The Joe Rogan Experience - #2193 - Jack Symes

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Jack Symes is a public philosopher, writer, and producer of the "Panpsycast" podcast. A researcher at Durham University, he’s the author of "Defeating the Evil-God Challenge" and editor of the "Talking About Philosophy" series. www.jacksymes.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Yeah, very well. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. So I got the request to be on when it said multiverse and new atheism. I'm like, what a combination that is. Let's talk. Nice. Yeah. So I think, like, it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right? It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff.

But I think there's a, at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society. We're like stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions. So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, they all say something along the lines of like, philosophy is dead. So just before we get into the multiverses, it's probably best to say like, what philosophy is and what the point of talking about the multiverses. So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like what they take philosophy to be,

because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects. And one of the ideas that I love is this one by the late great British philosopher Mary Michley. She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing, right? So like we have these conversations in our societies, and like these conversations are flowing around, and likewise we have these pipes running underneath our houses, keeping the water flowing, but occasionally it gets clogged. And so the philosopher needs to pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again. So these are things like what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech or what it means to say that a gene is selfish. So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like trying to understand

the concepts we're using. But then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy, which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology, and the arts, and let's try and get a big picture of the world. And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be. So I take that to be the project. And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing? No universe.

Like, why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life? Where does consciousness come from? Like when I make a moral statement like the Holocaust is bad, is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad? Like are they the same kind of statement? Is that the same bad I'm using? Right. But the big question, and to get to the multiverse now, is the big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question. The French Algerian philosopher Albert

Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living. So my question is, what's the point of all this? Is existence on the whole a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased to be alive? And what's the purpose of life? And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism, and these arguments for theism all come in into the project. I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of science. Just that reductionist perspective, the idea that thinking about things and developing, for lack of a better term, a philosophy, developing your own personal philosophy, taking from

the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting, unique view of the world that we live in. The idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly. It's silly. Like we use it. I don't know how they get away with saying these things. Like I think you get it though, right? Like science splits the atom, it puts the mount on the moon.

So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems. Right, but the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the splitting of the atom all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by. Yeah, they had with this thing that he had created that was ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives, if not the entire human race itself, which was very deeply based in philosophy, like his perspective and his struggles with it. I mean, if he was just like an automaton, like some, you know, sociopathic, just super Alzheimer's guy, you know, that didn't, not autism guy, rather that didn't think at all about no concept at all about empathy, no concept at all about our perspective.

He would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs. Like that's... Science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking. And how does that not come out of philosophy? Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism, fundamentally, right? We've got this movement in the early 2000s, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, who were all being critical of religion in the light of the September 11th terrorist attack and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond criticism. But then once that project, once they embark on that project and they criticize religion, there isn't really anything left there. They

don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics, and when they try to do it, it's lacking, something's missing. So I see that as, like, the reason why new atheism is going out of favor, why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions. Well, I think it becomes almost as dogmatic as religion itself. Like, atheism in a lot of ways is kind of really, they're committed to this idea that there is nothing else Yeah, you know, I just don't understand how you could do that without enough if you're a person who You view the world based and he is so fucking loud, dude Marshall and and Carl were having a wrestling match for about 15

minutes and poor little Carl was over there panting. It's also one of the hottest days of the year without aircon so that he is really going hard for the panting. I was where I was before I was distracted. So I just think that these people sort of looked at this as religion is all this superstitious nonsense that these people have concocted and put together over years to keep people in line, and science is something that we can prove and see, and you know, there is no God, there is no... But just, how do you know?

You do not know. It's a crazy thing to say. You have such a limited perspective just in terms of the universe itself. We only see what we see on our planet and the tiny amount that we can reach out into the... And they can look back 13 billion years, but what are they looking at? They're looking at bright lights, like little dots, and they understand this is a galaxy. But it's like, how big is this fucking thing? Where did it come from? What's going on? You don't know. What is the purpose? Is this a grand test? Are you a part of some very bizarre journey that the soul has to go through in this environment before it expands and goes into the next dimension,

the next phase of existence? Who fucking knows? You don't know. We do know that people die. We do know that people have near-death experiences and these very bizarre moments where they come back from the dead and have very similar accounts of something happening about encountering... Like I had Sebastian Young on the podcast the other day, and he was... Sebastian Younger, and he was Sebastian Younger and he was explaining how when he almost died he had an internal bleeding and he saw his father. His father came to the bed with him. It was talking to him. It was like this very bizarre thing.

We don't really know, we really don't know what life is. We don't know what consciousness is. So we're being arrogant. And I think, unfortunately, brilliant people that are so used to schooling people in debates, like Christopher Hitchens, like Sam Harris. So these guys are so good at making religious zealots look like buffoons, right? And you get real good at that and you just sort of think that, look, I got it down. down these fucking religious people they don't know what the fuck's going on yeah but you're you're involved in a religion as bizarre as it seems just like wokeism as a

religion just like far-right ideology as a religion I'm not sure about putting like religion on those things in particular but cult like yeah they might be cool they might have some aspects which are called like... They're ideological captured people. But I think to have a religion, you do need to have like a belief in what Christians, Jews, and Muslims take to be the perfect being. Like God has to be by definition perfect. If you think that being exists, then I think you certainly qualify for having a religion. What about Scientology?

I guess that's a cult. But in our country, they actually want a religion. What about Scientology? I guess that's a cult. But in our country, they actually want a lawsuit. It's a bad classification. I used to have a joke about it, where I said that a cult is created by one guy, and that guy knows it's bullshit. In a religion, that guy's dead. That's good.

Well, OK, let's say this, though, on behalf of religion, right? I think the two best things going for it aren't the, like for me, the sense of community and the cultural aspects, they don't appeal to me. I can't think of anything more boring than spending my Sunday singing hymns and doing that. No, that's not for me. There's so many other things that you can do to find community, to find fulfillment, to be happy. But you could recognize how some people would find great engagement with enjoyment from it.

But I think in terms of like philosophical arguments for thinking it's true, like the one you mentioned a moment ago, like where this all came from, like science can't get to that question. Right. The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular. It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore it needs a cause. And then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be and it would have to be something outside of time and space with the power and knowledge to bring this

into being. And that might not get you all the way to God. That's a really strong reason for believing in God. And the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong. And likewise, like the argument from fine-tuning, which is gaining traction again, the physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature, like 26 of them, have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form. He calculates that the initial low-entropy point of the universe had to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding, and you wrote down one digit every

second, you'd still be writing out that number now. Like that number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible. And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best explanation for that, then I think, you know, those that posit the existence of God have the better hand. Like I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go, no, to those two problems, they've got really strong arguments for believing in God. But people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit more, I guess, sympathetic to those arguments than the other three. But they're not serious about

following the arguments. They're not serious about going wherever they take them. Like you know, they're not serious about following the arguments. They're not serious about going wherever they take them. Like you say, there is a dogmatism there. They're not open-minded enough on these points. Matthew 14.12 Well, I think the dogmatism, a lot of it is like, all the public discourse that we've seen that you can watch on YouTube between atheists and religious scholars, it generally turns into a debate. They're almost all debates, and almost all of these debates are, in a sense, intellectual competitions. And so it's like, if you give a cop an incentive to

arrest people, he's going to find reasons to arrest people. And if you have a person that is getting social credit, you're getting notoriety, adulation from schooling these religious people, from mocking what you think are ridiculous ideas that are superstitious, it becomes a part of yourself, right? It becomes a part of yourself. It becomes a part of your identity. And then I think your unwillingness to engage in the mystery of all this, it speaks to that. I think that's the origin of it. I think it becomes a competition with people that their ideas are correct and that these ideas that they've

held for a long time, they want to defend those ideas instead of going, huh, I am of the opinion that I am not my ideas. And I think it's a really important thing to say because I think more people should try this out. Maybe it's not for you, but it's my personal philosophy. I am not married to my ideas. They're just ideas.

And they come in my head and they go. And a lot of times while I'm saying them, I do it on the podcast all the time. I go, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense because of this. I don't want to be that buffoon that's connected to the first shit that comes out of my mouth. And I think that happens with a lot of people. I also think the idea that there's no God, that there's nothing, I think the universe might be God. And I don't think it was born. I think it's probably always been here. And I think Sir Roger Penrose's latest work, he seems to think that the Big Bang is just one of a series of these events. I don't want to paraphrase because I know I'll fuck it up,

but his position is not that that was the beginning. That there's probably, this is probably a series of these things that have gone on in eternity, and that they're, the infinite nature of the universe is probably something that even mathematically, even if you get the most genius people, they're probably going to struggle to understand something that has no boundaries, that has never been. We have biological limitations. We are born and we die. And I think we try to impose those pump things. And there's some things you can, like, oh, we know this tree grew 2,000 years ago. How crazy.

You know, oh, we know this planet formed, you know, 4 billion years ago. But there's some things we really just, we don't have the capacity to really put it into perspective. We don't know. There's just too much we don't have the capacity to really put it into perspective. We don't know. There's just too much we don't know. They're starting to think now that the universe is quite a bit older than they thought it was before because of the observations of these galaxies by the James Webb telescope. So now there's certain people that are these controversial ideas they're throwing around about like 22 billion years old or 23 billion years old.

Oh, well, it's interesting what you say first of all, like about us being like so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments. It's always baffled me that people can care about their like their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they're willing to die on these hills and refusing to, they count in their wins and not their losses. I just had a two and a half hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about his motivations for being religious. You know, I basically sketched out my broad argument, which is atheism's shortcomings are it can't answer the two problems we've

just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing fine-tuning. But then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection. Like what a wicked thing to do to create the rules of the game to be that, to have intelligent life it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years. Like, if God exists, then God's a psychopath, right? If that's what God didn't have to do that, it's logically and metaphysically possible for God to create it as the Christians thought God did in the Garden of Eden 5,000 years ago. That is way more compatible with the perfectly good God hypothesis, right? Pete Then what we're currently experiencing.

Yeah. But then when I asked Jordan about this, again, I don't think he's serious again about following the evidence and argument. He just digs down, he builds a trench. He says, like I said, what do you think of what's called the systemic problem of evil? Why would God create the system? And he goes, we just need to keep working on it. So I know you need to suspend belief in something. What did he mean by that? You need to keep working on it? Like we just need to crack on with the problem. Oh, and try to solve it? Yeah, but like, you know, we've been trying to solve it. In between 1960 and 1998, 3,600

articles and books were published on the problem of evil. Like people are working on it, and it's not going anywhere. Like the systemic problem of evil undercuts the God hypothesis. But then it's this weird place, right? Because you've got these strong arguments that an atheistic view can't solve, but then you've got this big problem for belief in God. And like you say, this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask, well, maybe we need a different concept of God, like the universe. So this is pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical. And panentheism is the view where the universe is in God, but there's this extra layer of God, which is like heaven or the thing that brought it

into being. I'm glad there's a word for it because I just been saying the universe is God. So pantheism, I'll go with that now. The interesting thing about pantheism is, like, is it worthy of the name God, like the universe? Because if it's just nature-loving atheism, then that doesn't get you far. But I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious, like there is some will or agency underlying the things that we interact with, then I think that gets you pretty close to a concept of God.

Do you think that we have an egocentric perspective of consciousness that it only applies to things that move and that things that can express themselves? Yeah. Like, there's a reason why I think people don't want to buy houses where people were murdered, right? Because they think the consciousness is still like lingering. Yeah, like there's something there. There's something there.

There's a memory in that house of a horrible thing. Like if you bought a house from a horrible person, when you kind of like, I almost bought a, um, a building that was run by a cult. Yeah. And, uh, I did, I knew it was run by a cult because my friend told me about it. It was like, my friend, Ron, I was building a comedy club by a cult because my friend told me about it. I was building a comedy club and my friend Ron White is a hilarious comedian. He told me about this great theater that was for sale.

I should buy that theater. And so I was like, okay. And I looked into it. Yeah, it used to be owned by a cult. Oh, great. I go sign all these paperwork and then my friend Adam calls me up and goes, hey, did you watch the documentary on that call? I'm like, oh god, there's a documentary and in watching the documentary

It was so sad to me to watch these people that for decades were Deceived and led by this person and at the end of it, they're weeping and crying They've lost their life their life like 20 plus years of their life have been dedicated to this charlatan who was like 20 plus years of their life have been dedicated to this charlatan who was He was a hypnotist and a gay porn star who was teaching yoga in West Hollywood and convinced all these people to do this I had to get out of that building. I'm like, there's no way There's not enough sage in the world that I can like get rid of all the demons I mean how much all the vickers around I felt like they're like the comedy store in Hollywood used to be Ciro's nightclub Which was Bugsy Seagull's nightclub and a bunch of people were murdered there like provable

Definitely and it kind of feels like it there But this the idea though that probably everywhere in the whole world there's some creature that's died right sure feel weird sat here Or like when you get like a you know you get a record or something or you're listening to it on like Spotify or something like a song, but you know the person who's made that song has done something dreadful. Right. You get that same kind of feeling then. So maybe it is like a, like maybe the simpler explanation is something like, you know, it's your association with these things.

It's just these connections in your brain going bad thing, this building, right? Sure. And you break this shortcut this building, right? Sure. And you've broken this shortcut, evolutionarily speaking. Oh, I think both. I think both things. But I think there's places that do have, like, my stepfather went to Gettysburg, and he's not a religious person, and he's not woo-woo. He's a very intelligent, hard-line person who believes in facts, and he was like, there's

something there. He goes, the sadness it's like Yeah, feel it the death of all those people in this place like it stained the place But my point is not that my point is that? Perhaps everything has some sort of a consciousness We just have this egocentric perspective of what consciousness means, because to living things it has ego, it has biological needs, human reward systems, they're all in play. Social structures and the value of status, we're moving around through this grid of other beings and we call that consciousness because that is our experience with it.

But maybe this table has consciousness, maybe cloth has consciousness, maybe rocks have consciousness. They just don't have an ability to express themselves, and they don't have this language and culture and all this other stuff that we connect to consciousness, but that it is an integral part of everything in the universe. Pete Yeah. Pete And if the universe is God, the universe creating all these things, it is essentially a creation machine, right? It creates stars, it creates galaxies, it creates supernovas, it creates carbon-based life, all these different things that happen, they're all created by this process. It's just not a guy in the sky in a robe. And I

think the dogmatic perspective that a lot of religious zealots put to these ancient texts is, look, we don't trust what people in the 1950s thought about dentistry. Why the fuck do we trust people from 2,000 years ago what they thought about God? It's kind of a crazy thing, because either one of two things is either true, either this is God's word and God is a psychopath, or this is the hand of human beings that is writing down an oral tradition of over a thousand years and trying to put in perspective what steps that we have to apply to our civilization in order to move towards a more loving and prosperous place, which is what God wants. But I think all those things about evil, like, I think maybe the evil is what we need to

see to respond to become better. And maybe this is this grand evolutionary process that's going on with the human spirit and the human psyche. If you look at trends, like if you study Pinker's work, if you go back to, you know, any time in recorded history versus today, today is less violent, less discriminatory, less racist, more open to, you know, equal rights amongst the sexes and genders and sexual orientation. We're way better now than we were like Alan Turing from the Turing test went to He got arrested for being gay. They put him on hormone blockers He wound up killing himself because it was illegal to be gay the the man who? Invented the ability or he came up with the the concept of the ability to detect whether or not artificial intelligence is real That guy was tortured by human philosophy and human perspective.

Yeah, I think Pink is right on all of these metrics. Everything's better now than it was. And if you want to combine that with like a process theology in which God is identical to the world and the world's getting better, and it's better to like start a business, go broke, pull yourself up again and then succeed, then it is just to have the best thing to begin with. Then to win the lottery when you're 10. Yeah. Right, so that taps into our intuitions about what it is to develop a great character and

have a better world, you might think. But I suppose like pre-1859 on the origin of species in Darwin, I think actually theism was the reasonable worldview to have, like this idea of this God outside of time and space. And you can run all of these, they call them like theodicies and defenses, like reasons why God allows evil to exist. Right. I think when you think about like the evils that like events, like, you know, like the wars and all the diseases that are in our country, in our world, you sort of go, well, I can see how some of these defenses, like you need hurricanes for hurricane

relief funds, or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something, right? All of these, I think they probably work for humans. But then I don't think since then, and maybe this is a part of the reason why people or Christians, especially in this country, are fearful of evolution by natural selection. Maybe it's not because they just care so much about the history of the world, which would seem a little bit weird to me that that's the hill they want to die on, like how old the earth is. But actually, if God is responsible for this process, that seems like a bigger stain on God's record. So you can see

why they're reluctant to accept something like that. Maybe it's the only way. Maybe this process of natural selection and of constant improvement and what we call evolution, maybe is the only way. Do you think it, I worry though that like when you do the maths, whether it can be justified, we're talking like trillions of uncountable animals. Forever. Into time. It eventually sorts itself out. It's kind of getting better, right? But like if I was to say to you, like, you know, I can spawn a person here next to us now, but to do it, I'm going to execute 50 chimpanzees right there. Like if you said yes, I think I'd say that was a stupid choice, Joe.

It's a stupid choice to like It's a weird choice because we've definitely done that. We've definitely done that for makeup. Well, we've tested it, you know, I mean, they've done some wild shit with animals, unfortunately. Yeah, well, this ties in like, I think people think this though, that the problem cuts deep. Like when you ask people like 90% of people in the UK think that keeping animals in cages is cruel, 50% of people in the US think that, yet 98.5% of chickens, turkeys, and pigs are kept in factory farms. Is that the real number? 70% of cows.

It's 98%? Yeah. Wow. It's 99% of chickens. Holy shit. And 98% of turkeys. It's about the same for pigs. Like people are, but you see the juxtaposition there, right?

You've got people that think it's wrong, but they're doing otherwise. Well, it's not that they're doing otherwise. They can compartmentalize because factory farming, we talked about this yesterday. They have ag-gag laws, a couple of days ago with Russell Crowe, rather. Ag-gag laws prevent people from detailing the horrific conditions Yeah, which these animals live and if you film it if you're a worker there and you're like, this is horrific I'm gonna film this and out this place you'll go to jail. Yeah, which is insane. Yeah, it's it should it should be a crime It should be like animal cruelty like Russell Crowe was in here the other day and he keeps 200 head of cattle and he has a ranch in the

bush in Australia. And the way he described, the way he takes care of these animals, the way they gently move them into new pastures, they live this idyllic life until, and he's like, and the meat is better, you feel better about the whole thing. It's like- I've heard him say something about this before where he goes like, but ultimately it's because it tastes better. So although like I'm happy he's doing it, right? This is a, this is no comparison to factory farming. And if all the farming that was out there in the world

was like Russell Crowe's, then it's not just because it tastes better. That's not, do you think he, do you think he's got like the, yes, he cares about them. He does. Did he talk about how he like ends their lives? He didn't. I didn't ask. I should have, but he was going on a rant. I didn't want to interrupt. I wanted to know if they did the, you know, no country for old men bolt to the head. Well, right. Apparently that's instantaneous. Take, yeah, take the comparison, right? Yeah. Like, would you rather have your nose cut off, your children taken away from you, be stuffed in a cage for your life and pump full of hormones, and then be electrocuted or have your throat slit Mm-hmm

Would you rather run around in the field with your family and then one day the lights just go out? Well one day the lights are gonna go out anyway Yeah, this is part of the thing But there is a question They don't live very long on their own like yeah, they're kind of like dogs Like I don't know what a cow's maximum age is. What's the maximum age of a cow? Let's guess. I'm gonna say 18. What do you think? Because that's like a golden retriever

if you give them all the right food, apparently. I'm skeptical because if it goes average age of a cow, if it's gonna be like wild cow, maybe 15, 16 years. Yeah, but wild cows, where are they? So wild cows are an interesting thing because domestic cattle's a completely different strain of cattle and when we let them go wild they become what we call scrub bulls and scrub bulls are the most dangerous animal you can encounter in the

Australian bush. Oh really? Yeah, Asian buffaloes are dangerous but scrub bulls will fuck you up. They're like those bulls that people ride except they're wild. Yeah. So they're completely feral and they're there to breed and to protect their cows and anything that comes in. I've heard countless stories of men camping in the bush getting gored by scrub bulls. They're crazy looking too. They develop all these weird colors and they look really cool. They kind of like, you know how pigs, they go through a metamorphosis when they go feral do you know that process it's really quick it's like six weeks once a pig is feral for six weeks and just running wild in the woods they start

changing their snout extends their their tusks grow their hair gets thicker they become boars they become what we think of as a classic wild boar and those are the same species of animal, which is very bizarre. That happens with bulls too. Well, especially in the factory farms as well, they're definitely not going to live much longer there, are they? No. Well, they kill them quicker too, because they plump them up fast with antibiotics and they get them fat.

Just more chronically obese basically. Yep. Totally ill. And that's the best stuff. The best stuff is the super ill cow. What does it say? 15 to 20 years. Oh, there you go. Yep, it's totally ill and that's the best stuff. The best stuff is the super ill cow. You got a... What does it say? 15 to 20 years. Oh, there you go. There you go. So the dairy industry really allows cows to live past five. They're sent to slaughter soon after production level drops.

Yikes. Well, it's interesting. So I don't know like when he's obviously killing these cows, right? But if, is he doing it right towards the end of the life? Then it seems like it might still be wrong in a sense though, right? There's a reason why when we take our dogs to the vets to be euthanized, that you don't get there and the vet pulls out a fucking crossbow or a gun or something, right?

Right. Because you go, no, there's a better way you can do this. Have you run out of injections or something? The Greek for euthanasia means good death. There are better ways of doing it. Do you think it's better to use a poison that you inject into their veins than a bolt to the brain? My suspicion is yes. Why?

It slows down the heart. Right, but? You can't see them struggling in a sense of like, they don't exhibit features that look like they're in pain or they're fighting. So it's better for you? The heart slows down, the brain slowly shuts down. Well you'd expect them to resist in some certain way. Maybe there's not much difference between them.

I don't think there's any difference. The bolt to the brain is instantaneous. Our concern is blood. Our concern is seeing trauma. so we're not seeing it's all internal. Yeah, you know poison kills you in a horrible way I mean, I guess probably the last moments are probably deeply painful and very confusing where your body's shutting down I think it's more of like a cultural thing that we don't want our pets shot rather. Yeah have injections Yeah, I mean we see it's less stick. I don't want to shoot my pet. I don't want our pets shot rather than have injections. We see it less sticking fire door. Look, I don't want to shoot my pet. I don't want to see your pet shot. God, imagine seeing Carl get shot.

That'd be horrific. But there's no difference between Carl getting an injection that kills him either. It's just our own sensibilities. It's an ending of life. And the most effective, quickest way that causes the least amount of pain should be what we strive for Yeah, no, definitely but that still I think we both agree on this right that the factory farming is the like the

Overwhelming amount of meat we're consuming is that yeah and people feel and we think this we know that non-human animals Like a morally valuable. I love this thought experiment by the philosopher Tom Reagan. He asks you, imagine you're on a lifeboat with, let's say, a golden retriever and another human being. And you've got to throw one out and you get to keep the other one in. And so everyone throws out the golden retriever. Depends on who the person is. If it's Hitler.

I haven't met any. If it's Hitler and my dog, Hitler's going for a swim know, let's just like I would do that random default, you know What do you do that? But let's be real throw it. I throw a hitter in a hundred percent I'm gonna kill Hitler with my bare hands. Then I'm gonna throw him in the water hundred percent. All right It's not it's not him. I might eat him. You don't know who this guy me and the dog might eat him It's not it's not your it's not Marsh. Like martial arts some random golden retriever. I love all golden retrievers I'm killing Hitler over every fucking gold retriever that's ever been born if it's a default person. You don't know who this is Okay, then well then it becomes a problem. Yeah. Yeah, then I mean I want that person and then too Tom

I went on a date with this this girl in in London once and I asked her this thought experiment I said, what would you do? And then she said I killed a golden retriever And then I did the Tom Reagan thought experiment said, well, how about if it was five golden retrievers, 10, a hundred, a thousand Tom Reagan goes, I'll kill a million of them. And you kind of go like, that's not, that's not cool. Like, you know, one person starts disappointing you and lies to you and you're like, oh, I should have fucked up those dogs a lot. Yeah. Well, this...

It was just you and this dude and you have a bond with that guy forever. You killed your dog for him. Exactly. Well, this girl I was on a date with, she said she had killed an infinite number of golden retrievers because she was Catholic. And I think an infinite number of suffering in the ending of life. You say that. You say that.

You probably kill yourself. Yeah, I think after you get through like 50, you go, I've made a real mistake. Yeah, you'd probably shoot yourself. You watch them whimper on the ground in pain, you'd probably shoot yourself. The interesting thing is as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non-human animals

have a comparable value to human beings. And you have to draw the line somewhere. There's going to be a rough like number. It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves or water droplets make a cloud It's not gonna be clear exactly how many but as long as you pick zero. Yeah Yeah, I think everyone wealth minus a few people. I think if someone says infinite something's gone wrong in their thinking I think that's absurd. Well, I think that's just them talking Yeah, there's no way you believe that. There's no way. You know what infinite

golden retrievers look like? That's fucking crazy. Kill that guy. You know I've got great sympathy for people who like you've probably heard this before people give like health reasons for why they still consume non-human animals. Yeah. And you know they they say I have to eat this much meat or maybe they just eat meat and nothing else. That's me. And you just eat meat? Yeah. You don't eat anything apart from meat?

I eat very little other than meat. OK, this is good. Right. I eat fruit, and I eat meat. And occasionally I'll eat something else. I'll have spaghetti or a sandwich every now and then. But for the most part, I eat mostly meat. So those people who, like yourself,

who maybe it's whatever health reason it is, they still, some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook, like as if they, because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like. But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go,

is what I'm doing morally right? Is this something I should reconsider? And I think, if you pick a number, then you have to make a call on that. I think it's not a zero-sum game. I don't think it's morally reprehensible to eat meat, but I do know that an animal has to die. Yeah.

What I've preferred, there was a few years back in 2012 that I decided that I was either going to become a vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter. And so I'd watched too many of these peter documentaries. I'd seen too many things about factory farming. I was like, this is disgusting. It would freak me out. And I was like, okay, I either have to come to grips with what it means to kill an animal and eat it.

And if I can't handle that, if I don't like that, then I'll just become a vegetarian. I tried being a vegetarian for a brief amount of time in my life when I was like, I guess I was 18 I was when I was fighting I was I was having a really hard time because I was still growing I was having a really hard time making a lower weight class that I was competing in and there was other people in my team that were competing in the higher weight

class and it was it was a real problem so I tried being a vegetarian for a while I don't think I did it the best way. I don't think I was really intelligent about it. Again, I was 18 and this was like 1985, somewhere around then. Different vegetarian world. No one knew shit. So I was just eating salads and I felt terrible. I felt terrible. And then I had a conversation with my instructor and he was just like, you're just getting bigger. You need to move up. And I started eating meat immediately. I gained 10 pounds in like three weeks. I felt like a completely different human being.

I felt like I had all this energy. I was just, I think I was malnourished before and I was just going on drive, but I do think that there are very different body types and there's very different requirements that certain people have when it comes to protein. I think animal protein is the most dense, most nutrient packed protein and food that's available for human beings.

And I think it probably has something to do with why we became human beings in the first place. But I think of hunting as I'm dipping my toe into the natural world and I'm going out into the wild where these things live. They're not in a cage. What's that? Is it a bow, a crossbow? I use a bow. When I first started I started using a rifle. I shot that mule deer that sits on the table. That was the first deer that I ever shot. Jesus. That was in 2012. I'll look this way. And I decided when I was eating that mule deer, it's all on film. We did it for a television show called Meat Eater, my friend Stephen Ranallo hosts.

And when I was eating that deer by the fire, I was like, this is what I'm doing forever. I'm doing this. It was like, it ignited parts of my DNA. It gave me an understanding of the cycle of life instantaneously in a way that was, like fishing does that a little bit, but this is like that times a thousand, which is why people don't have a problem with you showing dead fish on your Instagram. If you hold like a dead bass, look at the bass I caught.

Everybody's like, good job, nice fish. You're gonna eat that fish. You hold up a dead deer, people kinda freak out. Yeah, I bet. Hold up a dead bear, people go fucking crazy. Well, okay. Here's a couple of things, right? So I think you're probably you well you speaks to your own experience, right? that you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it taps into our histories when you when you hunt especially with a bow like 10,000 years ago the first bows come about and you know There's I imagine it was thrilling for them now and it's it's then it's thrilling still

now to do it same reason like paintball or like laser tag and war can be fun right people enjoy it people going off to the First World War thought it was a great sport sure and maybe it taps even deeper than that because it's the food we're eating and in the early. I think the worry, okay, let's think about the ethics though, right? So I think it's not comparable to factory farming again. Like this is split in hairs really. Well, I don't think we even have to compare these things. We just talk about the merits of or the ethics of what we're doing.

Good. So two things come to mind, right? The first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting. Like if I hunt with a spear, and you'll know more about this than me, a spear is probably not gonna knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head. Right. A crossbow and a bow are gonna be somewhere between them.

Right. And so they're gonna be better ways to hunt than not. So maybe perhaps, I wonder what you think of this. on the whole when you run the numbers in terms of probability that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even bows. Would you agree with that? Yeah, hunting with guns is absolutely the most effective way. In order for you to be equally effective hunting with a bow, it requires a lot more work. Yeah.

It requires intense amount of practice, hours and hours every day. I practice at 74 yards every day. Hundreds of arrows at 74 yards just grouping into this small area about the size of a grapefruit. Are you good? Are you pretty accurate? Yeah, I'm very good. I practice a lot. When you hunt, it's like elk.

Yeah. When you hunt elk, do you kill the animal without much suffering, would you say? Well, the last one that I killed died in 10 seconds. He was dead in 10 seconds. He literally ran up to the top of a hill. It took, like, not even 10 seconds. It was like, whack, the arrow hits,

run, run, run, boom, dead. Because of an accurate shot placement. If you shoot an animal accurately, they die instantaneously. They die very quickly. You either hit them in the heart or you hit them through both lungs. If they're alive for 30 seconds, it's a lot, generally. But there's been times where it might take 30 minutes for them to die. They just lay down and you see them moving a little bit and you sneak in and try to get a second arrow into them to take them out. Any way they die by a hunter is infinitely more humane than how they will die in the wild and they will all die in the wild. They will

all get old and they will do the dire starvation, they'll freeze to death or more likely they'll get eaten by cats. Well, okay, so here's where I agree with you, right? Is that when people eat, again, you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on Earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls, right? And that rings true for me, right?

This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of like production of our food, in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating. So I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms, which the overwhelming majority people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on. What they're doing is way worse. Right. I think people just say that because they want to have a leg to stand on. What they're doing is way worse. Right, I think people just say that because they wanna have a moral high ground and they haven't looked into it enough.

If they did, they would have to come to grips with the fact that this is, you're paying a supermarket hitman, okay? Is it not a murderer if you hire someone to get murdered? It seems like you're a murderer. It seems like you'd go to jail as a murderer. It's the same thing. If you go to the grocery store

and you buy a T-bone steak, you paid a supermarket hitman. He just assumed you were gonna pay him, so he did the work before he got the money from you. And then you wanted that cow dead, right? You're like, yes I did, thank you. It's a psychological explanation. Or like, it's the same reason why RAF bombers

will drop a bomb on a clouded city, but not go down there and shoot a mother and a child, right? But even though... Or hire the RF fighter. Even drone pilots have severe PTSD. Do they? Yeah. Yeah, there's a very specific kind of it because it's like this... You're not totally connected to the act, but you know what you did.

And then you'll be haunted. Like if you're just operating a little PS4 or PS5 controller and you're zooming some drone, I mean that's kinda what they do it with, right? Don't they use like game controllers? They use game controllers, which is so fucking wild because that's the best way to do it. You get these kids that are, you're playing Call of Duty eight hours a day

and then that kid goes and becomes a part of the drone program, that's your assassins, that's your ultimate killers. And these guys are doing it for real. They're using, they're playing a video game, but real human beings are dying and in their head when they lay in bed at night, they know that. Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right? We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act. So, more killings when you're using guns than when it's hand-to-hand combat.

Even in the Second World War, like, field work showed that it was about 20 or 30% of people were actually firing the weapon. So it's a little more complicated than a PS4 or PS5 thing, but it does have like a joystick, just like a simulator. Yeah. Like a flight simulator is what it looks like. there's a that's the view in town but how nutty is that what what does that feel like when you're in Nevada and you're operating something that's in Iraq or wherever in Yemen and you're you've got a drone flying over some compound and you're just shooting hellfire missiles into human beings yeah based on metadata yeah I'd be interested to know how much like how severe their

PTSD is. See you can find an article on it because there was something that I'd read about it really recently. Because there's a thought right which is we seem to be outraged at the use of drones but it takes one less person out of the fight and so it seems if you're doing like a utilitarian calculation that it's gonna be better on the whole. No, no it's not because the amount of civilians that die are very high. It's a, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 plus percent. Some estimations are 90% of civilians.

It's hard to tell because what's been explained to me by people in the military is that the people, first of all, the government will undercut the number. They'll give you a lower number than probably Israel. And then the people that were attacked will give you a higher number than Israel. And so you have to sort this out. Like a good example is, remember the New York Times reported that the Israelis had blew up a hospital. And it was on the front page of the New York Times.

And they had been told that 500 people were dead or 5,000, I forget the number. The reality was the bomb hit the parking lot and 50 people died. But they had been told it was a much worse scenario. They reported it, not knowing- The numbers, though, according to like the UN and stuff are pretty damn High though. Oh, they're horrible. No, no, no the no, I'm yeah, but just in this specific example one specific Numbers are the numbers are terrifying. Yeah, it's We're just looking at an article

New York Times about they're like PTSD and whatnot This is like just because they're not deployed They seldom got the same recovery periods or mental health screenings as other fighters instead They were treated as office workers expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war Under unrelenting stress several former crew members said people broke down Drinking and divorce became common some of the some left the operations floor in tears others attempted suicide and the military failed to realize the full Impact despite hundreds of missions captain Larson's personal file under the heading combat service only offers a single word, none. Drone crew members said in interviews that while killing remotely

is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars. In many ways it's more intense, said Neil Shuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks, and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse in the burial. People often think this job is going to be

like a video game and I have to warn them, there is no reset button. Yeah. So it's a horrific, very intense thing. But it's akin to buying a steak in the store. Well I think the things that are relevant morally speaking are the same things there. Do you eat only vegetables? Yeah, it's a vegan diet. Well it's like a 98 or 97 percent, especially when traveling and stuff, when you can't seem to find things. I think the perception is,

and there's a lot of gotcha stuff, right, in terms of when people say they've got vegetarian or vegan diets, the idea that they're going to be eliminating suffering entirely from their diets, it's impossible. That's not what anyone thinks is happening. You hear like crop death arguments and stuff like this, right, which don't tread much water.

Monocrop agriculture, which is a horrific loss of life. Like if you're buying corn or grain, most likely you're getting it from monocrop agriculture and they kill thousands of animals to do that. They poison the ground, they poison bugs. If you consider insects, life forms, they kill millions. They kill groundhogs, gophers, anything that gets in the way. And then the monocrop agriculture kills the environment because it destroys the topsoil. The topsoil is destroyed. And like most farms in this country, we have to pour shit on the ground in order for it to be able to sustain life. Well, the vegan needs to be, or the utilitarian, or there's all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this. I don't know any serious philosopher of moral philosophy or

ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non-human animals, their pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter. So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well, or the pain and suffering that goes into it. There are going to be better ways to do it than not. But you know, I often get asked about like tofu, so or like our soy production. So 77% of global soy production goes towards feeding non-human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating. A bunch of it's used for like biofuels and stuff, but only 7% of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings. So if we look

at like the vegan's contribution to that, right, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for. But here's I think an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side because you hear loads of different arguments like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff, as if it's going to get in often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non-animal rights such as the Catholic was mentioned a moment ago don't matter. But think of this, like if it was the case that we're forced to do these things and we

can't do otherwise, to sustain the people we have, we have to kill animals. Let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case. That wouldn't get God off the hook if God's forcing us to do that. Like, here's life. To enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it, like, 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals each year? Well, let's assume that God didn't conceive of factory farming and this is like a loophole

created by human beings because I think it is. I think it's just like, it's like money in politics. Like the founding fathers didn't see that coming. They didn't see social media coming. They didn't see a lot of things that are interfering with this concept of self-government, right? And I think God probably like, they're never gonna do that. They're never gonna stick all the chickens in a fucking warehouse and stack them up. Yep, we will. If you let us get away with it, and then we develop laws,

you can't film those things. Yeah, yeah. There's a problem with animal intelligence, right? Animals are sentient. They have instincts, they love their young. There's also a problem with plant intelligence. And plant intelligence, I think, the emergence science of plant intelligence is fascinating.

I don't wanna say they're the same thing as people, just like I don't wanna say a golden retriever is the same thing as a person in a boat. It's not. Out of interest, how many did you pick in terms of how many golden retrievers you were gonna chuck out the boat until you chucked the human being out?

Depends on the person. I can't say. If it's just a random person, you don't know them, any person walking down the street in Austin today. He's talking like tens, hundreds? No. Thousands? He's talking thousands? No. Like fewer?

Yeah. Like less than ten? I'm not gonna kill 20 dogs for some dude, I don't know. You and me first. I don't know Depends on I don't know man. I love my dog so much. I shouldn't think a golden retriever that yeah, it's like I can Even if I get upset at him, I feel bad It's It's you can't just say a random person. Like I said, if it was Hitler I'd kill Hitler for sure I kill Hitler over a snake. Yeah, but we probably just kill him anyway

But we think I probably wouldn't I probably bring him back so people could study him I think if you like it was sure that I could capture him alive and and get him in front of the press It's just to see just what the fuck happened. Yeah. How the fuck did you do this? Yeah, like what what come? Goddamn Norman. She give me money for this Norman Oehler. We've been talking about his book Over and over again with the right weeks. Yes since he's been here, but Hitler was cranked up on all kinds of shit Yeah, so were the Nazis they were all on methamphetamines Hitler was on oxycodone apparently. Yeah thinking he could live long He was worried. He's gonna die right a vegetarian diet. make sure he could not just vegetarian but terrible vegetarian diet mostly bread and sugar yeah you've got to do it right but he certainly didn't i've just finished ian kershaw's book on hitler it's like a over a

thousand pages it's a real good read like 40 hour read so if you're interested in like you got to be careful leaving those around your house i bought it my dad for his birthday and he's there in the restaurant showing everyone. It's a real problem, like you can't do that. But you know what we're talking about with the animal intelligence and plant intelligence and human intelligence, like yeah for sure the way we're doing it now is wrong. I think we would all agree to that. If you could wave a magic wand and let all the animals be free and no one eats them anymore, you're going to have chaos. You're going to have real chaos. First of all, you're going to have massive overpopulation and you're going to have predators everywhere. Because unless you do have predators everywhere, you're going gonna have car accidents that you would never imagine train accidents you're yeah there's a guy named why am I blanking on his name

American Coyote Dan Flores Dan Flores this I forget where is your professor out of he studies the history of animals and Dan Flores, he wrote a paper called, I think it's called Buffalo Ecology something, what was it? Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology. He thinks, that's it, genius guy. He thinks the reason why when they came across the Great Plains and there was millions and millions of buffalo, I think the reason why is because 90% of the Native Americans were killed by the plague.

Oh wow. This is his thought, like, because the earliest settlers in the 1400s, the 1500s, they didn't see that many buffalo. It wasn't like they didn't even report them. There were many accounts where they didn't even report them. Why? Because the Native Americans lived off them and they kept their population in check. The buffalo have a very long gestation period, right? They're an enormous animal. And if you can kill one, it takes a long time to replace that one. So they would travel around, track the buffalo, kill them, live off them, use their skins, eat their meat, and then nomadically travel with them. And they kept their population in check. When 90% of Native Americans were dead, Dan Flores believes that led to this insane overpopulation problem of buffalo where you see

millions of them in fields because that doesn't exist anywhere in nature unless there's a problem. Yeah. And that problem is a lack of predators and the predators at that time being the Native American hunter. Yeah, I think if you go like if you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't even on the view, which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the morally relevant facts are pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, right? If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around, that's gonna, as you say,

create like a sort of mayhem. Well, it's not just that. You would have to control their population somehow. You'd have to give them birth control. You'd have to... That seems... I mean, that's... In my view, that's okay to give them birth control and the like. Right, but to what length? Wendy, how many do you let breed? How many do you... You have to have population control, right? Yeah, you can have population... Wildlife biologists. Let me explain something about hunting areas, right? So like if you're going to go to this place in Montana where we went and hunted mule deer

Wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas and they know Roughly the exact amount of deer that are in this area, right? Okay, and they know them they have a less accurate Number of predators particularly stealthy predators like mountain lions pretty good with with wolves, but even then in high density areas, very difficult to really figure it out. But they get the numbers of the deer and then based on some very exact science, they calculate the amount of hunters who will be allotted tags. So like say if you apply for a limited draw entry place.

So limited draw entry is like say maybe you have an Allocated piece of land that's you know X amount of thousands of acres and in that there are X amount of thousands of deer And you will allow 100 hunters into that area and out of those hundred hunters There'll be maybe a 10 to 15 percent success rate. So you are thinking that these hunters will trim 10 deer, 20 deer, whatever it is for this particular, and there's a bunch of different areas like this all over the country. But they're all tightly managed. And the wildlife biologists that do that in the United States, it's a beautiful and incredible

thing. Because it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world where you have public land, where people, the United States and all the people living in the United States own this land, this is our land. And you can go out on that land and in some places you don't even have to have a tag, you get what's called an over the counter tag.

Because these are areas where they're difficult to get to, there's plentiful deer, they don't have to worry about you depopulating. And so you get a tag and you go out, you go five, six, ten miles in, you camp out, you live under the stars, and you get your food. And you can do that in this country. And you can do that because these wildlife biologists have a very keen understanding of the amount of animals that are sustainable in the area and the amount of hunters they

can allow to hunt in these areas. That's how it's done. If you don't do that, and if you just have animals run free, you get the buffalo when there's millions of them on the fields, and you're going to have to kill some of them because they're going to get diseased because they don't have any food. They're going to starve to death. Or you're going to bring in mountain lions. And mountain lions can't kill buffalo, so you're going to have to bring in wolves.

You're going to have to bring in mountain lions and mountain lions can't kill buffalo so you're gonna have to bring in wolves you have to bring in big Cats you're gonna have to bring in all kinds of things that eat things to keep them in line Then you've got fucking wild nature taking place everywhere in the world that there's not a city and even in cities You're gonna have it you have coyotes in New York City right now. Well, okay. This is good I think Martha Nussbaum in like a new book, Justice for Animals, she argues that like these things, as you say, are a problem. You can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control. And she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in like

animal sanctuaries, if you like. And I was thinking recently like there's a lot of arguments for human reparations like when a full group is harmed by another group that we think that they're owed something, whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in in North West Africa. And we think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should right that wrong. I don't know the details. I don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher, but let's say that's a view that people hold as they do. Well, if you take non-human animals to be like these subjects which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure or happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group. And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures

were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group, then that group owes them some, like, the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible. Now, it might be just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day to day of it. It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can, says the argument, to reduce it as much as possible. If that ends up being like having to add predators to a sort of, you know, into that situation, then so be it. But perhaps there's a, you know, with the right time and money, you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering then so be it. But perhaps with the right time and money,

you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, so to speak. So if the goal is just completely to eliminate suffering, why don't we kill all the predators? Yeah, so I don't think- Because they're gonna make all these animals suffer. And if you get killed by wolves, oh, that's a rough one.

That's a rough, the worst is killed by bears, because they just eat you. They just hold you down and start pulling you apart like a salmon. So if we want to really eliminate suffering perhaps we should eliminate all of the predators or just put them in zoos where they all suffer but they're evil and then because they just kill and eat. That's all they do. Well there's a question of like what's wrong with death which is at the heart of this. So it might not just be like the hedonistic

properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, you're somehow wronging them. So like if I was to hypothetically, you know, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one will remember them, and I put a bullet in the back of their head. This person had no friends, family, no one will remember them, and I can erase that thing I did from my memory. You might still think what I did was wrong,

because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects they were working on, and I stopped their flourishing in some sense like that. Unless they're Hitler. Unless they're Hitler, then it's a good one to stop. But again, you probably would want to bring them back. And then when it comes to non-human animals, the same is true, right? The dog looks forward to their dinner in the evening, they look forward to the walk, they bury their bone. These are creatures with complex inner lives which

see their futures or know that they will exist in the future. I think the same is true of the creatures which are hunted or in the farms and so Simply painless killing might not be everything there removing the potential for future happiness and pleasure Also seems to be morally relevant. Well, you know when you hunt animals you hunt mature animals one of the things that See you check the like how do you know the age of like you can see you could tell by the way they look Yeah, they get bigger their their head looks different. They're different I've killed them that are 11 years old. That's really old. Okay, really old He probably his teeth were all worn down to almost nothing

He probably had another year or two left if he was lucky and again their death is horrific The death that they have from wild predators is terrifying. There's not too many. I hunt in Utah every year and we see cats there. I saw the biggest cat I've ever seen in my life there. It's a huge mount lion. But I've seen other predators. You see a lot of coyotes and they do spot wolves there too.

There's bears there, we see bears. But that death is so much worse than a hunter's death. Yeah, most probably, yeah. And 100% and it's gonna happen. They're not living forever. And what I'm doing is I'm dipping my toe into the wild world and through considerable effort, bringing back meat. Yeah. To bring this back to like, you know, that fundamental question we began with, like, on the whole is existence a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased with this world? And

it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or, you know, especially if we're forced to do these things, like, we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that. Again, like, this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good God would do. So if you're an atheist and you're... But why not? Isn't that, this is the process. The reason why the elk is so fast and strong is because it's been avoiding mountain lines for hundreds of thousands of years. But it's the process which, according to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, that God created. And God can do anything with the following qualifier. It has to be logically or metaphysically possible.

So there are possible worlds without evolution by natural selection. Like those things are entirely possible. And a perfectly good God would have to bring about the best possible state of affairs. But maybe this is the best possible state of affairs to achieve a desired goal. What did they say? The optimist says this is the best possible world and the pessimist hopes it's not the case. Matthew 14.30 I think even the evils of this world exist to incite outrage and for us to do better.

I think this constant struggle of good and evil is maybe even necessary for us to keep moving in the right general direction through rigorous debate and deceit and lies and propaganda and having your dreams shattered and figuring it out. Yeah, that's us, right? That's us and animals. That's the reason why the fucking elk is 900 pounds and built like a super athlete. It's because it has to get the fuck away from outlines. If it didn't, it would never look like that.

It would never become an elk. It would not become this majestic thing with horns growing out of its fucking head. It's got literal weapons growing out of its head. And they're competing with each other with these weapons and killing each other. We find dead elk all the time. They find them every year. They're stabbed in the rib cage by other elk. And they die a horrible death.

And they get torn apart by coyotes and bears when they're down. You find their bones scattered all over the place where they've been killed and ripped apart. Yeah, I mean, I felt there's still a sense in which they're like doing good, like when a non-human animal like sacrifices themselves for their young or something. Like there has to be something they're going towards in order for it to be good. And they're getting better at being elk to avoid that. And that's what leads to their natural selection.

But they don't seem to have like a, like, there's going to be a significant number of non-human animals that don't have what we call free will, which is the power and freedom to do otherwise, the power and choice to do a rather than be there are some non-human animals that just act the Raindrop lands on the bird's beak. It just instinct it turns sees what's there. It doesn't think what was that? It doesn't have this inner chat. It doesn't choose reflects and there's gonna be a lot of non-human animals, which that's the case for So that's sort of like character development theodicy or defense won't work for them. Like, especially if they're, you know, it doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it.

For all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop, like their individual lives seem like they're again, cases of gratuitous, i.e. unnecessary evil. But the point fundamentally is this, right? God could have made it so that these creatures that don't have free will and that can't develop their characters don't suffer. He could have made that the case. Pete Unless God is truly all-knowing and us with our primate minds are trying to make sense out

of this thing that ultimately will make sense when we reach the end of our journey, and that this whole process, as complicated and vicious and evil as it seems to be with predator and prey and natural selection, and what you're just talking about like with birds and different animal, well, they don't have to, they figured out a niche. They could fly. they move around, they basically got it nailed, right? To keep their populations high, not that difficult unless people come along with shotguns.

That's when it really becomes a problem, like the passenger pigeon disappeared. Why, because we ate them all, you know, and we shot them all. But when you look at animals in the wild, when they have a very successful model, they don't change. That's crocodiles. They have a very successful model. The don't change. That's crocodiles. They have a very successful model. The model is this thing doesn't need to eat for a year,

it can go underwater for hours, it can stay perfectly still in four inches of water, knows exactly where the animals are, and explodes and eats them and kills them. And it's been in that same form for millions and millions of years. Because it's a successful form. Same as sharks, successful form, doesn't need to evolve.

Human beings live in the most comprehensive and bizarre environment. First of all, we figured out how to shelter, and once we did that, we became weak. We figured out agriculture, we became weaker, we developed cities, we completely separated ourselves from the natural world. So we think of ourselves as different

than all these other processes that are happening because we've elevated in our own eyes beyond this, beyond the natural realm, into this world of morals and ethics and philosophy and our view of our perspective of the world. But we're still in the natural world. We're still beasts. Yeah. There's no distinction between beasts. And when you go hunting, you really get a sense of that. You really understand.

You're in the natural world. Yeah. Well, here's the thought, right, which is in terms of like cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs, is that when you look at the system, and you mentioned a second ago like, maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this. Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him, and I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words, or, you know, William James, as the philosopher, has this example of a mountaineer who's got like this gap they need to jump over, a storm behind

them, so it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump, or the runner who has to believe they're going to win the 100-met meter race. It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence. I think these arguments work for like psychological states, but you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable that there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true Right. So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief is to go Here we have some really good arguments for this hypothesis Here's the evidence we have against it, but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace like some form of agnosticism where we go

How can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless? And that's the, that's to go back to the start of our discussion there, it's like the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that. We are looking for the meaning of like, Shakespeare, it wouldn't be right for someone English to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quoting Shakespeare, wouldn't it? So you'll have to excuse me. Shakespeare says, if essentially if there's no God, then life is like a tale told by an idiot. It signifies nothing. Oh, that's amazing. That guy was so good. So many years ago.

Like if, so the agnostic life is like this. And a lot of my thought here comes from Albert Camus, which everyone should read. He says that, I wonder if you've had a feeling or experience like this, because this is sort of like what got me on my philosophical journey. He says, one day the stage set collapses and everything begins in that weariness with a tinge of excitement. I.e. one day you're going about your life, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday Thursday And you sort of start to think like what's the point of all this? What's the meaning it almost seems like it is a tale told by an idiot right and like maybe it isn't meaningful I'm not part of this big plan and

And you sort of a loss, but there's an excitement there too like the openness of being the gift of meaninglessness so I think The reasonable thing for us to do in the light of those arguments we've spoken about is to suspend and be agnostic about belief in God, but then have this honest search for finding meaning and moral value. Like, this isn't the kind of notion of the absurd that physicists keep talking about. Like, again, this is when, you know, I won't talk about physics and sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy and you sort of get a little bit frustrated. Like, you've probably heard people say things like this, like, in comparison to the vast cosmos in which I exist,

I feel so small and meaningless. Like, or comparison to the 13.8 billion years in which I've existed. Like, my 70, if I'm lucky, feels like it doesn't really matter. But like, imagine if you were really big, like the size of the universe. Imagine you live for 13 billion years. It doesn't seem to have any effect on how more meaningful your life is. Your life still lacks that fundamental purpose. So like, how big you are, and how long you last. I don't think you'd have an insecurity complex if you were the universe. Same with Dr. Manhattan. Same with the multiverse or like simulation theory, right? I've just been watching this on the flight over here, the umbrella academy, I was watching

that on the flight. Oh yeah, my daughter loves that show. Yeah, it sounds like a burn then. No, she loves it. It is good. Anyway, they're in like a multiverse, and their lives like they're still going about their lives like they matter or imagine We're in a simulation Like imagine the fundamental nature of stuff is ones and zeros rather than particles or consciousness, right? It all still matters

so I think the project of agnosticism a thing we need to be doing isn't just like digging down with this new atheism that's flippant and doesn't offer us any, like, can't solve these big problems and lacks answers to the fundamental questions. And it isn't just a gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it, but it's to try and like create ourselves a patchwork blanket to keep us warm in the void of meaninglessness, right? Well, we inherently know that it feels better to be a good person.

We know it. We know it feels better to have good friends and good community and be someone that people can rely on and count on. We know there's a general direction that makes us feel good to go in that way. And I think that's the guiding light of whatever this power is that wants us to become a better version of what we are is. That's what forces that action.

I think we get too caught up in religious dogmatism, and we get too caught up in religious dogmatism and we get too caught up in these literal interpretations of ancient texts which are not even in the original language they were written in, which is so bizarre, and apparently an incredibly difficult language to read and comprehend and to translate when you're going back to like ancient Hebrew. We're trying to translate that into English, like how much is lost there? Like what did these people, and also what was the original story? Where the fuck did all this come from? Like what was the original guy that told these stories?

What was the experience that he actually had? We're guessing because of people. I used to say about the Bible, and it was just a joke, I don't really mean this if you're a Bible fanatic, that people are full of shit and that story sucks Like that's all you have to do is look at it. Like people are full of shit 100% We know it's a fact. It's the greatest story ever told you don't you know

It's like listen the president United States is just on TV the other day lying this people are full of shit They lie all the time. We know they lie We catch them lying. Have you seen the the Trump clip when he's asked about his favorite Bible verse? Jamie we're allowed to get the what he say was He doesn't have one But yeah, but yeah, I would say to ZQ Here's just to wrap up like the like the fine meaning part I think you're right like we can still even if there's no God and there's no ultimate

Trump on gay rights And you said I think last night in Iowa some people are surprised that you say that I'm wondering what one or two of your most favorite Bible Verses are I wouldn't want to get into it because to me that's very personal You know when I talk about the Bible is very personal, so I don't want to get into it because to me that's very personal. You know, when I talk about the Bible, it's very personal. So I don't want to get into verses. I don't want to get into it. There's no verse that means a lot to you that you think about or cite? The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics.

Even decide a verse that you like? No, I don't want to do that. Are you an Old Testament guy or New Testament guy? Probably... Old Testament. You got to go old, son. New Testament's been monkeyed with. Even the New Testament, it's all fascinating to me. I am not an anti-religious person. I think I was when I was younger. I went to Catholic school when I was a little boy, and I decided that religion was bullshit because they were mean. But that was just me being six. But then as I was raised by hippies,

but as I've gotten older, I kind of have a belief that the arrogance of atheism is just as bad as the arrogance of the religious zealot, and that this whole thing is a massive mystery. And to pretend that it's not is to, we're gonna hamstring all of these conversations. We're gonna put shackles on all of our debate in all of our conversations where we're trying to figure out

what's real and what's not real and what's the shared experience that we all have. Like, I don't know how you view the world. And the only way for me to find out how you view the world is for me to ask you and not berate you for your opinions, but try to get it out of you. But what about this? Challenge you with other perspectives.

How does he feel about that? Sometimes you can get very quickly to how deep a person's perspective on an issue is, which is just a couple of questions. Because you see what they espouse, what they say, and a lot of times that aligns with very particular ideologies, whether it's right-wing or left-wing. And then a couple of questions deep, you know, you start asking about opposing viewpoints, and why do people think this way, and do you think that perhaps it's this? And then you can get to how much they have actually thought about it.

And the moment people become dogmatic, the moment people become ideologically captured by a very specific group of things that you've adopted as your opinions, because it aligns with science. We saw that during the pandemic, this trust the science idea, but which science? Like what is science? Science is not a consensus. It's a bunch of different people looking at data and trying to come to a...and when you know that that's hamstrung and you know that that's captured, that's not science anymore.

You know there's propaganda involved. You know there's lies. This is not science. This is a business and it utilizes science and you're caught up in an ideological debate about a thing that you should be completely objective about, but you're caught up in an ideological debate about a thing that you should be completely objective about, but you're not, because it's just like all the other things that human beings do. We like to decide that we are correct and that we defend from that position. Instead of just looking at these ideas, like, I think one of the things that happened with atheism

is that it did become like a philo... Remember when they had Atheism Plus? Do you remember that? Do you remember that? Oh, it was wonderful. So they had atheism and then they had these like social justice warriors that came out with Atheism Plus. And it was atheism attached to a whole bunch of ideas about like ways to behave, things that they value. Yeah. It's like a humanist Bible as well, isn't it? Exactly, they were basically forming a new religion. It was adorable. It was adorable to see that these patterns of thinking just seem to be inherent to human beings. Yeah. Like the tribal cultural rituals, tribal cultural

philosophies, their myth of the origins of things that they all accept as their own. It's like an identifying factor that cohesively connects groups, which is why, like you said that you didn't enjoy church because you don't like going to that. I actually like it. I've been to church. You just told me that the Bible is one of the most boring stories. It's not boring. I didn't say I was boring. Oh, is it one of the worst stories? No, no, no. I said people are full of shit and that story sucks. Oh the story so that's like the story of

I used to do a joke about Noah and the arc that if you told that I Can't even do the same joke anymore But if you told it to you five you feel do the same joke because I used to say retarded Okay, if you see total to a I think I said a five-year-old kid, you know, obviously with mental problems, he's going to find holes in that story. He's going to go, wait a minute, there's two of each animals, animals eat other animals, and you know, the punchline was, I'm not that retarded. But this idea that we have about these stories, I think is that they happen exactly as written.

And I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about Real events that took place a long time ago and we're told in an oral tradition It's just what would what really happened is very difficult to say and when you have the hand of man When you have human beings, especially in the New Testament, you know I mean you you literally have people deciding what is going to be and not going to be in it. So there's human beings deciding what is going to be in the Bible, which is insane. That's insane as it is. It doesn't mean that the things that are in there aren't representatives of the most recent version of telling a tale that probably did happen. Well, this is what's dangerous, right? And this is what's like, not just confused, but careless about some

of this thinking when you go, my team thinks this, and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna double down on it, even though I've got reasons against this position, I'm still going to be defending the position of my group. So people like, like conservative commentators, like, like Ben Shapiro think that, like, eating non-human animals is morally wrong, but they, you know, they care on doing it. I think probably because it's part of like what their team does. When I spoke to Peterson, you know, he conceded that that problem we spoke about a moment ago, the problem of systemic evil in nature was a massive problem for the God hypothesis. And as we said, he thinks you should just crack on and carry on working

on it. But there's, there's a sense in which it's okay if your view isn't affecting anybody, right? You can have a false belief and you're entitled to that, that freedom of conscience to think something, as long as it's not bringing about and breaching the harm principle. But there's a sense in which like, take Peterson's view because we spoke about taking that leap of faith, right? After I had this conversation with him, he tweeted like an hour later, I was arguing that my view is that happiness and pleasure has to correspond to a purposeful life, right? That if your life is meaningful, it also has to involve a flourishing of happiness and pleasure. Well, I think we see that with people, right? People that don't have a meaningful life and

just seek pleasure all the time are miserable, because they're missing that part of the equation, meaning. Yeah, that's essentially his view was like that. He tries to pull them apart. And afterwards, he tweeted something like, what uses happiness when we have mountains to move, which is a nice Nietzschean quote, but it's nice bumper sticker or something or fridge magnet, but I don't think we should live our lives by it. I gave him this example. I said, suppose God came down to us and said, here's the meaning of life, like, create war, spread disease, commit genocide, right? You'd go, that's not the kind of meaning I thought, that's not what I had in mind. I don't want that kind of meaning. But this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter, and

they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure. Like that's a recipe for disaster. You can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose and meaning. You just have to look at the 20th century, right? To see how when people think they know what ought to be done despite all the pain and suffering they cause, like how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities. So this idea that we should just carry on

sticking with our thinking beforehand. This ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things, right? It ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith. He offers arguments. Let's take Peterson for an example again. People are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment. People are writing books saying, this person's going to save our faith which is going extinct. You know, in the US, for example, the Southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s, but your population's growing, it's disappearing. In 2001 in the UK, we had 70% of people identifying as Christian. Now it's less than half, and you're about that now in the US. You're just 23 years behind, and it's the same trend.

Religion's disappearing, and it needs to evolve philosophically. You need a proper philosophical defense of it. People like Bill Craig do a good job. I don't see why we can't just keep holding him up for the Christians. But this same old, just bet your soul on it, just go for it, take the leap of faith, is the thing and the reason why Christianity is going out of favor. Well, we have some real bad examples of it in this country too. We have some real distortions, you know, like the factory farming version of Christianity. What kind of stuff? Televangelists. These people that fill out arenas and they fly around in private jets and drive around

in Rolls Royces and brag about their stuff. Yeah. You know? I sort of want to tell a televangelist saying he has a private jet because it means he's closest to God and God can hear his prayers quicker. One of the guys, was that guy's name Richard Copeland? Is that his name? The guy that was confronted, he was confronted by this woman that was asking him

because she had heard that he said that he didn't want to fly commercial because then he would be flying with demons. And so she says to him, like, do you think that the passengers in commercial airlines are, listen to this. It's crazy. Here, Kenneth Copeland.

Here, put your headphones on. Commercial. Why you don't want to fly commercial? Why have you said that you won't fly commercial? commercial airlines are, listen to this. It's crazy. Here, Kenneth Copeland. Here, put your headphones on. It's just kidding. Why you don't want to fly commercial? Why have you said that you won't fly commercial? You said that it's like getting into a tube with a bunch of demons. Why do you think that? No, listen to me just saying.

Not the people. The main reason is because of the need. If I flew commercial, I'd have to stop 65% of what I'm doing. That's really the main reason. Isn't it true that you want to fly commercial so that you can fly in luxury? How much money did you pay for Tyler Perry's Gulfstream jet, for example? Well, for example, that's really none of your business, but... Isn't it the business of your donors? Listen, I paid. You kind of caught me off guard here, okay? Certainly.

Look at his eyes. If you'd like to come out here, I'd like to give you a chance to catch your breath and have a conversation. We don't want to catch you off guard. I love Inside Edition. You gotta get this now. Hey, you listening to me? My wife thinks Inside Edition is oh yeah. Now, thank you Lord. Help me. Let me pray. It gets better. Here it goes. I'm becoming for a preacher to live a life of luxury and to fly around in private jets.

What's your response to that? Very simple. It takes a lot of money to do what we do. We have brought over a hundred, let's see, the latest figures just came out. I don't trust any men with fingernails like that. 122 people. Let me give you another example. 122 million? Last May I was scheduled for Lagos, Nigeria. That's a long ways. I had a week off and I was scheduled for Peru. And I prayed about it and I thought, I'm not missing that dedication in Jerusalem. Without the airplane that we have

that I bought from Tyler Perry, and I didn't pay anywhere, Tyler's one of the greatest guys. He made that airplane so cheap for me, I couldn't help but buy it. Well my question then, I think he's barely a human being. I want to get to the demons because people are very concerned about that comment. Here goes dark. I love your eyes and here's what happened. We flew in 21 days, 70 hours, 40,000 miles, touched five continents and preached face to face personally with twenty five thousand people. Do you ever use your private jets to go visit your vacation homes for example?

Yes, I do. Okay, again getting back to the comment, you said that you don't like to fly commercial because you don't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons. Do you really believe that human beings are demons? No, I do not. And don't you ever say I did. We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but principalities and powers. Can you explain what you meant by that term then? Just explain because it's really simple. You said you didn't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons. What did you mean? The, well, let me ask you.

Do you think that people that fly commercial are demons? If you give me a chance to talk, sweetheart, I'll explain this to you. But it's a biblical thing. It's a spiritual thing. It doesn't have anything to do with people. People. I love people. Jesus loves people. Okay, we can kill it. We get it. It's like he's been possessed by a demon, isn't it? His eyes when he like jumps up the love people. Jesus loves people. Okay, we can kill it. We get it. It's like he's been possessed by a demon, isn't it? His eyes when he like jumps up for defense. So that's part of the problem that we have with religion in this country. It's like we have factory farming religion too.

He skipped all the verses about like selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor, and not fitting through the eye of a needle. Yeah, he skipped everything. Right, you went right to private chat. Tyler Paragame is such a great deal. He's such a great guy. Good. You can tell that he's just fumbling, isn't he? Just trying to find anything to say. The eyes on that guy. Like, good Lord. If you wanted to show me like an AI generated vision of a guy who looks like he's possessed. Wild, wild behind the eye. Maybe it's wild with the Lord. I think here's something I think the atheist does need to concede though, right? I was

just thinking about it as we're watching this clip. Look at those fucking eyes. Jesus, that would scare the shit out of me. I think the theists, if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God, right? And we talk about all this evil which we've just explored, maybe we can jump and bring the multiverse in on this as well, is that you know, if you're a up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here, is it? It's like five, six hours? Yeah, probably. Eugene Nagasawa working there has got this brilliant argument where he says,

given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimists. Like you can't be happy and pleased to be alive and think the world is a good place and believe in all of the evil that you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity. So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world. I can say that the world is neutral at best, right, or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic. I think this is the

difficulty of it all is that, and again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, Is that and again to give another quote from Camus that I love he says um, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas Threatened at the height of royal happiness, right? So you're in this moment where you think actually my life's pretty good And then you remember all of the the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all We're any sort of left like that's the state for the atheist Well, and that's that this is the atheist. And that's, this is, I mentioned like that notion of the absurd from, it's Nagel's idea, like I wish I was

bigger and I last longer. And maybe that resonates with people. Maybe that's just Thomas Nagel. Is that, right, the real problem of the absurd and the meaninglessness of life for us as agnostics and atheists is we desire or want meaning from the world, but the world sits there cold, dark and empty. It doesn't respond to us. It's worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you, because at least they're there, right? The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that love and affection. The universe, we ask for meaning, we ask for purpose, and it doesn't respond. I love this quote from Michael Hauskatter from Liverpool, who used to be my head of department. He says, this notion of the absurd

rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons. Here be cold and dark and emptiness." And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world. But that, I think, is, Camus says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide. They kid themselves and think that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis. They don't want to feel that feeling. Like, it's a really uncomfortable feeling. You know, there's three great books by Camus which I highly recommend. One, The Outsider or The Stranger. A lot

of high school students read this book. And the main character starts off his mom just dies and he doesn't care. And then he goes to the beach and just shoots some random guy and he doesn't care. And then he's put on death row and he dies. And he still doesn't care. And you're reading it as the reader like, what's wrong with this guy? But he's mirroring the world's indifference. He doesn't like, that's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world. In his next, in one of his next books, The Fall, the characters trying to find meaning, or better put, trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins. Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists. When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all-forgiving Father figure to

take that away from us. Like, we have to live with it. I think as someone who's never embraced Christianity, I have no idea what that's like, what a gift that is to do something bad and be forgiven by God from it. It seems like a great life hack. Yeah, it does. Can I push back on this idea that the world's meaningless though? Yeah.

That it's cold and meaningless and uncaring? Well, if you're a human being, all you truly know is human experiences. You know your experiences in the world, and you know there's part of the world, there's parts of the world that at any given time are cruel and Terrible, but there's also parts of the world that are wonderful There's things that you do find meaning in like I assume you find meaning in this conversation

You find meaning in a great dinner date a fun time with friends a vacation Things that you like to do for a living philosophical pursuits. I'm sure in your well all kinds of different things people find meaning in. And they enjoy and love, and they have happy moments. And you go for a hike in the mountains, and it's beautiful, and you feel spiritually enriched by touching nature. There's meaning out there.

It's not just not like the lottery. You don't just get all of it all at once, and that's all you get, and you live in a utopian world. No, one of the things that makes meaning so wonderful when you do find it in this world is that so much of life feels like there's no meaning. It feels like you don't connect to it. So when you do connect to something,

whether it's groups of people, your family, your loved ones, your friends, whatever you do for a living that's unusually rewarding. You are one of the lucky people that's on the right frequency, and that frequency is what we should all gravitate towards and try to attain. I think the problem with a lot of things that are written is that they're written from an individual's perspective, and that person might have been depressed.

That person might not have had a good connection to their community or to friends or to loved ones. They might not have had a great personality. They might not have been a fun person to be around so they didn't really attract a lot of people that wanted to have good times with them. We do find tremendous meaning in this life. We do. It's just not everywhere and you got to look for it. You got to work for it and once you get it you you gotta maintain it. I think that's exactly right. But it's a different kind of meaning to the one which the world ultimately lacks.

So, call one meaning with an uppercase M, like meaning with a capital M. So the world's ultimate meaning. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you mean the world or as human beings interface with the world? Yeah, as human beings as well. Like, if God exists for the Abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout

their lives and to the end of their life. What we're talking about or you're describing there is what you might call like not the meaning, but like a meaning within life. And there's a problem here, which is... You are the only thing that you're aware of that interfaces with this universe that you're consciously connected to. You are you. You are you. You are you. The you that's talking out of your mouth right now is the only you that interfaces with your world. If you find meaning in that world, the world has meaning.

Yeah, but it depends, like, again, when you strip away all of these Judeo-Christian principles, we're left trying to find worthwhile meanings to non-worthwhile ones. So let's say you said the meaning of your life, Joe, was like counting blades of grass on your front garden, right? And I said my meaning was like being a doctor and helping people. I would hope there's other things other than counting blades of grass. Yeah, but imagine you thought that, right? Imagine you said the meaning of your life was counting blades of grass. And I said mine was helping people with like medical care. I have the more meaningful life. But if what you're saying is true, if it's like, there's no ultimate

meaning and all meanings are just created by the person. Like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful. We need some kind of way of differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile. And so there's a problem there. I think we can solve that problem which is although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering, right? The reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right and you're doing something which... I'm not willing to concede that it doesn't have meaning.

But the... That the world does not have meaning. Oh, like as a whole? Yeah. I think it's moving in a direction and I think it's moving in a very specific direction with the apex predator, which is human beings And I think if you looked at if you were an alien you visited earth I've said this before so I apologize people heard it and you looked at us you would say well What does this thing do well it makes better things? It's all it does

It's all they do and everything that's hardwired into people Just think about the stupid things that are hardwired into people like materialism. Like you can't keep these things. Why are you piling up things and you're 80 years old? Why is Kenneth Copeland buying a jet? Right? What is it? Well, materialism forces innovation because you always want the latest and the greatest things. It's one of the many motivations. Status is attached to these things as well. That's another motivation that pushes innovation. If I looked at us from another perspective I was another life form. I'd say it makes technology and it makes better technology every year with a fever pitch

I mean, it's it's it's few every year. There's a new phone every year. There's better computers every year There's better chips Samsung just came out with a new battery That is gonna be on EVs that has a 600 mile range and charges in nine minutes. You're not sponsored by Samsung, are you? No, but it was just a new article that just came out that they were talking about in terms of game changers, in terms of technological innovation. That's what we do. We do it constantly.

I think that means we make our artificial life. And that's what I think we're here for. I want to separate the meaning, though, from like the thing we do, right? There's a... Define meaning. Well, in the thing that you're giving there, it's like, it's called like the is-or fallacy, right? It is the case that certain things do this thing. Right.

So they ought to be doing it more. So like you might run a similar argument. Imagine you come down to earth as aliens ages ago, let's say like 30,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food. What are the humans? They just eat sugary food. That's their meaning, that's their purpose or something. You'd go, no, like the meaning or the purpose of them or their natures isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past. Right, so when I'm talking about meaning, I'm saying in the context of Christian beliefs, it's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you, right? It's imposed from elsewhere. Like, it's quite odd to think about what it would

be like outside of religious beliefs, because that's the problem of agnosticism, right? It's an absence, or better put, I keep saying that the world is meaningless. What I really mean is it's seemingly meaningless. Like, it's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be, or it feels like it ought to be. So it's not the case that the world is meaningless. But I think maybe our disagreement here, or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is, I think as you mentioned earlier, like you're quite a fan of these like pantheistic views, where the world is moving towards like a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and the like.

So if you hold that view, then yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning. If there is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with, then yeah, if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process, then it can be meaningful. But there are problems with that view too. So I don't want to like, I don't want to cash out and go, that is the view. Hence why embrace the agnosticism. It seems like meaning is a very human-centric concept. Meaning to us means that something makes sense, that it's noble and ethical and moral, and it's the right way. It's the most intelligent way to advance and exist.

And that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning to. But I would push back on the whole thing if aliens came and found primitive man just eating berries. It depends on how primitive, right? Even if you discover chimpanzees in the Congo and you go and study them like that Chimp Nation documentary on Netflix, they have a very interesting social structure.

They have alpha males and they have bonds between the other males and they have neighboring tribes, they fight over resources. Like you'd be fascinated. And if you went further ahead a few million years and saw that they've developed tools, so now they figured out how to skin animals and throw Spears he'd be like, oh, I see where this is going

Like their meaning is to continue getting better at this then they develop metallurgy then they they figure out combustion engines how to harness Electricity and like whoa. Okay. Now we're cooking these things have a meaning It's just all the the chaos to us because we're personally meaning. It's just all the chaos to us because we're personally attached to other human beings and we see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world and not just terrible for you know violence that other human beings commit to but also just what we're doing to the earth itself like in terms of natural resources. What we're doing to the ocean is fucking insane. And you would say well this thing is making a better version of itself.

It's going to make an artificial life. It's probably going to happen within our lifetime, and that might be the progression of life everywhere in the universe, and that might be what God really is. Intelligent life and creativity might be a seed of God, and that if it keeps going and this biological life gives birth to digital life that can make better versions of itself instantaneously and then continue to do so, it will eventually have the unimaginable power to harness every single element that exists in the universe. Yeah, this view is pretty close to, I think you've had it on the show before, Philip Goff,

who's my colleague at Durham. He's currently defending a view just like this, right? He thinks that the fundamental nature of the world is consciousness that is identical to what we should describe as God, and that this is a process by which we're becoming, making the world better and we have parts to play in that and that's what constitutes a meaningful life. So I sort of got two problems. But that's the thing that you keep saying that meaningful. Like it comes, like the meaning there for for Goff would be something like the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before,

and if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful. If you're sat on your ass not doing anything and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then your life isn't as meaningful as the person. So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful in this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be. Well, let me push back against that, because what about Buddhist monks that spend their entire life celibate just meditating in a room? Are they, is their experience less meaningful?

Is their achieving, they're actually communicating with what they believe is God. Matthew 14.1 They weren't the people I had in mind when I said people sat on their ass doing nothing. Well, they are sitting on their ass doing nothing though. Matthew 14.2 Okay, I'll bite the bullet. I'll say, like, there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a Buddhist monk sat on your ass doing nothing. Although here's the value of what they are doing, right?

Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world, which is a unified field of consciousness. So hypothetically, if something like Goff's view of this fundamental consciousness is right and the Buddhist monks tap into this and they tell all of their mates in the town and they all come to see it to be true and they all contribute towards it it then that is meaningful. If you sit on your arse in a cave doing absolutely bugger all for your whole life you never tell anybody about it then I don't see that as being as meaningful as being an NHS worker or fighting to defend your country or something like this.

I mean there's a classic versions of stories right like the the king's son the wealthy kid that never had to do anything just sits around getting grapes fed to him like what a piece of shit you know like yeah we know like we would like as human beings we would like things to continue to move in a better direction every presidential campaign in the United States is all about making it a better place yeah or like when you've like kids? If they're sat around doing nothing, just playing video games, something,

you go outside, we say stop wasting your life, right? There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards, individually and holistically. But the problem I think, and why I don't embrace this view myself, is that there's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say, you contemplate your own being, let's say, and

you look inside of yourself. What's it like to be a physical entity? And you look inside your mind and there's this consciousness, there's this qualia or being or experience. People like Schopenhauer say that because we don't know the inner nature of things, and Galen Strawson here at University of Texas at Austin says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics. It tells you what things do but not what things are. So let's say, for the sake of argument, underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness. And then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion, and you say that as a whole, all of the universe is one big conscious mind. You've got a problem

there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something like this. You take all of these little conscious particles in the table, like how do they add up to one unified mind like they do in my brain, right? I don't have loads of little experiences going on now. I have one coherent stream of consciousness seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights. It's not like there's loads of little conscious experiences happening. So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience? And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness underlying everything, how does that big godlike mind decombine into little minds? Like why is my experience not your experience? Why

is it here rather than there? And it doesn't seem like although we might have some like knee-jerk reaction answers that question Philosophically, we can't draw the boundary Like the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when I'm saying that the whole thing is cool Let's explore it like what would be the reasons why we would have individual experiences and a collective consciousness You can have reasons for it as in like, let's say... What would be the benefits of having individual experiences? There could be benefits and there could be reasons for it. Like, in terms of, let's paint this pantheistic picture of, again, the reason and the goal of the universe and life.

Like, if I see myself as here rather than there, you know, it's maybe perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual. Actually, I'm starting to think about it. I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart. Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place despite the fact that you just want to buy private jets and look after themselves. Maybe that's a better world. Pete Slauson Well, don't you think that it motivates activity?

It motivates movement? And to have all these different consciousnesses like competing with each other and comparing to each other? This motivates people when you meet people. What is inspiration, right? When you meet someone, you're inspired by them. It literally makes you a better person. It can make you better to see a great musician play. It can, you leave inspired. You might go home and write something.

You might be in the middle of a novel and write something completely connected to your experience that you had watching that concert. And that all these different examples of people we admire, like, God, I wish I was more like that guy. Try to be more like that person. You know what I say all the time? Aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid. Does actually become that guy like it's possible, right?

If you could fake it for a little while, you know, when you're 21 years old trying to pick up a girl, aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid. Drunk. Well, why are you drunk? You're drunk because it loosens your inhibitions, you become more jolly, you're a fun person. Yeah, okay, these are good reasons for perhaps why like you break up the mind in that way. But they don't tell us how. They tell us why the universe would want to do it. But still it doesn't carve out the boundaries between why our experiences are different from each other's if we're a part of this big global mind.

Well that competition has to exist all throughout nature, right? There's no way that the mountain lion and the deer can share our consciousness because the deer will be like, don't eat me. What the fuck are you doing, man? Why are you eating me? And they have to be an individual for them to compete. They have to have their own needs and their own desires and then this is how natural selection works because if it doesn't happen then there are no predators, there are no prey, and then life does not advance.

Matthew 11 Yeah, this still gives you a good why, like a really strong why. It seems that the better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like loads of individual minds, like you say, all able to do lots of different things. I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right? And I was quite surprised because in the past I came, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool and I remember showing them one of these clips and it was of Musk talking about like the origins of consciousness And I was using it as like this is like the general public opinion of it You learn more about the brain

This is like his neural link stuff and you solve the problem and we spoke about like how that won't happen But recently he came out and said something I thought was really interesting Which is essentially the view we're talking about here, panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere. He said, well, in order to have consciousness, there'd need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds like me and you. But in the origin of the world and the Big Bang, it was just hydrogen. So what hydrogen

gets more and more complex until it gets right, gives rise to consciousness. And he sort of, he gave this, he gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now. He said, either consciousness is nowhere, as in it's just an illusion, it's a trick of the brain, it's pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there's not really a rabbit, or it's everywhere. And I think given that you can hear me and see me now, and this is what Descartes' cogito ergo sum is, right? You're 100% confident that you are conscious right now. So it's not a non-existent thing. So following that reasoning, which is being embraced by public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way

in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience. But leaving aside the how the big mind can break itself up, there is still a question, this might be a bit of a boring terminological one, so you can tell me to shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary recording. But it's the idea that I spoke about earlier that all theists think that God is the perfect being. If God exists, God has to be perfect. Like you can't have a unicorn with no horn on its head, like you need cornu, one horn. A unicorn has to have one horn. In the same way a triangle needs three corners, God needs to be perfect. But on this definition, it seems like God isn't perfect. At the beginning of time,

if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect then. There was a greater being that God could have been. And even in the fullness of time, perhaps God won't be as perfect as the being which is described by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. So what we're seeing is people embracing, I think this is Goff's term as well, I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him, he's describing himself as a heretical Christian. So to be a Christian, he thinks, you don't need to believe in the virgin birth, you don't need to believe in the resurrection, you don't need to believe that God's perfect, but you can still believe that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of, and that there is something God-like at the essence of it all. I think that's the kind

of view that we need to start carving out, like, theisms on the decline. I was just speaking about the numbers. The problem with this new idea is that someone's going to be at the head of it. That person's going to be like Kenneth Copeland. It's just a human thing that we do. And to push back on this question of why God would want to have the consciousness is all separated, or what's the reason for it, everything's separated. I mean, everything in the world, right, everything in this room is constructed of atoms, and most of it is empty space, but yet some of it is a table and some of it is a microphone and some of it is you and some of it is me. So if you look fractally at what the observable universe, what we're aware of in terms of

like what exists physically, right? We're aware of subatomic particles. We don't understand them. We're aware of them. We know they blink in and out of existence. Spooky action at a distance. It's magic stuff. It's wild things.

That's the very nature of the matter of the world in which we find ourselves conscious in. And then as you expand through that, every single thing, even plants and animals and everything is an individual. It's all individuals. And that process of all these things being individuals seems to be a part of this expansion and growth and a part of natural selection and a part of evolution and a part of this constant state of improvement.

Everything is moving towards a state of deeper and deeper complexity. Everything improves. The elk gets big muscles to run away from the wolves and all these things happen in order for these beings to prosper and survive and to keep this healthy balance as this weird ape develops electronics. Yeah, I mean I think that seems to be, that's the general view I think, that it's the zeitgeist of the time, it's the feeling of the age that we think in such a way. But there is still that movement, and this is my view, I just want to shed light on like an alternative idea which is, you know, go back to Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion, that we live in this block universe, this big

one thing, and have you heard of Zeno's paradox? You've done this one before? No, no, what's that? Zeno's paradox is great. So you've got two, like, see these two cups here. And to go from that cup to reach that one, it needs to go from point A to point B, say in the middle. And then to get another half, it has to do another half journey from point B to point C. And that goes on infinitely for Zeno. Like there's always another halfway point in between point A and point B, because you

need to keep making these half journeys, which seems ridiculous, because we quite clearly can move the cup next to the other one, right? But theoretically, if time and space is infinitely divisible, then you can always make another half journey in between point A and point B. It gives the example of like a... And every step of the way.... And every step of the way.

Yeah, every step of the way. Like, is it Hercules or somebody racing a turtle? Maybe it's not Hercules. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, Achilles, there you go. So the turtle and Achilles are having a race. And the idea is like, for Achilles to get to the finish line, Achilles needs to go halfway, but then he needs to

get three quarters of the way. And then there's another half point between three quarters in the full way, and it will go on and on and on and on. So the answer to the question, who wins the race out of Achilles and the turtle, is neither of them win. It's a draw. No one can finish the race. But we quite clearly finish races. We quite clearly move the cups next to each other. So Zeno thought and people like Heraclitus thought as well that this means that it's all an illusion Like the idea of change and motion isn't actually something that's out there in the world. It can't be possible So when you're seeing change in motion, what are you saying?

Did but did they understand evolution back then? Not long so that they know but not by a long shot. So yeah, so we should we still be listening to them It seems like seems like that's not true Well take like Einstein tells us and this is let's do that bring in the multiverse for this too, right? Einstein told us that space is like stretchable, right? So it expands and so we have the moment of the Big Bang and the universe or existence as a whole we might say space and time the universe or existence as a whole, we might say, space and time, evolves according to the law of inflation.

So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space. And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created, or one or two later. So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized. So there's worlds according to this view where we're having this conversation in Spanish or God forbid French, right? Or it was a very nearby possible world where we're having this conversation

in Italian, German, or Japanese, right? Exactly the same words, exactly the same pauses, infinitely. There are worlds though, and I think the real question we want to ask, there are a bunch of these multiverse views. We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy, Mary Midgley clarifying these concepts. This is an idea my friend Ellie Robson convinced me of recently that it's a really important job with philosophy. We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse. We keep using the word but you've had Sean Carroll on the show, he's fantastic and I've spoken

to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. You've got views in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility. The easiest one to illustrate it's just this inflation model that I've just given. But what we really want to know is why this like matters. Like does this change the value of the world? Because there are universes where little girls are born, they're tortured for their whole lives, they're executed and it repeats, right? There are universes where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better, right? So there are good universes too. But on the whole, that means you've got an uncountable number of bad universes and an uncountable number of good universes.

So I think if the multiverse theory is actually true, as agnostics or atheists, we should be really fucking worried. Like, this is a horrible state of affairs. If there are all of these worlds, if you actually believe that they exist, you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and being all excited about existence. Like, we should be really concerned. But we're really concerned about things that we're not even sure exist that are horrific? Yeah, well, you should be against it. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's existential angst to the power of a thousand.

There's a couple of problems there, right? Well, there's three big problems that come out of it. The main one, which you've just linked to, is like, if you're trying to weigh up the overall value of existence, is the world, i.e. the multiverse, a good thing on the whole or a bad thing? And I think if you say that there is, let's just say it's infinite, even though it might not be, if you say there's infinite suffering and infinite goodness, that doesn't seem like you can be optimistic. You'd have to go on the whole, the existence is like neutral mixed, or maybe it's bad. Maybe you don't want a city where

everyone's getting tortured next door to a city where everyone's living a blissful life. But in our own experience on earth, horrific things and beautiful things are happening simultaneously. And generally speaking, more beautiful things than horrific, but we count, we concentrate on the negatives. Yeah. You know, to sit around and ponder the multiverse being an infinite number of evil civilizations destroying themselves and torturing themselves. Okay, how is that any different than thinking about demons? How is that any different than thinking about the puppet masters of the universe controlling all of our minds. Yeah. It's like it's just mental masturbation.

Like there's no way you're going to know whether or not there's a multiverse of people suffering. So to not be happy in this beautiful existence because perhaps there's a multiverse in which infinite suffering is occurring seems to me to be a giant waste of an amazing trip like the trip that we're on right now is Earth 2025 Western civilization pretty fucking cool pretty cool And I think your job is if you're so fortunate that you're in this position to enjoy this very bizarre place in history Where it's the strangest time perhaps ever that human beings have been alive and we're going through it. You could sit around all day and think, oh, but in other multiverses people are just getting eaten by other people. Maybe.

Well, it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that like if you it just means that you can't when you contemplate all of existence, think that it's an overall good thing. So in that sense, we don't know know we don't know what it is Really don't know for the multiverse There's so there's there's probably an infinite number of Multi if the multiverse exists, and if there's not a limited number of universes But it's an infinite number of universes. It's probably an infinite number of universes that are also fucking amazing. They're all probably competing just like all life is on this planet.

And what if the universe is constantly in a state of evolution itself? Why would we limit that to the physical things that we can currently observe? If we know that there's stellar nurseries, we know how planets get born and stars, we're very aware there's this process going on Why do we assume this process is completed and perfected? Maybe this process is also moving in a better direction constantly just like human life is just like Human civilization is maybe that's something that exists everywhere in the universe and that the universe itself is Advancing to a

more powerful state or a better state. Well this is good. So let's say, entertain the multiverse viewer. Let's pretend it's true, right? And so you've got infinite pleasure, happiness and infinite suffering and pain. So I think once you do, you know, you minus one from the other, you've got a neutral set of existence. Like, let's just, let's say this. So on balance, it's about the same. So if you're a pantheist, and you believe in the God of the multiverse, if you embrace multiverse theism, then you can't believe that God is good in the same way.

There's also a problem which is, you mentioned something like the process, right? But there are worlds in which this process has already been realized. It doesn't really matter if our world reaches that or not. In the grand scheme of calculating the amount of good and bad in the world, you might think that-

Explain that again, say that again. Well, you might think that like, some people say stuff like this, right? I want to like stop eating meat or stop taking long-haul flights but really when it comes down to it it doesn't really matter whether I buy that chicken or take that flight it's not gonna impact the overall good and bad that's in the world it's a drop in a huge ocean that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of it if the multiverse theory is true something like that hits a little bit harder. If your goal is to make

existence as a whole greater or better, then it's nothing compared to the infinite suffering and pain that's already out there. You can't change the overall value of existence. I still think and I'm with you on this, I'm sort of following the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out fully But you know now we've said that I still think there's a point in being moral in developing your own character Sorting out your own house or community or country or continent and and the world it seems like that's what our job is Yeah, it seems like that's where we still work. Yeah, what you keep referring to as meaning that's what we get meaning Yeah, I think that's fine. There's there's other problems though that seem to fall out of this as well Right, which is like we have a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual subjective conscious minds

You know when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today is the same person born 31 years ago and the same person and the halfway point between that again to go back to Zeno. Like how's the, how am I the same person throughout time? I think the best answer to this is something like I have the same capacity for conscious experience. If it was stream of consciousness, that would mean every time you drift off during me talking now, then you would die and you'd be born again when your stream of consciousness re-emerges. Or if it was, yeah, like if you say Joe Rogan is that stream of consciousness, that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now, and that stops because you drift off, that would

mean your stream of consciousness has ended. Think of it like sleep. When you go into like N. Ren sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences, let's say, you would die according to that view. Or the reviews in philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity. Joe Rogan is the person that believes, I don't know, that Marshall is golden retriever is fantastic and that consciousness is the fundamental nature of stuff. But then if I were to strip those beliefs away from you, the psychological continuity of you would say Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore. Because I don't exist anymore. Yeah, I get you. I think it's like the thing that gives you your consciousness.

The drifting off thing doesn't make sense to me because drifting off is just a failure to connect. Yeah, but you're still conscious. It's not like I'm dead, like everything goes black and I don't know anything. I'm thinking about other things. My stream of consciousness just stop paying attention to you. When I if I dripped off, I never drift off entirely. I don't go to sleep. Well, you're having Yeah, but when you sleep, you have it right? Yeah, but when you sleep, you dream like, right? Yeah, but when you sleep, you dream. Like, what is going on there?

We don't even understand that. You don't think there's ever a moment when you don't have an experience? Well, you don't have a conscious experience because you're not conscious. Oh, that will do. Right, but what is going on? Like, why do we have such vivid dreams?

Like, what is going on with consciousness in regards to REM sleep? We don't totally understand that. We don't really know what that is. It's a bit of a, even then, it might seem like a bit of a problem, right? Take out like copy and paste teleportation to really put it out there.

You know, I copy all of the parts of you, I destroy them and recreate them elsewhere. Right, like Star Trek. Yeah, Star Trek's, I don't know much about Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty. It's different on Star Trek. I don't, it's not copying. Beam me up, Scotty. It's different on Star Trek. It's not copy and paste. This sounds so fucking nerdy.

Isn't it? Yeah, I'm really embarrassed to talk about this. Well, it's not copy and paste, but it's like they take you and they beam you to another planet and you don't exist here anymore, but you exist over there. But some nerd told me that when the beam beamed, do you like Star Trek? Yeah. Sure. I shouldn't call you that.

It's okay. I was a kid. So when you're getting beamed around in Star Trek, it's not copy and paste right? Paste no, it's not cut. Oh, it's cut. It's cut and paste here. Okay, so it would be cut and paste I copy you I recreate you right copy and paste if I made another Joe Rogan And then we've got the problem that right sort of Paul Rudd has in that Netflix show, which is great Living with yourself. Oh, no, I haven't oh, it's gold of himself. Yeah Yeah, he said that like you can't give that power to dictators like if you can like yeah You know when I was talking to Kurzweil and he was talking about downloading consciousness into computers

I'm like what's to stop someone from doing that a thousand times. What's to stop someone from making an army of Donald Trump's? Yeah, you can't you can't stop if you could do it once you could keep doing it especially as technology advances oh it's a gold the Paul Rudd one he bet they recreate him but as a better version of himself no it's all of his friends want to hang out with the other one his wife wants to be with no yeah no he's just killed himself he's already here I wonder if he shot himself in the head he would just be that other guy in Star Trek what happens is you carry on having experiences they beam you someone told me there's an episode where you see what? It's like to be teleported and it's just like this world of things and lights around you

So it's not like the lights go out even for a split second, right? But on the copy and cut and paste version, it would be that second. Well, it is an interesting question because if consciousness is not local and you download someone, like what, you know, if you do take someone out of this physical existence and put them somewhere, but then they don't have a soul, they have this bizarre vessel that can no longer communicate

and then we'll realize like oh we fucked up Yeah, we got to go find out where that guy's consciousness got dropped off along the journey I think it probably does get dropped off. It probably needs the same capacity there to begin with You're probably an antenna for consciousness an antenna for it. Yeah, you're probably You're probably a physical thing with a lot of biological requirements that's connected to some sort of consciousness that sees itself as an individual but is completely connected to all the life forms around it. What makes you, because I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding

these views, right? What's your motivation for, I'm not sure if this is your view, but even entertaining it, right? It might seem like a They call them like just so stories right in philosophy, right? You can tell a tale about what it might be but why take that tale you're telling seriously First of all not completely connected to this but I think it's possible that what consciousness is is almost like a giant motherboard and We are all connected to that motherboard as individuals.

But that we share this one thing together. And I think we really become aware of that when the community comes together, when there's a tragedy, when there's an event, something happens, we all mind meld together. And I think the individual, the biological entity that is you and that is me, has all of these requirements that it has to meet in order to stay alive and to move forward and to progress in their civilization and culture. And that this is a different

thing than the entire consciousness that we share. But we share it with each other so much so that we can't be alone. I mean, people that are alone for too long go crazy. The worst they can do to you in prison is put you in solitary confinement. Yeah, I can think of much worse. We're social animals, right? So we do look for that, but that's still something, you need something stronger there, right?

So you go, we wanna connect with people, we wanna form these communities and bonds. In the face of tragedy, we come together and we support each other and we empathize with each other and we love and support each other. But like on a deep philosophical level, I'm still seeing the world through my eyes and not your eyes, right? So why think that gives us a reason to think that there is this unifying experience or mind that occupies all of space and time, right? What's the motivation for thinking something like that?

It's just a thought that it may be the case. It's not of I'm sure that that's what's going on. And also, this is a sort of a universal sentiment that gets told by people that have profound psychedelic experiences, that we're all sharing some sort of consciousness, some very bizarre connection that we don't totally understand and that the biological vehicle that we have that carries around the soul has these motivations and you will battle with these motivations in order to do the greater good. Do you think this is parallel with religious experience there?

Yeah, I think so. I think most religious experiences have their root in psychedelic experiences. Have their root, like Paul on his road to Damascus or Saul at the time. Certainly Moses and the burning bush. In fact, scholars in Jerusalem, they believe that what that was a metaphor

was burning a bush that contained dimethyltryptamine. If you think about burning the bush, right, and that's one of the ways that they consume psychedelic drugs is they burn them. And the acacia tree is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a very potent psychedelic drug. There's countless depictions of psilocybin mushrooms, both in ancient Egypt and in cultures all over the world. There's mushroom rituals that occurred. There's the sacred mushroom in the Bible, John Marco Allegro's book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, where he thought that the entire Christian religion had its origins in fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom therapy, that they were all having these rituals

and consuming these mushrooms. That's the Eleucinian mysteries, that they all got together and drank some sort of a potion, the kukion, that was a psychedelic potion and they devised democracy, and they figured out all sorts of very unusual philosophies from these psychedelic experiences. Yeah, do you think then, what makes you think that on the one case, let's say, someone takes a drug and they think that there is a fundamental conscious unifying mind behind the cosmos, right? That's person A. Person B has it and they see like the Easter Bunny or something running down the road. What makes, given that they have the same cause, person A's religious experience caused by psychedelics in this case more reasonable than person B's? Not more

reasonable. I think each each experience is probably valid and maybe person B that sees the Easter Bunny, he doesn't have the capacity for whatever reason, like his psychology is not strong enough to grasp the entire possibility of everything. That all of this is connected and they freak out and they compartmentalize and that's one of the things that happens to people that have bad trips, right? Bad trips are essentially you trying to control an experience that's uncontrollable and or maybe you go into that trip with a significant level of anxiety, maybe the loss of a loved one, a devastating moment in your life, you know, loss of job, loss of family, and you have this experience and you just freak the fuck out, which can happen too.

It seems that people have those experiences, perhaps without those obvious triggers as well though, right? In the literature, I do work with the Center for Inner Experience at Durham University. Some cool work from Jules Evans on this. It looks at people who have had like long-term negative effects because of taking psychedelics. It takes like 700 people because they're pretty under-reported. The data doesn't reflect them very well. Do you remember what they took? No, not off the top of my head. They say that a third of people who have long-term effects from the psychedelics, maybe you can pull this up Jamie, Jules Evans the guy's name, a third of people have negative effects lasting longer than a

year. One third of the entire group of 700. Yeah, and one sixth have it for longer than three years. And what were these effects? Feeling the sunlight on them and shaking with terror, seeing things that aren't there, extreme forms of anxiety. What do they give these people, acid? Well, perhaps. I'm not sure. This is the thing I think I'm concerned with as a We same kind of stuff when we talk about free speech

Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech? Right everyone everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line in different places So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is Similarly with psychedelics what we see are writers Philosophers documentary makers just give this blanket statement about them being good, but don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives. Like you see these documentaries on Netflix, right, that don't mention the bad things that happen to people. And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they

have certain similar comparable analogous properties about them. Then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data. The Alistair Hardy Research Center asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them, right? And the researchers were really surprised. Like Alistair Hardy himself said, I didn't think five percent of these were going to be people seeing the devil or having Satan watch over their baby every night, or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell, terrified for the next several years. These are religious experiences from people from what year was this? This is like the last 30, 40 years or so. I think this date was collected in the 80s maybe.

And these people, had they been diagnosed with any mental illnesses? The data, like they just asked for them to account to give their examples of these experiences. But what's notable is, first of all, the phrase religious experience and it being negative is kind of like oxymoronic. Right, we never think of that.

Yeah, we don't. And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff. So let's say if it's about 5% and that's a modest generalization, right, given they didn't ask for it. Let's say it's about 5%. And then you take the number of people that have claimed to have had religious experiences, then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are Zoroastrian, Jains, people who are Jewish. We consider them significant minorities. Add all those groups together to the, I think it's in between maybe one or two million people have had negative religious

experiences. And lay out all the boring maths in a bucket I had out of the shed and say like, look, my point there was if you're a Christian, then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones if you want to accept religious experiences. You can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian. Right. But the deeper point there is like, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences.

And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well. They're scared, they're ashamed, they don't want to talk about the negative. In my life, I've probably known about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs, whose lives have fallen apart because of it. In my life, I've probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs whose lives have fallen apart because of it. I was reading through this study. It was just a survey, but I thought this was very interesting. Participants were active, still take psychedelic drugs in response.

333, 34, 54.9% said yes, and 246, 40.5% said no. 28 did not respond to the question. They were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement. I believe that the insights and healing gained from psychedelics when taken in supportive settings are worth the risks involved. The frequencies across the four response points to this question, strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, are shown in Figure 2. In total, 89.7% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. This is good.

So have we taken from that 10% of people say that we shouldn't be? So it's like 10%. It does make sense though that human beings vary so much biologically and we vary so much psychologically. You vary by what your experiences have been on this planet up to the point we take the drugs, where you're at in your life. I think the real problem is that they've been illegal for so long. We haven't been able to study what the correct dosage is, or what biological problems you

may have, like unique to yourself that makes you either allergic to these things, or having an extreme response, or a negative response. Medications you may be taking that you don't know interfere with them. We talked about that yesterday with Prozac, MAO inhibitors. There's a bunch of things that people take that will profoundly impact the way these drugs, I'm sure they probably screen for those, at least some of them when they did those studies, but I don't think there's anything in this life that's 100% good. I think most medications have side effects, even ones that have been hugely beneficial and saved countless lives. They have side effects, and some people are allergic to them,

and some people that just biologically don't agree with them. I think that's the case with psychedelics as well. Well, I want to just make it clear, right, so that I've sort of formed an overall view on it, which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've given there. It's that I don't want to say that people ought not to be using them or stuff like that. I think in controlled circumstances... Yeah. Oh, no, I don't think you are saying that. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that I don't deny the positive things that come from this. No, I think what you're saying is very important.

But there's 76 billion neurons there, right? And we don't know what they're all doing. And everybody is coming into it with a fucking different set of baggage. Yeah. Yeah. Some of that baggage you can't carry up the hill. Yeah. I think it's important to differentiate as well, and this happens with the problem of evil in philosophy of religion, is we differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is really bad things happen to me, so I'm abandoning my belief, and compared to the evidential problem, which is let's look at the big data, does that give me a reason not

to believe? And I recognize that as a person that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part that people that I care about have been their lives have been ruined because of this. But then I look at the big data and I think on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally. But I still think that there is a there's a big amount of data there about these negative experiences, which just aren't reported that aren't in

our data logs. And I'd be interested to know just how many there are and how severe they are when people sort of have these. I'm sure there's quite a few that people don't want to talk about and I bet they get a lot of pushback from the psychedelic community if they want to discuss it. Like all zealots, you know, they're psychedelic zealots. I think that's the real problem is the illegal nature of them. And the fact that, I mean, even just recently,

they denied FDA, denied MDMA to be used in clinical settings for veterans. They have to do more tests with MAPs, which is very unfortunate because that particular type of therapy has been very beneficial for people, especially veterans who've seen the horrors of war and to come back and try to psychologically deal with these things. To have some tools that we know are effective be denied to these people that went overseas and served and saw these horrific things and experienced these horrific things I just think is

unreasonable. And I think that the real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being governed by people that have never taken them. They don't really understand what we're even talking about. And I think that, I'm not saying it's the panacea for all, but I'm saying it's a tool. And I think it's been a tremendous tool to a lot of individuals. They've experienced some extreme changes of perspective and of their own personal connection to the world through these things that are very, very beneficial. I know multiple people that have just become completely different human beings after psychedelic experiences and much better, much more caring, abandoned whatever chip they

had on their shoulder and I think that can't be denied and I think it's another thing that's here to help us evolve. That's what I think. Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I'd like it to be the case that they were all like that, right? I know a friend who's over in Australia who's, you know, abandoned his family after taking these and ran off with a 70 year old man This guy's like 30 living in a mud hut now. What was he like before that? Just like me me and you right now And just like me just like

Just from the outside and no right, but the thing is it's not on the outside. It's psychologically That's really like where how does how strong is that person's foundation in the world? I had a housemate when I was at university who seemed from all measures grounded. I was happy enough to live in the room next to him, and we got along just like good friends. And he started taking psychedelics. We left university. Six months later, he started a Facebook live feed, and this was like just masturbating in front of all his friends and family Because he was just he'd lost his mind. Well like these This her I'd like to talk to that guy before all this shit went south and see how loony he was already

I knew a dude was a little bit loony and then he delved very heavily into the world of psychedelics and he became schizophrenic. I suspect that he was already schizophrenic before, that he was like, he had it under containment. But then he went nuts and just thought that everything was a psy-op and it was very strange. Very strange to talk to him, you know, thought everyone was a government agent. Very weird. Yeah. just weird, weird interface. And he had slipped completely into the world of paranoia, almost inexorably, I don't know how you'd pull the guy back to make him a normal person again.

And again, I don't know if he was a normal person before. I didn't know him that well. But I know he deteriorated. It's hard to know yourself as well, right? I think that like every other tool, you could abuse all tools. I think there's like every other tool you could abuse all tools, you know I think there's there's a lack of understanding of what the again the doses the the correct way to consume it What the biological factors that your unique biology? Yeah the way it might interfere with this experience Yeah, I just think all the things we've just said there right?

Yeah, is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation about this stuff. Absolutely. Like just at the start of your documentary just say don't do this. Like if you're gonna do this like you need to speak to medical like some kind again it's about legalization it's about safe use. Imagine being a shaman and you have to deal with these fucking wahoos taking a propeller plane over to your country just to have... Just to see what jobs to take next. You have no idea what's wrong with these people. You're dosing them up with ayahuasca in the middle of the jungle.

There's jaguars and snakes out there. These people are freaking out. I bet their version of... I bet... I would love to know. If we had real good data on these shaman adventures where people go to the jungle, how many of them lose their fucking marbles and are cooked forever after that? I don't know.

Well, it's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes to psychedelics. I mentioned free speech a moment ago, right? This is something which is huge in our culture at the moment. I was at your comedy club on Monday seeing, I've never seen Kill Tony before. But yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was great fun.

And afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards were asking what I'm talking to you about. And they started talking about free speech, because I'm obviously from the UK and wanted to know whether I supported Keir Starmer as if Keir Starmer was like this, like this, it's like Mao or something. I was like, there's no comparison. He's like, you're like Marxist there now, they're right. I was like, no, it's not quite like that.

We're terrified of everything going in that direction. Yeah, you are. Especially in Texas. It's like a... Texas is the last frontier. You think so? This is what America, like, Texas is what the rest of the world thinks America is. A bunch of freedom loving people with guns. Wild people playing

music, drinking all the time, that's Texas for real. I didn't think it was going to be like this. It's a fun place. The people in Austin are some of the best people in the last five days that I've came across. It's got a great vibe. The city has a very hopeful vibe and that sucks for me when I go back to Los Angeles because that was my home for so long. Whenever I go back it does not feel, I do not feel that vibe. But is that me? Is that my, you know, are there people that are like thriving and loving LA right now with all the craziness and the chaos? Perhaps. And maybe if I was a young man, maybe if I was 25 again and I moved to LA again now,

I'd be like, this is crazy. I love this fucked up place. This is awesome. Maybe I would. I probably would, knowing me. But the 57-year-old me is like, uh-uh. That place is ruined. Yeah, well, it seems like, I'm not sure if this happens in the UK

as well, especially with the, like we've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and stuff as of late, those three poor girls that lost their lives in Southport. You know, and it's a huge shame, because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar, right? The big shame is that people are going out of their way

to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right? Like every single politician in the UK condemns them. Less than 5% of people in the UK even sympathize with them, right? But there's an interesting question that comes out of that which we're not talking about,

which is the line of free speech, right? Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something like it's like uh you you can't be open with your thoughts and it's been interesting being here and experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment which is you know I think there are like free speech isn't an absolute I think there are free speeches and an absolute like right in the US or in Europe right there. You can't share You can't engage in like slander these laws against that You can't share sexually explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of freedom of expression Which might come under freedom of speech, especially if it's a violation of privacy of the child and it's also endangers them.

Yeah. So it's against the law. And so- So it's not as simple as free speech. That takes it to a completely different level because you're talking about images of innocent people. Well, if you were to take, okay, let's take an image. So you don't want to include, if you want to include images, plays, acts, symbols- Well, you can't dox people.

You can't put, you can't make threats. All those things are illegal. You can't threaten violence. You can't display a Nazi flag on your front lawn. You might be able to do that some places. Well, it was interesting. In the US, it was 1919 when the Supreme Court legislated against somebody for spreading anti-war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the US more generally. And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case. So there are things,

you might think that free speech is like intrinsically valuable, the thing which is more important than anything else. Nat. Yeah, but I would say that those people are wrong, and that if someone did have an opposition to the war, if you want to have a healthy society, you have to let those people express themselves. Especially when you read about the actual history of the war and you go, hey, maybe this could have been fucking prevented. You know? Like, and if people weren't so blindly allegiance to this idea of going over there and fighting.

Yeah. And my intuition is in that case, that was the wrong way to legislate against. But there are... Like when would you think free speech would be a good thing to stop? Well this is what I... What would be the boundary?

This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the show, because comedians are often the strongest offenders of free speech, right? It's an interesting conversation. Is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences,

the potential to flourish, be happy, and experience pleasure. So I take, even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to flourish, be happy and experience pleasure. So I take even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be, it is still subject to those other things. So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single scenario, except when it breaches the harm principle. And so the interesting question we need to ask is when does something breach the harm principle? So people famously say like,

so you can't shout fire in a crowded theater. If you know by shouting fire that there's going to be a stampede and two people will die, thought experiments, pretend those are the rules. You shout fire, two people will die, should we punish that person for doing it knowing that those two people would die? And you sort of go, I think it's fairly reasonable. It doesn't have to be 100% the case. We just need it to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person. So in that case, you

might go yes. So it breaches the harm principle. John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think it's like a corn dealer and saying like, you can write in a newspaper, like, the corn dealer is like, you know, he's the worst, he's exploiting us all. That's the reason we're hungry. But then he says, you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealer's house. And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky because there's more, the harm's not as direct. But what we're seeing is public intellectuals

who, back to our conversation earlier, like I'm a part of this team that just defends free speech no matter what. Even the most valiant defender of free speech might go, don't shout fire in a crowded theater. One of your comedians actually said, I'd shout theater in a crowded fire. I thought that was funny.

I'd even think it's OK to get people to stay in the fire. If that was what. But when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxis and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel. Let's burn it down. I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close

That's exciting violence. Yeah, so in that case, I think but people people aren't saying that right? We're just we're stuck in this these sweeping snappy statements, which are it's like all Wales 1984 It's like it's either anti free speech It's like no Tell me what kind of free speech you want to defend and why you want to defend it or else we're going to carry on being stuck in this. Well, the way Elon treats Twitter is whatever is illegal. You can't do things that are illegal. You can't threaten people. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Those are things that are illegal.

He legislates against those Twitter policies. Yeah, you can't do things that are illegal. You can have very controversial and unpopular opinions. Yeah. And you're allowed to do that. And that was what got you banned from Twitter before. But the problem with that is we found out through Twitter that they expanded that and kept expanding that to include include some things that a lot of people disagreed with. Like transgender athletes and sports criticizing them would get you banned.

Criticizing the lockdowns would get you banned. Saying anything negative about the mRNA vaccines would get you banned. And then we found out the FBI was involved. They were asking Twitter to censor posts. And there was just so much shit involved that made you go, well, this is not good. This is not free speech. And this is actually dangerous to society if you let the government dictate what people can and can't say. This is not free speech. This is actually dangerous to a society if you let the government dictate what people can and can't say.

Because they will do it to their best convenience. Like what's best for them? What makes their life more convenient? What makes their job easier? What makes it easier to control people? Tell people what to do and punish people that don't listen. Because if you lock them up, then you will automatically incentivize other people to toe the line and

That is what got scary and that's what's scary about government controlled speech Yeah, and I think that's what people are scared about in the UK when you see people Saying things they shouldn't be saying but they're saying it on Facebook and they're getting arrested and they're doing like 20 months in jail I haven't found in the might well be a more fringe example I think it's like 20 maybe Jamie you can live fact check me here maybe up to about 30 ish people have been prosecuted for stuff they've put online in the UK recently. I think 3,000 have been arrested. Have they? 3,000 arrested. No it's a it's a very strange story. Right it's a it's like what that encompasses it's like too

broad right? Is that what it is? It got repeated over and over again for like the last few years a few people might have been arrested There's a really egregious example. I'm doing a video. There's a video of a guy handing down a Sentence to a man who put something up on Facebook You know, I think I think bad behavior should be, it should be rightfully, everyone in the community that agrees it's bad behavior, they should shun that person. They should not want to shun them, not want to connect with them, not engage with them. Well what happens with like, you know, we've got the right-wing thug in our country, he's

not in our country, I think he's in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment, Tommy Robinson, who's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence. I'm not aware of him. I know the name but I'm not aware of his history. Well, same with like, we should shun people. He tweeted something along the lines recently. I'm going to paraphrase it, and Jamie, I'd be really grateful if you could fact check this one, because it might

be liable if I get the wrong... Okay, yeah, you don't want to get sued. He essentially said that people in Palestine are, or the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists, inbreds, and parasites. And given what's going on like there right now, right, I don't know anyone on the right who thinks, who uses such obviously degrading language. And that person's not being shown, he's having more attention than ever. He's got, he's record outreach right now. So that's not illegal what he said? I'm not sure if it's illegal. Did he say it online or did he say it in a

statement somewhere? He said it on a tweet. Oh, he put it on a tweet? Yeah, he put it on a tweet replying to somebody at some point. Again, as far as my knowledge, that's roughly what was said. I should say that. It sucks that there's idiots that will agree with those kind of things. What's going on? This is an interesting, you know, I'm pretty liberal when it comes to platforming and speaking to people who we disagree with. I think it's a real shame we get really polarized when we stop talking to people we disagree with.

Yeah, I agree. And there's very, very, very few people I won't have a conversation with. But when we're continually platforming someone like him in a moment like this, that does raise questions. And Peterson's had him on once. I think he's having him on again recently. That sort of thing. The opposite of me this isn't aware of the things that he said I'd be surprised do you have contact with Jordan yeah I'd be

surprised if you should tell him and see what he says about I mean a quick when when Tommy Robinson says something like the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country a quick Google would reveal to Jordan that like that's not true in terms of like the big big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things. Rutger Bregman. But is there an increase in violence? Well take Rutger Bregman. Did you know the Utopia for Realists guy? He's a big proponent of universal basic income.

We should find out what Tommy Robinson's quote actually was before we go on so we don't get in trouble. He's got a lot of quotes that are apparently in... I was trying to find that... Just try to... just Google that exact what he said. I tried to and it wasn't coming up. I'll show you what I was getting. Okay, show us what you're getting. I don't know if this... Tweets you what I was getting. Okay shows shows what you're getting just Tweets from Cyprus viewed 50 million times a day. It's had something about boys got a face you fucking hate doesn't he?

He's got a face from Peaky Blinders. Yeah, by order the Peaky Blinders. He looks like that, right? So what do we got here? What did he say that specific tweet? This was something about a stabbing somewhere What it's but what does he say? That specific tweet, this was something about a stabbing somewhere. But what does he say? Again, it doesn't even have to... Does it say what he says? No. Let me see if I can... It has a partial quote. I can see if I can dig it at the same time.

Okay, good. Look for it. See if you can find it. It says, claim far-right protesters have been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke in a post to receive 2.7 million views. Staffordshire police said that two men had been hit by an object but no stabbings had been reported. That's not what he was asking. Yeah, that's not the same one. See, we can find that tweet. I'm just turning this on now as we're going. The big point here though, when we're looking at, this is something Stephen Pink has always emphasized, right, the idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like

he does, and cherry picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas. We should look at the big data. Rutger Bregman points out wonderfully in his book Utopia for Realists that people that come to the US, for example, first generation migrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native population. The same is true for their children as well in the US and the same stories in the UK. They're less likely to be filling up our prisons than people who live there. Is this people that come over illegally as well as people that migrate legally?

Is it all the same? Is it lumped in together? It might be lumped in together. That's in, again, we're fact-checked in the city. I think the fear that people have is people that are coming here or coming to your country or going wherever illegally and altering the culture. Right? Yeah. Not assimilating, not adopting the English language, not adopting the culture.

I'm going to have to... That's okay. ... do that to multitask. No worries. But I see where you're going. So you think that that kind of talk should be illegal? I think during the violence upon people who are Muslim in the UK, attacks on mosques, attacks on people's lives, and the current state in Palestine. Even if he's completely wrong in saying those things.

My honest, my fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal. I don't know if that kind of dehumor, it's morally abhorrent, it's something we should reject and condemn, but should it be legislated against? I'm not sure. What's clear though is that people, to me, that are sharing those ideas, people who are platforming that person, helping that idea spread, are doing something again that doesn't have to be legislated against, but we should condemn as morally wrong as well. We should say you ought not do that, because you should know that that's not

that's reasonable I think what we should do is I mean the the Age-old anecdote is you combat bad speech with good speech. Hmm, you know, you can bad bad speech with better speech You have those people debate people that can lay things out Yeah in a way that it makes a very compelling argument that they're incorrect and then people could watch remember when I was a kid very compelling argument that they're incorrect and then people could watch. I remember when I was a kid my high school had a debate between Barney Frank who was a, I don't remember, I don't think he was a congressman at the time, I don't know, Massachusetts, but he was like, I think he was the first openly gay politician in the country and he

was debating a guy from the moral majority who was this right wing group at the time. So this is like the 1980s when I was in high school. And the guy had like an American flag pin on his lapel. And you know, he spoke and said all of his stuff and then Barney Frank kind of annihilated him. And it was interesting for me, it was fascinating to watch these two, and no one booed or hissed or pulled fire alarms.

They let this one guy speak his mind and. They let this one guy speak his mind, and then they let this other guy speak his mind. And we got a sense of who was correct. And in my eyes at the time, Barney Frank was correct. And I was probably 15 years old. I was like, wow, this is kind of cool. It was interesting to see this person, just with his view of the world,

make the other person's view of the world look foolish and make his very sort of rigid definitions of what should and should not be legal look preposterous. Yeah. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people nowhere near as the amount of people that you've managed to interview over the last, how long you've been doing this? How many years? 15 years. 15, like three or four times a week over 15 years as well. So a hell of a lot. So I've been going nine years, but interviews like once a month or something, right?

So nowhere near the amount of people. And what I've thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something, we don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that might be needed. And so I wonder if you've got any views on like what the moral responsibility is or what

the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just like say, read up on like a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something. So I know you've been like, there's been previous things, right, where people have said that you've like, you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail. Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem. Yeah, you know, it depends. Like if someone's known for a very specific stance that they take on something that I don't agree with yeah I will look into that and I will try to look at it from their perspective as well

Yeah, I'll try to find out how did this person come to this conclusion? Why do they believe this? What is the best way to approach this? How do I do this civilly so I get the most out of them I want them to feel comfortable while they're explaining this I don't want them to feel pressured and combative You know when people are involved in arguments and combative situations, they get very tense and it's very difficult. Then it becomes you against them. It's like, I try to like get as far away

from that sort of sensibility as possible. And just have, I just wanna just tell me what you think and I'll try to steel man it. I'll try to like figure it out. And then I'll say what I think. And I have to know where they stand first. I have to really understand like why why they come to that conclusion. I've had some disagreements with people about some pretty pretty

important issues and that you you gotta let that person express themselves. You got to figure out but the beautiful thing about a podcast as opposed to almost any other form of media is that no one is telling us what to do It's just you and me having this conversation We only met for like 10 minutes before we sat down and then we talked for three fucking hours Which is crazy how long we've been going for three hours now Yeah, so it's like it's an interesting way to see how a person views the world Yeah

Well, I think maybe so what what we do to avoid that problem, because we're just doing philosophy as well, right? We're just doing a philosophy podcast, and we say to them, we're just sticking with this book or this paper. And so we've got four researchers working on this, and we know all the ins and outs of it, like the back of our hand. So we can give the audience member the best analysis

they can get without having to go and do it themselves. When you're doing such a broad project like this on so many different topics, it's impossible to be able to do that. But I wonder if you think, a genuine interest and curious to hear your thoughts on it, is a better situation for our public discourse, a media in which we've got lots of different, like let's say podcasts, for example, lots of different podcasts, lots of different hosts who all like specialize in a different thing in order to analyze. Or do you think that having this

general public facing podcast, which has not an area of specialty with people talking about things which are, you know, in some cases dangerous, right, or like, are important at least. Is this situation better when we have lots of hosts, lots of topics, and lots of podcasts? Or is it when we've got a general podcast which is covering all of these topics, right? Well, first of all, we have lots of podcasts and lots of hosts. It's just this one's the most popular for some strange reason, but that's not my fault. I mean, I can't alter it because it's too popular. That's ridiculous. Like one of the reasons why it's popular is I talk to a bunch of different people about a bunch of different things. And some people I am just eternally curious and I have no understanding of it at all and

I want it laid out to me. And then other things I have very strong opinions about and I want to know why a person thinks differently or how they came to their conclusions or maybe there's a person that I really admire, I want to understand their mindset. Maybe it's someone who's got some very fascinating esoteric information and I want to understand their mindset. Maybe it's someone who's got some very fascinating esoteric information and I want to learn it. The podcast is entirely based on what I'm interested in. So that's how I do it.

And there's a lot of podcasts that are experts in a very particular field and they talk only about that very particular thing. The thing about that is you're not gonna get as many people that listen to it, but you'll get millions of people listening to this conversation between you and me. So the benefit of that is then this ignites

someone's curiosity, and if we only do a cursory examination of whatever the subject is, if I'm really not qualified to really delve into it, now this person's excited about it, and they can expand, check out your podcast, check out other podcasts. It's good for the greater ecosystem of podcasts and just of general discourse.

So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, I've just listened to this person for two or three hours, I should leave my church or like, I don't know, revert and live in the middle of nowhere. You should do whatever you feel like doing, you know? And I think that's the best message that I can give to people. You should live whatever you feel like doing, you know? And I think that's the best message that I can give to people. You should live your life

in the way that you want to live your life. And if you are inspired and motivated and if something changes in the way you view the world based on a conversation that some people have on a podcast, then that's good. That's good. As long as it's beneficial to you, it's good. And we should all sort of try to acquire these conversations and experiences of people because it

elevates our own understanding of ourselves and how we interact with each other maybe if someone listens to this and decides to quit the job and start I don't think you're gonna do that. I just don't want someone to give up and it's not your fault. It's all meaning no isn't like counting grass instead of helping people. It's not your fault if they do that It's not your fault like that's their path for whatever reason and I don't know I don't know I don't know why anybody chooses what they I don't know how you think I don't know what things smell like to you I'm just guessing I'm just guessing that your view of the world is similar to my view of the world And that's just a guess and it can't be because so many people like art that I think is dogshit So many people listen to music that I can't stand obviously we're getting different things out of this world

Obviously, and I don't I don't mind that I think that's a good thing I think it's a good thing that there's a lot of stuff that I don't like is a lot of people that don't like me Great good. Yeah, and the more popular you get the greater surface area of people that hate you will be. Well, I'm fundamentally here for a reason, which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just things that are underrepresented in legacy media, especially non-human animal rights stuff. I find that when I've tried to talk about it, whether it's BBC or podcasts and stuff, that people

sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive. Like two weeks ago, I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending non-human animal rights. So they changed the topic of it because well, they don't want to upset people who are in the audience who consume these creatures. That's stupid. It's stupid. It's a conversation. Yeah, precisely. And that's a shame. And it's well with agnosticism too. There's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious. And we've got this public conversation, which is you're either like the Pope or Jordan Peterson, or you're like one of the fourth horsemen of new atheism, and leaves out all of these people in the right

Right. It was like trying to search for that. You're either in TFO. You're a proud boy Yeah, we're nuts we're nuts but we're sorting through it listen man, thank you very much for being here I really enjoyed the conversation. It was a lot of fun I tell people how they can find your stuff website all that stuff cool So if you just search Jack Simes, you can get to my site where everything sort of is. The podcast I do is the Pan-Scicast. It means casting thought everywhere in reverse, and that's all about all kinds of philosophy. Two books out this year, Philosophers on God. Two in a year, damn!

Both on God as well. So first one is Philosophers on God, talking about existence, and the second one is Defeating the Evil God Challenge in Defense of God's Goodness. So, I spend that book defending the existence of God despite being an agnostic. So, that doesn't show that I don't have a horse in the race. I'd love to be driven, I don't know why. I don't think any of us should have a horse in the race. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. Thank you, too. All appreciate you. Thank you. Bye everybody.