Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, public intellectual, ex-New Atheist, card-returning IDWer, and someone who likely needs no introduction. This is especially the case if you are a DTG listener as we recently released a full-length decoding episode on Sam.Following that episode, Sam generously agreed to come on to address some of the points we raised in the Decoding and a few other select topics. As you will hear we get into some discussions of the lab leak, what you can establish from introspection and the nature of self, motivations for extremism, coverage of the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and selective application of criticism.Also covered in the episode are Andrew Huberman's dog and his thanking eyes, Joe Rogan's condensed conspiracism, and the value of AI protocol searches.LinksOur Decoding Episode on SamOur interview with three virologists on the Lab LeakKevin Drum's blog. 'I read the entire Slack archive about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. There is no evidence of improper behaviour'New York Magazine article by Eric Levitz 'Sam Harris’s Fairy-Tale Account of the Israel-Hamas Conflict' Making Sense Podcast Episode 351: 5 Myths about Israel and the War in GazaMaking Sense Podcast Episode 352: Hubris & Chaos- A Conversation with Rory StewartGlobal Catastrophic Risk Institute: The Origin and Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Expert Survey. The Israel Democracy Institute. War in Gaza Public Opinion Survey (2): See Question 15. Atran, S. (2016). The devoted actor: Unconditional commitment and intractable conflict across cultures. Current Anthropology, 57(S13), S192-S203.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand why they're talking about what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh.
How are you doing today, Chris?
Good, dude.
I'm doing well.
Insight smart from the realm of psychology, the world of anthropology.
That's where we bring the expertise from.
We gather insights from these disciplines and we apply them critically.
To guru material.
That's what we do, Matt.
That's what we're here for.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know a bit about psychology as well.
You're not just an anthropologist.
I'm a professor of psychology.
Oh, yeah.
Associate professor.
Associate professor of psychology.
Yes, I do.
I'm published in many psychology journals.
I'm published in one philosophy journal.
Take that, philosophers.
And it's a German philosophy journal.
I remember when I published that article, a couple of articles in Vaccine.
It's obviously a vaccine.
And I thought, you know, I'm a medical researcher now.
You're a vaccine scientist.
If we were gurus, we could just be like, you know, well, I'm a neuroscientist now.
I'm published in Cognition.
Like, you know, that's it.
So, yeah, yeah, that's what we are up to.
We're working hard, like the little busy beaver academics that we are.
We're back now from our winter retreat.
We are going to have a special guest on this episode, but before that, Matt, there's a couple of goings on in the guru sphere.
I need to raise your attention.
Yes, you like to do this, don't you?
Is it something nice?
Something nice happened?
Somebody killed a puppy?
I'll let you be the judge of that.
Why don't you listen to this?
It's just a short segment.
It's just over a minute long.
How much badness can be in one minute?
Let's listen.
How many people were promoters of the vaccine and then died suddenly?
It's crazy how many fucking young people just died in their sleep after they took it.
And everybody's like, nothing to see here.
Sudden adult death syndrome.
Yeah.
Just died suddenly you ever go to the died suddenly Instagram page like holy shit There's so many and so many people like talking about people who are you know anti Darwin anti-vaxxers, and then then you're dead Sorry you bought you bought into the wrong bullshit,
but that's You know, if you really want to get cruel, that's Darwinism.
Do you not know they lie by now?
Are you not aware of the opioid crisis?
Are you not aware of Vioxx?
Are you not aware of the various, like, 25% of all FDA-approved drugs that get pulled?
It's one out of four.
And you're like, what are you, an anti-vax?
What are you, a conspiracy theorist?
You fool.
Darwin's going to do its work with you.
You're modifying your genes, you fucking idiot.
Like, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
You're just gonna trust Pfizer?
Well, they do support Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer.
So that was Joey Reagan, was it?
Yeah, that was it.
Yeah, old Joseph displaying his keen insight on a range of topics, but mostly circulating around the vaccines and the sudden deaths that they've caused.
Have you not noticed that...
All the vaccinated people, they're just dropping dead.
Like, there was an Instagram.
There's an Instagram page called Sudden Deaths.
Yeah, Died Suddenly.
Died Suddenly.
Yeah, that's it.
So, there's a movie of the same name, which has actually included people in that movie that claims that have died who are still alive.
So, you know, they died suddenly and returned to life equally as suddenly.
But, yeah, so, you know, it's anti-vax.
Rhetoric, stupid stuff, but it's how much he crams into one minute, which is quite impressive.
Like, he demonstrates that he thinks the vaccines are killing lots of people, right?
And that his source of information from this is Boomer posts, you know, anti-vax Instagram accounts that he saw.
And he does the funny voice, you know, like the, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, like critics will say, ooh, trust the science, that marking thing.
And he manages at the end to mention that you're all being credulous, you're all just, you know, accepting the corporate things, and it's changing your DNA.
Yeah, like if he believes that vaccines are actually rewriting your DNA.
Then, you know, he's pretty far gone.
Like, he's in the extreme level.
And I know that he devotes, like, a lot of time to anti-vax stuff now and has been doing for a long time.
Yeah, he's still talking about it.
Yeah.
Like, every week.
Yeah, and, like, he's, you know, the biggest podcast in the world.
In terms of the impact, Joe Rogan's impact in terms of actual medical misinformation, it's got to dwarf some of the other influences out there, like your John Campbells and your Brett Weinsteins.
Just the sheer magnitude with Joe Rogan, like how much anti-vax drivel he spews multiplied by his reach.
He's got to be responsible for a lot of deaths, I've got to say.
Yeah, and you do also get from that clip that he's still very afraid.
Like, you know, his whole thing is, you know, making fun of the people that are getting vaccinated and boosted and, you know, they're just too afraid to go outside.
But you can see that, like, actually, he's really afraid of the vaccine.
Like, he thinks that if he gets it, the side effects are very...
Likely to kill them.
He talks about, you know, how he's dodged a bullet by not getting the Pfizer vaccine when the UFC was kind of mandating that.
And, yeah, like, it's just this funny thing because back at the start of the pandemic, like a lot of people, Joe was also very, very concerned about catching the virus.
He talked on the show about waking up at the night, like, sweating about the danger that he was in.
And this is a common thing that you see.
In the anti-vax arena that they have like a hyper concern about the sanctity of their body and while at the same time presenting everyone else as being these scared sheeple.
But like Rogan is probably out of a lot of public figures the one that is most still focused on vaccines and the dangers they pose and the virus and all that long after most people that are vaccinated have stopped thinking about it.
Yeah, we've talked about this before, which is it almost seems like existential fears with someone like Joe Rogan.
He's afraid of contamination.
He's afraid of getting sick.
He's afraid of taking the medicine.
He's afraid of getting old.
He's afraid of getting weak, and hence the testosterone and things like that.
I mean, I think it goes to one of the things that's always interested me, which is why do some topics attract a high degree of conspiracism?
Misinformation and delusional beliefs and not others.
So, for instance, why?
I don't know.
Pick something random, like how you mow the grass in your backyard or something.
That doesn't attract the same level of delusional beliefs as health-related issues like COVID.
And it's because these are existential concerns, things to do with your health, things associated with potentially getting sick, getting old and dying.
And that's why the wellness industry and the diet industry...
And they're optimizers and stuff like that.
That's why it's so weird because we're squishy biological creatures and we're all terrified, well, just to one degree or another.
I know you and I have repressed it effectively, but people express it differently.
We're all, you know, unable to deal with the existential facts of our own mortality.
We're all managing the existential dread, the terror in different ways.
And some are just more unhealthy than others.
But speaking of which, Matt, the other movement in the guru bodies that I wanted to raise your attention, it's actually related.
Or maybe it's related.
Let's see what you think.
There was an Instagram comment under a post by Peter Adia about neutering.
And whether or not it's good or not, but our good friend Andrew Huberman responded, and I'll just read what he wrote, okay?
I put Costello, my bulldog mastiff, on TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, when he was nine years old, and it dramatically reduced his shedding, joint pain, and boosted his mood.
And no, he did not mind more often after that.
He just looked at me with thanking eyes.
I have a close relative who is a veterinarian and said this is becoming more common practice.
I regret I neutered him, but I'm sure that I'll catch a lot of flack for saying it.
He lived to be 11, which is a good age for his breed.
So Huberman believes so much in the importance of testosterone and TRT as this very beneficial thing for virility.
Various other things that his old pup, his dog of nine years old, had to go on TRT.
So the point that I want to make there is, one, it illustrates that if you're injecting your dog with testosterone, you're really, you know, at true believer levels of that.
And secondly, that Huberman mentions, you know, these positive outcomes.
He shed less and had less joint pain.
But really, I think the crucial...
Criteria that he was working from is that he mentions it boosted this dog's mood and that the dog looked at him with fanking eyes.
And I think that speaks to the level of evidence that, you know, it takes to get Herberman to regard some treatment as a success.
I'm kind of imagining Scooby-Doo.
I mean, even if you assume Grant.
That the testosterone is doing wonderful things for the dog, right?
It's the best thing for him.
The idea that the dog could somehow be aware that these benefits were attributed to...
That was from the ejection.
The ejection.
Yeah.
Dogs famously good with their long-duration causal reasoning.
Yeah.
They know what's going on, Chris.
They know.
They know.
Yeah, because I'm sure that dog was jabbed.
Famously, dogs enjoy injections or, you know, however you give it.
Maybe you just give it in the food.
I don't know how you do TRT.
I know when we take our dog to the vet and, you know, he's got to have the injections.
He looks at me with thanking eyes afterwards because he knows they're good for him.
He does it.
He hates it.
He hates the entire experience.
He doesn't understand why we've been so mean to him.
Yeah, because actually, I was thinking, well, if it's not an injection, if it's food, then, you know, the dog maybe...
But that's even worse because...
Then how would the dog even know?
Unless Huberman told him, right?
Because it's not like, oh, my food tastes different.
What did Andrew put in there?
And then, you know, later, oh, I'm feeling more muscular.
And then, oh, thank you, Andrew.
And communicate it with his eyes.
Yeah.
And also on Huberman News, he developed an AI.
Which lets you ask questions so that you can search his protocols.
I think it goes through transcripts of his show.
So I went on and asked the questions about, you know, what's he said about grounding?
But the ones that I was most curious about is, what has Andrew Huberman said about vaccines?
And has he ever recommended COVID vaccines?
And I already knew the answers, but with vaccines, it was like, oh, Andrew has never discussed vaccines.
He did highlight the...
Issue about autism and vaccines and that the evidence is not strong.
So it kind of says he's never covered it.
And with COVID vaccines, it again kind of emphasizes that he hasn't made any strong statements about it.
And he decided not to talk about it because it's outside his area of expertise.
Very responsible.
That's a stance that he doesn't seem to apply consistently.
But the AI, you know, when it was giving the answer, it did mention that he has on a couple of occasions discussed.
COVID vaccines in different contexts.
And invariably, the context is that he's raising the need for empathy about alternative points of view and that there are side effects that we have to consider.
So it's just...
All of it is kind of...
He hasn't said anything, but what he has said has emphasized that there's two sides to every story.
So thank him for that service.
That was a useful thing that he's developed there.
You can search his protocols.
Yeah, that is good.
That is good.
I won't be searching his protocols, but it's good to know it's there.
Okay.
Huberman and Rogan, both testosterone addled.
Oddballs.
With perfectly healthy attitudes towards their approaching senescence and mortality.
But let's leave them floating out there in the Guru Galaxy and turn to the episode that we have for people today.
So today, Matt, we have a right to reply slash discussion slight debate with one Sam Harris.
I don't think...
We need to introduce him to many people in our audience, but he is a public intellectual, has written books on atheism, on free will, on the nature of self, on telling the truth,
on various things.
And he has a successful podcast and a successful app for meditation and introspective practices.
Talked to him previously.
We covered his material recently on a podcast and he agreed to come on and, you know, discuss with us some of the things that we said and some broader topics.
Yeah, he exercised his right to reply since we formally covered him on Decoding the Gurus.
And look, he gave a little introduction to him there.
But honestly, if you're listening to Decoding the Gurus and you don't know who Sam Harris is, then yep.
You might be lost, I don't know.
Yeah, this is true.
So, you know, we already know what's happened by the magic of podcasting.
It's already occurred.
So I did want to take this opportunity just to mention, Matt, that there's one point during the discussion, as you might anticipate, there's, you know, back and forth and whatnot.
And I will say, this time I don't mention tribalism.
Not even once I didn't say it.
Okay?
I was tempted to clarify.
But if you go back and listen to the original episode where that came up.
I actually did, at the introduction of that episode, explain where part of the divergence of perspectives were.
So if you want to hear that, go there.
We tried not to cover the same ground as before, but there were some restrictions about the time and whatnot.
So at the end, it ends up a little bit rushed and condensed, but that's the nature.
Of people being busy and having schedules and whatnot.
But I deserve the credit because I didn't mention tribalism, so you all can't complain.
I mean, tribalism is one of our banned topics.
There'll be no talk of tribalism on our podcast ever again.
The other thing that we're never going to read again is that we're not going to talk about the nature of consciousness and whether it's a mystery or not.
No, that's banned.
You keep saying that.
I'm certain.
Let's wait until Kevin Mitchell comes on and let's see what happens.
No, I don't want to...
Okay.
But that's not what I wanted to mention, Matt.
That was me just giving myself credit.
But I wanted just one very quick thing to know.
At the end, we're talking about somewhat sensitive topics about the far right and rising authoritarianism in various European states.
And Sam is giving his thoughts there.
And during that, he ends up characterizing the UK and London in particular, almost as if it has fallen to a stealth.
I do not think it is fair to present London as having fallen to the jihadis,
nor Do I think that all the protesters at the various anti-war marches or critical of Israel marches are all supporting Hamas?
There are segments of that audience that at least have a rather ambivalent or selective position on that.
But I think a lot of people are just, you know, lefty anti-war types.
Sure, sure.
Yep.
Okay, so that unvoiced disagreement, dearly noted there, Chris.
I obviously was nodding along furiously.
I agreed with every word, but, you know.
That's right.
It only applies to me.
Where you don't hear my object, that means that he signs off.
So just keep that in mind and send your correspondence his way.
Yep.
Okay, that's all good.
So let's move on.
Yeah.
So anyway, let's get to the interview and I'll see you after for a little debrief.
Okay, and so here we have with us Sam Harris.
Thanks very much for joining us, Sam, and exercising your right to reply and hopefully having an interesting chat with Chris as well.
Yeah, good to see you, gentlemen.
I believe, Sam, that you listened to the episode that we did on you, which must have been a joy, a great entertaining moment, and have some points that you'd like to raise with us or push back on.
And then assuming we end up with time, there's some other topics that we might cover that we have different opinions on, but I think some of them might come up in the points that
Yeah, happy to do it.
Yeah, well, I seem to remember, again, I did listen to the audio, but it's been a while.
I seem to remember two things stood out.
One is that you...
Faulted me for my lab leak episode with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan.
You seemed to wish that I had done much more adversarial research and was far less credulous on the point of the lab leak hypothesis.
And you seemed to suggest that I had some commitment to believing.
In a lab leak as opposed to a zoonotic origin, which really I don't.
I mean, my only hobby horse to ride into that conversation was that the lab leak hypothesis always struck me as totally plausible and not at all racist.
And as you know, it was immediately condemned as a racist symptom of bigotry, largely because some version of it had come out of Trump's mouth.
But it was always plausible, and it is, in fact, still plausible.
I've since listened to your episode, which followed mine, where you had your experts on.
And yes, if I had heard that before I recorded with Matt and Alina, I might have asked a few more skeptical questions.
But the truth is, even in the aftermath of hearing your episode, the jury's still out.
It's still totally respectable to believe that a lab leak is at least still possible.
And as you know, the intelligence community is split on it.
I think the FBI and the DOE still claim that it's likely of lab origin based on evidence that is not publicly available, if I'm not mistaken.
and as for trusting the community of virologists,
This also came out a little bit in my episode with Matt and Alina.
There are reasons to worry that the world's leading virologists were not altogether forthcoming, both around what happened and around what they actually suspected.
Donald McNeil, the New York Times writer who...
He's covered pandemics for 25 years for the Times until he was defenestrated for woke reasons, as you might know.
He just came out with a book talking about how he knows that some of the leading virologists in America really lied to him.
I mean, they kind of circled the wagons, and I think through a Freedom of Information Act, he got their Slack communication, and they were...
They were collaborating to lead him astray when he was reporting on the possibility of a lab leak early on, again, working for the New York Times.
And he's talked about that in his book.
Again, this has come out since I recorded my podcast.
So, again, if I were going to do that interview again with Matt and Alina, I would plow in a few of your skeptical points from your episode, certainly.
It's just, it's still sort of in coin toss zone for me, whether it's zoonotic or lab leak.
And we certainly can't trust the CCP to be forthcoming and transparent on this subject.
I mean, they have not been good collaborators at all in this.
They've just been stark adversaries as far as I know.
So, you know, I don't trust the virologists entirely.
I've done other episodes on...
My concern around virus hunting and, you know, the deep vision program that has since been abandoned for the United States was, in my mind, a total scandal intellectually and ethically.
I think a lot of that work is deeply suspect, and the fact that there are any virologists who don't see that now is of great concern to me.
So, yeah, I mean, that's just, you know, that's kind of my vomiting up my memory of what my reaction was when I heard your criticism.
There's a couple of points there, Sam.
I think one thing that we would definitely agree on is that it's not off the table to reasonable scientists, non-scientists who consider the possibility of a lab leak.
And I think all of the experts that we...
Discussed with also made that point.
And also that even that it's perfectly reasonable that people would be sceptical when they hear various details and that we are right to not trust the CCP account, which to be clear, they were also denying that there are any relevant animals being sold in markets initially and so on.
So the CCP, like not being forthcoming seems like A given that most actors in this space would agree on.
Actually, the one point I would add there, which I forgot to say, is that it's always struck me as strange that there is this preference for the zoonotic wet market story.
Because that actually strikes me as, politically, the more invidious, and not to say racist, account.
I just think it's a worse look for the Chinese to be maintaining these Atrocious wet markets at, you know, and imperiling all of humanity because they can't figure out how to stop eating raccoon dogs and pangolins and all the other crap they have in these markets piled on top of each other.
It's just that that looks more barbaric and insane than a lab leak.
Lab leaks happen to everyone.
The most civilized, most careful societies.
Have lab leaks.
We know that.
And it's a great concern.
But the idea that there would be this passionate bias as a hedge against so-called racism and xenophobia for a zoonotic origin makes absolutely no sense to me.
Yeah.
Of course, you're talking about political narratives and preferences.
Right, but that is the preference I detect in the reaction to anyone who is...
Speculated about a lab leak.
Yeah.
I mean, the other lens to look at it, I mean, this is how we try to approach it, is that you focus on the scientific evidence rather than the spin either way.
And, you know, as far as I understand, the scientific consensus has only firmed up since the interviews that you had and we had.
You know, the discourse is always there.
There's always political stuff going on.
Trump was definitely using the issue as a political football.
There was definitely a reaction against that, claiming about xenophobia and racism, whatever.
But that's all on the surface of the discourse, right?
Underneath that, you either believe that all the scientists are corrupt and they're all in the pocket of somebody, or you believe that there is actually a community of career virologists, experts and specialists who don't really care much.
about Trump or the CCP or anything like that and are actually beavering away to figure out the evidence on where the virus actually came from.
And I would say, Sam, that the experts we spoke to, one of them, Michael Warby, for example, was on a paper originally arguing for more efforts to be put into investigating the lab leak origins, but he subsequently changed his position based on...
You know, investigations and evidence.
And all the experts that we talked to in that episode, they weren't saying it's racist to ever consider it.
They were saying the overwhelming weight of evidence continues to point to this being likely.
You know, they were talking about the genetic evidence and the epidemiological evidence and so on.
On the counter side, and this is kind of the criticism, I think the main criticism that at least I was levying, is that very recently there was an expert survey on the general weight that you attach a probability to a lab leak versus a natural.
Zoonosis origin.
And the results show from epidemiologists and virologists, overwhelmingly, the consensus is that a lab leak is less likely.
It's something like 80% and relevant virologists were on the side of natural zoonosis being more likely.
But that's still saying that there's scope for disagreement.
Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, in this case, when you spoke to them, they presented the case that there was a very strong implication that virologists are potentially conspiring to hide their own culpability.
And in the case of a lot of the people that we're talking to, that clearly doesn't seem to be the motivation.
Whereas on the lab leak side, there are people who now have profiles purely.
About promoting the lab leak as a possibility.
And in the case of Matt Ridley, who I know is a respected science writer, and I know that many people are fond of him, Richard Dawkins reads him and so on, but he also does have a history of advocating various fringe positions, including non-climate contrarianism,
alternative origins, the HIV, AIDS.
Well, just to be clear, that I knew nothing about.
But again, you have to take people's views as they come.
I mean, obviously, some people can entertain sufficiently crazy ideas that I would never want to talk to them.
And RFK Jr. is one of those people.
But yeah, I mean, Matt is a totally respected science writer about biology, and he's written a bunch of books that many people have found valuable.
And as you say, Dawkins is one of them.
And yeah, I can't...
You know, I can't be held responsible for views of his that I'm not aware of.
I know he's been somewhat contrarian with respect to climate, but there's a bunch of people in that bin who we can't cancel.
You know, you talked about, usually in the context of the rampant conspiracism that you see all over the place, but including in, I don't know, the Brett Weinstein side of the ad, wherever that is, right?
You know, or Alex Jones or Elon Musk.
And they show a tendency to endorse a wide variety of conspiracies.
It isn't just one.
It's, you know, that there is a history of conspiracism that it should lower your assessment when they're alleging.
Another conspiracy, right?
Like at least, not that the conspiracy is true, but the fact that they are alleging it means something significant because they are prone to allege conspiracies.
So in that case, I heard you very eloquently talk about with Joe Rogan or Brett Weinstein that they're selecting experts on COVID, you know, people like Pierre Corey or Robert Malone, Peter McCulloch, who have genuine credentials.
They then give their audience the impression that because there's no respectable figure to kind of like debate back the following week, that the fringe position is much more firm and convincing than it is.
So there seemed a potential parallel there from if your podcast has on like Alina Chan and Matt Ridley.
And then leaves the lab like issue alone.
I would imagine that a lot of your audience would come away thinking that a lot of the criticisms that they put are convincing because they pushed them in a very convincing way.
So like the experts that we had on, if you think those questions are worth answering, why not seek out to raise them with them?
Well, again, I would have had I known them.
Again, you did your podcast after I did mine, right?
I need a time machine to be fully informed.
And it is true that I didn't do much more than read their book to prepare for that interview.
So it's not like I went into this having preloaded my brain with lots of reasons to be skeptical of their thesis.
The line we took in that interview was, I thought, fairly balanced.
I mean, anyone listening to that interview would come out feeling like, well, the lab leak certainly seems very likely or more likely than not, perhaps.
But it was still sort of in coin toss zone.
It wasn't like this is 99%, you know, we have a 90-90% confidence that it was of lab origin.
And neither Matt nor Alina were claiming that.
I mean, I think I've probably, hearing your interviews, I probably became a little more skeptical of the lab leak origin.
But still, now, I mean, again, it's still not a decided question.
You still have the Department of Energy and the FBI saying it's likely based on evidence that we can't see.
And again, you should listen to Donald McNeil's account or read his account in his recent book of what it was like to deal with the virologists.
There was a circling of the wagons.
There was a pretending to be settled on zoonotic origin when behind closed doors they were saying, oh shit, this looks like a lab leak.
That doesn't answer the basic scientific charge.
Your guess made, which I think is very interesting.
I forget some of the details, but if memory serves, perhaps the most interesting was that it looks like there were two origin stories that suggest more of a zoonotic origin as opposed to a lab leak origin.
But in any case, it's...
Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know that we can extract much more wisdom from this.
I realize I didn't do the interview you wished I had done, but it is just true that I, you know, I did not have much prior bias one way or the other going in.
It just, my really strong bias was everyone who was claiming that the lab leak thesis was racism was a moron.
Right?
And should be chastised as such until the end of the world.
So that's still where I stand.
Okay.
I think Chris disputes some of the minor points in some of that, but we're not going to let him respond.
We can let the lab leak lie, I think, for now.
So, Sam, was there anything else you wanted to respond to from that episode?
Well, I think I remember you, I forget how you...
What your focus was in the conversation, but you seem to be saying that many of my claims about what one can realize through meditation, I think in particular the illusoriness of the self, that those were kind of merely subjective claims that I was kind of trumping up into some greater than rational.
status as objective claims, right?
The path by which I'm seeking to make credible claims about the nature of human subjectivity is not one that can actually be walked because all it really is is a matter of personal experience or personal opinion down that path.
I mean introspection on some level can't bear I mean, you might want to just give your criticism again so that our listeners can hear it, but what seemed to be happening for me is that you were confusing the linguistic claims for the reality indicated,
right?
Like, yes, when talked about, it is just language, right?
These are just...
You know, small mouth noises that I'm making now and anything I say about the nature of mind is just going to be a string of sentences.
But what I'm talking about isn't just at bottom a string of sentences.
And there are features of the mind that we can only experience directly from a first-person side about which we can nevertheless make objective claims, right?
These are not merely subjective claims, not merely bias, not merely personal.
There's a functionally infinite number of things you can say about the mind from a first-person point of view, which are nonetheless objective, epistemologically objective while ontologically subjective.
I think I got lost somewhere there, Chris.
Sorry.
And it's partly that I'm a little bit vague about the crux of the issue.
Actually, let me just sharpen that up with a couple of claims.
I mean, again, it may sound hyperbolic for me to say you can make an infinite number of claims about the mind, the subjectivity of people that are nevertheless objective, but you obviously can, right?
So, for instance, I can say, you know, what was John F. Kennedy thinking the moment he got assassinated, right?
Well, we don't know, but there's an infinite number of things he wasn't thinking, and we can rule those out, absolutely, right?
He was not...
Attempting to factor the largest prime number human beings have discovered in the years since, right?
He wasn't thinking about string theory.
He wasn't thinking about what a genius Edward Witten is, right?
Just add your propositions that he was not entertaining ad libidum.
These are objective claims about his mind, right?
We know these are things that we can rule out.
So we're talking about his subjectivity.
We're talking about what it was like to be him from a first-person point of view.
And we're making claims about what wasn't there in his conscious mind.
And so that's just one way to see that you can make objective claims about subjective states of mind without any doubt.
Engaging in introspective practices.
Concede that there are basic experiences, that the nature of the way that human minds operate, that if somebody is to engage in introspective practices in a certain way, that they will very likely have those experiences.
And I think that accords with what you're saying about being able to make statements that are objectively true or that you can introspect and see for yourself if it's easy to not make thoughts about the future and past arise in your mind when you just sit.
It would be very strange if somebody sat down and said, oh, I had no problem doing that, that you'd met a quite interesting person in that case.
But from there, there are plenty of different introspective traditions and spiritual, religious, philosophical practices that...
Investigate mind using introspective practices and arrive at rather different conclusions about the nature of mind.
Now, there are mystics and comparative religious people who have tried to argue that they're essentially just grasping the elephant from all different points, but the conclusions of a transcendental meditation practitioner and a Dzogchen Buddhist are often different because In part of the framing that those traditions have provided to help interpret those experiences.
And our argument, I think, is that you, like all people who engage in those practices, have inherited a particular, like, interpretive framework, which you tend to present as reflecting a kind of universal insight that People from any tradition could have.
It's universal if it's true, right?
So I fully agree with you that there are different traditions and they don't totally agree.
And from my point of view, the various traditions are more or less cluttered with concepts.
Some concepts are more useful than others.
Some teachings, you know, I do somewhat take the Buddhist view that some teachings are more appropriate for...
Different sorts of people.
So there's a kind of a skillful means argument.
So some of these differences, seeming differences of opinion can be reconciled with a different skillful, differences of skillful means, depending on the audience.
But I think, yes, I think there are maps that fit the territory better than others.
But there is a territory.
You're talking at the leading edge.
Yes, there might be differences of opinion.
There's certainly differences with respect to the metaphysical picture suggested by the experiences that practitioners have.
And I'm very slow to draw any metaphysical conclusions from any experience.
I'm fairly skeptical about all of that.
I don't tend to talk like Deepak Chopra and say that because you experienced this thing in the darkness of your closed eyes, you now know something about cosmology, right?
What I claim is that we can make objective claims about the nature of experience, not about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of meditation.
And there are many claims that there would be no disagreement about, really, no matter how different the traditions are.
For instance, that thoughts arise and pass away, right?
Your thoughts are not permanent.
There's this experience of, first, that particular thought of what you ate for lunch yesterday wasn't there a moment ago, and now it's there, and there it's gone, right?
So there's a transitory quality to the flow of thought.
To each increment of thought that you can think about distinctly or experience distinctly.
So anyone who's claiming that that doesn't happen and thoughts are permanent, that would be an odd person to have a conversation with.
It's almost like saying that sounds are permanent or sentences are permanent.
This sentence eventually comes to an end.
Period.
Full stop.
So does the analogous thought.
But again, certain things follow from that, right?
So if you can notice the transitory nature of mental objects, thoughts included, and emotions, a state of anger can't be permanent, right?
Because it wasn't there a moment ago.
Whatever physiology that constitutes it in this moment is...
By the sheer fact that it arose, it will prove impermanent.
It's not going to be there for a week and a half, right?
It's not even going to be there for an hour.
It's not even going to be there.
So here we get closer to an objective claim that's kind of interesting and certainly psychologically useful.
The claim is that it's not going to be there for even minutes.
Unless you get lost in thought about the reasons why you're angry again.
So you can't sustain the emotional reaction of anger for more than orders of seconds or tens of seconds, I would claim, unless you get lost in thought in a very dreamlike way,
identified with thought about why you're angry, right?
And so this is the first useful thing I've said from a meditative point of view.
That offers a key to how you can become free of anger if you want to be.
You can notice the linkage between thought and emotion and break the connection.
You can notice thoughts as thought and how they're impermanent.
You can notice the physiology of anger and how it's impermanent.
And you can continually break the spell of identification with thought and notice that an emotion like anger has a certain half-life and is very, very brief, right?
Astoundingly brief.
And there's liberation from anger to be found in that.
Again, this is anyone adequate to the task of observing this, right?
And not everybody is, and it takes a little training to become so, can converge on an agreement about the nature of this experience, right?
And anyone who says, oh, no, that's complete bullshit.
Whenever I get angry, it lasts for 17 hours, and I'm not thinking at all at that time.
I know that person is unable to witness certain things about them, about what it's like to be them, based on just a lack of facility or a lack of training.
And you can know that every bit as much as you can know, you know, that somebody claiming to run a three-minute mile is just, he's got a broken stopwatch, right?
It's just not happening.
Sam, I might jump in and reply.
I'm a little bit vague on exactly what my issue was too.
I think it partly could be the idea of pointing to subjective experience and like, for instance, the benefits you experience from meditation as the kind of evidence for a particular way of looking at things.
I don't dispute that that may well be true.
Nothing against meditation.
I'm all for self-reflection.
I'm all for taking a pause, practicing a bit of self-awareness, especially the way you just phrased it then.
It's kind of just good advice, right?
It's homespun wisdom, perhaps, in some ways, but that's the kind of advice I'd give to a young person, for instance, who is a bit emotional and not practicing a bit of self-reflection.
The problem is when we point to Our own subjective experiences, right?
Like the immense calmness and groundedness that we're experiencing by doing X, then ultimately other people have to take it on faith a little bit, right?
Unless they do the thing that we're telling them to do.
So in terms of epistemology or whatever, it's not fundamentally that different from the revealed truth that a mystic doing any other kind of thing.
Saying that he's getting messages from God or pulling them out of a hat or something like that.
I know it's more elegant.
It's quite different because, again, I'm not making that the lurch into metaphysics, right?
If you're claiming to be hearing the voice of God, right?
Now, you might be claiming to hear voices, and that can be an honest claim about which I really wouldn't doubt.
If someone said to me, you know, listen, I hear a voice and it's not my own, well...
You know, then we're talking about schizophrenia or we're talking about, you know, something.
But the claim that this is the voice of God is a metaphysical claim.
It's a claim about the relationship between this person's subjectivity and other entities in the cosmos.
And it's testable, right?
Of an omniscient being, I would ask that voice a few questions, right?
And it's provable.
The person could give me answers of a sort that would prove that they're in contact with some kind of superhuman intelligence, right?
I could write down on a piece of paper a 15-digit number and known only to me, not even known to me because I can't even remember it.
I just wrote it down and I've forgotten it, right?
And it's in my desk.
Tell me what that number is, right?
If the person can tell me what that number is based on this voice they're hearing, okay, I'm all ears.
Let's talk about the miraculous situation we're in, right?
So all of this is amenable to testing.
The claim I'm making, and I think the claim that you were most uncomfortable with was not so much like the impermanence of thought or the impermanence of emotion, which seems kind of this remedial self-help technique, but the more The spookier claim that the ego is an illusion, right?
The sense of there being a subject in the center of consciousness is an illusion.
And I will admit that's a claim I'm making that is not just for me and it's not just for people who agree with me.
It's for you whether you realize it or not, right?
So it's an intrusive claim.
It purports to be objective.
And the analogy I would give...
Which I've given before, and perhaps even on your podcast, is to the optic blind spot.
I have a story as to why the optic blind spot is there to be noticed.
I also have a story as to why it's hard to notice, and why most people don't notice it, and it requires a little training to notice it.
Some people also notice it, and it's not even interesting.
It's like, so what?
All of that...
Maps on to the territory of so-called self-transcendence or noticing the illusoriness of the self rather faithfully, right?
It's neuroanatomically plausible that this would be true.
And as is the case with the optic blind spot, it's hard to notice, arguably harder to notice with respect to meditating on the illusoriness of the self.
It can be noticed and then overlooked again, right?
And it's in the same way that the blind spot can.
But it's an objective claim in the same way.
The only difference is it's a little bit harder.
In some cases, maybe a lot harder to confirm.
And I can't easily say, I can't, you know, we can't use a piece of paper and a pencil.
To do it in a way that is super reliable, because it is harder, right?
And that's just an accident of just what it takes to notice this thing.
I think something that might tighten up the disagreement here is that when I've heard you present this, you know, you tend to frame it that people, they don't like the thought of not...
Having a permanent self, right?
It's a kind of challenge to most people's notions of identity.
Some people, yeah.
Yeah.
But if they engage in the practice, they'll come to see that.
And I had and have an interest in introspective practices.
I focused on...
Buddhist traditions for my initial studies because of an interest in that, which I think mirrors a lot of the interest that you had when younger as well, and you've retained the interest.
But whenever I engage in introspective practices, whenever I use your app as well, most of the things about the self that you point out, about that when people try to grasp that idea of a little homunculus, it falls apart on observation,
right?
But I agree with pretty much all of the kind of insights that you can gain from introspective practices about the way that the minds are operating and the narratives that they're constructing and so on.
But I haven't reached the same conclusion as you or a lot of Buddhists in regard the notion that self is non-existent.
Except to say that the popular conception of self is non-existent.
But there are aspects, because you can focus on an individual moment and go down the layers of analysis until you get to the level of atoms and then say, well, where's the actual person?
It's just vibrating forces around.
And in the same way, you can go through thought processes down to the individual thoughts and reactions in the individual arising moments in consciousness.
The patterns in the brain and the way that it's structured, life experiences, are consistent patterns over time, right?
That's why we have personalities.
That's why we have autobiographical memories.
And to me, saying that the sense or autobiographical sense is a complete illusion is...
Yeah, that's not what I'm saying, though.
Part of the confusion might be on what self are we talking about, right?
So there are many ways we can use the term self, and there's really only one that I'm claiming is illusory, right?
I mean, the others are, you might say, are constructed.
They might not be what they seem either, right?
I mean, they're subject to a kind of deflationary analysis of the sort you just suggested, right?
If you look at it, you know, any object closely enough, it resolves into its constituent parts and, you know, the object itself is not in any of the parts, right?
And so there's this sort of mirage-like quality to everything that we decompose.
And so, you know, everything is just a, this is a Buddhist trope.
I mean, just going back to...
A famous sutta, you know, the questions of King Melinda, where he was asking, Nagasena, the monk, was asking, you know, is a chariot in the wheel, in the axle,
in the rope, in the carriage, in the seat?
And, you know, you can't find a chariot in any of the chariot parts, and you bring all the parts together and you have a chariot.
And the question is, at what point do we actually get a chariot?
I mean, you can talk about a chariot without an axle, but you really can't talk about a chariot without a wheel, an axle, a carriage, every other chariot part.
And so it is with any aggregate thing.
You can imagine a person missing a hand, but you can't really imagine a person missing, you know, a hundred different parts and still be a person.
I'm not saying that people are illusions, right?
And I'm not saying that...
It's mysterious that you have your memories and I have my memories.
Why don't I wake up tomorrow with all of your memories?
There's no mystery about personal identity of that sort.
The self that is illusory, that is in fact spurious, that doesn't survive analysis, and that you can actually experience to be absent, is the self as The presumed subject of experience,
right?
So again, most, and forgive me, I feel like we must have had this almost an identical conversation of this sort last time, but I mean, just to remind you and your listeners, the claim is that most of us, certainly most of us,
perhaps not all of us, but most of us, most of the time, feel like...
Certainly prior to any real experience with meditation, we don't feel identical to our experience.
We feel like we're having experience, almost from someplace outside of experience or on the edge of experience.
There's this feeling of being a subject, a locus of consciousness, an aimer of attention.
And if you're talking about action, a willer of will, this entity that has free will, right?
The whole free will conversation is just the other side of this coin, right?
The feeling of agency.
It's me here doing these things.
I'm pushing these sentences out, right?
I'm having thoughts.
I'm the thinker of my thoughts.
And I'm the doer of my doings, right?
And I'm, you know, if I'm going to reach for something, I'm the motive force.
I'm the, as the subject.
And so there's this sense that there's an observer.
It's almost like you're looking over your own shoulder into the theater of your experience.
And then there's the things you experience.
You have sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions, and it's all changing, and yet there's something static about the subject.
There's almost a sense that there's an unchanging subject that gets carried through moment to moment.
That subject, the feeling that there's a man in the boat, right?
Or that you're on the bank of the river, you know, watching the river of consciousness flow by, that is the illusion.
When you look for that subject clearly enough, precisely enough, if you're attentive enough to what it's actually like to look for the one who is looking, right?
You can kind of, there's a subjectively speaking...
There's a needle to thread here, and it is, again, somewhat analogous to looking for the optic blind spot under the right conditions.
You can confirm for yourself the absence of data.
Just as if I give you the piece of paper with the two marks on it, and you stare at one, you stare at the fixation cross, and you move the dot in and out of existence in your visual field, you can confirm for yourself that There's this area in the retina where you're getting no data,
where there's just an absence of visual experience.
You can do meditation, this kind of meditation on the nature of the self, or in Buddhist terms, on anatta, selflessness, or shunyata, emptiness, depending on how you want to think about it.
You can play at the boundary of that sense of self and no self in a refined enough way and in a meticulous enough way so as to confirm for yourself that this feeling of subject, the feeling that you are divided from your experience in the subject-object way is spurious,
right?
And that there really is, as a matter of experience, only experience, right?
And you're not on the edge of it.
You're not in the middle of it.
You're identical to it, right?
There is this totality of energy, sight, sound, sensation, everything in your sensorium, including your mind and its objects.
And there's no boundary between you and any of it.
There is no you to be aiming the spotlight of attention into it or onto it, right?
There are many things that follow from that insight.
The more you can explore it, the more you can sort of unpack its significance psychologically.
So there's a lot to be said about that.
And as Chris pointed out, there are differences of opinion about the metaphysics of all of that and what any of that means and what we should think on the basis of that experience.
But if there is an experience that exists...
At the heart of the perennial philosophy that unites all of these mystical traditions to some degree, it's the intimation of this experience that, again, in certain contexts, it immediately gets layered with what I consider to be bogus religious concepts and metaphysics.
But there is this ground truth.
I mean, it really is the ground of being, by another name, that can be...
Discovered.
And that's, again, it's an objective claim, but it's a very simple claim.
And it takes, you know, in my, again, in my case, I probably spent a year on silent retreat and still couldn't reliably notice this about my mind, right?
So it's like I was, you know, and by silent retreat, I mean like, you know, really doing nothing but meditate for 12 to 18 hours a day.
You know, I did that, you know, the longest I ever did was three months, but I did that twice, and I did two months many times, and one month.
And I'd probably done at least a year before I got enough, I got kind of the crucial instruction for me that allowed me to notice this, you know, just very directly without any, you know, real effort.
And that was a, I mean, as Chris said, I mean, that was in a Dzogchen context.
So there's a role for...
Precise information here.
I think it matters if you have a confusing map, it's not going to be surprising that you're confused about the territory.
And I view some maps as intrinsically confusing.
But anyway, it's an experiment you can run on yourself.
And yes, it can be frustrating.
It can sound grandiose.
It can sound...
Certainly adjacent to mystical and religious claims that do not have good scientific bona fides, but there's nothing unscientific about this.
It really is.
You can tackle this very much in the spirit of scientific hypothesis and ultimately confirm it or not.
I mean, granted, it is somewhat...
I mean, it's confusing what to make of one's failure to confirm it, right?
Like if you went on a 10-day retreat and you didn't experience anything like this and you came away thinking, well, there's no there there, you know, I would have nothing to say but try harder, right?
But the problem is this insight can't be physically demonstrated in a way that some things can.
Like if I was telling you, well, it's possible to hit a golf ball 300 yards.
Right.
And here's how to do it.
And then you have someone like Tiger Woods who can do it, just go up and do it.
Right.
Then it doesn't matter how much you struggle and fail to do it.
You still know it can be done.
Right.
You know, like you've just saw someone else do it.
And there's some...
Sam, I think we might have to...
Certain things that can't be demonstrated in that way.
Yeah, yeah, I take that point.
I'm sorry to jump in and cut you off, but I think we're not going to get to the bottom of metaphysics in 25 minutes, but we've definitely given it a good go.
Just because you have to go shortly, I thought we might move on to some other topics.
Sam, maybe this I can tie two together that are, I think, related.
And I can't remember if it came up in the past content, but I know you've thought about it quite a bit.
So you've done a number.
of episodes on the Palestine and Israel conflict, understandably, and took quite a strong line in presenting it as the forces of civilization fighting the kind of jihadism extremism.
Mm-hmm. And there's a couple of points I'd like to raise there, but one is that you very strongly emphasize the role of jihadism as like a core component that goes kind of under-acknowledged and
that that
Is part of what is very much driving the conflict and which makes it into an asymmetric warfare because one side is not playing by the same rules, right?
Because they are pining for an everlasting second life, right?
So stop me if there's anything that I've said wrong there in terms of framing jihadism as the central component of that conflict, motivating it.
Yeah, I mean, it's...
I'm sure I know where you're going here.
Let me just...
Perhaps save you some time.
I fully acknowledge that in many of these conflicts, and certainly in the conflict with the Palestinians, between Israel and the Palestinians, there are other layers to the problem.
And there's a layer of nationalism.
You know, Hamas is, if you were going to ask, you know, what is the difference between a group like Hamas and a group like the Islamic State?
The variable of nationalism is certainly a lot of the difference, right?
And for that reason, you know, the Islamic State, a jihadist organization like the Islamic State would view Hamas as a kind of, you know, an apostate organization, right?
And the fact that they have the goal of a nation state is anathema, right?
So it's not just jihadism.
But the thing that worries me most about this conflict and about many of these other conflicts is the fanatical religious layer of it.
That's the thing that makes it truly insoluble from my point of view.
If it was just ordinary nationalism, even if you add a layer of terrorism onto nationalism, as you did in the so-called Troubles in Ireland, right?
It's like that's...
The troubles would have been much more troublesome.
Granted, they were awful, but they would have been much worse if you added a layer of fanatical commitment to martyrdom and jihad.
That makes things worse.
That's always the point I want to bang on about, that if you're not going to acknowledge that piece of it, like the cancer on top of the...
The bacterial infection.
We're not talking about what's real.
I think completely that like any account which doesn't acknowledge the role of jihadism and extremist ideologies would be absolutely incomplete.
Like you can't deal with Islamic extremism.
Talking about the underlying ideology.
But one of the issues that I have with the way that you've presented it is that whenever you are talking about the need to take into account what the extremists say, right, and to look at what they are telling us,
right, the issue of tabiq for, you know, why we hate you, you've commented on it, and that kind of thing.
There are...
Various statements from Hamas and other groups active in that area, which come across as motivated by jihadist ideology and they want to wipe Israel out and it's a holy war.
But at the same time, there are also statements which very clearly link it to political grievances, especially national grievances and In the oft-referenced Hamas charter that they started with,
they did produce a more moderate one.
Now, I'm not saying you've got to hand it to Hamas for doing that or take them at the word, but I'm saying that the fact that they would remove the section that specifically is openly anti-Semitic, openly stating that they're going to wipe Israel out,
doesn't that contradict the...
Image that you're suggesting that if these are people that are purely motivated by going to heaven, why don't you see so many more martyrs?
Why would you find things like them trying to moderate language in a new charter?
Why not double down?
Doesn't that somewhat contradict the notion that it's purely It's not purely.
Again, it's not purely.
I think it's purely.
The problem is more or less purely religion, right?
I mean, if everyone were a Sunni Muslim in the region, we'd have no problem, right?
So religious tribalism is the major variable here.
But jihadism itself is an additional problem.
I think be forgiven for not trusting Hamas.
I think that their original charter is far closer to what they really believe and really want than their subsequent refinement of it, which is still not good.
It's only just good by comparison.
I just think they're politically perhaps a little savvier than they used to be.
They realize they have to export their Their product to the rest of the world and use the rest of the world as leverage against Israel.
But still, just look at how carefree they are with respect to their atrocities.
They're not really trying to seem like rational actors to the rest of the world.
You don't burn families alive and shoot it on your GoPros.
And then drag, you know, dismembered bodies through the streets and, you know, bloodied hostages and kidnap babies.
And it's just the idea that they're moderated in a way that I should care about is...
Yeah, I'm not saying you should care for that.
It's more that, as you mentioned, the terror that they unleashed on October 7th is very well documented.
Yet, you have lots of their supporters, and maybe actually a majority, doubting many of the things that happened, right?
You have Hamas stating that they didn't target civilians, right?
In various statements, like Hamas officials make different kinds of statements.
But the point is that If you are right, and it is just about a holy war and paradise, why even pretend in that case?
Because if it's good to kill Jews as many as you can, why cast doubts that there's a conspiracy?
Why not say that you are just about targeting the infidels?
But in most cases, they're not.
I mean, most cases, you know, the leaders of Hamas in the immediate aftermath, I don't know what they've said since, but they said they would...
They would do this as many times as they could.
They were not...
But until...
They're splitting it differently than I think you're suggesting.
They're just saying that there are no non-combatants in Israel.
They're all combatants because they're occupying land that's not theirs.
They're all settlers.
They're all colonists.
It's all illegitimate.
Right?
From the river to the sea.
So it's not, so like if they're killing teenagers at a rave, these are, they're not disposed to distinguish between them and soldiers carrying guns.
Right?
It's just, that's, they're all combatants.
I'm certainly not claiming, like, Hamas is an ethical organization that is making those.
I'm saying that various members of their leadership and supporters make appeal to that, which suggests that they aren't occupying the kind of justification space that you're suggesting the majority of them are.
Listen, I would agree, and I've said this before, I think it's a distinction that doesn't make much of a difference in the present case, but Hamas, certainly historically, I mean, prior to October 7th, If you had asked me to compare Hamas and the Islamic State, I would have said the Islamic State was much scarier than Hamas,
much more of a real jihadist organization than Hamas is.
And I would still say that to some considerable degree.
And yet, Hamas, even with all of its sort of quasi-terrestrial goals, Was still capable of, you know, medieval barbarism, which they seem committed to replicating whenever they're given the chance.
Yes, the Islamic State is the much purer case of where jihadism leads and what it looks like in the pure, you know, in a Petri dish, right?
I mean, that's the unadulterated strain.
So I guess the flip side, and it relates to that, is that whenever discussing, like, Israel...
That yourself, and I would say Douglas Murray as well, who you've had on the channel, are rightly pushing back at the equivalence that we see on the far left, right?
Or the kind of anti-Semitism that is clearly there in the reaction to the October 7th attack.
But in so doing, there's often a loss of nuance that on the Israel side, you have Also, religious extremists and not just fringe extremists with no influence, right?
You have a member of the government, Ben Gavir, who had the poster.
Of the Goldstein massacre guy, right?
The person who went in and gunned down.
That's somebody in the Israeli government who had a poster on the wall of a terrorist and Netanyahu kind of supporting the increasing settlement movement and courting the far right, the religious right.
So my kind of point there is, if you...
Present that conflict as being purely about the forces of civilization versus like a religious fanatical cult and don't mention that there is a fanatical religious Cult that is in the government of Israel and has made various statements which are similarly talking about the promised land and reclaiming it,
that it seems like you're being selective.
And it doesn't mean that you have to say they're both equal in that respect.
You can still completely condemn Hamas and all the things.
You can still argue that Israel has a right to defend itself, but it doesn't require serving.
As their kind of propaganda wing, because lots of Israelis were very unhappy with Netanyahu and his government.
It is a very right-wing government.
And the last thing I'll say, and I'll give you a chance to respond, Sam, is like the ex-Israeli prime minister who was assassinated, Rabin, he wasn't assassinated by Islamic extremists.
He was assassinated by a Jewish extremist who derailed the peace negotiations that were going on.
And the legacy of which was that Netanyahu, who was in opposition to Rabin, you know, ended up in power.
So the history over there is very complex in that, but I'm arguing, isn't there a case that the presentation yourself and Douglas Murray have done kind of whitewashes those concerns, which are legitimate?
I mean, I raise those points a fair amount.
It's just in proportion to the problem on the Islamic side.
They're quite small.
I mean, they're very unhelpful.
I fully grant you that Netanyahu has been a disaster.
His support for the settlements has been provocative.
He's, to some degree, culpable for what happened on October 7th, for no other reason than his attention was split, and he was propping up the settlements in the West Bank and leaving the border with Gaza fairly undefended.
All the mad work that the settlers are doing in the West Bank and the religious extremists who support them, all of that is incredibly unhelpful and I don't support it at all.
I mean, I've said in other contexts, I thought that the settlers should be dragged off contested land by their beards, right?
I mean, that's not a fair, that's not a...
Optically a great thing to say in the aftermath of October 7th, but, you know, I'm Jewish and I can say whatever I want on the topic.
I think those people are religious imbeciles and they're creating immense harm, right?
And their imagined claims upon real estate based on where they think Abraham walked shouldn't be supported because, you know, I think it's very unlikely Abraham even existed.
At this point.
So religious maniacs in every context are, you know, are people I would, you know, these are views and behaviors I would condemn.
But again, we have to be alert to the differences, the differences both with respect to the sheer numbers of people and their influence, but also with respect to the specific beliefs that they're maniacally adhering to.
And the logical and behavioral consequences of those beliefs.
I mean, the differences really do matter.
And it matters that Judaism does not have a clear conception of the afterlife, much less one that could really motivate a carefree attitude toward martyrdom, right, and the martyrdom of one's children.
I'm not saying that there aren't Jews who aren't willing to die for their beliefs.
I mean, there are people who are willing to die for their beliefs.
You know, they're all flavors of those sorts of people.
But there's something about the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad that are especially unhelpful, right?
And when you look at just the sheer numbers, there are 15 million Jews on earth and most Jews don't believe anything that I care about.
There's very little commitment to otherworldly propositions and the supernatural among Jews generally.
They're just an overwhelmingly secular and even agnostic group of people.
And then you have the ultra-orthodox.
Who, yes, believe whole rafts of divisive nonsense that I don't support.
And I think they should be politically disenfranchised insofar as possible in Israel.
And, yeah, when you can find one of them who's saying idiotic things about some kind of counter-genocide, you know, or talking about, you know, the Amalekites in the Bible that needed to get...
You know, wiped out down to the last child.
Let's kill their livestock as well, right?
It's, you know, sheer religious barbarism, you know, Taliban style that I, you know, would never support.
But again, there's so few of these people.
Yes, a few of them are in the wrong places.
A few of them are in, you know, too close to power in Netanyahu's government.
But...
There really isn't much of an analogy to draw between the two sides.
If the Jews in Israel were behaving like the Palestinians, if they were committing analogous atrocities, you know, going into music festivals in the West Bank and raping and burning.
Teenagers.
And then supporting it to the tune of 80%.
Once you export these details to the rest of Israeli society, you had Jews dancing in the streets over these moral victories.
And when you poll them, 80% claim to support the atrocity just committed, right?
Or they're just riddled with conspiracy theories about how it never happened, right?
There's just no way to have a reality-based discussion with these people.
Because they're so addled by their religious mania, right?
If that were true of the Jews of Israel, I would condemn them in precisely the same terms that I condemn jihadism and its influence in the Palestinian community.
There was a poll done recently, Sam, and it was discussed by Rory Stewart, who you recently had on the podcast, where they polled Israeli Public about how concerned they should be about the suffering of civilians in Gaza.
And it was a similar percentage, something like 80% that said it shouldn't be.
A concern, right?
The priority should be the wiping out of Hamas.
And I think for a lot of people, they do see an equivalence.
They don't see the equivalence in terms of like that the IDF is just going in and mowing down civilians at a rave.
But they do look at the fact that there's huge amounts of people starving with no access to water now in Gaza, right?
And that there is a huge death toll, no matter whether you think the war It is absolutely the case that there's huge amounts of unjustified suffering there.
And so you pointed to the kind of Islamist and jihadism, but I would say that is creating really fertile ground for, in general, just a psychology of justified grievance.
And if you have a pride people, that is going to be...
Remembered, it will lead to support for more extreme groups.
If you remove Hamas, I would hope, there's a chance for more moderate things.
But it doesn't seem that the most punitive response possible, targeting civilian populations.
And I'm not saying targeting civilian populations on purpose, right?
I am talking...
About it being a collateral of attempting to remove Hamas from civilian populations.
But in that respect, whenever you have organizations like the Tamil Tigers, that was a Marxist organization with Hindu members that was pioneering.
Suicide attacks.
There you don't have a very strong reference.
They learned it from Hezbollah, but yes, they were pioneering it after they learned it from Hezbollah.
But in that respect of being able to motivate people for it, you know, Rory Stewart raised the point as well that if people are very strongly wedded to a particular ideology, be it Marxism, be it whatever the case might be, you don't always need a paradise in order to motivate people.
And so I'm kind of layering in two points.
One is that What is happening in Gaza now is undoubtedly a humanitarian crisis with huge suffering.
And that will motivate, it seems certainly possible to motivate more extremism in response.
And related to that, that it isn't just the jihadist and afterlife narratives that enable people to end up being willing to sacrifice themselves for causes.
You see it all the time in nationalist causes.
In World War II for different reasons with, you know, Japan and so on.
So those two points that there is a level of huge suffering going on at the minute, and it's in Gaza, right, primarily, not in Israel.
Yeah, well, I think there's probably three points in there I should respond to.
One is just this comparison between the moral status of the people suffering in Gaza, the innocent victims of...
Bombing, so-called collateral damage, which is the euphemism we tend to use here.
And the, let's take the teenagers massacred at the music festival by Hamas, right?
There's a very important difference between those two groups of people.
The first are being victimized.
However surely they're being victimized, it is inadvertent.
It is not desired.
On the Israeli side, leave aside the sociopathic fanatic who wants to kill Palestinian children.
Generally speaking, if the IDF could go in there and kill only Hamas, you know, if you gave them magical weapons, what would they do with them?
They would kill only Hamas, right?
And they would turn Gaza into, you know, the south of France, right?
I mean, it's clarifying to ask.
What would people do if you gave them the power to do anything they want, what would they do?
What would members of Hamas do?
They would kill all the Jews on earth.
No question.
And many other people.
And what would the Islamic State do?
They would turn the whole world into the hellhole that they created in Syria and Iraq.
That's exactly the way they like it.
Crucifying apostates and blasphemers, taking sex slaves, all of it.
None of that was an aberration.
That's exactly what they wanted.
What would Dick Cheney have done in the invasion of Iraq?
Would he have killed everybody?
No.
He would have turned Iraq into Oklahoma.
It's important to track people's actual motives.
What kind of world do they want to build?
What do they want for other people?
Just how zero-sum are they?
Wait, Sam, I've got to jump in there because I'm not sure if that analogy is helpful.
Let me just give you one aspect.
Before you jump in, let me just give you the one real-world variant of it, which you really can't argue with.
What did we do to Germany and Japan, we the allies, do to Germany and Japan after World War II?
What revealed our motives?
With respect to the German people and the Japanese people.
I mean, we killed a whole lot of innocent people, right?
I mean, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo.
I mean, just, you know, to say nothing of the nuclear bombs we dropped.
I mean, indiscriminate violence of a sort that Israel is not, simply not practicing now at all.
It doesn't matter how many kids die in Gaza, Israel is not doing what we did in World War II at all.
Yeah, no, I take those points.
But our revealed preference, our preference was revealed with respect to what we did after we won.
Did we just take them all, all the pretty girls as sex slaves?
Is that what we did in Germany and Japan?
Did we kill all the fighting age males?
No, we helped build those two societies.
We wanted sane collaborators in Germany and Japan and we got them.
Amazing.
You've made that point well.
One of your points was about the stated intentions versus unpleasant side effects.
That's why you can't use body count to resolve this issue.
It doesn't matter that the Israelis have killed more Palestinians than Hamas killed in Israel.
That's not the way to think about it.
It's just collateral damage and unpleasant necessities is not always such a clear thing.
The limit to that thought experiment, I think, is illustrated by, say...
Communism in Southeast Asia.
Take the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot.
Their stated goal was to build a utopian communist society.
If they had the power to do anything they want, they wouldn't just massacre a bunch of people.
They would turn them into very good, politically aligned communists.
But unfortunately, they had to kill an awful lot of people because out of necessity.
But there are Orwellian projects.
There are situations where words don't mean what they seem to mean.
You can't just track these superficial sentences so as to get to the moral core of what someone is attempting to do.
I mean, what are people's real intentions with respect to other people?
I mean, whatever Kim Jong-un says about North Korea, we know what his intentions are, right?
He's turned that into a prison state because he's a total sociopath.
It's not like he wants everyone to be happy and well-fed and prosperous.
He wants to rule like a sadist over a prison population.
And that's what he's doing.
Would that mean that we don't take into account that there are various statements made by senior figures in Israel which suggest that, for example, whether or not they want to do it, if the Gaza population relocated to Egypt?
That wouldn't be a terrible thing, right?
And so if Ben Gavir or so on have made various extreme statements, which in the same respect...
Honestly, it's not all that extreme.
I mean, I don't know how...
I mean, he's just running...
I'm not supporting him, but it's hard to see how Israel survives.
In the long term, it's hard to see how Israel is a viable project.
With the current assumptions of a so-called two-state solution, I don't know how it works.
I mean, either they're not really states or something has radically changed about the cultures, but there's no one-state solution, given what most Islamists and jihadists and conservatives among the Palestinians actually want,
right?
I mean, that's a recipe for, at the minimum, just...
A demographic change that is not compatible with the endurance of the Jewish state.
A demographic change where the entire Arab population of Gaza is relocated to a different country and that country is then subsumed into part of Israel.
That would be like genocide, right?
At least cultural genocide.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Genocide has a specific meaning.
At the very least, then, it is a forced relocation.
You mean ethnic cleansing, right?
Which is a phrase that's often used along with genocide, and they are worlds apart with respect to their moral implications.
History is just full of ethnic cleansing, which means people moving, right?
People who can't get along wind up moving apart, right?
That happens a hell of a lot, and it's, you know, It can be awful in terms of, you know, when done at the point of a sword, which happened under Islam again and again and again.
I mean, nobody's losing sleep over the Jews that got run out of Syria and Yemen and Iraq and Egypt and Morocco and all after 1948, right?
No one's talking about their right of return.
What happened to their homes?
The UN's not worried about that.
And yet everyone is worried about the Palestinians as this perpetual refugee population.
What about all the people who left Syria in 2015 and went to Sweden?
Do they have perpetual refugee status or are they just now in Sweden?
So Sam, just to clarify, so you are saying that ethnic cleansing of the...
Gaza Strait isn't extreme position.
Two million people.
It's totally extreme.
It is totally extreme in that it's a non-starter.
No one in the Palestinian world wants that.
If you look at the Arab state's contribution to the status quo over the last 50 years, it has been very deliberately to hold the Palestinians in perpetual refugee status.
So as to put the existence of Israel in question perpetually.
And when you look at how the Jordanians and the Egyptians treat the Palestinians, you know, they're just as culpable for, I mean, take Egypt, you know, which governs one of the borders of Gaza,
right?
It is just as culpable for keeping Gaza a, quote, open-air prison as Israel is, right?
Because they're maintaining one of their borders.
And they don't want the Palestinians in their society either.
But it's a...
We do recognize the desire for self-determination.
And like, you know, I'm not talking about from the river to the sea, like recapturing the land.
I mean, purely a people regarding their homeland as being occupied or taken or that they've been moved.
That is hugely...
Fertile ground for breeding conflict and extremism and that kind of thing.
Of course.
Maybe I'm a little bit more sensitive to this as somebody from Northern Ireland, right?
And there, I know the situation is not as comparable in terms of the level of suffering involved in that kind of thing, but there you have, for example, a Republican Party, Sinn Féin, that doesn't recognise the legitimacy of British control of the Northern Irish state,
but still gets elected into power.
They were associated with a terrorist group, the IRA.
They're now, I think, the biggest party in the Republic of Ireland as well.
And their overall long-term plan is to see Ireland reunited, right?
Into a unified thing.
But they are a political party that people have to deal with.
And they have renounced violence.
And, you know, it's a different situation.
I'm not drawing a parallel in terms of like saying, well, Hamas is just, you know, the IRA in wedding.
No, no, no.
I'm saying, though, that those kind of very strong feelings about the right to self-determination.
If you relocated the population out of...
Like, that would be the second Nakba, wouldn't it?
And the first Nakba led to a conflict that's lasted for longer than any of us have been alive.
Well, the analogy to Ireland, to make it a real analogy, I mean, there are reasons why it doesn't work great, but you'd also have to imagine, you know, a dozen other Irish-speaking states with Irish culture surrounding this whole problem that...
Those, the Northern Irish would be displaced too if they had their Nakba of ethnic cleansing, right?
Like it's a different situation where you would have to wonder why.
I mean, it's completely different.
It's a completely different situation because I've had people say, you know, like, well, you wouldn't just allow the British to bomb Belfast, right, to get rid of the IRA during the troubles.
And that's true.
But if the IRA had launched a raid on a city in the UK and killed a bunch of people and stolen babies, I think you actually would have seen significant military action in wherever they...
They took the children away.
So there are not parallels one-to-one.
But in the notion of like, you know, the British arranged plantations, moved populations over, and Northern Ireland ended up with like a demographic.
I'm not just agreeing with you.
I completely understand the nationalistic aspirations of the Palestinians, and there is an analogy to any other group of people that want their own nation.
But the moral core of this problem and the asymmetry of it should be unignorable, and it's this.
And this is a statement that you've probably heard me make, and you've probably heard Douglas Murray make it, but it's nonetheless true, which is if the Palestinians put down their weapons, if they were peaceful...
Right?
And even if they were peaceful protesters of a, you know, a Gandhian sort, right?
They would...
This problem would be solved and the two societies could live happily together.
There would be a two-state solution.
There would have been a two-state solution decades ago.
If the Jews of Israel...
Just to point there...
Well, let me just land...
Well, let me just land the obverse statement.
The obverse statement is if the Jews of Israel put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.
Right?
That is, October 7th reveals that to be as objectively true a statement as we can make in this sort of area.
So the only point I was going to raise there is, like, you've had Netanyahu come out and say there won't be a two-state solution.
That's because of who the Palestinians are and because of how Islam is informing their worldview.
Right?
If Islam were a peaceful religion, if Islam was Jainism, And there was no notion of jihad, we would have a completely different situation, right?
If they were producing leaders like Gandhi, right?
Or Martin Luther King Jr., right?
It would be a completely different situation.
So Netanyahu, and again, Netanyahu is awful, and again, culpable for the disaster he's presiding over, right?
So Israel needs better leaders, right?
He is reacting to the ongoing reality of what the Palestinians and even the surrounding Muslim states have wanted since Israel was born 70 some odd years ago.
And so much of the conversation has been explicitly genocidal as to make anything other than a very strong defensive posture.
Wouldn't that imply that when there was a much greater chance of a two-state solution, when, you know, the negotiations were going on, and they, in part, there were people on the Palestinian side who tried to scupper that, right,
who were doing suicide attacks and atrocities.
But you also did have atrocities committed by extremists on the right who are now people involved with those movements are in the government.
It's a tiny number.
It's ridiculous when you focus on it.
It's like Biden just passed an executive order that focused on four Israelis in the West Bank.
Literally, the President of the United States created an executive order that dealt with the The destructive behavior of four people on the Israeli side.
In order to give somewhat semblance of balance to the situation, it's just not an analogous problem.
I'll stipulate everything of that sort.
The massacre at a mosque that kills 25 people once in a generation is awful and decidedly unhelpful.
And yes, a religious extremist on the Jewish side is who assassinated Rabin.
And it was a religious extremist on the Hindu side who killed Gandhi.
There are those people.
But there's just not the analogous problem there or anywhere else.
I mean, we have not had to deal with crazy security concerns getting on airplanes for the last 25 years because so many Jews want to blow themselves up on airplanes.
It just has not been the problem.
And if it were, that's the problem I would be focusing on.
Well, I think we might disagree on the degree to which the far right in Israel has a significant presence in the government.
But there's one more...
I'm not disagreeing.
I'm saying that's terrible and should change.
And I think it will change.
I mean, the reason why it hasn't changed yet is because, again, they're in the middle of this emergency and this war.
You know, and Netanyahu is a very Trumpian figure, is using this emergency to prolong his life as a political figure.
But I think at the first opportunity, Netanyahu will be out of office, right?
I just think that is the general sentiment among Israelis.
I mean, most Israelis, I don't know what the recent polls say, but I have to think something close to 80% of Israelis.
I've actually heard really good stuff from moderate progressive Israelis and also really good stuff from moderate people in Gaza, Palestinians.
And they don't sound that different, to be honest.
And I think most reasonable people have a lot of sympathy with, obviously, the victims of terrorist attacks and also the civilians who are killed by indiscriminate.
Bombing.
I guess, look, I'm just going to make one little point.
But it is different.
It's just, again, we can't lose sight of, I mean, body count just does not get at the moral difference between the two sides.
But it's a point that, like, again, people forget it whenever, it's just, it can't be, it can't maintain its salience in the face of images of I
think we all get that motivations matter, right?
There is a difference between a child who is killed by a bomb that wasn't targeted at them and a child who was executed by a terrorist.
To give a very anodyne example, but this makes the point from the other side, right?
The three of us live in societies where there's some ambient level of carnage due to car accidents every year, and it's totally predictable.
In the United States, there will be something like 40,000 people killed this year.
On our highways, right?
And it's just because people are bad drivers and, you know, eventually self-driving cars will solve this problem, but not yet, right?
Now, we know with a moral certainty that we could reduce all this death and suffering if we just lowered the speed limit, right?
Just made it like wherever you can drive 60 miles an hour, let's cap that at 30 miles an hour.
We would save thousands of lives, probably tens of thousands of lives in America.
We don't do it.
Are we just sociopathic murderers for not doing that?
Is that like every day of our lives?
Are we like Saddam Hussein level evil bastards for not doing that?
No, we're not even thinking about it.
And when you bring it up, it's just kind of a curiosity.
It's like, well, yeah, but...
That would be so boring to drive a maximum of 30 miles an hour.
It would take forever.
There'd be some other economic costs.
We totally get it.
The point is well made.
And likewise, if there was an equivalent number of car deaths, but they were being caused by murderers, then there would be an outcry and extreme measures would be taken to stop it.
All those details really do matter.
Look, the only point that I'll inject into this, and I don't think it's too controversial, is just that perhaps the reason why I don't attribute all of the responsibility for the terrorist attacks to religion specifically, right?
And the pernicious ideas that are in religion.
And all three of us are atheists, right?
None of us like religion.
It's just that I recognise that, one, the social and political context matters and there's a big driver for why people do the things they do, why they're attracted to an ideology, right?
There's a reason why, you know, even though you have fundamentalist Christians in the United States, they're not blowing stuff up because they're relatively comfortable.
No one's taken away their farms and things like that.
And the second thing is just that I have to acknowledge that there is an asymmetry.
In Northern Ireland, the Irish were blowing up bombs, right?
And they were doing that, I don't think, because they were contaminated by worse ideas than the British.
There was a power asymmetry there.
They didn't have the option to send in regiments of armored cars and things like that.
That was the only tactic they had.
And I think we just have to acknowledge that there are asymmetries there of different kinds.
You pointed to one legitimate one, which is one of motivations and stated intentions and so on.
But there's also asymmetries in terms of the relative power differential, and that defines what tactics are even available to you.
One side has planes and can drop guided bombs.
The other side doesn't.
They send in guys on bloody motorbikes and Paragliders or whatever.
So that's just my point there.
Sam, I might have a last topic before we let you skip.
Do you have time?
Do you have time for one last thing?
Yeah, I mean, I'm actually...
Pass my cutoff.
What's the topic?
How quickly can we touch it?
Okay, let's see if we can clear it.
Let me know what it is, and then I'll see if it's possible.
I wanted to talk about, you know, pornography of doubt and conspiracism, taking account of it on the left and right, and in particular, the kind of growth of people who are very selective in their criticism of it, right?
That they are documentarians of the opposing side, but not on their...
Own side and some questions about that.
Okay, yeah.
Let's do it briefly because I do have to jump.
I think I know where you're going, but feel free to sharpen it up with a specific...
Okay.
So like I said, you've raised the point quite articulately about the pornography of doubt and of various people, that institutions aren't perfect and that there are plenty of things that you can criticize in institutions.
There are ideological things in various institutions that should be criticized and are criticized, but that we need institutions and that we should try to be fair in calling out whenever.
People are engaging in selective condemnation.
And in that respect, I'm wondering about currently, for example, just to give one illustrative example for you to deal with.
Douglas Murray has been very strong condemning all of the equivalents around the October 7th and the rise of antisemitism.
Very, very vocal opponent of that, arguing with various people, you know, in a passionate way.
On the other hand, He was a defender, him and various other people in that sphere, Jordan Peterson and so on, of Orbán's government, which made use of anti-Semitic tropes and rolled back various democratic things,
the independence of the judiciary and so on.
And Anne Applebaum has kind of made this point talking about intellectual clerics who Defend authoritarianism, right?
And I'm not talking about people who are MAGA, Trump, right-wing maniacs, right?
I'm more talking about that kind of selective application and that if you were concerned, for example, about anti-Semitism and rising authoritarianism and ideologies that are anti-liberal, you should be very concerned about things like what...
It's happening in Hungary or Turkey just as much as you are with things going on in the broader Muslim world.
Yes.
Yeah, I agree, except emergencies make strange bedfellows, right?
And Douglas has been focused much more on the erosion of basic sanity in Europe than I have been, right?
So I have much more of an American perspective on a lot of these questions.
You know, so the refugee crisis in 2015 that hit Europe to an extraordinary degree hit America much less.
And Douglas was all over that.
And I think that's probably when he had some entanglement with Orban.
But I really don't know the details there.
I know Douglas to be an incredibly sane and courageous Voice on the specific issues we've been talking about, specifically Islamism,
jihadism, the identitarian politics of the left that has blinded so many people to the threat of jihadism and Islamism in the West.
The fact that you have 300,000 people Coming out essentially in support of Hamas after October 7th in the streets of London.
I think that's unsustainable.
I mean, I share Douglas's alarm about that.
I mean, Douglas, you have people, you have MPs stepping down from Parliament because they perceive their security concerns to be too difficult around these issues in the UK.
The truth is, I don't even think Douglas can spend much time in the UK and be safe at this point.
And it's not because he's a bigot who's antagonized otherwise rational people.
No, there's a stealth, Islamist, jihadist takeover of the public space.
In the UK, you know, at these moments.
And the authorities, the institutions, don't quite know what to do about it, right?
I mean, they're completely ineffectual with respect to policing this problem and getting rid of, you know, imams who are actually preaching for the destruction of the UK,
right?
I mean, the barbarians have been let inside the gates.
There's no question of that.
And it's a much bigger problem in the UK than it is in the United States.
And, you know, at this point, it's important that the people in the US figure out how not to make the mistakes that many Western European countries have made with respect to the spread of Islamism,
right?
I'm not talking about all Muslims, right?
I'm talking about Islamists and jihadists.
In fact, the first people I would want to see immigrate to my society are actual secular Muslims, or better yet, ex-Muslims.
Ex-Muslims are the most valuable people on earth, as far as I'm concerned, with respect to this issue.
Give me a hundred million people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Yasmin Muhammad.
Sarah Hayter.
These people are exactly the people you want in your society.
And then after them, you want actual liberal Muslims.
So this is not a Muslim ban on immigration, but this idiotic idea that you can absorb an endless number of people who have zero interest in assimilating.
And what's more, they're importing a triumphal vision of Islamic supremacy into your society, and anti-Semitism, and misogyny, right?
And Douglas is living on the front line of that clash of civilizations in an extraordinarily brave way.
And his security concerns are not security concerns you would want, and they're coming from only one group of people, predictably.
Yeah, I can imagine that.
So maybe I can tune it up to the point, Sam, a bit, which is that, granted, various concerning tendencies on the social justice left, and you can...
There are different opinions about the degree to which, you know, that has captured all scientific institutions, all educational media.
But given the people that we cover in this podcast, right, the most kind of unhinged guru types who are constantly setting themselves up as the solution to this problem, right?
They're saying, don't trust academics.
They lied about COVID.
They lie about, you know, men and women, all of it.
It's all bullshit.
Don't trust the government, the CDC, everything.
It's all corrupt.
And then, as an alternative, present themselves to a podcast, which you've talked about, you know, the problems with podcasters, Dan.
But in that, there's a kind of, you know, what you talked about, a pornography of doubt, where you have people that are then posing.
Populist right-wing alternatives.
Douglas Murray was at the National Conservatism Conference in the UK and the Art Conference.
Those are not the moderate right-wing groups like Rory Stewart.
Orban is not moderate right.
That's populist right-wing, quite extreme right.
Let me just short-circuit this because I am truly out of time, but I have never spoken with Douglas about any of that.
I have not spoken with Douglas all that much.
I would certainly be eager to talk to him about all of that and see what he was thinking and what he thinks going forward.
There might be some genuine daylight between us on those issues, but I can see in extremis, I can see the impulse to, I mean, you sort of have to pick the allies you can find, right?
And in certain contexts, There are inconvenient alliances, right?
And I could imagine if things were quite a bit worse in the U.S. with respect to the derangement of the left and the real threat of Islamism subverting much of what I care about in American society,
which is where we are in the U.K., honestly.
When I saw those protests after October 7th, I thought, okay, London is ruined.
Right?
That's just an awful situation that this is the number of people you can get out in support of atrocity, right?
If that were the situation in the U.S., I might find myself on stage with, you know, quasi-theocratic Christians, right?
Who are like the last people who I could find to see eye to eye with me on this particular subject, right?
Honestly, the only reliable people in the United States for the longest time on this subject, and to some degree, to a first approximation, it's still true, are fundamentalist Christians.
They're the only people who you don't have to burn endless amounts of gas trying to convince that...
Jihadists actually believe in paradise, right?
I mean, when I'm at an academic conference talking to anthropologists, I can't get anyone to agree that anyone believes in paradise, right?
It's just, they think it's all economics, it's all politics, it's all propaganda, it's all posturing.
You have to find a Christian fundamentalist in the crowd who at least knows what it's like to believe in heaven.
I know you gotta disappear, but I have to push back at that because I'm involved in the area about extremism research.
I know you say that often.
Do you know Scotty Tran?
I do know Scotty Tran.
Do you know Richard Schwader?
Yes.
Both of them face-to-face.
Have denied that anyone believes in paradise, to me.
Right, yes, but there's a much bigger...
On Scott and Grant's count, it's all just bonding among fictive kin.
You know, male bonding among fictive kin.
It's all just like, you know, soccer players bonding.
It's got nothing to do with paradise.
It's got nothing to do with expectation.
And commitment to secret values is his model.
So if your secret value is that there's a particular religious one, he would also put that in the thing.
But in general, I would just say...
Pure delusion.
This is pure delusion.
But Aryeh Kruglansky, for example, or various others, there's a lot of models, and a lot of them have prominent positions for ideology and take seriously.
Probably, you know, quest for significance is one of the most well-known, and that can slot in very easily religious quest for significance.
So I just...
I want to push back now because I would encourage you to go to those conferences and see.
I mean, unfortunately, it sounds like I just had the misfortune of arguing with the dumb anthropologists.
But honestly, this is what I've encountered.
And the very, very last thing, Sam, is just that, you know, so I know your point about you might end up with particular allies, you know, given your stance on a given topic.
And in some cases, compromises are necessary or people are making more sense.
I can't help but think that, like, you know, I agree with Anne Applebaum's analysis that if you're someone that cares about liberal democracies and stuff, it is not right to, like, side with the far-right people who are rolling back democratic institutions.
And there is a strong moderate left and right, you know, like, the next leader in the UK is likely to be Keir Starmer.
That's not Jeremy Corbyn.
The leader in the Democrats is Joe Biden.
Compared to Trump, compared to figures like Nigel Farage, I don't see them in more sense.
I will agree with Anne Applebaum all day long about anything that happens in Eastern Europe, right?
I mean, she's a national treasure as far as I can tell.
So that would be a great conversation.
I mean, you know, I will try to put Anne Applebaum on a podcast with Douglas Murray and see where we get to, right?
That could be fun.
Yeah, on Hungary.
On Hungary.
That would be a pleasure.
So I know we're over the allotted time, and as predictable, you know, we have some points of disagreement.
But really appreciate you coming back, Sam, and, yeah, discussing.
Thanks for the opportunity to browbeat both of you and your audience.
Like you said, good to be browbeat.
Take care, you guys.
Till next time.
That was a conversation.
That was thanks to Sam for coming on.
And I think he outlined his perspective on various...
And then some.
And then some.
Yes, indeed.
Indeed.
We didn't cover everything that we wanted to do.
I didn't speak as well as I would have hoped at certain points and whatnot.
But, you know, that's the nature of the beast.
We're not interviewers.
We're not professional interviewers, okay?
We're just academics.
We're just men, Chris.
We're just men.
We're just normal men.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, we had our chance to say what we thought when Sam wasn't present, when we covered him in our thing.
We had all the time in the world to say all the things we wanted then.
This is our thing where we let the person we're talking about say their piece.
And Sam did, and fair play to him.
Oh, yeah.
There was one thing that I wanted to mention, and it's probably better to put it at the end of the podcast when only the hardcores are left, Matt.
Because early in the interview, I kind of pulled Sam up about not having on experts in regards to his discussion of the lab leak.
And he mentioned that after he heard our episode, he did think that that might have been useful, but he doesn't have a time machine, so he wouldn't be aware of those experts in advance of hearing our episode,
right? But I did think I remembered, but I didn't want to say because I wasn't sure,
I did email Sam and suggest the specific experts that we interviewed.
Let me just read it.
Given your recent comments on responsible use of platforms and the potential issues of elevating outlier perspectives without sufficient pushback, it seems a good opportunity to demonstrate healthy practices and you can even put the criticisms raised to the relevant experts.
Matt and Alina's portrayal is that scientists have misrepresented things, in some cases lied, and that their emails revealed that they were hiding their true opinions, likely due to being in favor of risky research or having conflicts of interest.
This strikes me as very similar to how Joe Breton, Heller, and their anti-vax guests talk about mainstream doctors.
There are a bunch of good, relevant experts who could explain the reasons that Alina and Matt have an outlier perspective on this topic and why their portrayal events are skewed.
I'd recommend Stuart Neill, Christian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, or Michael Roraway.
All of them are people who have careers dedicated to virus, have published on the evidence for COVID origins, are supportive of investigations, and have had experiences of being targeted personally by the more extreme elements of the online lab leak community.
Your guest presented virologists as sometimes seeking to intimidate those who are just seeking the truth.
I think any of them, or really any publicly known virologist, could offer you an alternative perspective on that.
And there we go.
And I said, I'm sure you're not keen to dedicate another episode on the topic, but I do think it's worth considering.
And if you want to see some detailed articles, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And Sam basically responded, saying that he might look at it again, but thought that they were fairly balanced in their coverage.
And then I responded, explaining that, okay, well, I disagree.
But we will then speak to relevant experts and attempt to address it.
So I'm just saying this because it would be unfair for me to level that charge a little bit.
But I think given that context that I wasn't being unfair to Sam in suggesting that the responsible thing would have been for him to do the podcast that we did because...
I did suggest that at the time.
I'm just saying, Mark, just saying.
Yes, I remember that.
I remember that.
You don't need it.
Yeah, so time machine, not necessary.
Just listening to Chris.
Yeah, I don't think we ever made a big deal out of that at the time, but when we had those three scientists on, your initial idea was basically hoping that Sam would have them on.
To talk to him, to provide the alternative point of view.
Yeah, because he's got a much bigger audience.
Yeah, and that's where Alina Chan and Ridley made their thing, so that's what made sense.
But he wasn't up for that, so we had them on our little show as a second choice, a fullback.
Correct.
I'm just correcting the record.
I checked that after we...
Had the discussion and yeah.
You have the receipts.
I've got the receipts.
The very long-winded emails that I sent.
That was just a section of the log email.
So yeah, that's the way the cookie crumbles.
But in any case, you know, I think now, Matt, we move on.
We look to the future, to other gurus that we're going to cover.
But we should also consider what other people have said about us.
And just have a little quick gander at the reviews that we've received, if you don't object.
All good, I assume.
All good?
Actually, they are, because we haven't received very many recently.
So everyone can get on.
I'm not saying filled up with bad ones.
You know, good ones, okay, as well.
Funny ones, appreciated.
They can be humorously bad ones.
Like, really over the top ones.
We've already established.
Five stars, write whatever you want.
That's all.
And so...
I'm going to read maybe just one so as not to be indulgent because they're all so nice.
This one is from xylophone792 and it's titled Preposterous.
Five stars.
A truly remarkable cacophony of brogue and schwa.
I have encountered something profound in this pair of polymaths.
No, they are not the kings of seal manning nor the kings of straw manning.
In truth, I believe they are the kings of mud manning and each mud man has become a brick.
And each brick placed on the disgustingly splendid Nouveau Tower of Guru Babel.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
That's really good.
I like that.
This guy gets it.
This guy gets it.
Yeah, that's it.
I'm not going to attempt to pronounce his username again.
Pick an easier username.
But, Matt, speaking of people with easy usernames, We have Patreon shoutouts to give.
We do need to give those out.
We have to thank the lovely people that support us.
There's lots of good things on our Patreon.
There's bonus material.
There's the Coding Academia series, 25, 30 episodes.
Who knows?
There's all the videos we recorded in Japan.
There's just general discussions.
There's lots of good stuff there.
Get behind-the-scenes peeks, advanced releases.
It's all there.
It's all there.
What can you not get by...
Joining the Patreon.
You can't get milk.
Can't get milk?
Good point, Matt.
You can't get milk.
Can't get milk.
Can't access the meditation app.
We haven't developed one.
So there are many things you can't get.
That was a lie.
You can get parasocial experiences and a small amount of additional content.
Right.
You get more of us.
That's what you get.
I'm sorry about that.
But that is what you get.
Now.
Conspiracy Hypothesizers.
I'm going to shout them out first, Matt.
Okay?
Here we go.
Mabui. Austin.
Dr. Badmouth.
Martin Nagy.
be to Linda.
Fake Chuck.
Podcast Fanatic.
Iris Zezelish.
Johnny Marengo.
I like that.
Do Tran.
Privatier. Michael Hoops.
Johan Swan.
Michael Delaney.
Marco Rafjan.
Matt M. Stefan.
Can. Werner Lotz.
John Kuzma.
Sam Kandler.
Sean. Sean Dawson.
Anthony B. Emma Chant.
Freya Winter.
And Gwen Boyle.
Mmm.
You know, the charming thing about the way you read out those names is that you have trouble with the difficult names.
But you also have trouble with the simple names.
Like, I swear to God, if we had someone called John, you'd go, we have John.
I just like to keep people on their toes.
That's all.
It's just for their amusement.
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.
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.
No way, Brett, you lying son of a bitch.
You're advancing conspiracy theories all the time.
Sorry.
Yeah, he's just been on the wrong page lately.
So, NIMAT, our revolutionary...
Thinkers.
Hayden Bruce, Thomas Tigger, Ben Mitchell, Sebastian, John Hand, maker of memes, Neil Hornsby, Chris from the Rewired Soul podcast, Selena Jones, Chris Barber,
Jorgen, Stanislaw Pistokonski, Thomas Jones, Simon Cooper, Starfish Pancake, Good names.
Yeah, very good names.
So these are the ones that have leveled up from me hypothesizing to getting a theory together of some kind.
Yeah, they dig it in there.
They can get into the coding academia.
Lucky bastards.
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.
Yo, by the way, what's his face?
Jordan Hall has converted to...
Christianity.
Oh, has it?
Yeah.
Seems like something you would do.
It does, yeah.
It's not really that shocking whenever a sense maker, you know, comes out as religious, kind of like, yeah, that's what I thought.
So now, the last one, Matt, the galaxy brain gurus, the big dogs.
They're a rare breed, as they often are.
And we've got Zak Katopodus.
That's one of them.
Okay.
And apart from that, maybe this is one.
I can't really tell, but there's someone, Jane, that could be.
It's hard to tell because the amounts are just a little bit weird in the way they're presented in different currencies.
How sad is that?
Only one new...
No, it's...
Possibly true.
It's just in this sheet that I'm looking at.
The way I'm searching it, there's only one that's easy to see.
That's okay.
Well, we have day jobs anyway, so it's fine.
It's fine either way.
Pablo Gonzalez?
Maybe.
If not, he's been upgraded in his thanks.
Thank you anyway.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like, what was coming?
How it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
So that's it, Matt.
We're done.
I had an existential moment.
Just, well, where are we?
What's happened?
Well, we're the end.
That's what's happened.
We've come to the end.
Yeah.
We have come to the end.
I'm gonna go, I think, and stare at the sun in the morning as the dew drops off the leaves.
Well, you do that.
I'm gonna go find a moving body of water and stand by that.
Get your negative ions topped up.
Makes sense.
Makes sense.
Well, if you see any dogs, just make sure they're...
Fully tapped up on their testosterone.
And they'll thank you for it, Matt.
They'll thank you for it later.
I don't want any weak womanly dogs in my life, Chris.
I don't have time for it.
No, shouldn't have neutered them, really.
But what can you do?
Can't go back in time.
Just...
Top up the testosterone now.
That's right.
You can't tack it back on.
You have to just give them testosterone.
Yeah.
You're like Santa Claus for dogs returning their testosterone levels.
They're still in tea.
All right.
Well, we've gone mad, so we'll end it here and see you next time for Sean Carroll.
