated in cosmopolitan societies. So people who are, I mean, worse than Al-Qaeda-inspired extremism, there's just this notion that on the left, and this came out of Obama's mouth, and it came out of Clinton's mouth, and it's largely why she wasn't president. It's just generic extremism.

So that like in the same sentence that you have to worry about the caliphate, you have to talk about abortion doctors being killed in the US once every 15 years. So of course you remember because President Obama refused to use the word Islamist extremism. Trump has the other problem. once every 15 years. So you, of course you remember because President Obama refused to use the word Islamist extremism. Of course, Trump has the other problem. He thinks that by like Rumpelstiltskin, by repeating it enough, you've solved the problem, you know,

but, but actually one of the elements in which he was correctly critical of Obama was, and I was at the time vocally critical of Obama's reluctance to use the word Islamist extremism. And we've got no problem when we talk about, you know, when we talk about white supremacist ideology we don't mean that all white people are supremacists you know what we we're

doing here is is actually attributing precisely specifically what the ideology is and believes in white supremacy likewise islamist you know it's important so we can identify that ideology um still while not calling it islam right so we're still giving a bit of a leeway there for everybody else all the other muslims but to call it islamist extremism is to recognize that it's an offshoot of islam it's a manifestation extreme or otherwise of islam and thereby we are acknowledging that its justifications are in islamic scripture as well as of course a multiplicity of other causes grievances and what have you but we cannot ignore that it also rests on justifications that are derived from the islamic scripture i mean i can cite for the arabic that tells you in the quran itself to cut the hand of the thief or to lash the adulterer um you know these are the quote the hadith of the saying of the prophet that says, kill the person that changes their religion. This is scripture. And so, of course, there are other factors involved as well. But one of the factors that gives rise to this is the unreformed scripture that these extremists cite.

And so we have to acknowledge that Islam has a role to play. I often say that, you know, because, again, under the Obama presidency, it was frustrating that the common refrain was to say that Islam, this has nothing to do with Islam. This is absurd as arguing that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism. He went even further at one point. Didn't he at one point say that not only does this have nothing to do with Islam, this has less to do with Islam than any other religion? It was just he bent over backwards. It's like saying the Crusades have nothing to do with Christianity. Gentlemen, unfortunately, I have to wrap this up.

But I really appreciate you guys coming on. It was a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much. And your book? The book is Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And actually, the one thing we do have to announce is we're going to Sydney and Auckland. The two of us and Douglas Murray and both Weinstein brothers oh it's toxic

we're gonna we're gonna wreck those towns oh my goodness we're gonna have are you doing live podcasts? a day long conference I think you want to use their first names

because I think Brett and Eric yeah not the other one they're Steins not Steens yeah yeah that's okay

it's okay no but it'll be great to get both of them together that rarely happens yeah those guys are awesome I'm really great to get both of them together. That rarely happens. Yeah, those guys are awesome. I'm really grateful to meet both of them and you as well. Thank you guys. Thanks, Jake.

Thank you. We appreciate it. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.