Interview with Matt Johnson on Christopher Hitchens
We are back for an interview with the author and independent writer Matt Johnson discussing the New Atheist hero and legendary debater, Christopher Hitchens. The other Matt recently published a book called "How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment" and kindly agreed to come on and waffle with us about Hitchens and where he fits in comparison to the modern gurus. We cover a range of topics including whether Hitchens would have been in the IDW, if he was an extremophile, how far did he rely on rhetoric over substance and to what extent different labels apply to him. Matt Johnson offers a surprisingly nuanced take and provides us with lots of interesting tidbits regarding Hitchens. This can also be listened to as Part 1 of our Hitchens coverage, as we have a full decoding of a debate of his coming shortly.And what if you are not into Hitchens? Well, there are still some goodies for you! In this episode, we also cover: Guru magnetism & depressing crossovers, Sam Harris' recent appearance with Maajid Nawaz, Scandinavian geopolitics, Chris' review of the Super Mario Bros Movie, and whether we are actually in the pocket of Big Harris! So join us one and all! And don't forget to subscribe to Sam Harris' meditation app using the code 'GurusPodSentMe'.LinksMatt Johnson (2023) How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-EnlightenmentMatt Johnson's Article at the Bulwark: What Christopher Hitchens Can Teach Us About LiberalismMaajid Nawaz & Sam Harris Reunite for the First Time Since Covid to Debate the Politics of Covid-MandatesMatt Johnson's articles at Quillette primarily about coverage of the Ukraine conflict
Hello and welcome to Dakota the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer when we try to understand what they talk about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
I'm staring right at the beautiful mug of Associate Professor Christopher Kavanagh.
G'day Christopher.
Welcome to this recording with you and me together.
G'day Matt.
On most days in this online office that we have, one of us looks slightly healthier than the other.
Me and Lee.
I think, you know, just the Australian sun, that kind of effect, and my pale effervescence gives the inaccurate impression of, you know, impending death or something like that.
But now, today, I have a healthy spring in my step.
I slept well, and you are recovering from an illness, so you look a little bit, you know, your bones look weary, your mind looks weak.
Your hair is tussled.
You're like in Lord of the Rings when the old king is possessed by Saruman.
After a minute, you look well.
You've got a rosy thing in your cheeks.
Yeah, yeah.
I slept more than six hours.
That's why.
That's what did it.
Once you get to my edge, Chris, it doesn't matter how long you sleep.
You just feel weary all the time.
I don't know what it is.
Maybe it's not age.
Maybe I just need to get some exercise, get some iron in my diet or something.
I don't know.
Maybe you should go see the Mario movie.
I went to see it with my son.
I'll just say, Matt, if you don't like that, if you're too cool for school, you know, oh, commercialism, like, go take a long jump off a short pier because that was just pure fun and escapism.
As somebody that's played Nintendo a lot, I...
Very much enjoyed it, and enjoyed my son enjoying it.
So, screw you all!
I think most people like it, so I'm not really sure.
Well, there are.
I've heard some, like, hipster-ish reviews about it.
But, yeah, I enjoyed it.
Oh, really?
So what, the hipsters were criticizing, saying, oh, the turtles weren't quite right.
They were just saying, commercialism, come to Nintendo.
God forbid.
Imagine that.
And, you know, all the jokes, they're just these kind of very straightforward jokes that we all heard 10 years ago and we're tired of now.
I'm like, what do you want, edgy Mario?
Do you want edgy Mario?
Where's the social commentary?
Chris, where's the social commentary?
Does it discuss injustice or something at all?
Where's the racial politics in the Mushroom Kingdom?
Well, there are some.
There's interracial marriage discussed in it and so on.
But, you know, you just have to dig a bit deeper.
A turtle and a mushroom princess getting together.
It's beautiful.
That's right.
And also an inherited monarchy.
The nomination process by which the princess came to par.
It's not clear.
It's kind of like a Hitler-esque rise that was unexpected that they would delve into that dark backstory.
But yeah, it's a totalitarian...
Mushroom kingdom.
What do you call that?
A monarchy.
Yeah.
Actually, that reminds me of Adventure Time.
Adventure Time had social commentary and it had a princess and she was the ruler of a kingdom and it did deal with some.
Issues, real issues.
Wasn't it also trippy?
Very trippy.
You never watched it?
I watched a little bit of it, but I didn't like the art style.
It annoyed me.
My son watched a bit as well.
It's alright.
It's a bit like, you know, Spongebob or those other cartoons.
I feel like they start to try too hard to be appealing to adults.
Bluey got the balance right, Matt.
Bluey's alright.
Still on the right side of that.
So, yeah.
Was it me that recommended Bluey to you?
It might have been.
It might have been.
Yeah, Bluey's the new Peppa Pig in my neck of the woods.
Yeah, I've been recommending it to a few people.
That's me, Australian cultural ambassador.
Yeah.
It's your greatest export, I think, in recent years, so congratulations.
Yeah, well, there hasn't been much competition, so you're probably right.
Well, I'm not going to watch the Mario movie.
Sorry, I have no plans to do that, but I'll take your word for it.
I'm sure it's good for children of a certain age and their fathers.
And people who enjoy fun as well.
It's good for that demographic.
Oh, those people.
Yeah, well, we don't need to worry about that.
Well, we've hit the five-minute mark.
That's our lot of time for banter.
The internet kills our eyes.
You happy now, guys?
That's it.
Chris has got more in him.
He'd like to banter more, but he won't.
He won't do it now.
I'm keeping it tight.
I'm not really, but, you know, we just throw...
I don't know what metaphor to go with.
Coins, pennies, bread to the ducks.
We throw them a bone.
Throw them a bone, Chris.
Throw them a bone.
That's what we do.
Bread to the ducks.
That famous phrase.
Let them eat bread.
But we do have guru-related goings-ons and commentary to offer.
So this episode is not a decoding, but you do have a series of decodings coming up.
This episode is going to be...
An interview with Matt Johnson about his book on Hitchens and the kind of discussion about Christopher Hitchens, where he would fit in the guru ecosystem, where he alive now, his politics and rhetorical flair when he was alive.
And yeah, is he an extremophile?
Various topics that we'll get into and discuss.
And we are going to have a separate decoding episode.
On Christopher Hitchens.
We've got it all clipped and stuff.
We're not sure when yet, but it's coming.
So just be prepared for that.
Consider this the appetizer.
The aperitif.
Yeah, we thought we'd do a twofer, do a decoding and the interview, but that was, you know, our...
Our eyes were bigger than our mouth, and we couldn't fit it all in.
So yeah, we're just talking to Matt Johnson.
He wrote that book.
It sounds like, and it is, boosting Christopher Hitchens a fair bit.
He's written, it's called How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment.
So that sounded pretty bullish to me, but Matt is pretty...
Pretty balanced.
He can rattle off the pros and cons of Hitchens pretty well, I thought.
So it's a good listen.
Yeah, Hitchens is a patron saint of the new atheist movement, but I also think quite popular amongst the intellectual dark web set as well.
So that title makes it sound like it would be a kind of peon to Hitchens.
But you'll see, he has a more nuanced perspective, I think, than that.
And yeah, so we will not spoil it.
Don't need this anymore because you'll hear it all very soon.
Very soon.
Enough about that.
You'll be hearing about that.
But tell us more, Chris.
What is coming up?
What is laid out on the Guru's Pod, Smorgasbord?
Ah, yeah.
That's what you want to hear, isn't it, Matt?
You want to know all the work that we have coming up ahead of us.
And do I have material for you?
We are going to have Eliezer Yudkowsky episode.
Which gave us a chance to talk about AI.
That's with his appearance on Lex Friedman.
So we're going to cover that.
We're going to cover Matthew McConaughey's new venture into self-help cults.
It was an interesting development.
So he did a five-hour YouTube video with a bunch of Tony Robbins types.
And it's quite something.
So we're going to look at that.
Hitchens, we already mentioned.
Guru figure that is equally as well established and influential, but still alive for now, is old Chomsky.
Mr. Chomsky.
People have asked us to do him for a long time, and even some weirdos are like, you'll never do, you wouldn't be too scared to do Chomsky or whatever.
I'm like, they don't get it.
They just don't get it.
So, Chomsky, we're going to do him.
And then, and then, Matt, we are going back to Weinstein world.
Into their UFO episodes because we've been waiting for it.
So we got all these.
I'm not promising that's the order that they will arrive.
But those are coming within probably the next one to two months.
And we have interviews with Rene DiResta about disinformation and online ecosystems, all that kind of stuff.
And Matthew Sheffield about...
Oh, talking about Trump and the kind of guru dynamics and the magosphere, I think, is what we'll be focusing on with him.
So, yeah, we've got interviews, we've got gurus.
What more do you want?
We've got it all.
We've got AI.
And, you know, for people that are into AI, you know, we don't often do this, but we can boost the Patreon feed, I suppose, which is we did do a bit of a deep dive into AI.
Oh, yeah, we did do that.
We have content in our Patreon.
If you go there, we were doing a paper on AI and up like a two-hour conversation on AI.
But, you know, actually, I think it's pretty interesting.
So, you know, should you want to hear that, it's on there along with, I think, 16 or so other episodes about research papers and all the Garometer episodes and various other bonus stuff which we put up.
Including early release of episodes and whatnot.
So there's tons of nice stuff on the Patreon.
There is.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So that's what's coming up.
Anything else on our introductory agenda?
More banter maybe?
Another installment of banter?
Oh, there were just two little things I wanted to mention.
Just too little.
We're still, look at that, it's only 11 minutes, calm down, hold your horses.
I can hear you all complaining in my mind.
So, Matt, one thing that I noticed recently, and that it would be good just to flag up, is how often the people that we cover, like kind of magnetic forces,
seem to find each other.
One of the things we've noticed is the general trajectory of the people that we cover is downwards.
Spiraling ever, ever down the guru dream with more hot takes and more polarization and more conspiracies.
But the other one is that they kind of spiral into each other.
So an example that I would give is Bill Maher.
Who we covered not so long ago, primarily focusing on this kind of anti-vaccine aspects.
So, yes, he's a talk show host.
He will have various guests.
But quite notable that he had on Constantine Kissin and Elon Musk for a 20-minute sit-down, metaphorically fellating interview.
Couldn't have been more.
Fawning about how amazing Elon is and, you know, getting all of his takes on the pressing issues of the day.
So, yeah, just like, you know, a lot of these people seem to just come together.
You know, I have to say, the take that annoys me is when people go, look, isn't it fantastic?
You know, you can see how terrible the establishment is when even a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like Bill Maher is going to be talking to...
Someone on the right side of politics.
Like, that's how concerning things have become.
And another pairing up that was mentioned was RFK Jr. going on to Tucker Carlson's show, I think it was, before he got the boot, and going, well, look at this, you know, these are good people that are just concerned about that, you know, yes, one of them's conservative,
but the other one, he's a doyen of the liberal, you know, blue blood liberal family, all that stuff.
It's like, come on, can you not think of some other reasons why these people are coming together?
And it isn't necessarily a good thing.
Yeah, well, I think that a lot of people know that, you know, are somewhat skeptical about Bill Maher's credentials at claiming to be a shining representation of the left.
He's like a crotchety.
Where would you put Bill?
Like, I can see him before too long taking a little bit of a Reuben.
Like, Ruben was trying to get him to pivot that way in the content that we looked at, and he was kind of resisting that.
Maybe he still died in the world to ever completely go that way.
But as he said, if they made vaccines mandatory, he'd be off the Florida and voting for DeSantis in an instant, right?
Yeah, I think part of it, I mean, apart from the anti-vaxxery, which is a big driving force, but just with these people, it's just generally them getting old.
Isn't it?
Like, they just get old and crotchety and things don't make sense anymore and they get annoyed by everything.
Oh, yeah.
Remember him talking about the Twitch streaming with the computer games and watching other people with games.
So, yeah, it is like that.
And Rogan, there's this clip of Rogan talking about how his eyes were opened about the pharmaceutical industry and the vaccines, what it was all about.
Because he read RFK Jr.'s book.
Like, look at these fools taking this horse dewormer.
And it wasn't until I read Robert Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, that I got a sense that this is a playbook that they have used forever.
They offer one solution.
This one solution is patented.
This one solution is controlled by these pharmaceutical companies, and it's very expensive, and they make a fuckload of money from it.
Whereas anything that's off-label, anything that's generic is dismissed.
They rig the test to make it look like they'll give you far more, like what they did with hydroxychloroquine.
I don't even want to go into this.
You can read it in the book.
But my whole journey on this is like, first of all, how did I find myself in this, right?
And Andy was talking about Epstein being a secret agent of the intelligence agencies recently.
An intelligence operation.
Whoever was running it, whether it was the Mossad or whether it was the CIA or whether it was a combination of both, it was an intelligence operation.
They were bringing in people and compromising them.
And then when they would compromise them, they would use, you know, whatever they had on them to influence their opinions and the way they expressed those opinions.
Rogan's brain is just like a big sloppy stew.
Of all the conspiracy theories bumping around on the internet and all the bubble-headed guru types that he talks to.
And he just absorbs it in and the good information from, like, scientists and stuff, it just bounces off.
It, like, hits a shiny dome and it might go in for a minute, but it just kind of filters out.
So it's that cross-pollination thing.
And, you know, the people we're talking about are...
Understandable because the linkage tends to be like conspiracy theories and anti-woke stuff that connects them together.
But it is the case that you just find these surprising crossovers.
Yeah, a lot of the people we cover, I forget all the pairings because there's been so many of them, but we've talked about it, which is they seem to match up.
You know, they're working in different areas.
But, yeah, a lot of the gurus we cover do seem to find each other.
And one special case, of course, is Eric Weinstein, who, if you're talking about cross-pollination, he's the busy little bee that's visiting all the flowers.
He seems to pop up with whoever comes on the scene and is somehow doing guru-esque stuff.
Eric is there.
He's there.
He's always there.
Who am I thinking of?
Oh, he met Constantine recently.
There you go.
Yeah, I think Constantine was also on Dave Rubin's podcast because, of course, he was.
But Eric and him were talking on Twitter about that they met up and they really appreciate what both of them do.
And just like, of course you do.
Of course you would.
It's surprising that you haven't met already.
And lest people forget, whenever Kanye West met Candice Owens back in the day, right, whenever he was starting down the path where he's ended up.
Eric was there in the shadows of those meetings.
If you read Barry Weiss's article, she mentions that Eric was there when Kanye met Candice, like helping it along.
And you just have to ask yourself, why?
Why is he there?
He's the man in the shadows.
But just around a whole bunch of bizarre...
Weirdos with extreme opinions.
But Chris, let me ask you this, to make it explicit, because you said, you know, of course Eric's there, of course he's there, and I feel like I'm nodding my head.
Yes, of course he's there, but can you spell it out?
Like, why is Eric always there?
Like, why would he attach himself to just literally anyone who seems to come on the scene?
In your own words, what would you say?
Well, so if you wanted to take a popular critique online, it would be that Eric is funded by Thiel, He is casting his net to create networks to forward Teal's agenda,
right?
Now, one, I don't think Eric works for Teal anymore because that's removed from all his bios and it says he worked there till 2022.
So I think he's out of the Teal network.
But Teal and him did see eye to eye.
But to me, it's kind of obvious why.
Because Thiel is this mental libertarian type who pays people not to go to universities, right?
The dropout of university.
Eric, that's all he's about, is complaining about institutions.
And they both were saying science is completely stuck.
There's no progress being made in technology or science and criticizing institutions.
So I think that Eric's...
Ideology largely aligns with Thiel's.
And that's why Eric was a useful person for Thiel to be supporting.
I don't think that he thought that Eric was this fantastic physicist who was going to produce a theory of everything.
And so, what was Eric's actual job?
What was he doing?
He wasn't writing books, right?
He wasn't really working on his theory.
He did have a podcast, but he stopped that.
But he was basically...
Like a...
I don't want to say a debutante.
A dilettante, I think, is the word.
Yeah, I think that's what he wants to be.
This person who knows lots of people, can bring people together, can organize things.
And he came up with the intellectual dark web.
I think he was involved in bringing Brett to Tucker Carlson and all of these...
Different aspects.
So, in some respect, it's just what his nature is as a conduit between people and to try and organize.
So, yeah.
So, he is about networking.
He is about meeting people and just like people on LinkedIn, you know, who are hyper into networking.
I feel like he's, like, it's almost like a hobby at this point.
Like, you know, these guys are kind of retired, really, and they're kind of dilettantes.
They don't have, like, a day job.
This can be almost thought of as a bit of a hobby for them, which is to somehow be influential, somehow to be in the public eye and to be in the corridors of some kind of influence.
Well, that's where they wear the jackets, Matt.
That's where they wear the jackets.
That's right, they wear the jackets.
Yeah, that's what I assumed.
But who knows?
Who knows?
Well, the last corollary to that, Matt, that I'll mention is our friend Sam Harris went on Majid Nawaz's platform to have a long conversation with him.
And anybody hasn't noticed, Majid Nawaz has absolutely went down the conspiratorial rabbit hole and not in a subtle way.
It's extreme.
So one, it was interesting to see Sam go and have a conversation with him, given some of the statements that have been written.
I actually do think it was...
An error of sorts, because one of the things is that it was on Majid's content paywall, right?
So it's generating subscribers for Majid.
So even if it was a knockdown to be it, Sam is giving Majid free publicity.
And then secondly, the conversation.
So it isn't that Sam completely agrees with everything that Majid says.
He pushes back at various parts and stuff.
He's fundamentally uninformed about, you know, Majid's position.
No, no.
I mean, in that email, I offered you a private apology, but I'm quite happy to offer you a public one.
And to some degree, this apology may extend to a few other people in our circle.
I mean, people are in very different buckets, you know, with respect to many of the details we're going to talk about.
But I should just say that I haven't...
Followed you down the various rabbit holes you've gone down in the last three years with any depth at all, right?
He thinks he knows some things, but he doesn't know exactly, right?
And they get hung up on various details.
And Majid is relatively effective, rhetorically, at adjusting his statements to make it more palatable.
And Sam does, to his credit, point out various...
Inconsistencies and logical leaps and whatnot.
But it comes across as a reconciliation of sorts.
And then Sam and Majid talk a bit about what a shame it is that they didn't have these kind of conversations earlier and that Sam expresses regret about not discussing these things despite various efforts.
I kind of lost the opportunity to actually just speak with you about what was going on and what you were thinking and why you were thinking it.
So, in any case, it's just to say that I'm sorry that I didn't, as a friend, just get connected with you before I was in a position to speak publicly about any of the things we see differently.
And I feel that way about, you know, frankly, I feel that way about several other people to various degrees.
I mean, there are people who I have had some private, you know, intercessions with, and then it's kind of spilled out in public.
There are people who don't fall into this category, like, you know, like Dave Rubin, you know, I went round and round in private before it spilled out in public.
And it's just a very different situation with him.
And I haven't known, frankly, how to navigate this moment.
And it just, it gives the impression that like, you know, isn't it good?
We're all able to sit down and despite our disagreements, we fundamentally can stay friends.
And Sam continuously talks about how it's a complicated thing to work out, this issue about friendships and where you disagree.
But loyalty and friendship has to count for something.
And I just noticed this weird dynamic where if you've met somebody and you've had dinner with them and you've laughed with them and you've had fun with them, even if you've only done that once, then they do something spectacularly unwise in public, you feel differently about criticizing them.
Maybe we should feel differently.
So maybe the way the balance should swing is that even strangers should be treated more like friends.
I don't know.
But I'm just confessing that I'm not comfortable with the haphazard solution I appear to have found on this issue.
I feel like there are many people I've criticized or not, depending.
And it often depends on just how many times we've been at dinner together.
I don't know.
But to me, The fact that Brett Weinstein and Majid are vocal conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine advocates, it's not the kind of thing that you should try to paper over with.
Friendly conversations or trying to find the common ground that you can find the best version of their position and just ignore the bits where they're going a bit crazy about Soros or that kind of thing.
It strikes me as an illustration of the limitation about the IDW-type approach, which still remains very fixated on interpersonal relationships and all that kind of stuff, despite claims to the counter.
So I don't think we've resolved everything, or perhaps even anything, but we have figured out that we can obviously have dinner as friends when we're next in the same city, and we should do that.
I look forward to it, man.
Yeah, it does seem quite futile, doesn't it?
Because someone like Maju, he's just an example.
There are hundreds of people like him.
They're never going to change their mind.
They're never going to have a chat with someone like Sam Harris and actually genuinely go, oh, yeah, maybe I've lost the plot a bit.
That's never going to happen.
Like you say, they'll moderate the tone of their thing depending on who they're talking to.
So it just feels fundamentally futile.
And I'm not having a dig at Sam here.
I come across this myself when you and I get invited to have a debate with so-and-so or hash it out with so-and-so.
If I think they're just fundamentally like a waste of space, then I can't think of any reason why I should be talking to them.
It just feels like it's a pointless exercise.
Well, I have a slightly more indulgent perspective maybe about the potential benefits that can be had, but I think it relies on you.
Having prepared and knowing the rhetoric of the person.
Even if you do that, it doesn't mean you'll be successful, right?
But if you haven't done that at all, you haven't spent even a night to go through the person's views and common arguments, you're going in completely blind then.
And they can say, I didn't say that or, you know, whatever.
And you don't know, right?
And it is a constant amazement to me how many people...
Have these kind of confrontations or debate things, but they don't do basic research about who the person is or what they've said on a topic.
And it's really common.
It's really common, including with people that come on the podcast.
There was an example recently where somebody was Googling the person interviewing them in the middle of the interview.
And you're just like, why didn't you spend five minutes before that?
You know, before the interview did this?
Yeah.
Anyway.
That's a win to the week.
This is my win to the week about that.
Do some research.
Stop treating having a nice conversation or dinner with someone like it's some magical fucking unbelievable thing.
It's absolutely mundane.
It's normal to be able to sit down and not spit all over someone's face and slap them around.
That's what normal people do.
And it's not an achievement that you manage that.
It's actually not great that you could sit down with Alex Jones and completely ignore all the terrible things he's done and have funny jokes over a beer.
It's the reason people dislike him is all the horrible...
Stuff that he's done and promotes.
And that's with Majid.
It's not, you can't have a nice chat with Majid.
It's Majid is a rank conspiracist promoting misinformation and anti-vax rhetoric.
That's the problem.
Got it.
Got it.
And you finished your whinge.
That whinge is over.
We're at 30 minutes now.
It's done.
It's filed.
Filed for this week.
I get whinger of the week for this week.
That's it.
I win.
All right.
So.
Well, and maybe now is a good time to turn to a non-winger, Matt.
Did you do your research on Matt Johnson?
Did you check him out?
Did you dig up any, find out any dirty dirt on him there, Chris?
I've got a dossier.
I've got a dossier.
But actually, yes, I did do research beforehand.
You know, it doesn't take that long.
Just a check.
Just a cursory glance.
I read his book.
Well, most of it.
I know he was interviewed by Schirmer.
I know he's contributed.
Yeah, that's right.
Don't throw that dead cat at our feet.
It's fine.
Someone could talk to Michael Schirmer to promote their book.
It's fine.
It's all right.
Yeah, we won't hold it completely against them.
So, okay.
Well, anyway, on that note, let's turn to Matt Johnson.
Okay, Chris.
So, with us today, we've joined by Matt Johnson.
So, thanks for coming, Matt.
Matt, you're a freelance writer, I think, is the best way to describe it.
You write for a whole bunch of online publications, the Bulwark, Persuasion, a bunch of things.
But, of course, most recently, you've been working on a book about Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens can save the lift, I think, is the title.
Yeah, is there anything else about yourself you'd like to say?
Nope, that pretty much covers it.
Matt, can I just say that it's the bulwark.
Bulwark, not the bulwark.
The bulwark.
It's worse than the mat jokes.
I think I'm closer to bulwark than bulwark.
It does sound more...
Am I wrong?
Well, pronunciation's not your belly wick, Chris.
This is true.
I wouldn't worry about it.
Yeah, it's not as bad as the matrix, so whoever's right, that's fine.
We can let the people decide.
All right, the bulwark.
The bulwark, yeah.
So, map two, or...
Johnson.
How about I call you Johnson?
You can call me Brown.
What made you decide you wanted to write this book about Hitchens?
Have you been interested in him for a long time?
Yeah, so I've been reading Hitchens forever.
I mean, since I was a freshman in college.
And I was probably attracted to him for his guru-ish tendencies.
I mean, I just think he's such a brilliant communicator and such an eloquent guy.
There are many YouTube videos with titles like Hitchens Slaps Down Opponent X or Y. There's just this endless perfusion of videos of him burning people.
And I think that's why somebody who's just getting into college and just considering the possibility of becoming a writer might be interested in Hitchens.
But yeah, as I...
I grew older and as I started to develop some ideas of my own, I just noticed that Hitchens' principles, especially his commitment to universalism, I would say, really struck me as the sort of political direction I wanted to take.
I was really heavily influenced by Peter Singer early in college, and I just saw Hitchens' view that the United States should be the anchor of...
You know, an international system that can address human rights violations and that can sort of provide security and stability.
It seemed like the political correlate to that sort of universalist idea that, you know, we should try to tear down national and tribal barriers to the extent possible.
You know, so it was just a series of things that kind of came together and made me think that Hitchens would be an interesting conduit to talk about a lot of stuff.
I really already cared about.
Your book, Matt, came out at when?
The tail end of last year?
It came out in February on Valentine's Day, strangely enough.
And the year before, Ben Burgess had a book, right?
The philosopher Ben Burgess, Christopher Hitchens, what he got right, how he went wrong, and why he still matters, right?
Yes.
How he went wrong, that sort of sounds like a British construction to me, more than how he went wrong.
Yeah, he's a wrong-un.
How he became a wrong-un.
So I'm just curious.
Yourself and Ben Burgess in dialogue at all over the topic since, you know, two books coming out in the space of a year on a thinker that was popular but, you know, has not been really focused on that much in the past,
you know, five to ten years since he passed.
Yeah, just curious, did you have any interactions with Ben and maybe your two...
If you have read his book, how would you distinguish the approach?
Yeah, they're very different books.
I actually reached out to Ben and asked if I could take a look at his when I discovered that he was working on it.
And he kindly sent me a copy.
We actually did a podcast together with Iona Natalia.
So it was her 2 for T, like, area magazine podcast.
And we actually did a trial run that went...
Quite poorly.
We just ended up yelling at each other about foreign policy for about two hours.
So we did a redo.
And that's the version that you can actually find if you look at the library of T4T episodes.
But yeah, we disagree very fundamentally.
And I think we just approached it entirely differently.
He actually constructed the book around a series of debates that Hitchens did.
Whereas I just sort of talked about him more generally.
But I mean, Ben's a socialist and he's one of those people who thinks that Hitchens's politics became increasingly deranged after the end of the Cold War.
And then after September 11th, he just thinks he just kind of took this horrendous neoconservative imperialist turn.
I don't agree on much.
I think he's a really sharp guy.
And I actually do.
Like his brand of left-wing politics in one sense, because I think it's very anti-identitarian.
I mean, I think he's really good on, like, free speech issues.
You know, he wrote a book called Give Them an Argument about how, like, people on the left shouldn't try to silence people like Ben Shapiro.
They should actually...
I think there's, like, a picture, a cartoon picture of Ben Shapiro on the cover of the book.
So, yeah, I think in that sense, he's sort of in Hitchens' tradition, you know, because Hitchens was a First Amendment absolutist and all that.
But, yeah, we definitely...
Do not share many political positions.
Well, that's interesting.
Maybe it's a fitting tribute that, you know, you would have a heated...
It did make a certain kind of sense, yeah.
I think we just decided that the audience would tire of the...
I guess it kind of got away from Hitchens and just turned into an argument.
That's happened on our podcast before, but we've never not released the result of it.
I did listen to that episode, the one that made it.
To air with you and I enjoyed that.
So, I mean, when I think of Hitchens, I was the same, I think.
You know, I think there's an aspect to his output, at least the stuff that gets memed and YouTubed and stuff like that, which is, you know, the sort of rhetorical flair and the hit slaps and the great one-liners.
But it seems like you're more interested in what underlies that rhetoric.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so how would you describe this universalism or this sort of political or philosophical stance that he's got?
Yeah, it's one of those words that I probably use too often in the abstract, and I think most people are probably wondering, like, what exactly I mean about it.
I mean, they're just different.
They're different lenses through which to view it.
I mean, I think he was very committed to individual rights, so I cover identity politics pretty extensively in the book.
The chapter is titled Sinister Bullshit, so to give you some idea of what I think about it.
Um, he, he just, he really didn't like the idea of speaking from a position of identity-based authority.
He didn't like it when people would say, you know, speaking as a gay man or speaking as a, you know, cause he always just thought that points should be universally intelligible to anyone.
And that didn't mean I'm really at pains to point out that it didn't mean.
He didn't think we should address, you know, systemic racism or, like, issues of inequality in society.
I mean, he was actually in support of reparations, for example.
There's a debate between him and Glenn Lowry that you can find in the C-SPAN archives where he's actually arguing in favor of reparations.
So, yeah, that form of universalism has always appealed to me.
And then there's just the internationalism.
I mean, he just thinks that the United States needs to be very heavily engaged in the world.
And I, you know, coming off of...
Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, the United States took a turn inward.
And that's one of the reasons why Obama was elected.
He ran against the Iraq War.
But, you know, the invasion of Ukraine is a good reminder that you can't really get away from the rest of the world.
So I've always admired both of those elements of Hitchens' approach to politics and philosophy.
And I do think that the underlying...
Assumption is just that we should value everybody's life equally.
It's a one-to-one.
It doesn't matter if the suffering is taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa or if it's in Iraq or if it's in Detroit.
It should matter to us equally.
I know that those are really broad brushes, but that's probably the best way to summarize it briefly.
Yeah, I think it's interesting.
Obviously, times have changed a fair bit since Hitchens was active and the kinds of...
Hot Topics has moved on in a way.
I think when Hitchens was railing against that kind of identitarianism and I guess a kind of relativism, like that was in vogue perhaps more on the left, but at least the impression that I get amongst the people that are more left than me,
Aaron Rabinowitz of Abraced the Void is our touchstone for this kind of thing.
I mean, he describes himself as a, what's the phrase, Chris?
A moral...
Not absolutist.
No, realist?
Realist, yes.
He subscribes to moral realism.
And that scene, which is kind of similar to how you describe that kind of universalism of Hitchens.
So the same sort of...
It's very anti-relativistic.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And it seems like that actually describes the left more generally now, where there is less, oh, you know, you see it this way and I see it that way, and who can say?
Whereas it's much more, no, no, this is...
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
And if you don't agree with that, then you're just morally wrong.
But I guess the other way in which things have moved on a bit is that there was that great withdrawal, obviously, from American interventionism after the various happenings in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But since then, of course, we've seen Russian imperialism.
And there's still debate, but it seems to me there's much more consensus now on the center-left of interventionist policy.
That's a great point.
It's good to make that point, just because I really don't want to generalize about the left too much.
I mean, right now, the German Green Party is more interventionist than many moderate Democrats in the United States.
I mean, they were pushing for the deployment of heavy weapons in Ukraine.
Certainly earlier than Olaf Scholz was.
And certainly earlier than a lot of leaders throughout Europe were.
And then, yeah, the Democrats, I think, have a better record on Ukraine than the Republicans.
Although there is a fair amount of bipartisanship in the United States around supporting Ukraine.
But there's also just a really powerful sort of insular dynamic on the right.
You just have to look at Tucker Carlson's monologues, which have...
Thankfully, come to an end, at least for the time being on Fox News, to just see this strain of sort of isolationism in American politics.
And that's something that's really become more prominent on the right since the Trump era began.
Because it just used to be, you know, it used to be that the right's big problem, big political liability was probably like overextension or sort of sympathy with neoconservatism or, you know, however you want to describe it.
So, yeah, I do think that the left has a complicated record on some of these issues.
And, you know, even figures like Bernie Sanders versus Corbyn, they demonstrate that the left has just always been dynamic.
Like, a lot of people would say, you know, Corbyn is the British Sanders and vice versa.
But Sanders actually supported the intervention in Libya initially.
He supported the intervention in Kosovo.
And that's the sort of thing that you just couldn't imagine Corbyn supporting.
So, yeah.
And this all gets back to the general principle that, you know, maybe I'm too sympathetic toward the Iraq War, which there are very good arguments against, and there's no doubt.
But I still think that even if you despise that war and you think it was the biggest mistake of American statecraft, you know, in 50 years, you...
It's pretty easy to see that Hitchens came at it from a liberal point of view.
He came at it because he supported the Kurds, because he recognized that Saddam had riveted this horrible tyranny on the Iraqi people.
I think these are conceivably left-wing positions that a lot of people will regard as reactionary or right-wing positions, but politics is kind of complicated.
Things have changed a lot.
The line you guys seem to take on some of this stuff is refreshing to me because you both know Bob Wright and I really like his stuff.
I love the book Non-Zero.
It had a huge influence on me, but it annoys me when he has Max Blumenthal on his show and he just kind of uncritically chats with the guy and I think he does it because he sees that people like me will run him down.
I mean, not that...
Robert Wright knows who I am.
But a lot of people will say, oh, this guy's an apologist for dictators.
This guy is an apologist for real imperialists in the world.
And I think he sees that as this effort to silence dissenting voices in the United States.
If there's one thing Robert Wright hates, it's the blob.
It's the American foreign policy consensus.
But I just appreciate the fact that it seems like you guys...
Don't have much patience for the Blumenthal's of the world, for the gray zones of the world.
And I just think that's necessary.
No matter what you think about US foreign policy, going on media junket tours in Assad's Syria is just hideous.
And it's just the sort of thing that Hitchens, you can imagine him pilloring that sort of thing.
So anyway, that's just something I noticed a while back when I was first getting into the...
DTG content.
Yeah, like you, we have a lot of time for Bob, but I think it's fair to say, as we've addressed with him, that we strongly disagree with his take and approach on foreign policy issues.
And as you highlight, the issue around figures, outlets like the gray zone loom large.
And I would also say the inverse of that, of the kind of Unwarranted or not fairly distributed.
What do you call that?
People distribute too much charity to one side and the Bellingcat, on the other hand, is treated with barely veiled disdain.
Yes, scorn.
Absolutely scorn.
Bellingcat, in terms of transparency or finances and all that kind of thing, is a light year.
Away from the grey zone and far less reprehensible to my mind.
But actually, that might lead to a point which I'd be interested to hear.
So I know how, or I think I know, how Hitchens would respond to Robert Wright's view about Ukraine and so on.
And indeed, he had debates with Robert Wright, mainly about religion.
But I don't think you need to...
Stretch the imagination to imagine his reaction.
But I am more curious about how you think he would have reacted to the kind of guru ecosystem or the intellectual dark web had he lived for that period.
He was very friendly with many of the people that would become central to that, you know, Sam Harris and Douglas Murray, those kind of people.
And as you noted, he certainly advocated a kind of free speech absolutism position, which...
At least in theory, many of those figures also champion.
I would take a strong issue that they actually are championing that in any way, but at least they claim to.
So it's interesting because you have a lot of people who claim that Hitchens would have had no truck with a figure like Jordan Peterson.
They would have called him out for the shallow charlatan that he is or something like that.
And on the other hand, you...
Have people who seem to suggest that, no, he would have been there alongside the Weinsteins and Douglas Murray on stage.
So I'm curious where you think he would have landed had he been around for the intellectual dark web and just the modern online ecosystem.
Yeah, well, there's always sort of a standing caveat to everything I say regarding what's happening in the world today.
Can't speak for Hitchens.
And he was a very unpredictable guy in many ways.
You have to take everything I say here with a big grain of salt.
But I will say when I look at some of the weird intersections between the heterodox folks and some of the people who I'm almost convinced Hitchens would have absolutely despised, I have to say
that I would imagine he would have been pretty ruthless in either ridiculing or just outright condemning some of these people.
So just for example, Tucker Carlson's out at Fox News.
I noticed there were a lot of Fox News obituaries for him.
Matt Walsh came out and said, you have to understand how fundamentally decent this man is.
When I was just a wee blogger at the Daily Caller or wherever he was, I don't know where he was, Tucker Carlson reached out to him and said, I love your work.
And that just demonstrates like...
And then, like Brett Weinstein said, you know, no matter what you think about Tucker Carlson, he had the power to unify Americans around some dangerous ideas.
Like, he tweeted this out after Tucker lost his job at Fox News.
And I just thought, yeah, he's the most divisive figure imaginable.
I mean, he's unifying people around toxic xenophobia and around nationalism of the most...
Bass and sort of like vintage Lindberghian kind.
If Hitchens saw Weinstein say that or if he was on stage with him and he said something like that, I just can't imagine that Hitchens would say, oh yeah, absolutely, Tucker.
He's a brilliant guy.
It's funny because Hitchens actually was friends with Tucker Carlson.
He apparently respected him as a writer and urged him not to go into television.
There was an interview on C-SPAN where he talks about this, and he co-edited a book called, I think, Left Hooks and Right Crosses, which is like a left-wing writer and a right-wing writer tried to choose essays from the other side and decide what are some of the best polemics out there.
And I guess Hitchens chose some essay that Tucker Carlson wrote.
But that's really pre-Tucker's turn.
I just think he really has become A reactionary and hideously isolationist, xenophobic figure.
To the extent that there's crossover between the guru sphere and people like Carlson, I think Hitchens would have definitely condemned it.
Tough to say what he'd have to say about somebody like Douglas Murray.
I think they were friends as well.
They obviously agreed about the...
Excesses of radical Islam and about the authoritarianism in much of the Muslim world and just the authoritarianism that can be found in the texts themselves.
So, you know, you look at something like Charlie Hebdo, and it's just not hard to imagine what Hitchens would have had to say about it.
You know, he wouldn't have taken the Greenwald route, which was to publish a series of anti-Semitic cartoons in The Intercept.
Declare that this is some kind of like challenging free speech exercise.
You know, hey, let's see.
Let's see just how far you can push it in the Western media.
You know, let's see if the same people defending Charlie Hebdo's Islamophobia, which is how he would have described it.
Let's see if they're OK with this expression of free speech.
And here's a series of anti-Semitic cartoons.
But of course, nobody blew up the offices of the Intercepts.
Nobody showed up at his doorstep wielding a machine gun.
So, yeah, it's just.
I think Hitchens was pretty consistent.
I don't think he cared about stepping on people's toes.
I don't think he would have joined the intellectual dark web.
He was too independent for that.
And he really kind of relished talking shit on his own side.
I mean, there's a famous video of him flipping off the audience, Bill Maher's audience.
I just think it was something he loved to do.
So, yeah, that's probably my best.
My best guess as to what he'd have to say about the guru sphere.
Like you say, it's difficult to imagine because we're stuck with Hitchens as he was.
There's a lot of people that we cover who get progressively more insane or take strange turns.
Even Nobel Prize winners are prone to it later in their career.
But on the other hand...
There are people, and I suspect that Hitchens may have been one of them, who end up fairly well-formed by the time they're in their 30s or 40s.
And they, for better or worse, they don't really change.
They have takes on different topics.
But, you know, Nassim Taleb, he might be against GMOs and he might be, you know, against Ukraine apologetics.
But all of it...
Comes from the basis of his grumbly personality and belief that he's the only one that understands statistics.
So I get the feeling that whatever Hitchens take on COVID Would have been that he wouldn't have had any truck with apologetics for Russia in the Ukraine war.
Like, that seems very unlikely.
Yeah.
You actually have just a direct record.
I mean, he was writing a lot about Putin's aggression and chauvinism and imperialism, you know, regarding Georgia, regarding things that had happened when he was still alive.
So I think it's pretty obvious what line he would have taken on the invasion of Ukraine.
I do think that he would have had a lot of contempt for people who fancy themselves left-wing, but who seem to think that a handshake deal at the end of the Cold War between Gorbachev and James Baker should permanently determine the geopolitical makeup of Europe.
There's this constant refrain on the left where people will say, yeah, we agreed.
Not to expand NATO.
And we agreed that these countries would be neutral and they'd stay in Russia's sphere of influence.
But it's just like, what kind of left-winger doesn't care about self-determination or the democratic aspirations of Ukrainians?
I mean, even before the invasion, Pew does global attitude surveys and they asked everybody in Europe, you know, how much do you trust these world leaders?
And in Ukraine, an overwhelming majority did not trust Vladimir Putin, you know?
So, it doesn't seem left-wing at all.
It doesn't seem liberal at all to apologize.
I mean, even if you're not apologizing for Putin, that kind of language can be a little risky and it can sound a little McCarthyite.
I understand that.
That's where I'll give Glenn Greenwald the benefit of the doubt.
But I don't have to call somebody an apologist for Putin to say that they're emphasizing the wrong thing.
They're obsessing over NATO expansion.
They're obsessing over...
The West's crimes.
They bring up Iraq when Russia invades Ukraine.
It's bizarre.
It's a deflection tactic.
But yeah, I can see what line I think you would have taken.
There's some other lines I'd like to put on, but there's one where we might disagree on some aspects that might be interesting to cover.
And you can correct me, Matt, if I characterize your position wrong, but you described yourself as like...
Free speech absolutist in some respects, or that the free speech is central, and that's part of what attracts you to Hitchens.
And in the same way, like Ben Burgess, for the various political disagreements, you would agree mostly with his kind of stance on lack of censorship on social media platforms.
So I think Matt and I, I won't speak for Matt, but he can agree or disagree that we're, and broadly, In favour of freedom of speech, of course, the right to things.
And I actually do hold the slightly unfashionable position about it being useful and productive to engage with people across political divides, but also including people that are potentially outside the Overton window.
But I think if you do that, you have to be very...
Be careful in what you're doing and consider it.
I do think issues of platforming apply, dependent on the size of your platform and all that kind of thing.
Somebody with Joe Rogan, size of audience, I think has much more responsibility than a random YouTuber with a thousand followers or something like that.
Yeah, for sure.
But when I look at Twitter, Now, under Elon, right?
Or when I dig into the Alex Jones case and all of the various horrors that unfold there, I can't say that I find myself favoring any environment which wouldn't have moderation and which would not penalize people for causing harm and potentially those that would foment campaigns of hate.
I think that all social media platforms end up grappling with those and all sort of public debates do as well.
So I'm kind of curious, would your principle towards free speech extend to that Alex Jones should be freely accessible on all platforms?
Would it extend that far?
Or are there edge cases that you also would want to remove or limit access to?
Well, I mean, it's interesting that you use the example of Alex Jones because I actually wrote a piece recently for an online magazine called The Free Thinker.
I think it's called The Free Thinker.
It sounds very heterodoxy.
But it was about Hitchens and his position on free speech.
And I actually will say the concept of free speech absolutism probably isn't terribly useful.
I actually liked it when he would call himself a First Amendment absolutist.
I thought that was a really good distinction.
So if you do take the view that the neo-Nazis should be allowed to march through Skokie, Illinois, because it's their First Amendment right to do so, and we have a responsibility to uphold the Constitution, then that seems like an eminently defensible position.
But Hitchens' attitude toward free speech was probably more radical than mine.
For example, he always defended the right of David Irving to publish.
And he's a Holocaust denier and kind of a monstrous figure.
And I think it was St. Martin's Press that had agreed to publish a book he'd written and then they rescinded that offer after agreeing to publish it.
And Hitchens thought this was an outrage and he said it was a disgrace and that they should follow through with their original commitment.
And his basic argument was just that...
You know, readers should be treated like adults.
They should be allowed to make their own determinations about content.
You know, it doesn't matter what the guy's political views are.
He still might have something to contribute, which is sort of what, I mean, it kind of sounds like Mill's argument for free speech.
You know, it's the right of the speaker to speak and the right of the audience to hear and our civil society.
Oh, Matt, sorry.
I hit the mute button by accident there.
I meant to hit a mind.
Could you unmute yourself?
I'm back.
Sorry, sorry.
I was breathing heavily.
You're censoring me.
That's what you think about free speech, isn't it, Chris?
Just mid-speech, you know?
Please continue and just ignore that that occurred.
Alright, no problem.
But yeah, I actually did use the example of Alex Jones in the article I wrote about Hitchens.
And I actually think...
He would likely say, yes, keep Alex Jones on Twitter.
Allow him to speak.
You know, our society should be grown up enough to resist him.
But, you know, this is a guy who was actually, like, sicking his mob on grieving parents who had lost children at Sandy Hook.
I mean, this guy's a monster.
And if I ran Twitter, if I was responsible for content moderation on Twitter, I'd kick him off.
I'd have absolutely no problem doing so.
So, I actually wouldn't call myself a free speech absolutist.
I just don't think an absolute position is terribly helpful.
The chapter on free speech in the book, to the extent that I'm putting my view forward, it's a concern that I have for self-censorship, which seems much more pressing today than other forms of censorship.
I mean, that's what's so funny about the...
Is it Weinsteins or Weinsteins?
I think it's Weinsteins.
Weinsteins, but we say Weinsteins.
It's like Einstein.
Yeah, Einstein.
Weinstein.
Makes sense.
But anyway, when they talk about actual top-down censorship or people in power who are contriving to silence them and prevent them from winning Nobel Prizes or whatever, it does make me laugh just because we live in such an obviously free society.
I mean, we don't live in the Soviet Union.
We don't live in Iran.
We can express ourselves pretty readily.
Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files, expose notwithstanding, I don't think that there's a whole lot of terrifying government censorship, but I do think there's a lot of self-censorship.
And Hitchens wrote about Islam frequently.
He was very heavily impacted by the Rushdie fatwa.
And I do think that what the fatwa revealed about Western liberal civil society is pretty alarming.
It's not possible to imagine a play like the Book of Mormon ending up on Broadway about Islam.
It's really hard to imagine that happening.
And it's not that I think that this is something we should be obsessing over.
It's not that I think that we need to make Islam some major focus of our politics.
I've actually witnessed how people like Donald Trump and populist authoritarians in Europe will use anti-Muslim bigotry and demagoguery.
To scare people and retain power.
So I recognize that there are massive pitfalls to making this point.
But at the same time, when Yale University Press wanted to publish a book called The Cartoons That Shook the World about the Danish cartoon controversy, they weren't allowed to publish pictures of the cartoons.
You just see this over and over again.
And it's really worrying that we will silence ourselves at the drop of a hat.
And it makes me think...
That we would be willing to do it in the future.
And I think it was sort of like this test case for Hitchens.
And he just didn't like what he saw.
So to that extent, I think his writing about free speech and self-censorship is still really salient.
And it still really matters.
George Packer gave a speech about Hitchens when he won the Hitchens Prize.
There's a Hitchens Prize.
I don't know if you guys know.
There's an organization called the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation.
And they give out the Hitchens Prize every year.
And his speech was really good.
It was called The Enemies of Writing.
And he was basically saying that there's a lot of pressure to conform to certain groups.
There's a lot of tribalism in our society.
And when you have tribalism, you'll say some things and you won't say other things.
You don't want to step on people's toes.
You don't want to be ostracized from your own group.
So yeah, I think that's an issue worth focusing on.
But does that mean I think everybody should have...
A platform all the time or that I think publishers should lend their imprimatur to monsters like Alex Jones.
I mean, definitely not.
So it's, yeah, I actually do think that's probably something of a blind spot for Hitchens.
Because, yeah, free speech absolutism is probably just unworkable, honestly.
I mean, it would just become 8chan.
Twitter would become 8chan very quickly if you allow them to just allow whoever to publish whatever.
It seems like it gradually is.
Yeah, it does.
A friend of mine is on Twitter and since the Musk era began, he says he's just seen really strange stuff.
For one thing, I see a lot of Musk content.
I see a lot of people engaging with Musk.
I see this weird Musk reply guy all the time who's also into Dogecoin and he says crazy things about Epstein.
And my friend said he started seeing these videos of people fighting on Twitter much more often.
Just physical fights.
And he's like, where is this coming from?
I don't remember ever inserting myself into the algorithm to the extent where I'd get this really weird content.
But I don't actually know how the algorithm works.
But yeah, it's kind of alarming.
I'm seeing weird things.
Qualitatively, I can report the same thing.
I now see tons of vids that go hard, fight...
Yeah.
And Elon Musk's cadre of favorite accounts seem to be high up in the algorithm.
And there doesn't seem to be that much mystery about it because all the reports are that Elon specifically asks for particular accounts that he likes to be boosted and himself primarily amongst it.
It's one of those weird things that There's a certain...
I feel like a lot of public intellectuals previously were probably just as shallow and narcissistic, but they at least had the decency to hide it publicly.
But with the Elon era, the contemporary guru era, it feels like the kind of thin-skinned, superficial narcissism is really...
on display 24/7, partly through Twitter feeds, but other processes as well.
So yeah, look at Jordan Peterson's feed, right?
That is a--
It's just like a chronicle of intellectual decay.
It's crazy.
I've always disliked Peterson.
The first article I ever wrote for Quillette was about how impenetrable his arguments about God.
Happened to be.
I mean, it's just like, I listened to like this lecture series or this series of conversations between him and Sam Harris.
And I just found it.
It was just downright impossible to understand what he was saying until he'd say something that was perfectly clear, but terrible.
Like, atheism is responsible for all the crimes of the 20th century, which is, like, the oldest, most boring apologist canard.
You know, so it's just, yeah, the appeal of Peterson is almost entirely lost on me.
I used to kind of see, like, because, you know, I guess it's nice to have a male role model who cries all the time, but it's kind of weird that he leaves the crying in, like, in the audiobook version of his book.
It's like, that seems oddly strategic.
You know?
And it's just like, yeah, there'll be a little sign on a paper towel machine in the bathroom, and it'll take a picture of it.
It'll say, you know, please recycle.
And it'll take a picture of it and be like, fuck you, Woke Total Attorney.
Like, you're not going to get me.
This just seems like such a weird neurosis.
I wrote one article for The Daily Beast, which is about this.
It was a video.
Oh, I sent it to you, Matt, on Twitter.
It's like a video essay, but I think it was also published somewhere.
And he's basically talking about how Deloitte is like this evil globalist octopus that's taking over the world.
And, you know, it's going to force all this like climate regulation down our throats and people will die and there will be revolutions.
And I was like, this is unhinged.
This is absolutely unhinged, this guy.
And he's just so, yeah, I don't know.
He still kind of manages to...
Be pretty mainstream, you know?
Yeah.
I don't see Stalinism in gender pronouns.
I just don't.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, isn't it?
I mean, the world has changed a bit since Hitchens was poodling about.
And I remember back when Charlie Hebdo was a thing.
And I think the principles of free speech, to me anyway, felt a bit simpler then.
Like it was easier for me to just be on board.
Full stop.
It's quite simple.
Free speech is good.
Self-censorship is bad.
Have an open exchange of ideas and the good ideas will rise to the top because that's what a democratic free society is all about.
And in the current age where the various platforms and the algorithms make our reality, then at least for me, I've become a little bit less idealistic and perhaps a little bit more cynical about the fundamental presupposition there,
right?
Would be a standard bearer for, right?
Which is that you have to respect people enough for them to be able to make their own decision about whether or not this is true or whether this is bullshit.
Holding on to those liberal absolutist ideas, you might say.
And I just, I mean, we're seeing the impact of conspiracy theories in the broadest sense, right?
Chris and I see it with Dakota Neguri's obviously all the time because these are...
These are basically lies and falsehoods and ideologically driven, very strange ideas that are pushed by our gurus.
And they will all bang the free speech drum at any resistance, I suppose, from a platform or whatever to just allow them to keep doing their thing.
And I don't know, I guess if I look back at Hitchens and I think about...
Where he generally stands, I feel like he's kind of, at least for me, still stands strong when it comes to those sort of principles of globalism and cosmopolitanism and the rule of law and things like that and trying to be the best version of the Western liberal democracies that we can imagine,
right?
But when it comes to the free speech, I feel like the technology has led us to a situation where maybe those old liberal ideals feel a little bit naive.
Yep.
Possibly.
I mean, it was kind of sad to hear you summarize the argument really effectively, but with a tone of voice that was like, this is what I used to think.
It's very naive and depressing now how things have degenerated.
I mean, if you could pump out really compelling propaganda via GPT-4 and just distribute it.
A hundred thousands of times more rapidly than it can be distributed now.
Is that free speech?
Does that count?
That's not what Mill was envisioning when he was making the case for unfettered free speech.
I think that's absolutely right.
You just have to deal with the reality as it confronts you.
I do think, to the extent that you see...
I'll find myself in interviews bringing up...
My Willianopolis, which feels like it was a different lifetime.
It feels like it was a different century.
But it did bother me to see people so willing to shout him down or shout down Christine Offsummers.
The sort of usual suspects.
It did seem like cowardice.
It seems like something Hitchens would condemn very readily.
But I do recognize how those concerns probably...
Start to seem sort of trivial.
I mean, compared to just the way people flood the zone with garbage now, and the way people are so cynically using arguments around free speech to just pump out propagandistic trash.
I mean, and then they're so incredibly contradictory and hypocritical.
I mean, the same free speech warriors who will decry the disc don't seem to have that much to say about DeSantis.
When he's telling schools what they can and can't teach in Florida, and when he's telling Disney that it has no right to express a political opinion, which is, I mean, make no mistake, yeah, it's Disney, but it's still a question of free speech.
And I think Disney is on really solid footing with its lawsuit.
I hope it wins.
And you just see these weird guys like Chris Ruffo, and they kind of talk like they're at the head of the vanguard of some new cultural phenomenon.
It's actually kind of creepy, I mean, for the kinds of people.
Who would say, you know, oh, the left is like neo-Maoist or Marxist or what have you.
He had some exchange with Steven Pinker on Twitter where he's like, your time is over, old man, and the new guard is taking over.
And I was just like, where is this weird attitude coming from?
Where people on the right are sounding like these weird revolutionaries and they're saying like, you know, the old...
Model of civil society and civil discourse doesn't work anymore.
We've got to legislate.
We've got to legislate CRT out of existence because it's so evil.
You know?
So, yeah.
I mean, we're definitely up against very opportunistic and dishonest and, frankly, authoritarian people.
And, I mean, one just general point to make, and I'm not sure if...
I would assume that with a title like mine, readers probably assume that it's going to be just an endless broadside against the left.
I mean, the whole point of the book...
Is the fact that I think the authoritarian right is actually the biggest political threat on earth right now.
And I think the left is ill-equipped to respond to it properly.
And I can see the ways in which the right will use the left's excesses and the left's authoritarianism against it.
I mean, there's a reason why Trump...
Came up with the 1776 Commission or, you know, somebody in Trump's orbit came up with it and shoved it into his mouth and why he called for patriotic education and why, you know, because there is an illiberal aspect to something like CRT or what have you.
And I just think it's really easy for the right to instrumentalize it and use it against the left.
So, yeah.
I mean, I really enjoyed you guys' your mini-decoding of Matthew Goodwin a couple episodes back.
Because he's such a classic case of a guy who's presenting completely standard right-wing arguments in this weird cloak of heterogeneity and heterodoxy.
He's basically just saying, I think his catchphrase for his Substack is like, politics analyzed differently or something.
I'm like, I don't really see what's all that different about the analysis here.
It's the classic, you're not listening to the will of the people.
Brexit was the will of the people.
All these coastal elites, that would be the...
Terminology in the United States, but, you know, the people who are part of the party of Davos, to use Bannon's construction, are like, this is like par for the course.
There's nothing new about that.
I haven't read his book, I'll admit.
That was, yeah, so with Goodwin, the kind of two-step, which you see a lot, is, you know, his thesis, insofar as it's true, is like mundane.
Oxford and Cambridge and elite education institutions are over-represented in the halls of power in the UK and other countries.
Yes, definitely the case.
In fact, pretty much a left critique there for decades, right?
And similarly, that media, in certain respects...
You know, has an over-representation of, like, left-wing politics.
Yes, because a lot of the people in the media, you know, creative types tend to lean that way.
But similarly, all of those analyses tend to just, like, people are over, just, like, very hand-waved towards the existence of the massive right-wing media ecosystem, which they are on, extolling their thesis, right?
And Goodwin is not censored.
He's invited onto...
Plenty of right-wing platforms.
He's invited on a couple of left-wing platforms as well.
But in any case, him and figures like him, and it kind of follows up on the point that you...
We're making.
When I listened to a recent episode of Sam Harris, and we were talking about the Twitter files or moderation on Twitter, that kind of topic, and you had Rene Duress, and you had Michael Schellenberger and Barry Weiss, right?
And actually, a relatively well-conducted, to be it, by those standards.
Like, people did turn-taking, and, you know, were able to express, like, quite...
Strong differences of opinions.
But what came across very clearly to me was that Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger were very strong rhetorically on the reference to freedom of speech, on the marketplace of ideas against the repression of even voices they disagree with or whatever.
But their facts...
Their grasp of facts and their ability to apply those standards consistently across the political domain were really weak.
And Renee DiResta, by comparison, she knew about the moderation policy.
She could talk about the actual examples and highlight the inconsistencies and the claims which weren't accurate.
But I think to some people that doesn't matter, right?
It's more the strength of the rhetoric carries.
The force of the argument.
And the fact that, you know, you saw Matt Taibbi embarrassed recently by Mehdi Hassan.
Mehdi Hassan, not somebody I'm hugely a fan of, but it didn't take much, right, for him to point out glaring issues in the way that Taibbi had covered the Twitter files.
And yet, Taibbi's response to that was, you know, immediately on the substack on things to kind of...
Start pointing out his kind of catalogue of MSNBC errors or this kind of thing, which doesn't actually excuse the mistakes that he made, right?
So, yeah, I just, I find this, and actually it does tie back into Hitchens, but I find this inconsistency of standards and extremely strong rhetoric over actual substance to be Like,
a really unfortunate thing and something that I see a lot of in a heterodox sphere.
And to type the Hitchens, so Matt and I watched in preparation a talk by Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan.
And, you know, I've consumed a bunch of Hitchens' previous content as well.
But I think one thing that struck Matt and I both when we were talking about it is that while there's an undeniable...
Depth to Hitchens.
He knows about history.
He knows about geopolitics.
And, you know, he's classically educated, or it seems at least.
But, like, there also is, he's extremely rhetorically powerful.
And he doesn't mind relying on rhetorical style arguments.
Like, in that debate, he talked about totalitarian, like, Islam as a totalitarian religion.
And he said, you know, our total.
And he said, what's the first start of totalitarianism?
Total.
And you're like, that's not...
That's a very weak argument, but it sounded good.
So I'm curious about your broader thoughts on that, but in particular with Hitchens, he's famed for his debates, and I think there is substance there, but he was undeniably like a rhetorical powerhouse.
So do you ever think he relied too much?
On that rollout and, you know, addressing substantive points when debating.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, I will say just really quickly to tie off the point about Mediasan and Taibbi.
I don't know if you saw the first post that Taibbi threw up on his sub stack, but I just thought the way he started it was so funny.
It was like Mediasan, or I decided to go on Mediasan's show.
If you're reading this now, it didn't go well.
It was like this really weird sort of, like, death note.
Yeah, hit the button when it goes out.
Well, seriously, like, yeah, I'm no longer with you if you happen to be reading this now.
Like, I just got blasted to shreds by Mehdi Hassan.
Can I also, before we move on from Mehdi Hassan, I just want to note that, like, there's plenty of stuff about Mehdi that you can highlight, but one thing rhetorically that I thought he did.
He infamously had a talk where he kind of lambasts atheists and he refers to non-believers as cattle and stuff.
And it's been memed plenty of times.
He's responded to it and said, you know, but one of his lines was, you know, I had some views that I expressed in my 20s.
And that speech was when he was 29. So technically you enjoyed this.
Yes, I was like...
Way back to ancient history.
It's funny that you mentioned the Mehdi Hassan thing and then led into Hitchens' rhetorical flair because Hassan's well-known as a good debater and somebody can cut quite a figure in front of the camera.
And he just wrote a book about how to win every argument or something.
And he's clearly...
He does seem to approach it...
Like a sport.
I mean, I really do think he went into the Taibbi.
I actually did feel slightly bad for Taibbi because he just seemed like a more normal guy trying to have a conversation like if he was sitting next to him in a bar and Medivis just like armed to the teeth with the numbers.
He had the receipts.
But anyway, it didn't go well for Taibbi.
Yeah, so on Hitchens, I think his rhetoric...
Can actually be a distraction a lot of the time.
I actually end the book by saying I think a Hunter S. Thompson effect has taken hold in the public imagination of Hitchens.
And you will encounter countless stories about Hitchens that seem to follow the exact same script.
I mean, this is so well attested that I have to imagine there is some truth to it.
But it basically goes like this.
They went out to dinner and then turned into a long night of drinking.
Then people went back to the apartment and a few more hours of drinking.
And at 3 a.m., he goes into his bedroom and he pounds out a 2,000-word essay.
And it's about Oscar Wilde.
And he rejoins the party.
And then he ends up in the studio the next day.
So it's like this weird personality-based story.
I've heard it so many times and read it so many times.
It's just like...
People talking about the man and not really his ideas.
But I definitely noticed times when Hitchens' rhetoric clouds what could be a much simpler or perhaps like readier at hand point.
One debate I mentioned to you guys was the one he had with William Lane Craig.
Who's this well-known Christian apologist, and he's known as quite a ferocious debater.
And I've never thought he was all that compelling, but at the same time, I've never sat on stage with the guy.
I'm sure it's a rough, it's a tall order to try to take him on.
But Hitchens did seem to have a series of points he wanted to make in that debate, and they were very broad.
I mean, they just dealt with religion.
Religion as a social phenomenon, religion as a harmful totalitarian phenomenon.
And the actual subject of the debate was, I mean, it was, you know, the existence of God.
It was an ontological debate.
And this is like what Craig does.
He always sets up debates that serve him well.
So when he debated Sam Harris, they debated like the...
Like, the objectivity of morals.
Like, can you have objective morality without God?
And if you're going to make the assumption that God exists, then it's a pretty effective locus of morality.
And Harris had written this book called The Moral Landscape, where he was making a very difficult argument that there are such things as objective moral truths, but it's just that there are many peaks.
There are many different truths and many different ways to suffer.
And it's kind of a hard argument to make.
I think it served Craig's purpose as well.
But yeah, there were times in that debate with Craig where I just wanted Hitchens to just say something like, isn't there an infinite regress, you know?
Or isn't there, like, to just come up with some of the classics.
I just feel like the atheistic arguments that have been advanced for the past few hundred years are generally pretty compelling on their own.
Here's another example.
He will say, you know, humans have been on the earth for, let's say, a hundred thousand years.
And for 98,000 of those years, heaven watches with indifference.
God sits there with folded arms and lets humans suffer and die and live out their lives.
And then 2,000 years ago, in Bronze Age, Middle East, you know, he sends his son to die.
He sends a human sacrifice, saves us all, and we're supposed to see the light, and we're supposed to, like, accept this vicarious redemption through Christ.
It's basically just this, like, really artfully put...
Um, demonstration of the absurdity of religion, you know, but it doesn't, it doesn't actually get at any of the core arguments, um, and in a way that you'll hear like Shelly Kagan or Bart Ehrman or like these other guys who debate religion,
debate, um, atheism frequently will get at.
And like, I've always found, found that sort of unsatisfying.
I think like Hitchens.
Hitchens' polemical power is really useful.
I think God is Not Great is a wonderful book.
I really do.
When he says how religion poisons everything in the subtitle, that's something that really upset Robert Wright.
Does it poison literally everything?
Does it poison chess and coffee and tea?
He's just basically saying that it's insulting people in our most basic integrity and capacities.
I understand the point that he's making with the subtitle.
But yeah, the book's just a great read, and it does demonstrate a lot of the horrors that have been wrought by religion.
But yeah, he wasn't a philosopher.
He was a polemicist.
I don't think that detracts from the ideas he did have and the way he put them.
I wouldn't have written the book if I didn't think he was an extremely compelling thinker and writer.
But at the same time, yeah, I think he would reach for the rhetorical blow and the sort of pre-prepared argument.
A little too readily sometimes.
And, you know, I think that's a habit a lot of guru-ish figures have.
Yeah, I might, just before you jump in there, Chris, I might say something similar, which is that in the postscript of this interview, perhaps with your help, Matt, we will do a little bit of a decoding of this debate about whether or not Islam is a religion of peace.
And, you know, I approach that.
listen to it sort of primed, I suppose, to watch out for guru-esque activity, which I, you know,
I'm just curious as to your impression.
I think you recommended that one as an example of where Hitchens perhaps wasn't at his best, maybe at his more.
But I came away from that feeling that I wasn't very much impressed with his interlocutor either.
But I think it was a case of exactly what you described, which is Hitchens reaching for statements with a whole bunch of rhetorical flair, but without necessarily a lot of depth to it.
And to be specific, I don't think at any point in that debate, Hitchens really established that there was anything special about Islam being particularly...
Unpeaceful, right?
I don't think he established that.
He made a bunch of points about religions in general being terrible, authoritarian, totalizing belief systems.
He cited a bunch of ways in which Islam is bad, but the counterpoints to each of those examples he cited, which are obvious if you think about it, which is that Islam in modern history has existed in relatively poorer,
much more war-torn, socially disturbed parts of the world compared to Middle England Anglicism, right?
So the direction of causality there really
Well, with the Ramadan debate,
I think he's in He's on less firm footing when he's debating a philosopher like Craig, who has constructed a debate around a very limited motion.
When it just comes to attacking Islam and attacking the unique problems of Islam, I think Kitchens has some pretty good points.
I mean, he'll mention that it's a younger faith, for example.
The Quran is supposed to be printed in Arabic, and it's supposed to have a parallel text in English or whatever language it's being translated into.
And a lot of people will say, you really can't understand the text unless you can speak Arabic.
And Hitchens would say, well, the idea that God is a monoglot strikes him as very tribal and dangerous.
And I think I agree with Hitchens.
It's difficult, but if you look at the way religious fundamentalism works in the world today.
You look at the amount of suffering that's wrought by fundamentalism.
There does seem to be a problem with Islam.
I mean, it's just too widespread.
You just have to look at Iran.
You just have to look at Afghanistan.
Because a lot of people will say, oh, Hitchens sort of concocted a civilizational threat out of Islam where none existed.
And look at what we're facing now.
We're facing a rising China.
You know, climate change.
Putin invaded Ukraine.
It's sort of easy to date Hitchens by looking at some of the arguments he made about Islam.
And there's just no doubt that the rush he fought and September 11th affected him really intensely and definitely determined where he would direct a lot of his polemical fire in the last couple decades of his life.
But I think what's overlooked in some of those arguments is just the sheer number of people who have been soldified by a very reactionary interpretation of a religion in the Middle East.
And, you know, the number of books that get translated into Arabic versus other languages every year is kind of horrifyingly low.
And like, you know, so I think those are all fair political points to make.
But what makes me wonder about Hitchens's approach?
The fact that he didn't seem to care about the consequences of his polemical fury.
Because he had a lot of secular Muslim friends, or at least more secular Muslim friends.
He had a lot of liberal Muslim friends.
He recognized that the only way to actually roll back theocracy and huge swathes of the world is to forge alliances with liberal-minded and progressive Muslims.
And you have to wonder if he's not undermining his cause by being so brutal, by saying it's a crude plagiarism of Christianity and Judaism, and by just ripping it to shreds at every available opportunity.
It just seems like the wrong way to approach the process of building alliances with liberal Muslims.
So I just think that he was so wedded to the idea that he was going to speak the truth as he saw it, come what may.
That he wasn't desperately tactical.
And that probably makes me sound like a weak-kneed liberal, you know, and I'm sure he'd say it's not my job to coddle people.
It's my job to just say what I view as the truth.
But, you know, I mean, here's an area where, since I've been running Robert Wright now, here's an area where I thought that Hitchens was very unfair to Wright.
During their conversation, Wright would just say, do you not think it's possible?
That a drone strike on a wedding in Yemen, this isn't the exact example he used, but this is like the essence of this point, could drive people to take up arms against the United States, could drive people toward extremism, could have very negative and horrifying political consequences.
And Hitchens just never accepted that.
He always said it was just the ideology of...
Fundamentalist Islam that you had to blame.
And you shouldn't blame external factors, you know, because it's exculpatory.
And it's forgiving people who deserve all the blame for their actions.
And I just don't think Robert Wright was being an apologist for Islamic extremism by pointing that out, you know?
And I think the example he might have used was the major Hassan shooting on the military base several years ago.
This is pretty old news, but...
I just think Hitchens was too quick to accuse people of being apologists for really reactionary and authoritarian ideologies.
And I think that was part of his rhetorical effect was just like, you know, I'm just going to rattle the saber.
I'm just going to slice these people up.
You know, it's not how I approach conversation.
I feel like I'm pretty combative and pretty argumentative, but it just seems too alienating.
It seems like you're going to foreclose on too many healthy conversations.
If you're always just saying, like, well, I mean, it's a revolting and crude plagiarism of Christianity.
I mean, that's just, there's just too many people in the world who subscribe to it and who value it.
I can't imagine saying that to somebody, you know.
And, you know, as I've gotten older, because I used to be sort of the classic new atheist, you know, there's like the meme of like the kid with the shirt that says, I'm an atheist, debate me, you know.
And I was like, I was influenced by Dawkins and Hitchens and all those guys.
But, you know, you get older and you meet a lot more religious people.
And you actually discover that many of them are more intelligent than you.
And, like, they're really thoughtful and kind and generous and decent human beings.
And you're just like, you can't imagine just being like, you know, you believe in an idiotic delusion.
And, you know, it's embarrassing for you.
Like, I just can't.
I have friends now who, you know, are some of my closest friends.
And they're also, like, pretty staunch believers, you know.
And I just don't think Hitchens was willing to split that difference.
And, you know, in Hitchens' defense, I think if he was...
Sitting next to somebody at the bar, I don't think he was just doing this on the stage.
I mean, if it was, like, his best pal and he happened to be religious, I mean, I think it just would say the exact same thing.
That's my intuition about, like, how he carried himself in the world.
I don't think there was any, like, theatrics that weren't just, like, didn't bleed into his personal life.
But, you know, I'm not really qualified to say that because I don't know for a fact.
But you kind of get the sense.
Most of the stories about him suggest that, like, if he didn't agree with you about something, he'd just let you know.
But yeah, that's pretty long-winded.
I think it's the way he's treated from the outside that made me think that there's a guru-ish element to it.
I mean, there is an unwillingness in many cases to interrogate the ideas themselves, even the good ones.
I mean, I just don't feel like the case for Hitchens has been made all that well by many of the people who like him.
And whenever I read remembrances of him...
You know, like on the anniversary of his death every year, there's usually a spate of articles about Hitchens.
And I just feel like they very rarely engage with any of the content of what he wrote.
And I think that's just a consequence of his eloquence and his showmanship.
But I think that's actually a shame, you know?
I mean, one thing that worries me about like approaching the subject, you know, through the guru lens is that listeners will come away with the impression that he was vapid or somehow like he didn't actually have good ideas.
I think you covered a lot, but in the debate that he had with Robert Wright, I actually think that was one of his worst performances,
Robert Wright to me.
Like, handily kind of addressed most of the points that he was making.
And mainly because, as you said, Robert Wright was willing to make concessions about his position and to acknowledge the harms of religion.
But Hitchens essentially wouldn't acknowledge any particularly positive aspect that was unique to religions, right?
And as Wright handily pointed out in that debate, but that's just like, you're making your position...
Way less defensible.
Like, you could say religion is very bad overall, right?
And make that argument.
But if you say it never does anything good in the world ever, you're basically almost, by definition, wrong, right?
And, like, he treated Wright as if Wright was, as you say, like, not necessarily an Islamic apologist, but more like a religious apologist.
And that's not his position, really.
Yeah, I listened to that debate and found myself in large agreement with Robert Wright, and I felt like Hitchens was relying too much on rhetoric.
It was less the case in the interview with Ramadan, or sorry, the debate with Ramadan, which, like you mentioned, he does both.
He's making substantive points, and he's using rhetorical flourishes to make his points land.
And there's some way in which, You can't avoid that.
If you're doing public debates and if you're a public speaker, there will always be elements of anything that you want to argue effectively that rely on rhetorical techniques.
But the question which matters is, is there a substantive argument and support behind that?
And in the case of Hitchens, I think there was.
But I was also very glad to hear you acknowledge him as a polemicist, because to me, Somebody who writes an article with the title, Why Women Aren't Funny, is obviously somebody who's courting controversy.
Helen Lewis wrote about this.
Maybe you'll think this is slightly unfair, but I'm interested to see if you think Kitchens fits this mold to some extent.
Helen Lewis talked about, when she was investigating, you know, kind of guru types, that there was a certain kind of people that were attracted to ideologies which were extreme, right?
Like, they might be attracted to hardcore Marxism, or they might be attracted to, like, strong atheism, or, you know, pick-up artistry, whatever the case it was.
But, like, in some sense, you can look at their ideological history, and you see this dramatic journey.
Across the ideological ecosystem.
You can look at someone like Stefan Molyneux going from alternative psychology to anarcho-capitalist to hard-right white nationalist.
They're through lines, but at the same time, it's kind of surprising, especially in the space of about 10 years.
Now, I'm not comparing Hitchens to Stefan Molyneux.
I don't think that's a fair comparison.
But famously, Hitchens, you know, was quite a strong Marxist in his younger years of the revolutionary variety.
And then towards later in life, people would have, you know, put him more towards the at least neoconservative line in geopolitics, right, during the Iraq war and that kind of thing.
So you've argued, I think, that there's consistency.
To his ideology underpinning those.
But I'm curious about that journey.
Like, how does somebody go from a devout leftist Marxist type to somebody arguing what the Hitchens did later in life and remain consistent underlying it?
Like, is there an issue that...
His fervor was attached to whatever political program that he currently believed in and that that was variable such that, you know, we can't see the last chapter of his life, but if he had become a right-wing reactionary, that he would have been like a very powerful orator for an ideology that fits.
That could fit into the right-wing or conspiratorial ecosystem?
Or is there something that you think that means that he could never...
I know, again, we're talking hypotheticals, but I'm wondering how immune you think his approach is to those kind of issues and the intellectual journey over his career.
Yeah.
Well, I do think he was just intrinsically attracted to radical politics.
And the through lines are clear, and I'll get to them in just one second.
I will say that there were clear contradictions.
I mean, you just can't reconcile his support for the Iraq War with his really steadfast opposition to the Gulf War.
I mean, any argument that you're going to make about the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein, would apply all the more extensively at the end of...
The Cold War and at the end of the Iran-Iraq War and during the Gulf War.
There was an obvious shift in many ways.
The commonalities to me are pretty clear.
If you go back and listen to a debate that he took part in in the 80s just about socialism, I thought it was suggestive that he started his speech.
By sort of summarizing the universalist element of socialism.
He basically just said, like, we're all part of one human family.
International solidarity is the most important thing.
And then he kind of got along, got on to the more generic socialistic points, like, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.
I do think that the argument he made against Henry Kissinger and his argument in favor of a really robust structure of international laws and norms, Can be grafted onto his positions post-911 very easily.
There was actually an interview he did pre-911 when he was still out promoting his Kissinger book where Saddam Hussein came up.
A caller said something like, we're just as bad as Saddam Hussein.
The sanctions that we've imposed on Iraq just make us these monsters.
And Hitchin said, no, Saddam Hussein is...
Everything that is said about him.
And he mentioned the fact that he had sat on an unexploded chemical bomb in Halabja and that Saddam Hussein could actually have the sanctions lifted if he wanted to.
I mean, if he provided unfettered access to, you know, every site that the UN wanted to explore, if he stopped rattling the saver, threatening to invade his neighbors.
I mean, people forget that, you know, he wanted to invade Kuwait again.
In the mid-90s, which horrified the international community and required the United States to sort of step in and say, yeah, you really don't want to do that.
The outcome will be similar to what you went through before.
But I just think that that desire to have a universal set of standards that all countries are beholden to and that all countries have a responsibility to enforce was a pretty clear consistency.
And that's why even when he still was.
A socialist, even when he still declared to be every bit as radical as he had been in the 80s and 70s, in the 90s, he was fully in support of NATO intervention in Bosnia.
And he was fully in support of NATO intervention in Kosovo.
And it's just because he thought that powerful countries had a responsibility to prevent egregious violations of human rights.
And, you know, I think you can draw a pretty clear line.
Some of this stuff is...
It's lifted from the things Hitchens has written.
But it is true that he was on sort of a faction of the left early in his life.
I mean, when he was very young, still a teenager, that didn't support the Stalinist invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example.
I mean, they thought that the Russians should get out of Czechoslovakia.
And it was a really horrifying moment for them.
And I think he saw that the Soviet Union was this dilapidated and ossified system.
Horrendously repressive.
He wasn't some communist who had to lose all of his illusions, you know, and then find his reason.
I think he was always anti-authoritarian.
I think he always despised religion.
I mean, he always thought of it as a totalitarian system of belief, you know, because there's this unalterable God whose judgments can't be appealed.
And, you know, and we're all just sort of, we all have to submit to his authority, you know, till the end of time.
So I just think all these things, and you know, some free speech.
I mean, his response to the rush he fought, well, he sounded exactly like he did when the Danish cartoon controversy ripped through the world, or however you want to describe it.
And yeah, I think he would have done the same with Charlie Hebdo, and he would have done the same with the Paris attacks.
These are all positions that the left seems to struggle with, elements of the left, the sort of elements that we've talked about tonight.
I mean, like the...
The people who fancy themselves anti-imperialists.
They find it very difficult to just roundly condemn the invasion of Ukraine or to roundly condemn Saddam Hussein or the Taliban or Slobodan Belosevich.
It's not that they're apologists.
They're not all apologists for these people.
But it's just that the United States comes first.
The criticism of the United States and the West always comes first.
And Hitchens started using the word masochism a lot in his last 10 years.
And he thought there was this sort of general social and political masochism that led his former comrades to this position.
It was just like always looking inward, always condemning their own system, their own government.
And I think he regarded that as a transition away from socialism because socialism died as a viable.
I think a lot of his fellow left-wingers saw the same phenomenon and thought to themselves,
there's no radical alternative in the world anymore.
So they shifted their energy.
Devoted to socialism to this sort of crusade against the West, this crusade against imperialism and neoliberalism.
And I think that was arrived at genuinely, that position.
And I think it's a valuable shift.
I think the left would do well to observe it and emulate it in many ways.
I don't think he was just looking for radical ideas to hitch himself to.
I don't think he was just a contrarian.
I think he just changed his mind.
And he would admit that he used to regard, you know, liberalism as sort of this weak-kneed, insipid form of politics.
He actually cites a really interesting passage from, I think it's a book by Conor Cruz O 'Brien.
I think so.
If that's wrong.
He changed his mind about the, like, utility of waterboarding, right, after infamously undergoing waterboarding.
So he was someone that was willing to reverse.
I'm not sure if he was ever...
I don't think he was ever in support of waterboarding.
I think he saw you could advance the argument if he got waterboarded.
Oh, I thought he started out saying that it was not torture.
And then...
He might have been sort of ambivalent about the extent to which it was torture.
Yeah, that's actually...
He's quite clear afterwards.
He's very clear afterwards, for sure.
And well, I mean, he was, you know, during the Bush Wars.
You know, he was a plaintiff in an NSA lawsuit against the Bush administration for warrantless wiretapping.
He had these flashes of just sort of like conventional left-wing politics that, you know, he still held until the end.
I mean, he was, you know, supported universal health care.
He supported reparations for the descendants of slaves.
I mean, these are like a lot of positions that you're not going to see a lot of the heterodox people who found their way to the heterodox right holding.
I mean, this is one theme of the book.
Is the idea that Hitchens didn't just clear his throat with a couple of bromides about how equality is important before getting to his core points about the horrors of identitarianism.
And when you guys were talking about Matthew Goodwin, I just had to think about Hitchens' attitude toward the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in Europe, even in the 90s.
I mean, he wrote about Jorg Heider.
In Austria, and he wrote about these figures who he regarded as people who were peddling very reactionary and old ideas, but in this like slick new garb.
You know, they were basically just saying like, "Yeah, we just really don't like the inefficiencies and bureaucracy of the EU.
We really just don't.
We just think immigration needs to be controlled and sustainable and all this stuff."
But I mean, there are often ugly ideas underpinning.
Those sort of neutral-sounding positions, or at least inoffensive, deodorized positions.
And I think a lot of that goes on today, where you have people who are making fundamentally pretty ugly arguments, and then sort of couching them in just common sense.
Again, it's long-winded, but basically what I think is that Hitchens had these core principles, and he wouldn't have...
I don't think he would have capitulated the...
I don't think it's fair to classify him as a neocon.
He had a lot of sympathy for neocons.
He had a lot of sympathy for Paul Wolfowitz.
He thought he'd been making good arguments for many years.
He was certainly friends with some of them.
But I just think it's too simple to cram his politics into the classic conservative and left-wing binary.
I just think that the idea that the United States...
Should use its power to protect vulnerable populations wherever they are in the world?
I think that's actually really radical.
And there doesn't have to be an imperialist component to it.
It's not like he thought, had the United States gotten more involved in Darfur, we should just stay there forever and mine their country.
The intervention in Bosnia was, to Hitchens, a pure humanitarian intervention because we weren't stealing their natural resources.
And just a note for the Greenwalds of the world who say he was an anti-Muslim bigot.
The Bosnian Muslims were the people who he was calling upon the West to defend in that case.
So yeah, I'm glad I got to get some supportive words in.
I don't want to just run the guy down.
I think people should buy the book and check it out.
It's great.
Yeah, well, I was going to give you an opportunity to give some final words in defense of Hitchens without any pushback whatsoever, but I feel like he kind of did a pretty good job right there.
Yeah, I tried.
I tried.
Meandered my way through a sort of holistic defense of Hitchens.
It's actually a really interesting question for the record.
I mean, it's worth asking, you know, because you go from radical Trotskyism to sort of radical assertions of, like, the value of American power.
Radical atheism.
All of these positions are quite radical.
It does seem like that was just his general approach.
I think that's just how he fashioned himself and saw himself.
He thought it would be too boring to just be a milquetoast liberal like me.
It's like making a hedging when it comes to Alex Jones and free speech.
Well, look, I mean, given all of the characters that we've covered on Guru's Pod recently, it sets such a low bar for a decent public intellectual.
You won't get much pushback from me if you want to make the point that Hitchens is a cut above or was a cut above.
So, you know, very interesting points.
Looking at the Gurometer here, as you were talking, I was just asking myself, to what degree might Hitchens fit that stuff?
And look, to be honest, apart from the rhetorical...
Flair and the eloquence.
I'm not seeing too many lights light up.
The system isn't blinking.
How's it compared to Oprah?
Better.
Better.
Yeah, well, he's not pushing natural health woos.
That's a plus.
Chris, any final thoughts from you?
No, it'll be interesting to look at his specific content.
And then, as you say, anyway, he will go into the grometer so we can see how he scores.
But yeah, Matt, thanks for coming on and discussing Hitchens in depth.
And we will have the link to your book in the show notes so people can check it out.
But is there anywhere?
In general, the standard podcast question, where do people find you?
On Twitter?
I am on Twitter.
I think Twitter is at like 4chan levels of derangement now, but it's probably trending toward 8chan.
Anyway, as long as I'm still on it.
Yeah, it's MattJJ89 on Twitter.
And then, yeah, just some of the publications you listed.
Bulwark.
Bulwark.
Quillet.
I wrote for Aereo.
That's Iona's outfit.
And yeah, a few other places.
Haritz.
I've been focused on the book lately, so I haven't been churning out as many essays.
But yeah, I wrote a piece about John Mearsheimer for Quillet recently.
You guys might be interested in.
It's an interesting combination to have the Daily Beast and Quillet on your CV, but I guess Ben Burgess probably can claim a similar...
I don't know if he's ever in Colette, but Jacobin and Colin.
So, well, Matt, I will now disappear in a puff of smoke into the ether because I have to pick up a young infant.
But it was good to meet you and thanks for the...
The discussion-spirited exchange and good to see the hitching spirit lives on in all of us.
Just in terms of eloquence.
Maybe that comment alone just gives him like a notch on my gurometer or something.
I'm like picturing the gurometer as just some machine that's wearing away in the background.
It is.
It is.
A vintage thing from like an old Star Trek episode.
Big bulbs on top of it.
Yeah, that's how it works.
Think steampunk.
It's a steampunk and it's passioning.
All right, well, cool.
You'll have to let me know what the result is, how he scores.
Yeah, but both of you don't go anywhere because this upload will need to happen now.
So bye-bye everyone else, but you guys stay here.
And with that trumpet sound, the interview is finished.
Matt, this is our new stinger.
This is our new stinger.
Our new stinger, yeah.
It was bad, Chris.
It was bad.
I don't know if I had COVID.
What, the interview?
No.
You're so bad.
My infection.
My health.
My health.
The interview was good.
Thank you, Matt Johnson.
Thank you, Matt.
It did sound like you were talking to yourself.
Thank you, Matt.
You did well, Matt.
Have I had a chance to complain about my health on this podcast yet?
I don't think so.
It's hard to tell.
The way these podcasts are particular, Matt, who knows what happens when.
Yeah, but you were sick.
You were sick.
Genuinely sick.
Genuinely sick.
And now I'm still sick.
It takes a while to get better from Influenza A and or COVID.
I'm not sure which one I had.
Maybe both.
I'm thinking both.
Either that or I'm just older and more feeble than I thought I was.
But it takes a little while.
What you could have done when you were sick is read this book about how your immune system works.
I'm holding this up by Philip Detmer, the creator of Kurzgesagt.
Kurzgesagt, yeah.
Free advertisement.
We're not sponsored by Kurzgesagt.
We're contractually obliged to mention it once per episode.
It actually just makes me feel guilty when you talk about that book because that's exactly the kind of book I feel like I should read that I would get a lot out of.
It's beautifully illustrated.
It looks beautiful.
It looks very heavy.
It looks very thick.
It looks daunting.
It's not a book that a kid should read.
It's like 40...
Chapters or whatever.
I initially thought it would be good, you know, for my son.
But now it's just for me.
But I haven't read it either.
Just looked at it.
I will get it.
I will get it, though.
Now we're in the tail end of the podcast, and we did have a minor grievance at the beginning that we dealt with.
You had a grievance, but yeah.
We both...
There were grievances aired.
That's all we can say.
Whose grievance?
It's unclear.
It's a collective endeavor, this podcast.
But I did want to address a conspiracy theory that I saw on the subreddit about us because I think it's pretty good.
I like it.
All right.
So that's going to be our review of reviews.
And to tie it up, I also have some feedback about your geopolitical analysis of Scandinavia feedback.
So this is our review of review section today.
I expect the feedback to be, he nailed it.
That was it.
Yeah.
And we'll see.
Okay.
All right.
So let's get started.
Tell me about this conspiracy theory.
So, you know, our subreddit is occasionally, like all subreddits, feuding amongst itself about various topics.
And one which is a consistent source of disagreement is one Sam Harris.
Now, there are people on the subreddit that remain fans or generally positively disposed.
And there are people that think...
He's the spawn of Satan and destroying society, leading individuals one by one into the waiting hands of the Weinsteins and Jordan Peterson and worse folk, Tucker Carlson and so on.
Now, that's fine.
Everybody's allowed their own takes.
But somebody decided to do a poll to settle the issue of whether Sam Harris was a racist.
And he won a landslide victory that he's...
Not a racist, according to that poll, right?
So that settles the issue.
I think scientifically, pretty much that's how you run things and check.
You do subreddit polls.
But in the various discussions, I think it's there or somewhere else.
Anyway, the topic came up and there were some people, Matt, who suggested that you and I, we pull our punches when it comes to criticizing.
We'll say some things, you know, we'll take some critical comments, but we fundamentally cannot criticize him because we need to keep his fans sweet.
We've got this overlap of audiences and we don't want to alienate the Sam Harris fans.
So that's why I'm always praising him and why I'm never willing to say any strong criticism his way.
So we are in the pocket.
Of Big Harris.
I don't know if you noticed that, but how is that for a conspiracy theory?
Yeah, well, that is a good conspiracy theory.
Look, sorry to debunk it.
Because it's fun to have conspiracy theories, but there's simply nothing that Sam Harris fans could offer us that would really value.
I mean, I don't know.
What about money?
Do they give us money?
How much money do they give us?
Well, this is a question.
All Sam Harris fans, please send emails with the exact amount of money that you give us, just so I can tally it up.
Some people do have conspiratorial mindsets, because maybe if we wanted...
To make the podcast more profitable.
We might do something like search out advertisers rather than try to, you know...
Butter up the Sam Harris contingent.
Yeah.
Or mention the Patreon consistently.
Like, that would be another tactic.
But, you know, just this notion that that's it.
That explains why we don't have the exact same critique of Sam as someone else.
And I just...
I love it.
And, you know...
The part that I really appreciate about it is that comes on the back of, you know, the Sam Harris episode where me and him had an enjoyable conversation was some time ago, but we released a specific episode that was a response to his coverage of the lab leak controversy,
right?
We organized a panel of experts and we took clips from his show and framed it very much as a response to The experts that he had just presented.
Quite a critical response.
Some might say.
Some might say it was critical, but no.
Not critical enough, Chris.
Not critical enough.
Not critical enough.
I think it's because that's not what they want.
They want us to focus on, you know, his palling around with various people and his charity being unevenly applied.
All things which we've already said, but in any case...
Just so you know, Matt, I won't be tolerating after this episode any more criticism of Harris because that's our cash cry.
Okay?
Okay.
All right.
That's all right.
So if you're a Harris fan...
This episode is an outlier.
You're never going to hear him again on the show.
We won't hear a bad word said against Sam again.
You bring up Sam Harris like every episode.
No, not enough, Matt.
I don't say critically enough.
That's the problem.
According to the people, I only bring him up positively to praise him.
Well, I enjoy the subreddit.
I appreciate you guys.
I like it.
People are unhappy about my pronunciation.
That's the only thing I remember.
I don't say matrix correctly.
No, there's other things people are upset about.
They have to give you a long list of things.
But, you know, we're not here to massage the gripes of the subreddit.
Well, no, I do want to respond to one more concern that's been raised on the subreddit because I'm sympathetic to it.
I am sympathetic to it, which is there's been a couple of threads and engagement about maybe us transitioning to becoming like a Weinstein.
Watch.
Focusing more and more on the antics of Eric and Brett Weinstein.
Maybe have a hanging as well.
And I'm sympathetic.
I'm sympathetic because they are extremely entertaining.
And I'm actually open to the idea of, you know, revisiting them semi-regularly, play some clips.
I know what you're going to say, Chris.
We are returning to them.
We're going to be looking at Eric and UFOs.
It's going to be great.
People will love it.
Yeah, and we'll do that.
We'll do that.
Okay, okay.
I wasn't expecting you to go there, but that's fine.
That's fine.
Yeah, I have no objection to that, but no, we will not become a dedicated Eric and Brett podcast, but we will return to the world.
My self-esteem could not.
If my role in life was to be an obsessive Weinstein watcher, that was my contribution to society.
I couldn't go on, Chris.
I don't think I could, to be honest.
So yes, we won't do that, but we will return on occasion.
They're just funny swords.
If it wasn't for the fact that they promote right-wing partisans and anti-vaccine lunacy.
And encourage people, indeed, to engage in conspiratorial-style reasoning, then that would be all great.
Oh, sorry, and the alternative theories of evolution and physics that they promote, that would also be, you know, apart from all these things, all these things that they do, they would be harmless.
Yeah.
You know?
So much.
As I said, we're not here to talk about this subreddit.
That would be far too indulgent.
So let me turn instead to feedback we received on our Patreon.
Yeah, that's not indulgent.
But this is good.
This is taking you to task, which is what we want.
So after chastising you for your fawning over Sam Harris, now I need to tell you about what you've been up to and what you've got wrong in regards to Norway, Scandinavia.
Here we go.
I'm just going to read it, Matt.
Hello, Norwegian listener answering requests on more information on Scandinavians.
For the Norwegian part, we don't like Swedes.
Our culture has a joke category called Svenskvitser, translated Swede jokes, mostly centered on making fun of Swedes.
But Norwegians love to go shopping in Sweden due to cheaper products, and many Swedes move to Norway for work.
Oh, also, Norwegians love Danes, adore Danes.
I don't know why, as Denmark ruled over Norway for about 300 years and considered Norwegians a bunch of dumb farmers, maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe because Denmark signed over a piece of ocean territory to Norway in the 60s,
where Norwegians found oil and made Norway one of the richest countries in the world.
Based on GDP per capita.
And said, yes, probably the latter.
Norwegians understand the Swedish and Danish language.
And Danes and Swedes pretend not to understand Norwegian.
And Chris is right.
There is a huge difference between the Scandinavians.
Huge!
No, sadly, there's not.
But the stereotypes are Swedes are hip, politically correct bores.
Norwegians are jovial, outdoorsy, and naive.
Danes are alcoholic artists.
And Scandinavians share a lot of sentiments with Irish and Brits.
Norwegians perhaps are most like Scots.
Too direct, bordering on rude.
Do not shy away from profanities.
We love dark humor and sarcasm.
A sign of love is to take the piss out of someone.
Maybe that's why you have a lot of Norwegian listeners.
And by the way, Finland is not a part of Scandinavia.
So, that was...
Wait, wait, the last bit threw me.
Finland isn't part of Scandinavia?
That's out of the Norwegian's mouth.
That's what they said.
I think he should double-check that.
He?
He not?
Well, it looks like your misogyny has raised its ugly head again.
And this is not a he.
This is, and they demanded that I try to pronounce it phonetically.
You don't know whether it's a better order, do you, based on that name?
You have no idea.
It's Sarah Buh.
How would you pronounce B-O-M line?
I simply wouldn't.
It's got the line for it.
B-O with the line for it and then an E. I think it's like a...
Yeah, that sounds about right.
I just wouldn't try to pronounce it.
That would be my...
Sarah Gunnhals Buh.
That was a good letter.
I think they need to double check about Finland.
I'm not sure they're right about that.
They might need to.
No, I know Norwegians.
I know Norwegians.
And I've got colleagues in Finland, in Helsinki.
I knew the gist of it.
I knew the gist of it.
I didn't know that.
I've seen Frozen.
I don't know what I assumed.
I assumed it was just like everywhere else where it was the narcissism of small differences.
Like, you know, between the Northern Irish and the English.
No, no.
It's a huge...
There's a huge difference there, Matt.
One is good, one is bad.
It's like saying the Jedi are just like the Sith.
I won't say which one, though.
I'll leave that for people to decide on their own.
But yes, that was very good feedback from Sarah Gunhasbue.
So thank you very much for that.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for educating me about your proud peoples and your different but equally valid cultures.
Up there, where the sun don't shine.
Now, Matt, I'm going to thank our patrons.
I'm going to do it so goddamn well that you're not even going to know it has happened.
And yet, it will have happened.
So, here we go, Matt.
It's going to be the usual crapshoot as to who gets it.
And it starts like this.
Conspiracy Hypothesisers.
Cat Barrett.
Vanessa Parr, Wheelgate, Pump and Nikki, Christian F, Nikki Gray, Nick Daly, James Melly, Hey, these have added, David Walker, David R, Philip Tries-Life,
Oliver Church, Eric Spenson, Tristan Bella, Fraser, and Andrew Silicano.
That's all our conspiracy hypothesizers.
Great, great people.
Good names.
But you know...
What's a better name than the name of any of those Patreons?
The guy on Reddit whose handle is Tamla's Ghost.
Oh, that's really good.
Yeah.
I like that.
I can't stop doing the Norwegian thing now.
That's pretty good.
It's an ugly, ugly, ugly invitation there, Chris.
I apologize to our Norwegian Scandinavian friends.
Then we get told off, white accents, doing accents.
Well, look, this is my natural accent, okay?
It's just a dialect of Belfast.
Okay, so yeah, I play this clip now.
I feel like there was a conference.
That none of us were invited to.
That came to some very strong conclusions.
And they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
Now, I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
You're hearing from Joe!
You hear it from Joe, Matt.
It's so annoying when you hear these conspiracy theories like, yeah, Joe, you.
You're the one that says that.
I know.
I know.
Stop getting angry about the clips.
It should be worn off by now.
Well, you're going to hear the Peterson and Weinstein interactions, so let's see if it's worn off.
Revolutionary geniuses.
James Reid, Giovanni, Rebecca Christensen, you know her.
Oh, yes.
Hi, Rebecca.
Al Keith.
Greg Binder.
Peter Alstrom.
Kerry Stout.
I can't stop.
You can't help yourself, can you?
Jesse Hodges.
Jordan Fernandez.
Thomas Clark.
And Bob Gower.
Oh, and Sean Gibby, again.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, one and all.
Thank you, one and all.
I'm usually running, I don't know.
70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Chris, that reminded me with that clip from Jordan Hall there at the beginning.
Like, not only would it be fun to return to the Weinsteins occasionally, just with some choice, select little clips for everyone to enjoy, but there are so many other people in the Guru's sphere that we could return to, just occasionally, when a little treat comes along.
Catch up with our old friends.
Yeah, I know.
There was a thing, again, on the Reddit.
Where Jordan Hall, I clipped with him talking about how he can teach you to play guitar in one minute.
I sent that to you.
That was hilarious.
Hilarious.
Can he do that?
Well...
Does he deliver?
We'll have to play the clip.
Let's play the clip next time.
Next episode.
We'll play the clip and just a few fun clips.
These things come along.
Okay, okay.
So, galaxy bring gurus though, Matt.
The shining stars in the guru sky.
Kyle Wilson.
That's one of them.
Now, you might be saying, where's the other ones?
That's the question, Matt, that we want to know.
And we have answers.
We've got Brendan Smith.
We've got Couch.
Just Couch.
Just an object.
That could be Couch.
That could be Couch.
That could be my mate in Sydney.
I know Couch.
As in Grass Couch.
Yeah.
Grass Couch, is it?
Well, okay.
Couch.
Cheers, Couch.
Have a bong for me.
It might be a guy.
If his name is Cooch, he sounds like a guy.
He's a middle-aged lawyer.
He doesn't smoke bongs.
His name is Cooch?
Well, that's his handle.
Come on.
Let a man live.
Let him live.
Let him be.
Sounds like Stonefish or something.
Anyway, yes, well, I appreciate his highest tier response or highest tier support for us.
So forget all that.
Good.
Couch, Cooch, whatever.
All good.
All good.
Yeah.
He brought me down.
So, Mark Curran, him as well.
Rob Leslie Jr., not the senior.
Unfortunately, couldn't get the senior.
Jennifer Nelson.
Karen Urquhart.
Urquhart.
Urquhart.
How would you pronounce that?
Yeah, Urquhart.
Urquhart.
Yes, yes.
Alex Anderson.
Chase.
Chase.
And Matt.
Last.
But certainly, not least, two people we've found before, but have somehow popped up on the sheet.
Dan Gilbert, bad stats himself, and mad half.
Yeah.
Oh, Sam Hurd, photography.
Oh, yeah.
Look, as a token of appreciation to Dan for being a gold-tier patron, we should steal some of his Jordan Peterson clips and Weinstein clips.
As a token of respect, this could work.
Yeah, Thomas T as well, Matt.
Dale Morris, good old Dale.
I'm sure we've said thanks to him before, but a wise man.
Yep, yep.
Thanks to him.
He's got heart.
He's got good heart?
He's got heart.
No, I don't know if it's good or not, but he's got heart.
He's got heart.
He knows a thing or two about Buddhism.
I'd say that as well.
Someone who may or may not know about Buddhism is Breen Niklasen.
I cannot watch.
For the Dharma knowledge there.
But that's the last galaxy brain guru for this week, Matt.
Well, that was a surprisingly large group.
Because I just worked out a new way to find them.
So, yeah, that's why.
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.
Nor should you.
Nor should you.
Keep your wits about you.
Well, so we'll be back, Matt.
We'll be back soon enough for another exciting decoding and we'll include some nice clips of people doing nice things or silly things or teaching us how to play the guitar in one minute just for fun.
We'll do it.
We'll do it.
Be more fun.
More fun in future episodes.
So don't worry if this episode wasn't as fun as you might have hoped.
There's more fun on the way.
A rollercoaster.
A steamroller of fun.
Poor old Alermatt.
That's throwing shit in the last one minute.
I'm disappointed in you.
No, current Matt is not talking about Alermatt, of course.
He's just talking about, you know, the general things.
I'm being too critical of our intro and outro.
That's what I'm thinking of.
That's all right.
We'll edit it down, Matt.
It'll be perfect.
It'll be perfect.
All right.
Any final thoughts for our listeners, Chris?
Any advice?
Anything they should be doing?
Hold on.
Hold on.
I'm getting it.
I'm getting it.
God, the tension is killing me.
Pay attention to the distributed idea suppression complex and watch out for the good institutional narrative.
Wow.
Wow.
Stunning, Chris.
Stunning.
That went to bed.
A poo from The Simpsons.
No, I was thinking the guy from The Muppets, you know, the chef.
Oh, the Swedish chef?
Okay, that's good.
Yeah.
That's not good.
It's not good, but we'll let it be.
We'll let it go.
I apologize to everyone in Scandinavia, including the Finns.
Hell.
They're probably offended as well.
That's it.
That's it.
We've got them all.
And as we always like to say...
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