Your Capacity to be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in. You,
you are calling for Twitter to shut down Trump's account and we were happy that it happened. Yeah, that's a very different position to pretty much everybody else. Why did you take that position?
Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in hundred items laptop in my view. That's a just a conspiracy essay.
Left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely. It was absolutely, but I think it was warrant, it sounds like, but you can't do that Sam. You've got to be fair, most people in our society, even if they're nominally religious, really are struggling to find meaning in their day-to-day about when you look at just the the hour by hour increments at which the you know, life is doled out to us, you're tasked out of deep sleep.
Or you know, phantasmagoria of dreams, you know, when the alarm goes off in the morning and how do you feel about your life and what is going to give you moral urgency and meaning millions and millions of people found it at specific moments in our recent history like George. Floyd killing was certainly one of those moments where is that? Okay, enough is enough, this is my religion.
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It's trigonometry dot locals.com. We'll see you there. Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Frances Foster and constant and Kissin and this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations with Fascinating People, delighted to say are brilliant. Guest today is a neuroscientist philosopher and one of America's and the world's most prominent public, intellectual Sam Harris, welcome to
trigonometry.
Okay, thanks guys. Yeah, great to be.
Here it is. Great to have you on the show? We mentioned the usually, when we started the show, we ask our guests to introduce themselves. You're well-known enough that you don't need to do that, but we did want to talk to you about which is what we've been asking, a lot of our guests on this trip in the u.s. is how are you who you are? Because you've done things that most people wouldn't do, I wouldn't want to do, would be scared to do calling out some ideologies that people are afraid to call out that takes courage, but it also takes determination. It takes something.
Why do you have that something? How did you get
it?
That's a hard question to answer and I think there's one algorithm, I'm running more than most, which is what I would call intellectual honesty, right? And and so your the burden is not to be who you were yesterday. The burden isn't to join some tribe who, you know, you'll get social reinforcement from for, you know, conforming to
So it's insofar as I'm continually just trying to figure out what's true. And what's consistent with? What I claimed was true five minutes ago or five years ago, that causes me to just bump up against taboos and and blasphemies and ideologies that are more rigid than that, right? I mean if your, it made really it's
I mean even having an identity itself is too much, you know it's like hey you not only can you not really conform to a tribe? You can't really even conform to who you were yesterday. If your, your master value is to be honest and rigorous and available to new data, new arguments and, and new insights,
that's a very good answer, but doesn't answer my question, which is, how did you become that way? Why are you?
Yeah, I have no idea. I just might like that.
I, you know, factory setting. And so from a very early age, you know, I guess I showed up as a skeptic on many fronts or I was I was certainly an argumentative teenager, you know, some kind of default and that part really hasn't changed. I think I pick my battles better now than I used to. I mean, I could,
You know, I could turn any dinner party into a knock-down drag-out debate about the most fundamental issues. Anyone could summon. And, you know, I think I, as I get older, I pick my battles more. Just because I like that, the hassle factor of touching certain topics and certain ways has become more Salient for me because I did Twitter was the, that was the real teaching tool for me. Like I just, you know, I got on the
Form, as everyone did not really aware that. I was enrolling myself into a psychological experiment to, which no one had consented. And the, the outcome is as yet unforeseen. And, yeah, I just kind of let loose, you know, with a on various topics and I would, you know, when I would see some malefactor there who was treating me or other people badly, well, then I had to deal with that, right? Then, and there. And and yeah, it's just the
Hassle factor of dealing with the, the toxicity of it. And also just the the
I'm convinced now that at bottom it's a misrepresentation of humanity, right? It doesn't seem like I'm, you're actually dealing with what someone wrote their. I mean it's not it's not in error but you're not getting the whole person. You're getting a part of them that has been Amplified by the the frame into which the conversation has been put. And the frame has certain features that are not helpful to good conversation and it's got anonymity is got you know it's got facelessness it
Got the performative aspect you're doing it in front of your crowd or some possible crowd. So it just it you know, it's disastrous for intellectual honesty and compassion and
You know, theory of Mind under actually understand taking the time the extra moment to understand where the other person is coming from. So as you know, there's no principle of Charity. So it's just, it's really a disasterous machine for manufacturing Discord.
We had a guest on the show called Richard, the ground who made the point that what it does is reduces everyone to an avatar. Mmm, so if everyone's an avatar, what does it matter if you attack them? If you, you know, humanize them, if you misrepresent
Because the game is to win, right? It's not to actually have a discussion is to destroy an ultimately to win.
Yeah, I was especially if you're not if you're a public person dealing with people who are not public people, right? Because then there's really this then it's just a single shot, you know, Lottery. It's not a there's no ongoing future of collaboration or cooperation that is being maintained. I mean it's even bad when you have two public people who
Our who know, both know they're going to meet each other in real life at some point. Still though the wheels come off rather often to a surprising degree. But yeah, it's just
Yes, I in the end I think it's bad technology which is still somewhat inscrutable because it seems like it should be good. I mean and in some ways it is good because you're seeing you know, you're seeing a lot of smart people, tell you what the most interests them and most worries them on a daily basis and sending you articles and videos that you. And that's why I'm like that's why I can't break my connection to it. Because I'm following so many smart people who are curating for me and information diet that I still
Appreciate and then I you know, occasionally put my own stuff out there just so it's like a kind of a marketing channel but I'm doing much less in the weeds back and forth with the even public people who I notice, you know, you know, poke me on a given issue or whatever.
So, some does it not go do not have a little thought in your head. When you go to tackle these very contentious subjects, you know, and you know that you're going to get pushed back, you know, that you're going to get flat, you know, that you're going to get.
Misrepresented. Do you not think I really shouldn't be doing this? Or what goes through your mind before you go out and you make
your point?
Well, again, I think about it more than I used to know. I'm, I used to. I used to do it very, there's a basically, there was no friction in the system. I mean, I just was like, okay, this is like that, that cartoon meme, you know, somebody on the Internet is wrong about something that's, you know, I was that guy on Twitter and
So I'm not that guy anymore and I really do pick my moments and there's a cost to that because there's you know that you're you decide to sit certain moment. It kind of cultural moments at he said on the sidelines and
but,
Move if I guess I could. If I could distill it to a to a lesson here is like a, not you don't, you don't always need to have an opinion about everything, right. He certainly don't always need to have a strong opinion about everything. And even if you do have a strong opinion, you don't always have to be the person expressing that opinion because very likely someone else will write and you know, given the, you know, given those adjustments to the to the machine, you can just decide if you know,
This do I really want to spend the next 24 hours dealing with the aftermath of this thing that I'm tempted to tweet right? Word to say in some other format and in particular it relates to the likelihood that certain personalities are going to go berserk and then with certain people it's you know it's guaranteed that they're going to go berserk. So like do I here's this this this odious opinion expressed by a you know a semi odious person.
Who really deserves to hear what I think right now is it worth? You know, this whacking that Hornet's Nest and then just dealing with dealing with and being seen to deal with or to know, or to not deal with and to maybe look like you can't deal with the aftermath. Yeah. Right. It's
like Sam, you talked about tribalism at the beginning and that's something that Frances. And I both feel very strongly is contributing to much of the divisiveness and the way things are going and look let's be clear. You know, the shows.
Trigonometry we want to explore difficult subjects. There's no question that neither him or I woke in the concerned opposing that ideology has been a big part of what we do. But the tribalism is that is a different thing. We don't want to be in the anti woke tribal. Yeah, that's right. And there was a tribe around 2015 2016. This very small tribe of very smart people which was referred to as the intellectual dark web which I remember at that time we weren't doing this, we're just two comedians, I remember
I'm watching you guys have those conversations and being inspired by people. I don't think you guys had the answers but you had the right questions, you did have the right questions and then over time we watched that loose tribe of very bright people as loose tribes of very bright people. Always do crumble, disintegrate. Roll out. Yeah. What
happened? Well, the first thing that happened is that it was actually for some of us more than others. A tongue-in-cheek label for a tribe that really wasn't me.
None of us are tribal people. You know, it really is a herding cats sort of situation. And when I lie so you know, is Eric, Weinstein, coinage, which I launched on a podcast. We did. And I think in that context, I telegraphed that I thought it was tongue in cheek. I may I think he probably thought it was more in Earnest than I did or he was at least more attached to the label and then very quickly, they were people who
Sort of joined this this collection or who were said to be in it who says some of whom I had never heard of at that point who you know on. I'll just a little bit of analysis reveal themselves to be people who I you know I really don't agree with not just on the actual substance of specific opinions, just just their methodology by which they would generate opinions, or their lack of methodology. So, you know, I'm not inclined to name names but there are
Who like it just it's just wrong to think you know they were ever moving in the same Lane. I was in at that point when we were all called IDW people, right? But I think the biggest force of fragmentation was Trump and what certain people did or didn't do with that phenomenon, you
know. And this is what I was going to ask you. I'd say there were two things that fractured it from that looking
at making covid later.
But right. Run Trump was
the. So let's start with Trump because I want to talk about covid has all. But if we start with Trump, you took a different view to almost everybody, I would say in what was described as IDW in the sense that you were, I think you were calling for Twitter to shut down Trump's account and were happy that it happened. Yeah. That's a very different position to pretty much everybody else. Why did you take that position?
Well for two reasons, whatever. So that
The non-generic reason is and this is something. I've never gotten a clear answer on from any of the people who took the different side of this and many that so many of these people are ostensibly Libertarians or at least you know quasi Libertarians. And if they want something like a minimum of State coercion and and control, they don't want just a proliferation of laws, did you know, just to make our lives more difficult?
And that's a, that's an orientation. You know, though? I'm, I consider myself a liberal and have always voted as a Democrat. I mean, the until until we dealt with this woke apocalypse. So, you know, I would have certainly called myself a Democrat without much self-consciousness. And I've always had this libertarian kind of underpinning to my, my politics, which is, you know, if the private sector can handle it is probably best done there, right? And we've just given the level of in a
Efficiency? And and poorly aligned incentives. You get in a government bureaucracy and peaceful honest, people should be should have the right to be left alone, you know, so it's like if unless somebody is harming people or you know, guilty of fraud, you know, the ID theft, you know, stealing from people.
We don't need the government involved. And so, you know, that's my general framework. And many people ostensibly in this group ostensibly agreed with that. So when I look at Twitter, Twitter is a company that can decide to, you know, I mean, as someone who has started information based companies at this point, I'm just thinking about what, what is what's the scenario under? Which I would want the government?
Force me to have Alex Jones on my podcast or have Donald Trump on my podcast. Shouldn't I be able to have anyone I want on my podcast, is it conceivable that my podcast could grow so big? Or that might you know that any other platform, you know? I've considered creating a social media platform, right? If that could grow so big that suddenly the government would have an interest in forcing me to have people on it who for whatever reason, I object to having on, am I? So this is this is some
Way in which I'm more extreme than than most people on the left. Like I do think at this point in history you should be able to have a social media platform and exclude any specific group you want and just say that's the way we do it, right? And if you don't like it, boycott us, right? So like I wouldn't have said this in 1964, when we're at when we have to pass a Civil Rights Act. But at this point, I think you should have the right to be
An asshole who destroys your reputation and suffers the the penalties in, you know, in the marketplace of ideas, right? So I think if you want to just have a social media Network for Beautiful People, right? Or people who are guys who are over 6 feet 2 and blond hair and blue eyes, right? You know, I can't get on, you should feel free to, you know, raise money for that Enterprise launch it. And I'll be, you know, I'll laugh when it fails, right? So like that's now under some control that kind of thing.
You know is or should be illegal, you know if you're if you're just a normal.
person on the left, but
I don't think I think at this moment in history, it shouldn't be but in any case I just when I look at Twitter I see a company that has a term has terms of service which people like Alex Jones and Trump clearly violated. I mean whether they, in fact, violated this terms of service as written, I think they violated any coherent terms of service at that Twitter should have had right, like you, you shouldn't knowingly be able to turn your mob on a private.
Listen and ruin their lives lives through dachshund, right? Which is what Jones and Trump were doing it. Just again, and again, and again, to people every time, I mean Jones was doing it with the Sandy Hook parents, right? You literally have the same. You're
conflating two very different people. I mean, Alex Jones does not belong in this conversation. I'm not interested in no no
I would dispute that. I think Trump is essentially we got Alex Jones as president of the United States. I don't think they're very different people. I think that it's the same phenomenon, how smile in my world because
Just the level of misinformation, disinformation lying, the charlatans ism, that the, the conscious fraudulence of everything at scale and the targeting of individuals, with with known consequences, right? Like like Trump every time Trump singles out a specific Citizen and says, look at this jackass, who's trying to, you know, whatever whatever the the claim would be.
That is a human sacrifice. We know that person's life is just never the same again because he's turned tens of millions of morons on that person and, you know, vicious morons on that, me like that lip and that's the core.
Of the Trump phenomenon is now and has been for many years. I mean, really since the beginning since he, you know, certainly since he he became the front-runner and certainly since he became elected in 2016,
It's a personality cult. I mean it has all the Dynamics of a personality called these are not reasoning. Yes, there are some there are few. Calculated people like Peter teal on the margins who have some story as to why they would back him, right? But the core of the cult, you know, which is all beat a nested with q and on and and and conspiracy thinking and the big lie and, you know, it like Trump can do no wrong, right? He's that is soaked. It's
As a Venn diagram it's just it overlaps 80% with Alec The Alex Jones phenomenon. So I just I see them as the same problem. I see these are these are these are you know if they're not actually clinically clinically you know diagnosable as Psychopaths, they're the next best thing. These are people who are so malignantly selfish and so careless with respect to the consequences of their actions in the lives of others that
You, if you are, if you own a platform or your, you know, it's you're overseeing a publicly a public company that owns a platform.
Why should the government force you to keep these people on really? Well, you should be free to say. Sorry, you're not on my watch. Are you going to be having these consequences and with trump? It was after January 6 that was just. And that's when it happened. I thought it happened a year too late but I mean, January 6, finally convinced Dorsey, he should kick Trump off. And that, I mean, if that's not going to convince you that, you know, we have we had a bet that point we had a sitting president who for months and months and months, I
Being a least six or eight months you know, certainly months prior to the November election.
Would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And then he did, you know, certainly something in him, whether it was everything in his power or just a lot. He managed to see that we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, right? And then, you know, so the who, what's going to, what's the mob going to do on January, 7th and 8th and 9th? You know, if you just leave Trump on the platform, I thought maybe, I just thought it was a very simple decision to kick them off. And
It's totally analogous to The Alex Jones. Decision maker. Alex Jones is just less consequential. But me that, there are Sandy Hook parents who have had to move ten times since their kids were murdered. That's all on Alex Jones, right? And it's, and it's all conscious. It's all, it's all he could see the
consequences of his actions in real
time. It's not like he woke up after five years and thought, Oh my God, I can't believe that, you know, it was totally inadvertent.
I released a podcast and you know then it's it. Had this totally unforeseen able consequence in the lives of these grieving parents. No. No, he monetized their misery with just a blizzard of
lies that I like stones. Is it for me a different case? But I
think Trump I mean Trump is
just I hate what you say. He got the in your mind, the similar I
got the reputation washing of having successfully become president, you know he's Alex
Jones, okay?
Before you move us into covid, let me try from a different angle Sam's because I want to explore this intellectual point, right? Do you really want to live in a country where you have a digital Public Square? Which in my opinion, Twitter is we can disagree about that if you want, but that's my opinion. It's a digital Public Square and you have a company that has clearly one-sided enforcement. I I hear what you're saying about Jill delegitimizing, the electoral process that Trump did and I was concerned about that. I think you can't question the
System in that way. But when you see that he gets banned and then a story about Hunter Biden gets banned that under the guise of it being Russian. Disinformation we later learn, it wasn't Russian disinformation. That's a lot of people seems like, you know, I said when we were talking to Joe Rogan it's putting your hand on the scales. Yeah. In favor of one side in the digital Public Square, you add that to the Banning of trump and lots of other people being banned from one side,
Dominantly. Where is that? Is that the world? You want to live in where one team gets to just ban people. It disagrees with off the platform, it gets to pretend that things that are true or not. True gets to shut down the sharing of information with people who want to make their own Democratic
choice.
Well, it's a hard question and they're pieces of the question that are individually. Hardest like the hunter Biden laptop story is something that I still
Don't have a full opinion about, I actually don't know what, we should have done about that. I mean so I see the reason I see both sides of it, I can argue either side of it that this so let's leave that piece aside the bias on the platform. So you either Twitter is a company that can do what it wants, right? It can have its own terms of service, it can change its policies, it can do, you can change, you know, it can decide to, you know, it can have a point of view.
Not right? Or we have to seize it as some kind of, you know, crucial piece of public infrastructure that has to,
you know, think about it is in terms of piece of public interest.
I think, I think people who are addicted to Twitter feel it mostly you know and I think it's you know, I don't think it should should be.
And it's odd to say that it's just so it. First of all, it's just, I mean, Facebook is much, much, much bigger, right? It's just that we have a lot of smart people journalists Brands, political people, folk a concentrated on Twitter. So Twitter moves the the conversation more than Facebook does, but it's the scale of it is much smaller.
I don't know, I just feel like
people can start their own companies, which they have, right? They can start competitors at Twitter. That many people who Twitter is not as it's still a failing business, right? It's like this, not, it doesn't work. Really think. Facebook is a much better business.
There's nothing stopping Facebook from becoming stickier for intellectuals and journalists. And it's attracting more of the conversation over there. I don't know. It's just, it's an extreme move to say. You, you can't, you can't be biased, right? Like who's going to say that? But behind behind the Seine of that is a law in the end.
And there ended. Therefore it's a gun. Therefore it's jail. Time for the person who wants to keep breaking the law rights like just imagine imagine is Twitter the Twitter board if I quit you. Everyone gets what they want. You know, everyone who's of this opinion gets what they want. You just we're going to we're going to come in there and and enforce something like a zero bias State, and Twitter and so far as possible and if the employees and the board just say, you know, sorry we have a point of view.
What we want to have, we don't like these people and we like these people. What does now you just break up the company. You just say, you know, I mean, I thought what I thought it should have happened with. Twitter's I thought Jack Dorsey should have deleted it. I'm literally thought he should have got the Nobel, Peace Prize, but yeah, I don't. So in any case, what should their should they be forced?
To be impartial, I'm very skeptical of that. Should they be cajoled by unhappy people like yourselves or like, you know?
The Trump fans to behave better. Yeah, I think so. Yes, I think.
If they were going to be the first thing to admit is it may be impossible to do this impeccably, right? It's like, this is like the until we have perfect artificial intelligence. It's just going to be impossible to be truly consistent, with your terms of service, because you're always going to be able to find the example of the thing. That was not appropriately.
Moderated. Yeah. But if we all know that, if that laptop was Donald Trump, jr. Oh yeah, this will be freezer. That's, that's all I'm asking.
Oh yeah.
But that's a so let's take that piece.
I think it was totally appropriate to view Trump.
E in a to be existing in a, in a domain that was orthogonal to partisan politics. My criticism of trump is totally nonpartisan right there is absent. There's literally nothing I say about Trump, that I could say about any other Republican, right? And I think, Liz Cheney is a total hero, right? So, it was so, and I don't agree with her politics at, all right. Like, Liz Cheney is a religious Maniac by my lights, right? And
In that sense, kind of a terrifying political figure like like like that. Like the old me, who, you know, was just worried about the, ah, Christian theocracy in the United States would have just revolted at everything. She would attempt to implement as a politician. But at this moment, she's, you know, she has no bigger fan than me because of how she's dealing with the Trump phenomenon. The Trump phenomenon is not
Not a matter of political partisanship. He is a, he's just a sweet generis phenomenon, and it's again it's analogous to have an elected Alex Jones president, I had States. It's a, it's a
It's not a matter of his pocket. Like, I probably agree with half of his policies or more than half of his policies. Is not a matter of policy. It's a matter of having someone who's totally unfit to have power, be given more power than any person in a generation. And, and he's unfit for
In every possible way. It's like it's not it's not that he's just got a few screws loose, like every screws, loose, every screw that you would want totally crank down, is looser non-existent in him and so yeah. So it's but that's my argument so I guess. So my argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of big Tech and journal and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of
Something like a once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency, right? Where's this is not the same thing as not liking George Bush, you know, or not like in John McCain or not, liking Mitt Romney for their politics. This was here's a guy who is capable of anything, right? He's not, he's not ideological, but he's again. He sees a black hole of selfishness, right? He's he's he's just as so there's no telling what?
He's going to do and we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy, right? And and so so what what should well-intentioned people do? Who have a lot of power in these various ways. You know, you're running the New York Times you're running CNN. You're running Twitter, what should they conspire to do? Admit that, it's those functions.
That Trump is their fault that I wasn't one from the
left.
That's what we don't know that. That's the perverse thing is totally their fault. He's seeing a CNN, gave us Trump row without know before CNN gave us from Mark Burnett. Gave us Trump. I mean, the thief is one person who could have not done what he did and could have closed the door this whole phenomenon. It was Mark Burnett but
Yeah, no says goodbye, giving him the attention but he was, he was great ratings, you know, for a year for the whole run up to to the 2016 election. Oh yeah, no there. No one has Clean Hands here. But it at the 11th Hour when it's when who knows how this election is, going to go. Who know, who knows what the capacity for, you know, disinformation at the last minute to to tip the balance is
Then what do you do with the hunter? Biden, laptop story, when we already know. We know how this played out in 2016 with the Hillary Clinton email, you know, press conference where Comey and in an abundance of scrupulosity felt like he had to come before the cameras. I think, 10 days out from the election and say, you know, we've we're going to open up this this investigation again because we've got Anthony Weiner's laptop.
We could see, I mean again, her failure to become president was over determined. She was a an appallingly bad candidate. But in terms of just tracking the poll numbers, you could like that was, that was the killing blow to her candidacy, right? That that final moment, and this was a, this was a highly analogous situation. This was we're going to open up this laptop from hell. And the News cycle for, who knows how long is going to be just a
Conceivably, just a nuclear bomb of an October October surprise. And we're going to get four more years of trump. If we actually give this a fair
hearing. But Sam, he can't do that, Sam. Surely, you've got to realize that you've got to be fair. And number the thing that I want, we're all equal before the law. Yeah. And then we and the others isn't a lot, but I know it's not a lot, but if this is, if you accept my my supposition, that this is the Public Square, then it is the law. It is, if it is
Public Square, then it is low. Now, you are arguing is not the Public Square, which is fair enough. Yeah. Right, that's fine. So why don't we move on? Because I think we've done enough natural. Yeah,
no, but I'll just say, just finally I do again, it's like a coin toss for me. The hunter Biden laptop thing. Because I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution, like the New York Times to show off.
Obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty in how they look like they couldn't even frame it. Honestly, it's not like, it's not like, it's like the way I would frame it is,
Listen, I don't care what's in Hunter by them. So I made a 100 by and at that point, 100 by literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared, right? It's like, it's and there's nothing. First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right? It's not. It's like, it's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe, but like, even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is like they do. If we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly, and understand the, he's getting kickbacks from Hunter and Biden's deals and Ukraine or whatever.
Right, or China, it is infinitesimal. Compared to the corruption? We know Trump is involved in. It's like, it's like, it's like a firefly to the sun, right? I mean, like, there's just it doesn't even, it doesn't even stack up against Trump University, right? Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view right now, that's not that doesn't answer the people who say is still completely unfair.
To not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the, you know, the New York, post's, twitter account, like that. That's a, just a conspiracy is a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely. It was absolutely right, but I think it was warranted, right? And I'm and again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not Sam. I'm sorry, particular pumps.
I'm really sorry. I was the one that said we should move on but you've just said something. I really struggle for that, which is
used to get the kids, the kids in the basement.
You know, no, fuck the kids, in the basement, I'm incident democracy, you're saying you are content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president.
Well no I'm content with. So it's but the thing is it's not left wing right? So Liz Cheney is not left wing, right? Liz Cheney. You can eat everything in her
power to prevent somebody
was a conspiracy out in the open it does, but it doesn't matter if it was it, it doesn't matter what parts can
Mira. See what parts out in the open. And I think it's like if people get together and talk about and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon? It's like if there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth and and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to reflect its course. Right. Is that a conspiracy? You know, like some of that conversation would be in public, some of it would be in private, we have a massive problem, we have an existential threat right politically
Speaking, I consider Trump an existential threat to our democracy right now. It's not, he's not going to destroy the world, very likely destroy
democracy in the process of protecting democracy, but that doesn't destroy.
No, you are.
I'm not what I'm not suggesting at. No point was I suggesting we should stuff ballots. No, no, no. We're actually break the Machinery of democracy but the alt political opinion is already being just completely inundated with misinformation biased takes half-truths and outright lies, right? If I can and or just the amplification of bad or misleading information based on the algorithm, right?
So let's like it's already just an abattoir of opinion, right? And now the question is, you know, what can you do with your own biases and your own, the to get the outcome? You think is actually better not just for yourself personally, but for the world, right? It's like I have like it is I'm completely unconflicted in in the claim.
That ain't that a first. Trump term was bad and a second Trump term would be bad and it literally doesn't matter. What was, what, what else was on the menu? Like, literally I pick a pick, a random American better than Trump in the Oval Office, like the the likelihood that you're going to get someone who's worse than Trump, gave a given? What I consider that is bad about Trump is, I mean, it's it's on the order of
in a million, right? Like you're just not, you're not going to get, you're not going to get worse than Trump. If you pick a random and, you know, Hillary Clinton for all of her flaws was not worse than Trump. Joe, Biden fraud, Joe Biden. We could have known Joe Biden was going to just become a toast in office. Not worse than Trump, right. Kamala Harris is not worth, like, it's all. And and again, it's not just a marginal call. It's just these are people who are normal politicians who are so much more constrained
And by predictable Machinery, right? There's like there's such less
of an opportunity there to destroy institutions that we have to rely on, write it with any of those people in charge, including a random person in charge, random person who's going to be terrified at the responsibility office and default to expert opinion, you know, across the board.
No, Trump is again a trump isn't Alex Jones level figure for me and okay. And so, you know, it's an ally like a smaller problem is to just for some billionaire to buy the New York Times and give it to Alex Jones to run, right? That would be an enormous be a catastrophic loss and mistake but that's a smaller problem. The getting Trump re-elected.
Hey Frances, do you like journalism course? So who's your favorite journalist then Superman? What Superman? Superman isn't a
Person Francis, he's an alien, he's not a journalist and more importantly, he's getting fictional me, if he was fictional, then why did Frederick nature? What about Superman? I've always known as ubermensch in his seminal work, Thus Spoke zarathustra published in 1883, but still widely quoted a by both students and intellectuals are like sometimes Francis. I feel as if I have no clue who you really are, but if you do like journalism, then you have to check.
Out the epoch times V Pape times. Unlike most media organizations is produced without the influence of any government corporation or political party. They distill a story down to the fact and get readers as close to the truth as they can. The articles are free from the influence of big Tech, corporate media and socialist and Communist forces as well. The epoch times believe the more facts you have at your disposal, the better able you are to preserve your rights. Here's what the readers say about them.
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M .e, s /, trigonometry the last question I'm going to ask which actually isn't really about Trump is. I think, could you agree that with Trump? The reason he is created is because he is a symptom of the system. Whereby people ordinary people feel that their voices aren't being
heard. Yeah,
they realize that, you know, Washington is a machine that doesn't particularly care about him about them. They were betrayed Time After Time many times by the
Many times by the Democrats who said that they were representing ordinary working, people that the Labour party were in my country and they felt that these politicians didn't care. So why not vote for Trump? What else have you got to
lose? Yeah. Oh yeah. No. I think that explains most of the his support and certainly his success. Yeah, but I think I think we should be honest about how
Well, both uninformed and nihilistic by turns that attitude is, right. It's just like, it's not.
I mean that that is like the
The clearest eruption of Thanatos, you know, In Our Lifetime, right? It's just like, let's I'm just, let's just burn it all down on some level. Like, he, this guy's are wrecking ball. We hate the elites, we hate the so-called experts, go fuck yourselves. We're just going to enjoy, just watching this thing, you know, you know, swing through everything you care about. And, you know, just the sounds of explosions are going to just give us pleasure, right?
Like that's where we are with tens of millions of people in this country. That's a very, you know, that is a
very scary bases from which to try to cooperate at scale and
Produce political outcomes that are actually going to be good, right? And, and again, the extremes amplify each other, right? So you've got trumpism in Nutwood. There was no greater goad to whoa, Chasm than trumpism, right? And so like, and, you know, I put myself, you know, in second place to nobody, you know, although I probably spent a little bit less time on it than some people we could name in my in the revulsion. I feel to the extreme
You know activism, right? And it's just, it's as dishonest as it can possibly be. And it's and it's dishonesty is harder to parse for smart people, smart. Ethical people find what's happening on the left. Much more confusing than what's happening on the, right? So it's like it so people ask me like that and so and I spend much more time focused on the left than I than I do on Trump or on the right because no in this interview Center.
And I feel exactly the same thing. And you know why we talked about my book before I come from a society that seen some of these ideas being implemented. Why do you feel revulsion? A very, very strong emotion about this ideology.
oh, because it's
One, it is destroying institutions that I actually care about. It's like, we know, white supremacy and far-right lunacy is not affecting institutions that matter, you know, by my lights, right? You know, you could argue it affected, the, you know, the White House and the US government to some degree at the margins of math. I guide, I think
I think allegations of Trumps racism or his alignment with the far far, right and white supremacy. I think that's been massively exaggerated by the left and, you know, most of most, of the claims to his right. I have the I actually have no doubt that he's actually racist, but most of the public claims to his racism, I think are obviously false and inconsistent. And so, it's, I think you have to be intellectually honest, even as you derive these dangerous people
Extremes. So,
The let's of the left has, you know, as I'm sure you've pointed out many times on your show made it has it has captured institutions as captured Academia is captured, journalism is captured science to an amazing degree. It's captured Hollywood. It's and for reasons that are understandable because you know, it is hard to figure out what's wrong with black lives matter as a movement as is like, it's you look at it, you know, it's it's almost perfectly.
Engineered to just get past the the blood-brain barrier and just attach to All the Right. Ethical receptor sites, right? It's like it's just this is this is, of course I care about, you know, of course, racism is disgusting. I would the last thing I would want to be as a racist. Of course, I acknowledge the the legacy of slavery and and just how hard fought all of our civil rights gains have been in the
States. Of course, I don't want you to members of minority groups, feeling victimized, you know, much less being victimized. You know, I want Fair hiring practices. I would just check all the boxes on, you know, to have a good liberal conscience, right? If you're that sort of person and you, you're confronted by the black lives matter as a social phenomenon and the protest over George Floyd. And all of that, it is very hard to see.
See that you're in the presence of a completely dishonest moral Panic. Right. Because there's so many points of contact with real grievance or potential points of contact with real grievance and so, yeah. It's it's it's harder to parse therefore more interesting. And is also more consequential in my world because it's vitiating the New York Times and Princeton University and, you know, Science magazine.
like, it's just, it's
It's a, it's a full-on moral Panic out there. And, and what's more, you have this layer of smart people who think all of that is being exaggerated, right? It's not really happening, is just a few college campuses. If you kids, you know, on a fee on a few college campuses, it's just like, you know, if 18 people at Yale, you know, lambasting, Nicholas christakis, and everyone else is really just a bystander to this. And it's, it's, it's all being exaggerated.
The kernel of Truth there is it really is? It is still a minority of people who actually believe this stuff but you know, you only need something like five or eight percent of you know really energized activist minority to completely co-opted a conversation. And that's what has been
accomplished. And but it's not just that there are minority there, an exceptionally powerful minority. So, yeah, you know, they're the ones who dictate culture, they're the ones who set the tone, they're the ones, who, you know, who edit and create newspapers.
Hundred percent. So that's the real problem isn't it? But the question that I want to ask you is
Where do you think this is going to go? Where do you think this is going to end up? Because he's more positive about it and I'm a rabid pessimist, right? Where do you think this is going
to go?
well, I think
If I had to bet, I think the vapor is of localism will magically dissipate at a certain point. I think it's I think it's just whether we're going to have one example of hypocrisy or
You know what just 1 own goal that is so spectacular that everyone will just all of a sudden pretend that they were never woke, you know, like the weather it's going to be the just going to be a Salient moment. Where did you can? You can point to in your timeline or it's just going to be this magical dissipation of where people start making much more sense on these topics. If I had to bet, I would think that's going to happen and I don't think it's. So I think it's going to happen in some short order. I don't think we're going to be
Having this conversation in five years, I would be very surprised if we're having this conversation five years. Now that you know Kalmia guess as an optimist on that front I certainly could be wrong but I would be surprised.
The one caveat, I would, I would put there as if we get four more years of trump, then that goes completely out the window. And I think a or if we get four more years of trump or a trump-like phenomenon, this just as provocative to the left then and then that calculation changes. But if we got into, we've got a normal presidency in 2024, you know, Democrat or Republican.
I think the woke thing has just become so
on pragmatic, and
Yeah, I just I just don't, I don't see how people don't begin aging out of it in some short order. I mean it's somewhat analogous to the submit a much bigger phenomenon, but it is analogous to the
Child sexual abuse, satanic, Panic thing. We had in. I don't know if you guys had an in England and you know we just had the Catholic Church. Yeah. Which is the true version of any of these concerns. Yeah. But yeah I mean in the state I don't if you know the story that the journalist Lawrence Wright told on my podcast but he's a he wrote a book on this and when he was doing a the New Yorker article that became a book
So he was just researching, the whole satanic Panic phenomenon, and this is in the 80s in the states. And so the Alex of the for those who are too young to have to remember this and that the allegation was that, you know, satanic calls it infiltrated preschools and they just in a very, you know,
conspiratorial way had decided to just get access to kids so that they could perform human sacrifices and Beauty ritual, abuse. And this was now happening at scale in American society and we had this massive pride and and it was who knows what was truly at the bottom of it. And, you know, whether it's certain real Rock lyrics, we're getting into the heads of teenagers and spawning a generation of devil worshippers. You know, who could, who could
But we clearly have a problem on our hands and so Lawrence Wright in kind of getting on-boarded to this phenomenon. Went to a seminar run by law enforcement. I think I'm not sure if isn't, it might have been in Texas where he's lived for many years. So, it's just, this is a seminar for, you know, journalists run by law enforcement and he remembers that moment where the, the sheriff or
Some Leo.
Said to the group.
Last year 50,000 children were murdered in ritual sacrifices by satanic Cults. In this country. This is a, this is a cop saying this and it took Lawrence, you know, five seconds to understand that there's been no year in American history where there have been fifty thousand murders of any kind, right? And that yet here we have a cop saying that 50,000 kids have been killed, if there's 50,000 missing, you know, and murdered
It's right.
So what explains at that level of confusion and derangement, right? Like, so we're in a moment like that. And
here's the question. We were going to ask you about that and I'm really glad you phrased it in that way Sam because I was a big fan of the new atheist movement Francis and I are not none of the three of us are religious. I was a big admirer. I'ma still am a big admirer of yours. Richard Dawkins, I read many of his books. However,
Is it possible? Just is it possible that people like us who think in the way that we do have forgotten that thing I think it was a Chesterton who said this that when you stop believing God, you don't believe in nothing. You believe in anything wrong. Is it possible that this new religion? And I certainly see work in us as a religion, is a product of a society that has let go of the religion that are used to
follow.
Well, I think it's
the short answer is probably not because I think many of the whoa car, you know, religious by my lights. I mean, they would certainly claim to be religious. It's not like you have a, I don't know if polling research exists on this, would be interesting to run these polls. But yes, yes, loss of faith has been kind of ramping up in America. I am and, you know, it really in all
Secular democracies but it's still not, you know, you don't have a minority of people. You don't have a majority of people identified as atheist, right? And this, and the minority, that identified with atheists is still still in a single digits because it because atheism is a concept is just has got bad, you know, PR associated with it. You have something like 20 to 25% of the so-called nuns who are again. These are not people who identify as atheists, but these are people who would say they're not identified with any
Effect church. But you still have most people who are, you know, at least nominally Christian and pretend to care about being Christian, you know in the u.s. at this moment and you have something like fully half who are, you know, really will check many or most all the boxes to attest to their belief.
It's more than how, you know. It's if you ask if you and say it again, a lot of these people are on the Christian right. But many of them are are are woke or woke adjacent, you know. I was like I just was on Van Jones as podcast right now. He's not
I mean much, whoa, car than any of us think. He's probably said some rational pragmatic things. We didn't actually tell him to stop. And he just kind of take on the old, the Obama line. I was like, like you say, listen kids, like this is not, you know, they're bigger problems than pronouns or whatever. I don't know how he touched it but
but still, he's like
he's someone who's coverage of black lives matter. I would have you know many critical things to say about and and again the topic didn't come up but he's you know he's someone who if you ask him do you think Jesus will be returning to Earth to raise the living and the dead?
I'm pretty sure he would say, yes, right. And you'd be surprised at the number at the number of the percentage of sober non bible-thumping, people would say yes to that question. I mean I was I've been
amazed at like, the people who I would have bet a lot of money would be, I would be skeptical of that piece. They would say, they might be Christian, they might be like, listen, I love the Bible, it gives me a great moral framework. Gives my kids, a great moral framework, the traditional. This is the, this is the tradition identified with its. This is all super important to me, but that's kind of as far as it goes, right. Like, I'm not going to make a magical magical.
About flying saviors. Who are literally going to come down from where, where is haven't exactly given that. We have, you know, multiple telescopes up there, you know, to be beaming back, you know, tens of billions of years worth of information.
I'm amazed at the number of people who will bite the bullet on the core Doctrine and say, yeah, I think Jesus is going to come back and raise the dead,
but some surely you have to agree in a society which is becoming ever more atomized.
Let me do it. Let me just close the loop on it, so good. Many of these people are woke, right? So you can't say you can't punch line. Can't be well, they lost their religion. And now there's they have a vacuum of ethical and and existential vacuum that they're filling.
With Walker's. Now, there's I would grant you that it's don't lose your point. I would grant you that it's drawing a lot of quasis spiritual quasi-religious energy from the fact that most people in our society, even if they're nominally religious
really are are struggling to find meaning in their day, in their day-to-day about you, when you look at just the kind of the the hour by hour increments at which Lino, life is doled out to us, like, you get up and, you know, you just your cast out of, you know, deep sleep or, you know, the phantasmagoria of dreams, you know, when the alarm goes off in the morning and
How do you feel about your life and what is going to give you moral urgency and meaning at a lot of millions and millions of people found it at specific moments in our in our recent history like and me the George Floyd killing was certainly one of those moments. Where is that? Okay this is enough is enough like this is my religion, right? And and that's
It's understandable. And it is. Yes, it does have a religious Dynamic, and there's a religious Dynamic. I mean, to call it religious, is to just basically say, It's actually an invidious statement about religion. It's basically started like all the things I don't like about religion, is tribalism is dogmatism. It's its immunity to good arguments and good evidence, right? The fact that it just, it can't be reasoned with really because it's just Chuck reason out the door.
You know initially or blind. And what is brought back in the name of reason is functioning under the the sort of the new physics of just casuistry. Like like we already know that God exists and we know that the Bible is perfect. We know the Quran is perfect. And So within that frame, now we're going to get really reasonable like, you know, st. Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine.
That's all the stuff about religion that religion that I find. So obviously wrong and it's so easy to see. Once you're not indoctrinated into that religion, a lot of that is explains. What is happening? Politically we on the far left and the far right at the moment or we far-right being Trump is Dan, right?
So some but I think all of us have got to admit that in a society where becoming ever more atomized where people are becoming
Isolated religion, organized religion. It was a bond. It was a community people could go. They can meet other people, they can feel connected. And so when people are disconnected, they're going to look for ways to connect with someone else. And what better way to do that was then with, you know, I support this political movement, BLM all you know, you share the same immutable characteristics. As me you know I'm gay or I'm black or etc etc. In because we're
So desperate because we're literally program to form communities that we're going to have this ideology which is going to enable us to create a
community.
Yeah, and end on the woke side. It has this. It has a precursor in Christianity but it's it's
Somehow in a pure form, now it has inverted. The the value structure such that, you know the lower status, you are the higher status. You you come out, you know, once the calculation has been done, it's like you know Dungeons and Dragons with the sort of the nude. I swear it's like the the least power points you have you know you know the more you find yourself winning and so the victimology of it is, you know, and the and the me
Shall inherit the earth. I mean it's really it is that ethos implemented in a very weird way and sort of gamified somehow in all of the intersectionality details of it.
Yeah, I mean, it's there's no question. People draw a tremendous amount of energy and, you know, hesitate to say, meaning, I mean, is there meaning in scare quotes from this? And it's all, I mean, I guess so to steal, man.
All of it, you know, briefly and B. It is again. It's especially on the left. It's genuinely confusing, right? Like, the, the
Mad work that the tiny pieces of misinformation or just fraudulent assumptions is doing is it's really impossible to exaggerate. And if you ask most people who like most people who saw the George Floyd,
Moment. I mean it's again I don't we've yet to totally understand what happened there because like you know who knows? Is it just US bracket that because I don't eat we still don't know who Derek Chauvin really is and why he did what he did. Right? So like either it was a racist murder or it was a you know, his brain malfunction door like I just I don't I honestly I look at that video. I don't know what I'm looking at their. It's just it's a part from the, the horrible.
Killing of a person who certainly did not need to be killed in that situation. But you ask most put most people who saw that, the vast majority of people who saw that he certainly left of center would bet their lives. But the lives of their children that what they saw, there was a racist, lynching, right? Like that was a, we have what we have is a white man, killing a black man.
Because of racism because like I wouldn't have happened to a white man, it wouldn't have been perpetrated by a black man, raised his 100% of the explanatory variable there. And Not only was that as unambiguously evil and sadistic and racist as it seemed
That happens thousands of times a year in America, like, you ask people to estimate? How many, how many black people do you think had murdered by white racist cops in America every year? They imagine we're talking thousands, right? So if you believe that right then what would you do? You know what would we wouldn't you to take to the streets when when everyone says we're going to, you know, we're protesting on Tuesday.
Of course, right? So it's like so you don't have to add too many pieces of distorting, you know, pseudo facts to get to get
People who are otherwise totally understand, two mouths, you know, you know, all the the predictable pieties on this topic but the truth is all of that is wrong, right? Like, you know, it's you can count on two hands, the number of unarmed black men who get killed every year by cops. And you can count more white people who get killed every year by cops, right? A under identical circumstances. Again, I've talked about this on
Podcast, we need not go there. Those who are interested. Could look at the episode. Can we pull back from the brink? We look beautiful together. Like, two hours, I talk about. It was
exactly what needed to be said on that moment. I really congratulate you on that, on invite people to go and find that I'm really very good.
Yeah, so if we leave that aside but the Mist so that the misinformation, or the faulty assumptions,
Her at the highest level, right? It's like this is not, you know, I mean, does I guess there's some people who actually know what is real here and as your cynically manipulating the politics, but it's hard for me to believe that someone like Kamala Harris doesn't actually know the numbers, right? But it's not in her political interests or lean which he conceives up as her political interest to act, like she knows the numbers, right?
But anyway it's so it's it's not the charitable view, is there. Very few people who are consciously lying
Or seeking to.
Do things that they know are wrong. I mean, just conscious evil is a rare thing. Yes, and
mostly useful idiots is what I talk
about in my book. Yeah, I agree with
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That's betterds3. H-e-l-l-o p.com /, trigger Sam. Listen, you've been very generous to the time. There's about 50 other questions we want to ask you. We're not going to get a chance to. So we'll pick out from a, we do a couple of questions for a supporter so I'll make sure to pick out a covered question because that's like came up a lot. There was before we ask you the final question if you don't mind a few more minutes.
I wanted well, Francis and I both wanted actually to ask you. We've talked about this very divisive things and people will have a different opinion about Trump and covid and brexit, and all of this stuff, whatever you want to do. But one thing that is strikes me is you're one of the few people that we've met whose content. Mmm, who's happy? I can tell right how does, how if people are watching this and they would like to be happy in spite of all the terrible things that they think about they see happening on Twitter.
To it strikes. Me Francis uses your app every
morning. Hmm.
How do you have this one in the modern world get closer to that point where whatever is happening at out? Whatever storms are out there you're calm and peaceful inside'.
Well first let me say I'm not, I'm certainly not always calm and peaceful but the half-life is great, but the truth is so mr. The back story here, is in my early 20s, I got really into meditation and I miss the first psychedelics just showed me that it was possible have a very different experience of the world and and there was a landscape of mind that could be explored based on just how you paid attention.
engine to experience right side prior to psychedelics, I would have
Really just been kind of waiting for the third person brain-based discussion to deliver early and all the right answers about you know, what the human mind is. And it was it was pretty well established and still is thought to be well established in Western science and psychological science, cognitive science, and even even Western philosophy. That introspection was a dead end and they tried to get it off the ground somewhere around 120 years ago. And it just, you know, you you
Come up short, almost immediately. I mean, the truth is you can you close your eyes and you look inside and you can't even tell that you have a brain, right much less that the brain is doing all of this complex things. That is actually delivering your experience of the world. So,
and this is just one curious asymmetry of cultural wisdom in the East. You know, for all the failings of what didn't happen, civilization Ali in eastern culture. And there's a lot to be said about that.
They didn't lose this strand of wisdom, which is there actually is something to be discovered in a first-person, way about the nature of your own mind. That is liberating, right? Like, oh, that, you suffer by certain Machinery, a certain Dynamics, which you, which could be either completely inscrutable to you or can become more and more transparent and, and in its transparency, less and less operative.
You know, a moment-by-moment basis. And so, it's a Amy, take any of the topics, we've talked about it. So we would you we've talked about me, getting on Twitter and getting really spun up over, you know, somebody saying something about me or about something else that I care about. You know. I've talked about you, anyone who thinks I have Trump? Derangement syndrome is going to look at me and say, well, you're why are you talking to this guy about meditation. This guy's so worked up over Trump, you know what it is like, this is a, you know, it's a performative contradiction, right?
that's actually to misunderstand my
You know, emotional relationship to the phenomenon of trump, right? Like I like I can say everything I say about and and think about Trump without spending much time, feeling, contracted around drum a bit, but it's not to say, it's not to say no time, but it's just much less time than I otherwise would. If I didn't know how to to quote meditate right now, made it the word meditation can mean many different things to people, but
what I think it should mean is a just a simple recognition of
What Consciousness is like, prior to entanglement with thought, right? So were they were all three of us are sitting here and
We're having a an experience of the world is happening in the, you know, five sensory channels. But there's this, there's this other mode or this other aspect to our condition which is our thinking about what we directly experience through our senses. Right? And the for most people, most of the time, the thoughts are incessant and uninspected, right? And under, and there are rising is unnoticed, right? So you just, it just feels like you.
It's like, so you'll say something that I disagree with and there's a voice in me which says what's he talking about or like, what does that mean? Really what I do? Like it but what he did but you just like, there's just that voice that, you know, is that either feels like a self. I mean in you know, nearly 100% of the cases that just feels like I right. That feels like it's me and then you're you're told
Something about the project of well again at you so you could have an experience haphazardly or on psychedelics where that get that identification gets interrupted, right? We're all of a sudden, there's just the mind is suddenly much more vast than that. Right. It doesn't feel like there's a subject in the head. Looking out through your eyes at a world. That's not you and you know Forever implicated by the glances of other people and the opinions of other people and
Just me and here, this concert of embattled ego, trying to navigate a world that is fundamentally or at least potentially hostile to my interest right like that subject-object dichotomy where it's just like I'm the Man in the boat trying to steer it you know to to some safe place and not go over the falls, emotionally that suddenly relaxes, again it matters and now I guess maybe I'm talking about psychedelics.
It's more replicatable for people. Depending on what drug, you've taken, that can relax in one or another way. I mean, MDMA is really just the relaxing of the emotional tone of all that without the, the the pyrotechnics of of changing your perceptions. If it's LSD or psilocybin, you can have a much more fundamental transformation of how you perceive the world. But whatever is the case
It just so happens that our nervous systems are perturbed obol pharmacologically or just by happenstance or this could happen to you just because it happens to you, right? And people have those stories but there's vast testimony on this topic that you can, you can experience your mind as a much vaster place than you tend to experience it as and
And then when you come back from one of those experiences you might become interested in what is it? That trims it down. So reliability of reliably to this experience of confinement. Where you feel like it's just me here, feeling uptight again, right? You know what's that about?
You're virtually 100 percent of that is just what it's like to be you identified with thought. And then if you're if you're identified with thought habitually, you are at the mercy of whatever you happen to think about, right? So it's just like, there's a
Mavs. I've
The analogy I've drawn somewhere. It's just, it's really, it's like the most boring person in the world comes to the front door of your house and takes you hostage, right? Like follows you from room to room, telling you the same stories over and over again. You can't shut him up and you can't get away from him. And it's just, and that's your life, right? And you're thinking about the past about what you could. Have said, I should have said or almost said you thinking about the future of what's this, what's
How's it going to go? And most of the Futures, you visualize never happen the way you've obsessed about them in the first place. So like 99% of your self-talk is
At best it's neutral with respect to its emotional tone. I mean that's really a mean some people have, you know, convince some people have a fairly happy self talk and that's a, you know, it's sort of hard to get through to them because they really don't think of themselves as ever suffering much psychologically, right? They they're very confident. They love the people in their lives. They get a lot of love back. They're not really conflict. They don't have regrets and disappointments that they're trailing. They're not, you know, they're not worried about anything.
And they just want to get up and do it again tomorrow because they're having so much fun. There are people like that. It's like a pasta.
Yeah. But it's
most people are not like that, right? Most people that are sensitive to this criticism of the default which is
Most of what you're saying to yourself. Isn't making you happy and worse. It's, it's predicated on a fundamental illusion of
selfhood of identification with this this subset of your, your mental experience, which is this again that this discursive thought and when you break that identification there's just much more space there and the past and the
The the it is in thought isn't in identification with thought that the past and the future exert their weight on the present, right? So like it's like you were it's because we're processing everything we experience in the present through this scrim of discursive thought that we don't we never actually make satisfying contact with the present or we rarely do. And and those moments where we do, you know, those those P kind of peak experience moments.
What has made it be? A peak is breaking the spell of thought for long enough for just to let in some of the breeze of, you know, awareness. That is always it's always there. But we just don't, you know, we're blocking it continually we just have an open, the door or the window and
It's meditation, really is again, there are many different techniques or demaio for ways to describe and frame it. In the end is actually not even a practice you're doing, it's not it. In the end, it is something your ceasing to do your. It's just it's non distraction, your ceasing to be distracted by thought, you're starting to notice thoughts themselves as appearances in Consciousness and noticed as a appearances.
They don't have Force, they don't have their own, it's really not have emotional Force, it's not like you suddenly become an idiot and you can't figure out what you want to eat for dinner or you know, how to find your car or you can you can think and you can plan, but the moment you, you begin to suffer you. Become you, your new default is to become interested. In this like, it's like a mindfulness alarm, you know.
Start sounding and then you relax your identification with that just that just the the physiology of suffering. And so take it to bring it back to what we were just talking about. So yeah, there's a moment where I notice something that I find
You know, either like personally annoying or the appropriate Target of moral outrage and I don't think we should get rid. I'm not envisioning psychological Health as being synonymous with never being angry ever again, or never being fearful every, I mean, you know, negative emotions are, you know, from, from a enlightened point of view in my book are still salience cues, right? Like if I walk outside this house, on the way to my car, and someone
Physically attacks me on the sidewalk like I don't want to be just a puddle of Goo you know just beaming love at the person like that. Now it's not it's not to say that there's not that's not a possible State of Consciousness. It certainly is and it actually they're they're definitely scenarios where that that quote works, right? Like just being the guy who's you know, beaming unconditional love as your only response to anything, right? It's possible to get out of some
Physical altercation because it's so surprising, right? Someone comes to mug you and you're just, you know, you're you're on MDMA and you just said, listen man, I love you right? Like that could either like that could turn out well, but practically speaking.
It strikes me is totally appropriate to feel these kind of punctate, neg, classically negative emotions, the quit. The real question is, how long do they last? And what are they good? Like, what like, when is it, when do you, when do you want to see Spain angry so that you can actually function intelligently? And in my book, it happens very, very soon after the arising of anger, I mean, like, you don't, you don't want to stay angry, right?
But the initial jolt of anger.
In many cases is totally appropriate and it is the orienting response that you actually need to respond intelligently to the, you know, whatever the emergency or quasi emergency is. So but
Once you know, how to meditate, you do notice that the half-life of negative emotions is really, really brief. And it's actually impossible to stay angry or embarrassed or, you know, whatever it is. Pick your negative emotion for longer than, you know, some tens of seconds.
Unless you were, then you're taken in by thought again about why you should be angry or why you should be embarrassed. And
yeah, your life becomes completely different when you can get off the ride. You know? I mean, the difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 minutes, even you know, much less, 10 hours or ten days is enormous, right? Me just you just think of how life deranged in those periods are where you're just helplessly motivated by anger, right? I mean 10 minutes is enough to completely fuck up your life, right? I mean to say the thing to your spouse that you
You can't even do the entire ring, the bell you can't unring, you know? And it may just like the you just see how people's lives run off the rails. Because
Their minds are out of control. And literally everything. We see out there that is producing massive human suffering and existential risk, even like, literally everything Beyond
Naturally occurring, disasters, right? Is a matter of people's minds being out of control and we just have we just said, we're running terrible Legacy code, you know, in a condition of increasingly
Destabilizing.
Power Amplified by technology. I mean, he's getting increasingly easy for one person to screw it up for the rest of us. Mr. The topic of existential risk is its own thing which I've, you know, I'm focusing on more and more. I think it's, you know, it's and it's you know, neglected to a scary degree. I'm it's just they're just not that they're not enough people thinking about how we can Shore up our civilization against existential risk and, you know, man-made and otherwise.
but miss so much of the daily evidence of
Conflict and needless human misery, is just born of people being captured by their thoughts and not knowing that there's any alternative, right? They're just, they're just talking to themselves right there and they're just claiming to know things that they don't know and being persuaded by those. Those inner proclamations right? At me, just like, what does it feel like to have a very strong opinion?
That is going to dictate everything, you do next.
And how often is that just an automaticity? That's totally unexpected. That would be
Could be completely deflated just with another which is a moment's pause. If you only knew how to you know do or just take the other side in that if you forget about meditation for a moment, just the ability to be skeptical about one's own opinions like that just talk about an untrained skill. I mean that's just something that almost nobody has, right? Nobody even has it as a possible Norm that you could endorse even in the abstract really, why would you want to be skeptical about?
And opinions I think like this is just what I
think that's why I'm like you, I'm always taunting debates around the dinner table because I'm always testing what I think against what other people think, and because I'm aware that it's just thought and they needs refining. But anyway, we've got one for Sam. First of all, thank you so much for coming. Happy doing what a pleasure to see you and speak with you and get a little bit of your opinion. Wisdom and can I just say, if people listen to this? I use your app. It's actually brilliant. And it has changed my life, the ability to
You just sit and meditate for 10 minutes. Every morning is one of the most if not the best way to deal with obtrusive and obsessional thoughts, which every time he comes into the studio and he's all over the place, I go, have you meditate of the answers always? No. Yeah, so yeah. Thank you know, it's brilliant and the podcast making sense for Sam Harris. I'm a big fan of like we talked about during the BLM situation. You covered it. I thought exactly the way that it needed to be covered and you have important conversations on there, we'll do a couple of
Actions for locals. I will ask you about covid because we promised people would do that, but before we do our final questions, always the same. What's the one thing? We're not talking about that, we really should
be.
In this conversation or just anything.
We've touched on pieces of it. I mean I do think
That.
Again at the generic level. I mean the problem is always failures of cooperation for us at this point be like virtually anything that's going to just happen to us, you know, coughed up by the hand of nature. We can figure out how to solve at this point. I think I'm including it an asteroid hurtling towards us. I mean at this point we have enough Tech and I'm not so sure we have enough people watching but close that will you know, we'd have
Tens of years, right? Would have some decades to deal with the problem that specific problem. But so all of our problems are on some level of our of our own making, I mean, to me, if nothing else, it's just our
The opportunity costs borne of all of the needless bullshit. We get entangled with based on our own, you know, you know, incapacity to cooperate. So it's just, it's
And that's the first order of business to business, and the next one to figure out how we can have successful conversations on some level right like this because it get it we'll all we have is is a capacity to persuade one another. So as to engineer you know forward-looking cooperation or we have violence right and I think in the end it's like that we just have to force people to do stuff. If we can't persuade them to do stuff for that, they you know, they can't come to the the epiphanies on there.
On and that's where politics comes in and, but more and more, I think we're in a situation where because of Technology, it's it's strangely getting harder and harder to, to get our, you know, our cognitive two Horizons to fuse, right. We've got eight billion strangers more or less trying to figure out how to cooperate and
Persuasion is the only good tool again made for it. Maybe we're going to use force in certain circumstances and I'm, you know, I think we should be very
I don't think pacifism is is is a, is a plan there? I'm, I think we actually do need to have our force game together for the situations where we need it, you know, and that's individually and collectively right at the level of nation states as well. But
I'm yeah, I'm increasingly worried about our incapacity to converge on a chest. A dispassionate fact-based discussion on things that are just so easy to assess. I mean, just like we've touched several topics here, but just like, how many people of any identity? Get killed by cops every year in America and just like in what are its like, and how does that relate to the levels of crime perpetrated by people of various identities?
And like what situations are cops actually getting into, and what are their reasonable expectations of people in a society, where there are 400 million guns, you know, like, why is it different, when an American suddenly turns around and reach its into the cab of his pickup truck? What while getting arrested, then, when that happens in Japan, right? Like weather note, whether or no guns, right? This is such an, this should be such an easy conversation to have right there should be no. Like like, I mean, this is it's not even.
No.
Made it it's hard to think of a simpler one where the facts are easier to get. I mean most of it and most of the stuff is on, so much of the stuff is on videotape it. So easy to parse it's repeatable year after year.
It's a problem that everyone like it's in no one's interest at the problem be bigger than it is and not smaller than it is like we want we all want to solve this problem, right? And we find it impossible to talk about
your problem is time, you meditate too much and you're too small.
You signed, you think other people are like, you. But they're not, you know
what? No, but I'd say, I know, like, there's none of this is foreign to me. I know what it's like to get emotionally hijacked by any something, right? Whether something happens right in front of you, and you're really care about is
about it, you care about the truth. And so, you will get emotionally hijacked, and then you will go and look at the phone. Yeah. Most people just get emotionally
hijacked. Yeah, yeah. So we and we need that as a
That's certainly a software flaw in our operating system. It's not a feature and it was a 12 web summarize this, in the past. Where people say, I mean your capacity
To be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in you, like that's just not. It's not an argue certainly on an argument, but it's not even a basis for respect like that it like table Stakes for any ethical conversation is more than just your capacity to be offended, right? And
until you understand that, like you're just, you're just not you, you can't play the game, we need to play in order to to ensure an open-ended
Circumstance of cooperation,
what a great note to finish on Sam Harris. Thank you so much for coming on. We really recommend you check out Sam's podcast and His Brilliant app. We're going to ask him a couple of questions from you for you, but for now Sam, thank you so much for joining us really but I will see you very soon with another brilliant episode. I mean, why be quite like this but it will be a brilliant episode as well or or show all of them. Go out at 7 p.m. UK time and for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available.
It's a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys, some of our listeners would be disappointed and how you handled yourself during covid? How do you reflect on the way you thought and spoke about covid? Are you happy with it? Would you have done a different? But
