Within Reason - #162 Two Million Subscriber QnA

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack. - VIDEO NOTES2 Million Subscribers. Have a Q&A. - TIMESTAMPS(0:00) – Intro(0:18) – My YouTube Watch History(01:33) – What Do I Want to Be Remember For?(10:13) – Will I Do a PhD?(13:06) – Warzone(13:28) – How Many Philosophers Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?(14:14) – My Music Channel(14:30) – My Career if I Wasn't a YouTuber(15:49) – Things I Struggle With(17:58) – Favourite Beatles Song?(19:20) – Daily Life and Episode Prep(23:09) – Favourite Debate?(27:17) – Which Country Do I Want to Visit?(27:30) – Which Country Do I Never Want to Visit?(28:09) – Which Person from History Would I Want to Talk To?(31:47) – Who Am I a Fan Of?(32:18) – Favourite Sport and Club?(39:25) – Favourite Dish and Beverage?(40:23) – What Is One Thing You Regret? - CONNECTMy Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comSOCIAL LINKS:Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkepticThe Within Reason Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/16wUbvDT95dxzpG2KEhakK?si=3196e07690bb489d - CONTACTBusiness email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]------------------------------------------

At IKEA, we make things just for college life. Come on, come on. Like our Calax desk in white, black, or stained oak for just $75. Yeah, let's go! It's got built-in cable management to help keep your game console cords organized. And a spacious work surface for your laptops, monitors, and textbooks. Whoa! Yeah! If only you were this excited about studying.

Oh, man. Shop back to school at IKEA. Do you live in North America? Do you like listening to me speak? Sometimes, at least for a bit. Then you should subscribe to my substack because an exciting announcement is coming your way very soon. Okay, I think it's time for a, I guess,

1.98 million subscriber Q&A. If we opened your YouTube Watch History, what videos would we be surprised to see? Interesting question. Let's take a look. Okay, um, history. What have I been watching? Okay, so one thing is like football highlights, apparently.

The World Cup is on at the moment, and I'm not really someone who follows sports, so I don't know when the games are on. Apparently, England are actually playing right now as I record this, and it's not exactly something I care too much about, but when the highlights go up on YouTube, I want to see it. I like seeing people doing things that they're really good at doing, and watching a great goal and seeing the crowd reactions and stuff like that. It's kind of cool.

I like to see what other successful YouTubers are doing, even if they're not in my niche. So there's a video here about like Mr. Beast's new studio that he's building. I don't aspire to be anything like Mr. Beast, except insofar as he's built a really successful platform on YouTube. There's a lot that I don't like about that kind of content, of course, but there's also a lot to learn from someone like that. So I'll watch stuff like that from time to time. A lot of physics videos actually recently, because I've been working on a project, which I will tell you. you about at some point, which involves a lot of physics. So I've been sort of immersing myself in that. Do you feel like your debates and podcast conversations are your crowning achievements as a

theologist slash philosophical scholar? Or is there something you've yet to accomplish that you'd like to be remembered for? In other words, is there anything you're still working towards besides deeper understanding? Well, I'm not a scholar. Definitely not a scholar, but I would like to be. I'd love to one day have a PhD and make a contribution to philosophy. I'm extremely proud of my podcast and the content that I put out. I think it's so much fun and I do believe that it's mostly at least good content, but a lot of it is platforming other intelligent people or sort of talking about relatively light-hearted philosophy or maybe just communicating ideas that other people have had in a way that's accessible for a YouTube audience, that's quite different from what goes

on in academia where, like, if you want to do a PhD, you have to contribute something new. You have to come up with some area, some niche, some kind of way to carve your name into the philosophical landscape. And I've got lots of ideas about what that kind of contribution might look like, but until I do such a thing, it's impossible to know whether or not I've got it in me. So I'd love to do some work, obviously, on consciousness, philosophy of mind, and particularly the relationship between a consciousness-first metaphysics, like idealism or panpsychism, and like different religious traditions. So does having a consciousness-first metaphysics more closely align with, say, divine simplicity in the scholastic tradition, or maybe something like Advaita-Vadanta? I'd love to look at the interplay between those things and how adopting this metaphysics can change the way that you look at religious traditions.

But also, I've spoken a few times about this idea I have about taking emotivism in ethics, so the view that when you make a moral statement, you're kind of just expressing an emotion and widening its scope to include non-ethical statements as well. Like, the table is there or the sky is blue, and try to characterize these as in at least one sense, expressions of emotions. That will have a lot to do with our theory of truth. Is truth a real thing? I had Simon Blackburn on my show to talk about emotivism, and we talked about what it means for something to be true.

And he and I seem to both have this so-called deflationary theory of truth, that essentially there's no difference between saying, the sky is blue, and saying, it's true that the sky is blue. In either case, you're just kind of asserting this thing, you're asserting a belief. I feel like, for reasons I've gone into before, there could be something really interesting to explore there. So I would love to do that at Masters and PhD level, and I think that if I were to make some contribution in that area, I'd feel really happy at the end of my life. I mean, I'm going to be glad of what I've done here on YouTube no matter what. But as you say, it's not scholarly. It's not the kind of thing that people are going to watch in a hundred years and think, wow, you know, he really did something for the world there outside of just communicating other people's ideas, which I still think is really cool and I love doing it and I'm very proud of it. But it would be cool to contribute something of my own as well. So hopefully, at some point, further study awaits. You know what, maybe I should actually just explain what I'm talking about a little bit. It's a big and weird topic, but let's put it this way. Let's say the phrase, this microphone exists, or this microphone is there, or this microphone is black, or something like that. That statement seems like it's got truth value. It seems like something that is true or

false, and when I say it's true that the microphone is black, I'm asserting some kind of belief, which I believe has a connection to a real truth about the world, and there's this correspondence between my statement and the truth of the statement, and that's what makes it true. This is the correspondence theory of truth. The deflationary theory of truth says something more like, when I say the microphone is black, saying that it's true that the microphone is black just sort of doesn't add anything.

In either case, I'm just asserting something. And what is it that I'm asserting? Well, let's think of it this way. Why do I think that the microphone is black? Why is it that I think that? What sort of motivates and justifies that assertion for me? Well, I can see it. I can see that it's black. Okay, so why do I believe that because I can see it, it must really be there? Well, because I believe that my sense data is to at least some degree giving me an accurate depiction of reality. Okay, that's totally fine. But again, like, why do I believe that? Why is it that when I see things, I just believe that I'm accurately observing the world. If you try to answer that question, you'll usually run up against something like, well, if I don't believe that, then I'm in this kind of Cartesian skepticism. I'm in this position where, well, how can I know anything? It leads me down the skeptical rabbit hole that

is sort of impossible to find any grounding on. I kind of can't psychologically deny that my sense data is accurate. It's just something that's kind of built into my psychology, or something like that. You know, there's no way to prove that the external world actually exist. At some point, we just have to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and argue in a circle and just say, I just believe it, because the alternative is like, well, boo. And that's the thing. I think that when it comes to a foundational belief like that, what people describe as intuition, well, it's just intuitively true. I think another great word for intuition is emotion. I think it's a kind of emotion. I think it's a really strong kind of emotion. But

think about what that word intuition really means. Well, I just have this really strong intuition that you know, torturing people for fun is wrong. In an ethical framework, you know, an emotivist would say, yeah, I understand that you have that intuition, but what you're really describing there is a really strong feeling. And you're expressing that feeling when you say murder is wrong or torture is wrong. And I kind of want to say that because intuition exists at the basis of all of our epistemology, that same move could probably be made, at least in some respect. You could say, at the very least, the sort of justification for all of these beliefs that you have about the world is ultimately an expression of a kind of emotion. Because when it comes down to it, if you

ask somebody, why do you trust your sense data? Why do you trust that the world exists? They say something which can be broken down into essentially boo sense data being inaccurate. They say, I just couldn't live any other way, or that's just a skeptical scenario that gets us nowhere and it just doesn't have any philosophical justification. It's an intuition. It's a feeling. So, okay, if when I say something like the microphone is black or the microphone is there, what I'm actually doing is expressing my belief that my sense data is giving me an accurate picture. And if when I'm expressing that, what I'm really expressing is like boo sense data being inaccurate, then arguably there's at least some sense in which my expression of the microphone's

blackness or my assertion that the microphone is there is motivated by this foundational sort of discontent with a particular fundamental premise. So let me put it this way. My saying that something is true is actually an expression of an emotional discontent with one of the premises upon which that expression relies. So you can imagine that X is really kind of an expression of why, and and Y is kind of an expression of Z, and the reason that I express Z is because I think boo to not Z, then my expression of X is kind of like an expression of boo not Z. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, there are perhaps two reasons for that. One is that I'm explaining it poorly.

One is that it's really stupid. I suppose the third option is that both of these are true, but either way, that's a kind of avenue of philosophical thought, let's say, that I'm excited to explore and feel like it would best be done in like a private academic setting where I can really kind of sink my teeth into it and not feel like I'm constantly having to present every step along the way because I feel like that's really fun and interesting and brings you guys along with me, but we'll probably bias my thinking to some degree at least towards what's going to make sense or what's going to be exciting. I kind of feel like there's definitely some value in doing things privately for a long time,

thinking about it for years and years, working on a dissertation, and then kind of presenting it to the world. And then, of course, I would love to see if this global emotivism kind of links up with these weird views that I have about consciousness and the nature of reality and metaphysics, and I'd love to see how all of that kind of interacts. So there's like lots to explore there. Would you do a PhD and what would it be on? I've heard you talk about this idea of global emotivism and it sounds super interesting. Well, there you have it. Here's like a really funny, silly argument in support of global emotivism.

See what you make of this. What is a proposition? A proposition like, you know, the table is brown or the sky is blue or my dog exists or something. What actually is the nature of a proposition? They're not kind of floating out there in the world somewhere. Propositions, assertions only exist insofar as they're being. either spoken or being thought. They're kind of things that people do, right?

Like you assert a proposition. It doesn't just exist in space. And so, propositions are things which are spoken. They're things which are thought. They're kind of things which a person does. It kind of seems like you could characterize a proposition as a kind of action. It's a kind of assertion, which is a kind of action.

And then consider how actions seem not to have truth value. They don't seem like they're the kinds of things which can be true or false. like walking to the shop, for example, or standing up or doing a star jump, it can't be true or false. It's just not the kind of thing that has what's called truth value. So try this on for size and see what you think of it. Premise 1. Propositions are actions. Premise 2. Actions don't have truth value. Conclusion, therefore, propositions don't have truth value.

So just as the emotivist about ethics says, murder is wrong doesn't really have any truth value. It just means something like boo murder, which can't be true or false. It's just something you're expressing. The global emotivist might say that when you say any proposition, the table is brown, the sky is blue, these aren't the kinds of things which can be really true or false in a meaningful sense. Instead, you're just like asserting something. You're just emoting. Now, one of the motivations that I have for this kind of thinking is Simon Blackburn's response to the Frager-Geach problem. I won't go into that now. Maybe I will at some point. But if you look at Simon Blackburn's

response to the Fregegig each problem, if you're interested in that kind of thing, and just like apply the same strategy to all conditional statements and then all propositions, I think it kind of gets you somewhere interesting. It allows you to emotivise all propositions in the way that Simon Blackburn has emotivised conditional statements. So if that makes any sense to you, then cool. If it doesn't, then if that's because you kind of don't care, then fair enough. If it's because you think I'm talking nonsense, then please tell me why. Because I probably am. I just think this is kind of funny.

That argument obviously has something deeply wrong with it, but finding out what exactly is wrong with it, I think can tell us a lot about our theory of truth and what it means to express a proposition. We're all waiting for that war zone stream, mate. Would anybody actually watch that? I think it could be kind of funny. I'm not very good at Warzone,

but I think I'm good enough that I could probably play a pretty good game while talking to an audience. I've not really done that kind of streaming before, but maybe as a one-off, maybe for two million subscribers or something. Let me know what you think. How many philosophers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Well, it would take at least one to understand how light and physics works to create the light bulb. there'd probably be a philosopher who could talk about the nature of motion and what it means to screw it in in the first place. There'd probably be a philosopher that would want to take it apart to examine what it's made out of and what makes it function. One more philosopher to

debate whether or not the electricity in the light bulb is conscious, and then I suppose once all of that's done another philosopher to offer a meta-analysis of why he thinks we wanted to turn the light on in the first place because by that point we've probably all just forgotten. Why don't you post on your music channel anymore? Because I haven't made any more music, but more is coming. So watch this space or watch that space. Go and preemptively subscribe and you will be the first to hear anything that may or may not come out in the near future. What career path do you think you would have went down if you had never started YouTube? I've thought about this a few times and I believe I would have at least tried to become a teacher. I love the thought of being a teacher. The reason I say

that is because being a YouTuber, I sometimes get the opportunity to speak in schools, and I love doing so. And especially when it's kind of a small group of students, like the kind of number of students you might have as a teacher in a classroom, it's just felt really fun. Like, obviously, I get to talk about the thing that I love the most, and they're probably more excited to listen to me than they would be to their normal teacher, so I might sort of have an inflated view of how cool and fun it is, but seeing young people interested in philosophy and asking, like, obscenely intelligent questions and beginning to understand concepts that I've spent ages trying to work out myself and sort of beginning to help make that click in the mind of someone else. Like, seeing that happen in real

life right in front of you is really cool. And I love making YouTube videos and I do that kind of thing online all the time. But there's something obviously about the sort of one-to-one interaction that you get with people in a classroom that makes it all the more rewarding, I suppose. So for the same reasons I love doing what I do on YouTube, I think I would love to be a teacher. What are things you personally struggle with in life, mentally, physically, socially, etc? I'm so glad you asked. One of the biggest things that I struggle with in my life is keeping on top of my nutrition. Really, though, I have been traveling a lot recently, and it's just difficult to keep on top of my diet and stay healthy. Even if I'm, like, trying really hard to eat well, on the go, it's just impossible to get all of the nutrients that I need.

However, and of course, I stay healthy, and I do manage to get the nutrients that I need in my diet. How? By using today's sponsor, Huell, that's H-U-E-L. This bottle, believe it or not, is a complete meal. 400 calories, 35 grams of protein, it's got 26 vitamins and minerals, it's got omega-3s, it's 7 grams of fiber, it's low sugar, it's gluten-free, it's plant-based, and it comes in at under $5. I drink one of these almost every single day. If you've ever seen me out and about, like on a train or something, you'll probably see one of these sticking out of my backpack.

They're convenient to carry around, convenient to consume, and in the case of this ready-to-drink edition, they literally take zero preparation time. This one is the iced latte flavor, which is actually caffeinated, which is great if you need an extra boost. But it comes in all kinds of flavors. I really like the chocolate one. I can't show you one because I've actually run out because I drink them like I say almost every day. But I will be stocking myself right back up. This is also the black edition which is slightly higher protein but Huell also comes in its original sort of normal kind. There's also a light version which is lower calorie while still giving you nutritional value. And Huell also comes in powdered form. You can

just mix it up in a shaker with some water or some milk or something. You get a bit more protein that way, as well as being able to choose how thick or thin you want to make the Hewle. So there are loads of different options. Like I say, my choice is the Ready to Drink Black Edition, but take a look for yourself and see what works for you. Just go to huel.com forward slash Alex O'Connor. And if you use the code Alex O'Connor when you order, then as a new customer, you'll also

get 15% off. And with that said, let's go to the next question. What's your favorite Beatles song? Gosh, that's always a really tricky question. I don't know, like, I mean, I suppose some of the more specific songs that I'm into that maybe aren't as obvious are songs like, mean Mr. Mustard used to be my ringtone when I was younger. I just thought it had a really cool, simple driving baseline. I thought it was pretty awesome.

I mean, the whole B-side to Abbey Road is really cool. She came in through the bathroom window was another favorite. when I was a bit younger. I love their cover of Till There Was You on the second album. That was, like, just awesome to discover. But if I was going to listen to a Beatles song right now, it would be, you know what, I love What Goes On from Rubber Soul. I just think that's such a fun little song.

They're just so good, aren't they, the Beatles. It's like, I think what Robert Graves said of Shakespeare, the annoying thing about him is that he really is that good. I think that's true of the Beatles. I think that the Beatles, as if it were possible, might actually be the most underrated band in history, even given how amazingly highly rated they typically are. Because they are just that good. There's no two ways about it. And if you don't think so, you're lying.

Or you just have an opinion that's different to mine. And art is subjective and that's totally valid. So more power to you. What does your daily life look like? How much time do you spend preparing for each within reason episode? I like to think that I don't interview guests unless I'm ready to interview them. I think that if I were in a position where I really didn't feel prepared, like it just wasn't going to be a good interview, I would just postpone it or cancel it because I think it's insulting

both to the guest and to the audience if my questions are bad or uninformed or I'm obviously underprepared. So to that effect, a lot of my time in a given week is spent kind of immersing myself in the universe of a particular guest. It means that if I'm like traveling somewhere or I'm cleaning up or cooking or doing something in my ears almost certainly is going to be the voice of my upcoming guest this week. I'm going to be listening to every interview that I can get my hands on, not just to like familiarize myself with their work, because of course I get that from their books, but also just to kind of get a feel for how they talk about things, anecdotes that they often like to bring up that

maybe they forget about and I can kind of prompt them into doing so. I get a feeling for what questions annoy them, what questions come up a lot. If anything seems like it's kind of boring, it starts with a kind of, well, yeah, I mean, okay, because they've answered it so many times, and I try to avoid that, or at least ask it in a more interesting way. So yeah, it's a lot of preparation, but it's hard to call it a lot of work, because, of course, a lot of people listen to podcasts that thoroughly and regularly just because they enjoy it. And of course, I enjoy listening to people talk about interesting things too. But I like to think that I'd be doing something like that anyway with my free time if I weren't preparing to interview the person. So it's,

it's kind of like being someone who really enjoys listening to interviews and podcasts all the time. And then at the end of it gets to talk to the person myself. So how much time I spend preparing is literally just however much time there is between now and my next guest or sort of bundle of guests, because sometimes we shoot multiple in the same day, so I've got to prepare for multiple people at once. But even if I'm sort of taking some time off and I haven't got a recording booked in for like a month, I'm probably just going to spend that entire month just listening to that person as much as I can. But as for my daily life, I am a night owl, as they say, I really struggle to get out of bed in the morning. So luckily, I work with a lot of Americans, and I'm in the

UK, so the clocks kind of line up in the right way for me. I can wake up in the afternoon and email people, good morning. Most of my recordings are in the afternoon or evening. I usually don't get started doing anything until the afternoon, at least. And so that also means that I'll be up quite late, so you'll catch me at maybe one or two in the morning, sometimes doing something productive, like working on a video or reading a book, sometimes doing what most other people are doing, at that hour which is scrolling in bed or something like that. But some almost non-negotiables. I try to go outside every single day. I try to go to the gym a few times a week. I try to make sure that seeing friends going to dinner, going for coffee, is kind of scheduled into my life

with as much importance as anything work-related because I think that having good friends around you is one of the key things to sort of having a balanced life. And I feel like a lot of people and my industry can get a bit absorbed in their work because all they're doing is sitting at home working on the next thing. Of course, we determine our own schedules. I can decide my own upload schedule. There's always more content that can be made, more guests that can be reached out to. So I feel like making sure that doesn't just swallow me whole is really important. And it's one of the reasons why I think I've managed to keep this going so long, because it is a lot of work and I put a lot of effort into it, but I don't let it consume me as a person. I've got a life outside of YouTube

and I'm happy to have a life outside of YouTube and I protect it for that reason. Who was the person you love debating the most? Could be most civil, most challenging, or just more fun? You to goat. Well, if you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free? Don't worry, we get it.

Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life. and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-2194. Please play responsibly. Car shopping this civic holiday weekend, most car dealerships are closed and all you'll find are crickets. Not Performance Auto Group. They're open this Saturday and Holiday Monday for their annual Civic Holiday Sales event. Celebrate this long weekend with rates from 0%.

They might be closed. Performance Auto Group is open to serve you. Join Performance Auto Group this Saturday or Civic Holiday Monday 9 to 5 for the best time to shop this summer. Thanks. Of my public debates, who has been the most fun? I am going to look on my own YouTube channel because I kind of just like forget some of the things that I've done. The Jubilee thing was really fun. I debated 25 Christians at once.

even though, of course, you can only debate one person at a time. That series has the same syntax as, like, one UFC fighter versus, like, 25 opponents. But, of course, you can't actually debate 25 people at one time. So really, it's kind of like a series of questions and answers. It's like doing an audience Q&A or something. It's great fun, but it's maybe not as impressive of a feat as it may sound. And, yeah, that series has gone a bit crazy since I was on it. But the one that I did was really fun and the people there were great.

We all got on really well and everybody was just really friendly. And we actually all went out for a drink afterwards. I took them all to some bar in L.A. where it was filmed. And we just had some drinks and talked about Christianity. And it was just a really good time. So I loved doing that. I enjoyed the debate that I did with Glenn Scrivener on whether Christianity gave us Western values. Just because like Glenn's really nice and we get on and I thought it was like a good conversation.

but also there were just some moments in there which I thought were super interesting and I think kind of deleterious to the Western civilization is based on Christianity position. Deleterious. Yeah, okay, that is how you pronounce it. Like the standout moment in that debate for me was probably when we were talking about women's rights, women's suffrage, the ability of women to vote and stuff like that. And Glenn was like, look, you know, this is ultimately a Christian movement. or if not, it's sort of rooted in Christian values. And I remember asking him, you know, do you really think that were it not just for women asserting themselves and protesting and throwing themselves under horses and stuff like that? Do you think that Christian men, on their own, just reflecting on their Christian principles, would have sat around and thought, you know, I know that we've kind of been oppressing women for thousands of years.

And I know that Paul in the New Testament tells us that women should be in submission and that they shouldn't speak over. a man or assert their authority over a man and that if they've got a question, they should go home and ask their husband and stuff like that. But you know what, I think we've been getting this wrong. I think that we should maybe give women the right to vote. Like, do you think that these Christian men would have done that on their own? To which Glenn said, 100%. Do you think that that would have happened, would have gotten off the ground, if women themselves hadn't just tried to assert it for themselves? Do you think, in other words, if they'd have done what the Bible tells them to do and to essentially say silent and ask their husbands at home, instead of

coming out and saying, you know, we've got something that we want and we're going to throw ourselves under horses until we get said. So female suffrage. So female suffrage. Do you think that men on their own, that like Christian men of the Enlightenment era would have just sat around and gone, you know what? You know, it's been hundreds and hundreds of years that we've been Christian. And I think, I think, and there's all these verses that we've been getting it wrong.

And I think we should, we should give women the right to vote. Do you think they would have just done that on their own because of the influence of Christianity? Listen, I mean, just read through without the protests of women. And, you know, credit where credits due, he's biting the bullet on that. But that just seems to me, and I think to most people that I've shown this to or talked to about this, just so unfathomably implausible that it borders on the comical. Ultimately, though, my favorite people to debate are my friends, because it's private, so we're not playing up to a gallery, except sometimes the gallery of our other friends at the dinner table. but also it's almost guaranteed that it's going to be in good faith. These people know me, and I know them better than any public opponent possibly could,

so it's more fun and often more brutal and often just more lighthearted. Would you do a quick fire? Sure. One country you want to visit in the future. Australia. I've never been there. I've never been to Japan either. Those are two that come to mind.

You ask for one. You got two. One country you never want to visit. Okay. It's tempting to say like some kind of horribly war-torn country or something because it's so dangerous, but that would in its way be interesting and probably teach me a lot. So where would I not want to go? Maybe like Antarctica. Does that count? Is that even really a country? Like, yeah, okay, it's probably kind of cool to know that you're like at the edge of the earth and all that kind of stuff and to check that the flat earthers are not correct. But I feel like there's kind of nothing going on there. like a lot of wind, a lot of ice. It doesn't really sound like my idea of a good holiday. One person from history you would want to talk to. Jesus of Nazareth, of course. I mean, like biblical characters alone is its own category. John the Baptist is, of course, another one outside of the Bible. Who would I talk to?

I feel like I would love to talk to Aristotle, mostly because his philosophy is still so pertinent and so interesting and so applicable. that I would really like to know if the ways in which people have applied his philosophy after his death, so say scholastic like metaphysics, people like Thomas Aquinas, adapting it into a very Christianized worldview, or in the modern day, his notions of friendship and his notions of the good life and ethics and living virtuously and all of that kind of stuff, I'd love to know if he kind of broadly agrees with how his philosophy has been applied. But also Aristotle was an exceptional biologist.

I think that about a quarter of all of his surviving works are about biology. He was really interested in animals. And his metaphysical worldview actually had a lot to do with the way in which he saw animals function as organisms. So I'd love to introduce him to modern biology to DNA and genetics and evolution and just kind of see what he would do with it, whether he would go back to the drawing board and have to rethink everything he knows about animals or whether he would sort of be like, yeah, sure, that makes sense. Aristotle, actually, somewhat amazingly, seems to preempt evolution by natural selection. If you look at the physics, book 2, chapter 8, he discusses an idea that maybe there are these random distributions of particular characteristics, and the ones which are suitable for living survive, and the ones which aren't suitable for living end up dying.

He does then dismiss this quite quickly, but it's really cool that there's this embryonic form of evolutionary theory right there in Aristotle thousands of years before Darwin. So in other words, I'd really like to show Aristotle the origin of species and talk him through our understanding of natural selection. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't be the person to do that. But I'd read up, I'd prepare for it as if it were a podcast and I would present it to him and say, hey man, what do you think of this? And he would probably say something in Greek and it would be lost on me. Even if I could understand Greek, it would probably still be lost on me because he's just that But yeah, it would be like a real full circle moment for philosophy, this really important

father of Western philosophy rubbing up against the fruits of his labour, where philosophy is today. Of course, I'd also love to ask him about like the argument from motion and be like, is this, is this an accurate representation of the entailments of your metaphysics, Mr. Aristotle? Because of course, Aristotle had a very different picture of reality to Thomas Aquinas, even though Aquinas relies very heavily on Aristotelian metaphysics. For example, Aristotle believes in this unmoved mover, the kind of unmoved mover that Thomas Aquinas associates with God. But for Aristotle, this unmoved mover is kind of associated with objects in the sky.

As well as this, he thinks that this unmoved mover would just be thinking about thinking all the time. It would just be sort of in this abstract mode of thought and have absolutely no interest in or anything to do with us, with humans. Whereas, of course, for Thomas Aquinas, this unmoved mover is the God of Christianity who comes to earth in the form of Jesus Christ. So quite a discrepancy there. And I would love to ask Aristotle what he makes of the way in which Thomas Aquinas builds on, and I suppose ultimately critiques his worldview. Sorry, this was supposed to be quickfire, and I've not been very quick. So what's next? One person you are a fan of. Lots of possible answers to this question,

but you know what, I'm going to give a shout out to Tony Lapidus, I think is how you say a second name. He's an impressionist and he does these impressions of like quite hyper-specific people from like the UK political scene. Like he just did an impression of Medi Hassan, which I've never seen anyone do before. And it was just like brilliant. So yeah, enjoy his stuff quite a lot. He also does an impression of Peter Hitchens, which is worth watching. Your favourite sport and club? I don't really do sport exactly, but does it count?

I like watching Snooker. I think that that can be quite entertaining, more entertaining than a lot of people might think, I suppose. And poker, I like playing poker, and it can be fun to, again, watch poker highlights on YouTube and watch people kind of lose their minds at a bad beat. But like I said earlier, I also watch football highlights, but I just don't really have a club. I've kind of got this problem with football clubs anyway. Like, I've talked about this before, but I suppose I've got like a philosophical problem with what actually makes a club a club. Most football clubs aren't made up of people who are like from the place.

So it doesn't really just make sense to support the team of like where you're from because the players aren't from there most of the time. So what is it that you're supporting? Well, you're not supporting the players because, you know, if say Manchester United and Manchester City had some kind of freak business deal where They just like each bought each other's players and just like swapped over. You've kind of got the identical players, but now they're playing for a different team. So which would you support? Like imagine that this happened halfway through a game, right? Imagine you show up.

You're a massive Manchester United fan and they're playing against Manchester City. Those are two different teams. And halfway through the game at half time, the players on Manchester United just get bought by Man City. I know that this can't happen because of like the rules. But suppose they change the rules. like you can buy players whenever you want. So at half time, all of the Manu players are bought by Man City, and all the Man City players are bought by Manu.

And so all the players come back out onto the pitch. It's the same players in the same formation. They just basically swapped shirts. Which team would you support? Well, I think the most sensible answer from a sports fan is to say, look, weird as it seems, you support the club. You don't support the players exactly. You support the club.

You support the kit. You support the community, right? And so, yeah, as weird as it seems, you would just be now shouting in support of the exact players you were in the first half shouting obscenities at, as they often do at English football games. But then, like, I want to go further with this. I want to say that maybe at halftime also the manager from either club, like swaps teams. So now the man city manager, managers Manu and vice versa. And imagine also at half time, because why not, the team is like, you know, I'm kind of getting a bit tired of this particular football kit. I want to change the design.

So Manchester United takes on the kit design of Manchester City and vice versa. So they also essentially swap football kits. And now imagine finally that for some reason they decide that they're fed up of their name and want to get a new one. So they come to an agreement and they agree to take on each other's names. So Manchester City is now called Manchester United and vice versa. So now it's like a bit of a mess. Like who do you support? So remember, you're a Manchester United fan.

You watch the first half, and then in the second half, all of the players you were just supporting come out, and they're wearing the same uniform, and they're still called Manchester United, and they've got the same manager. Everything about them is exactly the same, except somehow, like, technically, they're on the other side of the pitch. Like, they are the other team, even though they're the same players with the same kit and the same name. Who do you support then? It doesn't seem quite so easy to say something like, well, I just stick with the team, because in this case, sticking with the team, because in this case, sticking with the team, team would mean that you stick with the original team, which technically has now taken on the name Man City and taken on their uniform and taken all of their players and their manager. So you'd then have to be supporting the very thing which in the first half you were hoping and dreaming wouldn't score any

goals. And I think the only possible answer to this conundrum is to say there's only really one thing that has to remain consistent for the football club to make sense as a concept. It's not the players, it's not the kit, it's not the managers, it's not the name. It's not the name. It's not the of the team, it's the supporters. It's the community. And so I think essentially, whatever a football club is is just made up of whatever a particular collection of people throw their support behind. So whichever one they chose, that would just become their football team. And there's something kind of beautiful about that, I think, that really what a football club is, is not its players or its management or anything like that, but literally the only thing it could possibly be is its

supporters. Legally, though, of course, when it comes to who gets to take the profits from various games, I don't think that the management would see it that way. But still, I don't know. What do you think? What do you think makes a football team a football team? Once you can answer that question for me, then I'll pick one. You know what? Here's how I'm going to pick which football team I support. I'm going to look up, actually, the World Cup's on right now. So let's do it by country. Which country competing in the World Cup this year has the highest population? Okay, look, after all, I am a utilitarian. So I think the only fair way to settle this is to look at which team is going to arguably,

probably have the most supporters, and so them winning would bring the most happiness. And it looks like it might be the United States. Can that be right? Damn, yeah, I think at least of the teams that made it through that, like, qualified for the World Cup, the USA with 340 million people is the team with the highest population. So, okay, yeah, USA, USA, why not? But then I don't know, because the USA doesn't seem to care that much about football. Okay, maybe you think that you guys do care about soccer, as you call it, which, by the way, footnote, soccer is a Apparently, originally actually an English word, despite it now being used exclusively by Americans to refer to football. It comes from the phrase association football. Soccer is kind of short for association. And it's like, I guess, the kind of formal way of playing football sometimes and decades ago. So if you were playing association football, you were playing football properly. Got shortened to soccer and for some reason got exported across the ocean. But yeah, an English term. But I'm not sure that Americans care as much, shall we say, say about football as say like England definitely and countries like Brazil and Argentina. So maybe I would have to do a kind of hedonic calculus of the sort of average level of interest and level of care that a particular population has in football and measure that against the population size. And whichever comes out on top, that's who I'm going to support. The greatest good for the

greatest number. And I just can't wait to watch England, hopefully in the final of the World Cup, playing against some other team and I'm like the only person in the room supporting the other team and there's all these like angry drunk punters who are kind of shouting at me and I'm like, hey, hey, have you not heard of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham? Do you not know what a hedonic calculus is? Or maybe I'll just, maybe I'll just watch it from home. Okay, sorry, sorry, back to the quickfire questions. Your favourite dish and beverage. Look, if I could eat any food and it would like sustain me and be healthy and I could eat nothing but that food for the rest of the of my life with no negative impact, it just would be pasta. But unfortunately, it's just not that good

for you. So that's probably my favourite, but I just don't eat that much of it. Favorite beverage, I think red wine is probably the best, like, all rounder. You can have it with dinner, you can have it at the pub, you can have it with lunch. I suppose you could have it with breakfast if you wanted to. I don't do that. I have whiskey. I'm just a good. just kidding. I have gin. But like, I don't know, it depends whether or not that's allowed to be healthy, which it's definitely not to drink lots of red wine. I guess water would have to come out on top if we're taking health into consideration, because it seems quite important. Maybe, like, diet Dr. Pepper, I feel like I could probably live off that. One thing you regret.

Recently, I suppose one thing that I regret is the way that I went about my event with William Lane Craig. So we had this dialogue at the Royal Institution. I was quite looking forward to it. We'd never done anything in person before. And I remember thinking, like, how should I go about this? What should we talk about? At the beginning of the event, William Lane Craig laid out like five or six different arguments for God's existence. He talked about the Kalam cosmological argument, of course.

He mentioned the moral argument. He mentioned the evidence for the resurrection, I think. And then kind of threw the ball into my court, and I was able to kind of pick up wherever I wanted to. And I thought to myself, look, I'm sad across from the man who invented the Calam cosmological argument. I think it would just be a waste of an opportunity to not talk to him about his life's most famous work. And at the very beginning of the event, William Lane Craig said, Now, with respect to our time this evening, this is not going to be a debate between Alex and me, rather this is going to be a conversation where we openly discuss these issues.

And I thought, great, that's relaxing and sounds like a good idea to talk about the Calam, because why not? That's what he's known for. And we stayed on it for quite some time. And even about halfway through when the moderator suggested moving on, I thought, no, let's keep drilling down here. I really sort of want to get to the nub of this. But then that did mean that we just ran out of time to talk about other things which I do care about. like I wanted to talk about the problem of animal suffering, and we got to do it a little bit, but it felt

extremely rushed, and I feel like I didn't really get to get the point across in any detail, because we'd run out of time, and that was my fault, because I'd left it too late to bring up the topic. Then I had a bit of a shout-off with an audience member, which probably wasn't my best idea, but he kind of, like, asked a very pointed question, which, you know, fair enough, and then when I said something in response, he started talking back, like he didn't have the microphone, but he just started talking again. He was sort of shouting out something. So we gave him the microphone back, and then we had a bit of a back and forth.

And then he started like, at one point he sort of pointed over there and was like, you know, well, let's go to the next question kind of thing. And I remember getting a bit annoyed and thinking like, hold on, you don't get to shout out a response. And then when I start responding to your response, start pointing over there for the next question. And like, yeah, I guess it was a little bit animated, you could say. But then after the event, someone sent me a link to William Lane Craig's newsletter, which he had sent out after his trip to the UK. And I found it a little bit strange.

So in the newsletter, there's a paragraph on his dialogue with me, where he's sort of telling people how it went. He says, you'll be able to judge for yourselves how this evening went when the video is released, but I'll make a couple of observations here about it. The topic was basically God's existence, and I opened by summarizing briefly the six theistic arguments I have written on. In my view, Alex made a strategic mistake by choosing to focus exclusively on the Calam cosmological argument, which is my area of expertise.

This put the whole discussion right in my wheelhouse, and Alex was able to make little progress in refuting it. So for a start, I don't see how it's possible, like even in principle, to make a strategic mistake in a conversation. Like, yeah, if this were a debate, that would be a terrible idea, like picking him up on his area of expertise. But I thought this wasn't a debate, Dr. Craig. I thought that this was supposed to be a friendly conversation, a dialogue.

And if that's the case, like, of course I'm going to talk to you about your most famous contribution to philosophy. Like, imagine that I'd met William Lane Craig at a bar or something, and I just got chatting to him, and we were just having genuinely a conversation about philosophy. And because it's William Lane Craig, I say, hey, can we talk about the calum? Because, of course, that's what you'd want to talk about. And so I start raising objections, and I start asking questions and saying I'm not convinced by that, or I don't know how you'd respond to this.

Would that be a strategic mistake in a conversation at a bar? I don't think you can make strategic mistakes in genuine conversations. Now, I have no problem with having a debate instead, and you can definitely make strategic errors in debates, but if we were having a debate, then I probably would have chosen to talk about the moral argument instead, because then we'd have been in both of our wheelhouses. And maybe I should have done that anyway,

just to make it a more interesting conversation, but it kind of annoyed me that William Lane Craig made such a point out of saying this isn't a debate and then said that I made a strategic mistake by talking to him about his life's work. But anyway, William Lane Craig then goes on to say, the second thing that happened that was so remarkable was that during the Q&A, Alex, who was normally so calm and unflappable, really lost his cool and basically got into a shouting match with a member of the audience. Even when the moderator tried to intervene and move things along,

Alex continued to argue with the person in the audience. That's true. I did do that. In fact, maybe we should play a little clip here. You don't get to respond. Keep that microphone away from that as well. It's going to be a bloody night. Jesus. You don't get to respond by shouting out.

And then when I respond to you, point over there for the next question. That's not how this works. That's not how this works. Now streaming on Disney Plus, the Hulu original series Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black, played by Emmy Rossum on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur.

New episodes week over week. Watch the Hulu original series Furious, now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. If you want to keep shouting responses, that's fine. If you want to keep shouting responses, is that is absolutely fine. I'm going to do the same thing. Are we done now? Your question, please. Next question. Thank you.

Yes, sir. Maybe I got a bit frustrated and it wasn't my best moment, but William Lane Craig then says this. Alex's conduct in this dialogue really exploded the myth which Alex likes to propagate that he is a non-resistant unbeliever. It was evident, I think, that he is mightily resisting God. I'm sorry, like what? So I've said in the past that I believe I'm what's called a non-resistant non-believer, that I don't believe in God, certainly not the Christian God, but not because I like hate the idea of it or I wouldn't want to worship such a being or anything like that. I feel like I'm quite open to it.

I wish that God existed. I think it'd be great if there were an afterlife. If Christianity were true, that would be a wonderful story. And I feel like I'm sort of open to it. I just don't feel convinced. The supposed evidence just doesn't move me, the arguments. just don't convince me that Christianity or Theism is true, but I'm open to it. Like, it's not a hardness of heart, so to speak, that makes me not believe in God.

I could be wrong about this, of course, but I think it just stems from a genuine psychological position of just not being convinced by the arguments for Theism or Christianity. Now, you could dispute what I'm saying here. You could say, you know, Alex, I know you think that you're not resisting God, but secretly, you kind of are, even if you don't realize it, like, I don't know, the way that you live your life and the conversations that you have and stuff, it's sort of resistant in a way that you don't recognize, or something like that, that's fine. But the fact that I get a bit annoyed with somebody in the audience for like speaking over essentially the next question and then like pointing at the next questioner saying, like, let's go over there when I was trying to respond. Getting a bit annoyed about that is enough to, quote, explode the myth that I like to propagate that I'm a non-resistant non-believer. I might be wrong about being a non-resistant non-believer. I might be resisting God in ways that I can't recognize or imagine.

But for you to say that me getting annoyed in that particular moment with a particular person saying a particular thing is enough on its own to explode the myth that I'm a non-resistant non-believer just doesn't make any sense to me. Like, yeah, I'm sure that William Lane Craig has never gotten frustrated at any point during his entire career with an audience member or someone that he's debating with. Because of course, if he had, if there's any moment in his entire career where he gets a bit annoyed with the way that somebody's conducting themselves in a conversation, that just explodes the myth that he's thinking purely rationally about God. No, no, no, no. Religion is all just about like emotion and the way

that you feel and it stems from a sort of position of anger and frustration with the world, and that's why you invent deities. Clearly, if you can find any evidence that William Lane Craig has ever got an annoyed, say with an audience member, that definitely explodes the myth that his Christianity is based upon reason and rationality. Like, what are we talking about here? Am I not allowed to sometimes get frustrated in order to be a non-resistant non-believer? In order to be someone who is genuinely in a position of just not being convinced of arguments for God's existence, does that require that I never get annoyed in any conversational context where the subject is about God? Is that what it means to be a non-resistant non-believer? Because if it is, then I think you have trivially defined the

out of existence. Everybody gets frustrated every now and again, and that is not a reflection, necessarily at least, on their entire philosophical disposition. And I kind of also just actually don't understand why that particular moment with that audience member would have anything to do with whether or not I'm a non-resistant non-believer. So given that William Lane Craig seemed so sensitive to my tone and also seemed to think that I should have strategised better for this event, Maybe I should have just treated it like a debate. Maybe I should have prepared like a debate and done like a kind of opening statement where I laid out the case for animal suffering and how it contradicts with Christianity and how William Lane Craig's comments about how the Canaanites deserve their slaughter by the Israelites. So it was actually a tremendous blessing to these children for them to be killed.

Undermines our moral intuitions that he relies upon to make the moral argument for God's existence, like that kind of stuff. would actually be quite difficult, I think, for him to respond to. But no, I thought we were having a friendly conversation, so I wanted to ask him about the thing that he's most expert in. I guess that was a mistake. Even according to him, it was a mistake. So I guess I shouldn't have done that. But yeah, I found that non-resistant, non-believer thing, like, really weird. Like, I actually don't think it makes sense. If William Lane Craig would like to have a debate where we strategize and talk about things that are definitely very much in my wheelhouse as much as his, then I'm up for it. But I didn't think that that's what that event at the Royal Institution was supposed to be. So I guess that is a

recent regret. I should have just talked about the problem of animal suffering. I should have picked him up on the moral argument instead of the Kalam cosmological argument. And I guess I should have remained perfectly cool and not got at any point even remotely frustrated, lest I give off the impression that I'm in fact, as he put it, mightily resisting God. Anyway, I think, yeah, that'll do.