So Sam Harris went on Decoding the Gurus, and we decided we had to talk about it. Content warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Decoding the Gururs, Special Episode: Sam Harris and Meditation is all you need ( https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-episode-sam-harris-meditation-is-all-you-need ) Decoding the Gurus interview with Sam Harris ( https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/sam-harris ) Sam Harris in The Washington Times, December 1, 2004, Mired in a religious war ( https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/dec/1/20041201-090801-2582r/ ) "It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism.” We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us. Every American should read the Koran and discover the relentlessness with which non-Muslims are vilified in its pages. The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a dangerous fantasy — and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. "It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is, after all, little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the September 11 hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. Polite Conversations 17 with Sam Harris ( https://soundcloud.com/politeconversations/episode-17-sam-harris )
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
content warnings always apply.
Hear ye, hear ye. hear ye.
The podcast is now back in session and welcome back to part 97 of the ongoing trial, Jack Graham's podcasting presenting style versus the listener's ability to even deal.
And if you're listening to this, it would appear I'm winning.
Owing largely, I suspect, to my brilliant self-advocacy, because the defendant who represents himself has a super awesome lawyer, probably.
And yeah, I call my first witness, Daniel Harper.
I am.
I am definitely here and I am willing to be put under oath and you can impeach.
You can impeach every sentence I say with the things that I said on a deposition two years ago.
Oh, you're going to be impeached more often than President Trump, I tell you.
And I will be sure to say, well, look, I don't want to quibble over details.
You know, that's not what this trial is about, is quibbling over details.
Yes, we are referring to the Science v. Kessler trial and Richard Spencer's beautiful testimony in which the plaintiff's attorney literally, you know, says, ask him a question.
Spencer answers the question and then says, well, that's not what you said two years ago.
Over and over and over.
In fact, we have tweets in which you say the exact opposite.
Yes.
Not only tweets, but sworn statements from a previous deposition.
Yes.
It's pretty glorious.
Yeah.
Yeah, we are not going to be talking about Science V. Kessler today.
We have other things to talk about, unfortunately, as much as it would be fun to laugh about how terrible Richard Spencer was on the stand.
Instead, I will include the next, you know, days six through ten of Molly's live tweets of this, of the trial, if you want to kind of go track and see what's been going on.
And then, you know, at the end of the trial, we will do a fuller episode.
But yeah, that's where we are.
Yes, but instead of Signs V Kessler, what we're talking about this time, well, it's kind of it's back to an old an old subject of the show, isn't it?
Yeah, we do that a lot these days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We run out of ideas.
You see, it's a sign of a franchise coasting, you know, bringing back all these old All these old villains.
Speaking of which, yeah, we're kind of back on the subject of Sam Harris, particularly with reference to a guest appearance that Sam recently made on the Decoding the Gurus podcast with Chris Kavanagh and Matt Brown.
I came on.
Everybody wants to say Matt Smith, but his Twitter name is Arthur Dent.
And so he's Arthur Dent in my head.
Yeah, you see, this is this is why you say I'm a very old man now.
And something like that just plays merry hell with my ability to remember.
No disrespect intended.
No, you know, I'm to be honest, you're lucky.
I remember your name.
Ditto, but it's fine.
But yeah, we're going to be talking about Sam Harris actually went on decoding the gurus and yeah, on their invitation.
I guess, God, where to start with this?
One of the things that kind of came out of some previous episodes.
Maybe the first thing to say is that, you know, this isn't going to be like a savage, brutal podcast war takedown.
If that's what you're here for, you're not going to get it.
I was going to, I was going to couch this in a slightly different way.
And that is that, you know, one of the things that we, Certainly some criticisms that we got around episodes like 87 and 88 was that, you know, we were going after good people making a podcast because they weren't as far left as we are or, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's completely true.
You have to be as left as we are, or you're doing no good in the world.
That's our brand, right?
Well, you know, if you're if you're not as to put it that way, if you're not as far left as me, that means that I disagree with you about stuff.
So I'm going to say, I think you're wrong about this.
You see, it's one of those things.
It's one of those things about being on the left.
If you just say, yeah, I disagree with you about that.
I think you're wrong about that.
It gets characterized as, oh, you're attacking them because they're not as far left as you are.
Right.
But, you know, of course, that never, you know, never kind of comes the other way.
You know, like when people are to the center or to, you know, whenever they don't whenever they criticize the left, there's never like a sense of like, well, you're just a radical center, you know, like that never happens.
Right.
No, that's just sort of inherently taken to be.
Yeah, I'm just what I'm saying is that I'm the real victim here.
Exactly.
So we you know, we I don't want this podcast to be the, you know, Calling people out.
That's not what we're doing here, right?
Apart from Nazis, obviously.
Well, not, but, you know, like Nazis.
Well, in fact, in fact, I think, I think we might get into that a little bit, you know, in terms of, you know, who is, who, what are we doing here?
What is kind of the goal of this kind of work and what, you know, what value are we, are we trying to add to this, you know, and what, you know, and so we might get into it a little bit.
Episode 97, we're finally asking, what are we doing?
It's a question I've had to ask a lot lately, as we as we just kind of, you know, continually move into the space.
But yeah, I never I never want this to be like a call out or anything.
No, I feel like people, people responded to some of the earlier stuff is that we're like, calling out other podcasts and that sort of thing.
And we weren't naming people, but we were clearly like kind of intentionally You know, being combative or whatever.
And, you know, for me, the point of like not naming, you know, is because it's more about like the idea, like the strategies or the ideas or the, you know, the rhetoric or whatever, wherever it's coming from.
And, you know, mostly when I was recording 88, I was thinking about, you know, more kind of Twitter randos, you know, kind of the general response From, you know, kind of centrist IDW critics who don't get to the core of what's going on.
I've been a fan of Decoding the Guru since the beginning.
And I, you know, I went out of my way.
I actually messaged Chris Kavanaugh after I saw that episode, even before I'd listened to it.
I just said, Hey, look, I think, I think I'd listened to a little bit of it.
And I said, look, I think, I think we're going to do a, an episode just talking about some of this.
And I just want to, I wanted him to have the heads up, you know, because They have always they have always treated me respectfully.
I feel like there's a working relationship there.
And even while we disagree on certain things and there's something I'm going to call him out for here in a minute.
But even though we disagree on certain things, I mean, there is a there is a back and forth there.
And I think that's that's that's worthwhile.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it is a good show.
You know, there are there's plenty of areas of disagreement and criticism, which I'm sure goes both ways.
But yeah, it's a show I like as well.
Yeah, and I've learned things from from the show, clearly.
Yeah, absolutely.
No question.
So, so yeah, I just wanted I just sorry, we're not trying to belabor this too much.
But I do want this I do want to be absolutely clear that that's not what we're trying to do here.
And you know, we're not trying to like pick fights with every other podcast or you know, whatever.
That's not that's not the goal.
Um, Yeah, and I think that because I was on Dakota and the Gurus, and I kind of have that experience, I think that to a certain degree, I kind of know where, kind of how this production process happened a little bit.
And I did not pre-litigate this with Chris or anything like that.
I didn't discuss what issues I was going to have.
I think he suspects, I suspect he knows exactly what we're going to say.
I think that's enough preamble.
There's no, but you know, so if I make, if I make errors of fact or whatever, or conclusions that are not warranted, then he can copy that out for it and that's fine.
But I think that's enough preamble.
I think we should, we should get into it.
All right. - Yeah. - This episode's Genesis was Chris and Matt have a policy of any person that they talk about on the show, they kind of give, they kind of give this like right to respond, right?
And so they have had, you know, kind of people come on and have that conversation with them in the past.
And Sam Harris apparently heard an episode that they did Back in the, I don't have the date on it, but several months ago, and it's about Sam Harris and meditation is all you need.
And it was about, you know, Sam Harris's waking up meditation app and the kind of some of the claims, some of his claims to sort of like forms of enlightenment and sort of the way that he was kind of acting very guru like in that very specific space.
And it's worth noting that, you know, Chris Cavanaugh's actual like academic work feeds into some of this, like some of the like sociology of religion, I'm not sure exactly where his actual research interest is, but he lives and works in Japan.
He is familiar with Buddhism and these kinds of practices, and he is familiar with this kind of stuff in his academic work.
One of the things that comes across as we listen to, particularly this most recent episode with Sam Harris, is that Sam Harris is completely out of his depth.
And in terms of talking about certain issues.
He had a James Lindsay bug eyed, you know a lot about this moment.
It wasn't it wasn't quite to that degree.
But one of the things that they start talking about, and it makes up a big bulk of the episode is, is a tribalism, quote, unquote, tribalism in, you know, sort of like political alignments and that sort of thing.
It's this kind of and One of the things that Chris says in the intro to the episode, like sort of the post-recorded intro, is that like, well, what he wished he had done in retrospect is to like define the term tribalism a little bit more because he was using it in the kind of a fairly technical academic way.
And he was like actually citing to particular, you know, academic research that, you know, is about these things.
And Sam is using it in more of a kind of generalized like IDW, like you know, your tribe and my tribe and, you know, sort of political parties kind of, kind of sense.
And they're, they're definitely talking past each other for a good hour of this podcast, which is unfortunate.
So, you know, live and learn on that.
Also, I wouldn't hold out too much hope to be honest.
That same to Sam, by the way.
Right, exactly, exactly.
My other thing there is that I'm certainly also aware of the way that the term tribalism gets used.
Primitivism or, you know, like, like there's, there's a racial coding there that I think, I think, you know, Chris is smart enough to sort of like, again, because he does this research or because, you know, he would caveat all over the place that like tribe is not necessarily negative and that sort of thing.
But it definitely, when you have a couple of white guys kind of talking about tribalism In generic terms, and not kind of acknowledge the, yeah, there's some definite problematic elements to even just using this term for this, and that they get racially encoded.
And that's something that I always feel uncomfortable whenever people start talking about tribalism.
It just nails on the blackboard to me.
And I understand that it gets used in kind of technical ways, and that there are ways of talking about it legitimately.
But I do just kind of hate the term, and I'm going to try to avoid it as much as possible in this recording.
But anyway, the structure of the podcast kind of goes, they spend about 40 minutes talking about specific criticisms that Matt and Chris had at the beginning of the, in their original episode on Sam Harris, and then move into sort of broader I'm not, I'm not going to talk too much about the actual meditation app stuff because frankly, interest being very little.
But I do have some things, some, some very telling moments from that bits of the conversation.
And we're going to, we're going to deal with that a little bit, but before we even do any of that, I do want to like, I definitely want to highlight this very specific one moment.
In which, as kind of the bridge into the cultural conversation, Chris plays a bit of Ina Mohamed Smith's episode.
Way back in the day, back in I think 2016, she had a conversation with Sam Harris.
When she was a fan of Sam Harris and now she is a persistent critic and is a friend of our podcast.
And this is something I'm definitely going to kind of, I'm going to get to something with this, but I'm definitely going to ding Chris.
This is kind of the one moment where I'm like, yeah, you could have handled this a little bit better, but let's, this is about 56 seconds long and we're just going to play it here at the beginning just to sort of like comment on it and get it out of the way.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
I should probably issue a disclaimer before we go ahead, which is to say that I haven't actually listened to the episode.
I've actually been quite unwell recently, and I've had a succession of catastrophes.
You know, cars that suddenly don't work and hot water boilers that suddenly don't work, which has been a bit of a problem given that it suddenly turned freezing cold where I am.
And yeah, I've been both busy and dispirited.
And every time I tried to start listening to it, it's just, you know, my brain just went, no.
So I, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to try to be careful and not run ahead and talk of thereof.
I know not nothing.
Yeah, I didn't want to call that out, but Jack's just not having a great week.
It's okay, I listened to this episode four times and pulled clips, so I'm very familiar with the contents of this episode because I listened to it several times in seven days.
Let me give an example what I mean.
Sure.
I would say a lot of people identified relatively early where Dave Rubin's partisan bias lay, whereas the way that you spoke about him, and maybe the way to do it is, if you don't mind, I have a clip from a conversation you had a couple of years ago with Ina, a persistent critic of yours, who also is not super fond of us.
She went a little crazy in my view, but yeah.
Well, there's a conversation you had about Gadsad and Dave Rubin, and I just want to play this little clip of it, and then I'll tell you what I hear from it, and you can tell me why I'm reading this wrong, if that's okay.
Fuck you, Sam.
Fuck you very hard, Sam.
Before we get into it, I have a lot to say about this, but for context, the only clip that we're going to play in this episode that is not from this particular To Go To The Guru's episode is from Sam Harris's appearance on Eric Weinstein's podcast, The Portal.
This is from, I believe, episode 19 of The Portal, and I came up briefly, and I think it's worth a little compare and contrast here.
Yeah.
There are people that I can't diffuse because I don't think they want the thing to fuse.
Like you got into some, you went on this person, nice mangoes podcast.
Yeah.
That was that.
Talk about a no good deed going to punish.
I did my best to launch her podcast.
Well, there's something wrong with that account because there's many ways in which it seems quite reasonable.
Well, there's a personal nastiness about it that just doesn't let up, and a lack of charity.
So back in 2019, Sam Harris goes on Eric Weinstein's podcast and refers to, and Nice Bangos is INA, by the way, in case for anybody who wasn't clear about that.
Nice mangos.
Go and follow her.
Please go follow her.
Go listen to her podcast.
She's great.
Friend of the pod.
We like her.
We like Ida.
Even though we don't always agree on things, how does that work?
I'm sure she I'm sure she'd be happy to let up, Sam, if you just stop constantly spewing reactionary bullshit.
Right.
And if you would, you know, like it's like like her.
She's doing this Woking Up series, which is excellent, obviously.
I'm talking about her, talking about her evolving relationship with with Sam's material and about how she got into atheism, you know, and Came to appreciate Sam and, you know, being critical of Islam, but then, you know, also understanding larger political realities.
And I'm not trying to put words into Ina's mouth.
I don't think she would put it in quite that way, but recognizing that there's more going on than just, you know, being critical of a set of, you know, religious ideas, right?
The thing that really kind of rankles there is that he has, Sam Harris has a real, a habit whenever he refers to Ina.
And this has been, you know, I believe several times on Twitter and in other places, but this one was the one that stuck in my mind.
So this is the one I went to to pull.
He describes Ina as mentally ill.
That Ina is not wrong or mistaken, is not, you know, but mentally ill, like he brings it up on a regular basis. - Which, you know, where to even start?
I mean, firstly, there's nothing wrong with being mentally ill.
You can be right about stuff.
If you're mentally ill, you can be right about politics.
You can be right about Sam Harris if you're mentally ill.
That's that's, of course, not what he means.
He means she's wrong because she's she's a crazy bitch.
That's what he means.
It's misogynistic and patronizing and just vile.
Absolutely, completely.
I'm sorry to even play it, but I felt like it's necessary to play it to put it into context, right?
Because it's, it's ultimately, it's a way of dismissing very real criticisms, even if he disagrees.
I mean, I don't know how he could disagree with the criticisms.
She is so, you know, well-prepared and pulls so much material and, you know, like it's so exhaustive and meticulous about like not, not ever saying the thing that he says she's saying, et cetera, et cetera.
Like, you know, that there's almost no, there's almost no refuting.
woking up you know and i know larger criticisms i mean you can you could probably pull some like factual stuff and kind of i mean look there's always some kind of quibbling but like anything and anybody in terms of the overall criticism she's spot on of course she is you know i've never known her to make a claim or or anything that that she didn't back up with evidence and you know you you might be able to disagree but but it's never the case that you listen to what she proffers and say well how does she get there There's always something there and she's always got it.
If she says it, she's coming from somewhere and she's got something to back it up with.
She's straight as a die.
And so, agreed, obviously.
So, when Chris Kavanaugh is very aware of he, if anyone has listened to more hours of the Weinsteins than I have, I mean, there are a number of people, Chris Kavanaugh might be number one, you know, who isn't actually named Weinstein, you know, so, you know, he's lying.
Or Hying, right?
Or Marinos, that's possible.
So I found out, blocked me on Twitter, like this week.
I just, I discovered you blocked me on Twitter.
I don't, I don't know.
Okay.
So whatever.
Anyway, go back to the previous episodes about the Better Skeptics Project.
I think he filmed that episode and was none too happy with that, but.
This is also a technique that Sam uses on his persistent critics, and even more generally.
He's constantly talking about, well, there's confusion in other people's minds.
You're just not thinking clearly.
Unlike me, I'm thinking clearly and rationally.
I have all the facts at my disposal, and I use the tools of evidence.
But if you were just thinking as clearly as I am, then you would come to similar conclusions.
I mean, we may disagree on certain issues, but ultimately, we just need to have a reasoned debate.
And if you're this stridently against what I'm saying, because I know I am behaving rationally and in good faith, you must be just broken in the brain.
And so when he says mentally ill, he doesn't even mean like, She's got depression or anxiety or, you know, so he's not, he's not saying like, you know, she's got, you know, some, you know, diagnosable kind of mental illness that can be treated, you know, like, you know, not, he's saying her brain is broken.
And the reason I know her brain is broken is because she's a strident critic.
Right.
You know?
Yeah.
And it's, you know, because it's because she she is a strident and a persistent critic of it.
She pursues him, which is a completely fair enough thing to do, because, I mean, I made that joke earlier.
She'd be happy to quit if you'd be happy to quit, Sam.
That's actually a serious point, because Sam spends his I mean, that's his job now.
That's his career is to fill.
We're going to get into that a little bit here in a second, but continue.
To fill the airwaves with these bad opinions and these statements that are, you know, factually inaccurate and these interpretations that are highly dubious and damaging, etc.
That is what he does, and he does it all the time.
So, you know, to say that INA pursues him, it's true.
He needs pursuing because he keeps doing this.
So, you know, we're incredibly lucky that there's somebody who has said, yeah, I volunteer to be the person to just follow him around and pick it all up.
I could not do Woking Up, like I would not have the patience to put together that many clips.
Well, as I say, I didn't even manage to listen to the episode.
It was upsetting the prospect.
It's it's it's a lot.
It's a lot.
So it is.
So again and again, this is this is the this is the sort of It's a criticism of Chris, right, that I'm about to make a pointed criticism.
But I think it also points to kind of the issue that we kind of get at is like, why you don't get into these kinds of conversations.
So again, while it's a, I understand exactly how this moment happened, because
Chris Cavanaugh knows that there's a real kind of moment that the clip that he's actually playing from Polite Conversations is Ina asking Sam Harris in whatever, I think 2016 was when that episode aired or was released, about his kind of continued support for people like Gad Saad and particularly Dave Rubin, who had recently left the Young Turks and who was kind of moving into this kind of right-wing driftosphere and was bringing on really nasty people.
I mean, this is kind of like alt-right, but when the alt-right and alt-light were a lot less distinct, and there was this real kind of like moment in which, you know, he was bringing on, I mean, Stefan Molyneux and all these kind of people, and just kind of giving them like the friendly, you know, all G's and shucks, you know, treatment, right?
And asking Sam, you know, well, look, if you're a liberal critic, and you're like, if you're like, why would you not call out people who are doing real harm in the world in this space with your independent platform?
You have the ability to call out Dave Rubin, you know, because you don't take money from anyone who's paying, you know what I mean?
Like, again, she doesn't put it in those terms.
I'm going to put that episode in the show notes.
You go listen to that.
I think it's a A good conversation.
Well, I mean, it's interesting now, certainly.
So Chris knows he wants to use this clip.
He knows he wants to bring up Ina.
And he knows this portal clip.
And he knows that there's a persistent thing that Sam Harris does whenever Ina is brought up and he calls her mentally ill.
Now, note that he does not actually call her mentally ill.
He says she went crazy from my perspective.
Look at that.
Now, it's the same thing, you know, like semantic, I mean, you know, like the denotation there is very similar, you know, crazy and mentally ill, but, oh, she went a little crazy, like, oh, she went a little haywire, she went a little, you know, kind of off the rails.
And so it's sort of softened in this context.
Isn't that interesting?
Not that it's not still despicable.
I mean, I agree.
I'm not, believe me, I'm not saying it's not despicable, but I'm saying he's sort of giving Chris Kavanaugh a kind of a way to Ignore it to a sense, you know, and I don't know how much Sam Harris was thinking about this.
I mean, obviously, I'm not in the man's head.
But to me, you know, Christine, if he's going to bring up Ina, he needs to be able to defend her.
And he does the thing of like, she's not such a great fan of us, I think.
There's some truth to that.
Ayanna can speak for herself, obviously, and if she wants to come on and discuss this, I'm happy to bring her on again and we can have this conversation.
If you're going to bring up Ayanna to Sam Harris, then you need to be willing to respond to that if you care about defending I'm not.
you know, however you feel about Ina, against this really spurious, despicable accusation, right?
Like he knows this is going to come up because he's going to bring on the clip.
And yet because he's bringing Sam Harris on and Sam Harris is a big, you know, kind of podcast, he's a big get to get him on your podcast.
I'm sure they got a whole lot of listens to that episode who don't already listen to Dakota and the Gurus.
I'm not, I mean, there's no implied...
I mean, you know, do the thing you do.
That's fine.
Yeah.
But if you're going to if you're if you know he's going to say something like that, then you owe it to somebody to to be willing to be willing or able to respond.
And I get that what he's wanting to do is to sort of like avoid doing letting Sam Harris do the Sam Harris thing of like relitigating every single personal interaction he's ever had with anyone.
Because that's what Sam Harris just does whenever he's kind of confronted with this is like, well, and he does it over and over again in this episode, regardless.
But like, I think Chris is trying to get to this point of, I want to talk about some of the more higher level ideas instead of the more, you know, some of the actual issues as opposed to, you know, kind of getting mired into these things.
But that's that's sort of the limitation, I think.
I don't know if I'm making myself completely clear here.
I don't know.
Maybe I think you had a similar example that you want to bring up.
Yeah, I think if you're going to have Sam on your show, then he's going to try stuff like this.
He's going to do stuff like this.
Yeah, there was there was a there was a Twitter interaction, I noticed between Chris and somebody called at Rational Genius.
I don't I don't really know who that is, but it's somebody I think who who follows me.
And I think I follow them, you know, the way you do with Twitter.
And this person at Rational Genius was criticizing Chris Kavanagh over the Sam Harris appearance.
It wasn't abusive or anything.
And at one point, there's a tweet where they say, it's frustrating how you treat this dude.
I'm reading from the tweet now.
It's frustrating how you treat this dude with kid gloves.
He insults Mehdi Hassan, Christian Piccolini and others by calling them dishonest and worse, but you don't ask him for evidence for it.
It's because he can't take criticism and lashes out like a true Hollywood brat.
And then Chris replies to that with litigating all of Sam's grievances would have made it the sole topic of the conversation and we would have had to listen to a recitation of all of their previous interactions from Sam's POV.
You might imagine challenging his accounts to be simple and straightforward, dot, dot, dot.
And then he, you know, he goes on and you can imagine the next bit in another.
Right.
Yeah.
His point is, you know, that would be that would be incredibly time consuming and difficult and it would derail a podcast, et cetera.
Now, I have a certain amount of sympathy with that because.
Oh, no, absolutely.
Agreed.
You know, I fundamentally agree with the criticism, but I also have a lot of sympathy with the response, which is that, you know, we had him on the show.
This is what I take it to mean anyway.
I don't want to mischaracterize anybody, but I take it to be, you know, we had him on the show because we wanted to get into substantive issues.
But Sam does that Sam Harris thing.
So, you know, if we were going to stop over every instance of that, we'd never get anywhere.
Right now.
Yeah, that's true.
That is absolutely true.
My response to that would be probably that's one of the reasons why you don't platform the guy, because you know that that's what he's going to do on your platform.
He's going to take advantage of the fact that he's on your platform, which, you know, decoding the gurus has a certain reputation, a certain deserved reputation.
You know, Sam gets, you know, in my opinion, Sam gets something from going on there.
He gets the appearance, even if it's just reinforcing this to the people that already like him, he gets the appearance of being the guy who's prepared to have the debate, who's prepared to answer questions, who's prepared to go and talk to people that disagree with him and be reasonable and rational and all that stuff, which is so central to his shtick, his brand.
That gets reinforced by going on the show that has this certain reputation.
And what you end up with kind of just it's just it's just an integral problem to the whole project of doing this, I think.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Sam is going to do his Sam Harris thing on your show.
And you kind of need to either do what they see.
Again, I haven't listened to it, so I don't know.
But it seems like what they did was kind of brush past stuff like that in an effort to keep Sam on the issues.
Or you have to stop and address it.
And it seems to me that that's a really invidious position to be in, that you've placed yourself in.
Because you kind of need to just let Sam do things like go around calling women who criticize him very well, very conscientiously, calling them mentally ill.
Or, as I say, you just end up with that being the whole subject of the episode, which of course is not what you want.
It just seems like a track that's inherent in the whole idea of doing it.
We've brought people on the show who we didn't agree eye-to-eye with and sort of said things that I wish, in retrospect, I had sort of pushed on.
I mean, you bring somebody on in this kind of context, it isn't a sort of friendly, even if there's a conversation, even if there's some conflict, it isn't a, like, a friendly space, right?
You know?
And, you know, it's kind of like the, you know, the issue is, you know, you bring on, like, if you're making The Simpsons and you bring on Henry Kissinger, you had to be nice to Henry Kissinger.
I mean, I'm not saying that Sam Harris is as bad as Henry Kissinger, but... A few people are.
Yeah.
But, you know, you just, I think we've made the point, but I think there are ways of sort of like interjecting and kind of going like, you know, something like, look, I'd like to get to the issues here, but like, you don't really think Ina is mentally ill, right?
Like, don't you think that's a little unfair?
Like you can, you can sort of bring it in, but then you're like, batting him around and that sort of thing.
It's just, again, it is inherent to the sort of fundamental problem.
So, I think we've made that point at sufficient length, and I think we should kind of just kind of move forward on this.
Yeah.
So, again, as I said earlier, there are basically two kind of broad, you know, kind of things going on in this podcast episode.
The first is talking about the meditation app and sort of some of the philosophical questions, almost epistemological questions.
Around what he's doing on the app and whether he is kind of Sam Harris is kind of behaving like a guru, like a literal guru, and teaching people to meditate through this through this app.
And like, what are the kind of moral conundrums there?
And, you know, I think this is, I know, again, I listened to it several times, I think this is kind of, This is just not something I know a lot about, and so it's very difficult for me to really have a firm criticism of what's happening.
It's the stuff that sounds the most, like kind of, you know, Sam Harris sounds the most reasonable talking about this stuff.
Maybe that's just because I don't know anything about the actual content.
But there were two moments that I wanted to highlight in this bit, in this kind of section of the podcast.
And the first is, One of the things that I've always said about these kind of like liberal centrist IDW heterodox types and what my fundamental criticism of this kind of whole style of conversation is, is who do you actually give empathy to?
Who do you consider to be within the bounds of reasonable conversation and who is kind of othered and who is outside of that realm?
If I had the opportunity to have an in-person conversation with Sam Harris, it was going to be published on a podcast, I would talk a whole lot about his feelings about suicide bombers and the wars in the Middle East and his long, long activism in those regards, and not even bring up the term Islamophobia, because he would respond to that in very negative, hostile ways, but just sort of draw out that conversation, right?
He would try to get you to bring the word in.
He would try to bring the word in himself because he knows that, you know, with the audience he usually plays to, he can turn that into a win.
Exactly, exactly.
So, I mean, you know, there is a kind of a strategy there.
I have a, I have a piece in the show notes here, which is, you know, Sam Harris actually wrote in the ultra, not ultra conservative, but in the very conservative paper, the Washington Times in December of 2004, in support of like liberal intervention in the Middle East, like at the high, at the beginning of the Iraq war, when things weren't, even at that time, not going well.
And George W. Bush was getting enormous criticism.
This is shortly after the 2004 election.
And when she says, you know, in this op-ed, in this piece, it is time we admitted we are not at war with terrorism.
We are at war with Islam.
That is not to say we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Quran.
The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us.
Every American should read the Quran and discover the relentlessness with which non-Muslims are vilified in its pages.
The idea that Islam is a peaceful religion hijacked by extremists is a dangerous fantasy, and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.
It goes on like that.
There is a link to this in the show notes.
So that's how Sam Harris in 2004, and he still says the same shit today.
I mean, I'm not calling him out for something he said 15 or 16 years ago, 17 years ago at this point, Jesus Christ.
This is very much a piece of like how whenever he is asked about this issue, this is how he responds to it, right?
And he's been doing it for decades at this point.
During this episode, Sam and Chris started talking about Abusive guru types, like people who, you know, kind of basically cult leaders, cult's another word that kind of gets complicated, valences, and I don't like to use too much, but to simplify, cult leaders who bring people in and who do physically, emotionally, sexually, etc, etc, abusive things to them.
And spoiler alert, Sam Harris has a more nuanced view on those people.
And, um, I think we should, I think we should play.
I think we should, I think we, I, this is fascinating.
This is fascinating.
Um, so this is a longer clip.
It's about a minute and 50 seconds long, but, uh, I wanted to, I wanted to include this, this, this gets at something that's really interesting to me.
This is why this is such a strange area.
It is possible to be genuinely abused by a malignant narcissist who also has really interesting esoteric experiences to draw from in his experience, because he was raised as a tulku and spent years in meditation.
Or as you know, he spent years in a cave practicing meditation or he just had a real talent for it.
So he's not merely a fraud, but he's also a dangerous asshole.
And you can also get benefit from that encounter, even while you're being abused.
The cash value of all abuse isn't just bad outcomes psychologically for people.
The place I've referenced this is in the account of Osho's, Rajneesh's cult that Frances Fitzgerald in her book, Cities on a Hill, wrote about.
And Rajneesh is the perfect example.
I think he was a genuinely insightful, genuinely smart person.
Who was also genuinely dangerous and started a genuinely crazy cult.
And yet, when you actually hear the experiences of Ivy League educated lawyers who went over there to fall at his feet, and then were told to clean latrines with their toothbrushes.
and dig ditches in the hot sun, there was an ego-canceling effect of that demand on them, that self-abasement, which is psychologically interesting.
I mean, their experience of devotion, even to the wrong guru, they experienced as freeing.
I'm not disregarding the reality of abuse that goes on in cults, and I'm as critical of these scenes as anyone, but it is just a real quirk in the landscape of possible experience that someone can be treating you badly for genuinely bad reasons, and you can derive benefit from it if you're framing but it is just a real quirk in the landscape of possible experience that someone Thank you.
First of all, note the use of the word crazy there in the middle.
I didn't notice that until I was re-listening to it now.
Wow.
This kind of thing.
I mean, that's... Surely you have something to say here.
Go ahead.
I don't even know where to start with this.
I mean, the obvious thing to go for is the hypocrisy, as you pointed out.
Capable of much more nuance, and I would certainly say much less deserved nuance when it comes to things that he likes.
Or, you know, that he has a certain sympathy with or any on some level anyway.
I mean, Sam Harris spent like the bulk of his 20s, like studying meditation in Southeast Asia, from what I understand.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, you know, this is this is something again, part of his backstory that I think doesn't get talked about enough.
And so I'm just not qualified to really to really get into I would love to see, you know, someone with expertise in this area really kind of dig into, You know, what he was kind of getting up to and how and how he how that kind of influences kind of the rest of his work.
My God, it's not like you need to defend cult leaders to also defend meditation.
I mean, right.
Exactly like with Islam, the vast majority of people that practice meditation, just like the vast majority of people that practice Islam, are not dangerous cult leaders or terrorists or extremists.
I mean, it's it's almost it's almost too perfect.
It's almost exactly the same situation.
You literally do not need to defend a fucking abusive cult in order to retain what is useful in parts of this idea.
That is what millions upon millions of Muslims do all over the world.
They do not need to defend the bits of the book that you take exception to, Sam.
in order to live a life which is based upon the good stuff.
God, I'm being incredibly simplistic, but really, how sophisticated do you need to be?
This is not difficult!
How bending over backwards is he there to say, look, this meditative practice is so valuable and so powerful and so useful in people's lives, that even in a horrifyingly abusive situation, you still may be getting great benefit from it.
And yet, any conversation about Islam, any conversation about the burqa, for instance, is women forced into bags by patriarchy, etc., or by the men in their lives.
It uses a smear against Western feminists, too.
You know, rightly or wrongly see, you know, the way that Islamophobia is used to justify, you know, horrifying military action by Western democracies against these people.
And, you know, rightfully kind of start questioning, you know, exactly how hard they want to push for certain kinds of things.
I mean, there's real nuance here, you know, in that situation, which Harris Completely misses in every conversation for almost 20 years.
He's been having the same fucking conversation about this with no nuance.
I mean, I think the closest, you know, in this podcast at one point he says, you know, if I had gone and I become a, you know, if I, if I, instead of becoming a Buddhist for a while, I had kind of become a Muslim for a while.
I would have possibly had, you know, I would have gotten benefit from that.
And I would have gone on and perhaps become, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, like he does kind of justify, you know, that sort of thing.
And he will occasionally mention like kind of the beauty of the call to prayer and, you know, that sort of thing.
But like it's very thin rule compared to literal defending in any context, like literal, you know, abusive cults.
Like, yes, go clean latrines with a toothbrush for a penny a day for the next trillion years, if you're a Scientologist or whatever.
That's cool because you're getting some kind of spiritual benefit from a great leader.
And it's just so backwards, right?
It's just such nonsense.
And I don't even think it's hypocrisy.
I think it's just so embedded in his mind that this The power of meditation, the power of this kind of Eastern practice is so much a part of who he is that he just doesn't see it as something that could ever be negative for anyone in any context.
And I think that's sort of the vibe I get from that moment is like, well, yeah, but they're still getting, they're still getting access to this great leader, this great teacher who's going to teach them good things, even if he's abusing them while doing it.
It's just like, how can you, Like, if someone was saying about an imam, you know, well, yeah, that imam, you know, abused my child, but I got such spiritual benefit from his teachings otherwise, you know, that's monstrous.
I mean I think you're right that the impulse to defend the stuff that he's sympathetic to is just automatic now and I think it's equally automatic and ingrained and impulsive now on his part to just find the worst possible interpretation of anything to do with Islam.
Clearly.
And, you know, to translate this into kind of my home language, you know, how would Sam respond to somebody on the left who said, well, you know, I'm as critical of gulags as the next guy.
But, you know, the Soviet system did this, that and the other, you know.
He would, he would, he would not have any truck with that.
And he would be right to not have any truck with that.
How do you know people weren't actually getting, being, being properly educated in those re-education camps while they were, you know, uh, digging in the snow in Siberia for 20 years?
I mean, you don't know, there's a clear benefit here, you know?
Exactly.
He wouldn't listen to that for a second, you know?
No, of course not.
The more I, like, listen to Sam, and particularly in, like, this context, and, you know, like, I don't know, I had to pull, like, it's so long, it's so hard to find, like, the 30 seconds to a minute that really kind of gets at something here, because they kind of go back and forth.
I mean, I think the episode is worth listening to, because I think there's a lot there, but the more I listen to it, the more childish Sam Harris felt, and I The more, like, sophomoric and silly, like, everything that he was saying just kind of felt to me, you know?
Over and over again, he talks about, you know, they talk about tribalism, they talk about, you know, why do you criticize this person, not that person?
We'll get to this here in a minute, but, you know, and, you know, talk about, You know, Dave Rubin, why don't you criticize Dave Rubin?
It's like, well, you know, I, he's a nice guy.
I sat and we had dinners together and he seemed like a perfectly reasonable human being to me.
And, you know, then I hear people say he's saying these terrible things and hanging out with these terrible people on his podcast.
And I just, you know, I only have so many hours in the day.
How much am I supposed to go and research these things and find out for myself?
I mean, it just, I don't know.
He seemed pleasant to me.
And it's just, it's like this, like, You know, I get that, like, you're allowed to have personal relationships with people.
I mean, we'll get to this here in a minute.
You're allowed to have this.
But also, like, you're a public figure and you have some responsibility to talk about these issues, at least in general, even if you don't want to call out, like, a particular person, you should at least be willing to.
Have this conversation, especially when, like, it's very, very public stuff.
This isn't like, I found out Dave Rubin was cheating on his husband.
Like, that's not, it's not like that level.
It's Dave Rubin is platforming white nationalists, you know?
And look, you are entitled to be friends with whoever you want.
If you are consistently friends with people who are on the right, including the far right, Then you don't get to be defensive about it when people point that out.
I mean, I think I think just just like doing this.
I don't know this.
I'm going to get canceled.
Cornel West, Cornel West is someone that I have some fondness for Cornel West.
I feel like he's a you know, I don't agree with him on everything, obviously.
And but he will go on Andrew Sullivan Show and talk about like their their various like forms of religious faith.
And, you know, say, yeah, I disagree with you on all these other things.
And I think, you know, and call him out to his face, but say we can have a conversation about about religious faith.
And if you're going to do that, if you're going to be that guy, I mean, Cornel West doesn't think about as well as anybody can.
It's just it's hard to criticize him when he's like that open about it, I think is the point that I'm making.
You know, it's like saying, yeah, I have a personal issue with you.
I disagree with you on a whole lot of stuff.
I'm going to call it out where I see it.
And but, you know, that doesn't mean we can't, you know, Make some content together.
I don't know, like I have, it's a complicated thing, but if anybody is doing it well, I think Cornel West kind of does it well, you know?
That's not what Sam does.
Sam, you know, postures as somebody on the, you know, center left or in the liberal center or whatever, despite the fact that he consistently hangs out with right wingers, including people who consistently and persistently launder far right talking points.
And he will not listen to criticisms about it.
He responds every time with bad faith and defensiveness.
Right.
And will not really have any kind of conversations with anyone on even the nominal left, you know, particularly the quote-unquote woke left, the SJW left or whatever, you know.
To the point where, you know, he has, he accidentally has people on his show who he considers too left-wing and he undermines them on the show after.
Kathleen Blue, don't worry.
We're not going to talk about Kathleen Belew, but he did mention it.
Kavanaugh did mention it on the show.
That would be another thing.
I would ask him about his treatment of Kathleen Belew.
I would love to have a very long conversation about that particular episode of the podcast.
Anyway, let's move into our next clip here.
We're going back to another topic here.
It's only 30 seconds long.
It really kind of hit me in this weird way in terms of You don't get a lot of sense of like how Sam Harris makes his money for, you know, like whether it's just like an old trust fund from his family that was in television or whether it's, you know, book residuals or speaking engagements.
I'm sure all this is his thing, but he doesn't talk about his economic life like at all in most of his content, which I mean, you know, he has, I don't talk about my, I don't talk about, you know, what I do for my day job either, but, this was a real, this was just a real moment.
And one of the criticisms, one of the minor criticisms that Chris and Matt brought to, brought against Sam in the beginning of that episode, the first episode they did was that Sam Harris has this sort of like free model of his, of his waking up app is like, he, the first episode they did was that Sam Harris has this sort of like free model of his, of his waking up app is like, he, he, he charges a certain fee per month for it, but he says, well, if you're not, if you can't afford it, send us an email, we'll give
And we'll just, we'll just keep giving it to you because we think the value of the product we're making is so great that we don't want anyone to, to not have access to this if they need it.
Right.
And you know, that sounds a little sketchy.
And, uh, Chris called him out on it and said, like, in the, in the original episode said, like, this is, it sounds like, you know, okay, you get your first sample free, but most people are probably going to end up buying the product in the end.
Right.
And, um, That sounds fairly reasonable to me when I first heard it.
Sam Harris disagrees.
He claimed he was going to send over the numbers to Chris.
I don't know if Chris ever got the numbers from him or not, but I'm willing to take him at his word on this.
He lays out a little detail here, and stop me when you hear it.
I have the same policy on my podcast.
So there've been days where it's been a thousand on each, but I mean, in the general matter, it's in the matter of hundreds on each every day of the year.
And I literally staff, I think it's now an eight person full-time customer service team in the Philippines.
And 95% of their duties is to deal with free accounts.
So I literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to deal with how many free requests come in for the app and for my podcast.
Sam Harris is paying an eight person crew in the Philippines, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, presumably just to answer emails, just to do customer service work for one of his podcasts just to do customer service work for one of his podcasts for his He's, I mean, yeah.
Okay.
He's, He's, that's a lie.
Right?
Or he's doing incredible business.
I mean, he's saying he's getting hundreds, if not thousands, you know, up to a thousand is kind of the implication, like emails a day of people asking for, you know, free accounts or whatever.
And so he's literally got, you know, a team of eight people sitting in like hand typing it, you know, giving people free accounts.
And like, there are ways of automating that.
You can just, you know, have people sign up for the free version and then, you know, give them ads or something, you know.
I mean, there are ways around this, you know.
I don't know, like, it just, it strikes me as this, like, even taking it at face value, it means he's literally spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on, like, fairly minor, this thing must be bringing in a fortune.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, if he's spending that much, well, that doesn't say, like, what his budget is, you know.
Um, we don't know how many people are actually downloading this app.
We don't know how many people are paying for it, you know, and ultimately any kind of model like this in which you have like kind of a free version and a paid version, like you're ultimately sort of like building the infrastructure for everyone.
like once you've built the infrastructure, maintaining it is, you know, it's a relatively minor cost, all things considered.
I don't know the exact economics of how you maintain an app.
I mean, you've got to have developers and all that sort of thing.
But I also found it interesting that it's like an eight person crew in the Philippines.
You know, like it's just such a, it's just such a detail, right?
It's like, you know, these, I don't know.
It just struck me as this like very like tech bro capitalist thing to do.
Like he, like in one of his, One of his buddies, one of these neo-reactionary chads was like, yeah, there's real cheap labor in the Philippines.
I can hook you up with a company.
Like, yeah, it just it feels like this real like line into like what what's really going on behind the scenes to me.
It's like, obviously, this is all like speculation and who knows what's true and what's not.
But it was just such a, you know, dropping that line just in the middle.
And I just I was standing in the grocery store listening to that the first time and I just stopped and I was standing there in front of my cart and just going like, what did what the fuck did I just hear?
here yeah okay we're next clip here we're gonna be talking about we're gonna like it's
So, getting back to the INA clip, which we played at the beginning to sort of ding Chris there, and then there was a response, and this is about a minute long, and it's sort of Sam talking about why he doesn't call out certain people, which we kind of talked a little bit about earlier, but it's worth hearing this in Sam's own words, okay?
So, let's just move into this.
They identified something you didn't see.
This is the early critics of Sam.
And you didn't see it because of your sympathy and interpersonal relationships, which is a tribal bias.
Well, no, I don't agree with the diagnosis.
As I said in that clip, I was not in the habit of watching or listening to much of what Dave and Gad were putting out, right?
So I was claiming ignorance even while I was saying the few times I had dinner with those guys, I didn't detect any right-wing allegiance.
That was basically the extent of what I said there.
Now, things have changed in the intervening years.
I don't know if you notice what Gad says about me on social media, but the guy is working very hard to make a permanent enemy He's just attacking me by name as a utter hypocrite and sellout, and I don't want to call the specific allegations, but he thinks my reaction to Trump has destroyed my mind and made me a totally dishonest person.
So that's what he thinks of me.
So if we're in the same tribe, how durable was that tribalism if the guy hates me and he's expressed it ad nauseum?
Again, you know?
He doesn't like me anymore, ergo it wasn't tribal when he did like me.
Yeah, this is the back and forth that we have over and over again, talking about this like tribalism and you know, is, you know, well, I used to be friends with Gad Saad and then I didn't like Trump and he did and therefore, I've changed allegiances now, or he's changed allegiances, and therefore, you know, I'm getting attacked by these people all the time, so how can we be in the same tribe?
And, I mean, the answer that I would have given is, well, you have the same enemies.
Like, you have the same kind of anti-woke perspective.
You exist in this world, even though you argue amongst each other as to whether, you know, Donald Trump is great or not.
Like, ultimately, you have chosen a sort of clear set of, like, beyond-the-bounds enemies, and that is, well, people like me.
I mean, that's people like us, and, you know, people actually looking at, you know, systemic, you know, questions about racial issues, gender issues, etc., etc., etc.
You know, people who don't like Charles Murray, etc.
You know, those, it's all the people who are having that kind of systematic approach to these kinds of issues.
You reject all of that out of hand.
And you refuse to even look at this, these questions, like almost by definition.
And that's your, that's, if there's a tribe, that's the tribe.
And whether you disagree with each other on that issue, that's, that's meaningless, right?
I mean, that's what I would have said, you know, and I think Chris tries to get there.
I mean, I feel like we're, I don't want to be that super harsh.
I think Chris is trying to sort of be polite and sort of like kind of put this into, you know, politer terms than I would, but like, I think he's trying to get there, but Sam just like, every time they sort of start getting into this, Sam wants to relitigate some personal thing, or he wants to sort of add into some, some details of like, well, I had a private conversation with this person at the time.
And like, you don't understand because like all you saw was what happened on Twitter and you didn't see the private DMS that I got into.
You didn't see the private emails and you didn't see kind of all this background stuff.
You didn't see me criticizing Brent Weinstein, you know, in the background, you didn't see how long I like struggled with the decision to call out Brent Weinstein publicly for his support of Iphormectin for treatment of COVID-19 over and over and over again.
You kind of see this thing and it just like, I just sort of asked myself after a while, how many times do these people eat together?
Like, it's just this, like, constant refrain.
It's like, well, I've sat down to a number of meals with Dave Rubin, and I'm like, are you, like, are they having dinner parties, like, every weekend?
Is there a club?
You know, is there, like, a diner's club?
Like, I can imagine that, like, they did public events together or whatever.
And so, you know, okay, we're all traveling to San Antonio.
We're all traveling to Seattle for to do this conference.
So we sit and we have dinner together afterwards, whatever.
I mean, I guess that, but it just does, it just strikes me as like, they put so much like personal emphasis on, you know, when we've broken bread together and we had all these great conversations and I never, never asked him about like, you know, does he think brown people deserve to be in prisons?
And, you know, like, I mean, it's everyone's question, you know, instead.
It's never come up.
Never come up.
No.
At the risk of going into the world of geekery a little bit too fast there.
It is like that episode of Red Dwarf where it turns out that 30 years later, they've been dining out with Hitler and Stalin and Mao because, you know, well, they've just got the finest things in life.
And yeah, it's great if you don't talk politics.
It's a personal thing.
We don't talk about his work.
Not to say that Dave Rubin is as bad as Stalin, but yeah, like, no, no.
But I mean, it is like, there is, you just constantly get this thing again, who's in the club and who's out of the club, right?
Who's, who's worthy of your time, who's worthy of being someone that you engage with Personally, and it does feel like when the more you listen to these guys, like Ina, Ina is brilliant, but she, she is anonymous.
She is nobody.
She doesn't go and hang out in the green room of Bill Maher's show and, and, you know, hang out and have a conversation and glad hand with the boys, you know, like, unless you're on TV, you're invisible.
I mean, that's like, and I hate to be like that.
I'm open about that, but there is this very real sense whenever you listen to these people, it's like certain people are worth our time because they are public figures, they are public intellectuals, they are people, you know, with serious academic credentials or serious cultural credentials or whatever.
And if you're not in that social club, you're just, you're not worth, you're not even worth paying attention to at all.
Yeah.
Ayna is also a Muslim woman or a woman of Muslim, you know, a woman of color.
Yeah, it's very easy for people like Sam to write people like Ina off in a hundred different ways.
And of course, immediately people who like Sam will be, you know, the words, Ian Hersey, Ali.
He, I think he calls, I think he mentions Ian Hersey.
It's at least once.
It might be twice in like separate contexts, you know, he.
I think the fact that he makes such a song and dance out of it is very telling because he uses her as an alibi.
The point is, Sam will use the fact that Ina is who she is to get away with saying things like, oh, well, she's mentally ill.
Right.
And he will then make a great song and dance out of the fact that he's a friend and colleague with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you know, and that is precisely because I mean, again, I'm leery of using the word tribe because I don't like the associations.
Certainly being who I am, I should be careful using it.
But that's what we're talking about here.
She's part of their club and it's an ideological club.
They are part of an ideological front.
They are part of an ideological gang, if you like, who sing more or less from the same hymn sheet.
That's ironic use of words.
And the fact that Gad's sad has now fallen out with Sam Harris because he doesn't like Trump, Um, Harris has repeatedly said, he said this himself, that his big problem with Trump is that Trump is so bad in all these ways, you know, he's uncouth and lawless and foolish, et cetera, et cetera, is that he, he weakens the, I mean, he doesn't say this quite in these words, but this is what he means.
You know, Trump is bad because Trump weakens the fight against the left.
That's the whole point.
So this is an intra-tribe squabble over how best to oppose the people in the other tribe that they're at war with.
And that is obvious to anybody who looks at this in good faith.
The trouble with Sam, of course, is that he doesn't use good faith.
He is opportunistic and cynical, and he will use any distortion of arguments to get around and escape from things that are fucking obviously true.
Absolutely agreed.
Yeah.
You know, it's it's, you know, ultimately, who is Sam Harris going to ally with?
Like if push really came to shove?
Yeah.
You know, Gad Saad, Gad Saad or Esther Klein.
You know, that radical far leftist Esther Klein, right?
Well, you know, Trump or Black Lives Matter, Trump or Antifa.
Yeah.
He wouldn't hesitate.
He is literally on record.
And he hates it when you bring this quote because it's always out of context, right?
It's always out of context.
But I mean, he's literally it's a very famous quote that he made in which he says, you know, words to the effect of, you know, When talking about the threat of Islam, the problem is that the fascists are the only ones who are making any kind of sense on this issue, right?
Yeah.
And so what he means is, well, we need to get tougher on Islam.
We need to overcome our resistance to being called racist or whatever, or else the fascists are going to take over.
But ultimately, if it came right down to it, if it came down to letting Radical Muslims into into the country or, you know, letting the fascists take charge.
He's absolutely going to be right on the board with like, you know, who does he consider the bigger threat?
Yeah, well you put that back into context it doesn't change anything because the context is, you know, the fascists are right about the fact that Muslims are a threat to Western civilization and it's dangerous to Western civilization that they are immigrating to Western societies and changing their demographic makeup.
That is the context.
That is what he's saying.
He's saying, you know, I don't like these people so I don't like having to admit that they're right about this.
Well, the problem here isn't that you, you know, you didn't say you didn't like them.
You said you didn't like them.
Fine.
The problem here is that you also then said, but I agree with them.
They're right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I, you know, well, I don't, I don't want to agree with the fascists here, but clearly I have to, you know, I'm just forced.
I'm just forced into this place.
They're not on my tribe.
Of course.
I don't like these people.
They're uncouth.
If only we could get the left and mainstream liberal society to understand that, as the fascists do, that Muslims are a deadly threat that we should keep out of our countries, then I wouldn't have to go to the fascists for a tactical alliance on this one.
But I do, because you lot just don't get it yet.
That's it.
Put it back in context.
That's still what it means!
Exactly.
All right, wrap it up here.
Got one more clip.
Now, I was going to, because this comes up, talk about Stefan Molyneux, Holocaust denier, and Christian Piccolini.
I was going to put that in this episode.
It's really complicated.
It gets into some really thorny questions.
We might do that as a future episode at some point.
And to kind of talk about those issues because it's fascinating and it comes up briefly in this podcast.
And, you know, the closer you kind of look at that, the more there's stuff to kind of, to kind of dig into about like, what do we actually consider a Holocaust denier, et cetera, et cetera.
I just don't have the time to do it for this episode.
Maybe we'll do it in the future when I need something to prep quickly.
To his enormous credit, Chris Kavanaugh brings up the Christchurch Massacre and Sam's response to that, in opposition to the way he treated that issue of Da Beak, which we covered in episode 20.
I can't imagine that our first podcast episode on Sam Harris was far from Chris Kavanaugh's mind.
when he recorded that.
So we shall have to say, I don't know, there's no way of knowing that for sure, but it's very much right out of our episode there.
So if that was useful, I'm very happy for that.
But Harris was asked about how he treated the Christchurch massacre and sort of the manifesto, And I think it's worth, especially because this is how I speak German, I think it's worth kind of digging into this a little bit.
This is our longest clip.
This is about two and a half minutes long, but I assure you it's worth it.
The Christchurch shooting.
You had various conversations with people relating to the motivations of the Christchurch shooter.
In those conversations, there was a couple of things.
First was that Even a number of months after the event, I was quite surprised when you were talking with Kathleen Bellew that you mentioned you hadn't read the manifesto, but yet you had a strong feeling that because it had some shitposting content in it, that we essentially couldn't rely on identifying the motive.
Didn't he blame Candace Owens for radicalizing him or something?
But so here in that document, if you look at it, I mean, the title of it is The Great Replacement.
He shot up a mosque targeting Muslims.
And if you read the document, there's shitposting in it because he was a 4chan troll.
But there's no confusion about him being a white nationalist concerned with the right race.
And he's also an eco-fascist, but there's a deep swell of white nationalism.
Now, when you discuss that, The two things I have is, one, you didn't want to ascribe so quickly that ideology as the motivating factor.
You wanted to look at potential other explanations.
And the second point was, and this might be a general point.
Wait a minute.
But if you're going to say that I don't do that for jihadists, you're wrong.
I absolutely extend this main principle of skepticism.
It is absolutely not true of me to say that whenever a Muslim goes and kills people, I assume it's jihadism.
That is absolutely untrue.
But if you have an issue of the beak that describes the motivation, you say we should heed that motivation, what that says, and there's no ambiguity.
Only if it's credible.
I mean, the problem with this case, and again, I didn't read the manifesto, but what I read was secondary coverage of it.
That specific point, why didn't you read the manifesto, given that you've talked about this on several occasions?
There's so many other things to read and I haven't talked about it that much and it just came up in this conversation with, we were talking about domestic white nationalism and to what degree that's a problem.
He always has this dodge.
He always uses this dodge.
Well, I didn't read that.
I don't, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know the details on that.
I was just mentioned it briefly on the podcast episode I did with a world renowned expert in white supremacy and white nationalism with impeccable academic credentials, who, I mean, she was a little bit woke because she was talking about systemic white supremacy.
And I don't know why that has to come up in this conversation about domestic terrorism.
White Nationalist Domestic Terrorism, but you know, like, I certainly don't need to read the manifesto.
And that thing was like, that was long.
And I had a secondary sources that told me this has nothing to do with white replacement theory.
He was inspired by Candace Owens.
I had a secondary source.
Fox News told me that because they don't want to acknowledge that they fit into this guy's ideology.
No, it's just Candace Owens.
He's just crazy.
In other places, it's like, no, it's just some nutjob who snapped, right?
That's what that was, clearly.
That's not anything to do with, like, Great replacement theory and, like, fear of Muslims or anything like that.
This is just some guy who snaps.
You can't control for that.
This isn't ideology-driven.
I know that because I didn't read.
I didn't read the manifesto.
And I argued with everyone.
The experts that I brought on my podcast, I argued with them when they told me that this is what it was.
It's fascinating.
It's just, it's just, again, the longer I listen to this, the more childish and the more churlish and the more just like reactionary, just like interpersonally reactionary, just like this, like he's just got the thinnest possible skin, just the skin of an onion just covering him.
And he just like quivers with like indignation that anyone would dare question.
And yet every time he kind of like, anytime anyone asks him any question of substance, it's like, well, I didn't watch that episode or I didn't read that or I didn't, you know, I just, I was bringing it up as, as, as, as just a thing, just an example.
And I don't know the detail.
I'd have to go look into that.
I can look up, I can look into that for you.
And I'll do that as soon as no one's paying attention anymore.
But that's, that's, that's the way it works.
Every, every, every, every time you're either taking him out of context.
He needs to relitigate the details of the interpersonal interactions that he had with individual people and how they have wronged him.
Or, well, I'm just not familiar with that material.
And, you know, there's only so many hours in the day.
Those are his two responses to every criticism you ever bring to him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry, that was my rant.
Do you have other thoughts?
I think that says it all, really.
You know, I just always remember reading The End of Faith for the first time, and it begins with this anecdotal account of a suicide bombing.
And, you know, That's all he's got.
He derives his conclusions about the phenomenon of suicide bombing from anecdotal, this anecdotal evidence.
And what he deduces about what people must think based on what's written in the Quran, you know.
And there is an extensive body of sociological research on suicide bombing, why it happens, who does it, etc.
And with people with expertise in this subject, and you know, I know some people who do, you know, kind of terrorism studies and etc.
There is a healthy debate about like, well, how much does a belief in an afterlife really affect people's, you know, like, willingness to do suicide bombings?
I mean, that's an open question.
But, you know, Harris wants to ignore all of the other features, everything else that kind of goes into the fact of people committing acts of terrorism, and then to only focus on the very last step of suicide bombing.
How do you get this particular person to commit this particular kind of act?
And everything else just gets left completely out of the conversation.
And I don't want to strawman Sam Harris here, right?
Like, that's not what I'm trying to do.
He does have a slightly more sophisticated view than this, but it's almost like, well, if we just find these people at like the last step of their decision to have suicide, to go and commit suicide, to convince them you're not actually going to get 72 versions or whatever.
Uh, then suddenly they're just going to wake up and not have any kind of anger about the situation whatsoever.
And then we just won't have to worry about the real problems in society, which is clearly, you know, um, Islamic jihadist terror attacks.
Those are, these are, this is the thing that I am deeply concerned about and I'm deeply educated about.
I've spent 17 years, longer, I've spent almost 20 years talking about this in books and lectures.
I have made literally millions of dollars on talking about this topic and the sophistication with which I bring to this conversation Is high school sophomore level conversation like there is nothing that matters other than 72 virgins and paradise like that's in fanaticism like there is any kind of more sophisticated take on it is just literally beyond the pale ignorant.
You know, it's just it's just namby-pamby liberalism refusing to confront the real hard problem of you know that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There you go.
There we go.
Big picture.
Now, I played, you know, three minutes of this three and a half hour conversation, right?
It's worth, I think, kind of like asking the question, you know, what do you get out of, what do you get out of this kind of thing?
You know, what, what are the, what's, what, there isn't like, look, we made content off of it.
This is a, you know, criticism of us kind of saying, well, you shouldn't debate these people.
Well, then you're also like use audio of other people debating them.
Well, once the audio exists, I, It's worth commenting on, right?
I would never say in every situation that it's completely valueless to ever have a conversation with anyone or even like a select group of people or you're never going to debate this particular person or what, you know, never ever talk to Sam Harris because it's just going to fundamentally be wrong.
There's no value to be gotten out of it whatsoever.
That's not the point.
The point is, we have done this before.
We know exactly what kind of content we're going to get out of it.
It is very easy to predict what Sam Harris is going to say at any given time.
And why waste three and a half hours?
Why should Chris and Matt waste three and a half hours of their time doing this when they're going to get similar results?
Now, I think Chris does, given the choice to do it, I think Chris does about as good a job as you would expect anyone to do.
There's value to be gained, right?
But how much value and was it worth it in the end?
Did you really get anything out of it?
And again, if I was going to say, you know, how would you do this?
It's like, look, pick a high level topic or two or three high level topics that you're going to talk about.
Have some kind of moderator so that you don't have to be super nice to him.
Have someone kind of sitting in the middle who will keep to this set of topics and don't let him kind of go off into his interpersonal connections.
Like just kind of avoid that kind of dynamic and just like really like look I'm not interested in How Mehdi Hassan insulted you on Twitter in 2012.
That isn't relevant here.
I want to talk about the Christchurch massacre, you know, and why you didn't read his manifesto.
Let's have a conversation about it.
Keep it to those topics.
And honestly, given my appearance on Decoding the Guru, I'm like, yeah, it probably would have been better Had we kind of picked a couple of like big topics we wanted to discuss and really not bounce around so much.
It's really fun to sit and bounce around and have like complicated, you know, conversations about like kind of whatever comes up, but it's less useful for an audience.
And it's less, it's less useful in terms of the use of our time as well.
You know, like it was fun.
I think it's a good episode, but it's also like, yeah, well maybe we could do this a little differently, you know?
Again, constructive criticism.
I hope this gets taken as constructive criticism because that's what it's meant to be, okay?
Like, that's what we're here for.
We've spent a lot more time in this criticizing Sam than we have criticizing the group.
Right, right.
I mean, you know, like, yeah, no.
I mean, it's not because, I mean, Sam Harris could go fuck himself.
I have zero interest in ever having a real conversation with Sam Harris.
I mentioned, like, if I were in that situation, of course, if Sam Harris wanted to have a conversation with me in a neutral place.
Like, yes, please, shower me with money.
Yes, that sounds great to me.
Please draw much attention to my podcast.
I will happily go on and be abused by Sam Harris for two hours for the benefits of that.
Yes, how much suffering for me for the Patreon dollars.
It would surely shower upon me.
You know, of course, yeah, I do it, you know, but like, what's the value other than like that, you know, and again, I'm not trying to, sorry, I'm joking about like financial motives, etc, etc.
I don't think that's what Chris and Matt were really trying to do.
I think no, no, no, I think they were trying to have a real conversation and really trying because they are, they are actually like college professors, they are actually have university positions.
They have the they have this kind of ability and willingness to really kind of approach him in this You know, sort of good faith, collegial way.
And I think that there is a there is a use there to that as well.
And we didn't really get into that too much either.
But yeah, that's that's enough.
I think I think that's enough.
So what are we doing next time?
I think, and I keep saying we're going to do more Nazis, but I think, I think I really want to do Christopher Rufo.
I really want to, I found a treasure trove of stuff.
And frankly, if this episode is slightly undercooked, it's because the next one, there's probably going to be a two.
A full episode of Christopher Rufo material that never mentions critical race theory.
Like that's how much.
So, um, uh, yeah, so, so we'll probably end up doing a two part of They probably will not be together.
We'll probably do a later episode about his Critical Race Theory stuff, which has been really covered very well also, and so I'm not keen to sort of dive back into basically just reading the great New Yorker piece and the great Atlantic piece, etc.
But there's a lot of original stuff that I managed to dig up with Christopher Rufo, and I think It's really worth it's really worth kind of going ahead and doing that this month.
So that's the plan for the next episode.
And then whenever I announce it, it always gets delayed.
But that's yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
People people listening will be like, OK, well, we'll expect that maybe in three or four months or so.
We'll expect that in 2023.
Got it.
OK.
Yeah.
Lord, I hope that man is no longer at all relevant in 2023, but you know, I don't get much in that regard.
There's no harm in hoping, I suppose.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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