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Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's up, Jeff?

How's it going? Jay?

Nice to meet you.

Very well. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

So I got the request to be on when it said multiverse and new atheism. I'm like, what a combination that is.

Let's talk nice. Yeah. So I think, like, it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right? It tends to be, like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff. But I think there's a. At the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society. We're, like, stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions. So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, they all say something along the lines of, like, philosophy is dead. So just before we get into the multiverse, it's probably best to say, like, what philosophy is and sort of what point of talking about the multiverse is. So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like, what they take philosophy to be, because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects. One of the ideas that I love is this one. Bye. The late, great british philosopher Mary Midgley. She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing, right? So, like, we have these conversations in our societies, and, like, these conversations are flowing around, and likewise, we have these pipes running underneath our houses, keeping the water flowing, but occasionally it gets clogged.

And so the philosopher needs to pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again. So these are things like, what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech, or what it means to say that a gene is selfish. So that's, I see, like, the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like, trying to understand the concepts we're using. But also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy, which is, like, how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Like, let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology, and the arts, and let's try and get a big picture of the world. And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be. So I take that to be the project. And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks, are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing? No universe. Like, why are the laws of nature fine tuned for the existence of life?

Where does consciousness come from? Like, when I make a moral statement, like, the Holocaust is bad, is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad? Like, are they the same kind of statement? Is that the same bad I'm using? But the big question, and to get to the multiverse now is the big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question. The french algerian philosopher Albert Camus said, the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living. So my question is, what's the point of all this? Is existence, on the whole, a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased to be alive? And what's the purpose of life? And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism, and these arguments for theism all come in, into the project.

I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of science, just that reductionist perspective, the idea that thinking about things and developing, for lack of a better term, a philosophy, developing your own personal philosophy, taking from the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting, unique view of the world that we live in, the idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly. It's silly.

We know how they get away with saying these things. I think you get it, though, right? Science splits the atom. It puts man on the moon. So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems, right?

But the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the splitting of the atom all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by. They had to have something that allowed them to have the discipline to commit to their schooling, to follow through with the project. Especially think about Oppenheimer's struggle that he had with this thing that he had created that was ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives, if not the entire human race itself, which was very deeply based in philosophy, like his perspective and his struggles with it. I mean, if he was just like an automaton, like some sociopathic, just super Alzheimer's guy that didn't. Not autism guy, rather, that didn't think at all about no concept at all about empathy, no concept at all about our perspective, he would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs. Science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking. And how does that not come out of philosophy?

Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally, right. We've got this movement in the early two thousands, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11 terrorist attack, and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond, like, criticism. But then once that project, once they embark on that project and they criticize religion, there isn't really anything left there. Like, they don't do the projects of philosophy, of finding the meaning in the ethics. And when they try to do it, it's lacking. Something's missing. So I see that as like the reason why new atheism is going out of favor, why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions.

Well, I think it becomes almost as dogmatic as religion itself. Like, atheism in a lot of ways is kind of religious. They're committed to this idea that there is nothing else.

Yeah.

You know, I just don't understand how you could do that without enough. If you're a person who you view the world based. And he is so fucking loud, dude. He's just like. Marshall and Carl were having a wrestling match for about 15 minutes. And poor little Carl lives over there.

It's also one of the hottest days of the year without aircon. So that he is really going here too. Really going hard for the Panther.

I was where I was before I distracted. So I just think that these people sort of looked at this as religion is all this superstitious nonsense that these people have concocted and put together over years to keep people in line. And science is something that we can prove and see. And, you know, there is no God. There is no but just how do you know? You do not know. It's a crazy thing to say. You have such a limited perspective just in terms of the universe itself. We only see what we see on our planet and the tiny amount that we can reach out into the study and, you know, they can look back 13 billion years, but, like, what are they looking at? They're looking at, like bright lights, like little dots. And they understand this is a galaxy. And put it's like, how big is this fucking thing? Where did it come from? What's going on? You don't know? What is the purpose? Is this a grand test? Are you a part of some very bizarre journey that the soul has to go through in this environment before it expands and goes into the next dimension and next phase of existence.

Who fucking knows? You don't know. We do know that people die. We do know that people have near death experiences and these very bizarre moments where they come back from the dead and have very similar accounts of something happening about encountering. Like, I had Sebastian Young on the podcast the other day, and he was Sebastian Younger, and he was explaining how when he almost died, he had an internal bleeding and he saw his father. His father came to the bed with him and was talking to him. It was like this very bizarre thing. Like, we don't really know. We really don't know what life is. We don't know what consciousness is. So we're being arrogant. And I think, unfortunately, brilliant people that are so used to schooling people in debates, like Christopher Hitchens, like Sam Harris, these guys are so good at making religious zealots look like buffoons, right? And you get real good at that. And you just sort of think that, look, I got it down. These fucking religious people, they don't know what the fuck's going on. Yeah, but you're involved in a religion as bizarre as it seems, just like woke ism is a religion, just like far right ideology is a religion.

I'm not sure about putting religion on those things in particular, but cult, like. Yeah, cult. They might be cult. They might have some aspects which are cult.

They're ideological captured people.

But I think to have a religion, you do need to have a belief in what Christians, Jews, and Muslims take to be the perfect being. Like God has to be by definition, perfect. And if you think that being exists, then I think you certainly qualify for having a religion.

What about Scientology?

I guess that's a cult.

But in our country, they actually won a lawsuit.

It's a bad classification.

I used to have a joke about it where I said that a cult is created by one guy, and that guy knows it's bullshit. In a religion. That guy's dead.

That's good. Well, okay, let's say this, though, on behalf of religion, right? I think the two best things going for it aren't the like for me, the sense of community and the cultural aspects, they don't appeal to me. I couldn't think of anything more really boring than spending my Sunday singing hymns and doing that. No, that's not for me. There's so many other things that you can do to find community, to find fulfillment.

You could recognize how some people would find engagement with it and enjoyment.

But I think in terms of, like, philosophical arguments for thinking it's true. Like the one you mentioned a moment ago, like where this all came from. Like, science can't get to that question, right? The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular. It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore it needs a cause. And then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be. And it would have to be something outside of time and space with the power and knowledge to bring this into being. And that might not be. That might not get you all the way to God. That's a really strong reason for believing in God. And the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong. And likewise, like the argument from fine tuning, which is gaining traction again, the physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature, like 26 of them, that have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form. He calculates that the initial low entropy point of the universe had to be one in ten to the power of ten to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding and you wrote down one digit every second, you'd still be writing out that number.

Now, that number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible. And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best explanation for that, then I think those that posit the existence of God have the better hand. Like, I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go no to those two problems. They've got really strong arguments for believing in God. But people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit more, I guess, sympathetic to those arguments than the other three. But they're not serious about following the arguments. They're not serious about going wherever they take them. Like you say, there is a dogmatism there. They're not open minded enough on these points.

Well, I think the dogmatism, a lot of it, is all the public discourse that we've seen that you can watch on YouTube between atheists and religious scholars. It generally turns into a debate. They're almost all debates, and almost all of these debates are, in a sense, intellectual competitions. So it's like if you give a cop an incentive to arrest people, he's going to find reasons to arrest people. If you have a person that is getting social credit, you're getting notoriety adulation, from schooling these religious people, from mocking what you think are ridiculous ideas that are superstitious. It becomes a part of yourself, it becomes a part of your identity. And then I think your unwillingness to engage in the mystery of all this, it speaks to that. I think that's the origin of it. I think it becomes a competition with people that their ideas are correct, and that these ideas that they've held for a long time, they want to defend those ideas instead of going, huh, I am of the opinion that I am not my ideas, and I think it's a really important thing to say, because I think more people should try this out.

Maybe it's not for you, but it's my personal philosophy. I am not married to my ideas. They're just ideas. And they come in my head and they go. And a lot of times while I'm saying them, I do it on the podcast all the time. I go, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense because of this. I don't want to be that buffoon that's connected to the first shit that comes out of my mouth. And I think that happens with a lot of people. I also think the idea that there's no God, that there's nothing, I think the universe might be God, and I don't think it was born. I think it's probably always been here. And I think Sir Roger Penrose's latest work, he seems to think that the big bang is just one of a series of these events. I don't want to paraphrase because I know I'll fuck it up, but his position is not that that was the beginning, that this is probably a series of these things that have gone on in eternity, and that the infinite nature of the universe is probably something that even mathematically, even if you get the most genius people, they're probably going to struggle to understand something that has no boundaries, that has never been.

We have biological limitations. We are born and we die, and I think we try to impose those upon things. And I, and there's some things you can, like, oh, we know this tree grew 2000 years ago. How crazy, you know? Oh, we know this planet formed, you know, 4 billion years ago. But there's some things we, we really just, we don't have the capacity to really put it into perspective. We don't, we don't know. There's just too much. We don't know. They're starting to think now the universe is quite a bit older than they thought it was before because of the observations of these galaxies by the James Webb telescope, so that now there's certain people that are these controversial ideas they're throwing around about like 22 billion years old or 23 billion years old.

Oh, wow. It's interesting what you say, first of all, like, about the US being like so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments. It's always baffled me that people can care about their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they're willing to die on these hills and refusing to count in their wins and not their losses. I just had a two and a half hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about his motivations for being religious. And so I basically sketched out my broad argument, which is atheism's shortcomings or it can't answer the two problems we've just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing. Fine tuning. But then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection. Like, what a wicked thing to do, to create the rules of the game, to be that, to have intelligent life, it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years. Like, if God exists, then God's a psychopath, right? If that's what God didn't have to do, that it's logically and metaphysically possible for God to create it as the christians thought God did in the Garden of Eden 5000 years ago.

That is way more compatible with the perfectly good God hypothesis, right, than what we're currently experiencing. But then when I asked Jordan about this again, I don't think he's serious again about following the evidence and argument. He just digs down. He builds a trench. He says, like I said, what do you think of the, it's called the systemic problem of evil. Why would God create the system? And he goes, we just need to keep working on it. It's like, no, you need to suspend belief in something.

What did he mean by that?

You don't have the evidence.

You need to keep working on it.

Like, we just need to crack on with the problem.

Oh, and try to solve it.

Yeah, but like, you know, we've been trying to solve it. In between 1960 and 1998, 3600 articles and books were published on the problem of evil. Like people are working on it and it's not going anywhere. Like the systemic problem of evil undercuts the God hypothesis. But then it's this weird place, right? Because you've got these strong arguments that an atheistic view can't solve. But then you've got this big problem for belief in God. And like you say, this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask, well, maybe we need a different concept of God, like the universe.

Yeah.

So this is pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical. And panentheism is the view where the universe is in God, but there's this extra layer of God, which is like heaven, or the thing that brought into.

I'm glad there's a word for it, because I just been saying the universe is God.

Pantheism.

I'll go with that.

Now, the interesting thing about pantheism is, is it worthy of the name God, like the universe? Because if it's just nature loving atheism, then that doesn't get you farther. But I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious, like, there is some will or agency underlying the things that we interact with, then I think that gets you pretty close to a concept of God.

Do you think we have an egocentric perspective of consciousness, that it only applies to things that move and that things that can express themselves? There's a reason why I think people don't want to buy houses where people were murdered. Right.

Because they think the consciousness is still, like, lingering. Yeah.

Like, there's something there. There's something there. There's a memory in that house of a horrible thing. Like, if you bought a house from a horrible person, wouldn't you kind of. Like, I almost bought a building that was run by a cult.

Yeah.

And I did. I knew it was run by a cult because my friend told me about it. It's like, my friend Ron, I was building a comedy club, and my friend Ron White is hilarious comedian. He told me about this great theater that was for sale. I should buy that theater. And so I. Okay. And I look into it. Yeah, it used to be owned by a cult. Oh, great. I go sign all these paperwork, and then my friend Adam calls me up. He goes, hey, did you watch the documentary on that cult? I'm like, oh, God, there's a documentary. And in watching the documentary, it was so sad to me to watch these people that for decades were deceived and led by this person. And at the end of it, they're weeping and crying. They've lost their life. Their life, like, 20 plus years of their life, had been dedicated to this charlatan who was. He was a hypnotist and a gay porn star who was teaching yoga in West Hollywood and convinced all these people to do this. I had to get out of that building, I'm like, there's no way. There's not enough sage in the world that I can, like, get rid of all the demons.

I mean, how much all the vicars around.

I felt like the comedy store in Hollywood used to be Ciro's nightclub, which was Bugsy Siegel's nightclub, and a bunch of people were murdered there. Like, provable, definitely. And it kind of feels like it there.

But there's the idea, though, that probably everywhere in the whole world, there's been some creature that's died, right? Don't feel weird sat here. Or like, when you get, like a. You know, you get a record or something, or you're listening to it on, like, Spotify or something. Like a song. But, you know, the person who's made that song has done something dreadful, right? You get that same kind of feeling then. So maybe it is like a. Like, maybe the simpler explanation is something like, you know, it's your association with these things. It's just these connections in your brain going, bad thing, this building. Right?

Sure.

And you break this shortcut evolutionarily.

I think both. I think both things, but I think there's places that do have, like, my stepfather went to Gettysburg, and he's not a religious person, and he's not woo woo. He's a very intelligent, hardline person who believes in facts. And he was like, there's something. There he goes. The sadness. It's like you feel it. The death of all those people in this place. Like, it stained the place. But my point is not that. My point is that perhaps everything has some sort of a consciousness. We just have this egocentric perspective of what consciousness means, because to living things, it has ego, it has biological needs, human reward systems. They're all in play. Social structures and the value of status. And we're moving around through this grid of other beings, and we call that consciousness because that is our experience with it. But maybe this table has consciousness. Maybe cloth has consciousness. Maybe rocks have consciousness. They just don't have an ability to express themselves. And they don't have this language and culture and all this other stuff that we connect to consciousness, but that it is an integral part of everything in the universe.

And if the universe is goddesse, the universe creating all these things, it is essentially a creation machine, right? It creates stars, it creates galaxies, it creates supernovas to create carbon based life. All these different things that happen are all created by this process. It's just not a guy in the sky in a robe. And I think the dogmatic perspective that a lot of religious zealots put to these ancient text is, look, we don't trust what people in the 1950s thought about dentistry. Why the fuck do we trust people from 2000 years ago, what they thought about God? It's kind of a crazy thing, because either one of two things is either true, either this is God's word and God is a psychopath, or this is the hand of human beings that is writing down an oral tradition of over a thousand years and trying to put in perspective what steps that we have to apply to our civilization in order to move towards a more loving and prosperous place, which is what God wants. But I think all those things about evil, I think maybe the evil is what we need to see to respond to become better.

And maybe this is this grand evolutionary process that's going on with the human spirit and the human psyche. If you look at trends like, if you study Pinker's work, if you go back to, you know, any time in recorded history versus today, today is less violent, less discriminatory, less racist, more open to, you know, equal rights amongst the sexes and genders and sexual orientation, we're way better now than we were. Like, Alan Turing from the Turing test went to. He got arrested for being gay. They put him on hormone blockers. He wound up killing himself because it was illegal to be gay. The man who invented the ability, like, he came up with the concept of the ability to detect whether or not artificial intelligence is real. That guy was tortured by human philosophy and human perspective.

Yeah, I think pink is right on all of these metrics. Everything's better now than it was. And if you want to combine that with, like, a process theology in which God is identical to the world and the world's getting better, and it's better to, like, start a business, go broke, pull yourself up again and then succeed than it is just to have the best thing to do than to win.

The lottery when you're ten.

Yeah, right. So that taps into our intuitions about what it is to develop a great character and have a better world, you might think. But I suppose pre 1859, before on the origin of species in Darwin, I think actually theism was the reasonable worldview to have this idea of this God outside of time and space. And you can run all of these. They call them theodicies and defenses, reasons why God allows evil to exist. I think when you think about, like, the evils that, like, events like, you know, like the wars and all the diseases that are in our country, in our world, you sort of go, well, I can see how some of these defenses, like you need hurricanes for hurricane relief funds or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something, right? All of these, I think they probably work for humans, but then I don't think since then. And maybe this is a part of the reason why people or christians, especially in this country, are fearful of evolution by natural selection, maybe it's not because they just care so much about their history of the world, which would seem a little bit weird to me.

That's the hill they want to die on, like, how old the earth is. But actually, if God is responsible for this process, that seems like a bigger stain on God's record. So you can see why they're reluctant to accept something.

Maybe it's the only way. Maybe this process of natural selection and of constant improvement and what we call evolution maybe is the only way.

Do you think it. I worry, though, that, like, when you do the maths whether it can be justified, we're talking like trillions of uncountable animals.

Like, if you forever into time sorts.

Itself out, well, it's kind of getting better, right? But, like, if I was to say to you, like, you know, I can, I can spawn a person here next to us now, but to do it, I'm going to execute 50 chimpanzees right there. Like, if you said yes, I think I. I'd say that was a stupid choice to, like, it's a weird choice.

Because we've definitely done that. We've definitely done that for makeup. Well, we've tested, you know, I mean, they've done some wild shit with animals, unfortunately.

Yeah. Well, this ties in. Like, I think people think this, though, that the problem cuts deep. Like, when you ask people, like, 90% of people in the UK think that keeping animals in cages is cruel. 50% of people in the US think that. Yet 98.5% of chickens, turkeys and pigs are kept in factory farms.

Is that. That's real number.

90% of cows.

It's 98%.

Yeah, it's 99% of chickens. Holy shit. And 98% of turkeys. And about the same for pigs. But you see the juxtaposition there, right? You've got people that think it's wrong, but they're doing otherwise.

Well, it's not that they're doing otherwise. They can compartmentalize because factory farming, we talked about this yesterday. They have ag gag laws a couple days ago with Russell Crowe. Rather, ag gag laws prevent people from detailing the horrific conditions which these animals live in. If you film it, if you're a worker there and you're like, this is horrific. I'm going to film this and out this place, you'll go to jail, which is insane. It should be a crime. It should be like animal cruelty. Russell Crowe was in here the other day and he keeps 200 head of cattle and he has a ranch in the bush in Australia. And the way he described, the way he takes care of these animals, the way, you know, they gently move them into new pastures and they live this idyllic life until. And he's like, and the meat is better. You feel better about the whole thing.

It's like I've heard him say something about this before where he goes like. But ultimately it's because it tastes better. So although like, I'm happy he's doing it right. This is no comparison to factory farming. And if all the farming that was out there in the world was like.

Russell Crowes, then it's not just because it tastes better. That's.

Yeah. Do you think he, do you think he's got like the.

Yes. He cares about them. He does.

Did he talk about how he like, ends their lives?

He didn't. I didn't ask. I should have, but he was going on a rant. I didn't want to interrupt. I wanted to know if they did the, you know, no country for old men bolt to the head.

Well, right.

Apparently that's instantaneous.

Like take. Yeah, take the comparison. Right?

Yeah.

Like would you rather have your nose cut off, your children taken away from you, be stuffed in a cage for your life and pumped full of hormones and then be electrocuted or have your I throat slit? Or would you rather run around in the field with your family and then one day the lights just go out?

Well, one day the lights are gonna go out anyway. This is part of the thing. But they don't quite live very long on their own. Like, they're kind of like dogs. Like I don't know what a cow's maximum age is. What's a, what's the maximum age of a cow? Let's guess. I'm gonna say 18. What do you think? Cuz that's like a golden retriever if you give them all the right food, apparently.

I'm skeptical. So if it goes average age, if it's going to be like wild cow, maybe 1516 years.

Yeah, but wild cows, where are they? So wild cows are an interesting thing because domestic cattle is a completely different strain of cattle. And when we let them go wild, they become what we call scrub bulls and scrub bulls are the most dangerous animal you can encounter in the australian bush.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Asian buffaloes are dangerous, but scrubbles will fuck you up. They're like those bulls that people ride, except they're wild. So they're completely feral and they're there to breed and to protect their cows and anything that comes in. I've heard countless stories of men, you know, camping in the bush, getting gored by scrub bulls. They're crazy looking too. They develop all these weird colors and they look really cool. They kind of like, you know how pigs, they go through a metamorphosis when they go feral? Do you know that process, it's really quick, it's like six weeks. Once a pig is feral for six weeks and just running wild in the woods, they start changing. Their snout extends, their tusks grow, their hair gets thicker, they become boars. They become what we think of as a classic wild boar. And those are the same species of animal which is very bizarre. That happens with bulls too.

Well, especially in the factory farms as well. They're definitely not going to live much longer there, are they?

No. Well, they kill them quicker too, because they plump them up fast with antibiotics, get them fat, just more like chronically obese, basically totally ill. And that's the best stuff. The best stuff is the super ill cow. You gotta say 15 to 20 years. There you go. So the dairy industry really rarely allows cows to live past five. They're sent to slaughter soon after production level drops. Yikes.

Well, it's interesting. So I don't know, like when he's obviously killing these cows, right? But if is he doing it right towards the end of the life, then it seems like there's, it might still be wrong in a sense though, right? There's a reason why when we take our dogs to the vets to be euthanized, that you don't get there and the vet pulls out a fucking crossbow or a gun or something.

Right, right.

Because you go, no, there's a better way you can do this. You've run out of injections or something. Like the Greek for euthanasia means good death. There are better ways of doing it.

Do you think it's better to use a poison that you inject into their veins than a bolt to the brain?

My suspicion is yes. Why slows down the heart? You can't see them struggling in a sense of like, they don't exhibit features that look like they're in pain or they're fighting. So it's better. Slows down the brain slowly shuts down. Well, you'd expect them to resist in some certain way. Maybe. There's not much difference between them.

I don't think there's any difference. The bolt to the brain is instantaneous. Our concern is blood.

Yeah.

Our concern is seeing trauma. And so we're not seeing. It's all internal.

Yeah.

You know, poison kills you in a horrible way. I mean, probably the last moments are probably deeply painful and very confusing where your body's shutting down.

It's more of, like a cultural thing that. We don't want our pets shot, rather.

Yeah.

Have injections.

Yeah.

I mean, we see. It's less sticky.

I don't want to shoot my pet. I don't want to see your pet shot. I mean, God, imagine seeing Carl get shot. That'd be horrific. But there's no. I mean, there's no difference between Carl getting an injection that kills him, either.

It's.

It's. It's just our own sensibilities. It's an ending of life. And the most effective, quickest way that causes the least amount of pain should be what we strive for.

Yeah, no, definitely. But that still, I think we both agree on this, right? That the factory farming is the, like, the overwhelming amount of meat we're consuming is that.

Yeah.

And people feel, and we think this. We know that non human animals are morally valuable. I love this thought experiment by the philosopher Tom Reagan. He asks you imagine you're on a lifeboat with, let's say, a golden retriever and another human being, and you've got to throw one out, and you get to keep the other one in. And so everyone throws out the golden retriever.

Depends on who the person is.

I haven't met any. Yeah.

If it's Hitler and my dog, Hitler's going for a swim, you know? Well, it's just like I would do.

That random default, you know?

Wouldn't you do that? But look, but let's be real.

Throw.

I throw Hitler in 100%. I'm gonna kill Hitler with my bare hands. Then I'm gonna throw him in the water 100%.

All right? It's not. It's not him. I don't know who this guy is.

Me and the dog might eat him.

It's not. It's not your. It's not martial art. It's some random golden retriever.

I love all golden retrievers. I'm killing Hitler over every fucking gold retriever that's ever been born.

If it's a default person, you don't know who this is.

Okay, well, then it becomes a problem?

Yeah.

Yeah. Then, I mean, I want that person to live, too, Tom.

I went on a date with this. This girl in London once, and I asked her this thought experiment. I said, what would you do? And then she said, I'll kill the golden retriever. And then I did the Tom Reagan thought experiment and said, well, how about if it was five golden retrievers? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? Tom Reagan goes, I'll kill a million of them. And you kind of go, like, that's not. That's not cool. Like.

And then one person starts disappointing you and lies to you, and you're like, oh, I should have fucked. Kept those dogs alive.

Yeah, well, this.

Is just you and this dude. And you let me. You have a bond with that guy forever. You killed your dog for him.

Exactly. Well, this. This girl I was on a date with, she said she'd kill an infinite number of golden retrievers because she was Catholic. And I think an infinite number of suffering in the ending of life, you.

Say that, you probably think, actually, you.

Get through, like, 50. You got a real mistake. Yeah.

You probably shoot yourself. You watch them whimper on the ground in pain. You'd probably shoot yourself.

The interesting thing is, as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non human animals have a comparable value to human beings. And you have to draw the line. Somewhere there's going to be a rough, like, number. It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves, or water droplets make a cloud. It's not going to be clear exactly how many, but as long as you.

Pick, it's not zero.

Yeah, I think everyone. Well, minus a few people. I think if someone says infinite, something's gone wrong in their thinking. I think that's absurd.

Well, I think that's just them talking.

They're serious. Yeah.

There's no way you believe that. There's no way. You know what infinite golden retrievers look like. That's fucking crazy. Kill that guy.

You know, I've got great sympathy for people who, like, you've probably heard this before. People give, like, health reasons for why they still consume non human animals.

Yeah.

And, you know, they're. They say I have to eat this much meat, or maybe they just eat me and nothing else. That's me and you. So you just eat meat?

Yeah.

You don't eat anything apart from me?

Very little other than meat.

Okay. This is good, right?

Yeah. I eat fruit and I eat meat.

Okay.

And occasionally I'll eat something else. I'll have spaghetti or a sandwich every now and then, but for the most part, eat mostly meat.

So those people who like yourself, who maybe it's like, whatever health reason it is, they still. Some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook. Like, as if they. Because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like. But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go like, is what I'm doing, like, morally right? Is this something I should reconsider? And I think I, given the. If you pick a number, then you have to. You have to make a call on that.

I think it's not a zero sum game. I don't think it's morally reprehensible to eat meat, but I do know that an animal has to die. Yeah. What I prefer. There was a few years back in 2012 that I decided that I was either going to become vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter. I'd watched too many of these PETA documentaries. I'd seen too many things about factory farming. I was like, this is disgusting. It would freak me out. And I was like, okay, I either have to come to grips with what it means to kill an animal and eat it, and if I can't handle that, if I don't like that, then I'll just become a vegetarian. I tried being a vegetarian for a brief amount of time in my life when I was like, I guess I was 18. I was. When I was fighting, I was having a really hard time because I was still growing. I was having a really hard time making a lower weight class that I was competing in. And there was other people in my team that were competing in the higher weight class, and it was a real problem.

So I tried being a vegetarian for a while. I don't think I did it the best way. I don't think I was really intelligent about it. Again, I was 18, and this was, like, 1985. Somewhere around that vegetarian world, no one knew shit. So I was just eating salads, and I felt like. I felt terrible. And then I had a conversation with my instructor, and he was just like, you're just getting bigger. You need to move up. And I started eating meat immediately. I gained ten pounds in, like, three weeks. I felt like a completely different human being. I felt like I had all this energy. I was just. I think I was malnourished before, and I was just going on drive. But I do think that there are very different body types, and there's very different requirements that certain people have when it comes to protein. I think animal protein is the most dense, most nutrient packed protein and food that's available for human beings. And I think it probably has something to do why we became human beings in the first place. Yeah, but I think of hunting as I am dipping my toe into the natural world, and I'm going out into the wild, where these things live.

They're not in a cage.

What are you doing?

What's that?

Is it a bow? A cross bow?

I use a bow. When I first started, I started using a rifle. I shot that mule deer that sits on the table. That was the first deer that I ever shot. That was in 2012.

I'll look this way.

And I decided when I was eating that mule deer, it's all on film. We did it for a television show called Meat Eater. My friend Steven Renello hosts. And when I was eating that deer by the fire, I was like, this is what I'm doing forever. I'm doing this. It ignited parts of my DNA. It gave me an understanding of the cycle of life instantaneously in a way that was like fishing does that a little bit, but this is like that times a thousand. Which is why people don't have a problem with you showing dead fish on your instagram. If you hold, like, a dead bass. Look at the bass I caught. Everybody's like, good job. Nice fish. You're gonna eat that fish. You hold up a dead deer, people kind of freak out.

Yeah, I bet.

Hold up a dead bear, people go fucking crazy.

Well, okay, here's a couple of things, right? So I think you probably, well, speaks to your own experience, right? That you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it taps into our histories. When you hunt, especially with a bow, like, 10,000 years ago, the first bow has come about, and I imagine it was thrilling for them now. And it's then, and it's thrilling still now to do it. Same reason, like paintball or like laser tag and war can be fun, right? People enjoy it. People going after the first world war thought it was a great sport.

Sure.

Maybe it taps even deeper than that because it's the food we're eating in the early days. I think the worry. Okay, let's think about the ethics, though, right? So I think it's not comparable to factory farming again. Like, this is split in hairs, really, in comparison.

Well, I don't think we even have to compare these things. We just talk about the merits of or the ethics of what we're doing.

Good. So two things come to mind, right. The first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting. Like, if I hunt with a spear, and you'll know more about this than me, a spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head. A crossbow and a bow are going to be somewhere between them. So there are going to be better ways to hunt than not. So maybe, perhaps. I wonder what you think of this on the whole, when you run the numbers in terms of probability that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even bows. Would you agree?

Yeah. Hunting with guns is absolutely the most effective way. In order for you to be equally effective hunting with a bow, it requires a lot more work. It requires intense amount of practice, hours and hours. Every day, I practice at 74 yards. Every day, hundreds of arrows at 74 yards. Just grouping into this small area, about the size of a grapefruit.

Are you good? Are you pretty active?

Yeah, I'm very good. Practice a lot.

When you hunt, it's like elk.

Yeah.

When you hunt elk, do you have. Do you kill the animal without much suffering, would you say?

Well, the last one that I killed died in 10 seconds. He was dead in 10 seconds. He literally ran up to the top of a hill. It took like, not even 10 seconds. It was like whack. The arrow hits, run, run, boom, dead. Because of an accurate shot placement, if you shoot an animal accurately, they die instantaneously. They die very quickly. You either hit them in the heart or you hit them through both lungs if they're alive for 30 seconds. It's a lot generally, but there's been times where it might take 30 minutes for them to die. They just lay down and you see them moving a little bit, and you sneak in and you try to get a second arrow into them to take them out. Any way they die by a hunter is infinitely more humane than how they will die in the wild, and they will all die in the wild. They will all get old, and they will either die of starvation, they'll freeze to death, or more likely, they'll get eaten by cats.

Well, okay, so here's where I agree with you, right? Is that when people eat, again, you say, don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is, you know, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls, right? And that rings true for me. Right? This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of, like, production of our food, in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating. So I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms, which the overwhelming majority of people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on. What they're doing is way worse.

Right. I think people just say that because they want to have a moral high ground and they haven't looked into it enough. If they did, they would have to come to grips with the fact that this is, you're paying a supermarket. Hitmandeh okay, yeah. Is it use not a murderer. If you hire someone to get murdered, it seems like you're a murderer. It seems like you'd go to jail as a murderer. It's the same thing if you go to the grocery store and you buy a t bone steak.

Yeah.

You paid a supermarket hitman. He just assumed you were gonna pay him, so he did the work before he got the money from you.

Yeah, it's easy.

You wanted that cow dead, right?

Psychological explanation. Or, like, it's the same reason why RAf bombers will drop a bomb on a clouded city but not go down there and shoot at mother and a child. Right.

But even though hired, they are. Even drone pilots have severe ptsd.

Do they?

Yes. Yeah. There's a very specific kind of it because it's like this. You're not totally connected to the act, but you know what you did.

Yeah.

And then you'll be haunted. Like, if you're just operating a little ps four or ps five controller and you're zooming some drum. I mean, that's kind of how what they do it with, right? Don't they use, like, game controllers? They use game controllers, which is so fucking wild. Cause that's the best way to do it. You get these kids that are, you're playing Call of Duty 8 hours a day, and then that kid goes and becomes a part of the drone program. That's your assassins. That's your ultimate killers. And these guys are doing it for real. They're using, they're playing a video game, but real human beings are dying. And in their head, when they lay in bed at night, they know that.

Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right? We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's a trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act. So more killings when you're using guns than when it's hand to hand combat. And even in the second world war, like, fieldwork showed that it was about.

A little more complicated.

20 or 30% of people were joys.

So it's a little more complicated than a PS four or ps five thing. But it does have, like, a joystick. Just like a simulator.

Yeah.

Like a flight simulator is what it looks like.

But there's a.

That's the view. But how nutty is that? What. What does that feel like when you're in Nevada and you're operating something that's in Iraq or wherever, in Yemen, and you've got a drone flying over some compound and you're just shooting hellfire missiles into human beings based on metadata.

Yeah. I'd be interested to know how much, like, how severe their PTSD is, if.

You can find an article on it, because there was something that I had read about it really recently because there's a thought.

Right. Which is we seem to be outraged at the use of drones, but it takes one less person out of the fight. And so it seems if you're doing, like, a utilitarian calculation that it's going to be better on the whole.

No, no, it's not, because the amount of civilians that die are very high. It's a.

It's in comparison to somewhere.

Yeah, it's somewhere in comparison. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 plus percent. Some estimations are 90% of civilians. It's hard to tell because what's been explained to me by people in the military is that the people, first of all, the government will undercut the number. They'll give you a lower number than probably Israel. And then the people that were attacked will give you a higher number than Israel. And so you have to sort this out. Like, a good example is. Remember the New York Times reported that the Israelis had blew up a hospital, and it was on the front page of the New York Times, and they had been told that 500 people were dead or 5000. I forget the number.

Yeah.

The reality was the bomb hit the parking lot and 50 people died.

Mm.

But they had been told it was a much worse scenario. They reported it.

Not knowing the numbers, though, according to, like, the UN stuff are pretty damn high, though.

They're horrible. No, no, no. The note. I'm.

Yeah, but just in this specific example.

One specific numbers are true. The numbers are terrifying. It's. We're just looking at an article New York times about. They're like, PTSD and whatnot. This was like justice. Because they're not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental health screenings as other fighters. Instead, they were treated as office workers expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said. People broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears, others attempted suicide, and the military failed to realize the full impact. Despite hundreds of missions, Captain Larsen's personal file, under the heading combat service only offers a single word, none. Drone crew members said in interviews that while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars. In many ways, it's more intense, said Neil Schunemann, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the air Force. In 2019, a fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family.

We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote, but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them. There is no reset button. Yeah, it's a horrific, very intense thing.

Yeah.

But it, it's akin to buying a steak in the store.

Well, I think, like the weird way the things that are relevant, morally speaking, are the same things there. Yeah.

Like, do you eat only vegetables?

Yeah, it like a, it's a, it's a vegan diet. While it's a, you know, it's like a 98 or 97%, especially when traveling and stuff, when you can't seem to find, seem to find things. I think the perception is, and there's a lot of gotcha stuff, right. In terms of when people say they've got vegetarian or vegan diets, the idea that they're going to be eliminating suffering entirely from their diets is impossible. That's not what anyone thinks is happening. You hear like crop death arguments and stuff like this. Right. Which we don't tread much water.

Monocrop agriculture, which is a horrific loss of life. If you're buying corn or grain, most likely you're getting it from monocrop agriculture. And they kill thousands of animals to do that. They poison the ground. They poison bugs. If you consider insects, life forms, they kill millions. They kill groundhogs, gophers, anything that gets in the way. And then the monocrop agriculture kills the environment because it destroys the topsoil the topsoil is destroyed. And like most farms in this country, we have to pour shit on the ground in order for it to be able to sustain life.

Well, the vegan needs to be, or the utilitarian, or, you know, there's all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this. I don't know any serious philosopher of moral philosophy or ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non human animals, they're pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter. So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well, or the pain and suffering that goes into it. There are going to be better ways to do it than not. But I often get asked about tofu or soy production. So 77% of global soy production goes towards feeding non human animals that are fed. And we end up killing and eating a bunch of, it's used for like biofuels and stuff, but only 7% of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings. So if we look at like the vegan's contribution to that, right, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for. But here's, I think, an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side, because you hear loads of different arguments, like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff, as if it's going to get in, often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non animal rights, such as the Catholic Oz mentioned a moment ago, don't matter.

But think of this like, if it was the case that we're forced to do these things and we can't do otherwise, to sustain the people we have, we have to kill animals. Let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case. That wouldn't get God off the hook. If God's forcing us to do that, like here's life, to enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it, like 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals.

Well, let's assume that God didn't conceive of factory farming and this is like a loophole created by human beings. Because I think it is. I think it's just like, it's like money in politics. Like the founding fathers didn't see that coming. They didn't see social media coming. They didn't see a lot of things that are interfering with this concept of self government, right? And I think God probably, like they're never gonna do that. They're never stick all the chickens in a fucking warehouse and stack them up. Yep. We will, if you let us get away with it. And then we develop laws which. You can't film those things. Yeah, yeah, I. There's a problem with animal intelligence. Right. I. Animals are sentient. They have instincts. They love their young. There's also a problem with plant intelligence and plant intelligence. I think the emergent science of plant intelligence is fascinating. I don't want to say they're the same thing as people, just like I don't want to say a golden retriever is the same thing as a person in a boat. It's not.

How many, out of interest, how many did you pick in terms of how many golden retrievers you were going to chuck out the boat until you took the human being out of?

Depends on the person.

I can't say if it's just some random person. You don't know them. Any person walking down the street in Austin today, he's looking like tens, hundreds. No, he's talking thousands. No, like, fewer. Yeah, like, less than ten.

I'm not gonna kill 20 dogs for some dude. I don't know.

You and me first. Depends on.

I don't know, man. I love my dog so much.

Yeah. I shouldn't pick a golden retriever. That's.

It's like, I can't. Even if I get upset at him, I feel bad. It's. It's. You can't just say a random person. Like I said, if it was Hitler, I'd kill Hitler for sure. I kill Hitler over a snake.

Yeah, but what's probably just kill him anyway, we think.

I probably wouldn't. I probably bring him back so people could study him.

I think if I could, was sure.

That I could capture him alive and get him in front of the press.

Just to see just what the fuck happened to.

Yeah. How the fuck did you do this? Like, what? What company? Goddamn Norman should give me money for this. Norman Oller. We've been talking about his book over and over again in the past couple weeks. Yes. Since he's been here. But Hitler was cranked up on all kinds of shit, and so are the Nazis. They were all on methamphetamines. Hitler was on oxycodone, apparently.

Yeah. Thinking he could live long. He was worried he was going to die. Right. A vegetarian diet to make sure he could just finish it.

Not just vegetarian, but terrible vegetarian diet. Ate mostly bread and sugar.

Yeah. You've got to do it right. He certainly didn't. I've just finished Ian Kershaw's book on Hitler. It's like a. Over a thousand pages. It's a real good read. Like 40 hours read. So if you're interested in, like, you.

Gotta be careful leaving those around your house.

I bought it my dad, for his birthday, and he's there in the restaurant showing.

It's a real problem. Like, you can't do that. But you know what we're talking about with animal intelligence and plant intelligence and human intelligence. Like, yeah, I. For sure the way we're doing it now is wrong. I think we would all agree to that. If you could wave a magic wand and let all the animals be free and no one eats them anymore, you're going to have chaos. You're going to have real chaos. First of all, you're going to have massive overpopulation, and you're going to have predators everywhere, because unless you do have predators everywhere, you're going to have car accidents that you would never imagine. Train accidents. There's a guy named. Why am I blanking on his name? American Coyote. Dan Flores. Dan Flores, this. I forget, where is your professor out of? He studies the history of animals. And Dan Flores, he wrote a paper called, I think it's called buffalo ecology, something. What was it? Buffalo diplomacy? Buffalo ecology. He thinks. That's it. Genius guy. He thinks the reason why, when they came across the Great Plains and there was millions and millions of buffalo, I think the reason why is because 90% of the Native Americans were killed by the plague.

Oh, wow.

This is his thought, like, because the earliest settlers in the 14 hundreds, the 15 hundreds, they didn't see that many buffalo. It wasn't like they didn't even report them. There were many accounts where they didn't even report them. Why? Because the Native Americans lived off them and they kept their population in check. The buffalo have a very long gestation period, right? They're an enormous animal, and if you can kill one, it takes a long time to replace that one. So they would travel around, track the buffalo, kill them, live off them, use their skins, eat their meat, and then nomadically travel with them. And they kept their population in check when 90% of Native Americans were dead. Dan Flores believes that led to this insane overpopulation problem of buffalo, where you see millions of them in fields, because that doesn't exist anywhere in nature unless there's a problem. And that problem is a lack of predators. And the predators at that time being the native american hunter.

Yeah, I think if you go, like, if you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't even on the view which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the moral, morally relevant facts are pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering. Right? If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around, that's gonna, as you say, create like a sort of mayhem.

Well, it's not just that you would have to control their population somehow. You'd have to give them birth control. You'd have to.

That seems, I mean, that's in my view, that's okay to give them birth control and the like, right?

But to what length, wendy, how many do you let breed? How many do you. You have to have population control, right?

You can have population control.

Wildlife biologists, let me explain something about hunting areas, right? So if you're going to go to this place in Montana where we went and hunted mule deer, wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas and they know roughly the exact amount of deer that are in this area. And they know a less accurate number of predators, particularly stealthy predators like mountain lions, pretty good with wolves, but even then in high density areas, very difficult to really figure it out, but they get the numbers of the deer and then based on some very exact science, they calculate the amount of hunters who will be allotted tags. So like, say, if you apply for a limited draw entry place, so limited draw entry is like, say maybe you have an allocated piece of land that's x amount of thousands of acres, and in that there are x amount of thousands of deer, and you will allow 100 hunters into that area. And out of those hundred hunters, there'll be maybe a ten to 15% success rate. So you are thinking that these hunters will trim ten deer, 20 deer, whatever it is, for this particular. And there's a bunch of different areas like this all over the country, but they're all tightly managed.

And the wildlife biologists that do that in the United States, it's a beautiful and incredible thing because it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world where you have public land where people, the United States and all the people living in the United States own this land, this is our land. And you can go out on that land and in some places you don't even have to have a tag. You get what's called an over the counter tag because these are areas with, they're difficult to get to. There's plentiful deer, they don't have to worry about you depopulating. And so you get a tag and you go out, you go 5610 miles in, you camp out, you live under the stars and you get your food. And you could do that in this country. And you can do that because these wildlife biologists have a very keen understanding of the amount of animals that are sustainable in the area and the amount of hunters they can allow to hunt in these areas. That's how it's done. If you don't do that and if you just have animals run free, you get the buffalo when there's millions of them on the fields, and you're going to have to kill some of them because they're going to get diseased, because they don't have any food.

They're going to starve to death. It's going to be. Or you're going to bring in mountain lions, and mountain lions can't kill buffalo, so you're going to have to bring in wolves, you're going to have to bring in big cats. You're going to have to bring in all kinds of things that eat things to keep them in line. Then you've got fucking wild nature taking place everywhere in the world that there's not a city, and even in cities, you're going to have it. You have coyotes in New York City right now.

Well, okay, this is good, I think. Martha Nussbaum, in a new book, just as for animals, she argues that, like, these things, as you say, are a problem. You can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control. And she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in, like, animal sanctuaries, if you like. And I was thinking recently, like, there's a lot of arguments for human reparations, like when a full group is harmed by another group, that we think that they're owed something. Whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in north west Africa, we think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should right that wrong. I don't know the details. I don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher, but let's say that's a view that people hold as they do. Well, if you take non human animals to be like these subjects, which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure or happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group. And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group, then that group owes them, like, the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible.

Now it might be just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day to day of it. It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can, says the argument, to reduce it as much as possible. If that ends up being like, having to add predators to a sort of, you know, into that situation, then so be it. But perhaps there's a, you know, with the right time of money, you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, so to speak.

So if the goal is just completely to eliminate suffering, why don't we kill all the predators? Yeah, because they're going to make all these animals suffer. And if you get killed by wolves. Oh, that's a rough one. That's a rough. The worst is killed by bears because they just eat you. They just hold you down and start pulling you apart like a salmon. So if we want to really eliminate suffering, perhaps we should eliminate all of the predators or just put them in zoos where they'll suffer. But they're evil. And then because they just kill and eat, that's all they do.

Well, there's a question of, like, what's wrong with death, which is at the heart of this. So it might not just be like the hedonistic properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, you're somehow wronging them. So, like, if I was to, hypothetically, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier, and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one will remember them. And I can erase the thing I did from my memory. You might still think what I did was wrong because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects they were working on, and I stopped there. Flourishing in some sense like that.

Unless they're Hitler.

Unless they're Hitler, then it's a good one to stop.

But again, you probably would want to bring them back.

And then when it comes to non human animals, the same's true, right? The dog looks forward to their dinner in the evening. They look forward to the walk. They bury their bone. These are creatures with complex inner lives which see their futures or know that they will exist in the future. I think the same is true of the creatures which are hunted or in the farms. And so simply painless killing might not be everything there. Removing the potential for future happiness and pleasure also seems to be morally relevant.

Well, you know, when you hunt animals, you hunt mature animals. One of the things that.

So you check the like, how do you know the age of like you.

Can see, you could tell by the way they look. They get bigger. Their head looks different, their lungs looks different.

Live for.

I've killed them that are eleven years old. That's really old. Really old. He probably, his teeth were all worn down to almost nothing. He probably had another year or two left if he was lucky. And again, their death is horrific. The death that they have from wild predators is terrifying. There's not too many. I hunt in Utah every year and you know, we see cats there. I saw the biggest cat I've ever seen in my life there. It's huge. Mountain Lionde. But I've seen other predators. You see a lot of coyotes and they do spot wolves there too. There's bears there, we see bears. But that death is so much worse than a hunter's death.

Yeah, most probably, yeah.

And 100% and it's gonna happen. They're not living forever. And what I'm doing is I'm dipping my toe into the wild world and through considerable effort bringing back meat.

Yeah. To bring this back to like, you know that fundamental question we began with, like on the whole, is existence a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased with this world? And it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window. Or you know, especially if we're forced to do these things, like if we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that. Again like this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good God would do. So if you're an atheist, why not?

Isn't that this is the process? The reason why the elk is so fast and strong is because it's been avoiding mountain lions for hundreds of thousands of years.

But it's the process which, according to Christians, Jews and Muslims, that God created and God can do anything with the following qualifier. It has to be logically or metaphysically possible. So there are possible worlds without evolution by natural selection. Sure, those things are entirely possible. And a perfectly good God would have to bring about the best possible state of affairs.

But maybe this is the best possible state of affairs to achieve a desired goal.

What did they say? The optimist says this is the best possible world and the pessimist hopes it's not the case.

I think even the evils of this world exist to incite outrage and for us to do better. I think this constant struggle of good and evil is maybe even necessary for us to keep moving in the right general direction through rigorous debate and deceit. And lies and propaganda and having your dreams shattered and figuring it out.

Yeah, that's us.

Right, but that's us and animals. That's the reason why the fucking elk is 900 pounds and built like a super athlete. It's because it has to get the fuck away from mountain lions. If it didn't, it would never look like that. It would never become an elk. It would not become this majestic thing with horns growing out of its fucking head. It's got literal weapons growing out of its head and they're competing with each other with these weapons and killing each other. We find dead elk all the time. They find them every year. They're stabbed in the ribcage by other elk and they die a horrible death. And they get torn apart by coyotes and bears when they're down. Will you find their bones scattered all over the place where they've been killed and ripped apart?

Yeah, I mean, I thought there's still a sense in which they're, like, doing good. Like when a non human animal, like, sacrifices themselves for their young or something. Like there has to be something they're going towards in order for it to be good. And the same way that they're getting.

Better at being elk to avoid that. And that's what leads to their natural selection.

Like, there's going to be a significant number of non human animals that don't have what we call free will, which is the power and freedom to do otherwise. The power and choice to do a rather than b. There are some non human animals that just act. The raindrop lands on the bird's beak. It just instinct, it turns, sees what's there. It doesn't think, what was that? It doesn't have this in the chat. It doesn't choose reflects. And there's going to be a lot of non human animals, which that's the case for. So that sort of like character development, theodicy or defense won't work for them. Like, especially if it doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it. For all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop, like, their individual lives seem like they're again, cases of gratuitous, that is unnecessary evil. But the point fundamentally is this, right? God could have made it so that these creatures that don't have free will and that can't develop, their characters don't suffer. He could have made that, could have made that the case.

But unless God is truly all knowing and us with our primate minds are trying to make sense, out of this thing. That ultimately will make sense when we reach the end of our journey, and that this whole process, as complicated and vicious and evil as it seems to be with predator and prey and natural selection and what you're this talking about, like, with birds and different animals, well, they don't have to. They figured out a niche. They could fly, they move around. They basically got it nailed, right, to keep their populations high. Not that difficult unless people come along with shotguns. That's when it really becomes a problem. Like the passenger pigeon disappeared. Why? Because we ate them all. You know, we shot them all. But when you look at the animals in the wild, when they have a very successful model, they don't change. That's crocodiles. They have a very successful model. The model is this thing doesn't need to eat for a year. It can go underwater for hours. It can stay perfectly still in four inches of water, knows exactly where the animals are and explodes and eats them and kills them.

And it's been in that same form for millions and millions of years because it's a successful form, same as sharks. Successful forum doesn't need to evolve. Human beings live in the most comprehensive and bizarre environment. First of all, we figured out how to shelter. And once we did that, we became weak. We figured out agriculture, we became weaker. We developed cities. We completely separated ourselves from the natural world. So we think of ourselves as different than all these other processes that are happening because we've elevated in our own eyes beyond this, beyond the natural realm, into this world of morals and ethics and philosophy, our view of our perspective of the world. But we're still in the natural world.

We're still beasts.

And when you go hunting, you really get a sense of that. You really understand you're in the natural world.

Yeah. Well, here's the thought, right? Which is, in terms of, like, cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs, is that when you look at the system, and you mentioned a second ago, like, maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this. Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him, and I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words. Or William James, the philosopher, has this example of a mountaineer who's got this gap. They need to jump over a storm behind them, so it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump or the runner, who has to believe they're going to win the hundred meter race. It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence. I think these arguments work for, like, psychological states. But you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable that there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true. So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief, is to go here.

We have some really good arguments for this hypothesis. Here's the evidence we have against it. But it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem. So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace, like, some form of agnosticism where we go, how can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless? And that's to go back to the start of our discussion there. It's like the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that. We are looking for meaning like Shakespeare. It wouldn't be right for someone english to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quoting Shakespeare, wouldn't it? So you'll have to excuse me. Shakespeare says, essentially, if there's no God, then life is like a tale told by an idiot. It signifies nothing, isn't amazing.

That guy was so good so many years ago.

The agnostic life is like this. And a lot of my thought here comes from Alba Camus, which everyone should read. He says that I wonder if you've had a feeling or experience like this, because this is sort of like what got me on my philosophical journey. He says, one day the stage set collapses and everything begins in that weariness with a tinge of excitement. That is, one day you're going about your life Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you sort of start to think like, what's the point of all this? What's the meaning? It almost seems like it is a tale told by an idiot, and like, maybe it isn't meaningful. I'm not a part of this big plan and you sort of at a loss, but there's an excitement there, too, like the openness of being, the gift of meaninglessness. So I think the reasonable thing for us to do in the light of those arguments we've spoken about, is to suspend and be agnostic about belief in God, but then have this honest search for finding meaning and moral value. Like there's a. This isn't the kind of notion of the absurd that physicists keep talking about.

Like, again, this is when, you know, I won't talk about physics. And sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy, and he sort of get a little bit frustrated. Like, you've probably heard people say things like this. Like, in comparison to the vast cosmos in which I exist, I feel so small and meaningless. Like, or comparison to the 13.8 billion years in which I've existed. Like, my 70, if I'm lucky, feels like it doesn't really matter. But, like, imagine if you were really big, like, the size of the universe. Imagine you lived for 13 billion years. It doesn't seem to have any effect on how more meaningful your life is. Your life still lacks that fundamental purpose. So, like, how big you are, but if you. How long you last, I don't think.

You'D have an insecurity complex if you were the universe.

Same with Doctor Manhattan, same with the multiverse. Or, like, simulation theory. Right? I've just been watching this on the flight over here, the umbrella academy. I was watching that on the floor.

Oh, yeah, my daughter loves that show.

Yeah, it sounded like a burn then.

No, she loves it.

It is good. Anyway, they're in a multiverse, and their lives, they're still going about their lives like they matter. Or imagine we're in a simulation. Imagine the fundamental nature of stuff is ones and zeros, rather than particles or consciousness. It all still matters. So I think the project of agnosticism, a thing we need to be doing, isn't just, like, digging down with this new atheism that's flippant and doesn't offer us any. Like, it can't solve these big problems and lacks answers to the fundamental questions. And it isn't just a gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it, but it's to try and, like, create ourselves a patchwork like blanket to keep us warm in the void of meaninglessness. Right.

Well, we inherently know that it feels better to be a good person. We know it. We know it feels better to have good friends and good community and be someone that people can rely on and count on. We know, like, there's a general direction that makes us feel good to go in that way. And I think that's the guiding light of whatever this power is that that wants us to become a better version of what we are is that's what forces. Forces that action. I think we get too caught up in religious dogmatism and we get too caught up in these literal interpretations of ancient texts, which are not even in the original language they were written in, which is so bizarre and apparently an incredibly difficult language to read and comprehend and to translate when you're going back to, like, ancient Hebrew. You're trying to translate that into English. Like, how much is lost there? Like, what did these people. And also, what was the original story? Where the fuck did all this come from? Like, what was the original guy that told these stories? What was the experience that he actually had? We're guessing because of people.

I used to say about the Bible, and it was just a joke. I don't really mean this. If you're a Bible fanatic that people are full of shit and that story sucks. Like, that's all you have to do is look at it. Like, people are full of shit. 100% we know it's a fact.

It's the greatest story ever told. You don't. You don't.

Well, it's like, listen, the president of United States is just on tv the other day lying. These people are full of shit. They lie all the time. We know they lie. We catch them lying.

Have you seen the Trump clip when he's asked about his favorite Bible verse?

What did he say?

Can we, Jamie, are we allowed to get the.

What do you say it was? He doesn't have one. No, he didn't come along with a finger. Yeah, I would have said Ezekiel.

Here's just to wrap up. Like, the, like, the fine meaning part. I think you're right. Like, we can still. Even if there's no God and there's no ultimate. Oh, here we go.

We gotta put our hair froze on here. Trump on gay rights.

And you said, I think last night in Iowa, some people are surprised that you say that. I'm wondering what one or two of your most favored Bible verses are.

I wouldn't want to get into it because to me, that's very personal. You know, when I talk about the Bible, it's very personal. So I don't want to get into verses. I don't want to get into.

There's no verse that means a lot to you that you think about or sight.

The Bible means a lot to me. But I don't want to get into.

Specifics, even to cite a verse.

No, like, I don't want to do that. Old Testament guy or New Testament, probably. Yeah, the Old Testament. You got to go old son. New Testament's been monkey with even the New Testament. It's all fascinating to me. I am not an anti religious person. I think I was when I was younger. I went to catholic school when I was a little boy, and I decided that religion was bullshit because they were mean. But that was just me being six. But then as I was raised by hippies. But as I've gotten older, I kind of have a belief that the arrogance of atheism is just as bad as the arrogance of the religious zealot, and that this whole thing is a massive mystery. And to pretend that it's not is to. We're going to hamstring all of these conversations. We're going to put shackles on all of our debate in all of our conversations where we're trying to figure out what's real and what's not real and what's the shared experience that we all have. Like, I don't know how you view the world. And the only way for me to find out how you view the world is for me to ask you and not berate you for your opinions, but try to, like, get it out of you.

Like, but what about this challenge you with other perspectives? How does he feel about that? Where, how did you, like, sometimes you can get very quickly to how deep a person's perspective on an issue is with just a couple of questions because you see what they espouse, what they say, and a lot of times that aligns with very particular ideologies, whether it's right wing or left wing. And then you. A couple of questions deep. You know, you start asking about opposing viewpoints, and why do people think this way? And do you think that perhaps it's this? Do you think it's perhaps, and then you can get to how much they have actually thought about it. And the moment people become dogmatic, the moment people become ideologically captured by a very specific group of things that you've adopted as your opinions because it aligns with science. We saw that during the pandemic, this trust the science idea. Well, which science? Like, what is science? Science is not a consensus. It's a bunch of different people looking at data and trying to come to. And when you know that that's hamstrung and you know that that's captured, that's not science anymore.

You know there's propaganda involved. You know there's lies. This is not science. This is a business, and it utilizes science. And you're caught up in an ideological debate about a thing that you should be completely objective about, but you're not, because it's just like all the other things that human beings do. We like to decide that we are correct and that we defend from that position instead of just looking at these ideas. Like, I think one of the things that happened with atheism is that it did become like a philosophy. Remember when they had atheism plus. Do you remember that? You remember that? Oh, wonderful. So they had atheism, and then they had these, like, social justice warriors that. That came out with atheism plus. And it was atheism attached to a whole bunch of ideas about, like, ways to behave, things that they value.

Yeah, it's like a humanist Bible as well, isn't it?

Exactly. They were basically forming a new religion. It was adorable. It was adorable to see that these patterns of thinking just seemed to be inherent to human beings, like the tribal cultural rituals, tribal cultural philosophies, their myth of the origins of things that they all accept as their own. It's like an identifying factor that cohesively connects groups, which is why, like you said, that you didn't enjoy church because you don't like going to that. I actually like it. Church.

You just told me that the Bible. Most boring stories.

It's not boring. I didn't say it was boring.

Oh, he's one of the worst stories.

No, no, no. I said people are full of shit, and that story sucks.

Oh, the story.

Like, the story of. I used to do a joke about Noah and the ark that if you told that, I can't even do the same joke anymore. But if you told it to five years, because I used to say retarded. If you told it to a. I think I said a five year old kid, you know, obviously with mental problems, he's gonna find holes in that story. He's gonna go, wait a minute, just two of each. Animals. Animals eat other animals. And the punchline was, I'm not that retarded. And this idea that we have about these stories, I think, is that they happen exactly as written. And I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about real events that took place a long time ago and were told in an oral tradition. It's just what really happened is very difficult to say. And when you have the hand of man, when you have human beings, especially in the New Testament, you know, I mean, you literally have people deciding what is going to be and not going to be in it. So there's human beings deciding what is going to be in the Bible, which is insane.

That's insane as it is. It doesn't mean that the things that are in there aren't representatives of the most recent version of telling a tale that probably did happen.

Well, this is what's dangerous, right? And this is what's like, not just confused, but careless about some of this thinking. You go, my team thinks this, and I'm just going to double down on it. Even though I've got reasons against this position, I'm still going to be defending the position of my group. So people like conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro think that eating non human animals is morally wrong, but they carry on doing it, I think probably because it's part of what their team does. When I spoke to Peterson, he conceded that problem we spoke about a moment ago, the problem of systemic evil in nature, was a massive problem for the God hypothesis. And as we said, he thinks you should just crack on and carry on working on it. But there's a sense in which it's okay if your view isn't affecting anybody. Right. You can have a false belief, and you're entitled to that freedom of conscience to think something as long as it's not bringing about and breaching the harm principle. But there's a sense in which, like, take Peterson's view, because we spoke about taking that leap of faith right after I had this conversation with him.

He tweeted, like an hour later. I was arguing that my view is that happiness and pleasure has to correspond to a purposeful life. Right. That if your life is meaningful, it also has to involve a flourishing or happiness and pleasure.

Well, I think we see that with people, right? People that don't have a meaningful life and just seek pleasure all the time are miserable because they're missing that part of the equation.

That's what he's meaning. Yeah, that's essentially, his view was like that. He tried to pull them apart. And afterwards he tweeted something like, what uses happiness when we have mountains to move? Which is a nice nietzschean quote, but it's a nice bumper sticker or something, or fridge magnet, but don't think we should live our lives by it. I gave him this example. I said, suppose God came down to us and said, here's the meaning of life. Like, create war, spread disease, commit genocide. Right. You'd go, that's not the kind of meaning I thought. That's not what I had in mind. I don't want that kind of meaning. But this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter, and they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure. Like, that's a, that's a recipe for disaster. Like, you, you can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose and meaning. This is, you just have to look at the 20th century, right, to see how when people think they know what ought to be done despite all the pain and suffering they cause, like, how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities.

So this idea that we should just carry on sticking with thinking beforehand, and this ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things, right. He ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith. He offers arguments. Let's take Peterson, for example. Again, people are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment. People are writing books saying this person's going to save our faith, which is going extinct. You know, in the US, for example, the southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s. But your population's growing, it's disappearing. In 2001 in the UK, we had 70% of people identifying as Christian. Now it's less than half. And you're about that now in the US, you're just 23 years behind. And it's the same trend. Religion's disappearing and it needs to evolve philosophically. You need a proper philosophical defense of it. People like Bill Craig do a good job. I don't see why we can't just keep holding him up for the christians. But this same old, just bet your soul on it, just go for it. Take the leap of faith is the thing and the reason why Christianity is going out of favor.

Well, we have some real bad examples of it in this country too. We have some real distortions, you know, like the factory farming version of Christianity.

What kind of stuff?

Televangelists, these people that fill out arenas and they fly around in private jets and drive around in Rolls Royces and brag about their stuff.

I saw one clip televangelist saying he has a private check because it means he's closest to God and God can hear his prayers. Quick.

One of the guys was that guy's name, Richard Copeland? Is that his name? The guy that was confronted, he was confronted by this woman that was asking him because she had heard that he said that he didn't want to fly commercial because then he would be flying with demons. And so she says to him, like, do you think that the passengers and commercial airlines are deal. Listen to this here. Kenneth Copeland here. Put your, put your phones on commercial.

Why you don't want to fly commercial? Why have you said that you won't fly commercial? You said that it's like getting into a tube with a bunch of demonstration. Why do you think that?

No, listen to me just saying, not the people. The main reason is because of the need. If I flew commercial, I'd have to stop 65% of what I'm doing.

That's really to me, isn't it true that you want to fly commercial so that you can fly in luxury. How much money did you pay for Tyler Perry Gulfstream jet, for example?

Well, for example. That's really none of your business.

But isn't it the business of your donors?

Listen, I paid. You kind of caught me off guard here, okay?

Look at his eyes.

Come out here. I'd like to give you a chance to catch your breath and have a conversation. We don't want to. We don't want to catch you off guard.

I love inside edition. You got to get to. Hey, you listening to me? My wife thinks inside edition is.

Oh, yeah. Now.

Thank you. Lord help me. Let me pray.

Well, let me just ask you a really simple question.

It gets better here it goes.

Unbecoming for a preacher to live a life of luxury and to fly around in private jets. What's your response to that?

Very simple. It takes a lot of money to do what we do. We have brought over a hundred. Let's see this. The latest figures just came out.

I don't trust any men with fingernails like that. 122 people.

Let me give you another example.

122 million.

Last May, I was scheduled for Lego Nigeria. That's a long ways. I had a week off and I was scheduled for Peru. And I prayed about it. And I thought, I'm not missing that dedication in Jerusalem without the airplane that we have that I bought from Tyler Perry. And I didn't pay anywhere. Tyler's one of the greatest guys. He made it.

So.

He made that airplane so cheap for me, I couldn't help but buy it.

Well, my question then, he's barely a human being. I want to get to the demons because people are very concerned.

Here it goes. Here he goes.

Dark chance, you're inside Edition. I love your eyes. And here's what happened. We flew in 21 days, 78 hours, 40,000 miles, touched five continents and preached face to face personally with 125,000 people.

Do you ever. Do you ever use your private jets to go visit your vacation homes, for example?

Yes, I do.

Okay. Again, getting back to the comment, you said that you don't like to fly commercial because you don't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons. Do you really believe that human beings are demons?

No, I do not. And don't you ever say I did. We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but principalities and powers.

Can you explain what you meant by that, by that term? Then just explain, because it's really simple. You said you didn't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demonstration.

What did you mean, the well, let.

Me ask you, do you think that people that fly commercial are demons?

Give me a chance to talk, sweetheart. I'll explain this to you, but it's.

A biblical minute, spiritual thing.

It doesn't have anything to do with people. People. I love people. Jesus loves people.

Okay. We can kill it. We get it.

It's like he's been possessed by a demon, isn't it? Through that, his eyes, when he like.

Jumps up the defense, that's part of the problem that we have with religion in this country. It's like we have factory farming religion too.

They skipped all the verses about, like, selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor, not fitting through the eye of a needle.

Yeah, he skipped everything, right? You went right to private jet. Tyler Perry gave me such a great deal. He's such a great guy.

Good. You can tell that. He's, he's just fumbling, isn't he?

Just trying to say the eyes on that guy, like, good lord, if I wanted to, if you wanted to show me like an AI generated vision of a guy who looks like he's possessed, wild, wild behind the eye. Maybe it's wild with the Lord.

I think. Here's something I think the atheist does need to concede though, right? I was just thinking about it as well.

Look at those fucking eyes. Jesus, that would scare the shit out of me.

I think the theist, if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God, right? And we talk about all this evil, which we've just explored, maybe we can jump and bring the multiverse in on this as well. Is that if you're up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here, is it like five, 6 hours? Eugene Nagasawa, working there, has got this brilliant argument where he says given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimism. Like, you can't be happy and pleased to be alive and think the world is a good place and believe in all of the evil. But you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity. So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world. I can say that the world is neutral at best or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic. I think this is the difficulty of it all. And again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas, threatened at the height of royal happiness.

So you're in this moment where you think, actually, my life's pretty good. And then you remember all of the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all, and you sort of left. Like, that's the state for the atheist. And I mentioned that notion of the absurd from it's Nagel's idea. Like, I wish I was bigger and that I last longer. And maybe that resonates with a few people. Maybe that's just Thomas Nagel. Is that right? The real problem of the absurd and the meaninglessness of life for us as agnostics and atheists is we desire or want meaning from the world. But the world sits there cold, dark, and empty. It doesn't respond to us. It's like having. It's worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you, because at least they're there, right? The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that love and affection, the universe. We ask for meaning. We ask for purpose, and it doesn't respond. I love this quote from Michael Housekeller from Liverpool, who used to be my head of department. He says, this notion of the absurd rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity.

Here be lions and dragons. Here be cold and dark and emptiness. And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world.

Right?

But that, I think, is. Camus says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide. They kid themselves and think that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis. They don't want to feel that feeling, like it's a really uncomfortable feeling. There's three great books by Camus which I highly recommend. One, the outsider or the stranger. A lot of high school students read this book, and the main character starts off, his mom just dies and he doesn't care. And then he goes to the beach and just shoots some random guy and he doesn't care. And then he's put on death row and he dies, and he still doesn't care. And you're reading it as the reader, like, what's wrong with this guy? But he's mirroring the world's indifference. He doesn't like that's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world. In one of his next books, the fall, the characters trying to find meaning, or better put, trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins. Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists. When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all forgiving father figure to take that away from us.

Like, we have to live with it. I think as someone who's never embraced Christianity, I have no idea what that's like, what a gift that is to do something bad and be forgiven by God from.

It seems like a great life hack. Can I push back on this idea that the world's meaningless, though? Yeah, that's cold and meaningless and uncaring. Well, if you're a human being, all you truly know is human experiences. You know your experiences in the world, and you know, there's part of the world. There's parts of the world that at any given time are cruel and terrible, but there's also parts of the world that are wonderful. There's things that you do find meaning in. Like I assume you find meaning in this conversation. You find meaning in a great dinner date, a fun time with friends, a vacation, things that you like to do for a living, philosophical pursuits, I'm sure, in your all kinds of different things people find meaning in and they enjoy and love and they have happy moments. And, you know, you go for a hike in the mountains and it's beautiful, and you feel spiritually enriched by touching nature. There's meaning out there. It's not just not like the lottery. It's not like you don't just get all of it all at once. And that's all you get. And you live in a utopian world.

No. One of the things that makes meaning so wonderful when you do find it in this world is that so much of life feels like there's no meaning. It feels like you don't connect to it. So when you do connect to something, whether it's groups of people, your family, your loved ones, your friends, whatever you do for a living, that's unusually rewarding. You are one of the lucky people that on the right frequency, and that frequency is what we should all gravitate towards and try to attain. I think the problem with a lot of things that are written is that they're written from an individual's perspective, and that person might have been depressed. That person might not have had a good connection to their community or to friends or to loved ones. They might not have had a great personality. They might not have been a fun person to be around. So they didn't really attract a lot of people that wanted to have good times with them. We do find tremendous meaning in this life. We do. It's just not everywhere. And you gotta, you gotta look for it, you gotta work for it, and once you get it, you gotta maintain it.

I think that's a, I think that's exactly right. But it's a different kind of meaning to the, to the one which the world ultimately lacks. So I call one meaning with a, like an uppercase m. Like meaning with a capital m meaning. Yeah, yeah.

So, so if God in the world, or as human beings, in human beings.

As well, like if God exists for the abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout their lives until the end of their life. What we're talking about, or you're describing there, is what you might call not the meaning, but like a meaning within life. And there's a problem here, which is.

You are the only thing that you're aware of that interfaces with this universe, that you're consciously connected to. You are you, are you in the way you, with a hundred percent, you are you you. The you that's talking out of your mouth right now is the only you that interfaces with your world. If you find meaning in that world. The world has meaning.

Yeah, but depends. Like, again, when you strip away all of these judeo christian principles, we're left trying to find worthwhile meanings to non worthwhile ones. So let's say you said the meaning of your life, Joe, was like counting blades of grass on your front garden, right? And I said my meaning was like being a doctor and helping people.

I would hope there's other things other than counting blades of grass.

Yeah, but imagine you thought that, right? Imagine you said the meaning of your life was counting blades of grass. And I said mine was helping people with, like, medical care. I have the more meaningful life. But if what you're saying is true, if it's like there's no ultimate meaning, and all meanings are just created by the person, like, we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful, we need some kind of way of differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile. And so there's a problem. I think we can solve that problem, which is, although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning, we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering. Right. The reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right, and you're doing something which I'm not willing.

To concede that it doesn't have meaning.

But the world is not meeting. Oh, like, as a whole?

Yeah. I think it's moving in a direction, and I think it's moving in a very specific direction with the apex predator, which is human beings. And I think if you looked at. If you were an alien, you visited Earth, I've said this before, so I apologize. People have heard it. And you looked at us, you would say, well, what does this thing do? Well, it makes better things. It's all makes sense. It's all they do. And everything that's hardwired into people. Just think about the stupid things that are hardwired into people, like materialism, like, you can't keep these things. Why are you piling up things? And you're 80 years old. Why is Kenneth Copeland buying a jet? What is it? Well, materialism forces innovation because you always want the latest and the greatest things. It's one of the many motivations. Status is attached to these things as well. That's another motivation that pushes innovation. If I looked at us from another perspective, I was another life form. I'd say it makes technology, and it makes better technology every year with a fever pitch. I mean, it's. It's. It's few. Every year there's a new phone.

Every year there's better computers. Every year there's better chips. Samsung just came out with a new battery that is going to be on Ev's that has a 600 miles range and charges in nine minutes. They just.

You're not sponsored by Samsung.

No, no, they just. It was just a new article that just came out that they were talking about in terms of game changers, in terms of technological innovation, that's what we do. We do it constantly. I think that means we make our artificial life, and that's what I think we're here for.

I want to separate the meaning, though, there from the thing we do.

Define meaning.

Well, in the things that you're giving there. It's called the is ought fallacy. It is the case that certain things do this thing, so they ought to be doing it more. So, like, you might run a similar argument. Imagine you come down to earth as aliens ages ago, let's say, like 30,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food. What are the humans? They just eat sugary food. That's their meaning. That's their purpose. Or something you'd go, no, like, the meaning or the purpose of them or their natures isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past. Right? So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm saying in the context of christian beliefs, it's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you. It's imposed from elsewhere. Like, it's quite odd to think about what it would be like outside of religious beliefs, because that's the problem of agnosticism. Right? It's an absence, or better put, I keep saying that it's the world is meaningless. What I really mean is it's seemingly meaningless. It's not obvious to what the meaning is, when it ought to be or it feels like it ought to be.

So it's not the case that the world is meaningless. But I think maybe our disagreement here, or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation, is, I think, as you mentioned earlier, you're quite a fan of these pantheistic views where the world is moving towards a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and. And the like. So if you hold that view, then, yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning. If the. There is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with, then, yeah, if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process, then it can be meaningful. But there are problems with that view, too. So I don't want to, like, I don't want to cash out and go. That is the view.

Right?

Hence why I embrace the agnosticism.

It seems like meaning is a very human centric concept. Like, that. Meaning to us means that something makes sense, that it's noble and ethical and moral, and it's the right way. It's the most intelligent way to advance and exist. And that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning to. But I would push back on the whole thing if aliens came and found primitive man just eating berries. It depends on how primitive, right? Like, even if you discover chimpanzees in the Congo and you go and study them, like that chimp nation documentary on Netflix, they have a very interesting social structure. They have alpha males, and they have bonds between the other males and they have neighboring tribes. They fight over resources. Like, you'd be fascinated. And if you went further ahead a few million years and saw that they've developed tools and now they've figured out how to skin animals and throw spears, you'd be like, oh, I see. Where this is going, like, their meaning is to continue getting better at this. Then they develop metallurgy. Then they figure out combustion engines, how to harness electricity, and like, whoa, okay, now we're cooking. These things have a meaning.

It's just all the chaos to us because we're personally attached to other human beings and we see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world, and not just terrible for violence that other human beings commit to, but also just what we're doing to the earth itself. Like, in terms of natural resources, what we're doing to the ocean is fucking insane. And you would say, well, this thing is making a better version of itself. It's going to make an artificial life, and it's probably going to happen within our lifetime. And that might be, that might be the progression of life everywhere in the universe, and that might be what God really is. We might, intelligent life and creativity might be a seed of God. And that if it keeps going and this biological life gives birth to digital life, that can make better versions of itself instantaneously and then continue to do so, and it will eventually have the unimaginable power to harness every single element that exists in the universe.

This view is pretty close to, I think, you've added on the show before, Philip Goff, who's my colleague at Durham, he's currently defending a view just like this. Right? He thinks that the fundamental nature of the world is consciousness that is identical to what we should describe as God, and that this is a process by which we're becoming, making the world better. And we have parts to play in that, and that's what constitutes a meaningful life. So I sort of got two problems.

That's the thing that you keep saying.

That meaningful, like it comes, like, the meaning there for gough would be something like, the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before. And if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful. If you're sat on your ass not doing anything, and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then your life isn't as meaningful as the person. So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful on this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be.

But let me push back against that, because what about buddhist monks that spend their entire life celibate just meditating in a room? Are they, are they, is their experience less meaningful because they're achieving, they're actually communicating with what they believe is God.

They weren't the people I had in mind when I said people sat on their ass doing nothing.

Well, they are sitting on their ass doing nothing, though.

Okay, I'll bite the bullet. I'll say there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a buddhist monk sat on your ass doing nothing. Although here's the value of what they are doing. Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they uncovered the fundamental nature of the world, which is a unified field of consciousness. So, hypothetically, if something like Goff's view of this fundamental consciousness is right, and the buddhist monks tap into this, and they tell all of the mates in the town, and they all come to see it to be true and they all contribute towards it, then that is meaningful. If you sit on your ass in a cave doing absolutely bugger all for your whole life, you never tell anybody about it, then I don't see that as being as meaningful as being an NHS worker or fighting to defend your country or something like this.

I mean, there's a classic versions of stories, right? Like the king's son, the wealthy kid that never had to do anything, just sits around getting grapes fed to him, like, ugh, what a piece of shit. You know, we know, like, we would like, as human beings, we would like things to continue to move in a better direction. Presidential campaign in the United States is all about making it a better place.

Yeah. Or like when you've, like kids, right? If they're sat around doing nothing, just playing video games, something, you go, get outside, stop. We say, stop wasting your life, right? There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards individually and holistically. But the problem, I think, and why I don't embrace this for you myself, is that there's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say you contemplate your own being, let's say, and you look inside of yourself, what's it like to be a physical entity? And you look inside your mind, and there's this consciousness, there's this qualia, or being, or experience. People like Schopenhauer say that because we don't know the inner nature of things. And Galen Strawson here at University of Texas, Austin, says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics. It doesn't tell you about. It tells you what things do, but not what things are. So let's say, for the sake of argument underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness. And then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion, and you say that as a whole, all of the universe is one big conscious mind.

You've got a problem there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something like this. You take all of these little conscious particles in the table, like, how do they add up to one unified mind? Like they do in my brain, right? I don't have loads of little experiences going on now. I have one coherent stream of consciousness. Seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights, it's not like there's loads of little conscious experience just happened. So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience? And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is, if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness underlying everything, how does that big godlike mind decombine into little minds? Like, why is my experience not your experience? Why is it here rather than there? And it doesn't seem like, although we might have some knee jerk reaction answers to that question philosophically, we can't draw the boundary like the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries. When I'm saying that the whole thing.

Is going to be, well, let's explore it. Like, what would be the reasons why we would have individual experiences and a collective consciousness?

You could have reasons for it, as in, like, let's say, what would be.

The benefits of having individual experiences?

There could be benefits, and there could be reasons for it in terms of. Let's paint this pantheistic picture of, again, the reason and the goal of the universe and life. If I see myself as here, rather than there may, perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual. Actually, it's time to think about it. I'm not sure, from the perspective of God, what reason there is to break these things apartheid. Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place, despite the fact they just want to buy private jets and look after themselves.

Maybe that's a better world, that it motivates activity, it motivates movement. And to have all these different consciousness, like, competing with each other and comparing to each other. This motivates people. When you meet people and what is inspiration? Right? When you meet someone, you're inspired by them. It literally makes you a better person. It can make you better to see a great musician play it. Can you leave inspired, you might go home and write something. You might be in the middle of a novel and write something completely connected to your experience that you had watching that concert and that all these different examples of people we admire, like, God, I wish I was more like that guy. Try to be more like that person. You know what I say all the time? Aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laidden. Just actually become that guy. Like, it's possible, right? If you could fake it for a little while, you know, when you're 21 years old, trying to pick up a girl, inspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get late.

Drunk.

Well, why are you drunk? You drunk because it loosens your inhibitions. You become more jolly. You're a fun person.

Be the person. Yeah. Okay. These are good reasons for perhaps why, like, you break up the mind in that way, but they don't tell us how. They tell us why the universe would want to do it, right? But still, it doesn't carve out the boundaries between why our experiences are different from each other's. If we're a part of this big global mind.

Well, that competition has to exist all throughout nature, right? There's no way that the mountain lion and the deer can share consciousness, because the deer will be like, don't eat me. What the fuck are you doing, man? Why are you eating me? And they have to be an individual for them to compete, and they have to have their own needs and their own desires. And then this is how natural selection works. Because if it doesn't happen, then there are no predators or are no prey, and then life does not advance.

This still gives you a good why. Like, a really strong why. It seems that the better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like, loads of individual minds, like you say, all able to do lots of different things. I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right? And I was quite surprised because in the past I came, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool, and I remember showing them one of these clips, and it was of musk talking about, like, the origins of consciousness. And I was using it as, like, this is like the general public opinion of it. You learn more about the brain. This is like his neuralink stuff, and you solve the problem. And we spoke about, like, how that won't happen. But recently he came out and said something I thought was really interesting, which is essentially the view we're talking about here, panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere. He says, well, in order to have consciousness, there'd need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds like me and you.

But in the origin of the world and the Big Bang, it was just hydrogen. So what? Hydrogen gets more and more complex until it gets rise to consciousness. And he sort of, he gave this, gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now. He said, either consciousness is nowhere, as in it's just an illusion, it's a trick of the brain. It's pulling a rabbit out the hat when there's not really a rabbit, or it's everywhere. And I think given that you can hear me and see me now and you can, this is what Descartes cogito ergo sum is, right. You're 100% confident that you are conscious right now, so it's not a non existent thing. So following that reasoning, which is being embraced by. By public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience. But leaving aside the how the big mind can break itself up, there is still a question. This might be a bit of a boring terminological one, so you can tell me. Just shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary corner.

But it's the idea that I spoke about earlier, that all theists think that God is the perfect being. If God exists, God has to be perfect. You can't have a unicorn with no horn on its head, like uni cornu, one horn. A unicorn has to have one horn. In the same way, a triangle needs three corners. God needs to be perfect. But on this definition, it seems like God isn't perfect. At the beginning of time, if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect, then there was a greater being that God could have been. And even in the fullness of time, perhaps God won't be as perfect as the being which is described by Christians, Jews and Muslims. So what we're seeing is people embracing. I think this is Gough's term as well. I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him. He's describing himself as a heretical Christian. So to be a Christian, he thinks, you don't need to believe in the virgin birth, you don't need to believe in the resurrection, you don't need to believe that God's perfect, but you can still believe that, that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of and that there is something godlike at the essence of it all.

I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out. Like theism's on the decline. Are we just speaking about the numbers?

The problem with this new idea is that someone's going to be at the head of it. That person's going to be like Kenneth Copeland. It's just a human thing that we do. And to push back on this question of why God would want to have the consciousnesses all separated. Separated or what's the reason for it? Everything's separated. I mean, everything in the world, right? Everything in this room is constructed of atoms, and most of it is empty space, but yet some of it is a table and some of it is a microphone and some of it is you and some of it is me. So if you look fractally at what the observable universe, what we're aware of in terms of, like, what exists physically, right, we're. We're aware of subatomic particles. We don't understand them. We're aware of them. We know they blink in and out of existence. Spooky action at distance. It's magic stuff. It's wild things. That's the very nature of the matter of the world in which we find ourselves conscious in. And then as you expand through that, every single thing, even plants and animals and everything is an individual.

It's all individual. And that process of all these things being individuals seems to be a part of this expansion and growth and a part of natural selection and a part of evolution and a part of this constant state of improvement. Everything is moving towards a state of deeper and deeper complexity. Everything improves. The elk gets big muscles to run away from the wolves. And all these things happen in order for these beings to prosper and survive and to keep this healthy balance as this weird ape develops electronics.

Yeah, I mean, I think that seems to be. That's the general view. I think that it's the zeitgeist of the time. It's the feeling of the age that we think in such a way. But there is still that movement. And this is my view. I just want to shed light on an alternative idea, which is, go back to Parmenides, the pre socratic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion, that we live in this block universe, this big one thing. Have you heard of Zeno's paradox? You've done this one before?

No. No. What's that?

Zeno's paradox is great. So you've got two, like, see these two cups here? And to go from that cup, to reach that one, it needs to go from point a to point b, say, in the middle. And then to get another half, it has to do another half journey from point b to point c. And that goes on infinitely for Zeno, another halfway point in between point a and point b, because you need to keep making these half journeys, which seems ridiculous because we quite clearly can move the cup next to the other one.

Right, right.

But theoretically, if time and space is infinitely divisible, then you can always make another half journey in between point a and point b. He gives the example of, like, in.

Every step of the way.

Yeah, every step of the way. Is it Hercules or somebody racing a turtle? Maybe it's not Hercules. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. Achilles. There you go. So the turtle and Achilles are having a race, and the idea is, like, for Achilles to get to the finish line, Achilles needs to go halfway, but then he needs to get three quarters of the way, and then there's another half point between three quarters and the full way, and it will go on and on and on and on. So the answer to the question who wins the race out of Achilles and the turtle is neither of them win. It's a draw. No one can finish the race, but we quite clearly finish races. We quite clearly move the cups next to each other. So Zeno thought, and people like Heraclitus thought as well, that this means that it's all an illusion. Like the idea of change and motion isn't actually something that's out there in the world. It can't be possible.

So when you're seeing change in motion, what are you seeing? But did they understand evolution back then?

No, not by long shot.

No, but not by a long shot. So we. Should we still be listening to them? It seems like that's not true.

Well, take like Einstein tells us, and this is, let's do bring in the multiverse for this, too, right? Einstein told us that space is, like, stretchable, right? So it expands. So we have the moment of the big bang and the universe, or existence as a whole, we might say space and time, evolves according to the law of inflation. So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space. And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created or one or two later. So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized. So there's worlds, according to this view, where we're having this conversation in Spanish or, God forbid, French. Right. Or there's a very nearby possible world where we're having this conversation in Italian, German or Japanese.

Exactly the same words, exactly the same pause. Infinitely.

There are worlds, though. And I think the real question we want to ask there are a bunch of these multiverse views. We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy. Mary Midgeley, clarifying these concepts. This is an idea my friend Ellie Robson convinced me of recently that it's a really important job in philosophy. We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse. We keep using the word. But you've had Sean Carroll on the show. He's fantastic. And I've spoken to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. You've got views in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility. The easiest one to illustrate, it's just this inflation model that I've just given. But what we really want to know is why this, like, matters. Does this change the value of the world? Because there are universes where little girls are born, then tortured for their whole lives, they're executed and it repeats, right? There are universes where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better. So there are good universes too. But on the whole, that means you've got an uncountable number, an uncountable number of bad universes, and an uncountable number of good universes.

So I think if the multiverse theory is actually true, as agnostics or atheists, we should be really fucking worried. Like, this is a horrible state of affairs. If there are all of these worlds, if you actually believe that they exist, you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and being all excited about existence like we should. We should be really concerned, but we're.

Really concerned about things that we're not even sure exist that are horrific.

Yeah, well, you should be, you know what I'm saying?

Like, that's existential angst to the power of a thousand.

There's a couple of problems there, right? Well, there's three big problems that come out of it. The main one, which you've just linked to, is, like, if you're trying to weigh up the overall value of existence, is the world that is the multiverse, a yemenite good thing on the whole or a bad thing. And I think if you say that there is, let's just say it's infinite, even though it might not be. If you say there's infinite suffering and infinite goodness, that doesn't seem like you can be optimistic. You'd have to go on the whole, the existence is, like, neutral, mixed. Or maybe it's bad. Maybe you don't want a city where everyone's getting tortured next door to a city where everyone's living a blissful life.

But in our own experience on earth, horrific things and beautiful things are happening simultaneously, and generally speaking, more beautiful things than horrific. But we concentrate on the negatives. To sit around and ponder the multiverse being an infinite number of evil civilizations destroying themselves and torturing themselves. Okay, how is that any different than thinking about demons? How is it any different than thinking about, you know, the puppet masters of the universe controlling all of our minds? It's like it's just mental masturbation. Like, there's no way you're going to know whether or not there's a multiverse of people suffering. So to not be happy in this beautiful existence, because perhaps there's a multiverse in which infinite suffering is occurring, seems to me to be a giant waste of an amazing trip. Like, the trip that we're on right now is Earth, 2025, western civilization. Pretty fucking cool. Pretty cool. And I think your job is, if you're so fortunate, that you're in this position to enjoy this very bizarre place in history where it's the strangest time, perhaps ever, that human beings have been alive and we're going through it, you could sit around all day and think, oh, but in other multiverses, people are just getting eaten by other people, maybe.

Well, it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that, like, if you, it's. It just means that you can't, when you contemplate all of existence, think that it's an overall good thing. So in that sense, we don't know.

We don't know what it is. We really don't know.

For the multiverse theory, sure.

If it's so, there's, there's probably an infinite number of multi. If the multiverse exists, and if there's not a limited number of universes, but it's an infinite number of universes, it's probably an infinite number of uses that are universes that are also so fucking amazing, they're all probably all competing, just like all life is on this planet. And what if the universe is constantly in a state of evolution itself. Why would we limit that to physical things that we can currently observe? If we know that there's stellar nurseries, we know that how planets get born and stars, and we're very aware there's this process going on. Why do we assume this process is completed and perfected? Maybe this process is also moving in a better direction constantly, just like human life is, just like human civilization is. Maybe that's something that exists everywhere in the universe and that the universe itself is advancing to a more powerful state or a better state.

Well, this is good. So let's say entertain the multiverse view, and let's just, let's pretend it's true. Right? And so you've got infinite pleasure, happiness, and infinite suffering and pain. So I think once you do, you minus one from the other, you've got a neutral set of existence. Let's just say this.

Sure.

So on balance, it's about the same. So if you're a pantheist and you believe in the God of the multiverse, if you embrace multiverse theism, then you can't believe that God is good in the same way. There's also a problem, which is you mentioned something like the process, right? But there are worlds in which this process has already been realized. It doesn't really matter if our world reaches that or not. In the grand scheme of calculating the amount of good and bad in the world. You might think that.

Explain that again. Say that again.

Well, you might think that, like, some people say stuff like this, right? They go, I want to, like, stop eating meat or stop taking long haul flights, but really, when it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter whether I buy that chicken or take that flight. It's not going to impact the overall good and bad that's in the world. It's a drop in a huge ocean. That really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of it. If the multiverse theory is true, something like that hits a little bit harder. If your goal is to make existence as a whole greater or better, then it's nothing compared to the infinite suffering and pain that's already out there. You can't change the overall value of existence. I still think, and I'm with you on this, I'm sort of following the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out fully. But, you know, now we've said that, I still think there's a point in being moral, in developing your own character, sorting out your own house or community or country or continent and the world.

It seems like that's what our job is.

Yeah, it seems like that's where we.

Get what you keep referring to as meaning. That's where we get meaning.

Yeah, I think that's fine. There's other problems, though, that seem to fall out of this as well. Right? Which is like, we have a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual, subjective conscious minds, you know, when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today as the same person born 31 years ago, and the same person and the halfway point between that again, to go back to Zeno, how am I the same person throughout time? I think the best answer to this is something like, I have the same capacity for conscious experience. If it was stream of consciousness, that would mean every time you drift off during me talking now, then you would die and you'd be born again. When your stream of consciousness re emerges. Or if it was. Yeah. Like, if you, if you say Joe Rogan is that stream of consciousness, that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now, right? And that stops because you drift off, that would mean your stream of consciousness has ended. Think of it like sleep. When you go into like nren sleep, and you don't have any conscious experiences, let's say you would die according to that view.

Or there are views and philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity. Joe Rogan is the person that believes, I don't know, that Marshall is golden retriever, fantastic, and that. I don't know, like, that consciousness is the fundamental nature of stuff. But then if I were to strip those beliefs away from you, the psychological continuity of you would say, Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore.

Because I don't exist anymore. Yeah, I get you.

I think it's the thing gives you your consciousness.

The drifting off thing doesn't make sense to me because drifting off is just a failure to connect. Yeah, but you're still conscious. It's not like I'm dead. Like everything goes black and I don't know anything. I'm thinking about other things. My stream of consciousness just stopped paying attention to you. If I dripped off, I never drift off entirely.

Yeah, but when you sleep, you have it, right?

Yeah, but when you sleep, you dream, like, what is going on there? We don't even understand that.

You don't think there's ever a moment when you don't have an experience.

Well, you don't have a conscious experience because you're not conscious.

That will do.

Right, but what is going on? Like, why do we have such vivid dreams? Like, what is going on with consciousness in regards to REM sleep? We don't totally understand that. We don't really know what that is.

It's a bit of a. Even then, it might seem like a bit of a problem. Right. Take out, like, copy and paste. Teleportation to really put it out there. I copy all of the parts of you. I destroy them and recreate them elsewhere.

Right. Like Star Trek.

Yeah, Star Trek. I don't know if you have started. It's definitely on Star Trek. It's not copying. It sounds so nerdy. Yeah. I'm really embarrassed.

Well, it's not copy and paste, but it's like, like they take you and they beam you to another planet. You don't exist here anymore, but you exist over there.

But some nerd told me that when the beam beamed. Don't you like Star Trek? Yeah, sure. Sorry I shouldn't call you.

It's okay. I was a kid.

So when you're getting beamed around in Star Trek, it's not copy and paste, teleportation paste. No, it's not cut. Oh, it's cut and paste here. Okay, so it would be cut and paste. I copy you. I recreate you. It'd be copy and paste if I made another. Joe Rogandeh and then we've got the problem that Paul Rudd has in that Netflix show, which is great. Living with yourself.

Oh, no, I haven't clone of himself. Yeah, you can't give that power to dictators. Like, if you can, like, yeah, you know, when I was talking to Kurzweil and he was talking about downloading consciousness into computers, I'm like, what's to stop someone from doing that a thousand times? What's to stop someone from making an army of Donald Trump's? Yeah, you can't. You can't stop. If you could do it once, you could keep doing it. Especially as technology advances.

Oh, it's, it's a gold, that. The Paul Rudd one. He bet they recreate him, but as a better version of himself.

Oh, no.

All of his friends want to hang out with the other one his wife wants to be with.

No.

Yeah.

Oh, no. He just kill himself. He's already here. I wonder if he shot himself in the head, he would just be that other guy.

In Star Trek, what happens is you carry on having experiences. They beam you. Someone told me there's an episode where you see what it's like to be teleported, and it's just like this whirl of things and lights around you. So it's not like the lights go out, even for a split second, right? But on the copy and cut and paste version, it would be that second.

Well, it is interesting question, because if consciousness is not local and you download someone, like what? You know, if you do move, if you do take someone out of this physical existence and put them somewhere, but then they don't have a soul, this bizarre vessel that can no longer communicate, and then. Then we'll realize, like, oh, we fucked up. We gotta go find out where that guy's consciousness got dropped off along the journey.

I think it probably does get dropped off.

It probably does.

It needs the same capacity there to begin with.

You're probably an antenna for consciousness.

An antenna for it?

Yeah, you're probably. You're probably a physical thing with a lot of biological requirements that's connected to some sort of consciousness that sees itself as an individual, but is completely connected to all the life forms around it.

What makes you. Because I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these views, what's your motivation for? I'm not sure if this is your view, but even entertaining, it might seem like they call them just so stories. In philosophy, you can tell a tale about what it might be, but why take that tale you're telling seriously?

First of all, not completely connected to this, but I think it's possible that what consciousness is, is almost like a giant motherboard. And we are all connected to that motherboard as individuals, but that we share this one thing together. And I think we really become aware of that when there's. When the community comes together, when there's a tragedy, when there's an event, something happens. We all mind meld together. The individual, the biological entity that is you and that is me has all of these requirements that it has to meet in order to stay alive and to move forward and to progress in their civilization and culture, and that this is a different thing than the entire consciousness that we share, but we share it with each other. So much so that we can't be alone. I mean, people that are alone for too long go crazy. The worst they can do to imprison is put you in solitary confinement.

Yeah, I couldn't think of much worse. It's social animals, right? So we do. Yeah, we do look for that. But that's still something you need so much stronger there, right? So you go, we want to connect with people. We want to form these communities and bonds in the face of tragedy. We come together and we support each other, and we. We empathize with each other, and we love and support each other. But like, on a deep philosophical level, I'm still seeing the world through my eyes and not your eyes. Right.

Right.

So why think I. That gives us a reason to think that there is this unifying experience or mind that occupies all of space and time. Right. What's the motivation for thinking something like that?

It's just a thought that it may be the case. It's not of. I'm sure that that's what's going on. And also this is a sort of a universal sentiment that gets told by people that have profound psychedelic experiences, that we're all sharing some sort of consciousness, some very bizarre connection that we don't totally understand and that the biological vehicle that we have that carries around the soul has these motivations, and you will battle with these motivations in order to do the greater good.

You see what's a parallel with religious experience?

Yeah, I think most religious experiences have their root and psychedelic experiences have their root.

Like even the people like Paul on his road to Damascus or Saul.

Well, certainly Moses in the burning bush. In fact, scholars in Jerusalem, they believe that what that was a metaphor was burning a bush that contained dimethyltryptamine.

Hmm.

If you think about burning the bush. Right. And that's one of the ways that they consume psychedelic drugs, is they burn them. And the acacia tree is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a very potent psychedelic drug. There's countless depictions of psilocybin mushrooms, both in ancient Egypt and in cultures all over the world. There's mushroom rituals that occurred. There's the sacred mushroom in the Bible, John Marco Allegro's book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, where he thought that the entire christian religion had its origins in fertility rituals and psychedelic mushrooms, that they were all having these rituals and consuming these mushrooms. That's the eleusinian mysteries, that they all got together and drank some sort of a potion. The kooky on that was a psychedelic potion, and they devised democracy, and they figured out all sorts of very unusual philosophies from these psychedelic experiences.

Yeah. Do you think then, and what makes you think that on the one case, let's say someone takes a drug and they think that there is a fundamental, conscious, unifying mind behind the cosmos, right? Person a, person b has it, and they see like the Easter bunny or something running down the road, what makes, given that they have the same cause, person a's religious experience caused by psychedelics, in this case, more reasonable than person.

B'S, not more reasonable. I think each experience is probably valid. And maybe person b that sees the Easter bunny, he doesn't have the capacity for whatever reason, like his psychology is not strong enough to grasp the entire possibility of everything, that all of this is connected, and they freak out and they compartmentalize. And that's one of the things that happens to people that have bad trips. Right. Bad trips are essentially you trying to control an experience that's uncontrollable and. Or maybe you go into that trip with a significant level of anxiety, maybe the loss of a loved one, a devastating moment in your life, you know, loss of job, loss of family, and you have this experience and you just freak the fuck out. Which can happen too.

It seems that people have those experiences, perhaps without those obvious triggers as well, though, right? In the literature, I do work with the center for Inner Experience at Durham University. Some cool work from Jules Evans on this looks at people who have had like, long term negative effects because of taking psychedelics. He takes like 700 people because they're pretty underreported. The data doesn't reflect them very well.

Do you remember what they took?

No, not off the top of my head. They say that a third of people who have long term effects from the psychedelics. Maybe you can pull this up. Jamie. Jules Evans, the guy's name. A third of people have negative effects lasting longer than a year.

One third of the entire group of 700, yeah.

And one 6th have it for longer than three years.

And what were these effects like?

Feeling the sunlight on them and shaking with terror, seeing things that aren't there. Extreme forms of anxiety.

Like what do they give these people? Acid?

Well, perhaps. I'm not sure. Well, this is the. This is the thing I think I'm concerned with as a we, same kind of stuff when we're talking about free speech. Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech? Everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line different places. So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is. Similarly, with psychedelics, what we see are writers, philosophers, documentary makers. Just give this blanket statement about them being good, but don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives. Like, you see these documentaries on Netflix, right? That don't mention the bad things that happen to people. And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they have certain similar, comparable, analogous properties about them, then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data. The Alastair Hardy research Center asked for people to write in with their religious experiences. And just tell them about them, right? And the researchers were really surprised. Like Alastair Hardy himself said, I didn't think 5% of these were going to be people seeing the devil or having Satan watch over their baby every night or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell terrified for the next several years.

These are religious experiences from people. From what year was this?

This is like the last 30, 40 years or so. I think the state was collected in the eighties, maybe.

And these people, had they been diagnosed with any mental illnesses?

The data, like, they just asked for them to account, to give their examples of these experiences. But what's notable is, first of all, the phrase religious experience, and it being negative is kind of like oxymoronic, right? We never thought, yeah, we do. And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff. So let's say if it's about 5%, and that's a modest generalization, given they didn't ask for it, let's say it's about 5%. And then you take the number of people that have claimed to have had religious experiences, then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are zoroastrian, Jains, people who are jewish. We consider them significant minorities. Add all those groups together to the. I think it's in between maybe one or 2 million people have had negative religious experiences. And lay out all the boring maths in a buck I had out this year and say like, look, my point there was, if you're a Christian, then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones.

If you want to accept religious experiences, you can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian. But the deeper point there is, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences. And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well. They're scared, they're ashamed, they don't want to talk about the negative. In my life, I probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs whose lives have fallen apart because of it.

I was reading through this study, it was just a survey, but I thought.

This was very interesting.

Participants were actively still take psychedelic drugs. In response, 334 54.9% said yes and 246 40.5% said no. 28 did not respond to the question. They were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement. I believe that the insights and healing gained from psychedelics when taken in supportive settings are worth the risks involved. The frequencies across the four response points to this question, strongly agree, disagree, strongly disagree are shown in figure two. In total, 89.7% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, this is good.

So we take it from that 10% of people say we shouldn't be.

It does make sense, though, that human beings vary so much biologically and we vary so much psychologically. You vary by what your experiences have been on this planet up until the point we take the drugs where you're at in your life. I think the real problem is that they've been illegal for so long, we haven't been able to study what the correct dosages are, what biological problems you may have, like, unique to yourself that makes you either allergic to these things or having an extreme response or a negative response. What medications you may be taking that you don't know interfere with them. We talked about that yesterday with Prozac Mao inhibitors. There's a bunch of things that people take that will profoundly impact the way these drugs. I'm sure they probably screened for those, at least some of them, when they did those studies, but I don't think there's anything in this life that's 100% good. I think most medications have side effects, even ones that have been hugely beneficial and save countless lives. They have side effects, and some people are allergic to them, and some people that just biologically don't. Don't agree with them.

I think that's the case with psychedelics as well.

Well, I want to just make it clear, right. So that I've sort of formed an overall view on it, which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've given there. It's that I don't want to say that people ought not to be using them or stuff like that. I think in controlled circumstances.

Oh, no, I don't think you are saying that. Yeah, yeah.

So I think that. I don't deny the positive things that come from this.

No, I think what you're saying is very important.

But there's 76 billion neurons there. Right. And we don't know what they're all.

Saying, and everybody is coming into it with a fucking different set of baggage.

Yeah, yeah.

Some of that baggage you can't carry up the hill.

Yeah. I think it's important to differentiate as well, and this happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion is we differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is. Is really bad things happen to me, so I'm abandoning my belief. And compared to the evidential problem, which is, let's look at the big data, does that give me a reason not to believe? And I recognize that as a person that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part, that people that I care about, their lives have been ruined because of this. But then I look at the big data and I think on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally. But I still think that there is a big amount of data there about these negative experiences which just aren't reported, that aren't in our data logs. And I'll be interested to know just how many there are and how severe they are when people have these.

I'm sure there's quite a few that people don't want to talk about. And I bet they get a lot of pushback from the psychedelic community if they want to discuss it. Like all zealots, they're psychedelic zealots. I think that's the real problem is the illegal nature of them and the fact that, I mean, even just recently they denied, FDA denied MDMA to be used in clinical settings for veterans. They have to do more tests with maps, which is very unfortunate because that particular type of therapy has been very beneficial for people, especially veterans who've seen the horrors of war and to come back and try to psychologically deal with these things, to have some tools that we know are effective be denied to these people that went overseas and served and saw these horrific things and experienced these horrific things, I just think is unreasonable. And I think that the real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being governed by people that have never taken them. They don't really understand what we're even talking about. And I think that. I'm not saying it's the panacea for all, but I'm saying it's a tool.

And I think it's been a tremendous tool to a lot of individuals. They've experienced some extreme changes of perspective and of their own personal connection to the world through these things that are very, very beneficial change. I know multiple people that have just become completely different human beings after psychedelic experiences and much better, much more caring, abandoned whatever chip they had on their shoulder. And I think that can't be denied. And I think it's another thing that's here to help us evolve.

That's what I think yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I'd like it to be the case that they were all like that. Right. I know a friend who's over in Australia who's abandoned his family after taking these and ran off with a 70 year old man. This guy's, like 30, living in a mud hut now.

What was he like before that?

Just like me. Me and you right now, just like me.

Just. Are you sure?

Just from the outside and the.

Right. But the thing is, it's not on the outside. It's psychologically, that's really, like, how strong is that person's foundation in the world?

Like, well, I had a housemate when I was at university who was, you know, it seemed, from all measures, grounded. I was happy enough to live in the room next to him, and I was, you know, we got along just like good friends, and, you know, he started taking psychedelics. We left university six months later. He started a Facebook live feed, and this guy was, like, just masturbating in front of all of his friends and family because he was just. He'd lost his mind.

Wow.

Like, these. This horrendous.

I'd like to talk to that guy before all this shit went south and see how loony he was already. I knew a dude was a little bit loony, and then he delved very heavily into the world of psychedelics, and he became schizophrenic. I suspect that he was already schizophrenic before that. He was like, he had it under containment, but then he went nuts and just thought that everything was a psyop, and it was very strange, very strange to talk to him, you know, thought everyone was a government agent. Very weird. This weird, weird interface. And he had slipped completely into the world of paranoia, almost inexorably. I don't know how you would pull the guy back to make him a normal person again and again. I don't know if he was a normal person before. I don't. I don't. You know, I didn't know him that.

Well, but it's hard to know yourself as well, right?

I think they're like every other tool. You could abuse all tools. You know, I think there's. There's a lack of understanding of what the. Again, the doses, the. The correct way to consume it. What, the biological factors that. Your unique biology.

Yeah.

The way it might interfere fear with this experience.

Yeah. I just think all the things we've just said there, right. Is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation. About this.

Absolutely.

Like, just at the start of your documentary, just say, don't do this. If you're gonna do this, like, you need to speak to some kind of. Again, it's about legalization. It's about safe use.

Imagine being a shaman and you have to deal with these fucking wahoos taking a propeller plane over to your country.

Just to see what job they take.

You have no idea what's wrong with these people. You're dosing them up with ayahuasca in the middle of the jungle. There's jaguars and snakes out there. These people are freaking out. I bet their version of I bet. I would love to know if we had, like, real good data on these shaman adventures where people go to the jungle. Like, how many of them lose their fucking marbles and cooked forever after that? Yeah, I don't know.

Well, it's the same kind of. Again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes psychedelics or. I mentioned free speech moment ago, right. This is something which is, like, huge in our culture at the moment. I was at your comedy club on Monday seeing, I've never seen kill Tony.

Before, but pretty fun.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was great fun. And afterwards, a few of the guys in the bar afterwards were asking, like, what I'm talking to you about. And they started talking about free speech because I'm from the. Obviously from the UK and wanted to know whether I supported Keir Starmer. As if Keir Starmer was like this. Like this. It's like Mao or something. I was like, there's no comparison. He's like, you're like, marxist there. Now. They're right. I was like, no, it's not quite like that.

But we're terrified of everything going in that direction over here, especially in Texas. It's like a. Texas is the last frontier.

You think so?

This is what America, like. Texas is what the rest of the world thinks. America is a bunch of freedom loving people with guns, but just wild people play music, drinking all the time. That's Texas for real.

I didn't. He was gonna be like this. The people in Austin, some of the best people in the last five days that I've came across there.

It's a. Got a great vibe. The city has a very hopeful vibe. And that sucks for me when I go back to Los Angeles, because that was my home for so long.

Yeah.

Whenever I go back, it does not feel like. I do not feel that vibe. But is that me? Is that my you know, are there people that are, like, thriving and loving LA right now with all the craziness and the chaos? And maybe if I was a young man, you know, maybe if I was 25 again and I moved to LA again now, I'd be like, this is crazy. I love this fucked up place. This is awesome. Maybe I would. I probably would, knowing me. But the 57 year old me is like, uh uh, that place is ruined.

Yeah. Well, it seems like. I'm not sure if this happens in the UK as well, especially with the, like, we've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and stuff as of late. Those three poor girls that lost their lives and southport. And it's a huge shame because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar. Right?

Right.

The big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right? Every single politician in the UK condemns them. Less than 5% of people in the UK even sympathize with them. Right. But there's an interesting question that comes out of that, which we're not talking about, which is the line of free speech, right? Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something. Like, it's like you can't be open with your thoughts. And it's been interesting being here and experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment, which is, I think there are free speeches and an absolute, like. Right, in the US or in Europe. Right. You can't share. You can't engage in, like, slander. There's laws against that. You can't share sexually explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of freedom of expression, which might come under freedom of speech, especially if you.

But it's a violation of privacy of the child and it's also endangered them.

Yeah.

So it's against the law. And so it's not as simple as free speech. That takes it to a completely different level because you're talking about images of innocent people.

Well, if you take. Okay, let's take. Take an image. So you don't want to include. If you want to include images, play.

You can't dox people symbols. You can't put, can't make threats. All those things are illegal. You can't threaten violence.

You can't, like, display a nazi flag on your front lawn. Right.

You might be able to do that some places.

Well, it's interesting, in the US, it was 1919, when someone was, the high court Supreme Court legislated against somebody for spreading anti war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the US more generally. And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case. So there are things you might think that free speech is, like, intrinsically valuable, the thing which is more important than anything else.

Right. But I would say that those people were wrong and that if someone did have an opposition to the war, if you want to have a healthy society, you have to let those people express themselves.

Yeah.

Especially when you read about the actual history of the war and you go, hey, maybe this could have been fucking prevented. You know, like, and if people weren't so blindly allegiant to this idea of going over there and fighting.

Yeah. And my intuition is, in that case, that was the wrong way to legislate against. But there are, like, when would you.

Think free speech would be a good thing to stop? Well, this is what I, what would be the boundary?

This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the show. Because comedians are often the strongest defenders of free speech. Right. It's an interesting conversation is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences, the potential to flourish, be happy, and experience pleasure. So I take, even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be, it is still subject to those other things. So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single scenario except when it breaches the harm principle. And so the interesting question we need to ask is, when does something breach the harm principle? So people famously say, like, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theater. If you know by shouting fire that there's going to be a stampede and two people will die. Thought experiments, pretend those are the rules. You shout fire, two people will die. Should we punish that person for doing it, knowing that those two people would die?

And you sort of go, I think it's fairly reasonable. It doesn't have to be 100% the case. We just need it to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person. So in that case, you might go, yes, so it breaches the harm principle. John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think he's like a corn dealer and saying, like, you can write in a newspaper like the corn dealer is like, you know, he's the worst. He's exploiting us all. That's the reason we're hungry. But then he says, you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealer's house. And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky because there's more. The harm's not as direct.

Right.

But what we're seeing is public intellectuals who, back to our conversation earlier, like, I'm a part of this team that just defends free speech no matter what. Like, even the most valiant defender of free speech might go, don't shout fire in a crowded theater. One of your comedians actually said, I'd shout theater in a crowded fire. I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire if there was one. But when, you know, when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxis and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel, let's burn it down, I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as you can.

Well, that's inciting violence. That's inciting violence. That's illegal.

So in that case, I think. But people aren't saying that. Right? We're just stuck in this. These sweeping, snappy statements, which are. It's like all Wells 1984. It's like, it's either anti free speech. It's like, no, tell me what kind of free speech you want to defend and why you want to defend it, or else we could carry on being stuck in this.

Well, the way Elon treats Twitter is whatever is illegal. You can't do things that are illegal. You can't threaten people. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Those are things that are illegal.

He legislates again, you can't do things that are illegal.

You can have very controversial and unpopular opinions, and you're allowed to do that. And that was what got you banned from Twitter before. But the problem with that is, we found out through Twitter that they expanded that and kept expanding that to include some things that a lot of people disagreed with, like transgender athletes in sports criticizing them. We get you banned. Criticizing the lockdowns, we get you banned. Saying anything negative about the mRNA vaccines, we get you banned. And then we found out the FBI was involved. They were asking Twitter to censor posts, and there was just so much shit involved that made you go, well, this is not good. This is not free speech. And this is. This is actually dangerous to a society. If you let the government dictate what people can and can't say because they will do it to their best convenience, like what's best for them, what makes their life more convenient, what makes their, their job easier, what makes it easier to control people, tell people what to do and punish people that don't listen, because if you lock them up, then you will automatically incentivize other people to toe the line.

And that is what got scary. And that's what's scary about government controlled speech. And I think that's what people are scared about in the UK. When you see people saying things they shouldn't be saying, but they're saying them on Facebook and they're getting arrested and they're doing like 20 months in jail.

I haven't found that might well be a more fringe example. I think it's like 20. Maybe, Jamie, you can live. Fact check me here. Maybe up to about 30 ish people have been prosecuted for stuff they've put online in the UK recently.

I think 3000 have been arrested.

3000 arrested.

No, it's a. It's a very strange story, right? It's a. It's like what that encompasses. It's like too broad, right? Is that what it is? It got repeated over and over again for, like, the last few years. A few people might have been arrested. There's a really egregious example recently of a video. There's a video of a guy handing down a sentence to a man who put something up on Facebook. You know, I think. I think bad behavior should be. It should be rightfully, everyone in the community that agrees it's bad behavior, they should shun that person. They should shun them, not want to connect with them, not engage with them.

You know, we've got the right wing thug in our country. He's not in our country. I think he's in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment. Tommy Robinson, who's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence.

I'm not aware of him. I know the name, but I'm not aware of his history.

Well, saying, like, we should shun people. He tweeted something along the lines recently. I'm going to paraphrase it. And Jamie, I'd be really grateful if you could fact check this one because I might be liable if I get the wrong. He essentially said that people in Palestine are, or the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists, inbreds and parasites. And given what's going on like there right now, right. I don't know anyone on the right. Who thinks, who uses such obviously degrading language? And that person's not being shunned. He's having more attention than ever. He's got his record outreach right now.

So that's not illegal, what he said.

I'm not sure if it's illegal.

Did he say it online or did he say it in a statement somewhere?

He said it on a tweet. Oh, he said, yeah, he put it on a tweet. Replying to somebody at some point. Again, as far as my knowledge, that's roughly what was said. I should say that it sucks that.

There'S idiots that will agree with those kind of thinking.

Well, what's going on? This is an interesting, I'm pretty liberal when it comes to platforming and speaking to people who we disagree with. I think it's a real shame. We get really polarized when we stop talking to people we disagree with.

Yeah, I agree.

And there's very, very, very few people I won't have conversation with. But when we're continually platforming someone like him in a moment like this, that does raise questions. And Peterson's had him on once. I think he's having arm again recently. And I sort of think the opposite of.

Is Peterson aware of the things that he said?

I'd be surprised.

Do you have contact with Jordan?

Yeah, I'd be surprised if he, we.

Should tell him and see what he says about it.

I mean, a quick when, when Tommy Robinson says something like, the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country, a quick Google would reveal to Jordan that, like, that's not true in terms of, like, the big, big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things. Rutger Bregman.

But is there an increase in violence?

Well, take Rutger Bregman. Did you know the utopia for realists guy? He's a big proponent of universal basic. Incoming.

Find out what Tommy Robinson's quote obviously was before we go on so we don't get in trouble.

He's got a lot of quotes that.

Are apparently, and I was trying to find that. Just try to just Google that exact. What he said. I tried to, and I wasn't coming up. I'll show you what I was getting. Okay, show us. Show us what you're getting. Just tweets from Cyprus viewed 50 million times a day. Boys got a face you fucking hate, doesn't he? He's got a face. From Peaky Blinders. Yeah, by all of the Peaky Blinders. He looks like that. Right. So what do we got here? What did he say, that specific tweet? This was something about a stabbing somewhere. What? It's. But what does he say again? It doesn't even say what he says.

No. Let me see if I can tweet. It has a partial quote. I can see if I can. I can dig it at the same time.

Okay, good. Look for it so you can find it. I just says claim. Far right. Protesters have stabbed by month, have been stabbed by Muslims in Stokes, in a post that received 2.7 million views. Staffordshire police said that two men had been hit by an object, but no stabbings had been reported. Yeah, that's not the same one.

I'll just turning this on now as we're going. The big point here, though, when we're looking at this, is something Steven Pink is always emphasizing. Right. The idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like he does, and cherry picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas. We should look at the big data. Rucker Bregman points out wonderfully in his book Utopia for realists that people that come to the US, for example, first generation migrants, are less likely to commit crimes than the native population. The same is true for their children as well in the US and the same stories in the UK. They're less likely to be filling up our prisons.

Is this people that come over illegally as well as people that migrate legally? Is it all the same? Is it lumped in together?

It might be lumped in together. That's in. Again, we fact check.

And I think the fear that people have is people that are coming here or coming to your country or going wherever illegally and altering the culture. Right.

Yeah.

Not assimilating. Not adopting the english language, not adopting the culture.

I'm gonna have to.

It's okay.

That's multitask.

No worries. But. I see. So you think that that kind of talk should be illegal?

I think during the violence upon people who are Muslim in the UK, attacks on mosques, attacks on people's lives, and.

The current state in Palestine, that even if he's completely wrong, I'm not sure.

Saying I'm gonna be my. My honest, full. My fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal. I don't know if that kind of dehuman is like. It's morally abhorrent. It's something we should reject and condemn. But should it be legislated against? I'm not sure. What's clear, though, is that people, to me, that are sharing those ideas, people who are platforming, that person helping that idea spread are doing something, again, that doesn't have to be legislated against, but we should condemn as morally wrong as well. We should say, you ought not do that because you should know that that's not.

That's reasonable. And what we should do is, I mean, the age old anecdote is you combat bad speech with good speech. You know, you combat bad speech with better speech. You have those people debate people that can lay things out.

Yeah.

In a way that it makes a very compelling argument. They're incorrect, and then people can watch. Remember when I was a kid, my high school had a debate between Barney Frankenhein, who was a. I don't remember. I don't think he was a congressman at the time. I don't know, Massachusetts. But he was like, I think he was the first openly gay politician in the country. And he was debating a guy from the moral majority who was this right wing group at the time. So this is like the 1980s. And I was in high school, and the guy had, like an american flag pin on his lapel and.

Yeah.

And, you know, he spoke and said all of his stuff. And then Barney Frank kind of annihilated him. And it was interesting for me. It was fascinating to watch these two. And no one booed or hissed or pulled fire alarms. They let this one guy speak his mind, and then they let this other guy speak his mind. And we got a sense of who was correct. And in my eyes at the time, Barney Frank was correct. And, you know, I was probably 15 years old. I was like, wow, this is kind of cool. Like, it was interesting to see this person, just with his view of the world, make the other person's view of the world look foolish and make his very sort of rigid definitions of what should and should not be legal look preposterous.

Yeah, I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people. Nowhere near as the amount of people that you've managed to interview over the last. How long you been doing this? How many years?

15 years.

15. And like, three or four times a week over 15 years as well. So a hell of a lot. So I've been going nine years. But interviews, like once a month or something. Right. So nowhere near the amount of people. And what I thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something. We don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases, to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that might be needed.

Right.

And so I wonder if you've got any views on, like, what the moral responsibility is or what the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be. Let's just, like, say, read up on, like, a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something. Because I know you've been, like, there's been previous things, right, where people have said that you've, like, you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail.

Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem.

Yeah.

You know, it depends, like, if someone's known for a very specific stance that they take on something that I don't agree with. Yeah, I will look into that, and I will try to look at it from their perspective as well. I'll try to find out, how did this person come to this conclusion? Why do they believe this? What is the best way to approach this? How do I do this civilly? So I get the most out of them? I want them to feel comfortable while they're explaining this. I don't want them to feel pressured and combative. You know, when people are involved in arguments and combative situations, they get very tense, and it's very difficult. Then it becomes you against them. It's like I try to, like, get as far away from that sort of sensibility as possible and just have the. I just want to. Just tell me what you think, and I'll try to steel man it. I'll try to, like, figure it out, and then I'll say what I think.

Yeah.

And I have to know where they stand first. I have to really understand, like, why. Why they come to that conclusion. I've had some disagreements with people about some pretty, pretty important issues, and that you, you gotta let that person express themselves. You got to figure out. But the beautiful thing about a podcast, as opposed to almost any other form of Media, is that no one is telling us what to do. It's just you and me having this conversation. We only met for, like, ten minutes before we sat down, and then we talked for three fucking hours, which is.

Crazy how long we've been going for 3 hours now. Yeah.

So it's like, it's an interesting way to see how a person views the world.

Yeah. Well, I, I think maybe so what we do to avoid, like, that problem, because we're just doing philosophy as well, right? We're just doing a philosophy podcast, and we say to them, we're just sticking with like, this book or this paper. And so we can, we've got like four researchers working on this, and we know all the ins and outs of it like the back of our hand, right? So we can give like, the audience member the best analysis they can get without having to go and do it themselves. When you're doing like such a broad project like this on so many different topics, it's impossible to be able to do that. But I wonder if you think genuinely interesting, curious to hear your thoughts on it. Is a better situation for our public discourse, a media in which we've got lots of different, let's say podcasts, for example. Lots of different podcasts, lots of different hosts who all specialize in a different thing in order to analyze. Or do you think that having this general, public facing podcast, which has not an area of speciality with people talking about things which are, you know, in some cases dangerous, right?

Or like, are important, at least like, is this, is the situation better when we have lots of hosts on lots of topics and lots of podcasts, or is it when we've got a general podcast which is covering all of these topics? Right.

Well, first of all, we have lots of podcasts and lots of hosts. This is, this one's the most popular for some strange reason. But that's not my fault. I mean, I can't alter it because it's too popular. That's ridiculous. Like, one of the reasons why it's popular is I talk to a bunch of different people about a bunch of different things. And some people, I am just eternally curious and I have no understanding of it at all, and I want it laid out to me. And then other things I have very strong opinions about, and I want to know why a person thinks differently or how they came to their conclusions, or maybe there's a person that I really admire. I want to understand their mindset. Maybe it's someone who's got some very fascinating, esoteric information and I want to learn it. You know, it's, the podcast is entirely based on what I'm interested in, so that's how I do it. And there's a lot of podcasts that are experts in a very particular field, and they talk only about that very particular thing. The thing about that is you're not going to get as many people you listen to it, but you'll get millions of people listening to this conversation between you and me.

So the benefit of that is then this ignites someone's curiosity. And if we only do a cursory examination of whatever the subject is, if I really not qualified to really delve into it, now this person is excited about it and they can expand. Check out your podcast, other podcasts. It's good for the greater ecosystem of podcasts and just of general discourse.

So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, I've just listened to this person for two or 3 hours. I should leave my church or like, and live in the middle of nowhere.

You should do whatever you feel like doing, and I think that's the best message that I can give to people. You should live your life in the way that you want to live your life. And if you are inspired and motivated, and if something changes in the way you view the world based on a conversation that some people have on a podcast, and that's good, that's good. As long as it's beneficial to you, it's good. And we should all sort of try to acquire these conversations and experiences with people because it elevates our own understanding of ourselves and how we interact with each other.

Maybe if someone listens to this and decides to quit the job and start.

I don't think.

I just don't want someone to give.

Up and think, it's not your fault.

It's all meaning, no, like counting grass.

Instead of helping, not your fault. If they do that, it's not your fault. Like, that's their path for whatever reason. And I don't know, I don't know. I don't know why anybody chooses what they. I don't know how you think. I don't know what things smell like to you. I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing that your view of the world is similar to my view of the world. And that's just a guess. And it can't be because so many people like art that I think is dog shit. So many people listen to music that I can't stand. Obviously, we're getting different things out of this world, obviously. And I don't. I don't mind that. I think that's a good thing. I think it's a good thing that there's a lot of stuff that I don't like. There's a lot of people that don't like me. Great.

Good.

And the more popular you get, the greater surface area of people that hate.

You will be well, I'm fundamentally here for a reason, which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just like, things that are underrepresented in, like, legacy media, like, especially, like, non human animal rights. I find that, you know, when I've tried to talk about it and whether it's BBC or podcasts and stuff, that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive, like two weeks ago, I was removed from a panel, which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending on human animal rights. So they changed the topic of it. That's because, well, they don't want to upset people who are in the audience who consume these. That's pretty stupid. And it's sort of like stupid.

It's a conversation.

Yeah, precisely. And that's a. That's a shame as well with agnosticism, too. Like, there's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious. And we've got this public conversation, which is you're either like the pope or Jordan Peterson, or you're like one of the four horsemen of new atheism and leaves out all of these people in the middle who was, like, trying to search for that.

You're either antifa or you're a proud boy. Yeah, we're nuts. We're nuts, but we're sorting through it. Listen, man, thank you very much for being here. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was a lot of fun. Tell people how they can find your stuff, website, all that stuff.

Cool. So if you just search jack Symes philosophy, you can get to my site where everything sort of is. The podcast I do is the panpsycast. It means casting thought everywhere in reverse. And that's all about all kinds of philosophy. Two books out this year, philosophers on guard.

Two in a year. Damn.

Both on God as well. So first one's philosophers on God talking about existence, and the second one is defeating the evil God challenge in defense of God's goodness. So I spend that book defending the existence of God despite being an agnostic. So that's. That doesn't show that I don't have a horse in the race. I've logically driven.

I don't know why of us should have a horse on the right. Thank you very much.

I appreciate you.

Bye, everybody.