Russell chats to Sam Harris, a renowned neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and the host of 'Making Sense' podcast, as well as the creator of 'Waking Up’. In this episode, they tackle everything from the world of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, to the dangers of contrarian echo chambers. PLUS, the influence of prominent figures like Trump and RFK Jr, the ethics of Big Pharma and profits, and the roles of religion in our lives.To get 15% off, go to https://www.mudwtr.com/community and use code COMMUNITY15 WATCH Sam & Russell’s exclusive meditation: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Find out more about Sam Harris: https://www.samharris.org/See my new LIVE SHOW: https://www.russellbrand.com/live-dates/ Tickets for COMMUNITY 2024: https://www.russellbrand.com/community/ WATCH the FULL INTERVIEW: https://bit.ly/StayFree-203-Sam-Harris
Over the month of September I'm doing a handful of live shows that are a combination of spirituality, breathwork, individual awakening, community building and challenging authority.
How do you bring down the system while bringing up children?
Can't sleep! Can't f***ing sleep! Sleep's what I have, it's in the morning now!
How do you try to bring down Bear Grylls while you're on Running Wild with Bear Grylls?
And Bear Grylls is much better at that stuff than you.
How do we find new ways of challenging authority while trying to live normal lives?
So I'll be doing stand-up, breathwork, meditation, as well as conducting polls and votes because I believe democracy works.
Are you happy with your current government?
No.
With you live in theatres like Hayes on the 12th of September.
That's a little intimate London gig.
I'm at Wembley Park Theatre on the 16th of September.
Windsor on the 19th of September.
Plymouth on the 22nd.
And Wolverhampton on the 28th.
To get tickets go to russellbrown.com forward slash live.
That's russellbrown.com forward slash live.
The link is in the description.
Stay free.
Hello there, you awake and wonder!
Thanks for joining me for a very special episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
It's our conversation with Sam Harris, the intellectual, neurologist, writer and thinker, creator of the Waking Up With Sam Harris app.
He gives away some fantastic free memberships to our community, so stay to the very end and become an AwakendWonder by pressing the red button at the bottom of your screen right now to experience things like that.
Now, of course, this conversation has already gone viral, particularly for those of you that watch it on Locals.
You can watch these things first if you are an AwakendWonder and a member of our Locals community.
Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, the first 15 minutes will be here, but then I'm going to click over exclusively to the other place when we start talking about Trump, RFK and the rise in populism.
This has gone viral for a reason, because it was a great conversation.
But if you stay all the way to the end, to the bit in Locals, you'll see that we meditate together.
And even after quite a hot conversation, we find peace together.
Also, there's a fantastic episode of Here's the News where we look at Biden's new drug
negotiations and whether or not he really beat Big Pharma.
You won't believe Kamala Harris's grandstanding speech and how it contrasts with the
muted regulations and legislations that have been passed. Outrageous claims there. You're
going to love all of it. But without further ado, let's move straight into our conversation with
Sam Harris. Remember, if you're watching this on Rumble, give us a Rumble, press the
red button at the bottom of your screens right now and become an Awake and Wonder
like the people that are watching this live. That's how they do those screen grabs and let it
go viral on Twitter or X.
Are you calling it X yet?
Let's welcome Sam Harris to the show.
Thank you for joining us, Sam Harris, you beautiful man.
That's something I'm quite worried about.
I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way.
How do we get beyond this cavalcade of my experts versus your experts, my flag versus your flag?
By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.
There's a methodology by which we would resolve those differences and this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.
The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models.
No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable.
Have a little look around the Wuhan Laboratory for Infectious Diseases and check out how it's funded and how it's regulated.
I'm worried about what I'm saying.
But Sam, more important than that, mate.
I'm saying that these are domains of relative knowledge.
Do you agree we should start by addressing the most powerful interests in the world that seem to benefit more than ordinary people?
Energy companies benefit when there's an energy crisis.
The military-industrial complex benefits when there's a war.
We have to address this.
We should let them get rich.
No, no, this is wrong.
This year I have to contest with Sam.
Thank you for joining us, Sam Harris, you beautiful man.
Happy to be here.
It's great to see you, Russell.
When I met you, I remember in LA, you introduced me to Hiron Gracie, who became my BJJ teacher, along with my teacher, Chris Clear, over here in the UK.
I'm now a Purple Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
You still rolling?
Fantastic.
No, I have not rolled since COVID, actually.
Yeah, since, I mean, I was racking up a bunch of injuries, and just, you know, at some point it seemed like a choice between aging somewhat gracefully and not.
You know, I just was getting neck injuries and hip injuries, and so I just, I mean, and through no fault of Hiron's, obviously.
I mean, he's, He's the perfect person to roll with.
It's just gravity at a certain point is not your friend.
Yes.
I love it.
It's just one of the great losses of my life that I'm not currently rolling.
I keep fantasizing about going back, but it does worry me to go back.
How have you been holding up?
How's your body?
Pretty good.
Like, right now, my knee hurts a little bit, my left knee, and my left shoulder hurts a little bit.
What I try to do when rolling is, very near the beginning of the session, establish a rapport with my opponent that I hope will translate into them, on some level, holding back slightly.
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, at some point, I was only rolling with Jiron, right?
So, I mean, obviously, he has nothing to prove.
He can win at will.
He was the perfect teacher, as you know, and grappling partner.
Yeah, it's just bad luck.
I ascribe it to bad luck and bad genes.
Mate, as this online space continues to evolve, the relationship that you have with Jordan Peterson, where two people with opposing views, with perfectly valid perspectives on both sides, has somehow been mapped onto the entire internet space, but perhaps without the congeniality and goodwill that I assume exists between you and Jordan. I wonder what your fears are as we
increasingly find ourselves in some irresolvable cultural polemic that seems to be fuelled
by a will to impose, centralise, to accrue authority, to defeat without grace the opponent.
How do you feel about this advancing space and how can we engage in conversations with people we
don't agree with in good faith?
How can we take on board the views of those we disagree with and advance a mutual conversation?
Or do we just accept now that centralised democracies such as America and the UK are finished and we have to start moving towards decentralised cultural and political models because there's just too much agitation elsewise?
Well, I share your concern about all this.
That's something I'm quite worried about.
I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way,
but I'm just going to sketch out what I think the remedy is.
I think we need to collectively develop the ability to worry about more than one thing at a time, right?
So what I keep confronting are people who focus on one part of a troubling dichotomy.
Take the tension between censorship, which I know you're worried about, and misinformation.
Right now, I would acknowledge that free speech is almost an intrinsic good.
It's certainly the best error-correcting mechanism we have, and that we should protect it at almost any cost, certainly politically.
And yet there is this tension between misinformation and really waking up in a society that's one day ungovernable on the basis of misinformation, where we just cannot converge on a fact-based discussion about anything because people are so siloed into their delusional echo chambers.
And on the other side, our efforts to correct for misinformation, which increasingly look like censorship and increasing their intention with Again, the almost intrinsic good of free speech, which we protect much better here in America than you do over there in the UK.
So, what I'm continually finding are people, you know, we can talk about the left and right poles of the political spectrum as shorthand, it is not perfectly accurate now, but people on the left and the right can only focus on one of these bright shiny objects at a time, right?
They're only worried about misinformation, or they're only worried about censorship, they're only worried about wokeness, or they're only worried about Trumpism, they're only worried about You know, respect for tradition or, you know, innovating on everything, right?
So, there's all of these things that represent trade-offs, where it's not a landscape of very clear distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil, but where we just have to figure out how to tune things.
And, you know, or a trade-off between individualism and a commitment to the common good, right?
I mean, like, if you privilege individualism above everything else, You begin to lose your ability to create a society that any sane individual would want to live in.
If we respect your right to put smoke in the air above everything else, we have undermined my right to breathe clean air.
There is a trade-off here.
There's some amount of regulation I have to impose on you so that your enterprise doesn't fuck it up for everybody.
Again, there's a tension here.
What I continually find, I mean, it feels like 95% of people can focus on one problem and can't dignify any mention of the opposing trade-offs with even a single sane sentence, right?
And our online space has devolved into a polarized conversation about this landscape of trade-offs.
I agree with you that these media silos are contributing to the inability to take on the perspective of the opposing side.
And I think no one's more guilty of creating these spaces than what are commonly colloquially known as mainstream media spaces.
Just today we were Looking at a broadcast on MSNBC where it was openly posited and quite enthusiastically so that were Trump to win the election in 2024 that he would immediately declare himself president for life and therefore any opportunity to indict or indeed imprison Donald Trump will be lost forever.
So nothing less than the future of democracy hung in the balance in the forthcoming 2024
election. Now, this was the claims that were being made specifically on MSNBC, and in particular
it was Rachel Maddow. I feel like it perhaps would be more beneficial if what you want
to encourage is a rational discourse to engage in, to present rational arguments, and in
particular to be candid, open, and utterly transparent about the shortcomings of the
side that you yourself advocate for. If freedom of speech means anything, it means the freedom
of speech of your opponents. And I think we've seen over the last few years, terms like misinformation,
malinformation, and disinformation enter the public discourse, not solely because there
are now miracles around communication and technology that mean anyone with an idea and
a rhetorical flourish can reach previously unprecedented audiences, but also because
these new models precisely mean that centralising and controlling any particular narrative is
almost impossible, and the veracity of opposing information is indeed difficult to verify.
I completely agree with you that we can't have single-issue orators governing our space with Sturm, Drang and Bombast.
We do need to encourage, I would say, inclusive discourses where people are, as I said in my initial question, Deliberately favoring the views of their opponent, willing to see where they can concede, willing to accept that my freedom may at some point impede on your freedom.
What am I willing to sacrifice?
Now, these ideas are precisely the kind of things that I turn to meditation for, Sam, and I know that you're here in part to talk in depth about your meditation app, which I admire and I love and I use.
And I feel that there's precisely this kind of access to inner terrains that might provide us the ability
to move beyond these spaces.
One thing I'd also like to challenge, if I may, is that the distinction between left and right
devolving into periphery versus centre - to use Martin Guri's terms there from his book,
Revolt of the Public - is significant. What we have now is anti-authoritarianism
versus authoritarianism. I feel that once that gets mapped into a meaningful political system,
it's going to mean, to a degree, the devolution of power, further federalisation,
and an ability for communities to govern themselves.
I said a lot there, Sam, but I know you can handle it, so please let me know what that provokes.
Yeah, no, I would take that reframing certainly up to a point that, you know, as I said, left and right don't really cover the landscape very well at this point.
And so there is this This anti-authoritarianism, I would say, there's a contrarianism, there's an anti-establishment bias now, both on the right and the left.
There's a distrust of power, there's a distrust of institutions.
And it's understandable, because our institutions have failed us in obvious ways.
Certainly they have They've proven themselves, certainly at moments, untrustworthy.
So the loss of trust is understandable.
But what I would say is that the corrective we need is not to tear everything down.
We need institutions we can trust.
We need to figure out how to reboot our institutions so that they are trustworthy, so that they're worthy of trust, and so that people actually trust them.
And what I'm worried about now, given the online tools we have and the democratization of everything, And this almost, you know, apocalypse of contrarianism is that even if we had trustworthy institutions across the board, we couldn't get a majority of people to trust them on any one point.
Certainly not a point that is politically polarizing, right?
So if we have a new pandemic, how do we get 90% of people to trust the mainstream medical message about what the facts on the ground really are.
And how do we get people to trust government public health organizations as they give us up-to-the-minute information, insofar as they know it?
And again, the basis for distrust is totally understandable because we witnessed one pratfall after another during COVID.
But what I'm saying is that we absolutely need, and to speak locally in the U.S.
now, we need a CDC that we can trust.
We need an FDA that we can trust.
The fact that we feel that we can't trust these organizations is Absolutely corrosive to the maintenance of a healthy society.
And it certainly will put us in a position to fail once again to respond intelligently to the next pandemic.
And what I worry about, again, my concerns about COVID have, apart from the first few months, When no one really knew what the hell was going on.
My concerns about COVID have always been that it's a kind of dress rehearsal that we were obviously failing.
I worry that we're not learning the lessons of that failure.
Because I think it's just inevitable that we will one day have a pandemic that's quite
a bit worse.
And we will need to be able to respond with coherence and learn to cooperate at a global
scale.
And I'm not sure we're putting ourselves in a position to do that.
I do recall both in our nation and in yours, Sam, an incredible moment of goodwill at the
commencement of the pandemic period, where people sort of intuitively understood that
that we were facing something unprecedented.
And indeed, the principles of every measure, whether it's masking or lockdown or medications, is human life is, if not sacred, I'm aware of who I'm talking to, certainly valuable in a somewhat unique way, which if not sacred... I like sacred.
You can use sacred with me without apology.
Because if it isn't sacred, we're going to have to work out what the hell it is that makes human life so worthy of preservation.
So we'll go with sacred for the purposes of this conversation.
And any personal imposition is as nothing compared to our collective value and our joint duty to protect the vulnerable.
But of course, what we saw, and these are just a few points I'm tracking, and I know that you're a busy man, but I'm sure you're broadly aware of the kind of media that I engage with and convey, is that Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer, said it would be reprehensible if there were any profits made by Pfizer.
And I think we all know that there were profits made by Pfizer.
Their legal indemnity for any potential vaccine injury caused a lot of suspicion.
The very fact that the FDA is significantly funded by the pharmaceutical industry causes
a great many people concern, skepticism, and cynicism.
There are figures within the CDC, NIIH, that have a... Well, this is to one of our viewers
here on the Locals platform.
Primal Collins says that to get the kind of trust that we require, you would want no revolving
door between corporations and, in this instance, big pharma.
If you are right, and certainly across infinite time you are, that there will be another
pandemic.
I suppose, personally, what I would want is a real, transparent, candid mea culpa about, this is how we handled it.
This is what we did wrong.
This is what we'll never do again.
This is what we exploited.
This is how it was handled incorrectly.
These were people that were shamed, that shouldn't have been.
That should never have been said.
these companies should never have profited. Moderna should not have been invested in by a person who's now the Prime
Minister in the UK, set up a hedge fund that funded Moderna.
None of those companies should have profited from a disaster of this nature. Certainly public politicians
shouldn't have been partying during a time while the rest of us were locked down and we must radically redress the
the ability that Big Pharma has to influence policy, because I recognise that no one's
going to trust these government medical agencies until that's remedied. If that kind of conversation
took place, I think that would go some way towards it. Do you think that's a possibility,
and do you think that's a fair assessment?
I agree with the spirit of that. It would be hard to fashion a mea culpa so comprehensive
that it satisfied everyone who was waiting for it, because I think as a society, we're
going to disagree about what the facts are still. We're not in possession of the same
set of facts. If I were to ask you or your listeners how many people they think died
in America or the UK from COVID?
Right.
I think we would see something like a bell curve distribution of assumptions, and we would find it very difficult to agree, even just about that simple propositional claim.
Just how many people died from COVID?
We're suddenly going to have a conversation about the difference between dying from COVID and with COVID, and were people perversely incentivized to report deaths that were one versus the other?
But what you pointed to in your comments about pharma there are A set of perverse incentives that we have to worry about.
So, the profit motive in pharma is something that many of us, probably all of us when we look at it, are uncomfortable with.
But it's also not clear how to incentivize drug discovery in a way that works, that dissects out that perverse incentive.
So, yes, I was totally uncomfortable with the idea of a pharmaceutical company Enjoying windfall profits during a pandemic and racing vaccines to market, knowing that billions of dollars were waiting to hit the cash register.
It's easy to see what could go wrong with that.
Again, this is why we need an FDA and a CDC and other regulatory organizations we can trust.
Your revolving door comment is totally valid.
Except, the issue is, there are only so many domain experts.
What sort of jobs do they get when they transition?
Who do we want to be doing this research?
deciding about regulation apart from people who know all of the details of this research.
And you take a simple case, let's take it off COVID for a second because that's so highly
politicized, but take the fact that we as a society desperately need to create a new generation of
antibiotics, right? We have had, we've, you've...
For as long as you and I have been alive, we've lived in this bright, shiny moment where infectious disease has been radically curtailed by us having a very solid armamentarium of antibiotics that work.
Right?
If the first antibiotic doesn't work, there's one behind that, and there's one behind that, and there's one behind that.
But in the last, I don't know, 25, 30 years or so, we have witnessed this growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
And we know we don't have a good pipeline for developing new antibiotics.
The reason why we don't have a good pipeline is because the drug companies can't be appropriately incentivized to do the work and to spend the money to develop these drugs, because this next antibiotic, the seventh antibiotic in line, when all the other ones fail, when you get some weird lung infection, and you've gone through six antibiotics
and they haven't worked and we got one left, right?
That drug, whose name no one can pronounce, that is a drug that maybe you will take once
in your life for 10 days, right?
It's not like Prozac, where you're gonna take it for the rest of your life, or Viagra,
where you're gonna take it.
It's something that most people are never gonna take, and those of us who are unlucky enough to need it
will take it once for 10 days, right?
So there's not enough profit in this thing, and it takes a billion dollars to discover this drug,
right, and bring it to market.
So.
How do you get companies to do this?
And if we were going to make governments do this, how badly would they handle that project?
So, again, this is a problem of incentives and trade-offs, and we have to figure out how to untangle all this in a way that preserves public trust in institutions, and it is a hard problem.
It's astonishing to me that it was once the role of the left to offer aggressive critiques of those kind of models, and now they are entirely bereft of them, whether it's on the subject of war or the sort of immersive and disruptive power of Big Pharma.
It no longer seems to be there.
Whilst earlier on I did offer an alternative to those labels, as we discussed, it seems to me that any attacks on the militarism, particularly with regard to Ukraine-Russia
conflict, and the role of pharma and corporations more broadly seems to be coming
from the right. That's extraordinary for me with my own particular political and cultural
heritage. I'd also like to add, while I've got this opportunity, that I take neither Prozac nor
Viagra on a daily basis. It's at most once every other day. Chance would be a fine thing. We're
going to leave YouTube now, so if you're watching us on YouTube, please click the
link in the description to join us on Rumble, where I'll be asking Sam Harris about
the popularity of figures like Donald Trump, about whom he has spoken extensively, and
Robert F. Kennedy.
Why are we seeing this rise in populism?
If you want to see how Sam's going to respond to that question, click on the link.
Also, Sam's going to be giving away access to his Waking Up With Sam Harris meditation app,
which is fantastic. So join us over on Rumble. If you're watching us on Rumble, press the red
button and join us in our Locals conversation and consider becoming an awakened wonder where you get
access to all sorts of additional content and for a limited time only, a pair of underpants, which I
will be offering you in a moment or two, Sam. But first, I want to get your
perspective on the rise of populism and what that suggests about the decline in establishment
trust, which we've touched on.
I feel like Trump's a runaway leader in his own pie.
I feel like 80% of Republicans want to vote for Trump and something like 19 or 20% would vote for RFK in spite of the lack of mainstream media coverage of his campaign.
You have a significant number of Americans from across the political spectrum - narrow,
though I would contest that political spectrum is when you consider what's possible if you're
a regular meditator. What does this tell us about how bereft we've become of alternatives,
and what new ideas, what new conversations, and what new alliances need to emerge in this
new media space, and how this could evolve into new political movements? Perhaps if we start
with what you think underwrites the sudden surge in populism, whether it's left or right-wing.
Well, I think there are a few variables.
One is this siloing into echo chambers that has been enabled by the internet broadly, but social media in particular.
I think it's possible to stay in a silo now in a way that it simply wasn't a generation before, even though, yes, there was There was an opportunity to have your biases enshrined in just how you decided to use the media, you know, in the past.
But it's just gotten worse and worse to the point where there's almost no Darwinian corrective to misinformation and lies now.
Like, you really can swim in an ocean of lies for as long as you want, and nothing from the outside is going to intrude, or certainly need not intrude.
So you have these hermetically sealed spaces of information and misinformation.
And so we're not converging on anything like a fact-based discussion about anything of
importance now.
And so you take somebody like Trump, who to my eye is...
It's not an exaggeration to say it.
He is the most relentlessly dishonest person we have ever seen in public life.
He just lies at a velocity that doesn't even make any sense.
Many of his lies aren't even self-serving.
They don't serve his purpose.
It's just this automaticity that he distorts the truth.
He'll contradict himself in the span of 30 seconds.
He has cultivated an audience that simply doesn't care, right?
This is not an audience that likes him despite his failures of personal integrity.
It's an audience that mostly likes him because he is this chaos machine, right?
He's this kind of wrecking ball that is swinging through our institutions and our political norms and disrupting everything.
So the question really is, why do so many millions of Americans want to see everything disrupted in this way?
And it does come back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about distrust in institutions, some of which has been well-earned.
I think the role that wealth inequality and a sense of loss of opportunity is playing is rarely remarked upon.
It's amazing to me how little We grapple on either side of the political aisle that we grapple with the implications of wealth inequality now.
And so I think that is certainly a variable.
But it's not a straightforward one.
There are a lot of people who are not at the bottom of our economic stratum that support Trump or support the disruption of everything and support this kind of populism on the right.
I think it's I mean, for me, to the bright line with Trump and whatever you want to say about his character, and I've said many things about, you know, I've banged on for hours about Trump to the boredom of millions.
For me, there was a bright line that was crossed that I think everyone who cares about the future of democracy and the maintenance of American democracy in particular should acknowledge.
And it is this.
We had a sitting president Who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right?
And repeatedly, he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the run up to the 2020 election.
And lo and behold, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, based on the lies he told about that election.
Now, you can dispute some of this.
You know, a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump, Which for which there is no evidence.
You know, to the contrary, what was happening is he was trying to steal an election all the while claiming it was being stolen from him.
Believe that aside, even a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump has to admit that in the run up to the election, literally six months before the election was run, we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Now, that single act, I would say, it was so corrosive.
It was such a violation of our most sacred political norms, our most sacred and useful political norm, right?
This is something that even Ronald Reagan, right?
Somebody who used to be a darling of everyone right of center.
acknowledge. He said this somewhere in the late '70s. He said, "The greatest miracle of our
country is the peaceful transfer of power. It is the thing that makes us the envy of the world.
It's the thing that if you're sitting in some developing dictatorship outside America's borders,
it is the basis for your envy of America, or at least it was traditionally, that we could
accomplish a peaceful transfer of power every four years, despite our political differences."
This is a video As far as I know, this is the first time in American history we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
And so that was such a dangerous desecration of our political landscape.
That I think it should make it impossible to support Trump.
Whatever else you think about any other political figure, whatever you think about Hunter Biden's laptop, there's nothing else that rises to that level of concern.
And that has always been at the center of my argument against endorsing Trump in any way.
This is what I feel is comparable.
Whilst the sort of ongoing questioning around the Biden family business deals, I'm sure to anyone who's already encamped within one of those partisan scenarios will just cling to their own rhetoric and their own pre-existing beliefs.
This is what my response is, which is Like live tautology, actually, because I'm going to give you the response now, is that now Biden is in office and this inequality is continuing and this polarisation is continuing.
And we are not seeing anyone say, look, we got carried away with Russiagate and that's probably really damaged your trust.
And over the course of the pandemic, we've seen a lot of shifting narratives and we have not been as transparent as we ought to have been.
And our lack of trust in institutions, as you have said, Sam, is something that needs to be addressed.
And I recognize now that this ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is hemorrhaging popularity and many of you query, is this the humanitarian war that many claim in order to stop the criminal Putin?
Or is this like so many other American wars, like the one in Iraq, like the one in Afghanistan, like the one in Korea, like all American wars up till now, actually motivated by unipolar objectives, a globalist corporate agenda, the advancing of the interests of the military-industrial complex, an explicit plan for BlackRock to rebuild Ukraine post-war, and your tax dollars are paying for it, and the only person that
Be it empty oratory and yet more lies, I recognise what you're saying about Trump. I'm certainly
not going to try and change your perspective on anything like that, because for me, none
of these figures are the answer. Radical systemic change has to be immediately discussed, and
we have to acknowledge that what's happening in media has to be replicated with what's
happening politically immediately. We have to find ways of altering our systems of governance
and having the maximum amount of democracy and access to power for ordinary people, rather
than this continual mudslinging.
I would say that one of the few people who's willing to say, this war must end, is Donald Trump.
If I was to extract the name and the face, Donald Trump, from his rhetoric around the war and how he would bring about a diplomatic solution, I would say, this is the only person who's talking sensibly.
And I just cannot extract everything I know about what happened in 2014 in that coup, about what Putin has publicly said about if there's any infringement on Crimea, about the complexities, about ethnicity within Ukrainian territory, all of that, and with great respect and love and solidarity and support for those suffering in Ukraine and for the half a million that have died in that conflict so far, for me, Dancing closer and closer to the apocalypse with dubious motivation, claiming once again that it's a humanitarian endeavour, seems outrageous to me.
And the fact that, for me, the fact that this is the alternative is a much bigger problem than anything Trump has done or said, because I do see him as an outlier, as an extraordinary public figure.
I see him primarily, and above all else, as a response to institutional corruption, entropy within our institutions.
When Biden is able to meet with his donors and say, nothing will fundamentally change when he succeeds Trump, and as he does succeed Trump, for all of your concerns about the lack of a peaceful transition, I would say that is the problem.
You know, if Donald Trump dies tomorrow, where are we?
Addressing the kind of systemic problems that I'm wrestling with, I think could meaningfully alter the dilemma that you and I are trying to tackle.
Well, I certainly have different priors than you do about the war in Ukraine, right?
So, for instance, left out of your analysis is what the Ukrainian people themselves say they want, right?
So, this is an autonomous, or it was an autonomous country.
It was attacked by their neighbor.
Right, and certainly it seems that most of the people in Ukraine were not eager to be absorbed by Russia.
They were eager to maintain their autonomy and their sovereignty as a society.
Now, I don't consider myself an expert on Ukraine.
I've gotten up to speed more or less as everyone else has in recent years.
I've spoken with purported experts on my podcast several times, somebody like Timothy Snyder,
who takes a very different view of this war than you just articulated,
very pro-defending the Ukraine view, and other people like Ann Applebaum.
These are people who are subject matter experts, but from, I would imagine, your point of view
and the point of view of your audience, and certainly Trump's point of view,
they're part of the blob that would be arguing for this war in the first place.
But I would just make a few simple points.
One is, we're not fighting this war, the Ukrainians are.
We are arming them.
So it's different than having American boots on the ground fighting this war.
And I would agree that that is a bright line we really should not cross.
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The other point here is that I think this is, once again, a domain of trade-offs.
There's not, at every moment, clearly right and wrong answers to these very hard questions.
There's a trade-off between Giving in to nuclear blackmail and the whims of an authoritarian psychopath And not giving in to it and holding the line again, even in spite of threats to You know usher in the the end of the world To hold the line in defense of a rules-based international order now where whether we get that right or not is of some consequence, right?
I would argue that It is worth worrying about what Putin's going to do with his nukes as the temperature increases over there.
But it's also worth worrying that giving in to nuclear blackmail sets a terrible precedent.
Right.
So how we navigate that is is again, it's hard.
And what you want are not You want impetuous know-nothings steering the ship at that moment.
You want actual experts who understand the history of these kinds of conflicts and understand everyone's relevant capacities and lack thereof, understand what's likely to be bluffing, understand the incentives, understand what Putin's likely to do next.
And still, that's not a science.
That's an art.
The bigger picture here is, we should be very worried about the nuclear status quo.
The fact that we have a world that is, for as long as we've been alive, rigged to explode.
Forget about intentional nuclear war.
We have a world that can explode on the basis of misinformation and just sheer accident, right?
Just radars that malfunction can steer us into a nuclear conflict.
It's terrifying and it's something that we have to figure out how to address, but to treat Putin Like, he's just a normal actor with rational interests who we can deal with like any other leader of a free society.
It's just not accurate.
He is a person who murders his political opponents.
He murders journalists.
He's not a normally corrupt politician.
He's an autocrat.
And he's an autocrat who's armed with nuclear weapons who threatens to use them.
It's something that we have to treat as categorically different then we would treat a disagreement between us and France or
the UK, us being America in this case.
I do have a concern that pathologizing the opponents of the hegemony as maniacs,
whether that's Trump or Putin, is a shortcut to looking at some of the complex historical
arguments, notably including the infringement upon the - not treaty, but deal between the
former Soviet Union and America - not to infringe on former NATO territories. Of course, the rights
of the people of Ukraine are incredibly important. It is, after all, them that are living and dying.
Their intentions and their desire about their national sovereignty is utmost in everybody's
concerns and considerations.
Whilst you cited the people you had conversations with, I would cite Jeffrey Sachs, who came on here with a couple of other Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, who now would be lucky if they get a job on the internet with this curiously altering online space and media space.
What I feel It has to be our shared obligation, if indeed what we want is to bring people together who have currently opposing perspectives, is to critique and address the systems rather than the individuals involved.
Russia is a unique country, as perhaps all countries are, with a unique history.
This truly has the potential to be a global conflict and should be handled with extreme caution.
I would suggest that We have to be open to the possibility that the declared incentives and intentions of American unipolar interests are distinct from their actual interests.
Privately, it's pretty clear that it's been acknowledged that the Ukraine counter-offensive is not going well.
I think it's pretty plain that the military-industrial complex This asserts incredible power over the direction of American foreign policy.
I say that I would address this precisely how I would have looked at the conflict in Iraq.
Who is benefiting from this?
What are the relationships between military-industrial conflicts and then Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz?
Now, the hue and flag and mule and elephant may have switched, but I see the same subcutaneous interests apparently running the show.
Part of what we're discussing more broadly now, Sam, is that You could bring a host of perspectives and opinions.
I recognise you have a great deal of academic heft in your own particular area of expertise.
I occupy an entirely different space.
My intention is, I don't think that either political party is the answer.
I don't have any alliances.
The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models that allow us to forego the needless and irresolvable cultural conflicts that are currently dominating this space.
I think we have to get beyond our judgment of one another for individualism, whether that's from a right-wing libertarian perspective or a left-wing identity politics perspective.
I think we have to find a new way to navigate these spaces so that we can start Addressing the truly significant issues that define our times, which may be apocalyptic, regardless of how you approach this apocalypse.
That, too, would have a cultural flavour.
Yeah, my concern is that the starting point for addressing any of those problems is a fact-based discussion about what the problems themselves are, right?
So, for instance, if you think climate change is a hoax, right, and someone else thinks climate change is one of the most pressing problems we have to address as a society, somebody's wrong, right?
I mean, there's, you know, there's a, and there's a, There's a methodology by which we would resolve those differences, and this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.
I actually feel that even something as complex and hotly contested, ironically, as that issue could be resolved with this type of dialectic.
Do you agree that when looking for solutions for problems that affect all of us, we should Let's start by addressing the most powerful interests in the world that seem to benefit more than ordinary people.
Always check what the measures are that are suggested in order to solve these problems.
If the measures are, we are going to impede the freedoms of ordinary individuals as a priority.
We are going to tax ordinary people more highly.
That is going to engender cynicism.
And even the way the problem is described.
I think most people, particularly in our country, conservatism, the right-wing political movement, Is environmentalist.
They want to conserve the environment, England's green and pleasant lands.
Most Republicans are nationalist.
We can find ways of not like bludgeoning people with like my science versus your science.
Why did the inventors of MRNI vaccines get censored at the beginning of the pandemic?
Why did these Johns Hopkins experts get censored?
Why did these experts flourish?
You know, instead of going on and on ad infinitum about that.
We are going to have to live on this planet together.
It appears that there are a set of interests that continually benefit from crises.
Energy companies benefit when there's an energy crisis.
The military-industrial complex benefits when there's a war.
Big pharma benefits when there's a health crisis.
We have to address this.
We can't have an ongoing system that is punitive to ordinary people with every single advancing crisis.
That has to change, otherwise you're going to have ongoing cynicism and people, ordinary
people that wear different livery but have ultimately the same interest attacking one
another while nothing significantly changes.
In a sense, I think we have to find careful ways of moulding the clay of the argument
with the intention of resolution rather than the intention of winning.
That I think might be an important way that you and I, for example, could contribute.
I mean, what you're talking about are the effects of perverse incentives.
And it is, to my knowledge, no one has figured out a way to categorically clean this space up, right?
So again, I'll come back to the very simple and non-politicized example I brought up a few minutes ago.
Developing the next family of antibiotics, right?
It is massively resource intensive, right?
It costs a billion dollars to bring one new antibiotic to market.
Who do we incentivize to take to that risk?
Most of these drugs don't pan out, right?
So you're a company like Pfizer.
I would say we need a company like Pfizer to do that work, right?
The alternative is to say the government should do that work.
Now, the very same people who recoil from the perverse incentive of windfall profits to Pfizer when we have a
pandemic are some of the same people who will
laugh at the prospect of entrusting the government to develop our next generation of medical therapies.
There's this well understood principle that capitalism and the profit motive
and the free market are the best, among all the terrible ways to incentivize people,
they're the best ways we've discovered to incentivize creative people to get up early every
morning and make the personal sacrifices they have to make
so as to do the work that we need them to do to produce this new knowledge generation.
And if you think you're, and so there's some trade off between remunerating people for the risks they take
and the work they do and allowing, despite the obvious possibility of weird incentives,
allowing for people to get spectacularly wealthy when they get lucky based on their own intelligence, right?
They produce something that's immensely valuable to us, a new antibiotic.
And we should let them get rich, right?
And if you have an alternative to that, well, by all means express it.
But to my knowledge, we haven't found one.
I would like to express an alternative, but also outline a few things within your hypothesis.
No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable. This
tells us precisely the mentality that governs at Pfizer.
When indeed there is innovation, you might find that it came from BioNTech in Germany, who
were funded by the German taxpayers. You might find that Pfizer's profits were garnered
by charging the American taxpayers, who paid for that apparent Pfizer innovation, but actually
a BioNTech innovation anyway.
What I would say is, it's not like the government, you get a bunch of giddy, silly, owned, revolving
door civil servant corruptos in on the gig.
No.
The way that Pfizer would fund universities, the way that Shell Oil fund our exhibitions,
you would fund at the level of taxation in response to referenda, in response to a mandate
derived from the people of America or the country of relevance.
We want to spend this on developing this new antibiotic that we believe is going to help
people.
It's not going to be profitable for Big Pharma.
You saw how those guys carried on in the last few years, right?
Something needs to be radically re-evaluated.
We as sensible public intellectuals and true leaders are offering you an alternative.
We're going to in fact offer a one-time windfall tax that takes back the profits from Pfizer
and Moderna.
We're nationalising those companies right now and we will pay for our fine academic
academies at Stanford, John Hopkins, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge to do this research.
And when it works, and by God it will work, you who will benefit from it, not Pfizer,
not Moderna, you the good people of America.
Tuck the X in the box, we'll make sure we count every single vote.
That's what I would suggest, Sam.
But the very fact that that research isn't undertaken, of course, identifies the glitch in the machine that has to be addressed before all else.
Well, there is a glitch there.
The market is... Hold on one second.
I've got to silence the phone here.
Sam, we can use this opportunity to transition to the next part of our conversation.
Sam, I want to talk a little bit about... Actually, Russell, I need to make one point because I think it's very important.
There's a very strange double standard that we all feel in this space where we think It's somehow morally appropriate for someone to get spectacularly wealthy when they create the new iPhone.
Or they create a new, you know, block... That was funded by the government.
That was funded by taxpayers.
I don't think that's right either.
They're next on the list.
And Google.
All of them.
Unless you're going to stigmatize wealth itself, or private property itself, unless you're a communist... Gargantuan wealth!
Most people have this double standard.
Not communism.
No, no, no.
This is wrong.
I have to contest this, Sam.
I'm saying Google was funded by public money, so was iPhone, and the public should own it if they pay for it.
I think most people feel this.
Most capitalists feel this.
That there's a difference between getting wealthy by, if you're James Cameron and you create, you know, the Terminator franchise, right?
That's okay to get wealthy doing that.
Because we all want to see, you know, fun movies every summer, right?
So what could be wrong with that?
And yet the person who cures cancer shouldn't get wealthy, right?
There's something corrupting about getting wealthy in the service of a true benefit to humanity, right?
The person who's running a global relief organization that's responding to famines in Africa, the
CEO of that charity shouldn't be making $5 million a year, but the CEO of General Motors
should be, because how else are you going to recruit them?
And what we have with that double standard, we systematically recruit less talented people
we systematically recruit less talented people to solve our most pressing social
to solve our most pressing social and scientific problems, right?
and scientific problems, right?
So we give every smart, let me just lay on the plane here.
So we give every smart, let me just lay on the plane here, we give every smart college
We give every smart college student a forced choice between getting rich
by working for Goldman Sachs or following what might in fact be their ethical vocation
into philanthropy, but making an obvious economic sacrifice at the outset,
no matter how high they get in the organization running care or Doctors Without Borders,
they know they're not gonna get rich because there's a taboo around doing that.
And again, this is an incentive problem.
I think we probably want our smartest people working on our hardest problems,
and it's not obvious how to incentivize them apart from requiring that they be saints.
I think saints are in short supply.
because we are not organizing society to generate them.
Now, I would say that if we prioritise materialistic models, materialistic rewards and incentivisation models that are predicated on that modality, then we will be doubling down on this false progressivist mist and myth that's driving us ever further towards the kind of apocalypse That both of us, I think, sense he's coming in different ways.
You for this set of reasons, me for that set of reasons.
And I would say that, you know, let's face it, the main reason that we're having this conversation, Sam, other than both guys that like having a chat and we love the jujitsu and we can handle a gentle quarrel, Is to talk about your Waking Up app.
Now, what is the point of meditating if it is simply to make yourself a more efficient unit within a pre-established machine that's only going to evolve along predetermined lines?
The reason I meditate is because I believe in change.
I believe in the ability to change myself, to become a better man, to overcome my previous limitations, foibles and flaws.
And I believe in radical change for society.
And when I say radical change, I don't mean disruptive change that's going to hurt people.
I mean true progress, way inclusive progress, where we're able to look at the big picture and say,
whilst this aspect of the pandemic period was a reasonable error to have made,
this one appears like the type of error that benefited certain institutions and interests.
Whilst this part of the narrative is being excluded, perhaps in good faith,
it seems to me that this is being de-amplified precisely because it does offer a challenge
to globalist interests.
What I want is a society where you are absolutely free to believe whatever you want, I'm free to believe whatever I want, and we only need to argue where our shared interests are being challenged.
I reckon we would find that that's not so many issues as we might assume.
One of the ways we might get there, and where surely we agree, is on the subject of meditation and by the method of meditation.
I meditate in order to access Dimensions, framings, phenomena, frequencies, even space that is inaccessible to me if I remain within the rational, logistical, materialistic part of my mind.
Why do you meditate, Sam?
And why should we meditate?
Well, the main reason to meditate, I think there are two doorways into meditation and just finding it of interest and paying attention to it long enough to discover that there's a there there.
The first door could just be intellectual curiosity, wanting to know what's real about the nature of the mind.
I mean, it just makes sense if you want to understand yourself, better and the nature of your own experience better,
it makes sense to pay attention to it.
And meditation is really just the act of paying close attention
to what it's like to be you moment to moment.
So I think you can get there purely on the basis of intellectual interest.
But the most common route, and I think the route that is certainly more persuasive to most of us, is the doorway of psychological suffering.
Becoming interested in the mechanics of your own suffering.
Just how is it that thoughts about the past or the future can exert this overwhelmingly coercive influence on your
mood in the present, right? You think about something you regret or that embarrasses you, or you
think about something in the future that you're worried about, that produces anxiety. How is it
that that change in the character of your mind is accomplished and is it necessary, right?
Is there an alternative to that?
Is there a way of relating to the flow of thought such that you don't get pushed around in the same way?
And what is it that gets pushed around?
Is there a self in the middle of this storm that is actually vulnerable to changes in experience, or is there just experience?
And are you just identical to the totality of experience, moment to moment?
And so there's something to discover there about the mechanics of your own unhappiness.
And it really is freeing.
I mean, you really can be liberated from a certain kind of suffering that is truly unnecessary.
I mean, you know, if you take it far enough, You discover that virtually all of your psychological suffering has been unnecessary.
It's been a kind of dream, right?
It's very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it, right?
You're not in the situation you think you're in moment to moment.
And that discovery is quite freeing.
It's beautiful and as profound as anything I can imagine discussing.
If in this realm of consciousness you can discover that you're my entire identity and all our dilemmas and indeed all culture are a kind of construct relevant only within a particular framing or within a particular paradigm, what does that suggest about the nature of consciousness and awareness and do you ever query The perhaps unique status of consciousness, given the number of times it brings us to dead ends of inquiry, i.e.
where does it come from?
What is the significance of the presence of a conscious observer in some particular experimentation?
Obviously, most particularly in the instance of the double slit experiments and variations and progressions of that experiment.
The recent Nobel Prize in Physics discovered that there ultimately is no local reality, or at least posits that.
That's a pretty difficult thing to prove.
And I ask this, Sam, in particular in relation to what you've just said, that you can experientially and subjectively free yourself.
Like, you know, given the last half hour where you and I've gone, oh, I think this, I think that, or the war's this, the war's that, or the pandemic was this, pandemic's that, and both of us are saying, ultimately, it is all a construct, surely this will participate in the provision of a solution for the previous bloody 40 minutes?
Yes.
Well, I wish it were that easy.
I think much of it is... It's not easy, it's extremely difficult.
No, but even in success, I mean, just to take the examples of success where, you know, I've had... I was lucky enough to study with some of the greatest meditation teachers of the late 20th century.
I spent a lot of time in India and Nepal studying with people.
I mean, I had teachers who spent 20 years in a cave, right?
I mean, these wonderful Tibetan lamas who in the meditation space are analogous to the, you know,
Hirun and Henner we just spoke about in jujitsu, right?
You get on the mat with Hirun and Henner, and you know you're in the presence of knowledge
that you don't have, and a kind of refinement of technique and expertise that took,
certainly took 10,000 hours to accomplish, It might also require a certain kind of natural talent.
Maybe not everyone can be as good as the best people.
Certainly, if it's analogous to anything else in human life, there's a range for talent.
Many of these people, I would say all of these people, if I think of the greatest meditation masters I ever studied with, at least one of them might have thought the world was flat, right?
I mean, like these are people who are not educated.
With respect to 21st century science or politics or, you know, anything else we've been touching upon here.
And there's nothing about getting really good at untying the knot of self that necessarily gives you specific knowledge about any domain of expertise that we need to explore in order to solve our specific problems, right?
So just take like, what does it take to identify a pathogen that's jumping from bats into humans and make
that no longer be a problem? Or what is it going to take for us to solve the... Have a little
look around the Wuhan laboratory for infectious diseases and check out how it's funded and how
it's regulated. But Sam, more important than that, mate. I'm saying these are domains of relative
knowledge that have to be solved on their But to use your own argument, if you can undo the knot of self, then surely you will acknowledge that all that takes place on the material plane in this shared cultural space, which is nothing more than an amalgam of our shared cultural and personal experiences, the marketplace of ideas, the
Media meteorology of all of these colliding entities, all of which have passed through the consciousness of individuals just the same as you and I, be they historic or be they present now.
This is our shared experience.
To quote the Oscar, the famous quote around Schindler there, he who changes one life changes the world entire.
If we begin to change the prakriti The Prima Materia of reality, consciousness itself, we can of course adapt and evolve systems.
They will have to reflect those changes in reality.
Even you are talking about a shared hysteria when it comes to the phenomena of Donald Trump.
In spite of all this, he didn't do a peaceful transition, yet somehow he reaches deep down into the spiritual cojones of Pretty near 50% of Americans and they don't give a shit.
Now, if we can't find a way of hacking, bypassing this constant conflagration, we are doomed.
Otherwise, what is it?
50% are going to subjugate the other 50%?
Is that the solution?
Not going to happen, is it?
We're going to have a civil war?
Are we ever going to have an election in your country again that doesn't end with the other side going, oh, it was Russiagate, oh, it was stolen.
That's just, that's just the deal now.
So we have to find something else.
Where else is it going to come from?
This is a time to revivify the spiritual traditions and to note that all of these traditions emerge out of cultures where they believe in a deep, unitive experience.
That what you experience, and of course there's no way of proving this, and I'm sure that you as a sort of a, I don't mean this offensively, materialist rationalist, will say that you're in a Peace is a contrivance of neurological stuff that's highly personal and just within your personal skin.
And I would offer, what you experience in that meditative peace is what I experience in that meditative peace.
There is a true unity.
And from that place, from our shared humanity, the same way as skeletally you and I are more or less the same, in spite of our superficial cutaneous differences, we can find some archetypal unity to share together, to build upon.
Now, I know it doesn't That doesn't necessarily mean we're going to become experts in building nuclear power stations or whatever particular solution you or I might think we should pursue, but it does mean we might be able to establish a crucible of good intent based on that.
Otherwise, what is the point?
Personal peace while the world burns?
No, no, so I think there are two levels, at least two levels on which we have to address these existential problems, right?
One is the individual level, and the other is the level that you have addressed at various points here of systems and their consequences.
And these are fundamentally different, which is to say that no matter how good you get at playing the individual game of untangling your problems and untying your knots, again, you could spend 20 years in a cave and come out radiantly happy and filled with compassion and just having nothing but good intentions for the world, and yet, You have not done anything that necessarily has much greater significance until you can interface with a system level and make change at that level.
And the reason why the systems are so important, and I would argue that the greatest ethical and political changes we're going to make are going to be at the system level, because what we need are systems where Systems that make it easier and easier for ordinary, conflicted people to behave better and better, to behave more and more like saints.
And what we have are systems, very much of the time, that are so perversely incentivized that you essentially have to be a saint to behave like a normal human being, right?
I mean, take social media.
Take something like Twitter, or what used to be known as Twitter.
The reason why I left Twitter is I was experiencing it as a space where completely normal people were incentivized to behave like psychopaths.
I mean, I would look at my Twitter feed and I recognized, and it took me way too long to recognize this, but I recognized after some years That I was staring into a funhouse mirror where people were showing me their most grotesque faces.
And I just knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths in the world.
but I was seeing psychopath after psychopath in my Twitter feed, you know, coming from the left,
coming from the right, the most toxically dishonest behavior.
It was just gaslighting and insanity.
And I recognized that this was having an effect on me.
I didn't want to see, I didn't want this false advertisement
on an hourly basis to be getting into my head where I was forming an image of humanity
that I actually believe is inaccurate.
Right.
But yet people were behaving terribly in ways that they never would behave in person.
Right.
I knew it.
The reason why I knew it for sure is that I had met some of these people in person.
Right.
I had dinner with some of these people and yet they're professionally behaving like psychopaths because of the incentives that Twitter was delivering to them.
So.
My point is, Twitter's a system, you know, among many systems.
Social media is a system.
And what we need, in this case, we need a system of communication that is making it easier and easier for even normal people to have truly enlightened and enlightening conversations, where the wisdom is built into the system layer, right?
We have the opposite of that.
We have the corruption and the dishonesty and the bad incentives built into the system layer where you basically you have to be you know fucking Gandhi not to be an asshole on Twitter at least some of the time right and so that's In answer to your question, no matter how good you get at the meditation game privately and personally, no matter how ethical you get privately and personally, society is still going to be at the mercy of bad systems.
We have to play both games.
The reason why you play the individual game and commit so much time and attention to that
is because it is the closest point of contact to the difference between happiness and suffering
in your case.
When you wake up in the morning at four in the morning and are the prisoner of your thoughts, right?
Not only is the system not going to help you, your friends can't even help you.
Your family can't help you.
You are alone in the privacy of your own mind, right?
All of us are in solitary confinement all the time with respect to our own mind.
And only a technique like meditation that allows you to break the spell of your identification
with thought can help you there.
And that help does play out in how you are in the rest of your life.
But again, it's not going to solve our system-level problems if millions of us start meditating.
It just won't.
Well, there is actually some data that suggests that it will, funded by the David Lynch Foundation in Chicago, and I won't send you those studies because when this ends I'll bloody well forget this happened.
But Sam, now listen you beautiful man.
This is what I'm saying.
Perhaps the reason that these esoteric traditions have always existed, from the Rishis to the Sufis to the Saints, is because they intuit and perhaps even experience that subjectivity can be a portal to a universal experience.
But this transcendence of self that gives us relief from the incarceration of the ego, from the An enchilada of ever-carooming thoughts that become unbearable, ricocheting off the walls of the ego.
This can be undone through these practices, perhaps because we access an ulterior power.
Curious to me that each tradition has its own version, be it via the mantra or the breath, a way out.
The only way out is in.
It's curious too that these traditions often accrue moral and ethical principles that find perennial truth.
And this perennial truth, on a pragmatic level, Sam, on a pragmatic level, we should believe in this.
On a pragmatic level, we shouldn't We should apply the rigour of investigation and the zeal of faith to what we discover in those spaces.
Because what you said about that's the only place that can find you peace, you know, where you can find peace and succour, is not with a double C-O-U-R, not K-E-R.
Peace and succour is in that intimacy.
Semantics aside, it's no different from what anyone that believes in God would tell one another.
There within you, there is the deep imminence.
There is the imminent and transcendent, that peculiar paradox that plays out between waves and particles, plays out within you.
bear down in the Vedas we find in poetics that which could never be tracked through
materialistic observation, for we do not have the instruments when it comes to the apparently
external world, but within there are solutions. Now I believe, I have to believe, that this
will map onto reality. For reality, surely, is a projection of our faith and belief. If
it comes to design or culture or music, all things conceived of and constructed in this
space that can be a personal hell or a private heaven, can be projected out with via, via
the will. Via the will. You can will yourself to do many things but you can't will yourself
to will. And I feel that if personally and individually we endeavour in good faith to
find this new resource, this accessible and often ignored latent resource,
We can solve precisely the problem that you and I have been talking around.
How do we get beyond these silos?
How do we overcome this cultural cynicism?
How do we get beyond this cavalcade of my experts versus your experts?
My flag versus your flag?
By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.
And if we want to neglect that conclusion, then all we are going to do is sit On the fireside of Armageddon and just sort of say, well, I was right.
No, I was right.
And that doesn't seem like a nice way to go out.
I mean, I've got kids.
Mm hmm.
Well, so there's a reason why I resist the religious framing of these transcendent experiences.
I do not doubt the the importance and the accessibility of the transcendent experiences themselves, because I've had them and I have them.
Right.
And it's patently obvious to me That the ego, as it is generally experienced, is an illusion, right?
And on the other side of dispelling that illusion, there's this landscape of mind that is well worth exploring.
And meditation is one way to do that.
Psychedelics are another way.
There's a very interesting conversation to have about how those two projects are related.
But I would say that We should be slow to make metaphysical assertions about how all of this landscape of experience relates to the cosmos at large.
So it's like somebody like Deepak Chopra is very quick to say, okay, this experience of consciousness without ego
is what preceded the big bang, right?
Like he'll just jump into cosmology, right?
I see no reason to do that.
One, it doesn't seem intellectually honest for me to do that.
I mean, there's nothing about this insight into the freedom of consciousness prior to egocentricity.
There's nothing about that that tells you about quantum mechanics or about cosmology
or about the status of the singularity that preceded space-time, right?
Um, and--
And it doesn't resolve any of the paradoxes or disputes in any of those specific fields.
What it does do is tell you something very direct about what you are subjectively.
Like, there are objective claims we can make about human subjectivity.
There's an infinite number of things we can say about the nature of the mind from the first-person side, from the side of felt experience, that are not merely subjective, they're actually objective.
You can make claims about the way the mind is through direct experience.
For instance, you can make a claim about Impermanence, right?
Every state of mind you've ever had prior to this moment has arisen and passed away, right?
You know, the anger you felt two weeks ago isn't here anymore, right?
And if it comes back in the next moment, that's a newly arising phenomenon, which again, will pass away.
And the connection between the feeling and the thoughts is something that we can inspect from a first-person side and make objective claims about, right?
So, I'm not saying this is all a space where there's no truth.
There are very deep truths, first person truths to be discovered here,
but they're different truths than the truths of cosmology or physics.
Absolutely, of course, of course.
On that point, Sam, let me offer you this.
There are also medical claims about wellness, blood pressure, cardiovascular benefits that could be made that could not possibly have been medically understood by the people that conceived of these techniques, and yet somehow they knew.
I don't think that we can just extract these technologies from their traditions Without honouring and acknowledging many of what they declared to be the implications of this technology.
Particularly when they are such beautiful declarations!
Love, beauty, unity.
Now whilst you say that it's fanciful and doubtless conjecture to make cosmological claims on the basis of a person's subjective experience in meditation, It is similarly conjecture to say that there is nothing before the Big Bang.
There's exactly the same amount of proof.
One of them is optimistic, one of them is pessimistic.
see as much zeal and devoutness in the realm of materialism.
To some degree, it's been offered many times. Notable and brilliant atheists like yourself, Hitchens
and Dawkins - all men that I very much revere and respect. I know that you know stuff I
don't know. There is certainly a devoutness to the - I don't want to call it pessimism
because that's unfair in its pejorative, but the materialism and the rationalism and the insistence
that just because the - because what I offer is this.
There are realms and frequencies for which we do not have the instruments, but because we don't have the instruments, that doesn't mean the data isn't there.
And even someone much more popular and populist, in a different sense, figure like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox, friends of mine in science entertainment, say stuff like, if it can't be measured, it isn't there, and eventually we will be able to hold this knowledge.
But knowledge is limitless.
The potential for knowledge is infinite and we will remain finite. Yet in this space where we
transcend the personal self, I believe that we do exactly access a super state of possibilities.
If you can create a cultural bloody phenomenon like Pokemon Go, or Jesus Christ, the excitement
and fanfare around the Super Bowl, you can use this prima materia, this prakriti, to create
better cultures, particularly if there's a goodwill about it. And also I would say that down here in
this place we meet to the archetypes, we meet the perennial, we meet the eternal, we meet the
We meet stories, folklore, and dreams, which while being certainly housed within the metaphysical, have enough ubiquity, I would suggest, Sam, to warrant investigation.
And even if investigation isn't the right tool, maybe this short, abrupt, yet beautiful word, faith.
Hmm.
Well, so I take a slightly different line through this than the one you expect.
I'm not a devout materialist of the sort that you imagine.
I just see that There's a third option, which is to acknowledge what you don't know, right?
I think we all stand before an ocean of ignorance and we broadcast across that ocean rather often metaphysical claims that are unwarranted, right?
We do science on the seashore and we explore the ocean with respect to certain physicalist assumptions, but science is bigger than that.
Ultimately, if physicalism is limited, And it turns out to be untrue or partial or otherwise misleading.
There will be a rational accounting of how we wandered into error there, right?
It's not irrational to speculate that maybe mind is not what it seems, right?
And maybe it's dependency on the brain is not what it seems, right?
So, all of this is fair game.
But to pretend to know any specific thing to be true in this area, I think is intellectually dishonest.
Yeah.
And specifically, but this is the one piece that is truly seditious with respect to the religious project, which is the basis of my atheism.
One thing that the jury is no longer out on is the merely human origins of our religious institutions and our religious literature, because they broadcast their provinciality and their merely human origins on every page.
You read the Bible, And ask yourself, how hard would it have been for an omniscient being to have put in a single page of this text evidence of his omniscience?
It would be trivially easy to have done that.
And there's not a single passage like that in the Bible.
Everything in the Bible could have been written by a first century human being or somebody who lived in the fifth century B.C.
or 1000 B.C., depending on what book we're talking about.
And so it is with every other religious scripture.
So what we know is that the foundational claim, certainly of Abrahamic religion, of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the foundational claim that a specific book has a non-human origin, right?
That is the claim that gives you Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
We know that that claim is is specious and indefensible at this point in history.
And what we need, therefore, is a truly 21st century conversation about everything we've been talking about, about the possibility of self-transcendence, its implications for running a sane society.
How do we get billions of people to solve these coordination problems of cooperation and converge on common projects so as to not make themselves needlessly miserable?
All of this is a project that requires A 21st century intellectually honest framing.
And so the reason why I dispense with religion to begin that conversation is that all of our religious scriptures are intrinsically at odds with one another.
They're mutually incompatible.
They are, they are, they are, they're divisiveness is right there on the surface, right?
I mean, just take one example.
I mean, I hear, I see that you're resisting this claim.
Stop being a Bible Grinch.
You're Bible Grinching, you're Koran Grinching.
No, because I would say this.
Come on, you already know what you know.
If you're going to pander to the religious, if you're going to, if you're going to pander to the religious biases of traditional religious people, right?
If you're going to tell Muslims that they're not wrong to be Muslim and Christians that they're not wrong to be Christian, right?
These are totally valid projects.
I believe that they're right.
What you have done is, is enshrine a zero-sum contest between Muslims and Christians, because Islam and Christianity at their core are incompatible.
And I'll tell you why.
At their core, Jesus, every Christian, real Christian, asserts that Jesus was divine, and every real Muslim asserts that he wasn't.
How do you square that zero-sum contest?
You can't.
Honestly, you can't.
How I would do this is I would say that your unconscious framing, when you say from a 21st century perspective, enshrines the notion of progressivism, that we're at some current apex now, rather than a temporal gateway, a liminal space, where we, like the Hellenists who had to address the peculiar motions of the spheres, were precisely inverse to what they had ensumed.
Like those that preceded Galileo, who had to acknowledge that amidst the devices and new lenses, new realms have been uncovered.
We cannot judge the semantic devices by which these models and modalities are interpreted in the same way that we might adjudicate their cultural and social baggage.
I hope that they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited tool of language.
free of bats, because that's apparently the only way anyone can catch COVID. I hope that
they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited
tool of language. But I would say there is sufficient data in Buddhism, in Hinduism,
in Islam, in Judaism and Christianity to suggest that what we have to overcome is precisely
the individual that you have made a personal discovery about with your own meditative journey.
The cultural afflictions and inflections of a religion are an easy way to dismiss them, but I think what is lost in that analysis is real hope Real God.
And what I mean by God is love and the hope and possibility that somehow we can turn the tide of this thing.
For me, it doesn't matter if you are an atheist.
Some of my greatest teachers are atheists.
But what matters to me is that we revere and honour and re-sacralise the earth.
Otherwise, how do we save it?
Hello, everyone.
Nothing means anything.
You're going to die.
You're in limitless space.
Now, for God's sake, do something about climate change.
Why?
Who gives a fuck?
Because God is real.
You are God.
The Earth is real.
The Earth is God.
We are participating in a miracle right now.
Now sit down and meditate and learn to love and recognize that you are the number one problem in your life.
And then we can start overcoming some of this bullshit.
It doesn't matter if someone loves Trump.
It doesn't matter if someone hates Trump.
What matters is love itself.
Now, come on, let's get on with this bullshit.
Now, if we can't have that kind of conversation, we're just going to sit watching the plane go down, Sam, and just querying who the pilot was.
Is it consciousness itself?
Or was it CIA-sponsored agents that came out of Saudi Arabia?
Or did they come out of Iraq?
And what are we in this war for anyway, baby?
Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I agree with you about the power of love.
I totally agree with you about the primacy and the power of love, but we need to acknowledge that culture is a kind of operating system that we're all entangled with, and it's possible to have a pathological culture And I think you would agree that we're suffering from the pathologies of culture, and it is therefore possible to have love, real love, channeled in ways that are pathological, right?
I mean, just take, this is a topic I occasionally am forced to return to.
Happily, it's been many years since it's been in the news in a big way, but you take the link between between the doctrine of jihadism in Islam and suicidal terrorism.
The link is very direct, despite the fact that many people on the left would doubt it.
It's by no means all economics and politics driving people to be jihadists and suicidal terrorists in the Muslim world.
Ask yourself about the state of mind of a jihadist just before he pushes the button on his bomb when he's on a bus filled with non-combatants, or he's about to fly a plane into a building, or any other moment where he's about to commit a suicide.
What is, from the outside, I think appropriately judged as a suicidal atrocity.
I think it is actually quite likely that that person is experiencing real ecstasy, Real love, real love for his fellow Muslims, a real expectation of entering paradise, real faith, real joy.
My friend, what does that matter?
But Sam, I can recognise what you're saying, I'm not stupid, I've worked out the rest of this conversation.
Sam, what do you think the drone operator in Nevada is thinking when they bomb a bunch of Muslim kids in Iraq?
It's the same death, it's the same system, one set of deaths rationally undergirded, one set of deaths ecstatically undergirded.
What's the difference between ecstasy and rationalism?
Same dead children.
No, no, you're taking the wrong side of my point.
That's not the point I'm making.
My point is love isn't enough, right?
Because love can be channeled pathologically.
So love is absolutely necessary for a good life, but it's not sufficient, right?
A sense of community, a sense of solidarity with other human beings is, I would say, generally necessary for a good life.
It's not sufficient.
Right?
You can be feeling love and solidarity as a Nazi among Nazis.
Right?
That is a psychologically possible frame of mind.
We need to discourage Nazism.
It's not real love, actually.
It's not real love.
At the cultural level.
Sam, I'm going to contest that mad claim, because whilst I acknowledge... You don't think it's possible for a Nazi to love his children?
And love his wife?
And love Wagner?
I've looked a lot over Wagner at the end of the day.
This is what I would say.
The Nazis were clearly in their giddy genocide having a hell of a time.
But what I would suggest is if Nazis were instructed in the true nature of love, that that might have give them some recourse.
and some pause in their dreadful genocidal projects. And I would say there's more than
one way to skin a cat. The motives and psychological state of a jihadi, as opposed to the psychological
state of people running neat, neat, beautiful, little rational drones, is of no comfort to
those on the arse end of murder, whether it's rationally and state-sanctioned or whether
it's sanctioned by an ecstatic religious experience.
Listen, let's meditate together because it's late in my country and I've got to go home.
I've got like three kids.
My youngest kid's like four weeks.
Sleep is the ultimate meditation.
Yeah, and I will be actually meditating as well.
Should we do a quick meditation now?
Me and you, like you lead it.
Sure, oh sure.
We're going to leave now.
Those of us on our Locals platform, me and Sam are going to do a meditation.
Let us demonstrate that in spite of differences, we can find unity and peace in a meditative space.
You can join us by clicking the red link and joining us over on Locals.
Stay free!
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