Within Reason - #96 Music, Mormonism, and Peter Hitchens - 1.25m Subsrciber Q&A

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

A Q&A to celebrate hitting 1.25 million subscribers on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. 1.25 million subscribers, or thereabouts. I didn't do a Q&A for 1 million, so here we are. A lot of people are asking about music, and I think the reason for that is that the algorithm has recently picked up my music YouTube channel, which is a thing that exists. I think this is because I was recently on Jubilee debating 25 Christians, and it did really well. It got 4.5 million views in just over a week or something, and I think a lot of people are searching me up.

as a result of that and one effect has been that my music channel has been unearthed. I would like to make more music. It's been years since I uploaded to that channel and I have been planning on doing something since, but I always thought if I were to put out more music, I'd want to do it properly. The stuff on that channel is like recorded in a bedroom. It's sort of live performances. I'd want to do something in a studio, you know, but I'm not very savvy when it comes to musical production. And so I've kind of been putting it off for that reason, but it's been long enough now that I think I just need to bite the bullet and record it somehow, even if it's just in my bedroom. So watch this space or watch that space. I'll leave a link in the

description. It's Alex O'Connor Music. Subscribe and leave a comment if you want to see more and we'll see what happens. Hello, it's me from the future. Since recording this Q&A due to the renewed interest in the music stuff, I started a Spotify page. I don't know if it's actually going to be ready by the time this video goes out, but it will be soon after if not. So as soon as that link is ready, it will be in the description. If you were to meet one philosopher from history in your podcast for an hour or have a debate, anyone from all of history, which one and why? I think the boring but expected answer here is probably Jesus of Nazareth, not just because I think he'd be an interesting guy to talk to, but I would be super intrigued to work out who he really was. Obviously,

a lot has been said about the man. And the most interesting thing for me would be working out who this probably most influential human being of all time actually was and what he was actually teaching. And indeed, what he thought of himself. So perhaps people would expect me to say that. But it's the God's honest truth, if you like. Alternatively, maybe someone like Aristotle simply because, again, it would be interesting, but also we've got a lot of missing works from ancient Greek philosophers. So a lot of Aristotle's works, we just don't have any more. They're lost to time. And so I think by having a conversation like that, I would focus on the stuff that we don't have a record of and see if there's more that we can uncover. Because again,

he was just so influential. Socrates is another name that comes to mind because he didn't write anything down. We have records of the things that he believed through Plato. But it's not always clear if Plato is accurately recording a historical viewpoint that he held, or if he's just using him as a character. And so it would be interesting to know what he actually thought and perhaps asking why it is that he didn't feel the need to write any of it down. Do you have any tips to improve discipline for reading and studying, for example? When it comes to reading and studying, in my experience, discipline can only really be had when I've got some kind of deadline. So luckily for me, I have a lot of deadlines all of the time. If I've got a guest coming on the show, I want to prepare,

So I'll read their book and I'll read around their subject. If I've got a debate coming up, like the Jubilee thing, for example, I'm going to want to prepare for that. If you're a student, then you might have exams coming up. You might have a dissertation to be working on. That's going to motivate you to some degree to study. And so, in my experience, if I don't have such a deadline, I do find it very difficult to stay disciplined.

But then in a way, what we're really talking about there is motivation. You've got a motivation to study, which isn't the same thing as discipline, because discipline means doing this thing that you have to do even when you're not motivated. If you just do it because you're motivated, that's not actually what discipline is at all. So if you're asking how you can just actually read more and study more and do it effectively, I think creating some kind of deadline for yourself. Maybe you start a book club with some friends. And as long as you actually stick to the idea of meeting up once a month or whatever to discuss this paper or this philosophical idea, that will probably motivate you to get on with the work. But outside of those kinds of

motivational tips, if you're looking for actual discipline, that's just a case of increasing discipline overall in your life. And since discipline is just acting when you don't want to act, there's no way to become disciplined except to just sort of start doing it. Like right now, like I don't know what time it is when you're watching this, but when it's done, of course, go and read a book, just go and study. And if you can't be bothered, it's like, that's just what discipline is. It's overcoming that. So I struggle with that too, by the way. But if you're just looking to study or read more, set yourself some deadlines. But that's not actually quite the same thing as discipline. Do you think that the arguments for myriological

nihilism also apply to the existence of persons, or can some sort of bootstrapping save them? Okay, to anybody who's new here, myriological nihilism is the view that there are no such things as parts. So the way that this expresses itself generally is the idea that distinctions between objects, like this glass of water that I've got in my hand and the table that my computer is sat on right now, the only distinction between those things is a mental distinction that I make. There's no real distinction between them. Now, granted, that sounds insane, but here's how to think about it. When did this glass of water begin to exist? Well, that's kind of impossible to say, like, you don't know when this cup was manufactured, but at some point, this cup did not exist, and then it did exist. whenever that happened to be. But no new matter was actually created. Whenever this cup was made, it's not like new matter came into existence. Matter doesn't pop into existence or out of existence, except I suppose when it's exchanged with energy. And so what actually happened here? It's not like there's a bunch of new matter created. Instead, somebody took a bunch of pre-existing matter and

rearranged it and called it a cup. And that's true of any material object that exists, like a car, for example. Cars don't pop into existence. You take stuff that already exists like metal and glass and rubber and you sort of organize it in a particular way and stick it together and cool it a car, but nothing new actually exists. So what is the difference between one organization of this metal and rubber and glass, say it's just sat on the floor over there? And when I rearrange it and put it over there in the shape of a car, what's actually changed? The only thing that's changed is like it's arrangement. So suppose I start with a bunch of pre-existing matter, just a bunch of fundamental atoms. And I take this soup of atoms and I sort of arrange some of them into the

shape of a cup and I arrange some of them into the shape of a car. Nothing new has been created. All that's happened is I've organized things in a particular way and I've just put labels on them. I call that one a cup and that one a car. But the only thing that's actually changed is like my perception and the labels that I put on things. So given that all material objects, emerge from this, you know, quantum soup of foundational matter, the only distinction between any objects is the way that we label them. For example, think about this. Does the left-hand side of a car exist? Like, just the left-hand side of it? Yeah, I mean, it does, because the thing that I'm referring to with the words, the left-hand side of the car, like, exists. But it seems

weird to say that like the left hand side of the car is like a thing that really exists. The words that I'm using there refer to like a part of the car, but it's kind of arbitrary. I can talk about the front or the back and the only thing which determines how many parts there are of this car is kind of how I'm divvying it up, how I'm labelling it. And so in the same way that the left hand side of the car kind of only exists as a concept that I put onto the car. The car itself kind of only exists as a concept that I put on to the atoms and matter that it's made out of. I've talked about this quite a lot before, and I'm probably not doing a very good job of explaining it here. I'll try to remember to put a link in the description to a previous time that I've

spoken about it. But the long and short of it is this. There is no real distinction between objects. There are only mental distinctions. So the question here is asking whether this line of thinking also applies to persons, to like people. Now, this to me is incredibly interesting, because despite everything I've just said about atoms and arrangements, it does seem to me that people really are distinct. It seems like my mind is distinct from your mind. I have thoughts that you don't have access to. You have thoughts that I don't have access to. So if myriological nihilism is true, but it's also true that our minds are actually distinct, then we can run a really interesting argument, which I think comes from Peter Van Inwagon.

Premise 1. There are no real distinctions between material objects. Premise 2. Minds are really distinct. Conclusion? Minds are not material. So from myriological nihilism, we end up with this quite interesting argument for the immateriality of the mind. Now, of course, this relies on the idea that minds are truly distinct. And there's not really much of a way to prove that, except for just for just. Just intuition. It seems like, well, I can have thoughts that you don't have access to. You can have thoughts that I don't have access to, like I already said. But there might be some counter examples to this. For example, a friend of mine recently pointed out to me that the version of my brain while it's sleeping and dreaming generally doesn't have access to my waking brain. It doesn't know that it's asleep. When I wake up, I can remember that part of my brain. I can remember the dream that I've had, at least sometimes. But when I'm in the dream, I seem to like,

lose access to the other version of my brain while it's waking. But it's the same brain. Like the dream brain is the same brain as the waking brain, but at least in one direction, there's like an inaccessibility. So the fact that I can't access your thoughts might not necessarily guarantee that our minds are really distinct. And of course, it's worth pointing out that a lot of people experience something called ego death, especially under the influence of heavy doses of psychedelics. People report sort of losing their sense of self. They feel more connected with other people. They start to feel like all is one and that we're all kind of the same person. That kind of experience does happen and people do experience that. And so

for all the intuition that I have that our minds are distinct, if I was taking a hero dose of LSD right now, I might have an equally forceful intuition that our minds are actually the same thing, man. So whether myriological nihilism applies to the existence of persons is an open question, but hopefully something interesting to think about. How do you make money doing what you do? Well, I'm glad you asked. Do you ever struggle to focus? I know that I do, and especially given my line of work, it can be incredibly frustrating when I just can't stop getting distracted.

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reason for 30 days free. That was actually a genuine question, by the way, in the Q&A. Someone really did ask that. I didn't just plant it for the sake of a sponsor segue. Although I am not above doing that kind of thing. But speaking of which, let's get back to it. Will we eternally reoccur? There are a few things that you might mean by this question. You might be talking about something like reincarnation, maybe. But as far as, far as I understand the current laws of the universe, even if we could keep sort of reincarnating for a really long amount of time, the universe is going to come to an end at some point in like a heat death or something analogous to that. And so even if we develop some way to

regenerate ourselves, physically speaking, there's no way for that to continue forever. However, that might be wrong. Maybe the universe is actually eternal and will go on infinitely. And there are some really interesting thoughts to be had about the possibility of an eternal universe. Given an infinite amount of time, anything that can possibly happen will happen. It's like the monkeys typing at the typewriters infinitely. If the monkeys are actually typing randomly, which by the way they probably wouldn't do, in 2002 the University of Plymouth conducted an experiment with real monkeys giving them typewriters. And I'll quote here, not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages, largely consisting of the letter

S, the lead mail began striking the keyboard with a stone and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine. So even given an infinite amount of time, it's not clear whether monkeys would produce the works of Shakespeare. But if they were actually typing randomly at the keys, then the idea is that, yeah, over an infinite amount of time, you would produce every single possible combination of letters. You would produce the entire works of Shakespeare. You'd also produce every play that Shakespeare could have written but didn't. Everything that can occur will occur. So if the universe goes on forever, then presumably every single possible arrangement of atoms will at some point occur. Every single possible quantum

fluctuation of things popping into existence and popping out of existence for varying degrees of time will occur. So if the universe is infinite, then I'm going to die one day. My body is going to decompose and just at some point just scatter off into ashes across the universe. But at some point in the future, atoms will rearrange themselves in such a way that is identical to this room right now with this camera and this body. And if the mind is material, also this mind. So given an infinite universe, I would reoccur in that sense. But the question is, would that really be me? This is the Star Trek teleporter, right? Like in Star Trek, I've never actually seen it. But famously, they teleport from the spaceship down to the planet, I think.

And the way that they do this is like they disintegrate the person in one place and recreate all of atoms in the same arrangement down on the planet. So it's not like the person actually travels down there. It's like the atoms are destroyed and then rearranged down there. And the question for the philosopher is, is that really the same person? Or is it just a kind of duplicate clone of that person that has all of the memories implanted but isn't really the same person. And the same question would arise here.

So ask yourself, if you're scared of death, if you don't like the fact that you're going to die one day, then if it were the case, if you discovered that the universe is infinite, and at some point in the future, there will be a random arrangement of atoms that arranges itself in such a way that an exact copy of you, as you are right now, will be reproduced with all of your memories, all of your experiences, all of everything, everything's the same. Does that console you? Do you think that that will be you? Do you think that will be the same person?

If the answer is yes, then eternal reoccurrence is possible. If the universe is infinite, in fact, it's guaranteed. Because, again, over an infinite amount of time, this rearrangement of atoms spontaneously into the clone version of you right now would not just happen as a guarantee, but would happen an infinite number of times. So yes, you would eternally reoccur with great big chasms of time in between unfathomable chasms.

of time in between. But if the universe is finite, then the answer is no. By the way, in my existential crisis iceberg video, I talked about the concept of a Boltzmann brain named after the theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who came up with this thought that if you have this infinite universe of atoms spontaneously arranging themselves in particular ways and then disintegrating into randomness again, and this happening infinitely, then one of the things that would spontaneously pop into existence would be brains. So in an infinite universe, sometimes atoms will arrange themselves into stars and then planets, and then evolution gets kicked off, and then human brains evolve,

and you end up with people like you and me. But sometimes, and actually far more frequently, because it's far more simple, brains just spontaneously pop into existence with a bunch of false memories and they think that they've existed for years and years and years because the atoms are arranged such as to give them those false memories and false perceptions but they're actually just a brain floating spontaneously in space and five seconds later they're going to disappear from existence. Boltzmann points out that if the universe is infinite you are far more likely to be one of these Boltzman brains because there are just so many more of them that pop into existence, then you are to be a real human being whose memories

are actually real and is actually experiencing a real world around them. So chances are what you think is your life right now, watching this video with a whole history behind you, is actually just a chimera that's been produced in the last few seconds, and any moment now is about to pop out of existence again. Did you ever get an apology or have further discourse with Peter Hitchens? No, and I don't expect an apology any time soon. I mean, look, maybe I'm not owed one. I might have asked boring, repetitive questions and annoyed him, but I do think that that reaction was a little bit over the top when he stormed out of my podcast.

You're obsessed with drugs? But no, he still very much thinks he's correct and was right to storm out in such a way. He still occasionally tweets about it, like even now I sometimes get a notification that He's responding to some random person on Twitter about it. He also, you may have heard in the UK recently, there were some young girls who were stabbed in Southport. It was a horrible, horrible event. And Peter Hitchens recently wrote an article arguing,

hypothesizing what the cause might have been for this killer's state of mind when he committed these gruesome murders. Can you guess what it is? cannabis. We don't know that this attacker smoked cannabis. There's no record or indication that he used cannabis at any point. But Peter Hitchens just points out that he seemed to have started having mental health issues around the age that people are generally introduced to marijuana and so hypothesized that yeah, this is all about drugs. So I don't know, man, who's really obsessed with drugs here? Do you have a favorite skateboarder slash skate video? My favorite skateboarder

has always been Rodney Mullen, which is a bit of an obvious example. He's the guy that invented the kickflip. He's well known as just being this legend of the sport. But the reason why he's my personal favourite, I can show you actually. Okay, so this is my actual real-life skateboard. And on the nose, I don't know if that will focus. That is Rodney Mullen's signature because I met him. He was doing some kind of, or he was with some kind of tour that came to, came to Oxford. And Oxford has a not too bad skate park, actually. And Rodney Millen was there. And I remember, like, getting a text from a friend who was like, dude, like Rodney Mullins here, you've got to, you've got to come to the skate park. If you don't know anything about

skateboarding, like I say, this guy literally invented the kickflip. Like, he's a legend. And I sort of ran into the skate park and I was like pushing past people. I was like, you know, where is he? I found my friend. I was like, where's Rodney Mullen? And they were like, you just pushed past him on your way in, you know. So I went back and I took a photo with him, which I've now lost. But he signed my skateboard, which I will try not to lose. And I just remember him being like the nicest guy ever because everybody was flocking to him. He was like a mega celebrity. And he was just like so, so nice. So he's my favorite, not just because of his skateboarding, but because of him as a person. My favorite skate video, there is a guy called Aaron Cairo who runs a channel. called Braille Skateboarding, and he used to do these videos called Skate Support.

I don't know if he still does them or not, but basically people would send in videos of themselves trying to do a trick, and he would like help them out. I sent in a skate support once years ago, and I was trying to learn how to do a 50-50 grind, and it got on to skate support. So I've been pushing around for a while. I'm pretty comfortable. Here's an OLLI. It's not the best OLLI in the world, but it manages to get me up curbs and ledges, and I'm pretty comfortable with them. I can get them every time. no big deal I've also got a shove it and a 180 they're tricks I've been doing for a while I've

almost got my kick clips and heel clips down I'm pretty comfortable just doing flat ground stuff so I figured I might as well move on to the grinds and he made a response and he said that it was the best skate support he'd ever received awesome so first off I want to start by saying this is definitely by far the best skate support anybody has ever sent into me and so as far as skateboarding videos go that was probably it I was I was pretty excited at the time. Should any book ever be banned? It's easy to say politically, like, no, we shouldn't ban books. People should be able to read whatever they like. But if we're going to be philosophers, who are at base, of course, pedants, then we have to point out that there are, of course,

some books that we would ban. For example, if somebody published the nuclear codes in a book and we're selling it on Amazon, that would get banned and probably rightfully so. Also, trivially copyright infringements, you know, if I copy out the Chamber of Secrets, the second Harry Potter novel, and I just started selling it on my website, I would get fined, maybe thrown in prison, I don't know, but yeah, it would get taken down. I wouldn't be allowed to do it. And the question is, like, is this an infringement of free speech? Most people intuitively say, no, no, like, free speech doesn't cover copyright infringement, but the question is, like, why? Because of intellectual property. It's kind of a dubious concept, really. It's quite difficult to pin down exactly

what it is that somebody owns in intellectual property. That comes up all the time in cases of music, plagiarism, where it seems like someone's been pretty influenced by another song, but it's not entirely clear what the original musician actually owned. But okay, whether it exists or not, why can't I do that? Like, why is it illegal for me to take somebody else's intellectual property and sell it online? Well, broadly speaking, it's because it kind of like harms them, you know. It means that they're making less money because I'm giving away something for free that people should be paying them for. But what are we saying there?

Are we saying that there's like a particular series of words that if I write out, it's going to harm somebody else? And not physically, of course, not like with violence, but in some other sense, I don't know, it starts to sound a little bit like the arguments that people make as to why we should ban other kinds of speech. Well, if you say this particular thing, it's going to non-physically, but it will. harm another person. So that's one thing to think about. You might think that I'm talking nonsense here, but I spoke in more detail about this on my podcast a couple of years ago with Constantine Kissin. So if you want to watch us unpack that particular conversation, then you can go and watch that. But another thing to think about is pornography. A lot of people think that pornography should

be banned for various reasons. Some people see that as an infringement of freedom of speech. Some people don't. But if you are somebody who thinks that pornography shouldn't be legal, or at least should be banned in some circumstances, maybe that would apply here, like a pornographic book of some kind, like a comic book. But if you're somebody who's just like totally okay with pornography, uh, putting this in such a way that isn't going to upset the YouTube overlords and demonetize this video, let's just say that there are certain kinds of pornography or, you know, sexual material. I should say that I would presume you would not be okay with us putting into a book and publishing, whether in bookshops or just for free online, some kind of comic book or something

of that kind, right? So if that's the case, then trivially, there are instances in which some kinds of books should be banned. And the interesting question is, what is the principle that we use to determine when it's okay to say that you're not allowed to say that, you're not allowed to publish that? But in other cases, we'll allow people to say things which we consider to be really harmful or dangerous or upsetting, but our moral principles tell us that we have to protect their right to publish it anyway. What are your thoughts on deism? Okay, so deism, generally speaking, is defined as the idea that, like, God or some kind of creative power created the universe, but then had nothing to do with it. So it undermines traditional monotheisms like Christianity or

Islam, because these imagine a God who interferes with human affairs, who sort of sticks around to govern. Whereas the deist says, well, something said it all off, but then had nothing more to do with it. The reason deism can be attractive is because it allows you to get around arguments for the existence of God, the kalam cosmological argument or whatever, by saying, like, yeah, okay, there was a first course of the universe, but that's it, like, then it was hands off. I am not particularly attracted to deism, because I think that some of the best arguments for the existence of God point towards a consistent godly presence in the universe. Take the contingency argument, for example,

without going into too much detail. The idea is that God is necessary to hold everything in place like right now, right? Like the reason why the laws of physics are constantly staying in place and things aren't just sort of flying apart is because there's some sort of foundational cause, not a temporal cause in the sense of it coming before something else, but in the sense of it being foundational, holding it all together, like the glue of the universe. If that's what God is, then it doesn't make any sense to say that God like caused the universe and then, you know, went off for lunch. No, he has to be like there constantly right now at the foundation of the universe.

Like there are two kinds of causation. There's temporal causation, which is like, I push over a domino and that pushes over the next domino and then the next domino. And that goes on throughout time, right? And that means that once that first domino is knocked over and the chain is in motion, I can take that first domino that fell over and I can throw it away, I can chuck it in the bin, and that chain of dominoes is going to keep falling over, right? Because I've already said it in motion. I can get rid of that first cause. We don't need it anymore. And this is what a deist kind of imagines the universe is like. God is that first domino or like the finger that knocks over the domino. And then whatever, it's free. It can go off and doesn't need to be there

anymore. But there's another kind of causation, which is not temporal. It doesn't work through time, but works all at once. So I'm going to take this book, and I'm going to hold it in the air like this. And the question is, what is causing that book to be in the position it is right now? Not temporally, like, why is it there? Because I lifted it up. But like right now, why is it there? Why isn't it falling to the ground? Well, because it's being held up by my hand. And why is my hand there? Not because it's being held up by my arm. And why is my arm there? Because it's being held up by my shoulder and so on. And why is my body there? Well, it's being held up by the floor. And the floor's being held up by the ground, right?

So there's a kind of causation. Like the book's position is being caused by my hand's position. And my hand's position is being caused by my arm's position, but it's all happening at once. Right. And unlike the dominoes, suppose I were to remove the arm, it's not like the hand and the book would stay in place. If I remove the arm, the book's going to fall, right? And so it's, It's not the kind of causation that can be set in motion, and then the first cause just disappears. So this kind of causation, this hierarchical causation, as it's called, as opposed to temporal causation, if we push that question all the way back, like remember the book being held in place by my hand, by my arm, by my shoulder, by my body, by the floor, by the ground, by the earth. What's holding the earth in place?

Well, like gravity is, but what's holding gravity in place? like what's kind of making gravity consistently have the same kind of force, the contingency argument sort of keeps going down and lands on this first foundational cause of God. But in the domino case, the temporal case, God can push over the dominoes, go away, and the chain of causation keeps happening. In the case of hierarchical causation, if God is like the foundational course that's holding everything in place right now, he can't just, like, go away because everything else would fall from on top of him, right? He's literally the foundation.

And so because I think that as far as arguments through the existence of God go, like the contingency argument is a pretty good one, that wouldn't support this view of deism. And so I'm not particularly attracted to that philosophy. Debate with Trent Horn when? I already debated Trent Horn a number of years ago on Pints with Aquinas. We talked about the contingency argument, actually, I think. so if you want to see a deeper dive on that, then again, I'll try to remember to leave a link in the

description. But that was a long time ago, so perhaps would you another one? I don't know. What is the most valuable thing? More specifically, what object or concept should be regarded as most important in society and or day-to-day life? Time, money, pleasure, knowledge. Love, man. Gosh, that's a bit soppy, isn't it? But, like, really, I mean, I'm thinking of like an empirical analysis here. If you look historically, when somebody experiences love or even claims to experience love, it drives people crazy. And all of the things that you've listed, so time, money, pleasure, knowledge, these are all things that people have regularly been willing to just sacrifice in a heartbeat for love. And there are kinds of love which I've never

experienced, like I've never experienced the love that somebody has for their children, right? I don't have children. But I have no doubt that if I have a child, like, yeah, I'm going to give up time to raise that child. I'm going to give up money because I'm going to put that money into raising my child. I'm going to give up pleasure because it's going to suck in many ways. There's going to be lots of late nights and that kind of stuff. Knowledge. I don't know if I would have to sacrifice that to raise a child, but like I probably would once I had that child, right? And so just looking at how easily people have given up basically anything else ever for love when they experience true love. It seems to be the thing that's most valuable. Hi, Alex. If you could live any number of years

without being able to die, but you had to choose today, how many years would you choose? You cannot end your life early. Oh, I see. Like, once you've decided, you can't end your life early, so no suicide. That would be kind of interesting, because I'd love to test the mechanism by which I, like, can't die. Like, what if I'm, like, decapitated? Do I just keep existing, like as a head? Does my body still work? What if I cut my mind in two? Like I would definitely, if I had this kind of physical immortality, just start doing philosophical experiments. Like, I would just cut my brain into four quarters and see what happened. Like, is it like lights out for four of them and one of them continues in some like really debilitated form or do I like

become four people? Like, man, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff to do there. So I'd want a bit of time to experiment with that. But of course, you know, the famous observation, is that if you live for too long, then you just have to constantly see loved ones die. Of course, we have to see loved ones die no matter how long we live. Well, not no matter how long we live, but if we live, you know, an average human lifespan, people you love are going to die. And you would have to experience more of that. But if you're not living forever, I'm not sure how much that would outweigh the desire

to extend my life at least a little bit. I'm inclined to extend my life quite far for the following reason. I don't believe in the afterlife. I don't think anything happens after I die, but I'm not sure. And so if it turns out that I'm correct and there's no afterlife, then I want to live much longer so that I've had more experience and more life before I finally conk out. If I'm wrong, and there is an afterlife, then I want to give myself as long as possible to become convinced of that,

especially if the afterlife exists in such a way that I have to like accept the truth of a particular religion. in order to access it. I'd want to give myself more time to be convinced of that. So whether it's true or false, there's a benefit to extending my life for a fair amount. But I think, I'm not sure I could do more than like five or six hundred or something like that. I mean, even that would be probably pushing it. How long did Adam, like from Genesis, I mean, live? Was it about 900 years or so? Maybe I'd pick that. Yeah, 930 years. That's when Adam died. And if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. What are your thoughts on the ethics of separating the art from the artist? For example, in light of Kanye West's behavior as of late, is it wrong for me to listen to his music?

I personally think that it's really important to separate the art from the artist. Like, I think that you can really, really dislike one of those things, but still indulge in the other one. Like, I really don't like Kanye West's music. I think it's terrible. But his views, wait. How optimistic are you that the UK will finally leave the monarchy behind? Do you imagine William and George will both become kings? William, yes. George, honestly, probably, but maybe not. This is just going to depend on whether it becomes a national conversation. I think that if the question of monarchy were put before the British people in a similar way to like Brexit, where it was like all anyone was talking about for a period of time and there were debates on TV and stuff, I don't really see the monarchy surviving. I do think that with the growth of, like, nationalist fervor that we're seeing in the UK, there might be a

pretty successful monarchist campaign, but I don't think a lot of that nationalist sentiment is actually tied up in, like, monarchy anymore. When, you know, when, when Nigel Farage sings the national anthem and says, God save the king, like, I'm not sure, like, quite how crucial monarchy in particular is actually to that kind of, that kind of political movement. So I don't really see anybody making a very good defence for the monarchy in that context. The problem is that I don't see that question being thrust onto the British people like that because no one really cares. They're not really good enough to stay if tested in that way, but they're not bad enough for it to be felt necessary for that question to be put before the British public. So it just depends when it

becomes an issue felt worth discussing. But as soon as that happens, I think it's on its way out. coolest skateboarding trick that you know. If you mean I know as in I can do the trick, I once kind of landed a varial kickflip. So it would have to be that. Best Oxford Pub. I visited every pub in Oxford in one day on a 37 or so pub, pub crawl, in part to try to determine what was the best pub. What was the worst pub? My favourite pubs include the eagle and child, mostly for sentimental reasons. It's where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien used to meet up and host the inkling meetings and stuff. Unfortunately, that pub has shut down. It's unclear whether it's going to reopen or not. So you can't go there right now. But just across the road is the Lamb and Flag pub, which they also went to and is

sort of connected to that in the same way. But I kind of just don't think it's quite as good of a pub. It's a really good pub, so that's definitely up there. Just up the road from that is a pub called the Royal Oak, which again has a lot of sentimental value to me, because when I was at uni, I co-founded the Oxford Socratic Society, which is, because it still exists, a debate society that meets every Friday to debate some kind of philosophical issue. And we used to do that at Wycliffe Hall, which is a college up in the north of Oxford. And so afterwards, every Friday, we'd go down to the Royal Oak, and that's where we'd continue those discussions. So a lot of really intense and important and formative conversations in my life happened in the Royal Oak.

But my favourite pub of all is probably the Half Moon. It's one of the only pubs in Oxford that's open till 2 in the morning, which is a rarity in that city. It's Irish. It's kind of small. It's a little bit grim, but in a very beautiful kind of way. It often has live music, sort of folk music, people with guitars and fiddles and stuff. And it's just a really, really nice vibe.

So, yeah, catch me at half one in the morning. in the half moon if I'm in Oxford of a night. As you have become a larger player in the philosophy YouTube space and the philosophy world as a whole, is there anyone you have met that you felt starstruck by? Well, thank you for the implication. Yeah, I've been really lucky with a lot of the people that I've gotten to either meet or bring onto my show. Honestly, I don't get starstruck very much. And I think part of the reason for that is that if I've got like a big guest coming on the show or someone that I'm going to debate or something like that, and I'm really excited about it, I'll start preparing, right? It takes a long time to prepare for a big episode like

that. And so by the time it comes to actually doing it, I've kind of just normalized in my mind that it's happening. And so it's not like bumping into someone on the street and going like, oh my goodness, I can't believe it's you. So really when I get starstruck, it kind of tends to be, if it happens at all, from like less famous people. Like if there's some random YouTuber that I like used to watch when I was younger, who isn't even that big, but, like, I used to watch a fair bit, if I, like, saw them at an event, or saw that they followed me on Instagram or something, even though they're, like, sometimes maybe not even nearly as famous as some of the people that I've had on my own show, that's the kind of thing that gets me excited. I'm like, oh, no way, like that

guy, you know? So it's not necessarily about the level of fame, but rather the unexpectedness by which I come to meet them. And I think that's what being starstruck is, like, you're struck by it because say you're just like walking down the street or you're at the gym or something and you just saw like the president of the united states there's something so incongruous about your experience of everyday life but also like the president being there like and i think it's that incongruity that makes you struck you're like whoa this is so weird but if you like knew he was going to be there then you might still be a bit starstruck because it's still kind of unexpected in a in a grander sense but like maybe less so than you would be if you just came across them in that in that

way. And so for me, it's, it's the surprise that still allows me to sometimes get a, get a little bit excited. What's a book you wish you would have written? Harry Potter, like, I would quite like to be a billionaire. Actually, I don't know if I would want to be a billionaire. So I'm not sure. But yeah, Harry Potter, because I'd become a billionaire, see how it felt. And then if I didn't like it, I guess I would just give it all to charity. What would you ask Jesus Christ if he could only answer one question. Who's the naked man? Yeah, in Mark chapter 14, Jesus gets arrested. It's a very dramatic scene. So Judas betrays Jesus. They go to arrest him. One of Jesus' followers pulls out a sword and attacks the servant of the high priest. It's super dramatic. And after this,

it says that everyone deserted him and fled. That's verse 50. So verses 51 and 52, we read the following. A young man wearing nothing but a linen garment was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind. Now, we're not told who this person is. We're not told why he was there. It's not entirely clear why the author of Mark's Gospel thought this was an important detail to include. Like, maybe it's supposed to have some kind of theological undertone or something, but it's just completely unclear.

It's just this mystery, naked man who runs away from Jesus getting arrested and taken to eventually be crucified, and nobody knows who he is. But if I could cheekily ask for a second question, I would ask Jesus if he was God. I would ask if he claims himself to be God or not, because the most interesting question to me that jumps out of the Gospels is who does Jesus think that he is? He thinks he's the son of man, he thinks that he's the Messiah, all of this kind of stuff, but I want to know how much of that is tied to the historical person of Jesus. And I also want to know, did he claim to be God?

A lot of people think that there are instances in the Gospels that indicate that's what he thought of himself. I'm not entirely convinced by that, so I'd want to clear that up. Who do you agree with most? Christopher Hitchens or Jordan Peterson? Man, that is a hell of a question, because everybody knows that I've got a lot to say about Jordan Peterson. And I said it to his face as well. And a lot of people also know that I'm a massive fan of Christopher Hitchens and was hugely inspired by him. But a lot of people also know that I've criticised Christopher Hitchens a lot and said that basically everything he said about philosophy and religion was wrong.

And so this is actually a really difficult question to answer. I think that if you can actually pin down an opinion of Jordan Peterson, I might be more likely to agree with it than I would be Christopher Hitchens. Just because I think Hitchens' analysis of, if we're talking about religion and philosophy here, you know, Hitchens' analysis of philosophy was so... shallow, I hate to say, about a man who is not here to defend himself. But he did the same thing, you know, he wasn't exactly too kind to Jerry Falwell after he died. I'm not sure if you believe in heaven, but if you do, do you think Jerry Falwell is in it? No, and I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to. So if you actually just isolated the two men's views on philosophy and religion, like if you

take Hitchens and just remove all of the rhetoric, all of the poetry, and all of the British accent, and just put the arguments that he made. managed to also pin down whatever the hell Jordan Peterson actually thinks about religion. I'm inclined to think that I might be more likely to agree with Jordan Peterson, but honestly, it's impossible to say, because Hitchens was very clear, but very shallow. Jordan Peterson is very deep, but extremely unclear. What's your favorite Bible verse? I tend to like the bizarre and kind of funny Bible verses.

So I've already mentioned the naked man who flees from Jesus. arrest in Mark's Gospel. I just think that's so interesting and random. Or maybe Ezekiel chapter 23 verse 20. There she lusted after her lovers whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose a mission was like that of horses. Again, just quite unexpected for a lot of people to find that kind of phrasing in the Bible. Of course, there's also Jesus cursing the fig tree. The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry, seeing in the distance of fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves because it was not the season for figs. And this is the funniest thing about this for me, is that it's not the season for

fix. But it says, then he said to the tree, may no one ever eat fruit from you again, and the disciples heard him say it. And when they go back in the morning, although this is Mark's gospel in Matthew, this happens immediately. As they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, Rabbi, look, the fig tree you cursed has withered. So Jesus sees a fig tree, wants some figs, but there aren't any. And so he curses the tree and it shrivels up and dies. And it's not even fig season. Again, I just think it's a little bit weird. But outside of those kinds of verses, I think that the best verse in terms of like summing up Christianity is Romans chapter 5,

verse 8, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. I sometimes ask my Christian friends if the entire Bible were to be destroyed and every record of it and memory of it destroyed, but you could have like one verse retained that's discovered by some archaeologists and that's the only thing that they know about Christianity. What verse would you choose. And one time I asked a Christian, and they said this verse, and since then, I've tended to agree with them. It makes the most sense. It talks about God in the singular, so monotheism. It also mentions this Christ figure. I suppose it would be unclear who Christ is, but Christ is mentioned. It talks about dying for our sins, and it talks about love, which is like the most important

thing in Christianity. So Christ dying for our sins, monotheism, God being loving, all sort of wrapped up into one. So that's probably my favorite verse in a different sense. Do you feel your career would suffer if you became a theist? I do sometimes wonder, like, if I became a Christian and I announced it on YouTube, like what would happen? Would I lose subscribers? I'd probably lose some, probably a good chunk, but like would I go down to less than a million again? If I did, by the way, I would definitely celebrate like hitting a million subscribers, but like on the way down in the opposite direction. That would be fun. Honestly, I have no idea how it would affect my career, but the good news is that I'm in a pretty good position here,

because if I were a Christian, like, constantly considering atheism, then it would be like, well, if I become an atheist, I might lose all of my audience, and also, like, I'd be an atheist and there's no afterlife, and that kind of sucks. Whereas for me, it's like, okay, if I became a Christian and, like, it ruined my career, like, that would kind of suck, but I would be trading it for eternal life, or at least the belief in eternal life, which is not a lot of a bad thing to trade your career for. So I'm in a pretty good position there and means that there is no motivation attached to this thought in terms of being motivated to remain an atheist for my career or anything like that, which is a good thing because like my job essentially is

trying to get people to convince me that Christianity is true. That's kind of what it is at this point. And I think that there being that kind of implicit motivation career-wise to remain in my current ideology would get in the way. So I'm kind of glad that it's that way around. But the other reason why I don't really consider my career in whether or not I'd become a Christian is because I actually think that it wouldn't really suffer. Like my audience would probably change in the stuff that I do would change, of course, but I feel like my platform is big enough that, you know, there would be an audience of people who would listen to what I have to say no matter what I did. So if I become a Christian, if I become a Muslim, if I become a Mormon, who knows? I think there'll be people to listen

me, you know, what's your favorite color? Also, I'm very new to philosophy and don't know where to start. Any tips? My favorite color is David Hume's missing shade of blue. And as for tips on where to get started with philosophy, there are obviously loads of books that I could point you to. I'm actually hoping to put together a list of book recommendations, like 100 books or whatever at some point soon. But I always like to point people to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the it's a free online resource and it's just wonderful it has entries on any topic in philosophy and ethics that you can think of that there's going to be an entry on it and it's a bit like Wikipedia but instead of it being like anybody can just add information each entry is edited

by an expert by a professional and at the bottom of every sep entry is a bibliography is a bunch of books that they've referenced in this article so you've also kind of got a reading list for hyper-specific areas of philosophy too. So if you're interested in like a particular argument for the existence of God, or you want to know like who was a manual Kant and what was he banging on about, just look it up on the SCP and not only will you find a wonderful article that will teach you basically everything you need to know to get started. You can also, if something captures your imagination, look at the references, find the books that are being referenced and go and read those. So it's something to read and also a book recommendation list kind of all shoved into one.

How was life at sixth form for you? And which universities did you apply to? It was pretty miserable, to be honest. For those who don't know, sixth form in the UK is the last two years of high school before you go to university or before you take a gap year or whatever. And the first time I did sixth form, the first year, I just, I failed. I got three years. I did maths, further maths, and physics. I also took a kind of side course in critical thinking.

I think I got a D in that. I honestly was spending all of my time in the school recording studio, like making music. I did not care about school. I did not care about grades. It was fully my intention to just drop out of school as soon as I was legally allowed to and either pursue like a career in music or just do something else. I didn't care. I was a real like problem student.

And I actually saw some of my old teachers. not too long ago, I was speaking at this school's conference. So much of like secondary schools, high schools get together for philosophy and theology and they had some speaker events. And I was one of them. Two of my old teachers were like in the audience with their students. And I met them afterwards. And it was sort of like, they sort of said, oh, you know, it's so great to see you. Like it looks like you're doing so well. And they said like, you know, the, oh man, the kids, you know, they ask about you because they knew that we teach you. I was. really moved by that and I said well what do you tell them and she was like honestly I tell them that

you were like a little brat and yeah I mean I was so I just like totally failed but legally you have to be an education in the UK until you're 18 so I couldn't just leave I had to kind of do something so I went somewhere else and redid my A levels I took different subjects philosophy and religion sociology and politics, like government and politics. And I did a bit better. I think I got A, B, C. And then at some point around this time, I think I kind of started doing the YouTube thing properly and getting interested. And I thought, you know what? I actually kind of want to pursue this. I need to like sort out this academic stuff. So I just went really, really hard on the second year of A levels, got A star, AA, like scrape the grades that I needed.

applied to Oxford. I think because I had the YouTube channel that helped with my application because my grades were kind of in the dumpster. But I kind of just managed to turn it around. But that first time doing A levels, it just sucked because my heart wasn't in it. And the second time round, although I started trying a bit harder at some point, I just didn't like the institution. I didn't like the place I was in. I didn't really know that many people. I had like one good friend there, but I didn't feel like there was much of a community. It was just like a pretty miserable two years. I brought that upon myself, but I'm pretty glad that I managed to turn that around. So, like, if you're having a hard time at Sixth Form right now, like, you will forget

about it. Like, you'll move on, you'll get into some university, and you won't even remember that Sixth Form was a thing. Don't worry about it. And which universities did you apply to? I applied to Oxford. I think my second choice was Edinburgh. I can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure that was it. And I love Edinburgh. I was there recently. And I think, like, if I'd have gone there and said, I would have had a time too. So those were the two that I remember applying to. Are you more fascinated with Nosticism or Mormonism? Definitely Nosticism. I've made loads of episodes about Nosticism. I've never made an episode about Mormonism, but I do plan too soon. But it's kind of funny, like recently I've mentioned Mormonism a couple of times. Sometimes it's a bit of a joke, but also

as a sort of critique of mainstream Christianity. The Mormons have been pretty excited about that. I think they like when someone's given them attention, I suppose, and it's caused a bit of stirer online. Like, I've been tagged in a lot of stuff. Like, I'm not a Mormon, everybody. I think Mormonism is kind of interesting, and I've been, like, learning about it. But, yeah, no, I don't think it's true. I just think it's got this, like, wacky history. Like, take this, for example.

Do you know who the first ever U.S. presidential candidate in history to be assassinated was? It was Joseph Smith, the founder. of the Mormon religion. And not only is it kind of weird that he ran for president, but also, yeah, like, he was assassinated while he was running for president, while he was in prison. A gang, like, showed up to the prison, and there was a shootout, and he, like, fell out of a window. I think he was shot, and then he fell out of a window, and then they, like, shot him again when he was on the ground.

Like, the whole history of Mormonism is just, like, really interesting. So, yeah, I've been talking about it a lot, but it's been pretty tongue-in-cheek. So, like, no, I'm not a Mormon, everybody. is your favorite musician slash musical group? Mine is Bob Dylan. My favorite group, at least my favorite group that you probably won't have heard of is the band Flight, F-L-Y-T-E. I've known them for a long time. I found their music years and years ago, got to know them in the years after that, just like wonderful music. Like probably they are the best songwriters on the planet right now. So if you haven't listened to them, do yourself a favor. Do you think that rule you

utilitarianism is the best way to ground human rights. Utilitarianism is the view that when faced with two potential options, say you should look at the consequences of those options and whichever one is going to maximize utility, specifically like maximizing pleasure, minimizing suffering. That's the thing that you should do. The problem is that this seems to imply that every single time you go to do anything, you need to do this hedonic calculus as it's called to like, work out what the best course of action is. And that's pretty debilitating. And the very act of constantly analyzing consequences in this way might itself not maximize utility. So it might not be utilitarian to be a utilitarian. So stemming back to John Stuart Mill, there develops this idea

called rule utilitarianism, which essentially says, okay, we're not going to analyze every single action. Instead, we're going to develop some general rules, which if we follow, will generally maximize utility. And so if you're a utilitarian, it's kind of difficult to justify human rights. This is what the whole of the fifth chapter of John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism is dedicated to. If you think that maximizing pleasure is like the thing that you should always do, then what if maximizing pleasure seems to involve violating someone's rights? Or maybe that is just what you should do, but a lot of us feel like rights are a thing that should be protected, even if we sort of maybe agree with the utilitarian principle. So rule utilitarianism

might allow us to get around this problem by saying, yeah, we are utilitarians in principle, but in practice we need to develop rules. And these rules kind of look like human rights. Like generally speaking, like don't murder. Like don't abridge freedom of speech. And obviously there are individual instances in which violating that right would maximize utility. But we've all agreed to just follow the rules because overall that just leads to a better society. The problem with this is that even those rules will sometimes at least conceivably run up against counter examples. Like, take the general rule, don't murder. For a utilitarian, they will admit that there are circumstances in which murdering would be the right thing to do, but because of all

the effort and always trying to work that out, we're just going to live by the rule. But suppose it was obvious. Like, if you don't murder one person, two billion people are going to be infinitely tortured for the rest of time. Maybe you believe in rights. Maybe you think it would still be wrong to kill that person. But the utilitarian would have to think that murdering that person is the right thing to do. There's just like no way that you can think that we should be maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering and not think that's the right thing to do. So this rule that you've developed in the face of this counter example would just crumble. But the thing is, not all of these counter examples are going to be so obvious. There are going to be some gray areas.

And where there is a gray area, what are you going to do? The rule utilitarian has to make a choice. They either just stick to the rule because they've decided not to bother with analyzing individual actions, in which case they might run the risk of just doing a blatantly immoral thing according to utilitarianism. Or they have to analyze those gray area cases and decide whether the rule should be applied in that instance. But if you're just looking at individual instances and deciding whether or not to apply rule, it's not a rule anymore. You've just gone back to normal act utilitarianism based on individual actions. So a lot of people suggest that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism is that former version of crude utilitarianism that you just analyze each individual act and see what the right thing to do is. One way around this is to distinguish between what's called the criterion of good and the decision procedure. So the utilitarian has kind of two elements to their thinking. There's the element which tells us what actually makes a thing good or right. And there's another element which is like, in practice, how should we

live? And so it might be that we should be act utilitarians in our criterion of the good, but rule utilitarians in our decision procedure. So the thing that actually makes something good is whether in that individual instance, it maximizes utility. But our practical decision procedure as to like how best to align with that moral truth of the universe is to adopt some kind of rule utilitarianism. But even then, like even if it is just your decision procedure, there's just no way that I can see to get around these really obvious counter examples. Like those two billion people who are going to be tortured for eternity if you don't murder an innocent person, like for a utilitarian to come along and look at that and go, well, I know that in this instance,

You know, it's wrong to allow those two billion people to be tortured. But, you know, I decided on practical grounds to adopt this rule. And even if in this instance, you know, this isn't the right thing to do, I'm going to go by my rule because I think that overall it's like that just makes a mockery of what utilitarianism is all about because this is just so obvious. So the rules of rule utilitarianism just become practically helpful until they're not, until the problem is obvious enough that the rule just disappears. And if that's how we're grounding human rights, then what kind of human rights are we talking about? Like, yeah, you have a right to life and a right to freedom of speech. But if a big enough, obvious enough counter example comes along, I'm just going to violate that right. Those aren't really rights at all. So the questioner asked, do I believe that rule utilitarianism is the best way to ground human rights? No, it's a really bad way to ground human rights. If you think that rights are these inviolable claims that you have over,

other people, which is what I think rights are. That's a whole other discussion. I have dipped into it before. I can't remember where, but I'll try to remember to leave a link in the description. It might be the best way as a consequentialist, as a utilitarian, to ground human rights. But if you believe in human rights first, and that's the thing that you're trying to, like, defend philosophically, and you go to rule utilitarianism, I think you're going to have a problem. Anyway, I think that will do it for now. Thank you for 1.25 million subscribers. It's a cliche to say, but I genuinely, genuinely just never expected the channel to be quite this big. So thank you. Stay tuned. We've got some really cool stuff coming up. I'm so looking forward to

sharing with you some of the stuff that I'm working on right now. So thank you for being here. Thanks to subscribing. And I'll see you in the next one.