In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand sits down with intellectual, neurologist, writer and thinker, Sam Harris, creator of the Waking Up With Sam Harris app and host of the podcast, to discuss the current state of American politics and what we can do to fix it. We talk about the current political climate, how to deal with it, and how we can all work together to make it better for all of us. We also talk about Sam's journey to becoming a BJJ black belt, and what it means to be a black belt in the martial arts. And, of course, there's a lot more... Stay Free with Russell Brand is a great opportunity to get out there and get involved in the community, and it's a very good opportunity to become a member of the community! In this video, you're going to see the future, and in this video you'll get to become an awakened wonder by pressing the red button at the bottom of your screen right now to experience things like that! You're gonna love all of it! - R.I.P. - Russell Brand - Stay Free, W.E.W.A.M. (pronounced "WAKE UP, WEEK'E-DUH-WEEK) - Logo by Courtney DeKorte & Co. - This episode is sponsored by Rumble, Inc., a company that makes some fantastic free memberships! If you like what you see on Rumble, give us a RUMBLE, press the R-RUMBLE! and become an Awakened Wonder by becoming an AWAKEDWondered Wonder! - R-WON'T YOU'RE GOING TO SEE THE FUTURE? by becoming a WONDERED Wonder! by R-E-WILL YOU? RATE $5, RATE 5 STARS and get 5% off your first R-UPCOMING PRICING $5 or $10 OFF YOUR FIRST MONTH GET A SUBSCRIBE TO BUY $5 OR $10 OR $15 OFF $25 OR $20 OFF $50 OR $25 OFF $35 OR $50, VIP PROMOBSELLOWING $25, FREE PROMOTED? R-A-WELCOME? - FREE PRODUCED TO OUR FACEBOOK GROUP AND PATREON?
00:31:02.000This has gone viral for a reason because it was a great conversation but if you stay all the way to the end to the bit in Locals you'll see that we meditate together and even after quite a hot conversation we find peace together.
00:31:14.000Also there's a fantastic episode of Here's the News where we look at Biden's new drug negotiations and whether or not he really beat Big Pharma You won't believe Kamala Harris's grandstanding speech and how it contrasts with the muted regulations and legislations that have been passed.
00:32:00.000I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way.
00:32:05.000How do we get beyond this cavalcade of my experts versus your experts, my flag versus your flag?
00:32:09.000By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.
00:32:16.000There's a methodology by which we would resolve those differences and this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.
00:32:26.000The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models.
00:32:29.000No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable.
00:32:34.000Let's have a little look around the Wuhan Laboratory for Infectious Diseases and check out how it's funded and how it's regulated.
00:32:42.000But Sam, more important than that, mate.
00:32:44.000These are domains of relative knowledge.
00:32:47.000Do you agree we should start by addressing the most powerful interests in the world that seem to benefit more than ordinary people?
00:32:55.000Energy companies benefit when there's an energy crisis.
00:32:58.000The military-industrial complex benefits when there's a war.
00:33:21.000When I met you, I remember in LA, you introduced me to Hiron Gracie, who became my BJJ teacher, along with my teacher Chris Clear over here in the UK.
00:33:35.000I'm now a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
00:33:40.000No, I have not rolled since COVID actually.
00:33:44.000Yeah, since I mean, I was racking up a bunch of injuries.
00:33:48.000And just, you know, at some point it seemed like a choice between aging somewhat gracefully and not, you know, I just was getting neck injuries and hip injuries.
00:34:00.000And so I just, I mean, and through no fault of Hiron's, obviously, I mean, he's, he's the perfect person to roll with.
00:34:06.000It's just, I was, it was just gravity at a certain point is not your friend.
00:34:13.000I w it's, it's just one of the great losses of my life that I'm, I'm not currently rolling and I keep, Fantasizing about going back, but it does worry me to go back.
00:34:27.000Right now, my knee hurts a little bit, my left knee, and my left shoulder hurts a little bit.
00:34:32.000What I try to do when rolling is, very near the beginning of the session, establish a rapport with my opponent that I hope will translate into them, on some level, holding back slightly.
00:34:45.000Yeah, well, I mean, listen, at some point, I was only rolling with Huron, right?
00:34:50.000So, I mean, obviously, he has nothing to prove.
00:34:56.000He was the perfect teacher and grappling partner, but it's just bad luck.
00:35:04.000I ascribe it to bad luck and bad genes.
00:35:07.000Mate, as this online space continues to evolve, the relationship that you have with Jordan Peterson, where two people with opposing views, with perfectly valid perspectives on both sides, has somehow been mapped onto the entire internet space, but perhaps without the congeniality and goodwill that I assume exists.
00:35:29.000I wonder what your fears are as we increasingly find ourselves in some irresoluble cultural polemic that seems to be fuelled by a will to impose, centralise, to accrue authority, to defeat without grace the opponent.
00:35:52.000How do you feel about this advancing space and how can we engage in conversations with people we don't agree with In good faith.
00:36:00.000How can we take on board the views of those we disagree with and advance a mutual conversation?
00:36:06.000Or do we just accept now that centralised democracies such as America and the UK are finished and we have to start moving towards decentralised cultural and political models because there's just too much agitation elsewise?
00:36:21.000Well, I share your concern about all this.
00:36:24.000I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way, but I'm just going to sketch out what I think the remedy is.
00:36:34.000I think we need to collectively develop the ability to worry about more than one thing at a time, right?
00:36:43.000So what I keep confronting are people who focus on one part of a troubling dichotomy.
00:36:52.000Take the tension between censorship, which I know you're worried about, and misinformation.
00:36:59.000Right now, I would acknowledge that free speech is almost an intrinsic good.
00:37:05.000It's certainly the best error-correcting mechanism we have, and that we should protect it at almost any cost, certainly politically.
00:37:14.000And yet there is this tension between misinformation And really waking up in a society that's one day ungovernable on the basis of misinformation with a way where you just cannot converge on a fact-based discussion about anything because people are so siloed into their delusional echo chambers.
00:37:31.000And on the other side, our efforts to correct for misinformation, which increasingly look like censorship and increasing their intention with, again, the almost intrinsic good of free speech, which we protect much better here in America than you do over there in the UK.
00:37:50.000So what I'm continually finding are people, you know, we can talk about the left and right poles of the political spectrum as shorthand, it is not perfectly accurate now, but people on the left and the right can only focus on one of these bright shiny objects at a time, right?
00:38:07.000They're only worried about misinformation or they're only worried about censorship.
00:38:12.000They're only worried about wokeness or they're only worried about Trumpism.
00:38:15.000They're only worried about Uh, you know, respect for tradition or, you know, innovating on everything.
00:38:22.000So there's all of these things that are, that represent trade-offs that, that where there, it's not a landscape of, of very clear distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil, but we, where we just have to figure out how to tune things and, uh, you know, or a trade-off between individualism and a commitment to the common good.
00:38:42.000I mean, like if you, if you privilege individualism above everything else, You begin to lose your ability to create a society that any sane individual would want to live in, right?
00:38:53.000So it's like if we respect your right to put smoke in the air above everything else, we have undermined my right to breathe clean air, right?
00:39:03.000There's some amount of regulation I have to impose on you so that your enterprise doesn't fuck it up for everybody.
00:39:09.000And so again, there's a tension here and what I continually find I mean, it feels like 95% of people can focus on one problem and can't dignify any mention of the opposing trade-offs with even a single sane sentence, right?
00:39:30.000And our online space has devolved into a polarized conversation about this landscape of trade-offs.
00:39:39.000I agree with you that these media silos are contributing to the inability to take on the perspective of the opposing side.
00:39:49.000And I think no one's more guilty of creating these spaces than what are commonly colloquially known as mainstream media spaces.
00:39:56.000Just today we were Looking at a broadcast on MSNBC where it was openly posited and quite enthusiastically so that were Trump to win the election in 2024 that he would immediately declare himself president for life and therefore any opportunity to indict or indeed imprison Donald Trump will be lost forever.
00:40:18.000So nothing less than the future of democracy hung in the balance in the forthcoming 2024
00:41:56.000Now, these ideas are precisely the kind of things that I turn to meditation for, Sam, and I know that you're here in part to talk in depth about your meditation app, which I admire and I love and I use.
00:42:07.000And I feel that There's precisely this kind of access to inner terrains that might provide us the ability to move beyond these spaces.
00:42:15.000One thing I'd also like to challenge, if I may, is that the distinction between left and right devolving into periphery versus centre, to use Martin Gurry's terms there from his book Revolt of the Public, is significant. What we have now is anti-authoritarianism
00:43:42.000We need to figure out how to reboot our institutions so that they are trustworthy, so that they're worthy of trust, and so that people actually trust them.
00:43:50.000And what I'm worried about now, given the online tools we have, and the democratization of everything, and this almost, you know, apocalypse of contrarianism, is that even if we had trustworthy institutions across the board, we couldn't get a majority of people to trust them on any one point.
00:44:12.000Certainly not a point that is politically polarizing, right?
00:44:16.000So if we have a new pandemic, how do we get 90% of people to trust the mainstream medical message about what the facts on the ground really are?
00:44:29.000And how do we get people to trust Government, public health organizations, as they give us up-to-the-minute information insofar as they know it.
00:44:39.000And again, the basis for distrust is totally understandable because we witnessed one pratfall after another during COVID.
00:44:47.000But what I'm saying is that we need to get to, we absolutely need, and to speak locally in the U.S.
00:44:57.000The fact that we feel that we can't trust these organizations is absolutely corrosive to the maintenance of a healthy society.
00:45:07.000And it certainly will put us in a position to fail once again to respond intelligently to the next pandemic.
00:45:15.000And what I worry about, again, my concerns about COVID have, apart from the first few months when no one really knew what the hell was going on, My concerns about COVID have always been that it's a kind of dress rehearsal that we were obviously failing, right?
00:45:31.000and I worry that we're not learning the lessons of that failure, because I think it's just
00:45:35.000inevitable that we will one day have a pandemic that's quite a bit worse, and we will need to
00:45:40.000be able to respond with coherence and learn to cooperate at a global scale, and I'm not sure
00:45:49.000we're putting ourselves in a position to do that. I do recall both in our nation and in yours, Sam,
00:45:54.000an incredible moment of goodwill at the commencement of the pandemic period, where people
00:46:00.000sort of intuitively understood that we were facing something unprecedented.
00:46:04.000And indeed, the principles of every measure, whether it's masking or lockdown or medications, is human life is, if not sacred, I'm aware of who I'm talking to, certainly valuable in a somewhat unique way, which if not sacred... I like sacred.
00:46:18.000You can use sacred with me without apology.
00:46:20.000Because if it isn't sacred, we're going to have to work out what the hell it is that makes human life so worthy of preservation.
00:46:26.000So we'll go with sacred for the purposes of this conversation.
00:46:30.000And any personal imposition is as nothing compared to our collective value and our joint duty to protect the vulnerable.
00:46:38.000But of course, what we saw, and these are just a few points I'm tracking, and I know that you're a busy man, but I'm sure you're broadly aware of the kind of media that I engage with and convey, is that Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer, said it will be reprehensible if there were any profits made by Pfizer and
00:46:52.000I think we all know that there were profits made by Pfizer that the that their
00:46:56.000legal indemnity for any potential vaccine injury caused a lot of suspicion. The
00:47:01.000very fact that the FDA is significantly funded by the pharmaceutical industry
00:47:04.000causes a great many people concern skepticism and cynicism. There are
00:47:08.000figures within the CDC and NIH that have a well this is to one of our viewers
00:47:13.000here on the locals platform Primal Collins says you know that to get the kind
00:47:17.000of trust that we require you would want no revolving door between
00:47:20.000corporations and in this instance big pharma and if you are right and you know who's
00:47:27.000It's certainly across infinite time you are, that there is another, that there will be another pandemic.
00:47:34.000I suppose, personally, what I would want is a real, transparent, candid mea culpa about this is how we handled it.
00:49:01.000I think we would see something like a bell curve distribution of assumptions, and we would find it very difficult to agree even just about that simple, you know, propositional claim.
00:49:12.000Just how many people died from COVID, right?
00:49:14.000We're suddenly going to have a conversation about the difference between dying from COVID and with COVID, and can we, you know, and were people perversely incentivized to report deaths that were, you know, one versus the other.
00:49:26.000But what you pointed to in your comments about pharma there are A set of perverse incentives that we have to worry about.
00:49:34.000And so the profit motive in pharma is something that many of us, probably all of us when we look at it, are uncomfortable with.
00:49:45.000But it's also not clear how to incentivize drug discovery in a way that works, that dissects out that perverse incentive, right?
00:49:54.000So yes, I was totally uncomfortable with the idea of a pharmaceutical company Enjoying windfall profits during a pandemic and racing vaccines to market, knowing that billions of dollars were waiting to hit the cash register.
00:50:10.000It's easy to see what could go wrong with that.
00:50:13.000And again, this is why we need an FDA and a CDC and other regulatory organizations we can trust.
00:50:18.000And your revolving door comment is totally valid, except The issue is there are only so many domain experts, right?
00:50:26.000So what sort of jobs do they get when they transition, right?
00:50:29.000And who do we want to be doing this research and to be deciding about regulation apart from people who know all of the details of this research?
00:50:42.000Let's take it off COVID for a second because that's so highly politicized.
00:50:45.000But take the fact that We as a society desperately need to create a new generation of antibiotics, right?
00:50:55.000For as long as you and I have been alive, we've lived in this bright, shiny moment where infectious disease has been radically curtailed by us having a very solid armamentarium of antibiotics that work.
00:51:13.000If the first antibiotic doesn't work, there's one behind that, and there's one behind that, and there's one behind that.
00:51:18.000But in the last, I don't know, 25, 30 years or so, we have witnessed this growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria And we know we don't have a good pipeline for developing new antibiotics.
00:51:32.000The reason why we don't have a good pipeline is because the drug companies can't be appropriately incentivized to do the work and to spend the money to develop these drugs because this next antibiotic, you know, the seventh antibiotic in line, when all the other ones fail, when you get some weird lung infection, right?
00:51:50.000And you've gone through six antibiotics and they haven't worked and we got one left, right?
00:51:55.000That drug, whose name no one can pronounce, that is a drug that maybe you will take once in your life for 10 days, right?
00:52:03.000It's not like Prozac, where you can take it for the rest of your life, or Viagra, where you can take it.
00:52:07.000It's something that that most people are never going to take, and those of us
00:52:11.000who are unlucky enough to need it will take it once for 10 days, right? So there's not enough
00:52:16.000profit in this thing, and it takes a billion dollars to discover this drug, right, and bring it
00:52:21.000to market. So how do you get companies to do this? And what...
00:52:27.000And if we were going to make governments do this, how badly would they handle that project, right?
00:52:33.000So, again, this is a problem of incentives and trade-offs, and we have to figure out how to untangle all this in a way that preserves public trust in institutions, and it is a hard problem.
00:52:45.000It's astonishing to me that it was once the role of the left to offer very aggressive critiques of those kind of models and now they are entirely bereft of them whether it's on the subject of war or the sort of immersive and disruptive power of Big Pharma.
00:52:59.000It no longer seems to be there you know whilst earlier on I did offer a alternative to those labels as we discussed.
00:53:06.000It seems to me that any attacks on the militarism, particularly with regard to Ukraine-Russia conflict,
00:53:13.000and the role of pharma and corporations more broadly, seems to be coming from the right.
00:53:19.000And that's sort of extraordinary for me with my own particular political and cultural heritage.
00:53:23.000And I'd also like to add, while I've got this opportunity, that I take neither Prozac nor Viagra on a daily basis.
00:53:49.000Why are we seeing this rise in populism?
00:53:51.000If you want to see how Sam's going to respond to that question, click on the link.
00:53:54.000Also, Sam's going to be giving away access to his Waking Up With Sam Harris meditation app, which is fantastic, so join us.
00:54:02.000over on Rumble. If you're watching us on Rumble, press the red button and join us in our locals
00:54:05.000conversation and consider becoming an awakened one that we get access to all sorts of additional
00:54:10.000content and for a limited time only, a pair of underpants, which I will be offering you
00:54:15.000in a moment or two, Sam. But first, I want to get your perspective on the rise of populism
00:54:20.000and what that suggests about the decline in establishment trust, which we've touched on.
00:54:26.000I feel like, you know, like Trump's a runaway leader in his own pie. I feel like 80 percent
00:54:31.000of Republicans want to vote for Trump and something like 19 or 20 percent would vote
00:54:34.000for RFK in spite of the lack of mainstream media coverage of his campaign. So you have
00:54:40.000a significant number of Americans from across the political spectrum. Narrow, though, I
00:54:43.000would contest that political spectrum is when you consider what's possible if you're a regular
00:54:47.000meditator. What does this tell us about how bereft we've become of alternatives and what
00:54:53.000new ideas, what new conversations and what new alliances need to emerge in this new media
00:55:00.000space and how this could evolve into new political movements.
00:55:02.000But perhaps if we start with what you think underwrites the sudden surge in populism, whether it's left or right wing.
00:55:14.000Well, I think there are a few variables.
00:55:16.000One is this siloing into echo chambers that has been enabled by the Internet broadly, but social media in particular.
00:55:24.000I think it's possible to stay in a silo now in a way that it simply wasn't a generation before, even though, yes, there was There was an opportunity to have your biases enshrined in just how you decided to use the media, you know, in the past.
00:55:44.000But it's just gotten worse and worse to the point where there's almost no Darwinian corrective to misinformation and lies now.
00:55:53.000Like you really can swim in an ocean of lies for as long as you want and nothing from the outside is going to intrude or certainly need not intrude.
00:56:03.000And so you have these hermetically sealed Spaces of information and misinformation.
00:56:09.000And so we're not converging on anything like a fact-based discussion about anything of importance now.
00:56:19.000And so you take somebody like Trump, who to my eye is It's not an exaggeration to say that he is the most relentlessly dishonest person we have ever seen in public life.
00:56:34.000He just lies at a velocity that doesn't even make any sense.
00:56:40.000Many of his lies aren't even self-serving.
00:56:43.000It's just this automaticity that he distorts the truth.
00:56:48.000You know, he'll contradict himself in the span of 30 seconds, and he has cultivated an audience that simply doesn't care, right?
00:56:57.000This is not an audience that likes him despite his failures of personal integrity.
00:57:03.000It's an audience that mostly likes him because he is this chaos machine, right?
00:57:07.000That he's this kind of wrecking ball that is swinging through our institutions and our political norms and disrupting everything.
00:57:18.000So the question really is, why do so many millions of Americans want to see everything disrupted in this way?
00:57:25.000And it does come back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about distrust in institutions, some of which has been well-earned.
00:57:35.000I think the role that wealth inequality and a sense of loss of opportunity is playing is rarely remarked upon.
00:57:43.000It's amazing to me how little We grapple on either side of the political aisle that we grapple with the implications of wealth inequality now.
00:57:51.000And so I think that's that is a certainly a variable.
00:57:56.000But it's not it's not a straightforward one.
00:57:59.000There are a lot of people who are not, you know, not at the bottom of our economic stratum that, you know, support Trump or support the disruption of everything and support this kind of populism on the right.
00:58:14.000I think it's I mean, for me, to the bright line with Trump and whatever you want to say about his character, and I've said many things about, you know, I've banged on for hours about Trump to the boredom of millions.
00:58:27.000For me, there was a bright line that was crossed that I think everyone who cares about the future of democracy and the maintenance of American democracy in particular should acknowledge.
00:59:11.000You know, to the contrary, what was happening is he was trying to steal an election all the while claiming it was being stolen from him.
00:59:18.000Believe that aside, even a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump has to admit that in the run up to the election, literally six months before the election was run, we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
00:59:35.000Now that single act, I would say, it was so corrosive.
00:59:40.000It was such a violation of our most sacred political norms, our most sacred and useful political norm, right?
00:59:46.000This is something that even Ronald Reagan, somebody who used to be a darling of everyone right of center, acknowledged.
00:59:56.000He said this somewhere in the late 70s.
01:00:00.000He said, the greatest miracle of our country Is the peaceful transfer of power is the thing that makes us the envy of the world.
01:00:07.000It's the thing that if you're sitting in some, you know, developing dictatorship.
01:00:13.000Outside America's borders, it is the basis for your envy of America, or at least it was traditionally, that we could accomplish a peaceful transfer of power every four years despite our political differences.
01:00:25.000As far as I know, this is the first time in American history we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
01:00:31.000And so that was such a dangerous desecration of our political landscape that I think It should make it impossible to support Trump.
01:00:40.000Whatever else you think about any other political figure, whatever you think about Hunter Biden's laptop, there's nothing else that rises to that level of concern.
01:00:49.000And that has always been at the center of my argument against endorsing Trump in any way.
01:00:59.000Whilst the sort of ongoing questioning around the Biden family business deals, I'm sure to anyone who's already encamped within one of those partisan scenarios will just cling to their own rhetoric and their own pre-existing beliefs.
01:01:18.000This is what my response is, which is Like live tautology, actually, because I'm going to give you the response now.
01:01:25.000It's that now Biden is in office and this inequality is continuing and this polarisation is continuing and we are not seeing anyone say, look, we got carried away with Russiagate and that's probably really damaged your trust.
01:01:39.000And over the course of the pandemic, we've seen a lot of shifting narratives and we have not been as transparent as we ought to have been.
01:01:46.000And our lack of trust in institutions, as you have said, Sam, is something that needs to be addressed.
01:01:51.000And I recognise now that this ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is hemorrhaging popularity and many of you query, is this the humanitarian war that many claim in order to stop the criminal Putin?
01:02:08.000American wars, like the one in Iraq, like the one in Afghanistan, like the one in Korea, like all American wars up till now, actually motivated by unipolar objectives, a globalist corporate agenda, the advancing of the interests of the military-industrial complex, an explicit plan for BlackRock to rebuild Ukraine post-war, and your tax dollars are paying for it, and the only person that Be it empty oratory and yet more lies, you know, I would,
01:02:36.000you know, I recognize what you, you know, what you're saying about Trump
01:02:39.000and I'm certainly not going to try and change your perspective on anything like that because for me
01:02:42.000None of these figures are the answer. Radical systemic change has to be immediately discussed and we have to
01:02:47.000acknowledge that what's happening in media has to be replicated with what's happening with
01:02:51.000politically immediately We have to find ways of altering our systems of governance
01:02:55.000and having the maximum amount of democracy and access to power for ordinary people rather
01:03:00.000than this continual mudslinging I would say that the only person or one of the few people
01:03:04.000who's willing to say this war must end is Donald Trump if I was to extract the name and the face
01:03:09.000Donald Trump from his rhetoric around the war and how he would bring
01:03:12.000About diplomatic solution. I would say this is the only person who's talking sensibly and I just cannot extract
01:03:17.000everything I know about what happened in 2014 in that coup about what
01:03:22.000Putin has publicly said about if If there's any infringement on Crimea about the
01:03:28.000complexities about ethnicity within Ukrainian territory all of that and with great respect and
01:03:33.000love and Solidarity and support for those suffering in Ukraine for
01:03:36.000the half a million that have died in that conflict so far for me
01:03:40.000Dancing closer and closer to the apocalypse with dubious motivation, claiming once again that it's a humanitarian endeavour, seems outrageous to me.
01:03:50.000And the fact that, for me, the fact that this is the alternative is a much bigger problem than anything Trump has done or said, because I do see him as an outlier, as an extraordinary public figure.
01:04:04.000But I see him primarily, and above all else, a response to institutional corruption, entropy within our institutions.
01:04:11.000When Biden is able to meet with his donors and say nothing will fundamentally change when he succeeds Trump, and as he does succeed Trump, for all of your concerns about the lack of a peaceful transition, I would say that is the problem.
01:04:25.000If Donald Trump dies tomorrow, where are we?
01:04:29.000Addressing the kind of systemic problems that I'm wrestling with, I think, could meaningfully alter the dilemma that you and I are trying to tackle.
01:04:39.000Well, I certainly have different priors than you do about the war in Ukraine, right?
01:04:45.000So, for instance, left out of your analysis is what the Ukrainian people themselves say they want, right?
01:04:51.000So, this is an autonomous, or it was an autonomous, It was attacked by their neighbor, right?
01:05:02.000And certainly it seems that most of the people in Ukraine were not eager to be absorbed by Russia.
01:05:10.000They were eager to maintain their autonomy and their sovereignty as a society.
01:05:16.000Now, I don't consider myself an expert on Ukraine, You know, I've gotten up to speed more or less as everyone else has in recent years.
01:05:26.000I've spoken with purported experts on my podcast several times.
01:05:30.000You know, somebody like Timothy Snyder, who takes a very different view of this war than you just articulated.
01:05:40.000And other people like Ann Applebaum and, you know, I mean, these are people who are subject matter experts.
01:05:46.000But from, I would imagine, your point of view and the point of view of your audience, and certainly Trump's point of view, they're part of the blob that would be arguing for this war in the first place.
01:05:56.000But I would just make a few simple points.
01:05:58.000One is we're not fighting this war, the Ukrainians are, right?
01:06:03.000So it's different than having American boots on the ground fighting this war.
01:06:08.000And I would agree that that is a bright line we really should not cross.
01:06:13.000The other point here is that I think this is, once again, a domain of trade-offs.
01:06:19.000There's not at every moment clearly right and wrong answers to these very hard questions.
01:06:25.000There's a trade-off between giving in to nuclear blackmail and the whims of an authoritarian psychopath, and not giving in to it, and holding the line, even in spite of threats to usher in the end of the world, to hold the line in defense of a rules-based international order.
01:06:49.000Now, whether we get that right or not is of some consequence, right?
01:06:53.000I would argue that It is worth worrying about what Putin's going to do with his nukes as the temperature increases over there.
01:07:03.000But it's also worth worrying that giving in to nuclear blackmail sets a terrible precedent, right?
01:07:09.000So how we navigate that is, again, it's hard.
01:07:15.000And what you want are not Impetuous know-nothings steering the ship at that moment.
01:07:24.000You want actual experts who understand the history of these kinds of conflicts and Understand everyone's relevant capacities and lack thereof.
01:07:35.000Understand what's likely to be bluffing.
01:08:02.000We have a world that can explode on the basis of misinformation and just sheer accident, right?
01:08:11.000Just radars that malfunction can steer us into a nuclear conflict.
01:08:17.000It's terrifying and it's something that we have to figure out how to address, but to treat Putin Like, he's just a normal actor with rational interests who we can deal with like any other leader of a free society.
01:08:43.000And he's an autocrat who's armed with nuclear weapons who threatens to use them.
01:08:48.000It's something that we have to treat as categorically different then we would treat a disagreement between us and France or
01:08:57.000the UK, us being America in this case.
01:09:00.000I do have a concern that pathologising the opponents of the hegemony as maniacs, whether that's Trump or Putin,
01:09:14.000is a shortcut to looking at some of the complex historical arguments,
01:09:17.000notably including the infringement upon the not treaty but deal between the former Soviet Union and America
01:09:25.000not to infringe on former NATO territories.
01:09:29.000And of course the rights of the people of Ukraine, incredibly important, is after all them that are living and dying and their intentions and their desire about their national sovereignty is utmost in everybody's concerns and considerations.
01:09:44.000And like whilst you cited the people you had conversations with, I would cite Jeffrey Sachs, who came on here
01:09:50.000with a couple of other Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, who now would be lucky if they get a job on the internet
01:09:56.000with this curiously altering online space and media space.
01:10:00.000And what I feel has to be our shared obligation, if indeed what we want is to bring people together
01:10:07.000who have currently opposing perspectives, is to critique and address the systems
01:11:03.000What are the relations between military industrial complex and then Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz?
01:11:08.000And now, you know, the hue and flag and mule and elephant may have switched, but I see the same subcutaneous interests apparently running the show.
01:11:17.000But part of what we're discussing more broadly now, Sam, is that You could bring a host of perspectives and opinions and I recognize you have a great deal of academic heft in your own particular area of expertise and I occupy an entirely different space and my intention is I don't think that either political party is the answer.
01:11:39.000The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models that allow us to forego The needless and irresolvable cultural conflicts that are currently dominating this space.
01:11:50.000I think we have to get beyond our judgment of one another for individualism whether that's from a right-wing libertarian perspective or a left-wing identity politics perspective.
01:11:59.000I think we have to find a new way to navigate these spaces so that we can start addressing the truly significant issues that define our times which may be sort of apocalyptic Regardless of how you approach this apocalypse, because that too would have a cultural flavor.
01:12:17.000Yeah, my concern is that the starting point for addressing any of those problems is a fact-based discussion about what the problems themselves are, right?
01:12:27.000So for instance, if you think climate change is a hoax, Right?
01:12:32.000And someone else thinks climate change is one of the most pressing problems we have to address as a society.
01:12:49.000And this, this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.
01:12:57.000I actually feel that even something as complex and hotly contested as that issue could be resolved with this type of dialectic.
01:13:09.000Do you agree that when looking for solutions for problems that affect all of us, we should start Start by addressing the most powerful interests in the world that seem to benefit more than ordinary people.
01:13:21.000Always check what the measures are that are suggested in order to solve these problems.
01:13:26.000If the measures are, we are going to impede the freedoms of ordinary individuals as a priority.
01:13:31.000We are going to tax ordinary people more highly.
01:15:02.000I mean, what you're talking about are the effects of perverse incentives, and it is, to my knowledge, no one has figured out a way to categorically clean this space up, right?
01:15:17.000So again, I'll come back to the very simple and non-politicized example I brought up a few minutes ago.
01:15:25.000Developing the next family of antibiotics, right?
01:15:28.000It is massively resource intensive, right?
01:15:33.000It costs a billion dollars to bring one new antibiotic to market.
01:15:38.000Who do we incentivize to take to that risk?
01:15:41.000Most of these drugs don't pan out, right?
01:15:45.000I would say we need a company like Pfizer to do that work, right?
01:15:49.000The alternative is to say the government should do that work.
01:15:52.000Now, the very same people who who recoil from the perverse incentive of you know windfall profits to Pfizer when we have a you know when we have a pandemic are some of the same people who will laugh at the prospect of of entrusting the government to develop our next generation of medical therapies right there's this there's this well understood principle that
01:16:18.000Capitalism and the profit motive and the free market are among all the terrible ways to incentivize people.
01:16:24.000They're the best ways we've discovered to incentivize creative people to get up early every morning and make the personal sacrifices they have to make so as to do the work that we need them to do to produce this new knowledge generation.
01:16:41.000And so there's some trade-off between Remunerating people for the risks they take and the work they do, and allowing, despite the obvious possibility of weird incentives, allowing for people to get spectacularly wealthy when they get lucky, based on their own intelligence.
01:17:06.000They produce something that's immensely valuable to us, a new antibiotic, I would like to express an alternative, but also outline a few things within your hypothesis.
01:17:13.000alternative to that, we'll by all means express it, but to my knowledge we haven't found one.
01:17:20.000I would like to express an alternative but also outline a few things within your hypothesis.
01:17:24.000No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable. So
01:17:29.000this tells us precisely the mentality that governs at Pfizer. And when indeed there is
01:17:34.000innovation, you might find that it came from BioNTech in Germany, who were funded by the
01:17:40.000German taxpayers. And you might find that Pfizer's profits were garnered by charging
01:17:45.000the American taxpayers, who paid for that Pfizer innovation, apparent Pfizer innovation,
01:17:50.000but actually a BioNTech innovation. Anyway, so what I would say is, it's not like the
01:17:55.000government, you get a bunch of giddy, silly, owned, revolving door, civil servant corruptos
01:19:20.000Sam, we can use this opportunity to transition to the next part of our conversation.
01:19:25.000Sam, I want to talk a little bit about... Actually, Russell, I need to make one point because I think it's very important.
01:19:31.000There's a very strange double standard that we all feel in this space where we think it's somehow morally appropriate for someone to get spectacularly wealthy when they create the new iPhone.
01:20:38.000And yet the person who cures cancer shouldn't get wealthy, right?
01:20:43.000There's something corrupting about getting wealthy in the service of a true benefit to humanity, right?
01:20:52.000The person who's running a A global relief organization that's responding to famines in Africa.
01:21:00.000The CEO of that charity shouldn't be making $5 million a year, but the CEO of General Motors should be, because how else are you going to recruit them?
01:21:09.000And what we have with that double standard We systematically recruit less talented people to solve our most pressing social and scientific problems, right?
01:21:23.000We give every smart college student A forced choice between getting rich by working for Goldman Sachs or following what might might in fact be their their ethical vocation into philanthropy but making a obvious economic sacrifice at the outset no matter how high they get in the organization running
01:21:46.000You know, care or, you know, Doctors Without Borders.
01:21:50.000They know they're not going to get rich because there's a taboo around doing that.
01:21:53.000And again, this is an incentive problem.
01:21:55.000I think we probably want our smartest people working on our hardest problems.
01:22:00.000And it's not obvious how to incentivize them, apart from requiring that they be saints.
01:22:06.000And I think saints are in short supply.
01:22:09.000Because we are not organising society to generate them.
01:22:12.000Now I would say that if we prioritise materialistic models, materialistic rewards and incentivisation models that are predicated on that modality, then we will be doubling down on this false progressivist myth that's driving us ever further towards the kind of apocalypse That both of us, I think, sense he's coming in different ways.
01:22:34.000You for this set of reasons, me for that set of reasons.
01:22:37.000And I would say that, you know, let's face it, the main reason that we're having this conversation, Sam, other than both guys that like having a chat and we love the jujitsu and we can handle a gentle quarrel, Is to talk about your Waking Up app.
01:22:51.000Now, what is the point of meditating if it is simply to make yourself a more efficient unit within a pre-established machine that's only going to evolve along predetermined lines?
01:23:01.000The reason I meditate is because I believe in change.
01:23:03.000I believe in the ability to change myself, to become a better man, to overcome my previous limitations, foibles and flaws.
01:23:09.000And I believe in radical change for society.
01:23:12.000And when I say radical change, I don't mean disruptive change that's going to hurt people.
01:23:17.000Way inclusive progress, where we're able to look at the big picture and say, whilst this aspect of the pandemic period was a reasonable error to have made, this one appears like the type of error that benefited certain institutions and interests.
01:23:30.000Whilst this part of the narrative is being excluded, perhaps in good faith, it seems to me that this is being de-amplified precisely because it does offer a challenge to globalist interests.
01:23:41.000What I want is a society where you are absolutely free to believe whatever you want, I'm free to believe whatever I want, and we Only need to argue where our shared interests are being challenged.
01:23:51.000And I reckon we would find that that's not so many issues as we might assume.
01:23:56.000And one of the ways we might get there, and where surely we agree, is on the subject of meditation and by the method of meditation.
01:24:02.000I meditate in order to access Dimensions, framings, phenomena, frequencies, even space that is inaccessible to me if I remain within the rational, logistical, materialistic part of my mind.
01:24:23.000Well, the main reason to meditate, I think there are two doorways into meditation and just finding it of interest and paying attention to it long enough to discover that there's a there there.
01:24:36.000The first door could just be intellectual curiosity, wanting to know what's real about the nature of the mind.
01:24:44.000If you want to understand yourself better and the nature of your own experience better, it makes sense to pay attention to it.
01:24:52.000And meditation is really just the act of paying close attention to what it's like to be you moment to moment.
01:24:57.000So I think you can get there purely On the basis of intellectual interest, but the most common route, and I think the route that is certainly more
01:25:06.000persuasive to most of us is the doorway of psychological suffering.
01:25:13.000Becoming interested in the mechanics of your own suffering.
01:25:18.000How is it that thoughts about the past or the future can exert this overwhelmingly coercive influence on your mood in the present, right?
01:25:31.000You think about something you regret or that embarrasses you.
01:25:35.000Or you think about something in the future that you're worried about, that produces anxiety.
01:25:40.000How is it that that change in the character of your mind is accomplished?
01:26:54.000It's beautiful and as profound as anything I can imagine discussing.
01:27:01.000If in this realm of consciousness you can discover that you're my entire identity and all our dilemmas and indeed all culture are a kind of construct relevant only within a particular framing or within a particular paradigm, what does that suggest about the nature of consciousness and awareness and do you ever query The perhaps unique status of consciousness, given the number of times it brings us to dead ends of inquiry, i.e.
01:27:32.000where does it come from, what is the significance of the presence of a conscious observer in some particular experimentation, obviously, and most particularly in the instance of the double slit experiments and variations and progressions of that experiment, and the recent Nobel Prize in physics that discovered that there ultimately is no Local reality.
01:27:56.000And I ask this, Sam, in particular in relation to what you've just said, that you can experientially and subjectively free yourself.
01:28:03.000Like, you know, given the last half hour where you and I've gone, oh, I think this, I think that, or the war's this, the war's that, or the pandemic was this, pandemic's that.
01:28:09.000And both of us are saying, ultimately, it is all a construct.
01:28:14.000Surely this will participate in the provision of a solution for the previous bloody 40 minutes.
01:28:25.000I mean, I think much of it is extremely difficult.
01:28:28.000No, but even even in success, I mean, just to take take the examples of success where, you know, I've had, I was lucky enough to study with some of the greatest meditation teachers of the 20th, late 20th century.
01:28:42.000And I spent a lot of time in India and Nepal studying with With people, I mean, I've had teachers who spent 20 years in a cave, right?
01:28:49.000I mean, there's these wonderful Tibetan lamas who in the meditation space are analogous to the, you know, Hiron and Henner we just spoke about in jujitsu, right?
01:28:57.000You get on the mat with Hiron and Henner and you know, you're in the presence of knowledge.
01:29:03.000That you don't have and a kind of refinement of technique and an expertise that took, uh, certainly took 10,000 hours to accomplish.
01:29:11.000And, and it might also require a certain kind of natural talent, right?
01:29:15.000Maybe, you know, maybe not everyone can be as good as, as, uh, the best people.
01:29:21.000Uh, certainly if there's a, there's, if it's like analogous to anything else in human life, there's a range for, for talent.
01:29:30.000Many of these people, I would say all of these people, if I think of the greatest meditation masters I ever studied with, at least one of them might have thought the world was flat, right?
01:29:40.000I mean, these are people who are not educated with respect to 21st century science or politics or anything else we've been touching upon here.
01:29:51.000And there's nothing about getting really good at untying the knot of self that that necessarily gives you specific knowledge about any domain of expertise that we need to explore in order to solve our specific problems, right?
01:30:10.000So to just take like, what does it take to identify A pathogen that's jumping from bats into humans and make that no longer be a problem.
01:30:20.000Or what is it going to take for us to solve the... Have a little look around the Wuhan Laboratory for Infectious Diseases and check out how it's funded and how it's regulated.
01:30:31.000But Sam, more important than that, mate...
01:30:33.000I'm saying these are domains of relative knowledge that have to be solved on their own terms.
01:30:38.000But to use your own argument, if you can undo the knot of self, then surely you will acknowledge that all that takes place on the material plane in this shared cultural space, which is nothing more than an amalgam of our shared cultural and personal experiences, the marketplace of ideas, the Media, meteorology, of all of these colliding entities, all of which have passed through the consciousness of individuals just the same as you and I, be they historic or be they present now, this is our shared experience.
01:31:05.000To quote the famous quote around Schindler there, he who changes one life changes the world entire.
01:31:11.000If we begin to change the prakriti The prima materia of reality, consciousness itself, we can of course adapt and evolve systems.
01:31:21.000They will have to reflect those changes in reality.
01:31:24.000Even you are talking about a shared hysteria when it comes to the phenomena of Donald Trump.
01:31:28.000In spite of all this he didn't do a peaceful transition, yet somehow he reaches deep down into the spiritual cojones of Pretty near 50% of Americans, and they don't give a shit.
01:31:40.000Now, if we can't find a way of hacking, bypassing this constant conflagration, we are doomed.
01:31:53.000Are we ever gonna have an election in your country again that doesn't end with the other side going, oh, it was Russiagate, oh, it was stolen.
01:32:00.000That's just, that's just the deal now.
01:32:06.000This is a time to revivify the spiritual traditions and to note that all of these traditions emerge out of cultures where they believe in a deep, unitive experience.
01:32:16.000That what you experience, and of course there's no way of proving this, and I'm sure that you as a sort of a, I don't mean this offensively, materialist, rationalist, will say that your inner peace is a contrivance of neurological stuff that's highly personal and just within your personal skin, and I would offer What you experience in that meditative piece is what I experience in that meditative piece.
01:32:38.000And from that place, from our shared humanity, the same way as skeletally you and I are more or less the same, in spite of our superficial cutaneous differences, we can find some archetypal unity to share together, to build upon.
01:32:52.000Now, I know that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to become experts in building nuclear power stations or whatever particular solution you or I might think we should pursue, But it does mean we might be able to establish a crucible of good intent based on that.
01:33:18.000One is the individual level, and the other is the level that you have addressed at various points here of systems and their consequences.
01:33:28.000And these are fundamentally different, which is to say that no matter how good you get at playing the individual game of untangling your problems and untying your knots, again, you could spend 20 years in a cave and come out radiantly happy and filled with compassion and just having nothing but good intentions for the world, and yet You have not done anything that necessarily has much greater significance until you can interface with a system level and make change at that level.
01:34:03.000And the reason why the systems are so important, and I would argue that the greatest ethical and political changes we're going to make are going to be at the system level, because what we need are systems where Systems that make it easier and easier for ordinary, conflicted people to behave better and better.
01:34:26.000And what we have are systems, very much of the time, that are so perversely incentivized that you essentially have to be a saint to behave like a normal human being.
01:34:40.000Take something like Twitter, or what used to be known as Twitter.
01:34:43.000The reason why I left Twitter is I was experiencing it as a space where completely normal people were incentivized to behave like psychopaths.
01:34:54.000I mean, I would look at my Twitter feed and I recognized, and it took me way too long to recognize this, but I recognized after some years that I was staring into a funhouse mirror where people were showing me their most grotesque faces.
01:35:11.000And I just knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths in the world.
01:35:14.000But I was seeing psychopath after psychopath in my Twitter feed.
01:35:18.000You know, coming from the left, coming from the right.
01:35:20.000The most toxically dishonest behavior.
01:36:09.000And what we need, in this case, we need a system of communication that is making it easier and easier for even normal people to have truly enlightened and enlightening conversations, where the wisdom is built into the system layer.
01:36:27.000We have the corruption and the dishonesty and the bad incentives built into the system layer where you basically you have to be You know, fucking Gandhi not to be an asshole on Twitter, at least some of the time, right?
01:36:41.000And so that's an answer to your question.
01:36:46.000No matter how good you get at the meditation game privately and personally, no matter how ethical you get privately and personally, society is still going to be at the mercy of bad systems.
01:36:59.000And we have to, so we have to, you know, we have to play both games.
01:37:04.000The reason why you play the individual game and commit so much time and attention to that is because it is the closest point of contact to the difference between happiness and suffering in your case.
01:37:16.000When you wake up in the morning at four in the morning and are the prisoner of your thoughts, right?
01:37:22.000Not only is the system not going to help you, your friends can't even help you, your family can't help you, you are alone in the privacy of your own mind, right?
01:37:33.000All of us are in solitary confinement all the time with respect to our own mind and only a technique like meditation that allows you to break the spell of your identification with thought Can help you there.
01:37:47.000And that help does play out in how you are in the rest of your life.
01:37:51.000But again, it's not going to solve our system level problems if millions of us start meditating.
01:38:14.000Perhaps the reason that these esoteric traditions have always existed, from the Rishis to the Sufis to the Saints, is because they intuit and perhaps even experience that subjectivity can be a portal to a universal experience.
01:38:30.000But this transcendence of self that gives us relief from the incarceration of the ego, from the An enchilada of ever-carooming thoughts that become unbearable, ricocheting off the walls of the ego.
01:38:45.000This can be undone through these practices, perhaps because we access an ulterior power.
01:38:53.000Curious to me that each tradition has its own version, be it via the mantra or the breath, a way out.
01:39:20.000We should apply the rigour of investigation and the zeal of faith to what we discover in those spaces.
01:39:28.000Because what you said about that's the only place that can find you peace, you know, where you can find peace and succour, is not with a double C-O-U-R, not K-E-R.
01:39:38.000Peace and succour is in that intimacy.
01:39:41.000That, semantics aside, is no different from what any one that believes in God would tell one another.
01:39:47.000There within you, there is the deep imminence, there is the imminent and transcendent, that peculiar paradox that plays out between waves and particles, plays out within you.
01:39:58.000There down in the Vedas, we find in poetics, that which could never be tracked, Through materialistic observation, for we do not have the instruments when it comes to the apparently external world.
01:41:03.000By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.
01:41:08.000And if we want to neglect that conclusion, then all we are going to do is sit on the fireside of Armageddon and just sort of say, well, I was right, now I was right.
01:41:17.000And that doesn't seem like a nice way to go out.
01:41:57.000There's a very interesting conversation to have about how those two projects are related.
01:42:05.000But I would say that We should be slow to make metaphysical assertions about how all of this landscape of experience relates to the cosmos at large.
01:42:20.000So it's like somebody like Deepak Chopra is very quick to say, okay, this experience of consciousness without ego is what preceded the Big Bang, right?
01:42:31.000Like he'll just jump into cosmology, right?
01:42:36.000One, it doesn't seem intellectually honest for me to do that.
01:42:39.000I mean, there's nothing about this insight into the freedom of consciousness prior to egocentricity There's nothing about that that tells you about quantum mechanics or about cosmology or about the status of the singularity that preceded space-time, right?
01:42:57.000And it doesn't resolve any of the paradoxes or disputes in any of those specific fields.
01:43:03.000What it does do is tell you something very direct about what you are subjectively.
01:43:10.000Like, there are objective claims we can make about human subjectivity.
01:43:14.000Right, we can say there's an infinite number of things we can say about the nature of the mind, from the first person side, from the side of felt experience, that are not merely subjective, they're actually objective.
01:43:26.000Like you can make claims about the way the mind is through direct experience.
01:43:31.000And for instance, you can make a claim about Impermanence, right?
01:43:37.000Every state of mind you've ever had prior to this moment has arisen and passed away, right?
01:43:42.000You know, the anger you felt two weeks ago isn't here anymore, right?
01:43:46.000And it comes back in the next moment, that's a newly arising phenomenon, which again will pass away.
01:43:52.000And the connection between the feeling and the thoughts is something that we can inspect from a first-person side and make objective claims about, right?
01:44:01.000So I'm not saying this is all a space where there's no truth.
01:44:07.000There are very deep truths, first-person truths to be discovered here,
01:44:11.000but they're different truths than the truths of cosmology.
01:44:17.000But on that point, Sam, let me offer you this.
01:44:20.000There are also sort of medical claims about sort of, you know, wellness, blood pressure, cardiovascular benefits that could be made, that could not possibly have been medically understood by the people that conceived of these techniques.
01:44:56.000Now, whilst you say that it's fanciful and doubtless conjecture to make cosmological claims on the basis of a personal subjective experience in meditation, it is similarly conjecture to say that there is nothing before the Big Bang.
01:45:10.000There's exactly the same amount of proof.
01:45:13.000One of them is optimistic, one of them is pessimistic.
01:45:15.000I see as much zeal and devoutness in the realm of materialism, and to some degree it's been sort of offered many times, you know, notable and brilliant atheists like yourself and Hitchens and Dawkins, all men that I very much revere and respect and I know that you know stuff I don't know.
01:45:33.000But there is certainly a devoutness to the, I don't want to call it pessimism because that's unfair in its pejorative, but the materialism and the rationalism and the insistence that Just because what I offer is this.
01:45:47.000There are realms and frequencies for which we do not have the instruments.
01:45:51.000But because we don't have the instruments, that doesn't mean the data isn't there.
01:45:55.000And even someone much more popular and populist, in a different sense, figure like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox, friends of mine in science entertainment, say stuff like, if it can't be measured, it isn't there, and eventually we will be able to hold this knowledge.
01:46:49.000We meet stories, folklore and dreams, which while being certainly housed within the metaphysical,
01:46:54.000have enough ubiquity, I would suggest, Sam, to warrant investigation.
01:46:59.000and even if investigation isn't the right tool, maybe this short, abrupt
01:47:03.000Well, so I take a slightly different line through this than the one you expect.
01:47:12.000I'm not a devout materialist of the sort that you imagine.
01:47:16.000I just see that There's a third option, which is to acknowledge what you don't know, right?
01:47:25.000I think we all stand before an ocean of ignorance and we broadcast across that ocean rather often metaphysical claims that are unwarranted, right?
01:47:36.000We do science on the seashore and we explore the ocean with respect to certain physicalist assumptions, but we also, science is
01:47:48.000bigger than that. Ultimately, if physicalism is limited and it turns out to be untrue or
01:47:53.000partial or otherwise misleading, we will, there will be a rational accounting of that, of
01:48:00.000how we wandered into error there, right?
01:48:03.000It's not irrational to speculate that maybe mind is not what it seems, right?
01:48:09.000And maybe it's dependency on the brain is not what it seems, right?
01:48:14.000But to pretend to know any specific thing to be true in this area, I think is intellectually dishonest.
01:48:22.000And specifically, but this is the one piece that is truly seditious with respect to the religious project, and which is the basis of my atheism, is One thing that the jury is no longer out on is the merely human origins of our religious institutions and our religious literature, because they broadcast their provinciality and their merely human origins on every page.
01:48:50.000You read the Bible, And ask yourself, how hard would it have been for an omniscient being to have put in a single page of this text evidence of his omniscience?
01:49:02.000It would be trivially easy to have done that, and there's not a single passage like that in the Bible.
01:49:07.000Everything in the Bible could have been written by a first-century human being or somebody who lived in the 5th century B.C.
01:49:13.000or 1000 B.C., depending on On what book we're talking about.
01:49:18.000And so it is with every other religious scripture.
01:49:20.000So what we know is that the foundational claim, certainly of Abrahamic religion, of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the foundational claim that a specific book has a non-human origin, right?
01:49:35.000That is the claim that gives you Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
01:49:39.000We know that that claim is is specious and indefensible at this point in history.
01:49:46.000And what we need, therefore, is a truly 21st century conversation about everything we've been talking about, about the possibility of self-transcendence, its implications for running a sane society.
01:49:57.000How do we get billions of people to solve these coordination problems of cooperation and converge on common projects so as to not make themselves needlessly miserable?
01:50:06.000All of this is a project that requires a 21st century intellectually honest framing.
01:50:13.000And so the reason why I dispense with religion to begin that conversation is that all of our religious scriptures are intrinsically at odds with one another.
01:50:40.000No, because I would say this... If you're going to pander to the religious... If you're going to pander to the religious biases of traditional religious people, right?
01:50:51.000If you're going to tell Muslims that they're not wrong to be Muslim, and Christians that they're not wrong to be Christian, right?
01:51:01.000is enshrine a zero-sum contest between muslims and christians because islam and christianity at their core are incompatible and i'll tell you why at their core jesus christian every christian real christian asserts that jesus was divine and every real muslim asserts that he wasn't How do you square that zero-sum contest?
01:51:24.000How I would do this is I would say that your unconscious framing, when you say from a 21st century perspective, enshrines the notion of progressivism, that we're at some current apex now, rather than a temporal gateway, a liminal space, where we, like the Hellenists who had to address the peculiar motions of the spheres, were precisely inverse to what they had ensumed, Like those that preceded Galileo, who had to acknowledge that amidst the devices and new lenses, new realms have been uncovered.
01:51:54.000We cannot judge the semantic devices by which these models and modalities are interpreted in the same way that we might adjudicate their cultural and social baggage.
01:52:09.000your numerous yogis and Sufis and their 20 year spells in caves that I hope were free of bats because that's apparently the only way anyone can catch Covid.
01:52:19.000I hope that they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited tool of language.
01:52:29.000But I would say there is sufficient data in Buddhism, in Hinduism, In Islam, in Judaism and Christianity to suggest that what we have to overcome is precisely the individual that you have made a personal discovery about with your own meditative journey.
01:52:45.000The cultural afflictions and inflections of a religion are an easy way to dismiss them but I think what is lost in that analysis is real hope, real God and what I mean by God is love and the hope and possibility that somehow Now, we can turn the tide of this thing.
01:53:04.000For me, it doesn't matter if you are an atheist.
01:53:06.000Some of my greatest teachers are atheists.
01:53:08.000But what matters to me is that we revere and honor and re-sacralize the Earth.
01:53:45.000Now, come on, let's get on with this bullshit.
01:53:47.000Now, if we can't have that kind of conversation, we're just gonna sit watching the plane go down, Sam, and just, you know, querying who the pilot was.
01:54:04.000And what are we in this war for anyway, baby?
01:54:09.000Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I agree with you about the power of love.
01:54:16.000I totally agree with you about the primacy and the power of love, but we need to acknowledge that culture is a kind of operating system that we're all entangled with, and it's possible to have a pathological culture.
01:54:33.000And I think you would agree that we're suffering from the pathologies of culture.
01:54:39.000And it is therefore possible to have love, real love, channeled in ways that are pathological.
01:54:47.000I mean, this is a topic I occasionally am forced to return to.
01:54:53.000Happily, it's been many years since it's been in the news in a big way.
01:54:57.000But you take the link between Between the doctrine of jihadism in Islam and suicidal terrorism.
01:55:06.000The link is very direct, despite the fact that many people on the left would doubt it.
01:55:12.000It's by no means all economics and politics driving people to be jihadists and suicidal terrorists in the Muslim world.
01:55:20.000Ask yourself about the state of mind of a jihadist just before he pushes the button on his bomb when he's on a bus filled with non-combatants or he's about to fly a plane into a building or any other moment where he's about to commit a suicide.
01:55:36.000What is, from the outside, I think appropriately judged as a suicidal atrocity.
01:55:42.000I think it is actually quite likely that that person is experiencing real ecstasy Real love.
02:00:20.000Hyperbole, nonsense, bullshit instead of actual substance.
02:00:23.000Now pay attention to the hyperbole being conveyed because what's about to be expressed is that a bill that began as we are going to meaningfully control Big Pharma, particularly after the Purdue crisis, the fentanyl epidemic, the exploitation of the pandemic that you funded.
02:01:15.000So we are here today with the firm belief that in the United States of America, no senior should ever have to choose between whether they are able to fill a prescription That's what he's come down to!
02:01:57.000If you're an old person, you don't have to choose between expending your remaining resources with Big Pharma or putting a couple of groceries in your fridge that you can't afford to keep chilled because your energy bills are so high.
02:02:17.000That's what we're all getting so excited about.
02:02:19.000This is what all the vilification of Trump's about.
02:02:21.000This is what we don't need to consider Robert F. Kennedy or Marianne Williamson or Cornel West or people that at least seem to understand humanity from a better perspective.
02:02:30.000A very, very old person, if they're not too busy running the country, will be able to both get a couple of apples and continue to funnel their remaining dollars into the hands of Big Pharma.
02:03:15.000But all 10 of the drugs up for negotiation are already being sold in other countries at fractions of what pharmaceutical companies are charging for them in the United States.
02:03:24.000The victory is you will pay much more money than other countries.
02:03:35.000Not compared to Algeria or Sweden or Iceland or Somalia, but you know, we're just America, right?
02:03:42.000And drug makers are reporting huge revenues from those foreign sales, so they're able to spread the costs internationally because they're globalists, like your government.
02:03:51.000In some cases, Americans whose tax money subsidizes the development of virtually all medicines approved for sale in the United States are just... Sorry, did I not mention it?
02:04:00.000You've already paid for the drug once, and you're going to pay for it again, much more than other countries, but are you not going to... Why are you not... Why are you not applauding for... Because this is progress, remember?
02:04:23.000The cash haul disclosed in drug makers' earnings reports suggests that pharmaceutical companies will still be able to reap enormous windfalls even if Americans can finally access prices closer to those charged on the global market for some drugs.
02:04:36.000What's been negotiated is a deal with their donors in Big Pharma to adjust the administration so that across a quarter or a year their profits remain unaffected.
02:04:46.000You think that Albert Baller, Moderna, Pfizer, all those guys, the FDA, don't have tight relationships with the government?
02:04:52.000What power do you think this government, look at them, look at them, what power do you think they have to protect you?
02:04:59.000Americans pay the highest prices per capita among residents of wealthy countries for prescription drugs, even though the American public subsidizes research and development, R&D costs, on essentially every drug approved for sale in the United States.
02:05:30.000President Joe Biden pledged during his 2020 campaign to repeal the existing law explicitly barring Medicare from negotiating lower prices with drug corporations.
02:05:39.000Last year, Democrats finally passed a drug price negotiation provision, but the measure was much more limited than lawmakers originally proposed.
02:05:47.000I wonder what kind of conversations took place.
02:05:48.000Let me know in the comments if you think maybe Big Pharma was somehow, I can't imagine how they're able to assert control and influence.
02:05:54.000I mean, God, is there any record of Joe Biden just before his election in 2020 telling a room full of donors in New York Nothing will essentially change.
02:06:45.000Four of the ten drugs on the Biden administration's target list may not even have their prices negotiated in the end, thanks to incoming generic or biosimilar competition.
02:06:53.000So what they've done is like lawyers, they've tied it up and sewn it up in every conceivable way so they cannot lose.
02:06:58.000That's what it means, corporatist democracies such as the ones that we have.
02:07:02.000We have a similar thing in our country as well.
02:07:40.000In all, the Build Back Better Drug Pricing Framework is not a bad outcome for the industry, investment company Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note to clients.
02:07:49.000Most drugs wouldn't be affected by negotiations, the analysts said, and the caps could ultimately entice drug makers to boost their products' launch prices, the Evercore team said.
02:07:58.000Pharmaceutical companies in the US raised drug prices 1,186 times in 2022.
02:08:04.000This is very curious because essentially it shows you how the system functions.
02:08:08.000There's a little bit of fanfare and some celebratory rhetoric, some nauseating hyperbole, but actually backstage where the real governing happened, a deal has been done to ensure that the government is able to fulfil its promises to say some words in public without ever impacting the pharmaceutical companies.
02:08:28.000Is it me or does the future feel more insecure and uncertain?
02:08:32.000Wars, pandemics, lies, trickery, my cats keep having kittens.
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02:09:40.000But I doubt that has any impact on these kind of decisions, do you?
02:09:44.000In 2021, Democrats accounted for roughly 60% of the $177 million in pharmaceutical industry lobbying and campaign donations.
02:09:52.000So that would make an impact, I suppose, in the way they regulate and legislate.
02:09:55.000That's how we go from rhetoric around we beat Big Pharma and we're going to cap drug prices to we're going to cap drug prices in a way that doesn't impact the profits of drug companies and therefore cannot meaningfully improve your life.
02:10:08.000According to Open Secrets, in 2020, the biggest recipient of donations from the pharmaceutical industry was, drumroll please, it's America's champion, Joe Biden, who received $8.6 million.
02:10:18.000A growing number of Americans are delaying important medical care because of the high cost of treatment, a recent survey shows.
02:10:31.000Even in my own anger and outrage, forget that what we're talking about is the real life of real Americans.
02:10:36.000Why don't you let me know in the comments who you know who is impacted by the soaring cost of drugs?
02:10:41.000Let me know if you know someone who is affected or even died as a result of the fentanyl crisis.
02:10:45.000Let me know how you think pharmaceutical companies were able to assert influence over the last couple of years.
02:10:50.000Let me know if you're impressed with this bill or not.
02:10:53.000In 2022, 38% of Americans said they or a family member skipped or delayed medical care according to an annual health care poll from Gallup.
02:11:01.000The jump reflects an increase of 12 percentage points compared to 2021 and marks the highest year-to-year increase in Americans delaying health care.
02:11:08.000So things are bad and they're getting worse.
02:11:10.000That's what should have happened up there.
02:11:11.000This is an alternative to what we just saw Kamala Harris do.
02:11:14.000Listen, you know we promised you that we were going to cap drug prices.
02:11:17.000We sort of are a bit, but only in a handful of drugs under these specific conditions that there's no generic competition and that the drugs have been on the market for at least nine years.
02:11:25.000You're still going to be paying a thousand percent more than other foreign countries and things are getting a lot worse for Americans.
02:11:32.000This is from David Sirota from The Leather, a left-wing publication.
02:11:35.000Let's remember, pharmaceutical companies aren't altruistic charities that offer their products abroad at a loss.
02:11:40.000On the contrary, they are still making healthy profits at lower world market prices.
02:11:45.000So if you have a feeling that you're being ripped off, you're right!
02:11:49.000For all the pharmaceutical industry's self-congratulatory rhetoric about its own innovations, the federal government uses your tax dollars to fund a lot of that innovation, research, and development.
02:11:58.000A study from the National Academy of Sciences tells that story.
02:12:00.000The federal government spent $100 billion to subsidize the research on every single one of the 200-plus drugs approved for sale in the United States between 2010 and 2016.
02:12:11.000Obviously, though, that wasn't your money, because America has this taco stand on the border, and they sell tacos there, and they must have got that $100... Hold on a minute, they don't have a taco stand on the border!
02:12:44.000This is corporate status corruption, where you've got no options, where they come out and celebrate with a pack of lies.
02:12:49.000Meanwhile, your senior citizen family members or loved ones, well, they're not going to meaningfully have their lives improved, are they?
02:12:54.000After all, we took the initial risk and we lowered the overhead costs that the drug companies might need to recoup through higher prices.
02:12:59.000In business terms, the public is the early venture investor in these products, and we deserve a share of the returns when the product proves valuable.
02:13:31.000However, in the mid-1990s, drug lobbyists persuaded the Clinton administration to repeal rules that allowed federal officials to require government-subsidized drugs to be offered to Americans at a reasonable price.
02:13:45.000A few years later, Congress, with then-Senator Joe Biden, Joe Biden's help, voted down legislation to reinstate these rules, and later the Obama administration rejected House Democrats' request that federal officials at least provide guidelines to government agencies about how they can exercise their remaining powers to combat drug price gouging.
02:14:04.000Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama.
02:14:09.000We take the risk of investing early in the product, but instead of that investment reaping us something valuable like affordable prices, we're rewarded with price gouging by the drug makers, the bankroll, the lawmakers who've rigged the rules, and aim to keep them rigged.
02:14:22.000It's a top-down command economy perfectly calibrated for price gouging, and the pharmaceutical industry and its puppet politicians want to keep it that way.
02:14:29.000Seems like a pretty accurate appraisal.
02:14:33.000Kamala Harris is literally almost crying about a piece of legislation that is wretched and basically worthless.
02:14:40.000Because we know for years, far too many of our seniors, millions of our seniors across the country have struggled to afford their prescriptions.
02:14:51.000And too many of our seniors risked their health as they may have delayed to refill their prescription or they cut their pills in half to try and stretch out the length of time.
02:15:22.000So since we took office, President Biden and I and our administration has taken historic, historic action to cut the cost of prescription medication for our seniors.
02:15:55.000How dare you complain that a charismatic performer of a president like Donald Trump has garnered the attention and affections of many Americans when they're doing the same thing but less well.
02:16:04.000We will cap the total cost of prescription drugs at $2,000 a year.
02:16:16.000And we have made vaccines free of charge.
02:16:19.000When I say free of charge, you know the taco stand at the border?
02:17:51.000I almost myself am astonished to imagine that these two sets of facts, what I've seen on the screen and what we've read from the leather and elsewhere, actually align.
02:18:02.000I feel like I just watched someone introduce some historic legislation, but the facts appear to reveal that only minuscule changes Pledges are taking place, presumably because of the effective power of lobbying and the influence that pharmaceutical companies appear to have.
02:18:17.000Pledges were made, then negotiations happened, then pledges were made that obfuscated the fact that these changes are minimal.
02:18:24.000And I'm going to make a great deal of difference.
02:18:26.000That's as good as it's going to get, watching Kamala Harris do that and think, wow, she seems happy about something, surely something good must be happening, and maybe occasionally glance at the peeling, yellowing president of your country.