June 14, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:07:07
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| All right, we are live on YouTube, people. | ||
| I have just returned from touring with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| I went directly to Joe Rogan, and now we're gonna do a show. | ||
| Joining me today is neuroscientist, best-selling author, and mysterious man of internet controversy, Sam Harris. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, thank you. | ||
| How was that for an intro for you? | ||
| Mysterious man of internet controversy. | ||
| I guess it works as well as anything else in my bio, yeah. | ||
| You seem to be somebody that wants inner peace and yet constantly involved in these endless... I do enough to screw that up, it seems, for reasons that I can't figure out, but... Is that a scientific test for you, possibly? | ||
| Well, you know, I've just... I don't think we've talked about this, but I've pulled back from social media to a big degree, and that is a variable that... I mean, obviously, I'd heard that advertised to me as a problem, and I had thought about it in the abstract as a problem, and I know you've gone, you know, off the grid for a month or something, but just... I mean, I've cut down... I was never using Facebook as anything other than a publishing channel. | ||
| I never got into comments on Facebook, but I got hooked by Twitter, as you know, and I'm probably spending five minutes a day on Twitter at most. | ||
| It's just a surgical strike on Twitter, just put something out, see what's there, read a couple articles, just find links to articles that interest me. | ||
| It's still a way of getting news. | ||
| but to fundamentally not only not engage, but not even know what's going on on Twitter | ||
| has been a total reset of my brain. | ||
| I mean, it's been amazingly toxic in a way that I never appreciated. | ||
| So. | ||
| Yeah, so I think my audience knows my feelings on this, that it, yeah, it's endlessly toxic, | ||
| yet at some level it's helped connect all of us. | ||
| I mean, we originally connected through Twitter. | ||
| These things kind of morph and change and have moments where they're much worse | ||
| and then suddenly they're much better. | ||
| They also help start revolutions in the Middle East. | ||
| So it's like not all evil, but are you afraid a little bit | ||
| of getting disconnected altogether? | ||
| Like if you just, that you'll miss some of the zeitgeist. | ||
| Well, I'm definitely missing stuff. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm still trying to use it strategically. | ||
| So I'm trying to use it in precisely the way you just described, | ||
| trying to get connected with people. | ||
| I've reached out to somebody who's this woman, Dia Khan, who just did a documentary. | ||
| I want to get her on the podcast. | ||
| I tweeted at her. | ||
| I haven't spent enough time looking to see if she's even noticed, so it's like I'm not totally paying attention, but the benefit has been just immense, because I just realized there's a kind of It's a kind of hallucination machine where you begin to think you need to pay attention to certain voices that in the real world you would never see and I'm agnostic as to whether or not these voices are in fact consequential and you could sort of lose sight of how your reputation is unraveling online and you know just start getting phone calls from friends saying sorry that's happening to you which I think has happened to some people but in my experience | ||
| maybe there's some exception to this, but virtually all of my kind of substantial, | ||
| controversial engagements on Twitter where I've noticed somebody go after me and then | ||
| I've responded and then I've done a podcast in response, whatever the, however that's propagated | ||
| in my life, the net result has always been like, you're getting back to zero if you're lucky. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like the whole thing is a confection of having been on social media in the first place, and you're lucky to get back to zero. | ||
| And, I mean, the truth is, someone like, I mean, we can name the, you know, the usual suspects. | ||
| We don't even have to name them. | ||
| None of these people exist in the real world. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I would never see them just reading the New York Times for the most part. | ||
| I certainly never see them in my life. | ||
| It's very strange to feel like because someone has said something about you on social media, or lied about you, or spread an article that was terrible about you, whatever it is, that you then have to somehow engage. | ||
| Who is it? | ||
| Most recently, Robert Wright just wrote this idiotic, wired piece about me, right? | ||
| It's just like, there's not a single sentence in the piece that needs to be responded to. | ||
| And I get inundated by people who think, well, listen, you've really got to respond to this. | ||
| This is interesting and substantial. | ||
| And it's nothing of the kind. | ||
| It's his attempt at clickbait. | ||
| It's his attempt to provoke some kind of controversy between us on one of our podcasts. | ||
| He reached out to me and said, I just wrote this about you. | ||
| I hope you'll come on my podcast or I'll come on yours to talk about it. | ||
| He's fishing for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just a completely disingenuous and insubstantial thing. | ||
| And yet, paying attention. | ||
| It is a kind of meditation. | ||
| You become what you meditate on. | ||
| You become what you pay attention to. | ||
| And so checking Twitter 30 times a day, or whatever I was doing, just built a new mind for me, which I'm very happy to get rid of. | ||
| I don't know that I'll ever get totally off it, because for the reasons you suggest, but I've cut it down literally by 95%. | ||
| Yeah, so I saw the interview you did, was that CBS News about a week or two ago? | ||
| And you talked about how it's kind of making us all crazy. | ||
| Oh no, that was in Australian. | ||
| Was that Australia? | ||
| Yeah, that was ABC in Australia. | ||
| Yeah, so I saw that and you said something about how it's kind of making us all crazy and it was making me think, to your point just now, That it seems like we're almost living in two worlds at the same time right now. | ||
| Like if you walk around staring at that thing, like I'm traveling a lot now, so if I'm like at the airport, like I'm looking at this thing, you almost get disconnected from the actual physical location. | ||
| Oh yeah, you totally do. | ||
| You start ending up in some alternate world, and to me that's a little bit sort of where we're going to end up with AI, with all of these, they're all going to kind of collide into one thing that we're going to end up in the Matrix, or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, and you can be buried on your phone, obviously, without being buried on social media. | ||
| So, you know, I've taken it off my phone, which is a huge gatekeeping function. | ||
| What do you think about how it changes our perception of time? | ||
| Because that's actually where I was going to start with you, because we just figured out, so the last time you were on the show was July of 2016, basically two years ago, which is crazy, and it sort of seems like yesterday to me. | ||
| And yet, it also seems like 18 lifetimes ago. | ||
| And I think that maybe has something to do with social media changing the way we perceive time or something. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it's just social media. | ||
| I think it's just... I mean, everything is conspiring to make time go faster. | ||
| It's getting older, just the increase in novelty and just change, we're seeing changes in culture | ||
| and technology that are clearly accelerating. | ||
| So the world is different, more different over the course of a year than it's ever been. | ||
| I think that's objectively true. | ||
| But also you're just getting older so that every year is that much less a piece of the life you've lived. | ||
| If you're 40, the next year is 1 40th of the time you've been around. | ||
| And then, you know, it becomes 150th, and so it's subjectively shorter, and yeah, I mean, a year for me is like four months long now. | ||
| It just blasts by. | ||
| So there are a couple things I want to hit on here. | ||
| We'll do a little bit of politics, but I do want to talk about consciousness, and I want to talk about your upcoming talks with Peterson, and obviously I've gotten to know his mind pretty well at this point. | ||
| Do you have some inside information that I should have at this point? | ||
| I might! | ||
| I might be able to offer you a little something, and I think maybe we can set the table. | ||
| How many events are you doing with him? | ||
| We're doing four. | ||
| We've spoken about others, but I think four is certainly enough to see whether we can do this. | ||
| It might be three too many, that's what I'm worried about. | ||
| It might be four too many, you'll find out. | ||
| But the funny thing is that I didn't know until I mentioned to him last night when we were in Atlanta. | ||
| I said, oh, I have Sam on tomorrow. | ||
| Is there anything on your mind that I can bring up that'll sort of set the table for this whole thing? | ||
| I didn't realize that you guys have actually never met in person. | ||
| Which having listened to the two podcasts, which you did on computer or on Skype or whatever, | ||
| that podcast thing you used, that's kind of crazy that you guys haven't actually sat | ||
| there and just looked in his eyes and done this. | ||
| Does that feel weird to you that you're going to do all this publicly in that way? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, I've done a bunch of events with people I've never met, you know, where it's a podcast guest or someone I'm sharing the stage with for the first time. | ||
| And so I've actually, I've, I've, I know him better than several of the people I've recently done live events with. | ||
| I've spoken to him on the phone once and we've done those two podcasts. | ||
| It's obviously not optimal to be having these conversations. | ||
| It selects for different things. | ||
| I think there are people, I think it's, I think Terry Gross of Fresh Air | ||
| will never do anything face to face. | ||
| I think she does all of her interviews. | ||
| Even if you're in Philadelphia, I could be, apologies to her if I'm getting this wrong. | ||
| I think she just likes the sort of the purity of pure audio and because the product is audio, | ||
| there's no video component to it. | ||
| And I understand that in the sense that if you're having, like, so if we were just doing an audio podcast now, | ||
| I mean now as just a pure audio podcaster, I'm sensitive to this. | ||
| You and I are having an experience now. | ||
| We're looking at each other. | ||
| We have various cues. | ||
| We know, we have a sense of how the conversation's going. | ||
| And we're going to continue to do that. | ||
| Which can be misleading, because if the final product is just audio, you can think there's stuff coming through which isn't coming through. | ||
| So when you don't have any of that information, and you've just got the other person's voice on the line, you have a very clear sense of what you're getting. | ||
| And if you're not getting what you want to be getting, then you modify what you're doing on some level. | ||
| So yeah, it's working for me, but I think as far as establishing What do you make of this whole thing that somehow the conversations that we've all been having, often completely independently of each other, right? | ||
| we could have used more rapport probably. | ||
| Yeah, all right, let's shelve the rest of Peterson till after. | ||
| What do you make of this whole thing that somehow the conversations that we've all been having, | ||
| often completely independently of each other, right? | ||
| I mean, you haven't been here for two years, have suddenly become like the zeitgeist thing. | ||
| Like, you know, Barry Weiss wrote this intellectual dark web article. | ||
| People think we have a card and there's a clubhouse and the whole thing. | ||
| As far as there is, I haven't been invited. | ||
| But that whatever it is we're all doing, the conversations you're having and I'm having and Rogan's having and this whole crew of people seem to be doing something that was very needed at some level or another. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think there's certainly a diversity of opinion within this group or pseudo group about what's going on here. | ||
| As you know, we have not had a meeting where we've agreed about what this is. | ||
| If anything, we've had half a meeting where we disagreed on it, really, and it was barely that. | ||
| And did you see Eric Weinstein's video about just what what this was? | ||
| And that I mean, it's like, so 100% of what he said on that video was never anything that he said to me or that, you know, it's like, this, you know, this is how he coined the phrase in his own mind. | ||
| Yeah, well, I just brought him up on stage in Tempe at the improv the night before, and I think he was high on comedy and just like, I'm going to talk to people Right, right. | ||
| And so I found everything he said very interesting, and as you know I love Eric, he's fantastic, but he coined the phrase on my podcast, I think on an earlier podcast, but then it was reiterated in this live event we did with Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Right, you named the podcast. | ||
| And then I named that podcast. | ||
| No exaggeration, I thought for like 15 seconds about what I was going to title the podcast. | ||
| So it has always been tongue-in-cheek and a fairly superficial analogy for me. | ||
| But an interesting one in the sense that the analogy to the dark web is appropriate in that Insofar as there's this area where a lot is going on that the mainstream media in this case is basically unaware of. | ||
| I mean obviously there's many people in the mainstream media and people who consume the mainstream media where they're also listening to my podcast or Rogan's or watching you. | ||
| So many people know we exist, but people have been very slow to appreciate just how big | ||
| the audience is. | ||
| I mean, Rogan's audience is just enormous. | ||
| Our audiences are absurd compared to what's happening on CNN, for instance. | ||
| But I mean, Rogan's audience is like every episode is the finale of the Game of Thrones. | ||
| It's completely insane. | ||
| No one knows this. | ||
| I mean, he occasionally brags about how big his audience is, but my sense is that the | ||
| people of The New York Times aren't aware, or people even at CNN aren't aware that they're | ||
| in competition with, I mean, just to take CNN as the most relevant comment. | ||
| If you get invited to go on Anderson Cooper's show tonight and give an interview, you're | ||
| You're gonna get six minutes, you know, the best case twelve minutes to try to make sense and try to not embarrass yourself within a frame that is really rigid. | ||
| Time pressure alone modifies just what kind of conversation you can have there. | ||
| And in prime time, you're going to go out to a million people, at best, with Anderson Cooper. | ||
| And how many are actually watching the television? | ||
| I mean, the television's on in all sorts of locations that nobody's even watching. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, you know, I count my audience at something like a million people, and it's hard, as you know, to get great podcast metrics. | ||
| Joe's is probably ten times that per episode if not more so I mean you're talking so and and in those cases you're talking about two and three hour conversations that people are actually listening to and Forget about what it's like to be the host on a show like that the the opportunity for someone else to come on and have a conversation and make sense and correct themselves and and Go through the whole warp and woof of a genuine conversation that isn't unnaturally bounded by a time limit. | ||
| I mean, I noticed the difference between an hour-long radio conversation that gets ported to podcast where everyone just knew clearly that they had to bring this in in an hour. | ||
| Even that defines the conversation. | ||
| And so I think people are Very slow to wake up to how those two things, like a big audience with an unlimited time for a conversation, changes. | ||
| And also just different, you know, incentives with respect to funding of these things. | ||
| Because you know, there's no one, no one's gonna fire Joe Rogan. | ||
| Yeah, Sam Harris ain't gonna fire Sam Harris? | ||
| Yeah, no, not, well, I fired my Twitter director. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's, And so that part of the analogy is interesting because it's allowing for a very different style of airing ideas and the substance is changing. | ||
| And I think people value it. | ||
| You know when you're listening to one of our podcasts that you're getting a much less paranoid, much less circumspect, much more open-ended search for sanity and a kind of convergence between, in some cases, radically differing opinions than you're getting in other media. | ||
| I like that, open-ended search for sanity, because I think we've all tried to figure out what are the commonalities here. | ||
| You and Ben basically disagree on every, not only pretty much every political position, | ||
| not everyone, but probably 90% of the political stuff, you and Ben Shapiro, but of course also | ||
| the existential stuff and religion and all that stuff. | ||
| And yet, you guys are basically allies in that you're defending the ability | ||
| to have that disagreement. | ||
| That seems to me to be the thing that we're all doing. | ||
| Like we respect our audiences, but more than that, we're respecting the ability for people to sit here | ||
| And we have a couple political disagreements that I want to get into a little bit. | ||
| But to me, those disagreements aren't even that important as long as we're defending the ability to think and question. | ||
| And I think that's what we've all sort of done, even though we all came at it from very different places. | ||
| Yeah, and the master variable for me is a good faith disagreement. | ||
| So it's like, I'm actually concerned to get your position right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, some of this does, I think, boil down to not having a time limit, too. | ||
| It's like, I can take the time. | ||
| It doesn't matter if, like, you know, with Peterson and I, we can burn the first hour misunderstanding one another, right? | ||
| You know, or even longer than maybe the first whole podcast, and then we do another podcast. | ||
| So it's, Whereas in any other format, you don't have the time to wonder whether or not you're wrong about what you think the other person just said. | ||
| And then you add to that the cynical point scoring that is just politically motivated, that is omnipresent in the usual context. | ||
| You know, you just have people who are actually not having a conversation. | ||
| It's just, I'm going to say the thing that I think is going to make you look bad in the 45 seconds we have left. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That's the situation you're virtually always in on television. | ||
| And people feel it. | ||
| And it's just like, no wonder we're not making progress having conversations about hard topics. | ||
| Yeah, well I think we're making progress. | ||
| No, we as a species, yes. | ||
| We as a species not doing so well. | ||
| That reminds me, can you just quickly recap, you mentioned something on your podcast a couple weeks ago about how when Shapiro and Jordan were here, that Jordan sort of misrepresented your position sort of on truth, | ||
| and that Ben then subsequently on Twitter misrepresented, you contacted both of them and cleaned it all up | ||
| and everyone was good to go. | ||
| Can you just recap that real quick? | ||
| Because I think that sort of also gets to the heart of this. | ||
| That yes, they both kind of admitted, yeah, one thing was half joke and whatever, | ||
| we screwed up something, but we all cleaned it up. | ||
| You guys all cleaned it up and we're good. | ||
| And I think it's just important to reiterate. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, that's a point. | ||
| I made that point on my podcast to reiterate the difference between the kinds of bad faith arguments I'm getting predominantly from the left and what I'm getting from the right. | ||
| It was actually provoked by a question on AMA I got, which actually was probably your hate mail. | ||
| I'm getting some of your hate mail. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is it weird that I forward that to you? | |
| I'm sure you've gotten some of mine in the past. | ||
| Someone was saying, like, why are you hanging out with all these right-wing people? | ||
| And you seem to be able to have a congenial conversation with right-wingers, like, and then the people on the list of right-wingers were you and Rogan and... | ||
| more plausibly Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson. | ||
| And gay married pro-choice against the death penalty for reforming the prison system, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Right. Yeah. | ||
| Rogan's conservative Bonafides don't go much further than that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he hunts. | ||
| That's what damns him, I guess. | ||
| But so, you know, why can't you have the same kind of good faith | ||
| meeting of the minds with someone on the left, someone like Ezra Klein or, you know, | ||
| any of your other antagonists on the left, Glenn Greenwald or Chris Hedges. | ||
| And the difference has been, in my experience, is that on the left I am virtually always getting, I mean just like 90% of the time at least, I'm getting An argument that I perceive to be in bad faith, where it's just that the effort is to slime you with a view you don't hold, or take the worst conceivable interpretation of the view you hold, and hold you to that. | ||
| Like, I saw this thing, I heard this thing you said, I can interpret it to make you look like a fascist maniac, so now the burden is on you forever to prove you're not a fascist maniac. | ||
| Wait, let me pause you there for a second. | ||
| Is there any chance that you think these, forget the specifics of the people, but is there any chance you think that these people are acting like consciously good? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like that they really are just so deeply misunderstanding that this isn't an intention of evil. | ||
| In some, I mean, we could sort of do the post-mortem on some of these, but some I think are genuinely confused. | ||
| Some I think are truly sinister in their level of dishonesty. Yeah, I mean personally I think it's | ||
| more the latter. Yeah, yeah. I mean someone like Cenk Uygur, I think he knows what he's doing | ||
| and he's, he knows he's misleading his audience and you know it's just pure politics. And I | ||
| would, you know, it's many people I could name or fall into that bin, I would agree with you. But, so, | ||
| and then the thing that is totally toxic is when it's absolutely clear that someone has misrepresented | ||
| your view, right? | ||
| So like when Glenn Greenwald forwards to now millions of people a segment of my podcast that has been re-edited by some Twitter troll to make me seem to be saying the opposite of what I'm saying, in fact, in context. | ||
| He'll never correct that error. | ||
| He'll never apologize, whereas I will apologize instantly if I've misrepresented him the one time I did that. | ||
| You did it. | ||
| I mean, you actually did do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's just this asymmetric warfare. | ||
| And so the point I made about Peterson and Shapiro there is that they both came on your show and in one way or another totally misrepresented my views. | ||
| So Peterson quite comically in my world said, the thing about Sam Harris is that he doesn't understand that consciousness is mysterious. | ||
| He doesn't value consciousness. | ||
| He went on this whole tirade about my not getting just how mysterious and profound and interesting consciousness is, whereas anyone who knows my stuff knows that that's like The absolute center of the center of the bullseye for me, you know, ethically and intellectually, both as, you know, in terms of neuroscience, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy. | ||
| I mean, that's just, you know, I say things like consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion, right? | ||
| I mean, we could be in a simulation, we could be brains in vats, we could be confused about everything. | ||
| The one thing we can't be confused about is that, you know, consciousness is our first, you know, condition in each instant. | ||
| So, So I just emailed him and I said, like, dude, you've got me completely wrong on consciousness. | ||
| You have to stop saying what you just said on Ruben's podcast because it makes no sense. | ||
| And rather than, and this again, if I were going out to someone on the left, you know, the Ezra Clines, the Rez Aslans, the Jenks, the Chris Hedges, the Glenn Greenwalds, I like how I was giving you the out, not to name it. | ||
| I've been down this path so many times with these guys. | ||
| People think this all plays out in public. | ||
| It sometimes plays out in private. | ||
| With every one of these guys, there's been a private communication, which is like, listen, this is objectively mistaken. | ||
| Never have gotten an apology or a correction about anything. | ||
| What you get is basically, fuck you, this is what you really think. | ||
| But with Jordan, I was like, sorry, I guess I have to read your book so I know what I'm talking about. | ||
| I think that's verbatim. | ||
| And by the way, he has now. | ||
| He told me last night. | ||
| He's read all your books now. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| He's ready. | ||
| I'm sure he's still confused about something in those books, but we'll work that out on stage. | ||
| And the same with Ben. | ||
| Ben was saying something about, I think it was Free Will. | ||
| I think it was the joke, right? | ||
| It was the joke about the kid. | ||
| Oh, OK. | ||
| Is that what it was, I think? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So at our event, we got a question from the audience. | ||
| Where someone asked, so if free will is an illusion, what should I tell my kids about free will? | ||
| Do you lie to your kids? | ||
| And I made a joke, I said lie to them, right? | ||
| Given the fact that I've written a book about lying, and I've taken a very public position that basically you never lie, you don't even tell white lies, and lying is on the continuum of violence, and you just lie in real extremis, And it got a big laugh, by the way. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| Everyone in the room recognized it was a joke. | ||
| My audience knew I was joking, but Ben didn't know I was joking. | ||
| So Ben left and did some subsequent interviews saying, well, Sam Harris's remedy for this is that he thinks free will is an illusion, but you should lie to your kids about it. | ||
| So I said, Ben, that was a joke. | ||
| And he certainly suggested in his email, I haven't seen him since, but it seemed like he was going to stop doing that. | ||
| Again this what I would absolutely expect I mean like bet your life on expect to get from any of these other antagonists is sorry you said lie right like this is I have the text right here I'm going to hold you to that right and this is this is happening across the board on far more substantial things like you know whether someone's a racist whether it's like you if it's possible to parse Your tweet or your statement or your bad joke as you're now a Nazi, right? | ||
| That's what people are going to do to you until the end of time. | ||
| I had been living under the illusion that it's possible to play your game so impeccably so as to close the door of that ever happening. | ||
| If I just spoke clearly enough, if I just responded to enough of this crap, this would stop happening. | ||
| I mean, I never thought that, consciously, because it sounds ridiculous when I say it, but that was tacitly presumed in how I was spending my time and energy, trying to close the door to this stuff. | ||
| And now I basically feel like there's almost nothing worth responding to in that area. | ||
| So when you look back to the time that you either thought that consciously or not, does that just seem like naivete, or it just seems like just that the world seriously shifted, partly because of social media, where maybe 15 years ago, as someone that staked out some unpopular positions or politically incorrect positions, that you could do it, you could clean it up in a way that you'd be basically insulated, but now just because of the craziness of social media, it just doesn't exist. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's largely social media. | ||
| I think it's just, There's never a comment thread that will be clean for you no matter what you do or say. | ||
| If your measure of a controversy worth responding to or stuff that wasn't clear enough because someone's still confused is what you see in a comment thread or what you see in your ad mentions on Twitter, you'll never be out of hell. | ||
| I mean, it was a, I could have realized this years before I did, but it was a kind of, | ||
| you know, the frog in the boiling water didn't notice it was getting hot, you know, | ||
| as you gradually heated it up. | ||
| So I was that frog and I've since jumped out. | ||
| So what do you make then of that basic premise that you've laid out there, that for some reason, | ||
| whatever is happening on the left, broadly speaking, is incapable of having honest conversations? | ||
| I mean, do you at this point, one of the things when I do the Peterson event, | ||
| and I do a little thing about the IDW and just this crew of people, | ||
| and I say something about how we have a truly diverse group because we've got Sam Harris on the left | ||
| and Ben Shapiro on the right, and then I throw in a couple of Kanye jokes | ||
| and some other stuff. | ||
| But so in my mind, I guess you're still part of that. | ||
| And I know the labels are all changing and that whole thing, but what do you make of what's happening on the left? | ||
| And do you still consider yourself part of that thing that you're obviously really struggling with at some level. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm basically, despite that I've said many things about politics over the years, I'm basically apolitical. | ||
| I mean, I think politics is the most boring thing in the universe, right? | ||
| And I've said this before, I mean, one of the things that I mean, it's strange. | ||
| People actually say this is a good thing. | ||
| I mean, I think you've said this is a good thing. | ||
| I think this is a terrible thing. | ||
| The fact that we're talking about politics so much is a sign of something bad. | ||
| Oh no, I think it's terrible. | ||
| I just tweeted that the other day. | ||
| I think it's terrible. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I want small government, so that it can't affect us that much. | ||
| Okay, but I thought you thought that the rise of Trump led to this new level of engagement with all these issues, and that would be a good thing. | ||
| I think it's bad that we have an uninformed electorate and that people are disengaged, but obviously you want 100% of the people in the country to know how government works. | ||
| I mean, that would be great, but the fact that politics is So important to people. | ||
| The fact that their identity is wrapped up in it, the fact that you just can't get away from it, that's a sign of real dysfunction. | ||
| That's a sign of things not working. | ||
| And so, you know, in my world, I mean, I got sucked into that and I've said as much as, you know, more or less everything I have to say on those issues. | ||
| I mean, the issues aren't changing fast enough for me to have to keep touching it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, Trump isn't that different than he was six months ago, so I don't have to keep talking about him, but it's just... | ||
| Yeah, I find it incredibly boring and repetitive and it doesn't repay attention. | ||
| The noises you make seem ineffectual and there's not new knowledge coming your way based on those uses of attention. | ||
| So now I'm spending less time on it, both just consuming it and putting stuff out there about it. | ||
| Yeah, where do you think that leads us, just as a society? | ||
| It does strike me as a sickness, as a sort of societal sickness, that everything has become political all the time. | ||
| So I do, the first part of what you said there, I do think is good. | ||
| The Trump thing that came in and broke everything up, the idea that so many people are reevaluating what they think, that's what I would say is good. | ||
| The fact that everything now has become political, and sports is absurdly political now, and every TV show and movie and everything, Just non-stop endless that I think is dangerous because it's just putting up barriers everywhere Yeah, how do we how do we sort of bring some of that back? | ||
| Well, I just think, again, we have to resist the slide into politicizing everything. | ||
| I think it's the people who are not taken in by the... I mean, it's disconcerting how many of the examples that come readily to mind are on one side of the political spectrum. | ||
| It's like as someone who's on the left with respect to almost every variable that can define left and right. | ||
| So that's what I'm trying to figure out here. | ||
| So much of it is the left. | ||
| The truth is the left is so dominant in journalism and entertainment that I mean, and it's kind of high culture, academia as well. | ||
| It's like, if you're going to talk about the sources of knowledge and the sources of information that have, you know, heretofore been considered valid, and then the sources of entertainment, your, you know, I mean, I don't know how sports breaks, but, you know, sports, maybe, maybe sport by sport, it might change, but, You're talking about a disproportionate influence from the left and that's how, that's undoubtedly a source of the cluelessness that the left had about what was going on in the country and the prospects of | ||
| Trump winning the election, you know, I think that was just naturally an echo chamber effect. | ||
| So I think for most people that are watching this, they're probably agreeing with you, right? | ||
| Most of my audience is going to agree with that diagnosis. | ||
| Do you think the powers that be, whether it's in the media world or the political establishment or whatever's happening at the universities, are they getting the message yet? | ||
| Do you have any hope that they're actually realizing how toxic this thing has become? | ||
| Well, they're getting the message that there's a problem, but my concern is that the left seems totally capable of just taking a pendulum swing in the other direction into leftist identity politics. | ||
| I mean, I think, you know, it's hard to know how fully the left has been captured by that, but It's, I mean, the reaction to Trump, you know, Trump and | ||
| the left are now mirror images of one another. | ||
| It's a match made in hell. | ||
| And it's, I mean, the answer to Trump can't be, and just take it out of, you know, off Trump for a second, | ||
| just the answer to the excesses of identity politics and populism and unreason on the right, | ||
| you know, can't be amplifying all of that on the left. | ||
| I just think that's, I think it's, I think it will be just in fact a losing strategy going forward. | ||
| And it's just, it's just, it is more of a, I mean, It's more of a renunciation of everything that makes the left good than it is on the right. | ||
| So if you go far enough right, you're not expecting to meet rational, open-ended conversation about the nature of reality. | ||
| You're expecting to meet neo-Nazis and the KKK, and that's what you in fact meet. | ||
| But my problem is I'm meeting the same level of demagoguery and dishonesty and cynicism And just mere gamesmanship on the left, you know, much, much closer to where, you know, we all are living. | ||
| Like, so it's like just interacting with a reporter from, you know, Salon or Vox, right? | ||
| Like, who's there? | ||
| I'm meeting someone who essentially has the intellectual and moral integrity of the guy in the white hood, you know, over on the right. | ||
| And that asymmetry is just totally alarming to me. | ||
| Yeah, so we'll just do a couple more minutes on politics and then we'll shift to some stuff. | ||
| So one of the places where obviously we're not completely lined up is sort of the Trump stuff and the reaction to all of this. | ||
| I think as human beings, I don't think it particularly matters to either one of us what those differences might be, but I know our audiences have a little bit of a Different feeling on that, perhaps. | ||
| So my general feeling, again, I did not vote for Trump. | ||
| I voted for Gary Johnson. | ||
| I would have preferred having a president who I think really understands three branches of government and the history of America and all of those simple things. | ||
| And that would have been nice in the debates if anyone would have said to him, do you know what the difference between the legislative and executive and judicial branches are? | ||
| And I think that maybe could have caused an implosion of the whole thing and all that. | ||
| But that being said, I think the wrecking ball that he put through The machine that was dumbing us all down, that was creating this identity politics situation and everything else that had been so corroded into the system. | ||
| I think where we're at now, I'm quite hopeful. | ||
| I actually sense a lot of fertility for ideas. | ||
| I think the fact that this whole crew of people has come together or whether we're independent or together, whatever you want to call it, the fact that there's such interest in all of this, I think is all good. | ||
| And I see that as sort of a direct result of Trump just shaking up the system. | ||
| That being said, does he lie all the time? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Do I think they all lie all the time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did Obama lie about, if you like your health doctor, you can keep it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| The Syria red line, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It's just Trump does a different series of lies and does them much more blatantly. | ||
| Well, it's worse than that. | ||
| I only view him as a necessary evil, I guess. | ||
| I can't give you that last thing on the scale of the lying, because I think it's orders of magnitude worse. | ||
| I mean, like not even just one order of magnitude worse. | ||
| It's like a hundred fold worse with Trump. | ||
| So if you take those two though, so if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. | ||
| Obamacare obviously was his biggest public policy, domestic public policy thing. | ||
| So that's a pretty big lie, and they pretty much admitted that he knew he was saying it because he had passed it. | ||
| Whether that was a lie or not, or whether he just reneged on a promise, the red line I don't really view as a lie, I just view that as a failure of nerve. | ||
| It's like he drew a red line that he probably shouldn't have drawn because if he had thought about it, he knew he wasn't going to Go to war over it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he made us look weak because he didn't, you know, the line was crossed and we didn't respond. | ||
| I think that was, but it's just, we were living in a world where you would have a whole news cycle over Obama wearing a tan suit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now we're living in a world where a porn star can say, listen, you know, he's lying about this and I have evidence and It's like, it's so, it's eclipsed by the next lie he tells by the end of that news cycle, right? | ||
| So it's just, I mean, it's literally true to say that Obama's presidency would have been completely derailed By any one of maybe a hundred things you could say Donald Trump has said or done in the last year. | ||
| I mean not even, I mean way beyond ten things. | ||
| I mean, you know, I can't list them now. | ||
| But I mean almost anything he does on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis, had you seen Obama do it in that, you know, period of the earth that we can all dimly recollect. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So can you give me one that you think would have really derailed an Obama presidency? | ||
| Because to me it was like the media was so far up his butt that he could have pretty much gotten away with anything. | ||
| Well, I get what you're saying that, yeah, they focused on tan suits and silly nonsense. | ||
| But to me, I see that as almost like it's because you guys weren't doing your job. | ||
| You should have been digging a little bit more or whatever. | ||
| Well, no, but I think it's actually true to say that Obama was Basically, as honest as a politician can be and still be a politician. | ||
| I'm sure he lied about things, right? | ||
| But there's no story on Obama being just this depraved person behind closed doors. | ||
| Who's a con artist who gets away with everything that he can get away with, who's trailing a long list of business and interpersonal casualties, who will tell you, if you put them on camera or you get them privately, that he's the worst person they've ever met, right? | ||
| That's who's president now, right? | ||
| It's a completely different personality. | ||
| So whatever happens, let's say we're living in a universe where Having a uniquely narcissistic, selfish, shallow personality in this position of power works out well. | ||
| Let's just say that. | ||
| So let's just take your wrecking ball theory. | ||
| He's kind of swung through here. | ||
| He's disrupted everything. | ||
| You know, I do view him, as I've said before, as a kind of evil Chauncey Gardner character. | ||
| I don't view him as this sort of master... I think Scott Adams is completely out to lunch on this. | ||
| I don't think he's this genius manipulator. | ||
| I mean, he's got... he's got some talents, obviously, right? | ||
| But I think... But you think it's much less calculated? | ||
| Much less calculated, yeah. | ||
| I don't think him contradicting himself two sentences later Right? | ||
| When he says, you know, this is an amazing letter, you'd all like to read this letter, and then he says two sentences later, I haven't read the letter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not calculated. | ||
| He's just not, doesn't have the cog, he can't take the cognitive overhead to even figure out what, you know, what was logically implied by the last thing he said, right? | ||
| So he's not, the truth is, he's not, he lies all the time, but worse than lying, and this is the great distinction that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt made in his book on bullshit, Worst than lying is that he's bullshitting all the time. | ||
| And the difference between lying and bullshitting is that if I'm going to lie to you, I'm paying attention to what I know is true, I know you know what is true, and I'm trying to insert a lie into the space provided. | ||
| In a way that you won't notice, right? | ||
| I'm having to keep track of reality in order to lie to you successfully. | ||
| I understand your logical expectations. | ||
| I understand that if I tell you that, you know, I was an hour late here because the traffic was so bad, I can't say in the next sentence, oh, I left an hour late from my house, right? | ||
| So, the bullshitter isn't doing any of that. | ||
| The bullshitter is just talking, right? | ||
| And therefore has renounced the reality testing he has to do to lie successfully. | ||
| And he's just... the burden is not on him to make any sense at all, in the end. | ||
| And that, to an amazing degree, not entirely, I think he does actually lie strategically sometimes, but to an amazing degree, And this is why I think it's so harmful about his presidency, whatever happens with North Korea or anything else that we might, you know, care about. | ||
| To an amazing degree, he has revealed that half of our society will accept somebody who is just bullshitting all the time about things great and small. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter how important or how inconsequential. | ||
| Porn stars, you know, what just happened with the G7, you know, what was said behind closed doors, what he's going to say to some maniac with nukes. | ||
| We've completely forsaken any expectation of a reality-based conversation and many people seem to revel in it. | ||
| Many people seem to think this is just good fun. | ||
| It's a bit of the wrecking ball theory gone to some nihilistic extreme where it's just Let's just burn it all out. | ||
| There was nothing worth maintaining about our institutions, about our norms, about our traditions, about the expectations of our other countries that are our allies. | ||
| Who cares if all of our traditional allies don't know what to think? | ||
| about the president because he said one thing five minutes ago he says the opposite thing now and they're all left with their jaws on the floor that's just comedy for what forty percent of america uh... i think there's a real consequence of that because what Well, what Trump has revealed is that there's a space for a truly terrible calculating person, you know, like the sinister person with a real ideology, not just... So you think someone potentially worse than him? | ||
| Oh yeah, oh yeah. | ||
| I mean, we've just, we've proven to ourselves that literally anyone Who can connect certain dots. | ||
| I mean, anyone who can connect the dots of, you know, I'm not even sure what these dots are, but I mean, obviously Trump connected some of them, you know, fame and a certain kind of charisma, you know, a kind of populist, an ability to strike the populist note in a way that's compelling. | ||
| Someone whose could be way worse and way smarter | ||
| and have a very different agenda, can become president. | ||
| And I think that's, you know, I mean, it's good, perhaps it's good to know that, | ||
| but it's just, I think we now know that about ourselves. | ||
| Yeah, is this then the weird, so I think you know that I'm certainly not a nihilist | ||
| and I'm definitely not somebody that wanted to burn the whole thing down, | ||
| but I do view this reckoning as basically good as long as this other person | ||
| doesn't magically appear out of it. | ||
| And I also sense that the time of craziness that we're in right now, and this endless inability to have these honest conversations, and I agree with you on his basic Management of truth, or whatever you want, management of truth is an interesting phrase, but whatever that is, that I sense there is going to be a rebound towards sanity, that at some point, you can't always have the wrecking ball, always have the guy that's flipping everything over and destroying it, and that if our institutions are strong enough, and if there's enough sane people out there, and enough people that are listening to thoughtful conversations, and I think we both agree there's a lot of people growing in that regard, | ||
| That the next version of whatever happens at an election is going to come from something much saner. | ||
| Yeah, I don't see the evidence of that. | ||
| And even saner from where we were before, because that's where we were just getting a lot of bullshit from the media and from everything else that we might actually get a rebound into sanity. | ||
| So you're not as hopeful? | ||
| No, because what I see is the Republican Party has been destroyed, right? | ||
| The Republican Party has become Trump's party. | ||
| It's just this populist pandering. | ||
| I mean, they're just all... | ||
| trying to figure out what to do in his wake, but nobody, there's no coherent platform anymore there. | ||
| And as we've said, the left has swung into this insane, just victimology echo chamber of identity politics | ||
| where everyone's a racist, right? | ||
| So I- I guess maybe that's sort of the root | ||
| of where our little disconnect is on this, because I fear that much more. | ||
| I think that that thing that's happening on the left, this identity politics thing, | ||
| I think that's the thing that could actually, truly upend the entire American experiment. | ||
| The idea that we would end up looking at each other only on these immutable characteristics and hiring each other only on these things and having quotas and ripping apart the good pieces of multiculturalism that we've done here better. | ||
| And I'm not discounting anything you're saying about what's happening on the right, although I do see a streak of libertarianism on the right that I really like. | ||
| I think there actually has been a rebirth. | ||
| other really for no reason other than the way we look. | ||
| And I'm not discounting anything you're saying about what's happening on the right, | ||
| although I do see a streak of libertarianism on the right that I really like. | ||
| I think there actually has been a rebirth. | ||
| You know, a guy like Shapiro is obviously not a real Trump guy at heart, and he's arguing a lot of libertarian | ||
| stuff that I like. | ||
| Maybe you don't like it as much. | ||
| I think it's a decent place to be arguing from. | ||
| But I guess maybe that is where our little disconnect is on that. | ||
| The thing on the left I view as much scarier. | ||
| I think it's a much more of an immediate threat. | ||
| And I say that knowing full well that Trump has the nuclear codes. | ||
| So maybe that's a little... Yeah, I think they're both enormous problems. | ||
| I don't know which, you know, the Trump thing... | ||
| It could seem fine until something horrific happens. | ||
| It is, in fact, hard to know what's happening and what risks we're running. | ||
| The economy seems to be doing good by what metric? | ||
| The stock market hasn't imploded. | ||
| Unemployment's low, consumer confidence is high, black and Latino unemployment's really low. | ||
| Right, but there are ways to parse all of those numbers that are less optimistic. | ||
| The employment numbers are low because lots of people have just fallen out of the job search. | ||
| I think there's something like 8% of Americans are in the stock market. | ||
| 92% of Americans are not even exposed to the stock market, or at least directly. | ||
| Those numbers could be a little off, but it's something like that. | ||
| But all of that would change radically the moment something, you know, the left's worst fears about Trump are realized. | ||
| And the moment he does something that just gets, you know, gets us far closer to obvious, you know, war or actually into one, and it's clearly the wrong war, you know, the fact that, I mean, I think I think that the U.S. | ||
| no longer stands, at least in the eyes of the world, the U.S. | ||
| longer stands for sanity on some fundamental questions of human values, whether it's climate | ||
| change and environmentalism and doing something sane with respect to that, or human rights. | ||
| He just took a meeting with perhaps the greatest human rights violator, certainly the current | ||
| generation, and it's just clear now that the U.S. will glad-hand a dictator and say nothing | ||
| about the fact that he's running a gulag system, and they have been for decades. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That used to be unthinkable, and that extinguishes a certain hope of moral high ground that the rest of the world, I think, rightly depended on us for, and given the current occupant of the Oval Office, we've completely abandoned that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's hard to price in those changes. | ||
| I don't know what the consequences of all of that is. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So I guess the part that still seems odd to me is like, you know, when Obama ran, he said, you know, we have to sit down with these people. | ||
| He said he wanted to sit down with Ahmadinejad with no prior discussions or whatever. | ||
| That's basically what Trump did here. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying Trump's the right guy to do it. | ||
| Maybe he is in some insane way and maybe he isn't. | ||
| But in most of those cases there would have been some lambasting of the person about human rights. | ||
| If it was Hillary Clinton doing any of these things at least you know there would be the norm of acknowledging that, I mean, just compare what | ||
| Trump said about Kim Jong-un. | ||
| Yeah, the statements were insane. | ||
| To what's actually going on. | ||
| So we have someone who is presiding over the starvation and just, I mean, | ||
| beyond Orwellian immiseration of his people. | ||
| I mean, it's like if you are caught saying the wrong thing, or passing the wrong book to your neighbor, or you've tuned your radio to receive a broadcast from South Korea, you're sent to the gulag, and your progeny are sent to the gulag, and down to the third generation, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the punishment for this. | ||
| And we have the President of the United States saying that He's a great guy. | ||
| He's a intelligent guy. | ||
| He loves his people. | ||
| And that's a verbatim quote. | ||
| He loves his people. | ||
| I'm not surprised by that. | ||
| I mean, it's just, it's like, I don't even know what... I mean, is there anyone in this country who... I mean, it's just like, there's so many layers at which we have lost sight of reality here. | ||
| That's like, I don't know where the freefall stops. | ||
| Like, on one level, there's a sense that He's lying. | ||
| He's saying something he must know is untrue. | ||
| He knows what life is like in North Korea. | ||
| He knows what life is like in North Korea. | ||
| So he knows that to say that this man loves his people is a misrepresentation. | ||
| But what do people actually think? | ||
| I think there's another layer beyond that. | ||
| No, he actually doesn't know that. | ||
| He's so ignorant of what's happening in the world that he's just talking and there's just no burden on him to represent reality at all. | ||
| There's a layer beyond that. | ||
| It simply doesn't matter. | ||
| Like the difference between those two things, lying and bullshitting, doesn't matter. | ||
| And we're not even going to spend the nanosecond it takes to judge between them. | ||
| And beyond that... | ||
| We're not even going to notice that he said anything strange there. | ||
| And that's kind of where most of the country is. | ||
| It's like, we now have someone in office who will say things that make absolutely no sense, and they are meant to map on the most consequential examples of human suffering in our time, right? | ||
| And the most consequential risks we run as a civilization. | ||
| We're talking about nuclear war here, and the conversations that can be had to prevent it. | ||
| And he's saying things that are not only just untrue and obscenely untrue, no one's even noticing. | ||
| And no one's even noticing that no one's noticing. | ||
| I mean like, so this is like, I don't even know where we are now, but it's just like, I don't think there's a name for this, right? | ||
| And I think that matters. | ||
| How many firewalls do you think we have until, if what you're saying is right, | ||
| how many firewalls left are there before we're really in like some true dystopian complete inability | ||
| to communicate? | ||
| But let me just clarify here, I'm not even judging whether anything bad happened | ||
| in Singapore. | ||
| So it's totally possible that the evil Chauncey Gardner character could be the thing that successfully gets us | ||
| to have a better relationship with North Korea. | ||
| So I think that's what Scott Adams would say. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| I'm not saying I know that's impossible. | ||
| It doesn't seem like a great bet to me. | ||
| And even if it's possible, I don't think it's the best possible strategy. | ||
| It would be better to have someone who actually read the briefing books, knows the history | ||
| of negotiations, knows the possibility that he's being duped, is paying attention to all | ||
| of that, even while, let's say, playing like the madman, if in fact that's the right strategy | ||
| in this game of chicken. | ||
| But so there's nothing optimal about this. | ||
| But I'm just saying I'm not saying that my worrying about what's happening is not predicated | ||
| on the claim that, oh, this whole thing with North Korea is going to be a disaster. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If it's successful, that still doesn't answer my primary concern about what we've done to ourselves in terms of our politics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how do we negotiate those two things? | ||
| Let's just say for a second that despite all the lies, I'm with you, he lies about absolutely everything. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| Despite all of this craziness and nonsense and all of that, That basically four years past, let's say the economy's basically fine, we don't get into some extra intractable war, let's say something good comes out of the North Korea situation, basically things have been okay. | ||
| There isn't some massive terror attack or something. | ||
| I would say we've dodged many, many bullets and that we got very lucky. | ||
| What's impossible to argue is that this is all a brilliant, plan that has been thought through from the beginning on the part of trump i think i said there's just no evidence for that at all right it's not that he is he is deeply informed about world history and current events and all of the all of the information one would think you would need to know to to came this out inside some genius level you know four-dimensional chess right right uh... to follow the the scott adams program and so that's not happening so what what we could live in a world where | ||
| Having someone who fundamentally is just a reality TV show star thrust into this position of immense responsibility, we could live in a world where that can work out in surprising ways, or at least not cause some kind of disaster. | ||
| I hope we live in that world. | ||
| I hope that he succeeds in every way we would want a president to succeed, and then I also hope he doesn't get re-elected. | ||
| I think it's still It's obvious to me that we're paying an immense price even if terrible things don't happen. | ||
| So if terrible things don't happen and the left sort of continues with the track that I think we both see it's on, could you possibly vote for one of those people? | ||
| Would you feel that this could override every fear? | ||
| It depends who the person is and what the trade-offs are. | ||
| In my world, almost anyone would be better than Trump, but give me the sufficiently obnoxious choice on the left and I could rethink that. | ||
| I think you mean rethink that not to vote for Trump, but you'd end up voting for third party. | ||
| Yeah, or that it wouldn't matter. | ||
| We could be in a situation where it's just both sides are so terrible that let's just toss a coin. | ||
| But it should be. | ||
| I don't know how we got here. | ||
| We've got more than 300 million people in this country. | ||
| There are many really impressive people in this country. | ||
| How is it that we can't field a candidate who has an obvious depth of knowledge, an obvious moral compass, and sound goals? | ||
| Do you think it's just that nobody that was Truly good, that was truly knowledgeable, that was truly decent, and all the things that we'd really want from a president. | ||
| would ever do it now in a time when every one of your texts will be gone through, your internet search history, | ||
| your every little relationship you've ever had, that the ability to dig deeper and dive into more | ||
| of just the nonsense, that no good person who's ever lived a full life and made mistakes | ||
| and done drugs or whatever else it is would ever wanna do it. | ||
| So instead you get sort of this shameless person who has done probably everything | ||
| and all sorts of crazy things, but just doesn't care what you know, | ||
| whereas a good, decent person who wants to live a decent life and have a family and all that, | ||
| and I'm not even commenting on his, it seems like his family really loves him, | ||
| so I don't mean that, but that just someone, the person that you're looking for | ||
| in that imaginary equation would never wanna do it. | ||
| That's not someone who would opt in. | ||
| Well, I think there are people who will opt in who are normal, it's just whether or not they ...will get noticed and get promoted. | ||
| For instance, I just interviewed a guy who you may not have heard of, Andrew Yang, who's already declared his candidacy for 2020 as a Democrat. | ||
| He's a Silicon Valley guy. | ||
| I just recorded a podcast with him. | ||
| I think it'll be the next one I release. | ||
| A very interesting guy whose whole platform, it seems, is universal basic income. | ||
| He's looking at what's happening in tech and automation and AI, and he says, You know, as many of us have said, or at least worried, that there will be jobs lost in the near term that aren't coming back and aren't converting to new jobs. | ||
| It's not like any analogy you want to draw to previous moments in economic history. | ||
| There will be truck drivers losing jobs, and we're not going to retrain those truck drivers as software engineers. | ||
| This is going to be, forget about all the other highfalutin concerns about AI, this is going to be catastrophic if we don't figure out how to deal with it, and he thinks UBI is the solution. | ||
| He wrote a book that, in very stark terms, puts it all in perspective. | ||
| His book is The War on Normal People. | ||
| But I'll have a podcast with him probably out next week. | ||
| That sounds like it could have been your next book. | ||
| The War on Normal People. | ||
| But he's a very articulate guy. | ||
| He's thought about these issues deeply. | ||
| Whether he's right about UBI being the panacea, I think is certainly open for debate. | ||
| But he strikes me as, I mean, I don't know him, I just did one podcast with him, but he strikes me as a completely sane, normal, non-fame-seeking person who just wants to screw up his life by becoming president. | ||
| Because he's just simply worried about the future his kids are going to inherit. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so one more on the political stuff, then we'll shift to some other stuff. | ||
| So did you catch, I know you've been on the show a couple times, did you happen to catch Realtime on Friday or see the clip of Bill basically saying that he's sort of hoping for a recession because that'll wake people up? | ||
| No, no, I missed, I'm at least a week behind, but no, I didn't see that. | ||
| Yeah, so Bill in effect said that if it takes a recession to derail this thing, that he'd be for that. | ||
| You know, I like Bill a lot, you know, I'd love to have him on the show to discuss some of this stuff, but I thought that moment of him saying that, a guy who's, I have no idea what he's worth, he's probably worth at least 50 million bucks or something crazy, which I don't begrudge him any of that, of course, that what he said there so caught me as just, this is what people hate about liberals. | ||
| Liberals, whatever, or lefties, or whatever it is, this idea that, yeah, you may not like Trump, and you may joke about him all the time, and all this stuff, and you may think he's lying all the time, but that what you would want is a recession, which you'll survive, because you've got millions and millions of dollars, but it did make, my first thought when I saw it was that right after the election, for as much as you despise this man, and are so fearful of all of the things that he will rot upon us, You made the analogy about the pilot in the plane. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I think that's the right analogy. | ||
| And I thought, that's what we need right now. | ||
| And I discussed this a little bit with Rogan today, and that's where his take was also. | ||
| Yeah, so I haven't seen the clip from Bill, and so I can imagine at least two charitable interpretations of it that take that callousness off it. | ||
| One would just be the idea that we're running such an intolerable risk with this guy at the helm, And the only way he's going to be voted out is to have something like a recession. | ||
| So there definitely was an element of that for sure. | ||
| Right, so every day you wake up and don't think about it, you're running the risk of nuclear catastrophe with this guy that's, you know, fifty percent more than it should be or would otherwise be. | ||
| And the price of that, again, a price you're not aware of paying because we're just talking about hypotheticals, right? | ||
| It's just a risk, an increased risk. | ||
| It's worth Do some other, you know, catastrophic change if it's the thing that's going to get us a new president. | ||
| And so, I mean, that would be defensible if you actually thought that that was in fact the situation we're in. | ||
| But, you know, I don't know what he was actually thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't it nice that you give the charitable interpretation? | ||
| You don't want to just do what your opponent's doing? | ||
| It's certainly not surprising in this case, because he's a friend, but it's, I would, you know, I try to do that even when I'm thinking about, I mean, truth is, I do that with Trump. | ||
| The thing that I find so intolerable about the left is also exemplified in how they attack Trump for things that he's not guilty of. | ||
| Clearly, I mean, there's no one who despises this man more than me. | ||
| I don't know how you compare these things, but I'll go to the mat with anyone. | ||
| The piñata you brought here to destroy later. | ||
| I can talk endlessly about what's wrong with this guy, but when people on the left, I don't mean just fringe left, I mean the New York Times, go after him for things that seem clearly calculated to mislead, I mean they're just disingenuous. | ||
| I get as annoyed by that as by anything. | ||
| Within my own mind I feel pretty balanced in how Careful I am you know so like for I mean to take the | ||
| Like the MS-13 thing. | ||
| I mean, have you seen what's going on with MS-13 on Long Island? | ||
| Did you watch that front line? | ||
| I didn't see the front line, but I know what's going on there. | ||
| The fact that anyone is minimizing the significance of how horrible this is, right? | ||
| And playing politics with that and catching him saying, like, you know, these people are animals, right? | ||
| And then using that to mean that he thinks everyone coming from Latin America is an animal. | ||
| It's, I mean, it's just so toxic. | ||
| So I view that as different somehow than, all right, forget the BuzzFeeds and salons and that whole set that we already talked about, but this thing now with the New York Times and CNN where they're doing this now, that to me is something that is truly systemically, that's different and that's extremely dangerous. | ||
| Like, what could possibly be happening there at a, at a sort of systemic level that makes sense | ||
| that they can get away with this stuff. | ||
| They know, they know five minutes later it's gonna be exposed. | ||
| Well, I don't know if they know that, but I think the fact that you see it that way | ||
| is a measure of how important a reality-based conversation is | ||
| and how different the expectation is of something like the New York Times | ||
| versus something like Breitbart. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right, so like it matters that the New York Times gets it wrong. | ||
| It matters that the New York Times is at all clickbaity, right? | ||
| And so, and then when you compare that to something like Breitbart, | ||
| you know, it's just... | ||
| There's a fundamentally different expectation, and so... Well, that's why people give me shit all the time. | ||
| Oh, I'm always attacking New York Times and CNN. | ||
| It's like, those are the ones I think matter. | ||
| Yeah, no, it does matter. | ||
| You want me to attack the same ones everyone else is attacking, or that I don't expect to do real journalism. | ||
| They're just dot-coms. | ||
| You know, that's all they are. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean it matters across the board because people are confused by this. | ||
| People think that Vox is like the New York Times, right? | ||
| And it's confusing because you can find articles on Vox that are fantastic. | ||
| There's a real range of quality you get everywhere now. | ||
| And there shouldn't be a wide range in something like the New York Times, right? | ||
| And we're seeing this, you know, like as any of us get close to being part of the news story, right? | ||
| Whether it's directly on you or it's told about one of your friends. | ||
| It's like, the New York Times, I mean, someone I know at the New York Times, Brett Stevens, who moved from the Wall Street Journal and now he's an opinion writer at the New York Times. | ||
| I know the piece. | ||
| He just went after Elon for, I mean, it was just a pure clickbait hit piece It was just Breitbart-level trash. | ||
| It was wrong in every respect, apart from the fact that it summarized some of the economic skepticism about Tesla. | ||
| But that wasn't really the issue. | ||
| No. | ||
| He basically said that Elon is Silicon Valley's Trump and a con man. | ||
| And he's got this no there there. | ||
| He's lying about everything. | ||
| I mean, if ever there were a person you can't say is without substance and is just a pure con man, it's Elon. | ||
| He could fail to do half the things he's promising to do, and he does more than the next most productive hundred people. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It was hilarious, because this all was timed with my getting off Twitter, as I said, by like 95%. | ||
| But I was on long enough to notice this and just take a shot at Brett in response, because it was intolerable to me. | ||
| You did it in a somewhat respectable way, right? | ||
| You didn't do it the way that most people do it, which was just like a blurted out assault. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Well, I let him know because I'm a fan of Brett's. | ||
| I publicly celebrated also on Twitter his move to the New York Times. | ||
| I congratulated him. | ||
| And I think he's a very smart guy. | ||
| For whatever dogmatic reason, he was sort of destined to get this wrong. | ||
| But he's so totally wrong. | ||
| That it's just, it is a real consequence. | ||
| The New York Times can't afford to be this wrong about, in this case, you know, the prospects of a company like Tesla and, you know, cleantech and, you know, it's just, it was... | ||
| All of this connects obviously with climate change and, you know, huge important issues. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that one, I don't know Brett personally, but it seems like what this was all about was because Alain was attacking the media because he was unhappy about the way some stuff was reported. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then Brett was obviously being defensive over the media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I was very pleased watching Alain's thread on this because I was like, yeah, we need more people to be attacking this, you know, otherwise the times won't turn around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know whether he's doing himself harm by engaging in that way. | ||
| This could be just something that happens to somebody once they cross the 20 million mark on Twitter. | ||
| You become like Trump in that respect and you just decide to use Twitter that way. | ||
| It's I mean, on one level, it's refreshing that you have someone you have a CEO who's this transparent with what he's thinking and this and just engaging on all of these issues with with, you know, people in his ad mentions, but it's I don't know. | ||
| I think it's, again, I think social media, the net result for virtually everyone is you're lucky to get back to zero. | ||
| If you're going to take an inventory of what was gained in the end by all of this All of the energy you've spent fighting with people or correcting the record, you're lucky to have gotten even. | ||
| Right, you can check all the times you've owned someone versus all the times they owned you. | ||
| All right, so let's put all of that aside for a second. | ||
| I do want to do a sort of deep dive on the Jordan stuff, because I think maybe we can set the table in a nice way for your conversations. | ||
| But what's on your mind more than anything else right now that's not political, Unrelated to the conversation with Jordan? | ||
| What are you really thinking about right now? | ||
| Well, I'm thinking more about core things that interest me like the nature of consciousness and just how to live a good life given the fact that we wake up every day not knowing how long we've got and we're absolutely sure that we don't get this day again. | ||
| How to meaningfully engage moment to moment in our lives in a way that's rewarding and | ||
| minimizes unnecessary suffering and increases joy and insight and creativity. And so for me, | ||
| as you know, meditation is part of that certainly. And I've just come out with this meditation app | ||
| that is now in beta on Apple, and the Android beta will be probably about a month away. | ||
| It's completely mystifying to me that it's taken me this long to build an app. | ||
| Talk about something you didn't understand. | ||
| But, I mean, it literally is just a glorified mp3 player, and yet it has taken me longer than two years and just vast expense to build this thing. | ||
| But in any case, I'm happy with the iteration that's coming out now, and so that's, I'm going to, it's not just a meditation app, it'll have my podcast and other content I put on it, but I'm thinking My withdrawal from the toxicity of social media and the political conversations has led me to just clear a lot more space, frankly, for things that I think are interesting and profound in a durable way, that where you're not going to look back five years from now or 20 years from now | ||
| and wonder why you spent your time on those things. | ||
| And so much of all of our lives, but my life and my public life in particular | ||
| has been spent on things where I look back, it just looks like one opportunity costs after another. | ||
| I mean, like virtually everything that I'm well known for talking about | ||
| has been a waste of time. | ||
| And that's, in some sense, necessary. | ||
| It's not that I've squandered my time in a way that I didn't think was necessary. | ||
| But it woke up a lot of people along the way. | ||
| Yeah, hence I felt it was necessary. | ||
| But it was an opportunity cost. | ||
| In some level, it's trying to get to zero. | ||
| It's like, can we get to the starting point where We then can advance the conversation past what we had every reason to already understand to be true. | ||
| So I think a lot of people are lining up behind that. | ||
| And again, it still gets to where I think this thing is furrowed right now. | ||
| I do think there has been some sort of shift. | ||
| I can see it when I'm with the Peterson audiences. | ||
| I can see it just, there's a new conversation happening that people are starting to arm themselves | ||
| with like how do we move forward through this craziness, whether we all agree on belief or lack of belief | ||
| or religion or some of that other stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, one of the things that you told me the first time we met, which now, | ||
| it was the first time you did my show, was September 9th, 2015. | ||
| It seems like 87 lifetimes ago. | ||
| The first show, yeah. | ||
| That was at ORR TV way back when, which the whole purpose of having you on the show was to clean up so much of the mess. | ||
| And I think we did a pretty decent job. | ||
| But at the same time, because of all this, the people that want to drag you just keep dragging you. | ||
| But one of the most interesting things, and I know you don't believe in karma in any kind of traditional sense, but that you were on real time to talk about waking up, talk about the book tour that was about a guide to spirituality without religion. | ||
| Thus, your book tour got ransacked by that. | ||
| So it's like, I know you don't believe in karma, but it's kind of an, it's just like, | ||
| whoa, that's something pretty profound. | ||
| I've actually never thought about what my life would have been like | ||
| without social media at that point. | ||
| Because the consequence in my life of that fight with Ben Affleck on Real Time was basically a year spent digging out from that charge. | ||
| So your views about Islam are racist. | ||
| Had anyone ever called you racist before that? | ||
| Or bigoted? | ||
| Of any consequence? | ||
| Was there anything? | ||
| Well, undoubtedly. | ||
| I'm sure, but I don't remember it being something that I had to respond to, I don't think. | ||
| But it was just, that was so captivating to people, and there was so much spun out after that. | ||
| But again, had I not been on social media, it might have, in my world, it might have blown over in two weeks. | ||
| I might have not felt there was anything to respond to. | ||
| And I could have just moved on directly to talking about meditation and a rational Take on spirituality? | ||
| I don't know, but it's certainly possible that that's the case. | ||
| So, all right, so meditation. | ||
| What do you think is the right amount, then, of spirituality? | ||
| For the amount of people that are watching this, that maybe are on the fence about religion or actually are atheists, but that are trying to figure out some spiritual sense of going forward and cleaning out some of the clutter that we're inundated with. | ||
| What do you think is the easiest way to enter that world? | ||
| Well, I'm sure this is something Jordan and I are going to butt heads over, but the level at which people have been primed to think about meaning and profundity and awe and the sacred and spirituality by traditional religion, especially Abrahamic religion, is Certainly not necessary, and I would argue it's not at all useful when you talk about what the opportunity actually is, what's available to you as a conscious agent in this moment. | ||
| And it's not an accident that People are going to the East and to the Eastern tradition for insight with respect to this particular variable of just how to pay attention to experience closely enough so as to notice something worth noticing. | ||
| In the West, people have been praying to Yahweh for two thousand years to do that, right? | ||
| And it's explicitly dualistic, it's explicitly Hostage to this notion of revelation, the notion of a God with whom you're in relationship, who can be propitiated with prayer or not. | ||
| It's just, it's hooked to all of the mythologizing that Jordan is so enamored of. | ||
| And in my world, it's totally unnecessary and totally, all that's confusing. | ||
| It's needlessly confusing, right? | ||
| And it would be just as confusing to go to Tibetan Buddhism and acquire all the religiosity of the Tibetans, or to go to the Indian tradition and take on all of the ordinary forms of Hinduism, the exoteric, Uh, the dualistic forms of Hinduism. | ||
| So you're like, you know, just how much time should we spend thinking about the monkey god Hanuman or, you know, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Ganesh? | ||
| And did Shiva really, you know, tear his head off and put an elephant head on there? | ||
| It's like, do we, it's like these, you could run the same game that Jordan is doing with Judeo, the Judeo-Christian tradition with Hinduism. | ||
| And think that somehow all of that myth-making and storytelling is necessary. | ||
| I'm not saying you can't find people who have some good result in their lives by thinking they're in relationship to Hanuman every day. | ||
| There's something truly universal and not at all bound by culture and not at all bound by history about the nature of consciousness. | ||
| And that can be realized directly. | ||
| And meditation is simply a tool for doing that. | ||
| And it is just an accident, an explainable accident, but it's an accident of history that there are certain traditions that got the point very early in a way that's uncontaminated by needless concepts. | ||
| And certain traditions don't have it at all. | ||
| And Buddhism is unique in that you can find a strand in it that really is not even a religion. | ||
| It is just simply a methodology for paying attention to the nature of consciousness. | ||
| And you need not take on any Buddhism, even as a philosophy, in order to do that. | ||
| In my book, Waking Up, whenever I talk about this, Yeah, I try to boil it down. | ||
| It's here somewhere if you want to reference it. | ||
| I still remember what I think on that regard. | ||
| But yeah, you can get to the heart of the matter without Presupposing any religious nonsense, and the heart of the matter is that consciousness, as I said, is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. | ||
| So whatever we are, however consciousness is integrated with physical reality, that's still a question mark. | ||
| Whether we're being run on a supercomputer in some future state of humanity and we're just a simulation, or whether we have been invented by aliens, this universe can be strange in ways that we can't even imagine. | ||
| Still, there's this moment where something seems to be happening. | ||
| There's something that is like to be you, whatever you are, right? | ||
| Whatever the physics of things are. | ||
| Right this second. | ||
| This second, yes. | ||
| That is the fact of consciousness. | ||
| That is what we mean by consciousness. | ||
| I mean, it's possible to define consciousness in other ways, but those definitions are confusing. | ||
| Do you think Jordan disagrees with that point? | ||
| I don't think you can coherently disagree with that. | ||
| This could be a dream. | ||
| You could be asleep and dreaming and we're not even doing this podcast. | ||
| But still, the fact that it seems like something at this moment to be you, that is what we mean by consciousness. | ||
| It is just a fact that you can pay attention to that circumstance carefully enough to discover certain things that are profound and surprising and do actually link up with the phenomenology of Religion. | ||
| I mean, at least some of what Jesus said about what it's like to be Jesus is discoverable as a property of your own consciousness now, and you don't have to be a Christian to do that. | ||
| And so it is with Buddha or any other, you know, any other matriarch or patriarch of the world's religious traditions. | ||
| And you don't need these additional Cultural artifacts that clearly are the product of the fact that people were isolated from one another and speaking different languages and never corresponding about their claims. | ||
| There is a deeper, universal, culture-free reality which we are subjectively. | ||
| And that is consciousness and its contents in each moment. | ||
| And one thing you can realize about consciousness is that the self you take yourself to be in each moment, that the feeling that you are riding around in your head as the unchanging center of your life, that's an illusion. | ||
| And you can discover that to be an illusion. | ||
| You can lose that feeling of being an occupant of your body, like not being identical to your body, but being sort of just behind your face as a subject who's appropriating experience in each moment, who's, you know, in addition to thoughts arising, it's felt that there's a thinker of the thoughts, right? | ||
| That's an illusion that can be cut through, and when you do cut through it, Your experience changes in ways that, again, link up with some of the ideals of traditional contemplative and spiritual and mystical claims, but | ||
| Again, we can have a 21st century science-based conversation about that, and that's what I think is worth paying attention to. | ||
| Alright, so before we dive into some of the specifics with Jordan, do you ever get shit from the atheist community for even going this far into spirituality? | ||
| Is that a common thing? | ||
| Because that world of it, I think I've completely missed, if so. | ||
| Yeah, I often joke about the fact that the talk I gave at the The Atheist Alliance conference in, I think it was 2007, was the only talk I'm aware of that ever started with a standing ovation and ended with booze and people leaving. | ||
| And it was this, I made two points there that people found indigestible. | ||
| One is I said, you know, we don't need this word atheist or atheism. | ||
| we don't need to be a victim group that meets in bad hotels and talks about our identity. | ||
| And it was just a fact that I'd never...it was just an accident, but it was true that the book | ||
| that got me inducted into the pantheon of atheists in this generation, The End of Faith, was a book | ||
| where I never used the word atheist. I never... | ||
| I never suppressed the word atheist. | ||
| It just never occurred to me to use it. | ||
| I wasn't thinking in terms of atheism. | ||
| I was thinking in terms of science and common sense and evidence and the obvious, the flagrant violations of all | ||
| that on the religious side of the conversation. | ||
| So I was, I don't think we need the word, I mean, we can, this is a debatable point | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong about this and it's useful, or at least useful for a time, but I think... What was the second thing that you said? | ||
| And then I followed that with a conversation, you know, about 20 minutes of my talking about spirituality and the contemplative experience of the sort I just mentioned here, and I said that it was a problem in the atheist community that basically this variable of atheism and | ||
| And a repudiation of religion was selecting for people who, for the most part, either hadn't had certain kinds of experiences or viewed them as just purely pathological. | ||
| These were people who, you know, hadn't done psychedelics or came away thinking, well, that was just madness or that was, you know, those are just drug experiences. | ||
| And they had some deflationary account of all that, that basically said there's no there there. | ||
| There's nothing sacred. | ||
| We're just bags of chemicals and we're going to die | ||
| and then nothing happens thereafter. | ||
| And it matters that you have people who don't have | ||
| real powers of introspection so as to notice that there's something | ||
| profound to be gleaned by paying attention to your experience. | ||
| And I used to be one of those people. | ||
| I mean, I've said that. | ||
| But for psychedelics, I think, if you had taught me to meditate when I was 18, I think I was, again, I didn't think of myself as an atheist. | ||
| I didn't think in those categories, but I was a strident atheist. | ||
| And when I would meet someone, I remember meeting someone, and I remember when they taught I was in the Great Books seminar as a freshman in college, and the Bible was one of the great books. | ||
| And I remember just, you know, vilifying the Bible, you know, to my professor, because it's just like, what is this theocratic insanity we're having to read here? | ||
| This is not nearly as good as the other stuff you're having us read. | ||
| And I'm meeting half the class that believes this stuff is not just a book, right? | ||
| So it's funny to look back on that, because I was like, You know, I was as militant an atheist as I ever was as a professional atheist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I didn't even have the category of atheism in my head. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then I took MDMA for the first time and took acid after that. | ||
| Discovered a range of experience that I was just fundamentally blind to just just cognitively emotionally and every other you know channel, you know, like this was a total revelation to me that it was possible to to have consciousness appear that way right and How do you know when you're when you're doing MDMA or when people are taking you haven't done ayahuasca, right? | ||
| No, right or when people do all these things How do you know where it's just something that you need inside you versus true, or I guess you would count that as true consciousness or true truth? | ||
| Well, so whatever is true as a matter of reality out there, One thing that can't be doubted is that you take one of these drugs and it proves to you that it's possible to have a different kind of experience. | ||
| It could be psychosis, but it's still instructive to realize that you are having A, you're tending to get up every morning and be very recognizable to yourself. | ||
| I mean, you are very much like you were yesterday, and you're being buffeted within the bounds of, you know, positive and negative experience that is very familiar to you. | ||
| If you were at all like me at that point in my life, there was absolutely nothing within that channel that was fundamentally surprising in a way that would answer to the name of spirituality or anything profound. | ||
| If you had taken me into the religious section of a bookstore, or the mystical section of a bookstore, I would read all of that and It would be evocative of nothing for me. | ||
| These people are either conscious frauds or they're suffering from some kind of psychopathology, right? | ||
| And that is what many atheists believe about somebody like Jesus or the Buddha. | ||
| He's probably an epileptic. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And we know that temporal lobe epilepsy can give you, you know, or, you know, migraine auras can make you think you're having visions, right? | ||
| So, this is the kind of thing you get from, you know, the James Randis of the world, right? | ||
| And, I mean, it's no deep knock on James Randi. | ||
| I think he's done very important things for, you know, the skeptical community and to, you know, debunk religious bullshit, which, again, I think is Dangerous, and divisive, and confusing, and leads people to waste a lot of time. | ||
| But you don't think that that line of thinking, though, the James Randi line of thinking, just leaves you with enough of a human experience? | ||
| Is that a fair way to sum it up? | ||
| Of a full experience? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's just that there is something absolutely profound and even self-transcending about What we are, subjectively. | ||
| Consciousness is the only thing that matters on some level. | ||
| It's the only space in which anything can matter. | ||
| It's the space in which values can be discovered. | ||
| It's the space in which We discover just how good or bad the universe can be. | ||
| This is the opportunity. | ||
| Everything else is just a thought. | ||
| Everything else is your memory of yesterday or your expectation of some future moment. | ||
| Where you are going to be conscious, right? | ||
| So you're always ever here in this space where the lights are on. | ||
| And when the lights go off, if you lose consciousness in anesthesia or death or deep sleep, although I think the jury's still out on whether deep sleep is a state of unconsciousness, Then there's just the absence of all of that. | ||
| But here, as a matter of your own subjectivity, there is just this space, and this is the space in which every mystic, every founder of a religion, every person who's ever had his mind blown on psychedelics, or on ayahuasca, or every shaman, this is the space in which Epiphanies are had and claims true or false about the nature of reality are made. | ||
| And the thing that has been overlooked to an astonishing degree in the Western tradition, in particular, is that introspection can be a methodology that can be engaged with Real intellectual honesty and a spirit of, you know, empirical, you know, first-person empirical experiment. | ||
| It can now be correlated with, you know, third-person methods of, you know, studying people's brains while they, you know, have these kinds of insights. | ||
| But introspection was just still born in the West 150 years ago when, you know, people like William James were trying to get it off the ground. | ||
| And what you have in place of a really intelligent conversation about the nature | ||
| of human consciousness, you have people's lingering attachment to Judeo-Christian religion | ||
| in the West, right? Apart from what has been imported from something like Buddhism into science now. | ||
| You have dozens of neuroscience labs now that study meditation and a lot of these scientists are essentially closet buddhists. | ||
| And this will be, I'm sure, something Jordan and I disagree about, or at least this will be a part of the conversation we need to have, is that so much of what he thinks is profound and non-negotiable and just in our bones, based on our appearance in the West, is necessary. | ||
| This Judeo-Christian mishigas he's got going on. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| It actually isn't. | ||
| It's not doing the necessary work he claims it is. | ||
| And again, I'm not denying that you can't have certain experiences that seem meaningful given that frame. | ||
| Before Jordan was doing this, you had Joseph Campbell and the whole men's movement. | ||
| You had Robert Bly and other people who were Absolutely entranced by the power of story and all of the history, cross-culturally, of powerful stories being told and just how lives can be framed by story. | ||
| Yes, that is part of a possible range of human experience, but There's something deeper than that, and there's something that doesn't entail any parochial religious attachment, and so yeah, I'm much more focused on that level. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so I do want to, since I've spent so much time around Jordan, I do want to kind of share some of my thoughts on that specifically, but just to go back a few minutes. | ||
| I've had a few moments on the show when I found that if someone's really telling the truth, and we're like truly, truly locked in in the moment, that I do feel something. | ||
| I can't quite explain it, I'm sure perhaps you've had experiences like this, when you're really having a profound moment with someone, that there is a little bit of an aura, like a little bit of something that's a little bit different. | ||
| And I actually had it in that moment that you were talking about that a few moments ago. | ||
| It's a fleeting, it's just a bizarre fleeting thing that I can't quite explain, but I've had it a few times and it's only happened when I felt that someone, that we were either really locked in at that level or I felt someone was truly being as authentic as they possibly could be. | ||
| So as that was just happening just then, what I really felt you were saying was, I mean, almost everything that you just said really was, if we were all sort of truly being present at the highest level that we could be, which is virtually impossible to do for more than a fleeting second, and you talk about that a lot waking up, that that's how we would achieve, I think, what you're looking for. | ||
| Is that a fair estimation? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's hard to do, but it's actually simple. | ||
| It's not complicated. | ||
| In this circumstance, you and I are having a conversation. | ||
| We're looking into each other's eyes. | ||
| This is an experience that we all have all the time. | ||
| We're meeting people. | ||
| Having these social encounters is so much of what makes us human, and it's so much of what makes The sense of self, and the sense of self and other are inextricably bound up, and I would argue that they arise, it's really two sides of a single coin. | ||
| And so in a moment like this, it's kind of two levels at which one could be mindful, to use the term of jargon that's now everywhere. | ||
| Mindfulness is just an ability to pay close attention to what it's like to be | ||
| you without grasping at what's pleasant or pushing away what's | ||
| unpleasant, without being lost in thought about it, without seeing every moment through this veil of thought. | ||
| So the conventional circumstances, you and I are having a conversation, | ||
| we're looking at one another, and yet we're both inundated by the automaticity of our own discursive | ||
| thoughts. | ||
| So you're talking, I'm trying to listen to what you're saying, but I'm being distracted by my own thinking. | ||
| So you say something and I think, okay, what am I going to say to that? | ||
| And so that contest between the contents of my own mind and just giving you my attention, that's something people are living with all the time and If they're not meditators, they only notice it when things run completely off the rails. | ||
| So you're reading a book and you realize, okay, I've read this page three times and I still don't know what's on the page. | ||
| Then you're just a malfunctioning robot at that point. | ||
| You're thinking so much that you can't pay attention to what you want to pay attention to. | ||
| But we have that interpersonally. | ||
| So the first real gain would be to be someone who, in a circumstance like this, can just notice the difference between being lost in thought and really just being Focused on the other person than just paying attention and to sort of secure that in a in a a more Frequent way by just get letting go of your thoughts and coming back and paying attention, right? | ||
| But oddly thinking about that actually reinforces it in a weird way, which is part of the yeah Yeah, it's not a matter of thinking about it's matter of just just just kind of granting your attention again and like there's nothing to hold on to the moment you notice you're thinking you just come back to But the further insight, which tends to only come once you get pretty good at the first kind of mindfulness, is to notice that this feeling of being a self over here, a feeling of being behind your face, so the feeling that you have that I'm looking at you, the feeling that I'm looking at something, the feeling that you're there to be looked at, | ||
| The feeling that you're an object in the world for me. | ||
| That, if you look for that, if you look for yourself in this moment. | ||
| You can fail to find it in a way that really does change your experience. | ||
| The sense of being a self, the sense of being the center of consciousness can drop out in a way that just leaves the world. | ||
| It leaves me in the world, but there's only one face you see at this moment. | ||
| You don't see your face. | ||
| You just see mine, and obviously I'm in the opposite situation. | ||
| When I'm paying attention to you, when I'm really paying attention to you, I lose the sense that I'm over here paying attention to you. | ||
| I mean, there really is just the world and you're part of it. | ||
| And that, I mean, that's the insight that's often described as emptiness or selflessness in a Buddhist context. | ||
| And you can have that, obviously you don't have that in, you don't need another person to have that, you can have that looking at a coffee cup or even with your eyes closed, but With another person, it's really vivid because so much of our sense of being a self is ramified by being in a relationship. | ||
| And I care what you think of me, or like, you make a facial expression, and I'm reacting, like, what does that mean for, like, how do you see me? | ||
| It's like, we're constantly doing this dance with one another where we're reading in the other person's face how we're doing. And that, you know, that's something | ||
| you can have the experience of just dropping that entirely. And | ||
| it's it's amazingly freeing to drop that entirely because, you | ||
| know, all of your psychological suffering, and all of your sense | ||
| of being imperiled in relationship to other people is anchored to the sense of, I'm me over here vulnerable to | ||
| the thoughts and whims and, and, and malicious behavior of | ||
| others. | ||
| And it's possible to just cancel that by paying close enough | ||
| attention to what is what consciousness is like the The thing is that consciousness consciousness doesn't feel like a self. | ||
| The feeling of self is It's yet another object in consciousness. | ||
| I'm not making a claim about the physics of things. | ||
| This is not Deepak Chopra saying that the universe is just consciousness or that consciousness was here before the Big Bang or anything like that. | ||
| The sense, and I'm not making any claim that consciousness isn't the product of brains, but subjectively speaking, Your sense that consciousness is in your head is mistaken. | ||
| Your head is in consciousness. | ||
| The feeling of having a head, the feeling of having a face, all of that is appearing in consciousness in this moment. | ||
| It's just as much in consciousness as your thoughts are, as the world is, as sounds are. | ||
| So the feeling that you're inside of something Yes. | ||
| is subjectively, it has things backwards. | ||
| You can feel vividly that everything you experience in each moment | ||
| is just a matter of consciousness and its contents. | ||
| And the more you keep dropping back into that position of just being the space in which everything is arising, then you can notice that it doesn't actually feel like what you take yourself to be in most moments, which is this feeling of being a self or being a I sort of had one of those moments there. | ||
| I mean, I was trying to do it, right? | ||
| That's the irony. | ||
| I'm trying to do it as I'm listening to you. | ||
| It's not that all efforts to do it are doomed. | ||
| You can learn how to look for this thing and then find it in a way that cancels the sense that there was anyone looking. | ||
| or and and this their ways to the broadly speaking there's a two ways to do this you can | ||
| up again both this is this is There are different styles of meditation, but there are really only two ways to do this. | ||
| You can either look for the self you think you have in a disciplined enough way, in a clear enough way, in a way where you're no longer lost in thought and you can actually pay attention to something, you have enough concentration to pay attention, and you look for yourself, and in that first moment of looking, you fail to find it in a way that is Shows you that it's not there, yet everything else is still here. | ||
| The world is still here. | ||
| The lights are still on. | ||
| That's one method. | ||
| Another method is to pay close enough attention to anything else, whether it's a sound or your breath or sights or another person, and recognize that when you're truly paying undistracted attention, you in that moment of seeing say a coffee cup there really is just seeing there's not a seer and the thing seen there's not that you know I mean that really is what it's like to be continually tiling the world with concepts you're just you're just you know it's a it is a kind of undercurrent of thought in each moment that you're identified with and not noticing so if so a lot of techniques of meditation are just paying such | ||
| Scrupulous attention to an object, a seeming object, that you eventually collapse the distance between subject and object. | ||
| And that's a more conventional approach of mindfulness. | ||
| I've got to tell you, Sam, I think getting off Twitter was probably the key to this whole thing. | ||
| That might really be it there. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about a little bit of the specifics of the Jordan thing, because obviously we've done about 20 of these shows together. | ||
| You've been on a major tour with him. | ||
| I came home now for just like two or three days and then we head out again. | ||
| I think you know that I come more from a position of a lack of belief than a position of belief is sort of where I inherently start, probably similar to the way you described yourself at 18. | ||
| Now, he's different every night. | ||
| Every night that we've done one of these, I open it up, makes people laugh. | ||
| He does about an hour and a half. | ||
| Every single night it's been different. | ||
| So some nights he's talking about the fate of the West. | ||
| Some nights he talks about the sovereignty of the individual. | ||
| Some nights he gives you the 12 rules that are in the book, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| He mixes it up every night. | ||
| But at some point, there's always something that whittles down to something about truth and belief, of course. | ||
| From what I, I don't wanna, as Eric would say, if we're gonna do this, we should, as Eric Weinstein would say, if we're gonna do this, we should probably try to steel man him properly, and maybe he'll watch this, and I told him that we were gonna do this, so, you know, hopefully it offers a little something for both of you guys. | ||
| I never see him pushing the straight-up idea of religion on people. | ||
| Now, he is doing the, he's doing it through the prism that you described, the sort of Judeo-Christian prism of things, where he's talking about these stories. | ||
| And what I sense that he's really hitting on that is resonating with people, and it does resonate with me even, is that the power of these stories, and maybe this is sort of the Joseph Campbell thing, the power of these stories does offer some other transcendent truth. | ||
| that you cannot get another way. | ||
| So, the way that I can give it to you in a way that sort of makes sense to me is that, you know, although I didn't really like the last couple movies, that the amount that I've loved Star Wars in my life, the way that the stories of Star Wars, right? | ||
| Those stories of Star Wars have more relevance to how I sort of view good and evil and the journey that you're on as a person. | ||
| They have more value to me than anything that I ever read out of a biblical thing, so I'm not taking his biblical version of it, but that the power of story can somehow offer you some other... | ||
| Some map to truth that I don't think necessarily is in conflict with anything you've said. | ||
| Does that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not giving you purely what his argument is. | ||
| I'm just giving you sort of my personal take. | ||
| Yeah, no, but I'm aware of what he's been saying in this regard. | ||
| And I think this is where maybe you guys got a little lost in that first conversation. | ||
| I mean, so just as a general matter, I love much of what he says. | ||
| He does, with some regularity, say something ridiculous enough, with the same confidence he says all the good things, that I perceive a real problem with what he's doing. | ||
| Can you give me an example of one of those? | ||
| Well, did you see his event with Matt Dillahunty? | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| I didn't see it, but I know a lot of people have been talking about it. | ||
| That's worth watching. | ||
| And again, I'm hoping My hope is that we can make progress in these conversations where we don't get stuck just having a knockdown drag out over things like the points I'm going to raise now. | ||
| By the way, real quick, for the record, I'm more than happy to tell you, he, I think, is in that same exact spot. | ||
| He wants it to be fruitful and friendly and all of those things, which I think goes back to what we talked about an hour ago about just the way we all relate to each other. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he'll confidently say things like, Atheists aren't really atheists. | ||
| I mean, like, a real atheist is a psychopath who murders people. | ||
| I mean, so those people have existed, but someone like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or, I mean, he said this directly to Matt Dillahunty in this case, they're not, they only think they're atheists. | ||
| They're not really atheists. | ||
| have a God that's functioning in their life and they're just not acknowledging it, right? | ||
| You know, and again, it comes back to this historical claim that we all grew up in the West, | ||
| we all just got our ethics and our theology without ever naming it, we got it in the water, | ||
| right? And so any sense you have of what is good and worth doing, any sense you have of value, | ||
| just the reason why it would be bad to murder somebody, the reason why you don't have to think | ||
| that through from first principles every day and you can just navigate this social space with other | ||
| people in the West, it's because you are just fundamentally dependent on these stories, | ||
| are just fundamentally dependent on these stories, this tradition, right, and this God. | ||
| this tradition, right? And this God, and he's very, you know, I don't know what the steel man | ||
| And he's very, you know, I don't know what the steel man interpretation of what he's actually doing is here, | ||
| interpretation of what he's actually doing is here, but to my eye, he's very, | ||
| but to my eye, he's very either evasive or non-committal about what he means by God. | ||
| But he's, however he's using the word, he's not making a clear claim about what he believes. | ||
| He'll often say, you know, it would take me, you know, 40 hours to answer that, or I wrote a 600 page book on that. | ||
| And I can't, it's like, he will decline to answer a fairly straightforward question about what he believes | ||
| about Jesus or about God. | ||
| Right, so maybe you guys will get somewhere on that. | ||
| He doesn't, I don't think, I think I can probably count on one hand how many times he's actually mentioned God specifically in the course of all this, because the stories and what he would say are the maps of meaning. | ||
| I think they're much more important to him than to agree on the exact definition of God. | ||
| But the claim, for instance, that I am in a way that I fundamentally don't understand, but he does, that I am captive of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that my ethics is born of it, and that my notion of ultimate value is somehow anchored to Jesus, I mean, that is just so preposterous as to be unarguable. | ||
| Shapiro would take a similar argument, just not related to Jesus, though. | ||
| I think he would say something similar. | ||
| Because my mother was Jewish, presumably he would think I'm Jewish rather than Judeo-Christian. | ||
| Or that he would say that your enlightenment values, I mean, I think when I've done this with him, he would say, if I say, well, all the goodness in me, the things that I believe in, the moral principles that I believe in are really enlightenment values, he would say, well, you really have to dial it back to where it's not proving the point he thinks he's proving with it, right? | ||
| I mean, these are like points of confusion. | ||
| I think we could get past in five minutes, but it's also possible that he's going to dig in for two hours on this and then we'll have three more events to do and I'm not sure what the hell is going to happen. | ||
| But I really hope to make progress with him because, again, I think I think what he's doing is very interesting on other fronts, and what he's exposed is a real need, a real hunger for a meaning-based conversation about, you know, how do you get your life straight in the 21st century? | ||
| And clearly there's a hunger for wisdom that the secular community has not been answering in any kind of reliable way. | ||
| And so we want to hear from people who are saying, well, You know, I've been an atheist, but what I'm hearing from Peterson is really causing me to get my life together. | ||
| That just tells me that... I mean, it's no surprise. | ||
| I've said this about atheism ever since I was talking about atheism. | ||
| Atheism is not a philosophy. | ||
| Atheism is nothing. | ||
| Atheism is just a denial of the false certainties of religious people. | ||
| It's like, no, there's no good reason to believe in Poseidon, and there's no good reason to believe in Yahweh. | ||
| That's atheism, right? | ||
| So, atheism doesn't give you anything that makes you live a meaningful life. | ||
| But the thing is, Contra Peterson, that's not a knock on atheism. | ||
| Atheism is just not being convinced by the bad evidence and arguments put forward by religious people. | ||
| It leaves just a space for better conversations that you may or may not have, you may or may not discover, you may or may not fall in love with science and a rational approach to the contemplative life. | ||
| So in a weird way, as someone that wants to connect atheism to spirituality, the failure of whatever the atheist movement before you was, in a weird way is kind of Good, because you want to lead atheism to a future, right? | ||
| Well, I'm completely unconcerned by atheism. | ||
| I'm concerned about the future, right? | ||
| But, again, the place where Peterson and I will have disagreed and will disagree is, I don't think he understands atheism, or I've never heard him say anything that is an accurate portrayal of what it's like to be this sort of atheist, and certainly many atheists I know. | ||
| Sort of reframing your experience, yes. | ||
| But the truth is, you can do that with stories that you know to be bullshit. | ||
| Like, you can do that with Batman. | ||
| Well, I'm telling you. | ||
| I mean, I know Star Wars isn't a true story. | ||
| No, but you could decide, like, I'm going to get up each morning and think of myself as Luke Skywalker. | ||
| Like, you know you're not Luke Skywalker. | ||
| You know Luke Skywalker was invented by someone in your lifetime, right? | ||
| So there's no deep thing going back to our DNA, right? | ||
| It's just Luke Skywalker, and you can do it. | ||
| And perhaps, you know, perhaps Jordan would want to say, well, no, Luke Skywalker does go back to the DNA because Joseph Campbell was really in touch with these ancient myths, and it was Joseph Campbell who gave George Lucas all of his, you know, story structure. | ||
| Okay, leave it aside. | ||
| You could do it with that. | ||
| You pick the most preposterous character you want. | ||
| They could still conceivably be inspiring. | ||
| You know, Spider-Man, right? | ||
| You could get up tomorrow and say, I'm just gonna view each situation of the day that I encounter Through the lens of what would Spider-Man do? | ||
| How would Spider-Man act here? | ||
| I'm walking into a Starbucks. | ||
| I feel sort of vaguely neurotic. | ||
| I'm about to meet the barista and I'm having trouble making eye contact. | ||
| I'm the same neurotic person I was yesterday. | ||
| But how would Spider-Man do this? | ||
| If I knew that I could just To take down everyone in this place if I wanted to, and I could shoot a web and fly over a building, right? | ||
| If I knew that about myself, how would I navigate each subsequent moment here? | ||
| The truth of the matter is that changes your psychology. | ||
| You can do it with total fictitious bullshit. | ||
| It's a trick. | ||
| It's a mind hack. | ||
| That's the same game, right? | ||
| It doesn't require Jung to be right about the collective unconscious. | ||
| Now, you could say, well, it only works if there really is something that, you know, the substrate layer that is ancient and spooky. | ||
| That's an empirical claim that may be unfalsifiable or may be worth debating, but the reality is that stories have power even if you... Some stories have more power than others, right? | ||
| And we can talk about what makes a certain story more compelling or structured in a way that's more compelling, but... | ||
| The reality is that the mind is plastic to a remarkable degree, and our persistence in having the same mediocre experience we had yesterday is a kind of habit. | ||
| And you can create other habits that are more Inspiring and more useful. | ||
| And yes, it is totally possible to use some traditional framework to do that or some weird cultic framework. | ||
| I mean, someone can invent a new operating system and call it Scientology or call it whatever and gather acolytes in that context and Even the, this is how weird our circumstance is. | ||
| You can have a malicious fraud doing that, someone like L. Ron Hubbard, who's just clearly a con man, right? | ||
| And people can derive genuine benefit from it. | ||
| It's not like every Scientologist is wrong about the benefit they got from Scientology. | ||
| Clearly, they're not. | ||
| It wouldn't persist to the degree that it has if everyone's just having a bad time and seeing no benefit ever. | ||
| It would be over in a day. | ||
| Well, they're sweating all that goo or whatever they're doing in the sauna. | ||
| I think maybe we can wrap it with that. | ||
| I'm not here to litigate, obviously, on behalf of Jordan. | ||
| I thought if you could just get some of these ideas... I'm sure we'll get into it. | ||
| What's the date of the first one? | ||
| People would have to check my website. | ||
| Is it July, or is it this month? | ||
| No, it's the end of this month in Vancouver. | ||
| We've got two shows, the 23rd and 4th, I think. | ||
| And then we've got Dublin and London in July, middle of July. | ||
| The 14th, I think, is Dublin, and the 16th is London. | ||
| Could be a day off there. | ||
| Well, I have him back in here on the 29th, so that'll be right in between the two, so maybe that'll be an interesting spot to kind of refresh some of this stuff. | ||
| All right, so my final thing on this, and then we can wrap, would be, so what does it matter at the end of the day? | ||
| Let's say everything you've said here is true, and a certain amount of people watching this can can start going down that road and finding truth that allows them to live as presently and honestly and fulfillingly as possible. | ||
| And let's say, for the amount of people that are showing up to Jordan's events, they hear what he's saying and feel that it allows them to do that exact same thing. | ||
| Whether you believe that that's skimming off the top or not fully actualizing itself, but they ultimately live a good life that is, you know, the life that's coming from what you're prescribing to what Jordan's prescribing, ultimately both become comparably moral, decent, good lives. | ||
| At the end of the day then, does it matter? | ||
| Well, I think having a coherent idea about truth matters. | ||
| And so this is a sticking point that Jordan and I hit in our first podcast. | ||
| And I see it operating in a lot of what he's saying. | ||
| And so that I think should be ironed out. | ||
| And I think it can be ironed out. | ||
| And you can still be totally enamored of the usefulness of myth, right? | ||
| Like you can still Like, almost nothing else shifts in what he's doing, and you can still acknowledge that there's a difference between—this is what Bret Weinstein, I think, usefully dubbed metaphorical truth and literal truth. | ||
| And it's only by the light of literal truth that you can even make that distinction, right? | ||
| Like, clearly we need those two categories. | ||
| And we need to be able to say that certain things are not literally true, but they're useful. | ||
| And certain things are just starkly false. | ||
| I mean, they don't even have, they have no truth to them. | ||
| I mean, someone could just be fundamentally mistaken about reality. | ||
| And that could be, there are certain circumstances under which that could be useful. | ||
| Right? So it's like, to make those distinctions is the only way to preserve a notion of truth | ||
| that gets you something like a legitimate science and a legitimate error correcting mechanism | ||
| where it really matters that your beliefs both be internally consistent, | ||
| your belief system be internally consistent, and map on to reality in some way that is, | ||
| you know, if they were false, you would be unlikely to believe what you believe. | ||
| The problem is what people are getting, and this is traditionally what religion has been, and what dogmatism always gives you, I mean, dogmatism is the state of no longer interacting with reality in a way that would error-correct your beliefs. | ||
| Like, I'm going to believe this thing that I believed yesterday, no matter what you tell me, no matter what you show me, no matter what happens in human history, Jesus is the Son of God, right? | ||
| Whatever it is, right? | ||
| That's religion, traditionally speaking, and that is precisely The state in which the human mind and human communities can't error correct and make intellectual progress. | ||
| So clearly that's not, that part is not worth preserving. | ||
| And to some degree, I perceive Jordan is trying to have it both ways. | ||
| He'll endorse science in various ways, but he will also endorse... I mean, he won't call it dogmatism, but I'm perceiving it to be dogmatism, and so that's something that I certainly hope that we can flesh out and converge on. | ||
| It's good that you guys are doing four of these, because each one is going to sort of be like a discovery session until... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Until you can get enough of an agreement on that sort of base level stuff. | ||
| And yeah, you may end up just lost in the weeds on it. | ||
| Unlike my podcast, we have a moderator really in all four times. | ||
| Douglass is doing some of them. | ||
| Brett Weinstein is actually a moderator for Vancouver, so he knows his job and I think he'll be great at it. | ||
| Douglas Murray is joining us in London and Dublin, and he's not a moderator, but I think just having Douglas there will keep us from missing each other totally. | ||
| I think Douglas is so smart. | ||
| Having a British accent alone is a very calming effect on all of us. | ||
| All right, well, I don't think we should go two years again before we do this again. | ||
| We should also say we have a conference coming up in New York in November, which you are emceeing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is very cool. | ||
| This is sort of an idea you've been bouncing around for a while. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Why don't you tell everybody? | ||
| Because this is a, rather than avoid controversial topics for this conference, we decided to just ram toward the most provocative. | ||
| And so we have a session on Me Too. | ||
| I think it's titled, Has Me Too Gone Too Far? | ||
| And it's going to be a panel of women, all women journalists, | ||
| I think that's true to say, and fantastic people like Masha Gessen and Barry Weiss and Katie Roife. | ||
| Rebecca Traister, I don't think, can make it. | ||
| But we're still building it out. | ||
| But it will be the full spectrum of, yes, it's gone too far, to it hasn't gone far enough. | ||
| So it should be a very interesting conversation. | ||
| There's a panel on race with Glenn Lowry, who you know is fantastic. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to do it. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And Ta-Nehisi is just as far to the extreme racialist side of this as possible. | ||
| You just wanted to thrust me in the middle of this thing and have at it and see what happens. | ||
| And we all have to talk about how that stuff gets moderated. | ||
| And then it's got Coleman Hughes, this young, crazy, undergraduate who's writing these pieces in Quillette. | ||
| To give you a sense of just how weird the left is, so Coleman Hughes has written these pieces on race in Quillette. | ||
| He's this African-American undergraduate at Columbia writing these essays that so many of us | ||
| have found just one, incredibly well-written. | ||
| He does not have any of the affectations of someone who's overwriting at his age, which is just amazingly rare. | ||
| And just so clear-headed. | ||
| And so I retweeted one of his essays saying, congratulations, Coleman. | ||
| And I just decided to check my ad mentions just to take the temperature of the situation. | ||
| And this is more evidence of my racism that I'm favorably retweeting, like this Uncle Tom, as you'd expect. | ||
| So it's amazing. | ||
| But anyway, that again will be a panel that spans the full range of opinion on this topic of race. | ||
| The question is, can we get beyond race? | ||
| And then there's a panel on Islam that will have Majid and Ayaan, who are all-stars on the, I would argue, the perfectly sane side of this conversation. | ||
| But it will also have Fareed Zakaria and Shadi Hamid, who, I view it as a kind of intervention on those guys, because to my ear, they've just been making the wrong noises on this. | ||
| I've done podcasts with both of them, but me being a white guy, non-Muslim, who didn't grow up in the culture, There's certain moves not open to me for the kind of audience that will be persuaded by someone like Fareed or Shadi saying you don't understand the Muslim experience or whatever it is. | ||
| So obviously they can't do that talking to Ayaan and Majid or Sarah Hader and so all of those people will be on the panel and that should be fascinating. | ||
| And then finally there's a panel that Fareed is actually going to moderate, which is... Truth is, I'm on it. | ||
| I don't know who else is going to be on it. | ||
| I think it's going to be Eric Weinstein and Brett Weinstein and a few other people, and it'll just be talking about rationality and, you know, Is Reason Sacred is the title of that panel. | ||
| And you're doing a meditation session, too. | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm going to do a meditation workshop in that. | ||
| So it's like a ten-hour day, but... | ||
| I think after all this moderation, I'm going to need a little meditation. | ||
|
unidentified
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Feel free to come by for that. | |
| It's always a pleasure, my friend. |
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