Jack Symes challenges new atheism’s failure to address existential questions—like suffering, consciousness, and theodicy—while debating Joe Rogan on its dogmatic parallels with religion. They critique multiverse theory’s moral implications, including infinite suffering, and explore psychedelics’ risks (700 surveyed users report lasting trauma) versus therapeutic benefits for veterans. Symes proposes reparations for animal suffering in human-controlled systems, contrasting it with natural cycles, while Rogan defends hunting as ethical but condemns factory farming’s cruelty. The conversation exposes gaps in both atheist and theist frameworks, suggesting meaning may be subjective yet deeply tied to human relationships and progress amid an indifferent universe. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, so I think it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right?
It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff.
But I think at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society.
We're like, Stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions.
So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox.
They all say something along the lines of like, philosophy is dead.
So just before we get into the multiverse, it's probably best to say like...
What philosophy is and what the point of talking about the multiverses.
So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like what they take philosophy to be, because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects.
One of the ideas that I love is this one by the late great British philosopher Mary Midgley.
She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing.
So we have these conversations in our societies and these conversations are flowing around and likewise we have these pipes running underneath our houses keeping the water flowing.
But occasionally it gets clogged and so the philosopher needs to Pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again.
So these are things like what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech or what it means to say that a gene is selfish.
So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like trying to understand the concepts we're using.
Then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
Like let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology and the arts and let's try and get a big picture of the world.
And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be.
So I take that to be the project.
And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing?
No universe.
Why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life?
Where does consciousness come from?
Like, when I make a moral statement like, the Holocaust is bad, is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad?
Like, are they the same kind of statement?
Is that the same bad I'm using?
But the big question, to get to the multiverse now, is...
The big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question, the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living.
So my question is...
What's the point of all this?
Is existence on the whole a good thing?
Should we be happy and pleased to be alive?
And what's the purpose of life?
And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism and these arguments for theism all come in into the project.
I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of science.
Just that reductionist perspective, the idea that thinking about things and developing, for lack of a better term, a philosophy, developing your own personal philosophy, taking from the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting, unique view of the world that we live in, the idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly.
Right, but the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the splitting of the atom all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by.
They had to have something that allowed them to have the discipline to commit to their schooling, to follow through with the project.
Especially think about Oppenheimer's struggle that he had with this thing that he had created that was ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives, if not the entire human race itself.
Which was very deeply based in philosophy, like his perspective and his struggles with it.
I mean, if he was just like an automaton, like some, you know, sociopathic, just super Alzheimer's guy, you know, that didn't—not autism guy, rather, that didn't think at all about— No concept at all about empathy, no concept at all about our perspective.
He would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs.
Science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking, and how does that not come out of philosophy?
Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally, right?
We've got this movement in the early 2000s, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11th terrorist attack and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond like criticism.
But then once that project Once they embark on that project and they criticize religion, there isn't really anything left there.
They don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics.
And when they try to do it, it's lacking.
Something's missing.
So I see that as the reason why new atheism is going out of favor, why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions.
So I just think that these people sort of looked at this as religion is all this superstitious nonsense that these people have concocted and put together over years to keep people in line.
And science is something that we can prove and see.
And, you know, there is no God.
There is no – but just – How do you know?
You do not know.
It's a crazy thing to say.
You have such a limited perspective just in terms of the universe itself.
We only see what we see on our planet and the tiny amount that we can reach out into the ...
They can look back 13 billion years, but what are they looking at?
They're looking at bright lights, like little dots, and they understand this is a galaxy.
But it's like, how big is this fucking thing?
Where did it come from?
What's going on?
You don't know.
What is the purpose?
Is this a grand test?
Are you a part of some very bizarre journey that the soul has to go through in this environment before it expands and goes into the next dimension, the next phase of existence?
Who fucking knows?
You don't know.
We do know that people die.
We do know that people have near-death experiences and these very bizarre...
Moments where they come back from the dead and have very similar accounts of something happening, about encountering...
I had Sebastian Young on the podcast the other day, and he was...
Sebastian Younger, and he was explaining how when he almost died, he had an internal bleeding, and he saw his father.
His father came to the bed with him and was talking to him.
It was like this very bizarre thing.
We don't really know...
We really don't know what life is.
We don't know what consciousness is.
So we're being arrogant.
And I think, unfortunately, brilliant people that are so used to schooling people in debates, like Christopher Hitchens, like Sam Harris, these guys are so good at making religious zealots look like buffoons, right?
And you get real good at that, and you just sort of think that, look, I got it down.
These fucking religious people, they don't know what the fuck's going on.
But I think in terms of philosophical arguments for thinking it's true, like the one you mentioned a moment ago, where this all came from.
Science can't get to that question.
The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular.
It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist, therefore it needs a cause.
And then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be, and it would have to be something outside of time and space with power and knowledge to bring this into being.
And that might not be...
That might get you all the way to God.
That's a really strong reason for believing in God.
And the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong.
And likewise, like the argument from fine-tuning, which is gaining traction again.
The physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature, like 26 of them, have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form.
He calculates that the initial low entropy point of the universe had to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding, And you wrote down one digit every second.
You'd still be writing out that number now.
That number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible.
And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best explanation for that, then I think those that posit the existence of God have the better hand.
I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go, no, to those two problems, they've got really strong arguments for believing in God.
But, you know, people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit more, I guess, sympathetic to those arguments than the other three.
But, you know, they're not serious about following the arguments.
They're not serious about going wherever they take them.
A lot of it is—all the public discourse that we've seen that you can watch on YouTube between atheists and religious scholars, it generally turns into a debate.
They're almost all debates, and almost all of these debates are, in a sense, intellectual competitions.
And if you have a person that is getting social credit, you're getting notoriety, adulation from schooling these religious people, from mocking what you think are ridiculous ideas from mocking what you think are ridiculous ideas that are superstitious, it becomes a part of yourself.
It becomes a part of your identity.
And then I think your unwillingness to engage in the mystery of all this, it speaks to that.
I think that's the origin of it.
I think it becomes a competition with people that their ideas are correct.
And that these ideas that they've held for a long time, they want to defend those ideas instead of going, huh.
I am of the opinion that I am not my ideas.
And I think it's a really important thing to say because I think more people should try this out.
Maybe it's not for you, but it's my personal philosophy.
I am not married to my ideas.
They're just ideas.
And they come in my head, and they go, and a lot of times while I'm saying them, I do it on the podcast all the time, I go, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense, because of this.
I don't want to be that buffoon that's connected to the first shit that comes out of my mouth, and I think that happens with a lot of people.
I also think the idea that there's no God, that there's nothing...
I think the universe might be God.
And I don't think it was born.
I think it's probably always been here.
And I think Sir Roger Penrose's latest work, he seems to think that the Big Bang is just one of a series of these events.
I don't want to paraphrase because I know I'll fuck it up.
His position is not that that was the beginning, that this is probably a series of these things that have gone on in eternity, and that the infinite nature of the universe is probably something that even mathematically, even if you get the most genius people, they're probably going to struggle to understand something that has no boundaries.
We have biological limitations.
We are born and we die.
And I think we try to impose those pump things.
And there's some things you can – like, oh, we know this tree grew 2,000 years ago.
How crazy.
Oh, we know this planet formed 4 billion years ago.
But there's some things we really just – we don't have – The capacity to really put it into perspective.
We don't know.
There's just too much we don't know.
They're starting to think now that the universe is quite a bit older than they thought it was before because of the observations of these galaxies by the James Webb telescope.
So now there's certain people that are these...
Controversial ideas they're throwing around about 22 billion years old or 23 billion years old.
It's interesting what you say, first of all, about us being so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments.
It's always baffled me that people can care about their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they're willing to die on these hills.
They count in their wins and not their losses.
I just had a...
Two and a half hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about his motivations for being religious.
And so I basically sketched out my broad argument, which is atheism's shortcomings are it can't answer the two problems we've just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing fine-tuning.
But then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection.
Like, what a wicked thing to do to create the rules of the game to be that To have intelligent life, it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years.
If God exists, then God's a psychopath, right?
God didn't have to do that.
It's logically and metaphysically possible for God to create it as the Christians thought God did in the Garden of Eden 5,000 years ago.
That is way more compatible with the perfectly good God hypothesis, right?
Yeah, but like, you know, we've been trying to solve it.
In between 1960 and 1998, 3,600 articles and books were published on the problem of evil.
Like, people are working on it, and it's not going anywhere.
Like, the systemic problem of evil undercuts the God hypothesis.
But then it's this weird place, right?
Because you've got these strong arguments.
That an atheistic view can't solve.
But then you've got this big problem for belief in God.
And like you say, this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask, well, maybe we need a different concept of God, like the universe.
So this is pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical.
And panentheism is the view where The universe is in God, but there's this extra layer of God, which is like heaven or the thing that brought it into being.
The interesting thing about pantheism is, like, is it worthy of the name God, like the universe?
Because if it's just nature-loving atheism, then that doesn't get you far.
But I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious, like there is some will or agency underlying the things that we interact with, then I think that gets you pretty close to a concept of God.
And I knew it was run by a cult because my friend told me about it.
I was building a comedy club, and my friend Ron White is a hilarious comedian.
He told me about this great theater that was for sale.
I should buy that theater.
And so I go, okay.
And I look into it.
Yeah, it used to be owned by a cult.
Oh, great.
I go, sign all these paperwork, and then my friend Adam calls me up, he goes, hey, did you watch the documentary on that cult?
I'm like, oh, God.
There's a documentary.
And in watching the documentary, it was so sad to me to watch these people that for decades were deceived and led by this person, and at the end of it, they're weeping and crying.
They've lost their life.
Their life, like 20-plus years of their life, have been dedicated to this charlatan who was a hypnotist and a gay porn star.
Who was teaching yoga in West Hollywood and convinced all these people to do this.
I had to get out of that building.
I'm like, there's no way.
There's not enough sage in the world that I can get rid of all the demons.
I felt like the comedy store in Hollywood used to be Ciro's nightclub, which was Bugsy Siegel's nightclub.
Or when you get a record or something, or you're listening to it on Spotify or something, like a song, but you know the person who's made that song has done something dreadful.
You get that same kind of feeling then.
So maybe the simpler explanation is something like, You know, it's your association with these things.
It's just these connections in your brain going, bad thing, this building, right?
But I think there's places that do have, like, my stepfather went to Gettysburg.
And he's not a...
A religious person, and he's not woo-woo.
He's a very intelligent, hard-line person who believes in facts, and he's like, there's something there.
He goes, the sadness.
It's like, you feel it.
The death of all those people in this place, like, it stained the place.
But my point is not that.
My point is that Perhaps everything has some sort of a consciousness.
We just have this egocentric perspective of what consciousness means, because to living things, it has ego, it has biological needs, human reward systems, they're all in play.
Social structures and the value of status, and we're moving around through this...
The grid of other beings and we call that consciousness because that is our experience with it.
But maybe this table has consciousness.
Maybe cloth has consciousness.
Maybe rocks have consciousness.
They just don't have an ability to express themselves and they don't have this language and culture and all this other stuff that we connect to consciousness.
But that it is an integral part of everything in the universe.
And if the universe is God, the universe creating all these things, It is essentially a creation machine, right?
It creates stars.
It creates galaxies.
It creates supernovas.
It creates carbon-based life.
All these different things that happen are all created by this process.
It's just not a guy in the sky in a robe.
And I think the dogmatic...
perspective that a lot of religious zealots put to these ancient texts.
Look, we don't trust what people in the 1950s thought about dentistry.
Why the fuck do we trust people from 2000 years ago what they thought about God?
It's kind of a crazy thing, because one of two things is either true.
Either this is God's Word, and God is a psychopath, or this is the hand of human beings that is writing down an oral tradition of over a thousand years and trying to put in perspective what steps that we have to apply to our civilization in order to move towards a more loving and prosperous place, which is what God wants.
But I think all those things about evil, like I think maybe the evil is what we need to see to respond to become better.
And maybe this is this grand evolutionary process that's going on with the human spirit and the human psyche.
trends like if you study pinker's work if you go back to you know any time a recorded history versus today today is less violent less discriminatory less racist more more open to you know equal rights amongst the sexes and genders and sexual orientation we're way better now than we were like alan turing from the turing test went to he he got arrested for being gay They put him on hormone blockers, he wound up killing himself.
Because it was illegal to be gay.
The man who invented the ability, he came up with the concept of the ability to detect whether or not artificial intelligence is real.
That guy was tortured by human philosophy and human perspective.
Yeah, I think Pink is right on all of these metrics.
Everything's better now than it was.
And if you want to combine that with, like, a process theology in which God is identical to the world and the world's getting better, and it's better to, like, start a business, go broke, pull yourself up again, and then succeed than it is just to have the best thing to begin with.
So that taps into our intuitions about what it is to develop a great character and have, you know, a better world, you might think.
But I suppose, like, pre-1859, before On the Origin of Species in Darwin, I think, actually, theism was the reasonable worldview to have, like, this idea of this God outside of time and space.
And you can run all of these, they call them, like, theodicies and defences, like, reasons why God allows evil to exist.
I think when you think about Like the evils, like events, like the wars and all the diseases that are in our country, in our world.
You sort of go, well, I can see how some of these defenses, like you need hurricanes for hurricane relief funds, or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something, right?
All of these, I think they probably work for humans.
But then I don't think since then, and maybe this is a part of the reason why people or Christians, especially in this country, Maybe it's the only way.
They can compartmentalize because factory farming, we talked about this yesterday, they have ag-gag laws.
A couple days ago with Russell Crowe, rather.
Ag-gag laws prevent people from detailing the horrific conditions which these animals live in.
If you film it, if you're a worker there and you're like, this is horrific, I'm going to film this and out this place, you'll go to jail, which is insane.
It should be a crime.
It should be like animal cruelty.
Russell Crowe was in here the other day and he keeps 200 head of cattle.
He has a ranch in the bush in Australia.
And the way he described, the way he takes care of these animals, the way they gently move them into new pastures, they live this idyllic life, and he's like, and the meat is better, you feel better about the whole thing.
Would you rather have your nose cut off, your children taken away from you, be stuffed in a cage for your life and pumped full of hormones and then be electrocuted or have your throat slit?
Or would you rather run around in the field with your family and then one day the lights just go out?
So I don't know when he's obviously killing these cows, right?
But is he doing it right towards the end of the life?
Then it seems like it might still be...
Wrong in a sense, though, right?
There's a reason why when we take our dogs to the vets to be euthanized, that you don't get there and the vet pulls out a fucking crossbow or a gun or something, right?
The interesting thing is as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non-human animals have a comparable value to human beings.
And you have to draw the line somewhere.
There's going to be a rough, like, number.
It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves or water droplets make a cloud.
It's not going to be clear exactly how many, but as long as you pick something.
So those people who, like yourself, who maybe it's whatever health reason it is, They still, some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook, like as if they, because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like.
But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go, like, is what I'm doing, like, morally right?
Is this something I should reconsider?
And I think given the, if you pick a number, then you have to make a call on that.
I don't think it's morally reprehensible to eat meat, but I do know that an animal has to die.
There was a few years back in 2012 that I decided that I was either going to become vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter.
So I'd watched too many of these PETA documentaries.
I'd seen too many things about factory farming.
I was like, this is disgusting.
It would freak me out.
I was like, okay, I either have to come to grips with what it means to kill an animal and eat it, and if I can't handle that, if I don't like that, then I'll just become a vegetarian.
I tried being a vegetarian for a brief amount of time in my life when I was like...
I guess I was 18. When I was fighting, I was having a really hard time, because I was still growing.
I was having a really hard time making a lower weight class that I was competing in.
And there was other people on my team that were competing in the higher weight class, and it was a real problem.
And I decided when I was eating that mule deer, it's all on film.
We did it for a television show called Meat Eater, my friend Steven Rinello hosts.
And when I was eating that deer by fire, I was like, this is what I'm doing forever.
I'm doing this.
It ignited parts of my DNA. It gave me an understanding of the cycle of life instantaneously in a way that was like fishing does that a little bit, but this is like that times a thousand times.
Which is why people don't have a problem with you showing dead fish on your Instagram.
If you hold like a dead bass, look at the bass I caught!
Everybody's like, good job, nice fish!
You're gonna eat that fish.
You hold up a dead deer, people kind of freak out.
The first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting.
Like if I hunt with a spear, and you'll know more about this than me, a spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head.
A crossbow and a bow are going to be somewhere between them, and so there are going to be better ways to hunt than not.
So maybe, perhaps, I wonder what you think of this.
On the whole, when you run the numbers in terms of probability, that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even bows.
Well, okay, so here's where I agree with you, right?
Is that when people eat, again, you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is, you know, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on Earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls, right?
And that rings true for me, right?
This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of, like, production of our food, in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating.
Yes.
I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms, which the overwhelming majority of people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on.
Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right?
We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act.
So more killings when you're using guns than when it's hand-to-hand combat.
And even in the Second World War, like, fieldwork showed that it was about...
So it's a little more complicated than a PS4 or PS5 thing, but it does have a joystick just like a simulator.
Like a flight simulator is what it looks like.
That's the view.
But how nutty is that?
What does that feel like when you're in Nevada and you're operating something that's in Iraq or wherever, in Yemen, and you've got a drone flying over some compound and you're just shooting hellfire missiles into human beings based on metadata?
Yeah, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-plus percent.
Some estimations are 90 percent of civilians.
It's hard to tell, because what's been explained to me by people in the military is that the people, first of all, the government will undercut the number.
They'll give you a lower number than probably Israel.
And then the people that were attacked will give you a higher number than Israel.
And so you have to sort this out.
A good example is, remember the New York Times reported that the Israelis had blew up a hospital?
And it was on the front page of the New York Times.
And they had been told that 500 people were dead or 5,000.
I forget the number one.
The reality was the bomb hit the parking lot.
And 50 people died.
But they had been told it was a much worse scenario.
They seldom got the same recovery periods or mental health screenings as other fighters.
Instead, they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war.
Under unrelenting stress several former crew members said people broke down drinking and divorce became common some of the Some left the operations floor in tears others attempted suicide and the military failed to realize the full impact despite hundreds of missions Captain Larson's personal file under the heading combat service only offers a single word none Drone crew members said in interviews that while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground.
It still carves deep scars In many ways, it's more intense, said Neil Shuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a Master Sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes.
We had to watch a target for days, weeks, and even months.
We saw him play with his kids.
We saw him interact with his family.
We watched his whole life unfold.
You are remote, but also very much connected.
Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him.
Then you watch the death.
You see the remorse and the burial.
People often think this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them.
Well, the vegan needs to be, or the utilitarian, or, you know, there's all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this.
I don't know any serious, like, philosopher of moral philosophy or ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non-human animals, their pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter.
So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well, or the pain and suffering that goes into it.
There are going to be better ways to do it than not, but...
I often get asked about tofu or soy production.
77% of global soy production goes towards feeding non-human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating.
A bunch of it's used for biofuels and stuff, but only 7% of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings.
So if we look at the vegans' contribution to that, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for.
But here's, I think, an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side.
Because you hear loads of different arguments like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff.
As if it's going to often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non-animal rights, such as the Cathagos mentioned a moment ago, don't matter.
But think of this.
If it was the case that we're forced to do these things and we can't do otherwise, to sustain the people we have, we have to kill animals.
Let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case.
That wouldn't get God off the hook if God's forcing us to do that.
Like, here's life.
To enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it, like, 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals each year?
Out of interest, how many did you pick in terms of how many golden retrievers you were going to chuck out the boat until you chuck the human being out?
What we're talking about with animal intelligence and plant intelligence and human intelligence, for sure the way we're doing it now is wrong.
I think we would all agree to that.
If you could wave a magic wand and let all the animals be free and no one eats them anymore, You're going to have chaos.
You're going to have real chaos.
First of all, you're going to have massive overpopulation, and you're going to have predators everywhere.
Because unless you do have predators everywhere, you're going to have car accidents that you would never imagine.
Train accidents.
There's a guy named...
Why am I blanking on his name?
American Coyote...
Dan Flores.
Dan Flores...
I forget where he's your professor, Adam.
He studies the history of animals and Dan Flores, he wrote a paper called, I think it's called Buffalo Ecology something, what was it?
Buffalo Diplomacy, Buffalo Ecology.
He thinks, that's it, genius guy, he thinks the reason why when they came across the Great Plains and there was millions and millions of buffalo, I think the reason why is because 90% of the Native Americans were killed by the plague.
This is his thought, like, because the earliest settlers in the 1400s, the 1500s, they didn't see that many buffalo.
It wasn't like, they didn't even report them.
There were many accounts where they didn't even report them.
Why?
Because the Native Americans lived off them, and they kept their population in check.
The buffalo have a very long gestation period, right?
They're an enormous animal.
And if you can kill one, it takes a long time to replace that one.
So they would travel around, track the buffalo, kill them, live off them, use their skins, eat their meat, and then nomadically travel with them.
And they kept their population in check.
When 90% of Native Americans were dead, Dan Flores believes that led to this insane overpopulation problem of buffalo, where you see millions of them in fields, because that doesn't exist anywhere in nature, unless there's a problem.
And that problem is a lack of predators, and the predators at that time being the Native American hunter.
Yeah, I think if you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't even on the view which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the morally relevant facts are pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering.
If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around, that's going to, as you say, create a sort of mayhem.
Let me explain something about hunting areas, right?
So if you're going to go to this place in Montana where we went and hunted mule deer, wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas, and they know roughly the exact amount of deer that are in this area.
Number of predators, particularly stealthy predators like mountain lions.
Pretty good with wolves, but even then in high-density areas, very difficult to really figure it out.
But they get the numbers of the deer, and then based on some very exact science, they calculate the amount of hunters who will be allotted tags.
So, like, say if you apply for a limited draw entry place.
So, limited draw entry is like, say maybe you have...
An allocated piece of land that's X amount of thousands of acres, and in that there are X amount of thousands of deer, and you will allow 100 hunters into that area.
And out of those 100 hunters, there'll be maybe a 10 to 15% success rate.
So you are thinking that these hunters will trim 10 deer, 20 deer, whatever it is for this particular – and there's a bunch of different areas like this all over the country.
But they're all tightly managed.
And the wildlife biologists that do that in the United States, it's a beautiful and incredible thing because it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world where you have public land where people – the United States and all the people living in the United States own this land.
This is our land.
And you can go out on that land.
And in some places, you don't even have to have a tag.
And you can do that because these wildlife biologists have a very keen understanding of the amount of animals that are sustainable in the area and the amount of hunters they can allow to hunt in these areas.
That's how it's done.
If you don't do that, and if you just have animals run free, You get the buffalo when there's millions of them on the fields.
And you're going to have to kill some of them.
Because they're going to get diseased.
Because they don't have any food.
They're going to starve to death.
Or you're going to bring in mountain lions.
And mountain lions can't kill buffalo.
So you're going to have to bring in wolves.
You're going to have to bring in big cats.
You're going to have to bring in all kinds of things that eat things to keep them in line.
Then you've got fucking wild nature taking place everywhere in the world that there's not a city.
I think Martha Nussbaum in her new book, Justice for Animals, she argues that these things, as you say, are a problem.
You can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control.
And she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in animal sanctuaries, if you like.
And I was thinking recently, like, there's a lot of arguments for human reparations, like when a full group is harmed by another group, that we think that they're owed something, whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in North West Africa.
We think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should right that wrong.
I don't know the details, I don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher, but let's say that's a view that people hold as they do.
Well, if you take non-human animals to be like these subjects which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure and happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group, then that group owes them the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible.
Now it might be, just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day-to-day of it.
It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can, says the argument, to reduce it as much as possible.
If that ends up being like having to add predators into that situation, then so be it.
But perhaps with the right time and money you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, so to speak.
Because they're going to make all these animals suffer.
And if you get killed by wolves, oh, that's a rough one.
That's a rough one.
The worst is killed by bears because they just eat you.
They just hold you down and start pulling you apart like a salmon.
So if we want to really eliminate suffering, perhaps we should eliminate all of the predators or just put them in zoos where they'll suffer, but they're evil.
Well, there's a question of like, what's wrong with death, which is at the heart of this.
So it might not just be like the hedonistic properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, you're somehow wronging them.
So, like, if I was to hypothetically, you know, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier, and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one will remember them, and I can erase the thing I did from my memory.
You might still think what I did was wrong, because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects they were working on, and I stopped their flourishing in some sense.
To bring this back to like, you know, that fundamental question we began with, like, on the whole, is existence a good thing?
Should we be happy and pleased with this world?
And it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or You know, especially if we're forced to do these things.
Like, if we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that, again, like, this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good god would do.
There's going to be a significant number of non-human animals that don't have what we call free will, which is the power and freedom to do otherwise, the power and choice to do A rather than B. There are some non-human animals that just act.
The raindrop lands on the bird's beak.
It just...
Instinct, it turns, sees what's there.
It doesn't think, what was that?
It doesn't have this in the chat.
It doesn't choose, reflect.
There's going to be a lot of non-human animals which that's the case for.
So that sort of character development theodicy or defense won't work for them.
Especially if they're...
It doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it.
For all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop, their individual lives seem like they're, again, cases of gratuitous, i.e.
unnecessary evil.
But the point, fundamentally, is this, right?
God...
Could have made it so that these creatures that don't have free will and that can't develop their characters don't suffer.
Unless God is truly all-knowing and us with our primate minds are trying to make sense out of this thing that ultimately will make sense when we reach the end of our journey and that this whole process As complicated and vicious and evil as it seems to be with predator and prey and natural selection.
And what you're just talking about, like, with birds and different animals.
Well, they don't have to.
They figured out a niche.
They could fly.
They move around.
They basically got it nailed, right?
To keep their populations high, not that difficult unless people come along with shotguns.
That's when it really becomes a problem, like, the passenger pigeon disappeared.
Because we ate them all, you know, and we shot them all.
But when you look at animals in the wild, when they have a very successful model, they don't change.
That's crocodiles.
They have a very successful model.
The model is this thing doesn't need to eat for a year.
It can go underwater for hours.
It can stay perfectly still in four inches of water.
Knows exactly where the animals are and explodes and eats them and kills them.
And it's been in that same form for millions and millions of years.
Because it's a successful form.
Same as sharks.
Successful form.
Doesn't need to evolve.
Human beings live in the most comprehensive and bizarre environment.
First of all, we figured out how to shelter and once we did that we became weak.
We figured out agriculture.
We became weaker.
We developed cities.
We completely separate ourselves from the natural world.
So, we think of ourselves as different than all these other processes that are happening because we've elevated In our own eyes, beyond this, beyond the natural realm, into this world of morals and ethics and philosophy and our view of our perspective of the world.
Well, here's the thought, right, which is in terms of like cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs.
Is that when you look at the system, and you mentioned a second ago, like, maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this.
Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him.
And I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words.
Or, you know, William James, the philosopher, has this example of a mountaineer who's got, like, this gap they need to jump over, a storm behind them.
So it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump, or the runner...
Who has to believe they're going to win the 100-meter race?
It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence.
I think these arguments work for, like, psychological states, but you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable That there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true.
So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief, is to go, here we have some really good arguments for this hypothesis, here's the evidence we have against it, but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem.
So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace some form of agnosticism where we go, how can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless?
And that's to go back to the start of our discussion there.
It's like the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that.
We are looking for meaning.
Shakespeare wouldn't be right for someone English to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quoting Shakespeare, wouldn't it?
So you'll have to excuse me.
Shakespeare says, essentially, if there's no God, then life is like a tale told by an idiot.
Like the openness of being, the gift of meaninglessness.
So I think...
The reasonable thing for us to do in the light of those arguments we've spoken about is to suspend and be agnostic about belief in God, but then have this honest search for finding meaning and moral value.
This isn't the kind of notion of the absurd that physicists keep talking about.
Again, this is when...
I won't talk about physics, and sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy, and you sort of get a little bit frustrated.
You've probably heard people say things like this, like, in comparison to the vast cosmos in which I exist, I feel so small and meaningless.
Or in comparison to the 13.8 billion years in which I've existed.
Like, my 70, if I'm lucky, feels like it doesn't really matter.
But, like...
Imagine if you were really big, like the size of the universe.
Imagine you live for 13 billion years.
It doesn't seem to have any effect on how more meaningful your life is.
Your life still lacks that fundamental purpose.
So, like, how big you are and how long you last doesn't...
And their lives, they're still going about their lives like they matter.
Or imagine we're in a simulation.
Imagine the fundamental nature of stuff is ones and zeros rather than particles or consciousness.
It all still matters.
So I think the project of agnosticism, the thing we need to be doing, isn't just digging down with this new atheism that's flippant and doesn't offer us any, like, can't solve these big problems and lacks answers to the fundamental questions.
And it isn't just a gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it.
But it's to try and create ourselves a patchwork blanket to keep us warm in the void of meaninglessness, right?
Well, we inherently know that it feels better to be a good person.
We know it.
We know it feels better to have good friends and good community and be someone that people can rely on and count on.
We know there's a general direction that makes us feel good to go in that way.
And I think that's the guiding light of whatever this power is that wants us to become a better version of what we are is.
That's what forces that action.
I think we get too caught up in religious dogmatism and we get too caught up in these literal interpretations of ancient texts which are not even in the original language they were written in which is so bizarre and apparently an incredibly difficult language to read and comprehend and to translate when you're going back to like ancient Hebrew.
We're trying to translate that into English.
How much is lost there?
And also, what was the original story?
Where the fuck did all this come from?
What was the original guy that told these stories?
What was the experience that he actually had?
We're guessing because of people.
I used to say about the Bible, and it was just a joke, I don't really mean this if you're a Bible fanatic, that people are full of shit and that story sucks.
Even the New Testament, it's all fascinating to me.
I am not an anti-religious person.
I think I was when I was younger.
I went to Catholic school when I was a little boy, and I decided that religion was bullshit, because they were mean.
But that was just me being six.
But then as I was raised by hippies.
But as I've gotten older, I kind of have a belief that the arrogance of atheism is just as bad as the arrogance of the religious zealot.
And that this whole thing is a massive mystery.
And to pretend that it's not is to...
We're going to hamstring all of these conversations.
We're going to put shackles on all of our debate and all of our...
Conversations where we're trying to figure out what's real and what's not real and what's the shared experience that we all have.
Like, I don't know how you view the world.
And the only way for me to find out how you view the world is for me to ask you and not berate you for your opinions, but try to, like, get it out of you.
Like, but what about this?
Challenge you with other perspectives.
How does he feel about that?
Like, sometimes you can get very quickly to how deep a person's perspective on an issue is with just a couple of questions.
Because you see what they espouse, what they say, and a lot of times that it aligns with very particular ideologies, whether it's right-wing or left-wing.
And then a couple of questions deep, you start asking about opposing viewpoints, and why do people think this way, and do you think that perhaps it's this?
Do you think it's perhaps...
And then you can get to how much they have actually thought about it.
The moment people become dogmatic, the moment people become ideologically captured by a very specific group of things that you've adopted as your opinions, because it aligns with science.
We saw that during the pandemic, this trust the science idea.
Which science?
Like, what is science?
Science is not a consensus.
It's a bunch of different people looking at data and trying to come to...
And when you know that that's hamstrung and you know that that's captured, that's not science anymore.
You know there's propaganda involved.
You know there's lies.
This is not science.
This is a business, and it utilizes science, and you're caught up in an ideological debate about a thing that you should be completely objective about, but you're not, because it's just like all the other things that human beings do.
We like to decide that we are correct and that we defend from that position.
Instead of just looking at These ideas, like, I think one of the things that happened with atheism is that it did become like a – remember when they had Atheism Plus?
Do you remember that?
Do you remember that?
Oh, it was wonderful.
So they had atheism and then they had these, like, social justice warriors that came out with Atheism Plus.
And it was atheism attached to a whole bunch of ideas about, like – Ways to behave, things that they value.
I think I said a five-year-old kid, you know, obviously with mental problems, he's going to find holes in that story.
He's going to go, wait a minute, there's two of each animals, but animals eat other animals, and the punchline was, I'm not that retarded.
But this idea that we have about...
I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about real events that took place a long time ago and were told in an oral tradition.
It's just what really happened is very difficult to say.
And when you have the hand of man, when you have human beings, especially in the New Testament, you literally have people deciding what is going to be and not going to be in it.
So there's human beings deciding what is going to be in the Bible, which is insane.
That's insane as it is.
It doesn't mean that the things that are in there aren't Representatives of the most recent version of telling a tale that probably did happen.
And this is what's not just confused, but careless about some of this thinking.
When you go, my team thinks this, and I'm just going to double down on it.
Even though I've got reasons against this position, I'm still going to be defending the position of my group.
So people like conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro think that eating non-human animals is morally wrong, but they carry on doing it.
I think probably because it's part of what their team does.
When I spoke to Peterson, he conceded that that problem we spoke about a moment ago, the problem of systemic evil in nature, was a massive problem for the God hypothesis.
And as we said, he thinks you should just crack on and carry on working on it.
But there's a sense in which It's okay if your view isn't affecting anybody, right?
You can have a false belief and you're entitled to that, that freedom of conscience to think something, as long as it's not bringing about and breaching the harm principle.
But there's a sense in which, like, take Peterson's view because we spoke about taking that leap of faith.
After I had this conversation with him, he tweeted like an hour later.
I was arguing that my view is that happiness and pleasure has to correspond to a purposeful life, right?
That if your life is meaningful, it also has to involve a flourishing or happiness and pleasure.
And afterwards, he tweeted something like, What use is happiness when we have mountains to move?
Which is a nice Nietzschean quote, but it's a nice bumper sticker or something, or a fridge magnet, but I don't think we should live our lives by it.
I gave him this example.
I said, suppose God came down to us and said, here's the meaning of life.
Like, create war, spread disease, commit genocide, right?
You'd go, that's not the kind of meaning I thought.
That's not what I had in mind.
I don't want that kind of meaning.
But this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter and they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure, that's a recipe for disaster.
You can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose and meaning.
You just have to look at the 20th century to see how when people think they know what ought to be done despite all the pain and suffering they cause, how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities.
So this idea that we should just carry on sticking with our thinking beforehand.
This ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things.
It ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith.
He offers arguments.
Take Peterson, for example, again.
People are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment.
People are writing books saying, this person's going to save our faith which is going extinct.
In the US, for example, the Southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s, but your population's growing.
It's disappearing.
In 2001 in the UK, we had 70% of people identifying as Christian.
Now it's less than half.
And you're about that now in the US. You're just 23 years behind and it's the same trend.
Religion's disappearing and it needs to evolve philosophically.
You need a proper philosophical defense of it.
People like Bill Craig do a good job.
I don't see why we can't just keep holding him up for the Christians.
But this same old Just bet your soul on it.
Just go for it.
Take the leap of faith.
Is the thing and the reason why Christianity is going out of favor?
He was confronted by this woman that was asking him because she had heard that he said that he didn't want to fly commercial because then he would be flying with demons And so she says to him, like, do you think that the passengers and commercial airlines...
Listen to this.
Kenneth Copeland.
Here, Kenneth Copeland.
Here, put your headphones on.
unidentified
Why you don't want to fly commercial?
Why have you said that you won't fly commercial?
You said that it's like getting into a tube with a bunch of demons.
I think the theists, if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God, right, and we talk about all this evil which we've just explored, maybe we can jump and bring the multiverse in on this as well, is that If you're up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here, is it?
It's like five or six hours?
Yeah, probably.
Eugene Nagasawa working there has got this brilliant argument where he says, given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimists.
Like, you can't be happy and pleased to be alive.
And think the world is a good place and believe in all of the evil that you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity.
So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world.
I can say that the world is neutral at best, or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic.
I think this is the difficulty of it all.
And again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas, threatened at the height of royal happiness.
So you're in this moment where you think, actually, my life's pretty good.
And then you remember all of the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all.
And you sort of left like, that's the state for the atheist.
And that's...
I mentioned that notion of the absurd from Nagel's idea.
I wish I was bigger and I last longer.
Maybe that resonates with people.
Maybe that's just Thomas Nagel.
The real problem of the absurd and the meaninglessness of life for us as agnostics and atheists...
We desire or want meaning from the world, but the world sits there cold, dark and empty.
It doesn't respond to us.
It's worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you, because at least they're there, right?
The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that love and affection.
The universe, we ask for meaning, we ask for purpose, and it doesn't respond.
I love this quote from Michael Housecutter from Liverpool who used to be my head of department.
He says, this notion of the absurd rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity.
Here be lions and dragons.
Here be cold and dark and emptiness.
And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world.
But Camus says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide.
They kid themselves and think that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis.
They don't want to feel that feeling.
It's a really uncomfortable feeling.
There's three great books by Camus which I highly recommend.
One, The Outsider or The Stranger.
A lot of high school students read this book.
And the main character starts off, his mom just dies, and he doesn't care.
And then he goes to the beach and just shoots some random guy, and he doesn't care.
And then he's put on death row and he dies, and he still doesn't care.
And you're reading it as the reader, like, what's wrong with this guy?
But he's mirroring the world's indifference.
That's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world.
In one of his next books, The Fall, The characters trying to find meaning, or better put, trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins.
Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists.
When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all-forgiving father figure.
To take that away from us.
Like, we have to live with it.
I think as someone who's never embraced Christianity, I have no idea what that's like, what a gift that is, to do something bad and be forgiven by God from it.
If you're a human being, all you truly know is human experiences.
You know your experiences in the world, and you know there's part of the world, there's parts of the world that at any given time are cruel and terrible.
But there's also parts of the world that are wonderful.
There's things that you do find meaning in.
Like, I assume you find meaning in this conversation.
You find meaning in a great dinner date, a fun time with friends, a vacation, things that you like to do for a living, philosophical pursuits, I'm sure, in your...
All kinds of different things people find meaning in.
And they enjoy and love.
And they have happy moments.
And you go for a hike in the mountains and it's beautiful.
And you feel spiritually enriched by touching nature.
There's meaning out there.
It's just not like the lottery.
You don't just get all of it all at once.
And that's all you get.
And you live in a utopian world.
No, one of the things that makes meaning...
So wonderful when you do find it in this world is that so much of life feels like there's no meaning.
It feels like you don't connect to it.
So when you do connect to something, whether it's groups of people, your family, your loved ones, your friends, whatever you do for a living that's unusually rewarding, You are one of the lucky people that's on the right frequency.
And that frequency is what we should all gravitate towards and try to attain.
I think the problem with a lot of things that are written is that they're written from an individual's perspective.
And that person might have been depressed.
That person might not have had a good connection to their community or to friends or to loved ones.
They might not have had a great personality.
They might not have been a fun person to be around, so they didn't really attract a lot of people that wanted to have good times with them.
We do find tremendous meaning in this life.
We do.
It's just not everywhere.
And you've got to look for it, and you've got to work for it.
Like if God exists for the Abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout their lives and to the end of their life.
What we're talking about or you're describing there is what you might call like not the meaning, but like a meaning within life.
The you that's talking out of your mouth right now is the only you that interfaces with your world If you find meaning in that world, the world has meaning.
Imagine you said the meaning of your life was counting blades of grass.
And I said mine was helping people with medical care.
I have the more meaningful life.
But if what you're saying is true, if it's like there's no ultimate meaning and all meanings are just created by the person, like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful, we need some kind of way of differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile.
And so there's a problem.
I think we can solve that problem, which is...
Although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning, we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering, right?
The reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right, and you're doing something which...
I think it's moving in a direction, and I think it's moving in a very specific direction with the apex predator, which is human beings.
I think if you looked at, if you were an alien and you visited Earth, I've said this before, so I apologize to people who've heard it, and you looked at us, you would say, well, what does this thing do?
Well, it makes better things.
It's all it does is make better things.
It's all they do.
And everything that's hardwired into people, Just think about the stupid things that are hardwired into people, like materialism.
You can't keep these things.
Why are you piling up things when you're 80 years old?
Why is Kenneth Copeland buying a jet?
What is it?
Well, materialism forces innovation because you always want the latest and the greatest things.
It's one of the many motivations.
Status is attached to these things as well.
That's another motivation that pushes innovation.
If I looked at us from another perspective, I was another life form, I'd say it makes technology, and it makes better technology every year with a fever pitch.
I mean, every year there's a new phone, every year there's better computers, every year there's better chips.
Samsung just came out with a new battery that is going to be on EVs that has a 600 mile range and charges in 9 minutes.
Well, in the thing that you're giving there, it's called the is-ought fallacy, right?
It is the case that certain things do this thing, so they ought to be doing it more.
So you might run a similar argument.
Imagine you come down to Earth as aliens ages ago, let's say like 30,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food.
What are the humans?
They just eat sugary food.
That's their meaning, that's their purpose or something.
You'd go, no, the meaning or the purpose of them, or their natures, isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past.
So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm saying in the context of Christian beliefs, It's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you.
It's imposed from elsewhere.
It's quite odd to think about what it would be like outside of religious beliefs because that's the problem of agnosticism.
It's an absence.
Or better put, I keep saying that the world is meaningless.
What I really mean is It's seemingly meaningless.
It's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be, or it feels like it ought to be.
So it's not the case that the world is meaningless.
But I think maybe our disagreement here or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is...
I think, as you mentioned earlier, you're quite a fan of these pantheistic views where the world is moving towards a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and the like.
So if you hold that view, then yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning.
If there is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with, then yeah, if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process, then it can be meaningful.
But there are problems with that view too.
So I don't want to cash out and go, that is the view.
It seems like meaning is a very human-centric concept.
Meaning to us means that something makes sense, that it's noble and ethical and moral and it's the right way, it's the most intelligent way to advance and exist.
And that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning to.
But I would push back on the whole thing if aliens came and found primitive man just eating berries.
It depends on how primitive, right?
Like even if you discover chimpanzees in the Congo and you go and study them like that Chimp Nation documentary on Netflix, they have a very interesting social structure.
They have alpha males and they have bonds between the other males and they have neighboring tribes.
They fight over resources.
Like you'd be fascinated.
And if you went further ahead a few million years and saw that they've developed tools and now they've figured out how to scan animals and throw spears, you'd be like, oh, I see where this is going.
Their meaning is to continue getting better at this.
Then they develop metallurgy.
Then they figure out combustion engines, how to harness electricity, and like, whoa, okay, now we're cooking.
These things have a meaning.
It's just all the chaos to us.
Because we're personally attached to other human beings, and we see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world.
And not just terrible for violence that other human beings commit, but also just what we're doing to the Earth itself, like in terms of natural resources.
What we're doing to the ocean is fucking insane.
And you would say, well, this thing is making a better version of itself.
It's going to make an artificial life.
And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime.
And that might be...
That might be the progression of life everywhere in the universe, and that might be what God really is.
Intelligent life and creativity might be a seed of God, and that if it keeps going, and this biological life gives birth to digital life that can make better versions of itself instantaneously, and then continue to do so, it will eventually have the unimaginable power to harness every single element that exists in the universe.
Like, the meaning there for Goff would be something like, the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before, and if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful.
If you're sat on your arse not doing anything, and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then...
Your life isn't as meaningful as the person.
So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful in this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be.
I'll say, like, there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a Buddhist monk sat on your ass doing nothing.
Although, here's the value of what they are doing, right?
Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world, which is a unified field of consciousness.
fundamental consciousness is right and the Buddhist monks tap into this and they tell all of the mates in the town and they all come to see it to be true and they all contribute towards it, then that is meaningful.
If you sit on your ass in a cave doing absolutely bugger all for your whole life, you never tell anybody about it, then I don't see that as being as meaningful as being an NHS worker or fighting to defend your country or something like this.
If they're sat around doing nothing, just playing video games, something, you go, get outside.
We say stop wasting your life, right?
There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards, individually and holistically.
But the problem, I think, and why I don't embrace this for you myself, is that...
There's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say, you contemplate your own being, let's say, and you look inside of yourself.
What's it like to be a physical entity?
And you look inside your mind, and there's this consciousness.
Qualia or being or experience.
People like Schopenhauer say that because we don't know the inner nature of things, and Galen Strawson here at University of Texas at Austin says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics.
It tells you what things do but not what things are.
So let's say, for the sake of argument, underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness.
And then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion, and you say that as a whole, All of the universe is one big conscious mind.
You've got a problem there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something like this.
You take all of these little conscious particles in the table, how do they add up to one unified mind like they do in my brain?
I don't have loads of little experiences going on now.
I have one coherent stream of consciousness, seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights.
It's not like there's loads of little conscious experiences happening.
So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience?
And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness underlying everything, how does that big godlike mind decombine into little minds?
Like, why is my experience not your experience?
Why is it here rather than there?
And it doesn't seem like, although we might have some knee-jerk reaction answers to that question, philosophically, we can't draw the boundary.
Like, the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when I'm saying that the whole thing is consciousness.
There could be benefits and there could be reasons for it.
Let's paint this pantheistic picture of, again, the reason and the goal of the universe in life.
If I see myself as here rather than there, perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual.
Actually, it's starting to think about it.
I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart.
Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place despite the fact they just want to buy private jets and look after themselves.
It motivates movement and to have all these different consciences competing with each other and comparing to each other.
This motivates people when you meet people.
What is inspiration, right?
When you meet someone, you're inspired by them.
It literally makes you a better person.
It can make you better to see a great musician play.
You leave inspired.
You might go home and write something.
You might be in the middle of a novel and write something completely...
Connected to your experience that you had watching that concert and that all these different examples of people we admire, like, God, I wish I was more like that guy.
Try to be more like that person.
You know what I used to say all the time?
Aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid.
Just actually become that guy.
Like, it's possible, right?
If you could fake it for a little while, you know, when you're 21 years old trying to pick up a girl.
This still gives you a good why, like a really strong why.
It seems that...
The better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like loads of individual minds, like you say, all able to do lots of different things.
I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right?
And I was quite surprised because in the past, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool, and I remember showing them one of these clips, and it was of Musk talking about the origins of consciousness.
And I was using it as like, this is like the general public opinion of it.
You learn more about the brain.
This is like his neural link stuff and you solve the problem.
And we spoke about like how that won't happen.
But recently he came out and said something I thought was really interesting, which is essentially the view we're talking about here, panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere.
He said...
Well, in order to have consciousness, there'd need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds like me and you.
But in the origin of the world and the Big Bang, it was just hydrogen.
So hydrogen gets more and more complex until it gives rise to consciousness.
And he gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now.
He said, either consciousness is nowhere, as in it's just an illusion, it's a trick of the brain, it's pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there's not really a rabbit, or it's everywhere.
And I think, given that you can hear me and see me now, and this is what Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum is, right?
You're 100% confident that you are conscious right now.
So it's not a non-existent thing.
So following that reasoning, which has been embraced by public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience.
But leaving aside how the big mind can break itself up, There is still a question, this might be a bit of a boring terminological one, so you can tell me to shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary corner, but it's the idea that I spoke about earlier that all theists think that God is the perfect being.
If God exists, God has to be perfect.
Like, you can't have a unicorn with no horn on its head.
Like, uni-cornu, one horn.
A unicorn has to have one horn.
In the same way, a triangle needs three corners, God needs to be perfect.
But on this definition, it seems like God isn't perfect.
At the beginning of time, if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect then.
There was a greater being that God could have been.
And even in the fullness of time, perhaps God won't be as perfect as the being which is described by...
Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
So what we're seeing is people embracing, I think this is Goth's term as well, I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him.
He's describing himself as a heretical Christian.
So to be a Christian, he thinks, you don't need to believe in the virgin birth, you don't need to believe in the resurrection, you don't need to believe that God's perfect, but you can still believe that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of, and that there is something God-like at the essence of it all.
I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out.
The problem with this new idea is that someone's going to be at the head of it.
That person's going to be like Kenneth Copeland.
It's just a human thing that we do.
And to push back on this question of why God would want to have the consciousness is all separated, or what's the reason for it?
Everything's separated.
I mean, everything In the world, right?
Everything in this room is constructed of atoms and most of it is empty space, but yet some of it is a table and some of it is a microphone and some of it is you and some of it is me.
So if you look fractally at the observable universe, what we're aware of in terms of like what exists physically, right?
We're aware of subatomic particles.
We don't understand them.
We're aware of them.
We know they blink in and out of existence.
Spooky action at distance.
It's magic stuff.
It's wild things.
That's the very nature of the matter of the world in which we find ourselves conscious in.
And then as you expand through that, every single thing, even plants and animals and everything is an individual.
It's all individuals.
And that process of all these things being individuals seems to be a part of this expansion and growth and a part of natural selection and a part of evolution and a part of this constant state of improvement.
Everything is moving towards a state of deeper and deeper complexity.
Everything improves.
The elk gets big muscles to run away from the wolves.
And all these things happen in order for these beings to prosper and survive and to keep this healthy balance as this weird ape develops electronics.
I mean I think that seems to be – that's the general view I think.
It's the zeitgeist of the time.
It's the feeling of the age that we think in such a way.
But there is still that movement.
And this is my view.
I just want to shed light on like an alternative idea, which is, you know, go back to Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion that we live in this block universe, this big one thing.
Well, like Einstein tells us, and let's bring in the multiverse for this too, right?
Einstein told us that space is like stretchable.
So it expands.
So we have the moment of the Big Bang and the universe or existence as a whole, we might say, space and time, evolves according to the law of inflation.
So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space.
And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created or one or two later.
So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized.
So there's worlds, according to this view, where we're having this conversation in Spanish or, God forbid, French, right?
Or there's a very nearby possible world Where we're having this conversation in Italian, German, or Japanese, right?
There are worlds though, and I think the real question we want to ask...
There are a bunch of these multiverse views.
We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy, Mary Midgley clarifying these concepts.
This is an idea my friend Ellie Robson convinced me of recently, that it's a really important job in philosophy.
We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse.
We keep using the word, but you've had Sean Carroll on the show, who's fantastic.
I've spoken to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
You've got views in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility.
The easiest one to illustrate, it's just this inflation model that I've just given.
But what we really want to know is why this matters.
Does this change the value of the world?
Because there are universes where Little girls are born, they're tortured for their whole lives, they're executed, and it repeats.
There are universes where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better.
So there are good universes too.
But on the whole, that means you've got an uncountable number of bad universes and an uncountable number of good universes.
So I think if the multiverse theory is actually true, as agnostics or atheists, we should be really fucking worried.
This is a horrible state of affairs.
If there are all of these worlds, if you actually believe that they exist, you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and being all excited about existence.
But in our own experience on Earth, horrific things and beautiful things are happening simultaneously.
And generally speaking, more beautiful things than horrific, but we concentrate on the negatives.
To sit around and ponder the multiverse being an infinite number of evil civilizations destroying themselves and torturing themselves...
Okay.
How is that any different than thinking about demons?
How is it any different than thinking about, you know, the puppet masters of the universe controlling all of our minds?
Yeah, yeah.
It's just mental masturbation.
There's no way you're going to know whether or not there's a multiverse of people suffering.
So to not be happy in this beautiful existence, because perhaps there's a multiverse in which infinite suffering is occurring, seems to me to be a giant waste of an amazing trip.
Like the trip that we're on right now is Earth 2025 Western Civilization.
Pretty fucking cool.
Pretty cool.
And I think your job is, if you're so fortunate that you're in this position, to enjoy this very bizarre place in history where it's the strangest time perhaps ever.
That human beings have been alive, and we're going through it.
You could sit around all day and think, oh, but in other multiverses, people are just getting eaten by other people.
Well, it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that, like, it just means that you can't, when you contemplate all of existence, think that it's an overall good thing.
If the multiverse exists, and if there's not a limited number of universes, but it's an infinite number of universes, there's probably an infinite number of universes that are also fucking amazing.
They're probably all competing, just like all life is on this planet.
And what if the universe is constantly in a state of evolution itself?
Why would we limit that to physical things that we can currently observe?
If we know that there's stellar nurseries, we know that planets get born and stars, we're very aware there's this process going on.
Why do we assume this process is completed and perfected?
Maybe this process is also moving in a better direction constantly, just like human life is.
Just like human civilization is, maybe that's something that exists everywhere in the universe and that the universe itself is advancing to a more powerful state or a better state.
And so you've got infinite pleasure, happiness, and infinite suffering and pain.
So I think once you do minus one from the other, you've got a neutral set of existence.
Let's just say this.
So on balance, it's about the same.
So if you're a pantheist and you believe in the God of the multiverse, if you embrace multiverse theism, then you can't believe that God is good in the same way.
There's also a problem which is, you mentioned something like the process, right?
But there are worlds in which this process has already been realized.
It doesn't really matter if our world reaches that or not, in the grand scheme of calculating the amount of good and bad in the world.
Well, you might think that, like, some people say stuff like this, right?
They go, I want to, like, stop eating meat or stop taking long-haul flights.
But really, when it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter whether I buy that chicken or take that flight.
It's not gonna impact the overall good and bad that's in the world.
It's a drop in a huge ocean that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of it.
If the multiverse theory is true, something like that hits a little bit harder.
If your goal is to make existence as a whole greater or better, I'm sort of following the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out fully.
Now we've said that, I still think there's a point in being moral in developing your own character, sorting out your own house or community or country or continent and the world.
There's other problems though that seem to fall out of this as well, right?
Which is like we have a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual subjective conscious minds.
You know, when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today is the same person born 31 years ago and the same person and the halfway point between that again to go back to Zeno.
How am I the same person throughout time?
I think the best answer to this is something like, I have the same capacity for conscious experience.
If it was stream of consciousness, that would mean every time you drift off during me talking now, then you would die and you'd be born again when your stream of consciousness re-emerges.
Or if it was...
Yeah, like if you say, Joe Rogan is that stream of consciousness, that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now, and that stops because you drift off, that would mean your stream of consciousness has ended.
Think of it like sleep.
When you go into, like, Enren sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences, let's say, you would die according to that view.
Or the reviews in philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity.
Joe Rogan is the person that believes that Marshall is golden retriever is fantastic and that consciousness is the fundamental nature of stuff.
But then if I were to strip those beliefs away from you, the psychological continuity of you would say, Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore.
Well, it is an interesting question because if consciousness is not local, And you download someone.
If you do take someone out of this physical existence and put them somewhere, but then they don't have a soul, this bizarre vessel that can no longer communicate, then we'll realize, like, oh, we fucked up.
We've got to go find out where that guy's consciousness got dropped off along the journey.
You're probably a physical thing with a lot of biological requirements that's connected to some sort of consciousness that sees itself as an individual but is completely connected to all the life forms around it.
I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these What's your motivation for, like, I'm not sure if this is your view, but even, like, entertaining it, right?
It might seem like a, they call them, like, just-so stories, right, in philosophy, right?
You can tell a tale about what it might be, but why take that tale you're telling seriously?
First of all, not completely connected to this, but I think it's possible that what consciousness is, is almost like a giant motherboard, and we are all connected to that motherboard as individuals.
But that we share this one thing together.
And I think we really become aware of that when the community comes together, when there's a tragedy, when there's an event.
Something happens, we all mind meld together.
And I think the individual, the biological entity that is you and that is me...
It has all of these requirements that it has to meet in order to stay alive and to move forward and to progress in their civilization and culture.
And that this is a different thing than the entire consciousness that we share.
But we share with each other so much so that we can't be alone.
I mean, people that are alone for too long go crazy.
The worst they can do to you in prison is put you in solitary confinement.
And also, this is a sort of a universal sentiment that gets told by people that have profound psychedelic experiences, that we're all sharing some sort of consciousness, some very bizarre connection that we don't totally understand, and that the biological vehicle that we have that carries around the soul has these motivations, and you will battle with these motivations in order to do the greater good.
In fact, scholars in Jerusalem, they believe that what that was a metaphor was burning a bush that contained dimethyltryptamine.
If you think about burning the bush, right, and that's one of the ways that they consume psychedelic drugs is they burn them.
And the acacia tree is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a very potent psychedelic drug.
There's countless depictions of psilocybin mushrooms, both in ancient Egypt and in cultures all over the world.
There's mushroom rituals that occurred.
There's There's the sacred mushroom in the Bible, John Marco Allegro's book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, where he thought that the entire Christian religion had its origins in fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom therapy, that they were all having these rituals and consuming these mushrooms.
That's the Eleusinian mysteries, that they all got together and drank some sort of a potion, the kukion, that was a psychedelic potion, and they devised Democracy and they figured out all sorts of very unusual philosophies from these psychedelic experiences.
Yeah, do you think then, what makes you think that on the one case, let's say, someone takes a drug and they think that there is a fundamental, conscious, unifying mind behind the cosmos, right?
That's person A. Person B has it and they see like the Easter Bunny or something running down the road.
What makes, given that they have the same cause, Is person A's religious experience, caused by psychedelics in this case, more reasonable than person B's?
I think each experience is probably valid and maybe person B that sees the Easter Bunny, he doesn't have the capacity, for whatever reason, like his psychology is not strong enough to grasp the entire possibility of everything.
That all of this is connected and they freak out and they compartmentalize.
And that's one of the things that happens to people that have bad trips, right?
Bad trips are essentially you trying to control an experience that's uncontrollable.
Or maybe you go into that trip with a significant level of anxiety, maybe the loss of a loved one, a devastating moment in your life, you know, loss of job, loss of family, and you have this experience and you just freak the fuck out, which can happen too.
This is the thing I think I'm concerned with as a...
Same kind of stuff when we're talking about free speech.
Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech?
Everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line in different places.
So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is.
Similarly with psychedelics, what we see are writers, philosophers, documentary makers, just give this blanket statement about them being good.
But don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives.
Like you see these documentaries on Netflix, right, that don't mention the bad things that happen to people.
And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they have certain similar comparable analogous properties about them, then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data.
The Alistair Hardy Research Centre asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them, right?
And the researchers were really surprised.
Like, Alistair Hardy himself said, I didn't think 5% of these were going to be people seeing the devil or having Satan watch over their baby every night or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell, terrified for the next several years.
And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff.
So let's say if it's about 5%, and that's a modest generalization, right, given they didn't ask for it.
Let's say it's about 5%, and then you take the number of people that have claimed to have had religious experiences, then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are Zoroastrian, Jains, people who are Jewish.
We consider them significant minorities.
Add all those groups together to the, I think it's in between maybe one or two million people who have had negative religious experiences.
I'd lay out all the boring maths in a buck I had out of the shirt and say, look, my point there was, if you're a Christian, then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones, if you want to accept religious experiences.
You can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian.
But the deeper point there is, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well.
They're scared, they're ashamed, they don't want to talk about the negative.
In my life, I probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs, whose lives have fallen apart because of it.
You know, human beings vary so much biologically, and we vary so much psychologically.
You vary by what your experiences have been on this planet up to the point where you take the drugs, where you're at in your life.
I think the real problem is that they've been illegal for so long, we haven't been able to study what the correct dosages are, what biological problems you may have, like, unique to yourself that makes you either allergic to these things or having an extreme response.
Or a negative response.
What medications you may be taking that you don't know interfere with them.
We talked about that yesterday with Prozac, MAO inhibitors.
There's a bunch of things that people take that will profoundly impact the way these drugs.
I'm sure they probably screened for those, at least some of them, when they did those studies.
But I don't think there's anything in this life that's 100% good.
I think most medications have side effects, even ones that have been hugely beneficial and save countless lives.
They have side effects.
And some people are allergic to them, and some people just biologically don't agree with them.
I think that's the case with psychedelics as well.
Yeah, I think it's important to differentiate as well, and this happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion, is we differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is really bad things happen to me, so I'm abandoning my belief, and compared to the evidential problem, which is let's look at the big data.
Does that give me a reason not to believe?
And I recognize that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part, that people I care about, their lives have been ruined because of this.
But then I look at the big data and I think, on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally.
But I still think that there is a big amount of data there.
About these negative experiences, which just aren't reported, that aren't in our data logs.
And I'd be interested to know just how many there are and, you know, how severe they are when people sort of have these.
I'm sure there's quite a few that people don't want to talk about.
And I bet they get a lot of pushback from the psychedelic community if they want to discuss it.
Like all zealots, you know, they're psychedelic zealots.
I think that's the real problem is the illegal nature of them.
And the fact that, I mean, even just recently, they denied...
FDA denied MDMA to be used in clinical settings for veterans.
They have to do more tests with MAPS, which is very unfortunate because that particular type of therapy has been very beneficial for people, especially veterans, who've seen the horrors of war and to come back and try to psychologically deal with these things.
To have some tools that we know are effective be denied to these people that went overseas and served and saw these I just think that The real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being governed by people that have never taken them.
They don't really understand what we're even talking about.
I'm not saying it's the panacea for all, but I'm saying it's a tool.
I think it's been a tremendous tool to a lot of individuals.
They've experienced some extreme changes of perspective and of their own personal connection to the world through these things that are very, very beneficial.
I know multiple people that have just become completely different human beings after psychedelic experiences and much better, much more caring, abandoned, whatever chip they had on their shoulder.
And I think that can't be denied.
And I think it's another thing that's here to help us evolve.
I had a housemate when I was at university who was...
It seemed, from all measures, grounded.
I was happy enough to live in the room next to him.
We got along just like good friends.
He started taking psychedelics.
We left university.
Six months later, he started a Facebook live feed, and this guy was just masturbating in front of all of his friends and family because he'd lost his mind.
I think there's a lack of understanding of what, again, the doses, the correct way to consume it, the biological factors, your unique biology, the way it might interfere with this experience.
You're dosing them up with ayahuasca in the middle of the jungle.
There's jaguars and snakes out there.
These people are freaking out.
I would love to know.
If we had real good data on these shaman adventures where people go to the jungle, How many of them lose their fucking marbles and are cooked forever after that?
It's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes to psychedelics.
I mentioned free speech a moment ago, right?
This is something which is huge in our culture at the moment.
And afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards were asking, like, what I'm talking to you about.
And they started talking about free speech, because I'm obviously from the UK, and wanted to know whether I supported Keir Starmer as if Keir Starmer was like this, like this, it's like Mao or something.
We've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and stuff as of late.
Those three poor girls that lost their lives.
And Southport.
It's a huge shame, because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar, right?
The big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right?
Every single politician in the UK condemns them.
Less than 5% of people in the UK even sympathize with them, right?
But there's an interesting question that comes out of that, which we're not talking about, which is the line of free speech, right?
Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something.
It's like you can't be open with your thoughts.
And it's been interesting being here.
And experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment, which is, you know, I think there are free speech isn't an absolute right in the US or in Europe, right?
You can't share, you can't engage in, like, slander.
There's laws against that.
You can't share sexually explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of Freedom of expression, which might come under freedom of speech.
In the U.S., it was 1919 when the High Court, Supreme Court, legislated against somebody for spreading anti-war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the U.S. more generally.
And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case.
You might think that free speech is intrinsically valuable, the thing which is more important than anything else.
But I would say that those people are wrong, and that if someone did have an opposition to the war, if you want to have a healthy society, you have to let those people express themselves.
Especially when you read about the actual history of the war, and you go, hey, maybe this could have been fucking prevented.
And if people weren't so blindly allegiant to this idea of going over there and fighting...
This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the show.
Because comedians are often, you know, the strongest defenders of free speech, right?
It's an interesting conversation.
Is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences, the potential to flourish, be happy and experience pleasure.
So I take, even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be, it is still subject to those other things.
So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single scenario except when it breaches the harm principle.
And so the interesting question we need to ask is, when does something breach the harm principle?
People famously say, like, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre.
If you know by shouting fire That there's going to be a stampede and two people will die.
Thought experiments, pretend those are the rules.
You shout fire, two people will die.
Should we punish that person for doing it, knowing that those two people would die?
And you sort of go, I think it's fairly reasonable.
It doesn't have to be 100% the case.
We just need it to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person.
So in that case, you might go, yes.
So it breaches the harm principle.
John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think it's like a corn dealer.
And saying, like, you can write in a newspaper, like, the corn dealer's like, you know, he's the worst, he's exploiting us all, that's the reason we're hungry.
But then he says, you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealer's house.
And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky, because there's more, the harm's not as direct.
Public intellectuals who, back to our conversation earlier, like, I'm a part of this team that just defends free speech no matter what.
Like, even the most valiant defender of free speech might go, don't shout fire in a crowded theatre.
One of your comedians actually said, I'd shout theatre in a crowded fire.
I thought that was funny.
I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire if there was one.
But when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxis and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel, let's burn it down, I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as you can get to the theatre.
Well, the way Elon treats Twitter is whatever is illegal.
You can't do things that are illegal.
You can't threaten people.
You can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
Those are things that are illegal.
You can't do things that are illegal.
You can have very controversial and unpopular opinions.
And you're allowed to do that.
And that was what got you banned from Twitter before.
But the problem with that is we found out through Twitter that they expanded that and kept expanding that to include some Things that a lot of people disagreed with.
Like transgender athletes in sports, criticizing them would get you banned.
Criticizing the lockdowns would get you banned.
Saying anything negative about the mRNA vaccines would get you banned.
And then we found out the FBI was involved.
They were asking Twitter to censor posts.
And there was just so much shit involved that made you go, well, this is not good.
This is not free speech.
And this is This is actually dangerous to a society if you let the government dictate what people can and can't say.
Because they will do it to their best convenience.
Like, what's best for them?
What makes their life more convenient?
What makes their job easier?
What makes it easier to control people?
Tell people what to do and punish people that Don't listen.
Because if you lock them up, then you will automatically incentivize other people to toe the line.
And that is what got scary.
And that's what's scary about government controlled speech.
And I think that's what people are scared about in the UK when you see people saying things they shouldn't be saying, but they're saying them on Facebook and they're getting arrested and they're doing like 20 months in jail.
When Tommy Robinson says something like the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country...
A quick Google would reveal to Jordan that that's not true in terms of the big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things.
The big point here, though, when we're looking at...
This is something Steven Pinker's always emphasizing, right?
The idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like he does, and cherry-picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas.
My fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal.
I don't know if that kind of dehumour is like it's morally abhorrent.
It's something we should we should reject and condemn.
But should it be legislated against?
I'm not sure.
What's clear, though, is that people to me that are sharing those ideas, people who are platforming that person, helping that idea spread, are doing something again that doesn't have to be legislated against.
And what we should do is, I mean, the age-old anecdote is you combat bad speech with good speech.
You know, you combat bad speech with better speech.
You have those people debate people that can lay things out in a way that makes a very compelling argument that they're incorrect.
And then people can watch.
Remember when I was a kid, my high school had a debate between Barney Frank, who was a – I don't remember.
I don't think he was a congressman at the time.
I don't know.
Massachusetts.
But he was like – I think he was the first openly gay politician in the country.
And he was debating a guy from the moral majority who was this right-wing group at the time.
So this is like the 1980s when I was in high school.
And the guy had like an American flag pin on his lapel.
And, you know, he spoke and said all of his stuff.
And then Barney Frank kind of annihilated him.
And it was interesting for me.
It was fascinating to watch these two.
And no one booed or hissed or pulled fire alarms.
They let this one guy speak his mind.
And then they let this other guy speak his mind.
And we got a sense of who was correct.
And in my eyes at the time, Barney Frank was correct.
And, you know, I was probably 15 years old.
I was like, wow, this is kind of cool.
It was interesting to see this person, just with his view of the world, make the other person's view of the world look foolish and make his very sort of rigid definitions of what should and should not be legal look preposterous.
And like three or four times a week over 15 years as well.
So a hell of a lot.
So I've been going like nine years, but interviews like once a month or something, right?
So nowhere near the amount of people.
And what I've thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something, we don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that might be needed.
Right.
And so I wonder if you've got any views on like What the moral responsibility is or what the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just like say, read up on like a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something.
Because I know there's been previous things, right, where people have said that you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail.
Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem.
It depends.
If someone's known for a very specific stance that they take on something that I don't agree with, yeah, I will look into that.
And I will try to look at it from their perspective as well.
I'll try to find out how did this person come to this conclusion?
Why do they believe this?
What is the best way to approach this?
How do I do this civilly so I get the most out of them?
I want them to feel comfortable while they're explaining this.
I don't want them to feel pressured and combative.
People are involved in arguments and combative situations.
They get very tense and it's very difficult.
Then it becomes you against them.
I try to get as far away from that sort of sensibility as possible.
I just want to just tell me what you think and I'll try to steel man it.
I'll try to...
Figure it out, and then I'll say what I think.
And I have to know where they stand first.
I have to really understand why they come to that conclusion.
I've had some disagreements with people about some pretty important issues, and you've got to let that person express themselves.
You've got to figure out But the beautiful thing about a podcast, as opposed to almost any other form of media, is that no one is telling us what to do.
It's just you and me having this conversation.
We only met for like 10 minutes before.
We sat down and then we talked for three fucking hours, which is crazy.
So we can give like the audience member the best analysis they can get without having to go and do it themselves.
When you're doing such a broad project like this on so many different topics, it's impossible to be able to do that.
But I wonder if you think, genuinely interested and curious to hear your thoughts on it, is a better situation for our public discourse a media in which we've got lots of different, let's say podcasts for example, lots of different podcasts,
lots of different hosts who all specialize in a different thing in order to analyze, or do you think that Having this general public-facing podcast which has not an area of speciality with people talking about things which are, you know, in some cases dangerous, right?
Or like, are important at least.
Like, is the situation better when we have lots of hosts on lots of topics and lots of podcasts?
Or is it when we've got a general podcast which is covering all of these topics, right?
Well, first of all, we have lots of podcasts and lots of hosts.
It's just this one's the most popular for some strange reason.
But that's not my fault.
I mean, I can't alter it because it's too popular.
That's ridiculous.
Like, one of the reasons why it's popular is I talk to a bunch of different people about a bunch of different things.
And some people I am just eternally curious and I have no understanding of it at all and I want it laid out to me.
And then other things I have very strong opinions about and I want to know why a person thinks differently or how they came to their conclusions or maybe there's a person that I really admire.
I want to understand their mindset.
Maybe it's someone who's got some very fascinating esoteric information and I want to learn it.
The podcast is entirely based on what I'm interested in.
So that's how I do it.
And there's a lot of podcasts that are experts in a very particular field and they talk only about that very particular thing.
The thing about that is you're not going to get as many people.
They'll listen to it, but you'll get millions of people listening to this conversation between you and me.
So the benefit of that is then this ignites someone's curiosity, and if we only do a cursory examination of whatever the subject is, if I'm really not qualified to really delve into it, now this person's excited about it and they can expand, check out your podcast, check out other podcasts.
It's good for the greater ecosystem of podcasts and just of general discourse.
And I think that's the best message that I can give to people.
You should live your life in the way that you want to live your life.
And if you are inspired and motivated and if something changes in the way you view the world based on a conversation that some people have on a podcast, then that's good.
That's good.
As long as it's beneficial to you, it's good.
And we should all sort of try to acquire these conversations and experiences with people because it elevates our own understanding of ourselves and how we interact with each other.
If someone listens to this and decides to quit their job and start counting grass or something, I just don't want someone to give up and think it's all meaning.
No, as in like counting grass instead of helping people.
Well, I'm fundamentally here for a reason, which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just things that are underrepresented in legacy media.
Yeah.
Especially non-human animal rights stuff.
I find that when I've tried to talk about it, whether it's BBC or other podcasts and stuff, that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive.
Two weeks ago, I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending non-human animal rights, so they changed the topic of it.
That's ridiculous.
Because, well, they don't want to upset people who are in the audience who consume these creatures.