Special: Interview with Sam Harris on Gurus, Tribalism & the Culture War
Sam Harris probably needs no introduction in our neck of the info-sphere as he is seemingly never far from the spotlight... or the occasional controversy.We’ve had some nice things to say about Sam, but we’ve also made some harsh criticisms, particularly regarding a short episode he released which seemed to suggest it was necessary to practice introspective meditation in order to fully understand why his political and culture war views were correct.Although we’ve never done a ‘proper’ episode on Sam, we have always stated that anyone we discuss is welcome to come on the show and discuss (or dispute) our charges – which is exactly what Sam is doing here!This interview is split into two sections. In the first, we discuss Sam’s app and whether it might encourage guru dynamics and the role of meditation and (non) self-awareness in forming an accurate political outlook. We put some of our criticisms to Sam especially regarding guru dynamics, issues of introspective verification of truth claims, and the potential for abusive practices and manipulation by gurus.In the second section, we turn to some of the more controversial topics that have sprung up around Sam over the years. Sam responds to proposals that he might be as tribal as the rest of us suckers, and he defends himself against accusations that he might have selective empathy and blind spots towards the rightish side of the political spectrum. We talk about tribalism and the potential distorting effects of personal relationships, as well as anthropologists, Islamism, wokism, right-wing extremism, and how political biases manifest themselves on the left and right.Although the format is an interview, it does get quite ‘debate-y’ at times. And it’s probably true that we don’t come to a grand reconciliation of views at the end. However, nobody storms off, so what you get is a frank and friendly but robust exchange of views.We hope you enjoy it.LinksEmbrace the Void 170: State of the IDW with Chris KavanaghArticle by Stuart Hayashi on Stefan Molyneux's views about the HolocaustStefan Molyneux profile on the Daily BeastOur episode on Douglas MurrayOur episode on Gad SaadPolite Conversations with Eiynah 17: Sam Harris EpisodeWashington Post Article on Maajid's Promotion of 'Stop The Steal'Guardian article on Maajid's growing interest in ConspiraciesMaking Sense 243: A Few Points of Confusion (Sam's meditation episode)<a...
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what we're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
Good morning, Chris.
How are you?
Morning, Matthew.
I'm fine and dandy.
Genki.
You're genki.
That's good.
Yes, we just had a lot of audio problems, but I no longer sound like a robot, right?
So we can actually do this.
You do sound like a robot to me, but hopefully not to the listeners, so that's fine.
I'm dealing with some issues, Matt, with my internet.
I don't know what's going on.
Everyone sounds like a robot to me.
I hope it's the internet.
Yeah, not me, mate.
Not me.
Maybe you've all been replaced with these bad robot coffees, and I'm the main character.
I'm the, what's he called, Truman.
Yeah.
Could be.
Could be.
Well, I just got out of a grade assessment meeting, which was interminable.
This is the meeting where we all sit together and talk about the grades that were handed out for all the different units.
And I was...
Commenting snarkily on everybody else's inflated grades.
And then I realized that the comments were basically public.
And now you've told thousands of people.
Any colleagues listening, do not look for the private DM comments for that meeting.
Just don't even look for them.
You don't want to see them.
There's nothing there that you want to see.
That's right.
So one other thing that you did recently, which I was quite surprised to see.
And I think we need to mention, so, you know, last time we discussed that we got an unofficial Discord set up where we're taking a leaf out of the Guru's book and we're encouraging our community to form these insular communities where we can sick them on people and do all these kind of bad things.
And I was surprised, as were the other members of that Discord, when you created an alternative official Discord and were Siphoning people off.
You already created, you know, Discord drama.
We covered Eric's multiple Discord nullify.
And yeah, I was surprised to see that you had created your own Discord server and were pointing people in that direction.
So what happened, Matt?
You're just a power-hungry maniac.
I know.
It was so crazy.
Like, somebody on Twitter was asking for the link to the Discord.
So yeah, as you said, some people created an unofficial Discord, which was great.
And I popped in there and had a bit of a chat with people.
It was all very nice.
And then somebody on Twitter asked for the link.
And I was like, oh, I don't know how to get a link to the thing.
I just installed the app.
And I'm like, you know, I'm verging on Boomer territory.
I don't know how this stuff works.
And so I thought I was sharing a link.
To the unofficial server, but somehow...
And I just posted it in the link and then just didn't think any more about it.
And then this big brouhaha was happening.
Well, it turned out I'd made an entirely new Discord server.
You accidentally created a rival Discord.
That's impressive that you did that.
And I saw some people commenting and saying, oh, they've set up an official one.
You know, they were saying, oh, that's all right.
That's there, right?
And stuff.
I was like, wait, what?
What did we do?
And I was 100% sure that you did not intentionally create a discord that you would need to manage.
But I did enjoy that for a while.
People were speculating that this was what had happened.
And yeah, and then you needed to delete it.
It doesn't exist anymore.
But I enjoyed the suggestion.
That I think it was Dan Gilbert was saying you could call it Matt's Meat Cave and just make it your own little private Discord if people come there by accident.
But you nuked it, Matt.
It's gone.
It doesn't exist anymore.
It's gone.
It was sewing Discord on Discord and we couldn't have that.
Or maybe it was a Machiavellian plot for me and all of this is a cover story.
That's right.
You saw the negative feedback and you made a terrible mistake.
They're on to me.
Good job, Matt.
It's pretty remarkable that somebody could accidentally create a Discord.
You're an impressive person.
Patreons, all those things, they are available.
Seek them out.
Don't trust Matt if he sends you any links.
He might send you some dodgy private forums or something.
So just keep an eye out for him if you're going to the official account.
But otherwise, you're pretty safe.
Nobody asked me for the link to the Discord because this could all happen all over again.
I'm not handing out any more links.
So, Matt, before we get on to the episode of today and what we're up about.
We sometimes, you know, we just have these thoughts that pop into our mind about products and services that might be available and I'm beginning to hear In the back of my mind, some ukulele strumming happening.
I don't know.
Do you have any idea what's going on?
Maybe it's got something to do with this Ground News application, this wonderful app for people who aren't afraid to have their opinions challenged.
Could that be it, Chris?
Please go on.
Tell me more.
There's this app that allows you to compare how a single story is being covered across the political spectrum.
You know, it gets you out of those rabbit holes.
Yeah, that's right.
For those people who've gone down a rabbit hole, it gets you out of the rabbit hole.
If you're in the bubble, it'll pop that bubble.
It's amazing.
It's the cure for clickbait, sensationalism, and polarization.
And it'll give you a mix of stories across the political spectrum.
And you can also figure out where particular stories are being covered in the political spectrum.
All in all, a pretty amazing tool.
That's incredible, but this is nothing that exists, is it?
Can people access it?
No, I know.
It sounds like something in a beautiful, wonderful dream before I woke up and had to face reality again.
But no, it actually exists out there in the real world.
It's got these two amazing features.
One feature is the news blind spot that enables you to see news that's being ignored by one side of the political spectrum.
It's got this other one, which is a news comparison feature where you can take a particular story and see how it's getting covered across the entire spectrum.
So, you know, it helps you to think for yourself and not be totally driven by the particular slant of the news that you're consuming.
You can go to grind.news forward slash gurus or click the little link that we'll put in the podcast descriptions.
Check it out.
Absolutely.
Check it out.
Well, Matt, so today we have a special episode.
We're not doing a guru decoding.
We're doing an extended interview and we're doing our first guru response.
A response we gave anybody.
Who we cover on the show within reason.
The right to come and talk to us about what we said and, you know, respond to our critiques.
And the person who decided to take us up on that offer, yeah, you may have heard about him.
He's a little known figure.
It has a couple of blogs that he's contributed to and whatnot.
But one Sam Harris is the interview guest for this episode.
Have you heard of him, Matt?
Prior to this interview?
Yeah, it does ring a bell.
His name's come up a few times.
Something to do with religion, I think.
He's all for it, something like that.
Yeah, I've heard that.
He's a strong advocate for the importance of religion in modern societies.
But we're not focusing on that part of his output in this interview.
The interview is kind of split into two parts.
And I think it's important to flag up for people what those two parts are.
We cover it in the intro segment of the podcast, so it won't belabor it.
The first part is talking about the Waking Up app and some of the criticisms we had on a specific episode focused on him recommending the app and talking about how he links his political views potentially to the introspective practices that he recommends on those apps.
So we spend about an hour At the beginning, discussing that and issues of gurus and introspective practices before moving on to wider issues, broader criticisms with tribalism and the culture war and more controversial topics in the second half.
So that's the division.
I know most people tune in to hear me give my opinions and opine on things, but you're not going to be getting a lot of that.
In this interview, Chris is spearheading it.
Chris is spearheading it.
And that's fine.
That's fine.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Look at that passive aggressiveness.
I want to peel back the curtain a bit and say, though, it is true that in the second half of the interview, Mafia essentially disappears into the ether.
He becomes one with the cosmic consciousness and he returns at the end.
But one issue.
I think probably people will hear is that this interview is a little bit halfway between a debate and an interview in the second half.
And there's different dynamics to whether you're having a debate or an interview.
And perhaps we should have thought a little bit more prior about how to manage that dynamic.
It's no fault of Sam's, but I think we are stuck between.
That point, it causes some little bit of friction at the later stages of the interview.
Now, there's a bit of material you refer to at different points in the interview there, Chris.
Yeah.
So the one thing that comes up in the interview was our editor, Better Angels on Twitter, who is a prince amongst men and is responsible for Saving us a whole lot of work.
And he noted that there were some things that he didn't have the full context for because they're referencing people that we assume knowledge of, like Majid Nawaz and Douglas Murray or Stefan Molyneux and so on.
So we'll put a bunch of links into the show notes that will hopefully provide extra information about those.
But also, in the episode, there's only one clip played.
To Sam.
And it's about his previous opinions that he expressed in an interview a couple of years back about Gad Saad and Dave Rubin.
Now, I played the slightly wrong clip.
So when you listen to the episode, I've inserted the correct clip first.
Then there's a gap.
And then you'll hear the clip that Sam heard.
So Sam did not hear the first clip.
And I just want to make that clear.
That he's responding to the second clip, but I wanted to put it in so there's the context so people know what I was intending to refer to.
And there's one other part later in the episode where we're discussing comments he made in the same interview in relation to France and potential future conflict there and Muslim immigration.
And I don't want to insert a new clip into the interview because It's not really fair, but for context, I think it would be important or at least useful for people to hear what I'm referencing.
So I'm going to play it here, just not.
It has nothing to do with skin color.
It's just, you know, if you told me, you know, if you had a crystal ball and you said, actually, 75 years from now, Europe is going to have much more the character of The Middle East today than the Europe you know and love.
That certainly seems possible to me.
And it's worth worrying about.
And that would be...
Like, really possible?
Like, people will impose Sharia?
Or just, you know, if you said to me, 20 years from now there will be a civil war in France and a million people will die, right?
That does not seem like...
Like, a completely paranoid concern.
I mean, you know, one of the odds of that, I would put the odds of that at, who knows?
If you told me the odds were 50-50, I wouldn't find a good reason to tell you they weren't.
So, yeah, just to double and triple emphasize, Sam probably remembers that, if he remembers that at all, probably remembers it relatively vaguely.
You weren't all teed up and ready to play that clip for him, but that's just...
To let people know what you're referring to.
Because I think it was one of the things that was a little bit confusing in the later segment.
But as you say, Sam probably doesn't remember exactly what he said there, but that's the context of some of those comments.
And that is from a podcast, Polite Conversations with Ina, who's a very strong critic of Sam.
But there's an interview they did a couple of years back when she was more positively inclined, but she was still very critical.
In that episode.
So that's where the clips are from, and we'll put links in the show notes.
And there's only one other thing that I think might be useful to flag up.
I'm not going to spend very much time on it, but we get bogged down in the later parts of the interview with discussions about tribalism.
And I think part of the issue there is potentially differing definitions.
Maybe I'm coming at it more from the view of social psychology.
In-group bias and whatnot, which doesn't require that all members of a group are signed up to the exact same things or that you cannot be part of different groups and so on.
So there's a bunch of literature about things called the minimal group paradigm, which indicate that when you assign people arbitrary group identities, that you can produce in-group bias.
And I'm not arguing that what I'm calling tribal Biases are arbitrary.
But just to say that I think that Sam's view of what we mean by tribe is a much more very rigid and identifiable tribes like political parties and partisan political groups and so on.
So that comes up.
And if people are interested in the distinctions that I would make amongst the heterodox and IDW set, I did a podcast interview with Aaron Ravenowitz for Embrace the Void.
Explicitly on this topic.
So I'm not treating IDW and heterodox set as like just one individual thing where there's no disagreements or divisions.
Yeah, it's one of those things, isn't it?
With 2020 hindsight, you realize that it would have been good to define our terms or whatever more carefully.
So you guys talked a little bit of cross purposes, I think.
But that's what happens in live interviews.
Yeah.
And Sam deserves credit for coming on.
And addressing criticisms, and we have a fairly robust debate.
So people can listen, provide us feedback, and yeah, we hope you enjoy.
Enjoy.
Okay, so we have with us today, of course, the very well-known figure, Sam Harris.
Welcome to the podcast, Sam.
Thank you, Matt.
Christopher, happy to be here.
So Sam Harris probably needs no introduction for most of our listeners.
Suffice it to say, he is a best-selling author, a podcaster, someone with a background in neuroscience, but also someone who has spent a lot of time writing and talking about religion and also has a very strong interest in meditation.
He has his own app, Waking Up with Sam Harris meditation app, which Chris and I have been using for a while.
And Sam's on today to talk about some of the issues that we brought up in a recent episode.
We'll also get into some other topics in the second half where we can talk about our politics and tribalism and maybe we can present some of the criticisms and yeah, just talk about things as they arise.
How does that sound, Chris?
Yeah, good.
And we had critical things to say about Sam on that mini episode that we did to cover him.
And I think it's to his credit that he's willing to come on and discuss.
What we got wrong or where we may need to reevaluate things, we'll hug you our corner.
But I think you genuinely deserve credit, Sam, because in our experience, it's rare for people to want to engage with people that have had critical opinions.
I know you've had various experiments in having difficult conversations with varying degrees of success, but hopefully this leans towards one of the more...
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's what I hope for.
The reason why we're having this conversation is that I heard you do an episode on me and waking up, which to call it critical doesn't quite get at it.
I mean, you guys were really kind of shitting all over me, but you were having so much fun doing it that I found there was something just endearing about it.
As much as I wanted to despise you, I really couldn't quite.
So I just thought maybe there's an interesting conversation to have.
Dealing with your skepticism and various concerns, and I should just say, generically, I'm a fan of the project, decoding the gurus and unhorsing the gurus and shining light on the gurus and questioning the whole phenomenon of gurus.
So there's a conversation to be had about waking up, but there's a further conversation to be had on topics related to culture war issues, tribalism, social justice stuff, I think, because you've had other podcasts where...
or other episodes of your podcast where you've brought on people like Robert Wright, who have had critical things to say about me on these topics.
I may not have heard everything you guys have said about me.
I've certainly heard those two episodes.
So anyway, that's the basis of
You're quite right.
We don't hesitate to be critical in our podcast, but hopefully in a lighthearted and reasonably friendly kind of way.
You're probably not aware of the reasonably strong praise that Chris and I have had for you as well in different circumstances.
So you're a little bit unusual in our cast because we've got both nice things and mean things to say about you.
But yeah, this will be great.
And Sam, for context, you gave us some homework in preparation, which we were happy to do, where you kindly gave us full access to the app and asked us to use it for around about a month, which Matt and I dutifully did.
Not missing a single day.
Did you cram in 40 minutes this afternoon or this morning for you?
No, that's not true.
Yeah, I got the reminders on my phone making me feel guilty every day.
But I will say the app is very well designed in the sense of it definitely...
Uses what we know about the psychological rewards and reminders in order to reinforce the behavior.
You get the emails that are like a pat on the head for completing a session.
I'm not saying that in a negative sense.
I actually mean it works.
Even if I'm aware that I'm receiving automated prayers, I still cannot stop myself being like, yeah, that's right.
It sounded good.
Your psychological manipulation succeeded in that respect.
I should point out we've eschewed many of these standard manipulations like streaks and other gamifications that most apps use.
I just decided those didn't make any sense for the nature of the project.
So you were not subjected to the full Funhaus Vegas-style gamification of the content that you might get elsewhere.
Yeah, stars and badges and that kind of thing.
That's right.
It didn't feel intrusive.
I got into it as well.
I did do a bit of meditation many years ago and haven't done anything like that for a long time.
It was interesting.
The initial exercises were short and easy to do.
It's funny, isn't it?
Like you do feel relaxed and refreshed by just sitting down and doing it even in the reasonably half-assed way that I did.
And it's kind of a reminder that it is good for anybody to do any kind of just time out, just take 15 minutes or so and to just...
Sit still and be calm.
It's refreshing.
It's nice.
Well, so let's plunge into the places where you have been, were, remain skeptical of the whole project and my approach to it and the ideas and all of it.
Hit me with your best shot.
Yeah, dive in.
From the experiences of using the app, one thing that stuck out to me is that there's a potential issue that one of the hooks of the app...
Is that you're involved, right?
It's like waking up with Sam Harris.
The meditation lessons that you give are, by the nature of them, quite intimate things.
Lots of people have talked about the parasocial nature of podcasts, but meditation instruction in particular has an intimate quality to it because individuals are sitting in silence.
So I think there is a potential issue, especially because you've kind of tied.
Your wider views, including political views, to the meditational practice.
And so is there a danger that by you becoming somebody's virtual meditation teacher, you run the risk of accelerating the kind of guru dynamics, not through intentions, but that people might come to be very parasocially attached more than they would be to say someone.
Yeah, well, this opens the door to an interesting conversation about the phenomenon of gurus and whether there's a legitimate lane to travel in there or whether it's always problematic and the very structure needs to be somehow retired.
On one level, guru just means teacher.
You're the teacher of anything.
You're a guru of sorts.
Obviously, the stakes get higher when your expertise or your...
Your purported expertise relates to really core existential issues for people.
The difference between happiness and suffering.
What should I do with my life?
What kind of person should I be?
When you're dealing with ethical and psychological terrain of that kind, there are therapists and there are coaches and there are obviously parents.
People get into that space with other human beings and the amount of responsibility I think goes up there.
But one of the things I love about doing this in an app is that it frees me from the usual venues and pitfalls of functioning in this role.
Normally, without an app, without this technology that allows me to just put out audio and let people listen to it in an asynchronous way, the way to do this is on retreat or at some live event.
It puts you in direct relationship with specific individuals.
And then it opens you to all of the projection and the weirdness.
And it's not to say it's all projection and weirdness in those encounters with teachers, but there can be a lot of it.
And it can get very messy.
It can be very encumbering.
I mean, both the good and the bad parts are very encumbering.
The truth is, I just don't want to live that way.
Even if I felt that I were qualified to be in a kind of classical guru relationship with people who wanted to learn something about the nature of their minds with me, I think it's a role that is somewhat inevitable, and I've had immensely useful encounters with,
quote, gurus, you know, people who have served that role for me face-to-face, but it's not a role that I want to be in with people.
So the app allows me to just put the ideas out and to give people all the caveats around what it means to consume these ideas outside of a relationship with any specific teacher.
Just to see the kind of feedback we get, people get a tremendous amount of value from it.
And I'm not seeing much evidence of confusion about me or kind of weird attachments to me as a person.
I'm very honest about my experience and what I consider the limits of my experience.
And also, I have a podcast where I'm dealing with many other topics, and any illusion that I'm not up to my elbows in kind of the grittiness of the rest of the world is, I think, banished if you just listen to many hours of me on my podcast fighting with people about all manner of things.
I don't know if that gets to your question.
The limitations of doing this in an app strike me as the principal advantages of the medium for me, and I don't see it carry over into any weird...
I think I have an audience.
Before which, amplification of my gravitas with my audience.
In fact, I'm unusually vulnerable to criticism.
I've cultivated an audience that value intellectual honesty, I think, above all else.
So that when I get it wrong, I see many people with audiences where they get things wrong and there's just no accountability.
They're just playing tennis without the net with their audience.
If somebody like Trump is the ultimate example of this, like he literally can contradict himself in the span of 30 seconds and no one cares.
If I do that, everyone in my audience cares.
And so I get a lot of pain when I get things wrong or seem to get things wrong in front of my audience.
I value that.
So I don't detect any kind of hero worship or really gross projection coming toward me from my audience.
And I think I'm distinguished among the citizens of Earth at the moment in having a subreddit devoted to me where most people, or certainly many people, seem to despise me.
There's a lot of criticism out there, even among my so-called fans.
Yep.
Those points are well taken.
Just one quick comment to me.
So it's true that your subreddit is an interesting place where it's kind of a civil war ongoing between people that, as you say, hate you and people that are quite fondly disposed to you.
I would push back a little bit that it is true that you've got an audience that will be openly critical.
I would consider myself in your audience, and I'm pretty direct about my criticism.
But on the other hand, you do have a lot of people that are very strongly devoted to defending you.
In ways that you might not approve of, they get quite defensive about criticism.
I'm not blaming you for that.
I just want to point out that they're there.
As Chris said, I don't think you give the appearance of attempting to cultivate a kind of manipulating, controlling, cultural personality.
It's more about the point that when we intertwine these different roles, there's this natural parasociality that goes along with an audio meditation app and podcasts like ours, which we're aware of.
So it kind of helps to...
People don't take us seriously.
But then, at the same time, when you're acting as a personal guide to self-growth, and if not enlightenment, then a kind of greater self-awareness, and also explicitly linking that kind of state of mind to being able to have an accurate view on political and social issues.
Well, let me clarify that point.
I remember that being a real sticking point for you.
So I said at one point on my podcast that...
Unless you understand what I'm doing over at Waking Up, you being the audience, at many points you're not going to understand why I take some of the positions I take on other topics.
Social justice issues might be some of them, questions of race and identity politics, etc.
I was not arguing that my practice of meditation gives me some kind of special access to political truths.
I was more arguing that some of the positions I take are of a piece with what I believe I've experienced and know to be true, you know, ethically and psychologically.
My basis for taking those views or holding tenaciously to those views despite what may seem like counter-evidence, it'll just seem inscrutable to people because they just don't have all the data.
Because if I'm not referencing it, they just don't know what is informing my thinking on those points.
Whether I'm right or wrong, If you want to understand something that may otherwise be inexplicable, my core values and the most important experiences I've ever had as a human being are informing these seemingly distant topics to some degree, some of the time, for better or worse,
perhaps.
But anyway, that was just an accounting of kind of the phenomenology of why it is I say what I say on certain topics.
The point I wanted to ask you that relates to some of the things that you said on the episode is...
I wasn't sure from what you're saying, if you allow for the possibility that somebody could do the introspective practices, follow the things in the app, and they end up essentially having conclusions that are very different from you, both about introspective experiences,
self and determinism or free will, but also in terms of wider views.
Do you see it as essentially that if you do it right?
You will reach those conclusions?
Or is there room for different perspectives and reasonable people can disagree?
There's certainly room for disagreement on many points.
I mean, there's specific points where if you came to a different conclusion, I just would be so mystified as to what you think you've experienced that the conversation can't go anywhere.
If I was asserting the impermanence of phenomenon, right, you know, that things arise and pass away, thoughts arise and pass away.
An itching sensation comes and then it goes.
If I was faced with someone who said, no, no, all that stuff is permanent, nothing ever leaves.
I have no theory of mind to account for that utterance, right?
It's just so at odds with what is demonstrated every time I pay attention to anything.
So modulo a few things like that, there can be disagreement on all kinds of major points and certainly the types of points I was linking my practice to, like, you know, social justice, identity politics stuff.
The best example of this is in my friend Joseph Goldstein, who I have several conversations with on the app.
He's also been on my podcast.
And he and I disagree about some fairly esoteric points in meditation practice.
Not so much about the ultimate reality of things, but just the pragmatics of teaching people specific things and the consequences of doing that.
But there's substantial disagreements and they're very fun to debate.
And people can hear literally hours of us doing that.
What they can't hear, but what I've referenced in various places, is that Joseph and I totally disagree about these culture war issues.
I mean, Joseph is about as woke as AOC, as far as I can tell.
In my mind, he's been brainwashed by more than a decade of social justice activism that has been internal to American Buddhism and is about as vociferous as it could ever be on any college campus.
He and the rest of American Buddhists in teaching roles have something akin to Stockholm Syndrome, and so there really is a debate to be had there, and I've had it with Joseph privately, and maybe we'll do that publicly at some point.
But Joseph understands emptiness and selflessness certainly as much as I do, and he's one of the best meditators and teachers of meditation I've ever met.
He is an existence proof of the fact that you can get the point of meditation and all the other...
Esoterica that I discuss in Waking Up and not see eye to eye with me about how to talk about racial injustice in America in the year 2021.
So yeah, it's a yes to your question, I think.
So that yes, I take, especially with the linkage to politics, that you would say it's not as strong as we interpret it in the episode.
But how about the nature of self that you identify?
It sounds like, including in the app when I was doing introspective practices with you, having virtual you, your view that if you observe your thoughts and the way that they arise and you do introspective practices, to me, it sounds like you are essentially arguing that the interpretation,
a specifically Buddhist interpretation of the kind of nature of Consciousness.
And I know you've had similar discussions about this with Evan Thompson.
This may be a point quite esoteric, but it would be useful to clarify.
I'm unsure when you're discussing the topic, when you're talking about, say, awareness, the ground of awareness or Buddha nature, whatever the label you give to it, that it's unconditional and it's pure.
This thing which always is, which doesn't change, and which is capable of unconditional love.
In those descriptions, I'm unclear if you're describing something which you see as a psychological feature of the way that human minds work, just a quirk of cognitive architecture, or whether you're talking about being put in contact with a nature of reality and consciousness,
which is transcendental, unchanging, eternal.
So there are a few things I would claim here are...
True, or we have every reason to believe that they're true, and there's an inconvenient fact here that these truths require some effort and maybe even talent to bring into view.
An analogy would be something like the optic blind spot, right?
I mean, the optic blind spot is there to be found, and if you're in the presence of someone who's skeptical about that...
There's an experiment to recommend to them.
You can get out a piece of paper and a pen and you can make the marks and you can tell them to hold it in the right place and move it back and forth.
But if they still can't see it and they insist that you're a liar or that you're just deluded or that you've got a blind spot but they don't, you, as someone who has more experience on this front, I think are right to come away from that encounter saying,
well, they just don't get it.
I couldn't get through to that person.
But it's very unlikely that their retina has a different structure.
Until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume they just couldn't see it and not that they have a magically different retina and geometry of their optic nerve, right?
And there are analogous claims I'm making about the nature of conscious experience from the contemplative or meditative point of view that are as strong as saying, no, the optic blind spot is just, is there.
But there are many other surrounding claims about which Various traditions are unequivocal, but various traditions also disagree with other traditions, right?
So obviously there are topics of debate even within Buddhism, and certainly between Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta or any other tradition.
And there are claims that I'm uncertain about.
For instance, I'm never making metaphysical claims.
I'm never saying that because you can have this experience of consciousness without a center, and because the sense of self Can drop away, leaving just this kind of open expanse of cognizance and its modifications as our various sensory channels and objects of mind.
Because that kind of non-dual experience is available in each moment, that gives me license to say something like what Deepak Chopra would want to say about, this is the consciousness that was here before the Big Bang, or this consciousness pervades the whole universe.
That is just pseudoscientific.
It's not that I know it's not true.
I'm just saying you can't make those moves on the basis of those experiences.
But there are other moves in making claims about the nature of experience.
The important asymmetry to recognize here is that every very experienced meditator who agrees with me about the nature of mind or who's kind of gone through this experience of looking closely enough and then finding that they're not who they thought they were.
Or the sense of self is a construct or an illusion that can dissipate the moment it's clearly looked for.
Every person like that knows exactly what it's like to have not seen that originally.
There's a course of disenchantment or deepening understanding that a person has moved through, sometimes very suddenly, sometimes over the course of years of trying, so they know what it's like to not see it.
Rhetorically, this doesn't have much force because it sounds like I'm asking you to take something on faith, but that's not the case.
Just like the optic blind spot, just imagine if the optic blind spot were harder to see and took real perseverance and you had to get over your restlessness and you had to put 10 days aside and go on a retreat in silence.
It wouldn't make the optic blind spot any less real.
There'd just be more controversy about whether this was a thing in the first place.
And so it just would be harder to convince a skeptic.
To even do the experiment.
But there's nothing that I'm suggesting you take on faith.
It's just that it does require, unless you're unusually talented, it can require a fair amount of looking to be able to cash out any of these claims.
Yeah, I guess there's two aspects to that general view that might make people like me and Chris a little bit uncomfortable.
And I guess one is, and I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking, that this state of consciousness or awareness It is sort of out there, like this eternal constant that we can participate in, versus that very materialistic way of thinking, which is that consciousness in the mind is purely an emergent phenomena.
Let me just clarify that, Matt.
I'm not saying that.
I'm not taking a metaphysical position at all on the mind-body problem.
So everything I'm saying about the nature of the self and free will and the possibility of self-transcendence experientially and the psychologically auspicious knock-on effects of doing that, the relief from certain kinds of suffering, all of that,
which is very much resonant with Buddhism, none of that entails a claim about The relationship between consciousness and the brain or consciousness and the physics of things.
I'm still agnostic about all that.
Yep.
Yep.
Got it.
And, you know, you can still have a lot of commonality and common experience amongst humans because, as you said, we all share things like an optical blind spot.
It would make entirely plausible that we can have similar experiences.
I guess the other one is epistemic, which is that, let's assume This thing is completely true, that if one does a particular practice, then one will indeed get to a certain point of clarity and so on that is genuinely special.
Now, the problem is one of verification in that in order to see it, you have to do it and do it properly.
And supposedly, if you don't do it properly, then you say, well, I did it, but I don't have that experience or I don't agree, then.
It could well be because you haven't done it properly.
So even in the case where it's completely true and it's completely right, it's not possible for an independent observer to verify those claims.
And even though I'm completely open actually to the position that it is entirely true, right?
I'm just, from a specific point of view, it's impossible to verify independently.
And I think that's the sort of catch-22 we find ourselves in.
Just one point to add, Sam.
You had a conversation on your app, which was you discussing with somebody called Jim Newman, who has a very strong non-dualist position, right?
And listening to that conversation, I think people that are listening to this won't have heard it.
But to summarize, the two of you got into that exact issue where he was repeatedly saying to you that you basically haven't got it because of the things that you're saying that are different.
And if you...
If you did get it, you would know that he was right.
But you were saying, no, I do get it.
And I just disagree that, you know, the things follow.
And it seemed to me that you basically got stuck at an impasse that you're both claiming introspective validation of your perspective.
So how to overcome that?
Yeah, well, that was a very interesting conversation that many people found infuriating.
I'm one of them.
But enjoyable as well.
But I found it pretty fascinating.
There have been several conversations like that.
I'm bringing on people, in some cases, who I know are going to agree with me and we're going to see eye to eye on more or less everything.
But I'm also bringing on people who I have a sense the conversation may run off the rails for one reason or another.
And often, actually in almost every case, it will run off the rails not because I think these people are frauds or they think I'm a fraud.
But there's something that our mutual experience of these things doesn't resolve.
So I don't know.
Actually, I haven't done a proper postmortem for myself on what I think went wrong there.
But I found it an interesting conversation.
To come back to the general point, there is just this problem that we have to rely on self-report to understand so much of what interests us about the human mind.
And we have an illusion of getting off the gold standard of self-report.
In various areas in psychological science, we haven't tracked the moment where we got off the gold standard and claimed that it was valid.
But there's so much to take cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging as one method of studying the mind.
We rely on self-report for almost everything we study.
We'll say it's anxiety or depression or the phenomenology of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics come to the lab and they say they hear voices.
We dignify their reports with our credulity, and then we do some other follow-up testing that makes sense of their claims, right?
So if you scan their brains, you see that auditory cortex is active, and that seems to make sense of the claim.
But if auditory cortex wasn't active, either we would think they were lying or we would think auditory cortex is not the only reporter of hearing things.
We would question our statistical maps of the brain.
And so it is with any other third-person marker of an internal state.
We associate cortisol with stress only because so many people have come into the lab saying, Jesus Christ, I'm so stressed out.
Draw my blood.
And we find that their cortisol is elevated.
But if that broke apart, we would no longer associate cortisol with stress.
We would just say, well, some people have high cortisol and they're stressed out, and some people have low cortisol and they're stressed out.
We rely on self-report for so much that interests us.
That is just an inconvenient fact of what it's like to be siloed within our own minds and brains and to be communicating with one another, not telepathically, but with these small mouth noises that are really the only basis for us to share our thoughts in real time.
But that doesn't invalidate the experience at all.
You may have heard it, but it's another analogy.
It's another intuition pump, essentially.
But just imagine what the world would be like if remembering your dreams was much harder to do than it is for most people.
What if only one in a thousand people remembered their dreams, but everyone dreamed just as much as they do anyway?
I'm actually one of these people.
I almost never remember my dreams.
Presumably, I dream every night.
Based on EEG evidence, I'm sure.
Someone would say, listen, you're probably dreaming every night.
You just don't remember it.
And we've all had this experience of waking up from a very vivid dream and forgetting it over the course of 10 seconds.
So enough of us know that the mind can do this.
You can have a very vivid experience while you sleep and then forget all about it in a matter of seconds, even while you're trying your best to remember it.
What if we lived in a world where only one-tenth of one percent of people remember their dreams and they kept talking about every time they go to sleep at night they have these vivid experiences and they're talking to famous people and they're going on trips and they're even flying and we would think these people are crazy but they would be no more crazy than any of us is right now remembering last night's dreams.
That is something you run into in this space of where you're talking about rare experiences that can be hard won.
You do have to take people's word for it, at least to the point of becoming interested enough to look into it for yourself.
I should plant a flag here, though, that there really is a non-analogy between this and a truly faith-based claim that one meets in conventional religion.
God exists.
You're just going to have to believe it on faith.
Jesus can save you.
You just have to take that on faith.
No, it's not the same kind of claim.
Those are specific claims about history and about miracles that no one...
Currently alive, was around to witness.
As you know, I think most of those claims are terribly implausible.
And these are claims about what you can experience if you perform certain experiments.
And if you do perform those experiments and they fail, there is a conversation to be had about why they fail.
There's a phenomenology of failure there that if you're interested, the conversation can be had and you can see, okay, actually, this person, this so-called expert...
is describing my experience of not getting it pretty clearly.
This is intersubjective terrain that we really can speak intelligently about and help guide people across and come to a kind of consensus, even though at the margins there will be debates about the validity of any specific experience or how it links up with other experiences.
Yeah, well, Sam, look, I think there's definitely a spectrum there.
I can imagine Something like the claim that exercise, regular exercise, cardiovascular exercise makes you feel good, makes you feel happy.
Now, that's pretty much indisputable empirically, even though it does rest on self-reports of awareness.
And there are other ones that are a bit more difficult to verify.
But Chris, I think you wanted to move on to something.
So Sam, one thing that struck me there is like, I think probably We can all agree that, you know, miracles about flying horses or people raising from the dead are at the very least implausible in a different degree by people discussing the ability that you might have to be able to become aware of your thoughts.
But I'll return a little bit to the conversation you had with Jim Newman because the relevant fact to me there is that both of you talked about your experiences with Various meditation teachers in India, right?
And also Jim's experience following certain charismatic, introspective teachers.
Now, my concern is, first of all, that in both legitimate communities, like say the Tibetan community or the Zen Buddhist community, we have lots and lots of cases now of teachers who are regarded as having been very spiritually advanced and very aware.
And yet we know that they were engaged in sexual abuse or drug abuse, and that essentially you can detach those two things, but it looks like the insights that they're claiming that they've reached are not reflected in the behavior.
And an issue I have there is one, that you can't detect that in advance, right?
People didn't know that Cho Gyum Trungpa was doing what he was doing.
And two, that...
Like you talk about the example of a woman who you knew in India who thought that she had reached in like a kind of enlightened state from her experience with one guru.
And then she went to a Zen teacher who made her realize that no, she hadn't, right?
But so my one point I would make there is that there are plenty of people around who make the exact same claims that you would, that you can validate this.
And you can test it using the introspective practices that I set.
And if it's not true, you know, you'll find out and you can quit.
But those are manipulative gurus who have these personality cults and kind of things attached to them.
And these are in communities that also you have experience in.
So it isn't just that, you know, there's L. Ron Hubbard and there's Aum Shinrikyo.
But the way that those groups operate.
And the kind of epistemic justification that they use for their views is exactly the same in form as what you're suggesting that we can use to discern valuable introspective practices.
And the believers of those groups certainly think that the practices validate their teachers.
So I'm wondering from that standard how we claim that, well, they're just eluded, but the people who are following You know, what I say are not deluded, but they're like getting the real deal.
Yeah, the truth is it's even more confusing and dangerous than you're suggesting there.
This is something I do speak a lot about in Waking Up.
There's a section on gurus and cults, and it comes up in more or less, in most of my conversations with other teachers in the conversations track, I bring this up a lot, the fact that the connection between so-called spiritual experience or contemplative insights And ethical behavior is not as direct as we might hope.
I mean, all of this suggests that there's more to the project of living a good life and certainly more to the project of being a good teacher for others, a good company for others, than just having meditative insights.
This is what's interesting about this topic.
No part of it is as black and white as you would want to just Finally clarify your thinking about it.
It is not true to say that all of these misbehaving gurus have been frauds.
That's just, to my eye, obviously not true.
Many of them have given their life experience and given how they talked about the nature of the mind and meditation practice.
Most of these guys, I mean not all of them, but certainly many of them, have had real deep experiences in meditation.
Some of them are some version of spiritual athlete where if you know the terrain and you hang out with these people, you recognize you're in the presence of somebody who has real experience and, in many cases, real talent for inducting other people into these experiences and a dangerous level of charisma.
What you often find in this case is you also have someone who is coming from a tradition.
That doesn't play especially well with modernity.
They might be coming essentially from no tradition, where they're coming from some Asian context rather often, but they're eschewing all tradition, and they haven't picked up any explicit ethical code that is giving them any kind of guardrails for how they behave with other people.
Or they're coming from some tradition that is functionally recommending that we live in some kind of medieval theocracy with them, with the guru at the top of the hierarchy.
So it leaves them open to all kinds of possible misbehavior with people who are projecting onto them but also receiving real benefits from them.
This is why this is such a strange area.
It is possible to be genuinely abused by a malignant narcissist who also has really interesting esoteric experiences to draw from in his experience.
Because he was raised as a tuku and spent years in meditation, or he spent years in a cave practicing meditation, or he just had a real talent for it.
So he's not merely a fraud, but he's also a dangerous asshole.
And you can also get benefit from that encounter even while you're being abused.
The cash value of all abuse isn't just bad outcomes psychologically for people.
The place I've referenced this is in the account of...
Osho's, Rajneesh's cult, that Francis Fitzgerald, in her book Cities on a Hill, wrote about.
And Rajneesh's the perfect example.
I think he was a genuinely insightful, genuinely smart person who was also genuinely dangerous and started a genuinely crazy cult.
And yet, when you actually hear the experiences of Ivy League-educated lawyers who went over there to fall at his feet and then were told to clean latrines with their toothbrushes, And dig ditches in the hot sun.
There was an ego-canceling effect of that demand on them, that self-abasement, which is psychologically interesting.
I mean, their experience of devotion, even to the wrong guru, they experienced as freeing.
I'm not disregarding the reality of abuse that goes on in cults, and I'm as critical of these scenes as anyone, but it is just a real quirk in the landscape of possible experience that someone can be treating you badly for genuinely bad reasons, and you can derive benefit from it if you're framing it in the right way.
There's just a ton of testimony to that.
So it's just a very confusing thing to think about and talk about.
But to go all the way back to the starting point here, I am not claiming to be fully enlightened.
In fact, I'm very clear about what I view to be the limits of my own experience here.
But I have enough experience that I feel qualified to draw the line in the sand wherever you find me doing it.
In dialogue with other teachers, some of whom are claiming to be fully enlightened.
Jim Newman is one of these people who claims to have solved the whole riddle of existence.
He may well be right that there's something that I don't see, that I should see and need to see.
I'm agnostic as to whether his criticism of me was valid.
He has enough user interface issues as a person that I'm discounting some of what he says, but I know what I know, I know what I think I know, but I bracket all of that with The understanding that there's a lot that I may yet discover about the nature of my own mind.
So the point you make is well taken.
And it's also concerning that, you know, tantric masters throughout history have claimed that their abuse, sometimes physical, sometimes sexual, and so on, can be part of a path.
And your reaction against it is part of your conditioning that you need to break through.
So I don't want to...
Yeah, I discussed that in my book, Waking Up, and in this section in the app on gurus and cults.
This is a game that has no exit.
The guru is always in a position to say, oh, the reason why you're having this traumatized reaction to the thing I just did is your ego.
The reason why you're here is to get over your ego.
So you should just let me have sex with your wife or your daughter, or you should have sex with me.
Oh, you're not gay?
Well, I still want you to have sex with that man or woman over there.
And we're going to film it.
There is no limit to what a crazy guru could say.
And they would be right in saying that you are recoiling from this nastiness that's being foisted upon you is a symptom of your hangups.
You're not free.
We've hit the limits of your freedom right here when I just pushed on this particular button.
Oh, you don't like the idea of having your wife sleep with the fully enlightened teacher.
Well, that's your problem, isn't it?
Yeah, you're not as enlightened as Hulk Hogan.
Some skepticism is definitely advised for anyone getting into those sorts of relationships.
Let me just add one piece here that could be useful to people.
I think all of this goes under the rubric of crazy wisdom in Tibetan Buddhism and in this area generally.
And so these violations...
of cultural norms and conventional ethics that are thought to be a kind of enlightened display of freedom and compassionate demand for self-overcoming coming from the guru.
I can't rule out the possibility.
That that's ever true.
It may, in some cases, be, in fact, genuinely as advertised.
This is a fully enlightened being who's not bound by normal conventional ethics and is acting out of pure compassion.
And if you could only see it, you would be freed in this next moment by doing the otherwise objectionable thing or submitting to it being done on you.
But I have enough experience here to have a very strong sense that while that's possible, it's never necessary.
You don't actually have to be this chaotic, norm-breaking figure to help people recognize the nature of their minds through meditation.
While it may be on the menu, and conceptually I can understand how it could be on the menu, it just creates so many obvious harms so much of the time.
It's a terrible thing for less enlightened people to think they could ever emulate, and it's just not necessary.
So I would always advise people to get out of that situation and find a situation.
Where you're dealing with an honest, obviously more straightforwardly compassionate, better self-regulated human being.
Okay, so we've spoken a bit about the podcast and meditation and the things we raised in our episode.
Are you fine, Sam, with maybe moving on to some of those broader issues?
Sure, sure.
I'm happy to.
Go in any direction you want, but I don't want there to be any sense on your side that I've dodged anything.
So please, if there's something I've said thus far that was deeply unsatisfying, please let me hear that.
Now, one point that I think we would happily concede that some of our listeners pushed back on specifically related to the app and stuff is that we made the point that the one-year free offer...
I offhandedly compared it to a 30-day money-back guarantee, but I understand it's significantly more generous than that.
And also from the things that you've said about it, that it's genuine and that you don't mind if people indefinitely sent an email once a year saying, for whatever reasons, I can't do it, you'll give access.
And I completely just want to make clear that I understand that's generous, that you don't need to do that.
My point was purely that I would imagine I don't have the internal things for your app.
But the majority of users can't be doing that.
I don't tend to talk about these things.
It feels self-serving, but I mean, this is just a great example of you just not having certain facts.
I'm just happy to be transparent on this point.
And I think one thing you said, which you seemed fairly convinced was true, is that it's a marketing technique and that, you know, even people who are taking it free, a very high percentage of them wind up paying in the end.
It's kind of like the freemium model of giving out digital goods.
I wouldn't make that claim, that the majority of people switch from a free version to a not free version.
I guess the claim I would have anticipated, and I'm happy to be corrected if not, is that the majority of people will not avail themselves of that offer.
They will be outnumbered by the amount of paying subscriptions.
But I don't have any data to support that, so you can correct me.
I'm happy to give you the data.
So that's not true.
In fact, there are some weeks.
Where it's been 10 to 1 free to paid.
Oh, wow.
I mean, there are literally days where a thousand emails come in asking for free subscriptions to the app.
I have the same policy on my podcast, so there have been days where it's been a thousand on each, but I mean, in the general matter, it's in the matter of hundreds on each every day of the year.
And I literally staff, I think it's now an eight-person full-time customer service team in the Philippines, and 95% of their duties.
Is to deal with free accounts.
So I literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to deal with how many free requests come in for the app and for my podcast.
That's just the reality of it.
And in terms of the percentage of people who move from free to paid, ultimately...
It's in the single digits.
People who take it free take it free and they stay free.
And the reason why I have the policy is, as you alluded, I feel deeply that money shouldn't ever be the reason why someone can't get access to this work.
But the reality is that many people abuse the policy.
There's no question.
There's not much to do about that.
And so I've just decided to keep it as it is.
What makes me uncomfortable about this policy is I look at many successful digital businesses and I know that If they had my policy, they'd be destroyed.
If Netflix had my free policy, everyone would steal Netflix.
You'd feel stupid to be paying for Netflix when all you have to do is send an email to get it free for life.
So it's odd to have a policy that I actually can't recommend in any kind of straightforward way to other people, but I do feel like it's the right policy for me.
The only modification of it now is that we offer people a partial scholarship option in addition to the full scholarship.
So they're now seeing a way to pay less if, in fact, they want to go through that door.
But otherwise, we grant 100% of free requests.
So in response, I'm entirely happy to say that that was not a strong criticism, although people took it as a strong one.
I didn't mean it in that respect.
I'm happy to be advised of the data that we can't know from the eternal thing.
And I will also say I've never got the impression in general.
That you are someone primarily motivated by profiting from the various endeavors that you do.
So that isn't the criticism that I or Matt would want the level as, you know, a primary issue in any respect.
It's like, you know, you're just seeking to profit from the app.
It's clear that this is like a passion project.
Perhaps you've heard my whinging about this in other contexts, but I do have a very strong sense that ultimately we get what we pay for.
In digital space and the pressure to drive everything down toward free based on the ad model of generating revenue that everyone has adopted.
I think we made a catastrophic mistake in how we anchored everyone to free plus ads on the internet.
And so I'm fairly vociferous on that point that I think people should pay for content and they should get over their hangups around that because we're living with what I consider to be the disastrous consequences of people thinking everything's free and yet our societies are being torn apart by what is in essence just a badly incentivized information economy.
Yeah, and I think certainly with Substack and Patreon, you're sort of getting your wish that people are now paying for content creators, maybe not ideal.
But okay, so this is a point, Sam, that I think straddles both the episode and gets to wider issues.
And it's probably one of the stronger critiques and wider critiques that have been leveled at you.
In particular, it's the issue of tribalism and the extent to which you've transcended it.
And similarly, With relevant group identity markers.
And in our episode, we basically, I mean, you made comments which you've made elsewhere about how little importance you attach to any group identity and that trying not to be non-tribal is not the same,
like in the same way that being non-religious is not the same as having a religious identity, right?
And I want to push back there that the experience Myself, and also many of the other people that have argued with you in the past, they see in your behavior, online and otherwise,
that there isn't a transcendence of group identity and there isn't a kind of equal distribution of charity.
There are people who are closer to you ideologically that you extend a lot of charity to, to the point where it's led you to defend people who have went on quite On the other hand, you are quite reactive to criticism from certain people who you consider bad faith or to be coming from the left woke side of things.
So it's basically, there's a substantial reserve of generosity for Douglas Murray, the Weinsteins, even figures that are quite extreme on the right and general.
Disdain and lack of charity towards figures on the left, particularly the social justice left.
Right, right.
And how that gels with the claim to not be invested in tribal identities.
Yeah, so let me see if I can get at what the claim is.
So there's other things going on.
The reason why I've rejected this claim, because the way it's been made, I mean, the two people who made it, I think most clearly.
Maybe many people have made it, but I'm aware of Ezra Klein making it, and I'm aware of Robert Wright making it, that I'm tribal.
I'm claiming not to be playing identity politics, but I'm playing it as much as any social justice warrior.
I can live with the illusion of not playing it because I'm a white guy, and as a white guy...
You just take yourself as kind of the generic standpoint of truth and objectivity and science, and you're not seeing that you're being tribal in the same way that someone who says, I'm a lesbian and I need to talk about gay rights here.
Just to finesse, Sam, that one point there, I would say that there are people who make that claim that it's specifically your white male cis privileged elite that makes you unaware of it.
But I think that's a subset of the more General critique that you are not aware of biases in the sense that it isn't because you're a white male.
It's just that your in-group particularly is not identified as an in-group by you or that you're identifying that you're extending charity.
So it doesn't matter for that critique, whether you're white or black or whatever color.
It's just in not identifying the skew.
Okay, well, so then I think we have to leave Ezra Klein aside because he was definitely arguing with the color of my skin.
I'm a white guy who is just obtuse on these issues of, in particular, racial justice and systemic racism because I'm a white guy.
In my view, that's obviously wrong.
We don't have to spend time on it because you're not prosecuting that case.
But it's just, if that were true, I should have a lot in common with Ezra Klein and much less in common with someone like...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right, who is very much on my team.
I perceive her to be.
I feel her to be.
There's no impediment between me and her.
I'm sure we disagree about a few things, but it's just like, she's my sister.
Ezra Klein, for the purposes of that conversation, is showing up as the enemy, right?
And yet, by his analysis, I should feel really comfortable with him and not very comfortable with her.
So I'd ask you just, what is my tribe?
Yeah, so your tribe, I would put in the kind of anti-woke, critical of social justice milieu.
So you've handed in your IDW card recently, right?
But before you did so, and even still after that, you may not want, for example, to be associated with the people who are advocating that voter ballot fraud is likely or that the...
Coronavirus vaccines that we should be promoting Ivermectin, like Brett Weinstein has argued and stuff.
But I would say that that's a particular group within a broader category of people who fall into the anti-woke side.
And it would include people like Douglas Murray and Titania McGrath, and there's an entire ecosystem there, which is pretty coherent.
If you type into Google, Sam Harris, and it'll say, Other people like Sam Harris.
There's a set of people who are readily identifiable.
But the thing is, it's not coherent, and that's why I disavowed the label in the end.
The reason why I was never comfortable with it, I mean, one, it's superfluous to name a movement of people who are just attempting to have honest conversations.
But what became immediately evident is that people who are getting grouped under this rubric were people who, I want nothing to do with, in many cases.
And the only common point of agreement was that we were allergic to wokeism.
So there are people who are in this group, I mean, I don't know that I should break my practice of not really naming names here, but there's every version of this.
There are people who I initially agreed with and admired who have become dangerous imbeciles based on whatever the dynamics of their own political journeys have been.
In defense of some of these people, those of us who are on the left, Or started out on the left, we've had a common experience, which is the most dishonest and the most vindictive assaults on our reputation that we've ever encountered have come from the left.
The impossibility of conversation that has caused us to despair of even ever making an effort to communicate about anything substantial to anyone, that has been encountered when we're facing to the left, not to the right.
As somebody who has spent a lot of time fighting with the far right, at least on religious points, and I started as among the new atheists with my first couple of books, that was throwing up debates.
I mean, there were some debates with people on the left, but most of it was with people on the right who were essentially fundamentalist Christians for the most part.
None of those encounters have ever been one-tenth as poisonous as what I've gotten from the left, both performatively on stage and behind the scenes in private emails and in...
This is an experience people have had of socially being extruded from the body of the left by some kind of crazy rhetorical immune system that has gotten tuned up in response to very specific ideas.
Sam, before you move on from that point, I just want to highlight that that's actually part of the issue that I would argue is why you Would be likely to have a kind of bias towards those people because you feel that you have been treated unfairly like people in this category,
that you've had a similar experience and it makes you wary when you see somebody demonized like Charles Murray is, that maybe it's not justified, which you've quite clearly stated.
Well, it's just that I can see certain things coming from a mile away now.
I have less and less patience for the dishonesty and what I would call bad faith.
In terms of my political convictions, I am left of center on certainly most points and really have not been pushed rightward on any substantial point.
I mean, wherever I'm more toward the center than toward the left, I think I was always in that spot.
So if you're going to accuse me of bias based on having had dispiriting experiences with people on the left, I can just show instances where I counter that bias, right?
Let me give an example of what I mean.
I would say a lot of people identified relatively early where Dave Rubin's partisan bias lay, whereas the way that you spoke about him, and maybe the way to do it is if you don't mind.
I have a clip from a conversation you had a couple of years ago with Ina.
A persistent critic of yours.
Right.
Who also is not super fond of us.
She went a little crazy, in my view, but yeah.
Well, there's a conversation you had about Gadsad and Dave Rubin, and I just want to play this little clip of it, and then I'll tell you what I hear from it, and you can tell me why I'm reading this wrong, if that's okay.
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to do this, but the reason why this might be a waste of time is, this is now a few years old, and...
I'm sure what you're going to play there is born of the fact that in the case of Dave in particular, I'm being asked to talk about a friend in public.
I've been reluctant to do that in many cases.
And it's like, oh, I have social relationships with many of these people, or I had social relationships with many of these people.
I entirely grant that some, but I think it will help the player.
And it's not intended as a gotcha.
Okay, go for it.
I just want to use it to illustrate a point, okay?
And then I'll allow you to respond.
Okay.
Now that's a different problem from Gad and Ruben.
Ruben, who I think is unfortunately...
An opportunist.
I don't know if he believes that these are his friends now, the alt-right, or if he's just playing to an audience that happens to be supporting him and paying him pretty well, you know?
Yeah, no, I don't think, again, I think Dave...
And I don't want you to answer that either.
I mean, you can if you want.
I don't want you to feel like you have to answer for them because you're not responsible for them at all.
Well, no, but just insofar as I think...
You have the wrong idea about them.
I think it's useful to say so because Dave seems to me to be an extremely ethical person who would check all the right boxes in terms of gay rights and women's rights.
Oh no, I think you're so wrong about that.
Okay, so then that's something that I think you're wrong about and I wouldn't know how to...
Resolve that apart from, you know, getting him on your podcast or you on his.
But why do you think I'm wrong when I've shown you, like, a list of the people that he's with and refusing to call out?
Well, I just think it's what you're reading into the refusal to call them out.
I mean, so what could be functioning there is he has a very journalistic...
Or a much more journalistic agenda than I do.
And I feel that Gad and Rubin have gone too far to the other side.
Right.
Well, it could be in terms of their public work.
That may be the case.
And again, I'm speaking somewhat from ignorance because I haven't seen even anything close to the majority of their interviews.
But in terms of my interactions with them privately, That's not going on at all.
So that's at least, you know, and again, I mean, these are not people who I've spent a tremendous amount of time with, but, you know, I've, it's just, you know, insofar as you can get the measure of another person's mind by having dinner with them,
it's, that's certainly my view of them.
Okay, I'm not sure what my view was there.
We left the predicate out somehow, but I'm not sure what I was claiming about them.
I guess I was claiming that they're more liberal than she was alleging or something.
She was making the point that they have a clear partisan security and that they are platforming a bunch of...
Right-wing people without giving pushback.
And you were essentially arguing that, well, they're just having discussions and that from your experience with Dave, that he is a very principled journalistic person.
Now, I get entirely the issue about interpersonal connections, but two things here.
One is your interpersonal connections tend to be directed around a certain group of people.
So I don't think you can categorize that off, that like an unwillingness to criticize directly.
A certain type of people is a tribal bias.
And then the second part of that is that you, in this period before, essentially you're arguing that Gad Saad and D of Rubin are not partisans.
I think now, clearly from your interactions, you would agree that they are.
And similarly, people have been alleging for a number of years that people like the Weinsteins have a tendency towards conspiracism And the sympathy for various right-leaning people.
And I would put Douglas Murray in the same category.
And it's essentially that your charity there was extended towards a certain group of people.
And like now, I think when you're handed in your card and stuff, you're admitting that now you see their bias, but other people recognized their bias before.
So it isn't always the case that the people alleging that there is a skew or a bias are just Like social justice run amok, misidentifying things.
They identified something you didn't see, and you didn't see it because of your sympathy and interpersonal relationships, which is a tribal bias.
Well, no, I don't agree with the diagnosis.
As I said in that clip, I was not in the habit of watching or listening to much of what...
Dave and Gad were putting out, right?
So I was claiming ignorance even while I was saying the few times I had dinner with those guys, I didn't detect any right-wing allegiance.
That was basically the extent of what I said there.
Now, things have changed in the intervening years.
I don't know if you notice what Gad says about me on social media, but the guy is working very hard to make a permanent enemy of me, right?
He's just attacking me by name as a utter hypocrite and sell out.
And I don't recall the specific allegations, but he thinks my reaction to Trump has destroyed my mind and made me a totally dishonest person.
So that's what he thinks of me.
So if we're in the same tribe, how durable was that tribalism?
If the guy hates me and he's expressed it ad nauseum.
Yeah, but that in itself has been an interesting episode.
I mean, you mentioned before...
And Dave, just to close the loop on this...
This is one episode of Dave's podcast I did see recently.
He had Gad on and Michael Shermer and Peter Boghossian, two other men who I think you would put squarely in my tribe.
And they didn't attack me by name, but it was clear they were...
I mean, I don't think Peter and Michael knew what was being talked about there or what was on the agenda.
But Gad and Dave clearly referenced me without naming me.
And they just...
Shan all over me in that episode, right?
Yeah, I saw that episode too, Sam.
Look, just a quick comment, which I don't think you'd disagree with, which is that like you and actually many people on the moderate liberal left, from time to time, I find other people more hard on the left, extremely annoying.
The moral posturing and the kinds of attacks can be quite mean.
So I can kind of appreciate reactivity to that and also reactivity to that kind of purity policing.
And reacting against anyone who doesn't follow the line.
But more and more, I'm seeing it on this sort of heterodox right side.
And I think your experience has been a good example of that.
By doing the right thing and criticizing the Weinsteins, for instance, and other people very heavily for, say, pushing ivermectin and going down this anti-COVID measures route, you have not walked the line which you were supposed to walk amongst this clique.
And you're experiencing the consequences of it.
So I'm just making the point that I think it can happen across the spectrum.
Well, see, what you're calling it, you're disposed to call a tribe here.
I'm calling, I think, more accurately, a set of social relationships that are highly variable and in some ways just purely contingent.
I mean, there are people who I really agree with who would be the core to my tribe.
Who I'd be very surprised to disagree with in the future, who I've just never met because I just never met them.
You know, I just was never at a conference with them.
We just, you know, we've just, we may not have even exchanged emails or maybe we have a whole relationship that is entirely based on email.
And there are people who I have had a face-to-face encounter with that was entirely pleasant where I come away saying, like, I've got nothing bad to say about the guy.
He or she is just very nice.
And yet they're committed to something.
Or we'll be committed to something six months from now that I'm going to find odious.
It's hard to know what the rules are when you have a face-to-face relationship with someone.
The general principle here is not of tribalism.
It's that face-to-face relationships can be distorting of one's willingness to publicly attack someone for their bad ideas, right?
And especially when you push it into the level of actual friendship or some simulacrum of friendship.
So I've had that with a few people in this space and a few people I haven't had it with.
And that's the difference that sometimes makes a difference.
I had less restraint going after Candace Owens on Twitter at the outset of COVID because she was tweeting some truly diabolically stupid things and still does.
I did it in public.
I did it in private.
I did every version of this to no avail in the end.
But I've never met Candace in person.
But if I had had, you know, five dinners with Candace under my belt at that point, I might have been, I guarantee you I would have been more hesitant to have gone after her on Twitter for her dumb tweets.
But that is not tribalism.
Candace was never part of my tribe.
I didn't sign up for the IDW knowing Candace was going to be put in it.
Candace is a blowhard and an ignoramus of mythological proportions at this point.
And also a very charismatic and cool person, I'm sure, if you get to hang out with her.
So who would I be if I had hung out with her?
Maybe there's two things that we need to disentangle.
So one is, and I think you probably would agree with this, that in addition to interpersonal relationships existing, and if someone is a friend for many years, it's much harder to criticize them than an anonymous person online or somebody you've never met.
Granted.
And you don't have to call that tribalism because it could just be at an individual interpersonal level.
Now, a point I would want to make there is that that's a very potentially distorting thing whereby somebody could have very terrible ideas, but you've had an interpersonally nice relationship with them.
And you say, yeah, I've heard all these bad things about them, but they were charming to me.
And I find that a potentially dangerous thing because most people are not villains interpersonally, no matter what ideology they're promoting.
The vision of a snarling neo-Nazi who spits whenever he encounters a black person is rare.
But that doesn't mean that people who can be interpersonally nice, that they are not people with sinister ideologies.
And a point that I would relate to that is that you were able to call Candace, as I recall, because Eric Weinstein put you in contact and he encouraged you to do so.
So there is an issue in where, if you don't want to call it tribalism, Interpersonal networks come into play.
One point here that I want to attach to that.
If you had a longtime collaborator who you were close to, who became an advocate for Islamists, became an outspoken Islamist, I don't think you would have an issue publicly criticizing them.
And you might even say, I respect this person.
I've worked with them, but I don't endorse this ideology.
It needs to be critiqued.
I don't think you would have that much hesitation to name someone that was an Islamist.
Is that fair, just as an assumption?
Well, it's a hypothetical that's a little hard to parse, but it's because I just don't know who and to what extent and how extreme and all of that, but it's...
I think there's a generic one.
I mean, first of all, it's balanced on the other side by my willingness to go after someone like Brett Weinstein for, you know, finally saying too many stupid and dangerous things about ivermectin and the COVID vaccines, right?
So it's like...
Wait, though, Sam, before you get off the hypothetical, the point I want to make with that is I'm crediting you that you would be willing to criticize someone who was openly advocating an Islamist agenda.
Now, if the person was advocating, like with Brett Weinstein, as you mentioned, something which you consider a conspiracy or a claim which has the potential to do harm, you did directly call him out, completely to your credit, and without clear hesitation,
you indicated that you respect him, but you think he's dead wrong and doing harm.
You don't know how much hesitation was there.
You don't know how long I waited to do it.
You don't know what process I engaged before I did it.
Once I did it, I basically ripped the Band-Aid off.
But yeah, there was a fair amount of hesitation.
Yes, and I would expect her to be because he's been pushing up for a long time.
But the point there is that you are recognizing the potential harm.
But say somebody had become an outspoken advocate for right-wing partisan conspiracies about COVID vaccines, about election frauds.
But was a past collaborator.
So I think, you know, it's quite obvious that the name that is floating around would be Majid Nawaz.
And you haven't said anything about him and you have personal relationships.
But why not, as you often advocate, that you can take out the ideas from the person.
And if Majid is advocating ideas that are harmful, wrong, conspiracies, partisan, Then why can you not attack the ideas without the man if it isn't about bias or that kind of thing?
Well, so this is just an interesting ethical problem, and I don't think it's worked out.
It's definitely not worked out in my head, and so I don't know which way the balance should swing in these cases.
I mean, generically, if you have a friend whose brain goes haywire and they have some kind of public platform, what...
Is the ethical thing to do?
Is my responsibility only to the promulgation of sound criticism of bad ideas?
Or is there some scope for personal loyalty to a friend?
I don't actually know what is true there ethically.
And I haven't spent enough time thinking about it.
So in each one of these cases, I'm trying to just figure it out intuitively as I go along.
And in most cases, I'm averting my eyes because I don't even want to deal with it.
So in Maja's case, I have seen very little of what, first of all, I've stepped back from social media to an impressive degree.
So I miss a lot of what's happening on Twitter where I can seem to be paying attention because occasionally I pay attention, then I react to something.
But then I'm gone again and I'm not looking for days at a stretch sometimes.
So I'm missing a lot of it.
And most of what's...
Majid has been doing during COVID.
If I've seen it at all, it's in kind of the corner of my eye, and I'm just hearing echoes of the reaction to it.
So I can't even say I know all of...
If you give me a litany of his transgressions, some of them are going to be...
Half of what you just said is unfamiliar to me.
But part of what explains my ignorance here is part of me hasn't wanted to do a deep dive on it because I don't want to have to deal with it.
There's a limited number of things I can deal with in a day.
And this is not, I mean, I guess you could call that hypocrisy, but it's not.
It's just triage.
It's just me deciding what's worth my attention.
And when I have dealt with it, I mean, so far as I've dealt with Brett Weinstein and, to a lesser degree, Joe Rogan in public and private, and Dave Rubin and Gadsad, now they're coming for me.
I've said very little about either of them publicly.
But this is just a huge hassle.
As far as the benefits of doing it, they're fairly indiscernible to me at this point.
So it's like, what is actually the project?
What is the right thing to do?
What is the rewarding thing to do?
What is the skillful thing to do?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that overlaying tribalism as a concept here is the wrong frame.
There are people, in some cases these are friends and colleagues, in some cases these are kind of quasi-friends or associates or just people I've met.
Take like Jordan Peterson.
Jordan is someone who I disagree with fairly stridently on certain topics, but I had a fair amount of experience with him now doing events, and he's someone who I grew fond of because of that, and yet I'm sure we will disagree in our next conversation about a fair number of things.
And hopefully that's all very good-natured.
And it's also true that in many of these cases, what has been said about these people from the far left is at best a half-truth and rather often a tissue of malicious lies.
It's just very mixed.
And I do the same thing with people who are on the far left, too.
Some of it you don't notice, but it's just there to be done.
Someone like Kara Swisher, who's pretty far left, disagrees with me about, A lot.
Doesn't think wokeness is really a problem.
You know, it's just accountability culture.
It's not cancel culture on her account.
She had me on her podcast and tried to read me the riot act about my position on Islam and the link between actual Islam and jihadism and terrorism and felt that that went so badly for her side of the debate that she immediately needed to invite Mehdi Hassan on to clean up the mess I had made.
I never even listened to that hour because, you know, Mehdi is about as dishonest and interlocutor as I've ever encountered on the planet.
But Kara is someone who, despite the fact that in half her moods she doesn't want to touch me with a 10-foot pole because she thinks I'm at least toxic adjacent, I like a lot.
And I've reached out to her in private and I just spoke at her code conference because I wanted to support her and Scott Galloway at that event.
Whenever she talks about me, she gets something of significant consequence wrong, and yet I don't feel the same animus toward her that I feel toward Robert Ryder, Ezra Klein, because honestly, I find her more likable as a person.
So this is bias, but tribalism doesn't enter into this.
I overcame my desire not to be associated with Vox for the Code Conference because of what Vox has done to me and what Ezra Klein did to me in the pages of Vox.
Just to do Kara Swisher a favor and Scott Galloway a favor.
And I would never have done it had Ezra asked me, but I did it because Kara asked me.
And that's just an interpersonal phenomenon.
You do the psychological math on that, but tribalism just doesn't help you figure it out.
Okay.
I hear all of that.
And I can see why, in the way that you're conceiving it, that those might not be associated with tribal biases.
But let me try to give another illustration, because I think I can give you some examples where the dynamics that you're talking about aren't really in play, and yet there is a degree of charity extended, which seems unwarranted.
Listen, let me just put a few more pieces in play.
I extend an enormous amount of charity to Osama bin Laden, right?
I have said publicly that I think Osama bin Laden was almost certainly a better person than Donald Trump.
So square that with my tribal bias.
There's no force on earth I find more repugnant than jihadism.
I think my bona fides on that point stack up pretty well against anyone's, right?
I have banged on and on about how dangerous and delusional the worldview of the jihadist is.
But that said, I think Osama bin Laden...
Very likely was a deeply normal person psychologically.
He happened to be extraordinarily religious, but that's fairly well-subscribed.
I think he was probably a very conscientious and ethical person within the framework of his dangerously bullshit-addled belief system that informed his ethics.
I wouldn't say any of those things about Trump.
Trump is a moral lunatic, as far as I can tell.
I find Trump as a loathsome human being.
As I can think of, but he hasn't created nearly the harm that some much better people have created.
I think Osama bin Laden created much more harm than Trump.
Trump is an insignificant person, right?
Despite being the most famous person in human history at this point.
So I'm not going to say that you are unable to extend charity to Osama bin Laden as a human or even to Trump.
I wouldn't make that argument.
What I would make is that whenever you've been asked, for example, In the past about Stefan Molyneux, about whether you would have him on your show or when you've discussed Tommy Robinson or various people.
The stance that you tend to take is that you don't know, you've heard bad things, but you're not going to pass judgment and you know that people have misrepresented positions in the past.
And this applies not just to people that you have interpersonal connections with, but people.
Who are recognized as anti-woke or particularly Islamophobic that are tarred with that, obviously because you think that people are tarred with that brush unjustly.
But the point here is that lots of the people that you have extended charity to, there's two things.
One is that it isn't clear why, if you've discussed them over multiple occasions for lengths of time, that you don't devote time.
To look at their material and form an opinion.
Like with Stefan Molyneux, there was lots of material already available that it would only take a night or two to review.
And you would come across quite quickly that there's a lot of really, really serious material there.
But even on that, the people that you've granted charity to, they all tend to fall within a certain set.
Stefan Molyneux.
Deep rivet outside.
Okay, but it's not true.
Let me just take your foot out of my mouth on this particular point because this is just not accurate.
So I have not spent a lot of time talking about Stefan Molyneux or Tommy Robinson.
And as you'll notice, neither have been on my podcast.
I obviously have a policy of not having them on my podcast for reasons that you would, I think, support.
The thing with Stefan was born of...
I did a live event with...
This former neo-Nazi, Christian Giellini, who said a few things.
He was a former neo-Nazi, but now he's a woke social justice activist.
So he has as far a pendulum swing politically as any person in living memory.
This is one of these classic cases of hanging out with someone, liking them interpersonally, feeling like that encounter personally gave me some information about the person's integrity, only to discover This person has no integrity.
So I had a very disconcerting experience with Picciolini.
It was just a bro-fest on stage at that event.
We really did like each other.
It was nothing but rapport.
He said a few things from the stage.
That got pushback from the audience that I couldn't fact check in real time.
One was about Stefan Molyneux and one was about James Damore, both of which members of the audience declared false.
He said that Stefan was a Holocaust denier who was a friend of David Duke's.
Those were two claims about Stefan.
So we aired that.
I just threw up my hands and said, sorry guys, I can't figure this out on stage, but we'll just bracket that as your objection's been noted.
Then we released the audio and I get a letter.
A lawyer letter from Stefan, and I get an email from James Damore, both objecting to what was said about them.
And I looked into it, and as to the specific charges that Christian made, he was flat wrong, right?
These were baseless charges.
Sam, I'm familiar with this incident, and I question that because I know the argument that you...
But you have no, I mean, I'll tell you why you have no basis to question it, because what played out in private between me and Christian was me going to Christian saying, okay, well, you seem to be mistaken about Stefan.
He's not a Holocaust denier.
He just told me that he agrees that six million Jews died and blah, blah, blah.
And he doesn't know David Duke, and the only connection between him and David Duke is that David Duke once retweeted him.
And so I went back to Christian with that.
And what Christian gave back to me, purporting to be evidence, was a deranged word salad of non-evidence and then increasingly threatening emails where he's actually, if you read between the lines,
threatening me with violence if I edit my own podcast.
So that was my experience with Christian.
So yes, I cut those false statements in the podcast because there was no reason to Okay,
so some points there.
First, I'm not going to endorse everything that Christian did.
I don't even know all the interpersonal ins and outs, but I did see the evidence that he provided and he shared various.
Parts of the emails.
And I think there's some things that I would push back on.
And I would say, like, first of all, I think it would be good to make it clear to your audience that you received a legal threat from Stefan.
And that was relevant to you removing the criticism.
But the second...
No, because it wasn't.
It wasn't because if it were a legal threat that I disagreed with, I would have told them to fuck off.
Sure, sure.
I'm not...
It's very easy.
This is something that you can disconfirm in real time with someone.
If you're a Holocaust denier, you deny the Holocaust.
It's a very specific charge.
I don't know whether he's an anti-Semite.
There's all kinds of other charges that are adjacent to that.
But if he doesn't deny the Holocaust, he's not a Holocaust denier.
Let me make an analogy for you.
Is Brett anti-vaxxing?
Well, that's clever, but different.
He's functionally anti-COVID.
He's anti-COVID vaccine.
Okay.
That's a distinction he makes.
That's a distinction all anti-vax people make.
If you ask them, are you anti-vaxing?
They'll say, no, I'm just pro-CF vaccines.
I'm anti this specific vaccine.
I've got concerns.
Holocaust denial is such a specific thing.
The people who are Holocaust deniers make claims like, The amount of Jews that died.
This is a lie foisted by the Jews on the world to guilt trip the whole world.
Millions of people were not killed.
But in that area of Holocaust denial is the claim that the Holocaust was brought about because of Jewish communists leading, that this was a reaction to this.
That's not denial.
Perhaps an odious belief about one of its causes or an inaccurate belief about one of its causes or a half-truth that is malignant.
But in the same way, you could say...
But I'm guilty of this.
Take this.
Here's more evidence of my tribalism.
I'm Jewish.
I have written that the Jews are in part responsible for the Holocaust.
How tribal is that?
Now, that's part of my denigration of belief.
Of faith-based religion.
It's like the Jews defining themselves as Jews for 2,000 years, insisting upon living insular lives among communities that believe antithetical things about God and thinking that it's important to marry within their community because of the profundity of their religious beliefs and their unique covenant with God.
All of that divisive bullshit is part of the backdrop that gave us the centuries of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.
So yeah, I'm someone who has said, who has made Judaism itself somewhat culpable in giving us the Holocaust.
Now that, what am I, a neo-Nazi?
What's my tribe?
No.
Okay, Sam, here's the difference, right?
So Christian identified these tropes, which he lumps into the category of Holocaust denial.
Far-right Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, white nationalism.
And Stephan told you he doesn't deny the Holocaust.
And for you, That settles it because it's specifically that issue.
But if you look where Stefan has gone, Stefan is now a white nationalist.
He's with him.
He is hanging around with more people than David Duke that are concerning.
He's been removed from most platforms.
So the person that had the kind of read of Stefan more accurate was not you.
It was Christian.
He was...
No, no, not with respect to Holocaust, because this is the crucial point.
And this extends to everybody.
This principle of charity, you have to target your criticisms of people precisely, even if they are bad people.
Given what I just said about Trump, you would think I would tolerate sloppiness with respect to allegations about all the reasons why he shouldn't be president, or all the reasons why he is deceptive, or all the evidence that suggests he might be racist,
right?
But I don't tolerate.
The imprecision there.
And I have taken pains to be precise, even when it cost me.
Even when I appear to be talking about how many Trumpian devils can dance on the head of a pin, when I'm saying, okay, this claim about his racism is plausible.
This claim is obviously woke nonsense.
And I've just had to parse it that way because I think that if we lower our standards here, it's just we're returned to some kind of horrific, I mean, not returned, we're going to be...
Plunged into some newly horrific dystopian state of nature where everyone is permanently cancelled.
Where no one is pure enough to be associated with.
And everyone is content to spin half-truths and lies to their political advantage just in this internecine war of all against all on social media.
And I want no part of that.
Take a genuine enemy like Glenn Greenwald.
Glenn Greenwald has screwed me over every chance he could, publicly.
When I've gotten something wrong about one of his views, I have publicly apologized immediately.
I think it's only happened once, but I went on Cenk Uygur's crazy Young Turks show for three hours, submitting to his loviations in what seemed to be a debate, and I said something about Greenwald.
Believing something.
And I recognized that I got that wrong afterwards.
And so I immediately went on Twitter and apologized.
Greenwald has never apologized to me about anything.
Socially speaking, it would be so easy for me to just say, fuck him.
He's never apologized to me.
Why do I have to be such a rabbinical obsessive about my own honesty that I need to go back and clean up the record to his advantage, right?
But it's important.
It's important when you get things wrong and you notice it to own it, even when, maybe especially when the person is someone who you're going to be attacking the next day for all of your differences.
Again, this is completely orthogonal to tribalism.
What we're talking about is just the confusing nature of interpersonal encounters and what it's like to be sparring on dozens of fronts on very fraught issues.
Okay.
Let me, let me try the...
To go out a little bit and take some concrete examples, not in the camps that people would usually talk to you about.
I'll link these points up, so just bear with me for a minute.
So one of our first interactions online, and I'm perfectly willing to accept I'm not the most agreeable person online.
You're way more disagreeable on Twitter than you are on your podcast.
So you should just know that about yourself.
There's no way you and I would be having this conversation if all I had seen from you was...
What you're sniping at me on Twitter.
Oh, he knows.
Sure, sure.
I'll accept that.
Although I think part of it is to do with Northern Irish sarcasm and how compatible it is with Twitter.
But in any case, so one of our first interactions, and you actually ended up talking about me on the podcast, and I'm not taking this as a personal sight.
I don't mind because we were disagreeing.
But the particular disagreement doesn't matter.
What matters is that...
You saw my profile and you read Anthropologist and you assume from that...
There you're dealing with some of the legacy effects of my collisions with Scott Etran and Richard Schwader and a few other anthropologists who don't know which end is up on the topic of jihadism.
Scott Etran is going to figure here.
So first was that because of your negative experience with certain anthropologists...
I'm in the tribe of non-anthropologists.
Yes, but the thing is that anthropologists tend to have a particular kind of bias.
If there's a discipline that is likely to be strongly influenced by social justice and that kind of stuff, it's anthropologists, especially social anthropologists.
One thing is that you did what you would probably say is a bad thing to do.
You saw the word anthropologist and you made assumptions about me, which don't apply because I'm a cognitive anthropologist and I generally don't agree with some of the views that social anthropologists have.
But the other point is, Scott Atron, I know about your disagreements with him.
And I've heard you recently mention that he dismisses the role of ideology because of conversations that you've had with him.
Both in debate form and interpersonally.
Now, over six years ago, he's advanced a model for extremism and terrorist acts as well.
That's called the devoted actor model.
And that model has two key components too.
One is devotion to secret values.
And the other one is identity fusion and social bonds within groups.
But the devotion to secret values includes devotion to ideology and that kind of thing.
So when you're saying that he doesn't recognize any role for ideology, it's currently a misrepresentation because his model has that as one of the core components.
Now, I'm not saying that you're intentionally misrepresenting him because I get that you're unlikely to have read that document.
I've been politically unaware of what he's done in recent years.
But I would bet, I'll bet you, sight unseen, I'm willing to play poker with his evolution as an intellectual.
I would bet you that he still discounts the propositional content of those ideologies and does not think that jihadists expect to wind up in paradise with 72 virgins and rivers of milk and honey, really.
He's discounting the propositional content of those beliefs.
And if he's not, then he has fundamentally changed his view of the problem.
And I'm just unaware of it.
So if you read it, you would probably consider that he's capitulated to hear your viewers to a certain extent.
Then he should send me an email and apologize for all of the slime he's put on me on that point.
But I would say the distinction would mean that you're right, that he wouldn't put the emphasis that you do on the specific beliefs about virgins and an afterlife.
And I would add that in that respect, it's not just him as an anthropologist.
There are people like Arie Kruglansky.
Who have probably the most dominant models for understanding extremism and are not anthropologists with Scott Atron's politics or views.
And their model includes a very big emphasis on a search for meaning.
And that includes religious commitments and so on.
But they see a constellation of effects.
And I would put myself actually kind of in the middle between Scott Atron's old position and yours, where I think ideology matters and is important and we should consider it.
The social dynamics and so on play.
And you would, I suspect, find yourself somewhere there.
But I wanted to make the point about the assumption based on an identity marker that you are not fond of or that you've had trouble with.
And that, to me, is undoubtedly tribalism.
But it's not tribalism.
You can't put me in the tribe of academics and public intellectuals, but just not anthropologists, right?
No, I wouldn't.
You're in the tribe of people who are critical of out-of-touch humanities, academics, who are more devoted to social justice policies.
This is an artifact of just the fact that academia is so captured by social justice leftist thinking.
I mean, it's like 95% left, left, left of center in almost every college on earth, or at least every college in the West at the moment.
So there's just not, there's not viewpoint diversity in academia, but I'm as much a child of the humanities as, I'm not, you know, an engineer who's criticizing everything that's focused on writing and reading books.
My undergraduate degree is in philosophy, and humanities inform my view of the world as certainly as much as science.
It's just that anthropology is a discipline, starting with its disavowal of the very concept of human rights.
I think it was in 1948.
I mean, literally, like, Auschwitz was not even a memory.
I mean, they're still cleaning up the site.
And the anthropologists of America told the world that you couldn't come up with a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
That would be to impose our Western values gratuitously on the rest of the world.
And that's just so mistaken, from my point of view, ethically and ultimately scientifically.
Yeah, I have a bit of a hobby horse.
To ride on that particular point with respect to that discipline.
But you're reading too much into the fact that I said on Twitter, oh, another anthropologist doesn't get jihadism.
You know, it was.
Whatever I said.
Yes.
So, okay, we can step off that.
Just a quick comment, though, in anthropology, Sam, is that I think the cultural relativism strand that you're talking about is dominant in certain spheres of anthropology.
But like classical anthropology is very much universalistic, identifying.
Cross-cultural patterns and stuff.
So I think there's a lot of diversity in anthropology.
It's a minor point.
I'm sure what I'm doing is unfair to the field, but I have had just a few memorable collisions with anthropologists at conferences.
Me too.
And it's left an indelible impression.
And I probably share a lot of your criticisms of the field, so I don't want to dwell on that.
But the whole point with raising the issue with Scott Atron is that I want to highlight That's a topic that you talk about fairly frequently, extremism, political, Islamism, and so on.
But I'm often surprised at the relative lack of interest that you show in the research.
And I'm not talking about endorsing Scott Atron's model.
I mean the general, more mainstream thing.
And I want to make a related point and you can respond and tell me why I'm wrong here.
This is a good point to just...
Connected to the thing you found unscrutable and objectionable early on, which is based on my contemplative experience, if you don't understand what I've been up to there, you're going to miss the basis for some of my convictions on seemingly very distant points.
And there's a relevant piece here, which is I believe I understand from the inside.
The spiritual convictions of somebody like Osama bin Laden or any jihadist or somebody who could be a suicide bomber.
I know what it's like to have a range of experiences, you know, through meditation, through psychedelics, where if you were framing those experiences with a belief system that alleged, and you were convinced of the truth of this,
That the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe, and all you have to do is understand the contents of that book.
You add those experiences and that propositional attitude, jihadism and a religious ecstasy anchored to it is a, I would say, almost a necessary outcome.
So I'm not saying all jihadists fit this description, but certainly some do.
And I say this as confidently as I say that people who become Buddhists and spend their lives as Buddhist monks are doing it on the basis of their spiritual experiences, framed by very different beliefs.
So what I object to in so much of this research, and you take someone like Robert Pape, who's always thrown at me as a retort to my views on the connection between religious ideology and terrorism, is that We're talking about secular people who don't appear to have a spiritual bone in their bodies,
or at least they have no experience.
So when they're hearing someone talk about an expectation of paradise and a willingness to just view death as no factor at all, right?
To view this world as just this polluted way station on the way to a much better place, which will be eternal.
And you've got secular academics for whom that kind of thinking...
Doesn't resonate at all.
It resonates so little that they assume it's just all for show.
Like, no one actually believes that.
They're just pretending to believe it, whereas they're really motivated by economics and politics.
It's just not true.
It's not true.
And you can know that from the inside if you've really made contact with the existential concerns and spiritual yearnings of people and their apparent gratification.
The call to prayer is a genuinely beautiful sound.
That I can hear with the ear of real spiritual interest and faith, not actual Muslim faith, but I can do the correction and know what it would be like to really believe the ideology at the back of that sound.
And that's one of the most captivating experiences a human being can have.
It's every bit as captivating as sex.
And we've got a bunch of academics saying, People aren't really having sex because they find it pleasurable.
And all this talk about orgasms, I don't know what they're talking about, but it can't be all that interesting.
What they're really doing is just trying to procreate, even if they're using contraceptives.
It's just, it's so out of touch that it's not worth taking seriously if they're discounting this piece of it.
I'm never denying that politics and economics can be part of the story sometimes, somewhere.
But if you're going to ignore the core of the story.
That some people really believe what they say they believe.
I don't even know how to have a conversation on the topic.
So I think you're preaching to the choir in the sense that I wouldn't disagree with any of the points that you made about potentially being a bias amongst secular-type academics who don't appreciate the religious convictions that people can hold.
That's definitely true.
And I also think that ignoring it as a motivating role, that's a limitation that you can raise at various people who think within that space.
But I would say you're doing a disservice to the general field because overall, a lot of people take conviction seriously, but not just politics and social interactions and other factors are sometimes a factor.
They're always a factor.
And that applies even in the case where you have...
They're not always necessary.
They're not necessary and they're not sufficient.
So they're not always a factor.
I mean, there's like...
If you're going to drop out of medical school in England and go join ISIS, politics and economics, real political concerns, first-person political concerns and economic concerns were not the overriding factor.
In that case, though, Sam, from the research people do with those people, a lot of what they talk about is the feeling of being...
The desecration.
The desecration of living in a world that's not dominated by Islamist theocracy.
The only way for the world to be right...
No, no, like a feeling of alienation and a feeling, in some cases, where they're associated with Muslim backgrounds or whatever, it can be a feeling of anger at the status of Muslims in the West.
It can be.
I think, though, if you want to talk about that, you have to look...
The truth, the problem is there's every version of this.
There's every case.
There are people like me, who have my background, who convert to Islam and become jihadists.
I became a quasi-Buddhist sitting meditation retreats in my 20s.
I could have been a jihadist had I believed that the Quran was the perfect part of the creator.
So Sam, there's no point to disagree about that because I don't say that you can't have people that become devoted to a certain creed and that that is their primary motivation.
It isn't economics.
It isn't a political thesis that they've developed.
It's primarily a religious devotion.
That definitely happens.
I'm just pushing back at the centrality of which You apply that for most jihadists across most of the world.
But let's table it for a second because I've got a point that connects to it and it relates to the applying different standards.
The Christchurch shooting, you had various conversations with people relating to the motivations of the Christchurch shooter.
In those conversations, there was a couple of things.
First was that even the number of months after The event.
I was quite surprised when you were talking with Kathleen Belew that you mentioned you hadn't read the manifesto, but yet you had a strong feeling that because it had some shitposting content in it, that we essentially couldn't rely on identifying the motive.
Didn't he blame like Candace Owens for radicalizing him or something?
So here in that document, if you look at it.
I mean, the title of it is The Great Replacement.
He shot up a mosque targeting Muslims.
And if you read the document, there's shitposting in it because he was a 4chan troll.
But there's no confusion about him being a white nationalist concerned with the right race.
And he's also an eco-fascist, but there's a deep swell of white nationalism.
Now, when you discuss that, the two things I have is, one, You didn't want to ascribe so quickly that ideology as the motivating factor.
You wanted to look at potential other explanations.
And the second point was, and this might be a general point.
But if you're going to say that I don't do that for jihadists, you're wrong.
I absolutely extend this main principle of skepticism.
It is absolutely not true of me to say that whenever a Muslim goes, And kills people, I assume it's jihadism.
That is absolutely untrue.
But if you have an issue of tabiq that describes the motivation, you say we should heed that motivation, what that says, and there's no ambiguity.
Only if it's credible.
I mean, the problem with this case, and again, I didn't read the manifesto, but what I read was secondary coverage of it.
That specific point, why didn't you read?
The Manifesto, given that you've talked about this on several occasions.
There's so many other things to read, and I haven't talked about it that much.
And it just came up in this conversation with, we were talking about domestic white nationalism and to what degree that's a problem.
But I didn't read the Anders Breivik Manifesto.
I mean, I think that was like 1,500 pages.
I think I spent 10 minutes searching it with keywords, but I didn't read that either.
But that was a very different case.
The problem is that human violence is over-determined, right?
So there are cases where someone is genuinely mentally ill, and they're expressing their mental illness in the context of also paying lip service to various ideologies.
But it's pretty clear that, no, this is not real jihadism or real white supremacy merely.
This person is nuts.
Then there are people who are completely sane and motivated by an ideology.
Then there are people who are just trolling on some level.
And this is what I didn't know whether or not this was true in the Christ Church case, but this is the secondary coverage I had read of it suggested to me that this is new variant where you spend enough time on 4chan and you're nihilistic enough and you're detached enough from the general project of staying alive.
And you could be essentially a shit poster to the...
Kills Muslims.
Who just rides it straight into the grave.
He could be someone who's racist.
Could be someone who hates Muslims.
But this is what I read about.
And again, I have not revisited this topic since I did the podcast you referenced.
What I read at the time was that there was a delight in creating a document that was going to be widely misinterpreted.
The legacy of this nihilistic pseudo-martyr was going to be to create a document that would be Widely misinterpreted, but leave enough clues to his insincerity as to be a great goof on the normies who think they're in the presence of normal white supremacy,
whereas this is just the fourchanification of everything.
I don't know whether or not that's true.
I just read a seemingly intelligent opinion on that point before I happened to find myself on a podcast with...
Kathleen, talking about white supremacy.
Yeah, so that's my point because I think I know the article you're talking about, probably Robert Evans' one on Bellingcat about the gamification of mass shootings.
Yeah, I don't actually know.
But my point there would be, so when you're discussing white supremacy or white nationalism, there's a general hesitancy for you to describe that it's not widespread.
Did you hear the subtext of this is that I have some affinity for white supremacy or white nationalism as a Jew.
That's the only possible subtext to read into this.
No, no, no, no.
My bias is to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not going to give the far-left version the benefit of the doubt.
It isn't that.
So, Sam, you've said, for example, in an older conversation, you wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years there was a civil war in France.
You said if somebody said it was 50-50, that wouldn't be a surprise to you.
And this was in the context of the shooting in the Bastille, I think, and concerns about immigrant populations and what the destabilizing factor in France.
Now, I'm not saying that, therefore, you want a white ethno state.
But I would say that those sentiments certainly put you closer to people on the right and like Douglas Murray.
That's not true.
A few things have happened.
First of all, some of the demographic trends that were forecast for France in particular have not been borne out.
There was a time where totally sober people in the New York Times were anticipating France becoming something like a majority Muslim society in our lifetime.
I don't know where the demography is now, but that was, I mean, you could read, like, you know, a rock down that op-ed in the New York Times on that topic.
But Rose Stone is right-wing, right?
And, like, the figures that you cited in one of your books was Bat Yor.
You're talking about a topic that was so ill-dignified on the left that no one left of center would talk about it.
It was pure plutonium.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Who should have been a genuine hero to the left, was blackballed from every left of center think tank in America when she was looking for a home when she left Holland.
And it was only the American Enterprise Institute that would give her a position and give her security.
It was not because she had an affinity for libertarianism and limited government.
It was because no one left of center would take a critic of Islam.
Seriously, even if that critic was obviously being hunted by theocrats.
It was a complete failure of a safeguard against free thought in our society, left of center.
And it remains to this day.
Yes, you do find yourself talking to people who are more concerned, or agreeing with people who are more concerned.
I mean, this is a point I've made to my enduring disadvantage in a colorful way.
This quote is always taken out of context by dishonest people like Mehdi Hassan.
But I wrote a column, I think the title was The End of Liberalism, where I worried about the rise of fascism in Europe.
And one of the reasons I gave to be worried was that on this point, only fascists or quasi-fascists, only neo-Nazis are willing to even talk about the nature of the problem.
And so to people who want to slander me, I seem to be expressing some Sympathy for neo-Nazis and fascists.
On the contrary, I was saying this is how dangerous the situation is.
If we have a genuine social problem that can only be acknowledged by truly evil people, given the nature of the social pressure, because everyone else is so concerned about their reputations to not be called racist or bigoted in any way, that only really malevolent sociopathic people who are not concerned about their reputations will step forward and call a spade a spade.
Or say that the emperor has no clothes.
That's a completely unsustainable situation.
There are variations of that that explain some of the alliances and associations you're noticing.
Like, literally, someone like Douglas Murray, I mean, maybe this has changed, I doubt it, but for the longest time, someone like Douglas Murray couldn't go on CNN to talk about his book.
There's no one on CNN who wants to talk to Douglas Murray, so he gets invited on Fox.
I'm sure when his next book comes out, his publicist is going to send the book all around.
And the only people who will say, yeah, we want to give you access to our audience to promote your book will be people.
Sam, I paid attention to Douglas Murray's content, and I think part of the partisanship is bi-directional.
In the way that the coverage goes.
Right-wing people being treated more kindly by right-wing media stands to reason.
But I want to concede...
The problem is it's not just right-wing people.
On this topic, if you're going to say something critical about Islam as an ideology and say that it's not an accident that there are more Muslim suicide bombers than Amish suicide bombers, you are not going to get on Anderson Cooper to do that.
You're going to get on Tucker Carlson to do that.
And that is pernicious.
Right, because it's true, and you should be able to say it anywhere.
But then, okay, so I completely grant that there are people on the left who are overly sympathetic towards non-Western Islamist people, particularly because of a kind of anti-imperialist stance, which makes them uncritical to other regimes or to look over their faults.
Whether or not they actually have any ideological sympathy for them, but I think the overriding...
Dislike of the West can disguise that.
So I'll completely grant that and I'll set aside the issue of the extent to which that is the dominant view in left-wing media.
I'll even concede if you want to argue that that is the dominant view.
But the point I would make, Sam, is you say often that people are categorizing you with a bunch of people who you don't belong with because politically you're not aligned and you're just talking about things in a kind of objective fashion.
This is why the details actually matter.
I say what I say about Islam.
I have all of this concern about the ideas that anchor jihadism to the real religion of Islam.
But I also say that the first people I would want to let into this country when we're going to have an immigration debate are secular Muslims.
And moderate Muslims.
You'd think, if I'm so worried about Islam, maybe I've got this anti-immigrant, keep the brown people out bias.
But that's absolutely not what I have.
So I seem to be agreeing with whoever, the Stefan Molyneux of the world, who are worried about Islam.
But then you get me on immigration, and I am a xenophile.
And also, I feel a special commitment to support the voices in the Muslim world who are actually liberal.
Right?
But those are the people who should be saving from theocracy.
But so, Sam, how does your position, like, for example, you used the figures from Euravia, right?
And you now, I think, would say that those projections, like you just did, were likely hyperbolic, or turned out to be...
Or just not borne out.
I mean, whether they were projected accurately at the time, and then just things changed, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not a demographer, and the truth is, I don't even know where I got...
Maybe they're in Arabia as well, but I feel like I got those stats from somewhere else or those projections from somewhere else.
I don't know the source, but in any case, there were a lot of people in mainstream media assuming that those projections were going to be borne out and they were forecasting something like 25 years in the future.
But now we're 25, now we're 20 years in the future.
But so wouldn't your concern then be, not that it's with skin color, but you are concerned about the West changing?
Not because it's the West.
It's not because it's the West.
I'm worried about losing the Enlightenment.
I'm worried about rationality and a chance to get something like a universal conception of ethics to which we can all converge.
Where's the distinction there?
I'm worried about a global civilization.
Here's my issue.
There's a lot of people that have these concerns about the fall of the, you can call it Western or you can call it enlightenment civilization, but then they don't display the same concern with right-wing authoritarians.
Your friends, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, have been with Victor Orban and displayed very little concern about it.
And that to me strikes that if...
Yeah, I would agree.
That's a problem.
If there are people who...
Their worldview is that we need to be very concerned about preserving the culture of the West and that immigration from countries which are far from Western values are going to degrade that.
And they phrase that as a great replacement and that it's valid to be concerned about those cultural changes.
I'm wondering where you see the distinction from the argument that you're making just without...
Using the words like great replacement or those kinds of things, like France falling in 20 years to a Muslim-based civil war seems not just wrong to me, it seems extremely unrealistic.
And in the same way, I can be perfectly critical of the people on the left who are being apologetic towards Islamist regimes, but I can see on the right that there's an equal danger about people with hyperbolic...
claims and with a tendency towards partisanship, which is based on either a fondness for the
Well, again, I'm not provincial.
The slander on me, the cultural slander on me that someone could have would be that I'm a globalist.
I'm a cosmopolitan.
I'm someone who's not rooted.
Enough as an American or as a member of Western culture.
My interest is to pick and choose among the best ideas humanity has ever produced.
And where those happen to be Western, well, then I like the West.
If they happen to be Eastern, as is true for virtually everything I find spiritually informative, then I like the East.
And then we can figure out how to reconcile the fact that Eastern wisdom has not translated into terrestrial progress for many of these cultures.
So I view myself as someone who's keenly aware of the dangers of ascendant bad ideas.
And insofar as allegiance to those ideas gets leveraged by tribalism, I'm really worried about the enduring problem of tribalism.
I simply do not see myself as part of any tribe.
I am liable to disagree with someone who seems to be, whatever tribe you're going to assign me, just let the conversation go long enough.
And if that person stops making sense on issues of real importance, that person is no longer in my tribe for the purposes of that conversation, certainly.
And I'll be agreeing with someone who, for the purpose of some other conversation, will seem very distant from me, tribally speaking.
I think the allegation just doesn't track with my psychology.
And it's not to say I'm never biased.
I can certainly be biased insofar as there's quasi-tribal biases that have gotten grandfathered in.
If I've got a male bias or an American bias, or I've got cultural blind spots based on my upbringing, no doubt.
But in terms of the ideas that I talk about publicly and the things that I fight for, if you've listened to what I've said about Trump...
And you look at what that's done to these quasi-tribal allegiances in the so-called IDW.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile from all of those people who couldn't see what a danger Trump posed to America.
Does it concern you that you have been, let's say you've been good at identifying the blind spots that the left wing has and calling them out?
And maybe this is a strength of the kind of IDW sphere that it focuses on that point.
Does it concern you at all that amongst those people, there is a growing sympathy for right-wing populism and partisanship?
And when you've talked about it before as the fringe of the fringe phenomenon, from where I'm standing, it doesn't look like the populist right is a fringe phenomenon or that the people who you would have identified in previous years as people that we should heed.
And who have got their finger on judging these issues correctly, that they've been right.
Like, they've went in on voter fraud conspiracies.
They're wrong on coronavirus.
They always both sides with Trump.
And that includes people not...
You're talking about a few people.
You're talking about a few people who I happen to have been thrown into a group with.
But a lot of people that you have sympathy with, right?
Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray, too.
It isn't just a random assortment of people.
It's a kind of...
I have not heard...
Okay, but again, the specific claims are important.
So for instance, someone like Douglas.
Now, again, there's just not enough time in the day, and I have not seen his output of late.
So if he said something egregious that I'm unaware of, well, then obviously I can't defend that.
But I was watching fairly closely when I was getting more and more worried about Trump.
And I was seeing some of the people you've named become Trumpians.
The clearest bright line for me was when Trump would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 election.
Then when the votes were still being counted, declared himself the winner and asked for the votes to no longer be counted.
And then we had the whole stop the steal movement.
happened after that.
What did people say in those few days around Trump's patently obvious attempt to steal the election in November?
There are people on your list who said nothing useful and pretended none of these terrifying things were happening.
was not one of them.
Douglas very clearly said, I forget where he was, he was on somebody's podcast, he said that he absolutely should not have done
That's where things end for us.
So did someone like Ben Shapiro.
I mean, Ben Shapiro is someone I don't agree with, and I don't follow very much, so maybe Ben has gone on to say despicable things since.
I don't know.
But I was watching at that moment, and Ben said what he needed to say to put some daylight between him and Trump.
Ben said he should not have done that.
When Trump claimed to have won, when the votes are still being counted, Ben was on Twitter, if memory serves, saying he should not have done that.
That's totally unacceptable.
Dave Rubin is not someone who said anything useful at that point or since.
And that's one clue as to why you don't see much going on between me and Dave Rubin these days.
As much as I've tried behind closed doors to get Dave to make some reasonable concession to how unacceptable and dangerous that moment was and subsequent moments were around this stop the steal fantasy, he hasn't made any of those reasonable noises.
There's not much to talk about on that front, but I think there is significant daylight between even someone like Ben Shapiro and Dave on that point, as much as they may seem to agree about everything else.
And so, anyway, I can't own anything that's happened since, but I was watching at those moments, and both Douglas and Ben did something that Dave very pointedly didn't do at that moment, and that was the difference between madness and sanity, in my view.
There are people who did directly criticize Trump for his actions.
And I regard that as a very low bar.
Even for people on the right or left, we should all be able to do that.
But you're right that many people didn't.
They just slammed into that hurdle.
But people like Douglas Murray did overcome it, which is good and praiseworthy.
But I would add, Sam, that there's an issue I take.
I think you recognized it on your recent episode.
You talked about it.
To beat up...
On Trump is no great achievement, especially for anybody that wants to identify themselves anywhere on the left, right?
It should be obvious.
There's so many personal feelings.
It's not an achievement if you're liberal in any sense to say Trump is a terrible person and his politics are terrible and he just seems like a terrible person.
It's amazing how many people can't do it.
Yes.
The other thing that amazes me, though, is there's a lot of people who will grant that.
They'll grant that because they see that as like a pretty simple thing to do.
But then they'll immediately switch to both sides.
Or they'll add in strategic disclaimers where they'll basically say Trump is a bore and he's an idiot and all of these things.
But he's right on this point.
And a lot of the times it ends up that what happens is people say, look, I criticize Trump.
And I'm not saying you do this because I know you have devoted significant.
Yes, and those people infuriate me as well.
But here's the problem.
Trump, and this goes back to your point about my talking about white supremacy being the fringe of the fringe, whereas the extreme left wokeism isn't the fringe.
It has captured our institutions.
That's an asymmetry that still concerns me.
But don't your concentric circles model with moderate to extreme Muslims.
I think that applies with white nationalism as well, that the fringe of the fringe of neo-Nazis with swastikas on their head, that's a tiny, tiny minority.
But Tucker Carlson is not a minor figure, and he is talking to millions of people about queer replacement.
I haven't followed Tucker enough to know whether he's being slimed unfairly or not.
I mean, maybe he is one of those concentric circles.
The problem is, like, someone like Trump and the attacks on Trump as a white supremacist and a racist after Charlottesville were so dishonest and so sloppy that even I couldn't support them as much as I hate Trump and as much as I'm convinced he's actually a racist.
I believe I know Trump is a racist based on private conversations I've had with people who know that Mark Burnett suppressed tapes of him on The Apprentice using the N-word in earnest.
His public statement is almost him enough.
But the problem is, his comments after Charlottesville, where he talked about good people on both sides, those were widely distorted, universally distorted by mainstream media.
There is a genuine hoax there, and this is something like Scott Adams refers to it as the good people on both sides hoax.
And if you play the tape of what he said in that press conference...
He very clearly said that he was not talking about the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis.
He said exactly what he should have said and needed to say to say, listen, I'm not talking about the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis, but there were other people there.
They weren't all white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Everyone who has commented on this from Anderson Cooper on down has elided that detail.
Made it seem like when he was saying good people on both sides, one of those sides were the obvious Nazis with the tiki torches.
That was absolutely not the case, and it's easily disconfirmable.
And yet everyone just ran with it.
And the people who know what's true just lied about it.
And this is literally, this is everyone.
This is the New York Times.
This is CNN.
This is everyone in mainstream journalism.
And that is so crazy-making that people like Dave Rubin and Scott Adams and every other Trump supporter just threw up their hands and said, fuck it, there's no talking to these people.
There's no reason to even, like, they're going to call you a Nazi no matter what you do.
So none of this matters.
This is all just wokeism, hysteria, and you have to treat it like a mental illness.
And so there's...
That's where we are.
You would call that an over-extrapolation, right?
Like, even if people misrepresented that individual example, Trump's broader...
That did such heavy lifting.
That did such heavy lifting for the mainstream media.
I mean, it was like the Covington Catholic kid's hoax, too, right?
Or delusion, where that kid was spun up as the face of white supremacy, whereas it was a completely different...
Situation and just an awkward social encounter and he happened to be wearing a MAGA hat.
The New York Times never apologizes for it.
They never correct the record.
And that's what is making conversation on this so impossible because Trump should be canceled.
Trump is guilty of 10,000 things that should have...
Annihilated him as a politician, should have made his presidency impossible, and should certainly reveal him now to be the most dangerous cult leader on earth.
And yet, even though there are those 10,000 things, the left is so sloppy and so unprincipled that they're going to lie about 5,000 other things.
For some reason, 10,000 things aren't enough.
That's the problem I'm trying to deal with.
So I get it from both sides.
And this is, again, why...
I think considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense because I go hard against Trump.
I go hard against wokeism.
I go hard, as hard as anyone against jihadism, but then will say something seemingly totally charitable about Osama bin Laden and very invidious against Trump.
But then when you get too sloppy with Trump, I'll say, no, actually, he's not a white supremacist.
And he didn't say what you thought he said at the press conference.
And I get endless hate mail from all conceivable sides.
Of every one of these situations.
And it's from every tribe.
It's from every conceivable so-called tribe.
But look, just to hear in this conversation, the point about Tucker, you said, you know, I don't know about Tucker.
I don't watch him.
I don't watch him, and so I don't know.
I just know that you, you know, I'd be willing to bet money that you were taken in by the...
Good people on both sides hoax.
So I don't know if there's some analogous problem with the coverage of Tucker.
There are landmines everywhere here.
That's the problem.
I can't sign a blank check against Tucker Carlson.
Your condemnation of left-wing media is unequivocal.
That's because I'm on the left and I care.
The only legitimate media, for the most part, is left-wing media.
I don't care about Breitbart.
Breitbart and Fox are not journalism.
No, I care about them.
No, no, you're reading me wrong.
I care about them as destructive forces in our society, but they're pseudo-media.
I mean, they're pseudo-journalism.
Right, but they're hugely influential.
Of course, but that's what's so terrifying.
That's what's so terrifying about losing the New York Times to woke-ism, right?
But Sam, wait a second.
I don't think you would make this claim that you attract criticism in recent years primarily from Fox and from people like Tucker Carlson, because if so, I haven't noticed.
the criticism you get and the people on your Reddit form they're not the right wing right it's left and your attention is focused there the most no the truth is no no it's not true
I don't think Tucker Carlson notices what I'm up to.
I don't think people on Fox tend to notice what I'm up to, and the left does notice more.
But insofar as anyone who supported Trump noticed what I was up to in the last five years, I've gotten at least as much criticism from Trumpistan as I've gotten from Wokistan.
I mean, it's just, it's been nonstop.
But it's more, it's probably, it's even more decisive.
It's just, these are people who will never listen to my podcast again.
These are like, so like, if I tweet something that these people agree with, like if I tweet something that is against wokeism, I will hear from the people who are basically this, I'll hear from Gad Saad's audience or Dave Rubin's audience who will say, well, who cares what you're saying about them?
Even if you're accidentally right about wokeism here.
You're such a colossal moron for what you said about Trump that no one cares what you think.
This is the kind of thing I get ad nauseum from Trumpistan.
This is a discovery I made now a couple of years ago.
I think it was a couple of years ago.
Yes, certainly before COVID.
The last time I went on Dave Rubin's podcast, I discovered that his audience hated me.
To the last man, they hated me.
I rarely look at YouTube comments, but for whatever reason, I decided to look at YouTube comments after that appearance.
And it was just pure pain because his audience has been fully captured by Trump supporters and Jordan Peterson devotees.
So insofar as I disagree with Trump and disagree with Jordan Peterson, and that's pretty far, I was absolutely reviled in that audience.
That's not my tribe.
That is absolutely not my tribe.
I'm not saying you're- Go read the YouTube comments after that discussion with Dave Rubin, and you'll see whatever my tribe is, it's- It has no overlap with that tribe.
As much as we mutually spend time criticizing wokeness.
Where you would be fitted in, Sam, now is like with Helen Pluckrose and Kathy Young and Jesse Singel and that sphere where there has been...
Something of a civil war.
These are not tribes.
If you have to keep splitting people up and if you have to keep shuffling the deck.
That's what a tribe is.
It's a group of people that share common ideas.
When am I going to break?
When is the daylight going to emerge between me and Jesse Single or Helen Pluckrose on their account?
For something to be a group or a tribe, it doesn't have to be eternal and unchanging.
In fact, there's no group where that applies.
There should be more than five people in it.
There are.
There's a massive audience for all of those people, and there's an entire ecosystem, persuasion.
You talk about liberal media being captured entirely by wokeish dogma, but there's an entire ecosystem, a very popular one out there, which caters to people who do like your views.
It's truly heterodox.
It's a group of people.
Who can be classically right of center and classically left of center politically, i.e.
from different tribes.
People who can be religious, and there are people who can be anti-religious, i.e.
from different tribes, and yet they can have civil conversations on various topics.
About wokeism.
About wokeism and about Trumpism.
Primarily.
Yes, but that's it.
Just as much about Trumpism.
But you're not focusing on the areas where you...
Differ.
That's the point.
You're not focusing on all these parts when you disagree.
It's not a tribe.
It's whoever is left.
We've had a shattering of our society.
I will grant you, we have a tribal shattering of our society.
Some people who have not been captured by that shattering see what's happening on the left in that tribe and are worried about it, and they see what's happening on the right in that tribe, and they're worried about it, and are capable of different conversations.
And so, yeah, I mean, if you're going to call that a tribe, it is analogous to playing the language game that gets played on me as an atheist.
They say, well, you know, that's just your faith, right?
Atheism is your faith.
You know, collecting stamps is your hobby.
It's just a trick.
I don't see it as analogous because there's a core of beliefs which tend to reoccur.
It's shown, Sam, in the fact that lots of people from that sphere, they don't spin off into the far left.
And the progressive spheres.
It isn't a random constellation of views that people hold.
They tend to...
There are exceptions.
You've got to keep score clearly here.
You're alleging that the persuasion community and Helen Pluckrose, those types of people, are now part of this new tribe.
Criticizes wokeism a lot, but also criticizes Trumpism a lot.
They're not spinning off into Trumpistan.
Yasha Monk is not becoming a Trumpist.
Nathan Haidt is not becoming a Trumpist.
No, I'm not saying they all are.
But if they become a Trumpist, they can't be part of this group.
They're exiled from this particular tribe because it's antithetical to Trumpism as it's antithetical to Wokeism.
The thing that's confusing you is that is an asymmetric focus on Wokeism.
Because wokeism has captured fucking every institution we care about.
It's captured journalism.
It's captured media.
It's captured Hollywood.
It's captured tech.
It's captured academia.
Trumpism hasn't.
Trumpism has captured the parts of the country.
The Supreme Court in America.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, fine.
Political institutions, the right-wing media.
Arguably not Trumpism.
The right wing.
Yeah, but that's not media that any real intellectual cares about.
It's hundreds of billions of people.
No, no, I'm not saying it's not consequential.
You're misunderstanding me.
I'm not saying it's consequential.
But there are intellectuals in that audience.
The right wing has intellectuals.
Douglas Murray is one.
No, but Douglas Murray is, well, I don't think you're putting him in the persuasion community, right?
So that whatever the daylight is between Douglas and Persuasion, you know, but let's say he is in that community.
I mean, he's in that community for me.
I don't know if he's in that community for Yasha.
It's a little hard to place Douglas on this map because he's European.
He's avowedly conservative and has been forever so that he doesn't, he hasn't, he hasn't had to care about how he's perceived by the left because he thinks the left is insane.
And he's thought that for as long as I've known him, right?
So he doesn't, he hasn't had to play, he hasn't had this awakening of.
Oh my God, these people who are so reasonable on all these other points can't see that the Taliban are bad guys, right?
What's going on?
He knew that was going to happen, right?
For whatever reason.
But if you're talking about the core set of people who you're now, you're calling a tribe, let's take it the persuasion audience, right?
The audience of my podcast.
And look at the editorial board on Quillette.
Is there any slight lean that you might detect there?
Okay, but the asymmetry there is when you're talking about the intellectual work to perform an exorcism on our institutions, on our real institutions of knowledge, science, when the Lancet stops referring to women and starts referring to bodies with vaginas,
who is going to...
In a single issue on the cover.
And they used women in that very article that people are complaining about.
About a museum.
This is of a piece with what all these other journals have done.
It's of a piece with what all of these other institutions have done.
Nature has their version of this.
The key is that you can't say woman.
In, like, liberal spaces or academia.
I teach in academia.
Nobody is...
Because it's impossible.
It's impossible to live by that rule, right?
It's literally impossible.
But I'm not arguing, right?
Like, so, Sam, look, I'm...
The point...
This has to land, because this actually explains it.
The reason why there's an asymmetry here is, culturally speaking, the institutions we're losing, right?
The institutions that are no longer trustworthy.
The institutions where you have to pause...
Before believing the article where you never had to before because you understand how much ideological capture is working in the background.
We're talking about the most important sources of information humanity has.
We're talking about Princeton and Harvard and Stanford and the New York Times and Nature and Science and The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine.
But they're not lost.
And JAMA.
We're talking about all of it.
All at once, captured by a moral panic.
Now, if you don't perceive that to be true, you and I have a disagreement about the nature of the problem.
But just grant me that I perceive it this way, and Claire Lehman perceives it this way, and John McWhorter perceives it this way.
And that's why they're focused on the left more than on the right.
Because what's wrong with the right is so obvious.
It's been obvious for our entire lives.
Fox News was always dangerous bullshit.
The New York Times wasn't.
The New York Times was the news.
And that's why it's so disastrous to see pure woke pablum ever get published in the New York Times.
The 1619 Project is a complete subversion of our intellectual life in the way that Fox News isn't.
That's what's important.
So what's important is...
You cannot find a private high school in America now to send your kid where they're not going to be told to read Ibram X. Kendi sympathetically.
Is that true?
Yes, that's a moral emergency.
That is true.
If you're talking about Los Angeles and New York, if you're talking about the cities that intellectual, globalist, cosmopolitan liberals...
Academics care about.
That's true.
Well, Sam, so first of all, on the woke stuff, I think you're slightly misunderstanding because I'm critical, but I would count myself as within the general sphere of people critical of wokeism,
critical of the extreme right, and sympathetic, the heterodox takes.
I'm in that sphere.
So, you're telling me you and I are in the same tribe and yet we're spending all this time disagreeing?
Yes!
Yeah, in lots of ways.
This is what it feels like to be in a tribe?
Three hours of non-stop disagreement?
Odd member, I'll grant you that.
It's just like this.
Getting shit on endlessly on your podcast and then getting sniped at on Twitter.
That's my experience of being right in the tribe with you.
You're specifically saying that that's what a good person does with the groups that they belong to, right?
They criticize.
It's not a tribe.
This is the tribe of you're only as good as your last sentence.
No.
Like you get this thing wrong and then we disagree and now I'm in a different tribe.
It's not that sound.
That's the way it's functioning.
That is the way it's functioning.
If Douglas says something sufficiently stupid, I'm going to say, all right, Douglas, you and I can't talk about this anymore.
Unless we can get over this problem right here.
No one is saying you can't.
We are not in the same tribe anymore.
I'll not say that.
Lots of people are saying you can't talk to people.
My point would be you can talk to whoever you want.
It matters what you say and what you don't say and what you criticize and what you don't criticize.
And I've heard you voice the same sentiment elsewhere.
But you've talked about, Sam, the pornography of doubt amongst anti-establishment voices.
And you were talking in the context of Brett Weinstein, but I would imagine the point extends farther.
And what you just...
Outlined, right?
This complete capture of all instruments of science, all media, all liberal sources of information, all political parties, I would guess, in the mainstream left.
How is that different than what the people that you were saying who are casting that we can't trust anything the institutions are saying?
Because I hear that endlessly.
It's not complete.
It's everywhere, but it's not complete.
It is everywhere.
It's absolutely not complete.
It's a lie.
I mean, what it is, is it's a seeming capture because it is a minority of people who believe this divisive bullshit.
The rest of the people who don't believe it have been cowed into silence because they're afraid of being called racist or transphobic or misogynistic or whatever it is.
So, no, it's not complete capture, but it is a moral and intellectual emergency.
Absolutely.
So that's why so many of us Keep returning to the topic, as boring as it is, it's less boring.
It's harder to parse than what's going on on the right.
What's wrong with white supremacy?
What's wrong with Donald Trump?
These are questions that, in my world, answer themselves.
Yet, what's wrong with it?
Except you didn't anticipate some people going that way, who you were for.
Yes.
Like, you know, actors.
Of course.
But that's a whole...
Flabbergasted.
Flabbergasted.
And that surely...
Doesn't that indicate that there might be something in your picture which is important and which, like, explains, for example, why there's such a widespread distrust of vaccines, which is politically violenced?
Right?
And like...
No, but it's not.
It's multivalent.
The distrust of vaccines is multivalent.
It's not just...
It's also on the left.
It's also on the left.
It's people who are over-educated.
But it's like...
It's not evenly distributed.
It's also on the left.
I mean, it's in Trump's end.
But, well, if you're talking about true anti-vaxism, you know, the anti-vax community, pre-COVID, that's very...
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe there's a far-right variant of it, too.
But in my world...
That was always a leftist phenomenon.
Those are yoga moms, you know, and naturopaths and people who go to chiropractors.
You should be paying attention to those communities, Sam, because now there's a massive overlap with those communities and MAGA and QAnon.
I get you.
Yes, and QAnon and all.
Yes, it's crazy out there.
I will grant you that.
Listen, guys, I'm at the end of my, not my interest in this conversation, but at the end of my allotted time.
Sorry, Sam.
I hope we got somewhere worth going.
Maybe, Matt, can you, like, kick us to wrap up?
I'm sorry, Sam.
Like, these are questions that have been bubbling for years.
I think as frustrating as it might be to deal with it, I think it actually will be useful.
I look forward to hearing the name of my tribe after all of this.
We're going to get some set theorists out here to give us the diagram.
The whole time I've been listening, I've just been thinking about how we've gotten hung up on these words and partly on the assumption that tribe is some terrible, ideological, blind thing.
Someone like Chris and I would come from.
It's just that it's kind of inescapable.
We know where we sit.
We know it's hard to criticize our friends and people who are aligned with us.
But that's not tribalism.
The friends that I'm loathe to criticize are people in different tribes.
I will grant you that there are people in tribes.
The people who will never say a single bad word about Trump.
That is a cultic, I would call it a cultic phenomenon even more than a tribal phenomenon, but that is a social experiment run amok.
Whether you call it tribalism or cultism, fine.
Same with wokeism.
I have woke people in my life who I don't want to criticize publicly, right?
I have Trumpists in my life who I don't want to criticize publicly.
I'm pretty clearly in neither of those tribes.
And I reject, I mean, and I'm not a Buddhist yet.
Obviously, Buddhism massively informs my life, but the only thing I've written for a Buddhist magazine is kill the Buddha, right?
So it's just, I await the person who can pinpoint the tribe I'm actually in and demonstrate that it's full of other people just like me acting tribally.
And the set of all people who don't act tribally can't be yet another tribe.
There's a fantastic podcast called Cultish, which emphasizes that there's a spectrum here that we're all, we don't have to be in a cult, but it's rather that What we think is important, what we think is the sort of larger issues, the larger dangers, it tends to give us a selective attention and tends us to pick out and find.
But if what you think is important is universalism and intellectual honesty and transcending tribal divisiveness, if those are your master values, to call that yet another divisive provincial tribe is just a semantic game.
Now, I could be deluded about, I could be claiming those are my values, but those aren't really my values.
I'm really a closeted Zionist Jewish cultist or whatever it is.
But if those were my master values, right?
To call that yet another species of tribalism is just bullshit.
It's just like calling atheism another religion.
Well, I've accidentally reignited the debate, but I mean, I do disagree because I have the same value there about, say, cosmopolitanism and stuff like that.
And I, like you, I'm sure was outraged because I'm old enough to remember the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and my motivations there were entirely- You can't say cosmopolitanism, but- But you can't say cosmopolitanism is another form of nationalism.
No, I'm not saying that.
That's what's happening with this tribalism.
That's analogous to what's happening.
I'm not saying that.
No, that's not what I was saying.
I was saying that what I think is a good principle, a good value, could easily lead me to be focused on perhaps what might be relatively isolated, flagrant.
If the allegation is that I'm myopically fixated on the problem of wokeism most days, and then also myopically fixated on the problem of Trumpism on other days, and I don't have my priorities straight and I should be just thinking about climate change on all those days, well,
that's just an argument about priorities, but that's not a claim about tribalism.
No, but it can lead you into a Like, like you said, the thing, like you guys were talking before about how the thing that unites all of these characters is the anti-woke kind of thing.
I mean, it can create what is essentially a, call it a clique, call it a tribe, call it whatever you want.
In all my modes, I know I said I gotta go, but now I really have to go, but in all my modes about where I criticize Trump, I am perceived by the Trumpists who are anti-woke as being in a decidedly different tribe criticizing Trump.
Totally unfairly.
And I'm aligned with the shills, the liberal shills of the New York Times and CNN who are just in hysterics about the Russiagate hoax and other spurious things.
So you're just noticing the fact that I seem to be making the same noises as people right of center, some of whom I can't even talk to anymore.
And you're not noticing that I sound just like Kara Swisher when I'm talking about Trump.
Yeah, actually, I was making reflections on all of us, not you in particular, actually.
I just think a lot of us get criticized from both ends of the spectrum.
But yeah, anyway, I might wrap it up with a question, just a nice open kind of question.
Okay, sure.
And Sam, can I just say as well, I genuinely appreciate the time that you've given, the willingness to deal with somebody annoying and persistent with criticism.
You definitely deserve credit.
I know it hasn't been a pleasant experience, but I hope it's been useful.
I'm happy to do it, even though I don't always sound happy.
That's all I wanted to say.
Thanks.
Chris is like this with everybody.
I guess it comes with a drive.
Okay, Seb, this has been fantastic and it's been fun listening to you two guys debate with each other.
I can't usually get a wording with Chris, but this time I think it was fine.
So just stepping back a bit, taking a bit of a bigger view, leaving yourself in your own position in this landscape, totally out of it.
What do you think about what's going on?
I mean, because you know what we do, we sort of focus on these heterodox online figures that are cultivating, I guess, some sort of influence or followings outside of of institutions outside of mainstream media.
You've heard us making points that many of them are indeed taking anti-establishmentarianism to the degree of conspiracy theories and things like that, and often promoting a worldview that is somewhat catastrophic, like they're acting like Cassandra's warning of the dangers that are to come.
At the other hand, you've made good points, I think, about the institutions like the New York Times or the universities have become more ideologically rigid as well.
So we've got this new dynamic, we've got these online things going on.
Where do you see the future and where do you see the dangers?
Well, I'm personally very happy to be functioning where I am, you know, outside of institutions and hence uncancellable.
I feel very grateful to have found the gig I have as a podcaster and someone who's...
Just kind of control his own platform.
But generally speaking, in terms of the effect on the culture of having a million plus podcasts and institutions that people no longer trust, I think it's a terrifying circumstance, epistemologically and socially.
I think it's totally dysfunctional.
And we have to figure out some way to reboot our institutions.
We need our institutions.
We need the New York Times.
We need good universities.
We need the best scientific journals to still be the best scientific journals, though I think they should be readable by everyone because our taxes pay for the research.
So I think what is becoming the status quo here is really unnerving, even though I seem to be participating in it.
We need real journalism, and the bureau in London or Beijing can't just be some guy or gal with a cell phone.
Who's just going to hang that out the window and show us what's happening?
That's why, hence the seemingly disproportionate focus on the irrationality of the left, because the irrationality of the right has, as far as I can tell, no serious influence over the real organs of knowledge and sense-making in our culture.
It's been incredibly destructive to our society, but in these fake...
A world of fake, of, you know, genuinely fake news, you know, opinion that, that masquerades as news, you know, Fox, Breitbart, et cetera, that for now more than at least two decades, it was widely understood to be violating every norm of real journalism.
But now the left, the real journalists are violating these norms so often.
I think it's appropriate to be especially worried about what's happening in the mainstream.
So, yeah.
I'm worried.
The general message should be I'm worried.
Yeah, well, it's not a positive message, but it's probably a correct one and a good one to kind of finish on.
I'll let Chris comment, but I'll just say for myself, it's been a lot of fun to listen to you guys debate and credit to you again, Sam, for coming on and having what sounded to me like a pretty good...
Robust discussion.
So that was just good to hear.
We're probably going to be criticized.
We'll probably gain some profile by talking to you, but we're also going to be criticized by people for talking to you and by...
Being associated with me.
Ask those people which tribe I'm a part of and I would love to hear it.
Yeah.
And also by your fans.
Whether you want to or not, Sam, we are now in the same tribe from this episode.
Good luck to you.
And Sam, very last thing, just to say, despite the political disagreements and the various differences, opinions about tribalism, the app is good.
And despite the things that we...
Said in the previous episode in this one, I would recommend that.
Nice.
Okay.
Well, good luck with the podcast, guys.
Have fun with it.
And it was great to talk to you.
Okay, Chris.
So that was a big, long chat.
How do you feel after that?
I don't know.
It's like it was done weeks ago or something.
Yeah, you know.
Yeah.
I feel strangely detached from the conversation, and yet here we are.
We just finished it.
Well, I haven't listened to it, actually, since we recorded.
What do you mean it just took place, Matt?
Don't destroy the...
We did an intro, and that doesn't work.
It's been a while.
It's been a while.
Cool.
But yeah, I thought it was a good talk.
I'm sure we will hear people's opinions of it one way or the other.
Yes, I'm sure both the Sam Harris fans and the Sam Harris haters will both enjoy it and respect us all the more for having done that.
Indeed.
I'm sure we're going to be warmly received by both sides for this.
So there we go.
Something for us to look forward to.
Speaking of feedback, Oh, you're going to introduce that?
Okay, yeah, go ahead.
Speaking of feedback, we love getting feedback, and we have some feedback, don't we?
Our traditional reading of the feedback and responding to it.
The review of reviews.
The thing that everyone comes from.
That's what it's called.
That's right.
Review of reviews.
Okay, a good one or a bad one first, Eric?
Why don't we go with a bad one and then we'll wash out that bitter taste with a good one.
How's that sound?
That sounds good.
Yeah.
Okay.
I have a bad one.
Shall I read it?
You can read it.
It's titled Disappointed.
How I often feel about Matt.
And it's by Emojita.
Emojita.
It's a good username.
I found this podcast when I was annoyed with the Weinsteins.
However, I found the actual criticism here empty, superficial, just off point.
And that's why it's simply not funny.
So listening to this, only reinforce that the Weinsteins, love them or hate them, have a far superior intellect than most liberal shills who would jeer at them.
At least the Weinsteins.
Know how to construct a logical argument, even if the validity of the information they plug into that argument is debatable.
Well, Chris, I would like to say to Imojita that Brett Weinstein thinks that you shouldn't use sunscreen because there's no need to protect yourself against UV radiation.
That is not the mark of a superior intellect.
I am sorry.
I don't know what to say, Matt.
It sounds like a liberal shill.
How much are the sunscreen industry paying you to keep up this facade?
Oh, yes.
So this is a famously partisan woke opinion that you should use sunscreen.
Yeah.
No, they're actually not.
I don't think they're that smart.
People that are smart don't get so much stuff so obviously wrong.
So I reject this one.
As for us...
Superficial?
What?
Off point?
What?
Oh, yeah.
You know, all opinions are available.
So I like the fact that somebody listened to the critiques and was like, no, the Weinstein's are right.
Look, you're just demonstrating how much they're on point.
Wow.
That's the achievement.
I have one more problem with this because they say that our criticisms are too superficial and just off point, which is okay.
Let's grant that.
But then the next point is, and that's why it's simply not funny.
But that's a non-secretur.
We're not funny.
In particular, you, for completely different reasons.
It's got nothing to do with being right or wrong.
Yeah, they don't.
You can be funny and wrong.
Yeah, it's so mad.
The logic is bad.
You know, it's just standard fair for critical reviews.
They need to try harder.
Two stars, though.
Oh, was it?
Yeah, I think it was two stars.
Anyway, okay.
Thank you anyway, Emojita.
You were wrong, but, you know, that's okay.
Yeah, thanks for trying.
Thanks for playing.
Here's someone that's right, Matt.
I've got someone that's right, and which makes a nice pair because this person said we reinforced their love of the Weinsteins.
And here's a contrary view to that.
It's by Bill's Sauce.
Keep it up.
For the last few years, I've been a big fan of the IDW types and have been following them closely.
Your podcast has done a tremendous job of showing me the flaws in their worldview and style of thinking.
Honestly, it's been a relief to hear your analysis and to disregard some of the paranoid and conspiratorial thinking that I've been enamored with.
For instance, as a former fan of the Dark Horse podcast, I could have become someone who tried to find ivermectin instead of taking the COVID facts.
It feels good to have taken the COVID facts with confidence and to trust the scientific consensus.
Had you been mean-spirited and unreasonable in your critiques, I don't think I would have given your analysis a chance.
Thank you for the great work, and please keep it up.
P.S. I love the BBWA crossover, but I'm adamantly team Tumblr in the ghost argument.
I know I'm selecting something here which very much serves our purposes in what we are trying to...
To do and reinforces what we might claim that would be a positive effect of our material.
But I just want to say that we do get this kind of feedback and it's heartening.
It is heartening.
Yeah, I was just scrolling.
I haven't ever read any of the feedback except for the ones that you read, but I did for the first time now.
And there's heaps of ones.
There's one that refers to us as a leprechaun and a kangaroo.
There's one that says, You know, Chris Cavanaugh, please remain very spicy forever.
Thank you for your service.
It's a treasure trove.
There's one that calls me Batman.
I think it calls me like an annoying Batman or something.
It might be tongue-in-cheek, but it doesn't matter.
I got referred to as the Batman of our duo, which makes you Robin.
That makes me Robin.
I knew that people saw me.
I had a sneaking suspicion.
For a long time now.
People on Twitter have been presenting you as like a lovable Labrador, like kind of with your tongue hung.
That's right.
And you're like a grumpy cat.
You're like Garfield.
You're like Garfield, yeah.
So there's lots of photos of a dog and a cat together.
You presume they're friends.
The cat's not impressed.
The cat looks snarky.
I don't think I'm a cat.
I don't think I'm a cat.
Like I'm an angry dog.
You're not a Labrador, that's for sure.
You could be an angry dog.
Maybe a hug.
Angry dog, Matt.
Angry dog.
So last thing, Matt, last thing, because we're running out of time and we need to give some shout-outs to our patrons.
Lovely, lovely patrons.
So let's do it.
Let's do it.
So we have some conspiracy hypothesizers.
We have Nina Davies.
William Carpenter, James Loner, and Becca Thomas.
All conspiracy hypothesizers.
What do you say to that, Matt?
I say thank you for being a conspiracy hypothesizer.
Yes, so here's your reward.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
And revolutionary geniuses, Matt.
Now we have a couple of those.
Carrie Gauterson, woman artist and Alex.
All conspiracy...
Oh no, sorry, they're not.
They're all revolutionary geniuses.
That's what they are.
Hey, fantastic.
So Kay, woman artist and Alex.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all.
You revolutionary geniuses.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
So, lastly, Matt, a couple of galaxy brain gurus to mention.
The biggest brains in the guru sphere.
So, one is Mihaly Niccu, who I believe we've spoke to in the monthly hangouts before.
Thank you, Mihai.
And Carolyn Reeves.
That's another person.
And then I've got Mind the Gender Gap.
Mind the Gender Gap.
So Mihai, Mind the Gender Gap and Carolyn.
Sorry, Carolyn.
That's good.
There we go.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
You big galaxy bringers here.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
Thank you, Scott Adams, for that useful information.
So there we are.
And you know, the patrons, because we probably don't mention, like we put extra content.
We put like Garometer episodes where we code.
The gurus recruit episodes out in advance.
We sometimes do mini episodes and put them up and there's stuff up in the Patreon, the clips from the episodes and whatnot.
There's things there.
There's, you know, lots of extra content, if you want.
There are things there.
And we've got our monthly, what are they called?
Hangout.
Hangout.
Not AMAs, but Hangouts.
And they're good too.
So join up if you are interested.
And otherwise, hopefully...
You enjoyed the extended interview with Sam Harris.
