Stay Free - Russel Brand - Sam Harris (Wealth, Health & Debate)

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders!

00:00:01.000 Over the month of September I'm doing a handful of live shows that are a combination of spirituality, breathwork, individual awakening, community building and challenging authority.

00:00:11.000 How do you bring down the system while bringing up children?

00:00:15.000 Can't sleep! Can't f***ing sleep! Sleep's what I have, it's in the morning now! 0.76

00:00:20.000 How do you try to bring down Bear Grylls while you're on Running Wild with Bear Grylls?

00:00:24.000 And Bear Grylls is much better at that stuff than you.

00:00:27.000 How do we find new ways of challenging authority while trying to live normal lives?

00:00:33.000 So I'll be doing stand-up, breathwork, meditation, as well as conducting polls and votes because I believe democracy works.

00:00:40.000 Are you happy with your current government?

00:00:41.000 No.

00:00:42.000 With you live in theatres like Hayes on the 12th of September.

00:00:46.000 That's a little intimate London gig.

00:00:48.000 I'm at Wembley Park Theatre on the 16th of September.

00:00:51.000 Windsor on the 19th of September.

00:00:53.000 Plymouth on the 22nd.

00:00:55.000 And Wolverhampton on the 28th.

00:00:57.000 To get tickets go to russellbrown.com forward slash live.

00:01:00.000 That's russellbrown.com forward slash live.

00:01:02.000 The link is in the description.

00:01:03.000 Stay free.

00:01:08.000 Hello there, you awake and wonder!

00:01:09.000 Thanks for joining me for a very special episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:01:13.000 It's our conversation with Sam Harris, the intellectual, neurologist, writer and thinker, creator of the Waking Up With Sam Harris app.

00:01:23.000 He gives away some fantastic free memberships to our community, so stay to the very end and become an AwakendWonder by pressing the red button at the bottom of your screen right now to experience things like that.

00:01:33.000 Now, of course, this conversation has already gone viral, particularly for those of you that watch it on Locals.

00:01:39.000 You can watch these things first if you are an AwakendWonder and a member of our Locals community.

00:01:46.000 Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, the first 15 minutes will be here, but then I'm going to click over exclusively to the other place when we start talking about Trump, RFK and the rise in populism.

00:01:57.000 This has gone viral for a reason, because it was a great conversation.

00:02:00.000 But if you stay all the way to the end, to the bit in Locals, you'll see that we meditate together.

00:02:04.000 And even after quite a hot conversation, we find peace together.

00:02:09.000 Also, there's a fantastic episode of Here's the News where we look at Biden's new drug

00:02:12.000 negotiations and whether or not he really beat Big Pharma.

00:02:15.000 You won't believe Kamala Harris's grandstanding speech and how it contrasts with the

00:02:20.000 muted regulations and legislations that have been passed. Outrageous claims there. You're

00:02:25.000 going to love all of it. But without further ado, let's move straight into our conversation with

00:02:30.000 Sam Harris. Remember, if you're watching this on Rumble, give us a Rumble, press the

00:02:33.000 red button at the bottom of your screens right now and become an Awake and Wonder

00:02:37.000 like the people that are watching this live. That's how they do those screen grabs and let it

00:02:42.000 go viral on Twitter or X.

00:02:43.000 Are you calling it X yet?

00:02:45.000 Let's welcome Sam Harris to the show.

00:02:47.000 Thank you for joining us, Sam Harris, you beautiful man.

00:02:53.000 That's something I'm quite worried about.

00:02:54.000 I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way.

00:02:59.000 How do we get beyond this cavalcade of my experts versus your experts, my flag versus your flag?

00:03:04.000 By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.

00:03:10.000 There's a methodology by which we would resolve those differences and this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.

00:03:20.000 The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models.

00:03:24.000 No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable.

00:03:29.000 Have a little look around the Wuhan Laboratory for Infectious Diseases and check out how it's funded and how it's regulated.

00:03:35.000 I'm worried about what I'm saying.

00:03:37.000 But Sam, more important than that, mate.

00:03:38.000 I'm saying that these are domains of relative knowledge.

00:03:41.000 Do you agree we should start by addressing the most powerful interests in the world that seem to benefit more than ordinary people?

00:03:50.000 Energy companies benefit when there's an energy crisis.

00:03:52.000 The military-industrial complex benefits when there's a war.

00:03:55.000 We have to address this.

00:03:57.000 We should let them get rich. 0.97

00:03:58.000 No, no, this is wrong.

00:04:00.000 This year I have to contest with Sam.

00:04:02.000 Thank you for joining us, Sam Harris, you beautiful man.

00:04:13.000 Happy to be here.

00:04:14.000 It's great to see you, Russell.

00:04:15.000 When I met you, I remember in LA, you introduced me to Hiron Gracie, who became my BJJ teacher, along with my teacher, Chris Clear, over here in the UK.

00:04:29.000 I'm now a Purple Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:04:31.000 You still rolling?

00:04:33.000 Fantastic.

00:04:34.000 No, I have not rolled since COVID, actually.

00:04:38.000 Yeah, since, I mean, I was racking up a bunch of injuries, and just, you know, at some point it seemed like a choice between aging somewhat gracefully and not.

00:04:50.000 You know, I just was getting neck injuries and hip injuries, and so I just, I mean, and through no fault of Hiron's, obviously.

00:04:57.000 I mean, he's, He's the perfect person to roll with.

00:05:00.000 It's just gravity at a certain point is not your friend.

00:05:03.000 Yes.

00:05:04.000 I love it.

00:05:07.000 It's just one of the great losses of my life that I'm not currently rolling.

00:05:11.000 I keep fantasizing about going back, but it does worry me to go back.

00:05:17.000 How have you been holding up?

00:05:18.000 How's your body?

00:05:19.000 Pretty good.

00:05:20.000 Like, right now, my knee hurts a little bit, my left knee, and my left shoulder hurts a little bit.

00:05:26.000 What I try to do when rolling is, very near the beginning of the session, establish a rapport with my opponent that I hope will translate into them, on some level, holding back slightly.

00:05:39.000 Yeah, well, I mean, listen, at some point, I was only rolling with Jiron, right? 0.83

00:05:44.000 So, I mean, obviously, he has nothing to prove.

00:05:47.000 He can win at will.

00:05:50.000 He was the perfect teacher, as you know, and grappling partner.

00:05:56.000 Yeah, it's just bad luck.

00:05:58.000 I ascribe it to bad luck and bad genes.

00:06:01.000 Mate, as this online space continues to evolve, the relationship that you have with Jordan Peterson, where two people with opposing views, with perfectly valid perspectives on both sides, has somehow been mapped onto the entire internet space, but perhaps without the congeniality and goodwill that I assume exists between you and Jordan. I wonder what your fears are as we

00:06:27.000 increasingly find ourselves in some irresolvable cultural polemic that seems to be fuelled

00:06:37.000 by a will to impose, centralise, to accrue authority, to defeat without grace the opponent.

00:06:46.000 How do you feel about this advancing space and how can we engage in conversations with people we

00:06:51.000 don't agree with in good faith?

00:06:54.000 How can we take on board the views of those we disagree with and advance a mutual conversation?

00:07:00.000 Or do we just accept now that centralised democracies such as America and the UK are finished and we have to start moving towards decentralised cultural and political models because there's just too much agitation elsewise?

00:07:13.000 Well, I share your concern about all this.

00:07:15.000 That's something I'm quite worried about.

00:07:16.000 I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way,

00:07:21.000 but I'm just going to sketch out what I think the remedy is.

00:07:24.000 I think we need to collectively develop the ability to worry about more than one thing at a time, right?

00:07:35.000 So what I keep confronting are people who focus on one part of a troubling dichotomy.

00:07:43.000 Take the tension between censorship, which I know you're worried about, and misinformation.

00:07:51.000 Right now, I would acknowledge that free speech is almost an intrinsic good.

00:07:56.000 It's certainly the best error-correcting mechanism we have, and that we should protect it at almost any cost, certainly politically.

00:08:06.000 And yet there is this tension between misinformation and really waking up in a society that's one day ungovernable on the basis of misinformation, where we just cannot converge on a fact-based discussion about anything because people are so siloed into their delusional echo chambers.

00:08:23.000 And on the other side, our efforts to correct for misinformation, which increasingly look like censorship and increasing their intention with Again, the almost intrinsic good of free speech, which we protect much better here in America than you do over there in the UK.

00:08:42.000 So, what I'm continually finding are people, you know, we can talk about the left and right poles of the political spectrum as shorthand, it is not perfectly accurate now, but people on the left and the right can only focus on one of these bright shiny objects at a time, right?

00:08:59.000 They're only worried about misinformation, or they're only worried about censorship, they're only worried about wokeness, or they're only worried about Trumpism, they're only worried about You know, respect for tradition or, you know, innovating on everything, right?

00:09:14.000 So, there's all of these things that represent trade-offs, where it's not a landscape of very clear distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil, but where we just have to figure out how to tune things.

00:09:28.000 And, you know, or a trade-off between individualism and a commitment to the common good, right?

00:09:34.000 I mean, like, if you privilege individualism above everything else, You begin to lose your ability to create a society that any sane individual would want to live in.

00:09:45.000 If we respect your right to put smoke in the air above everything else, we have undermined my right to breathe clean air.

00:09:53.000 There is a trade-off here.

00:09:54.000 There's some amount of regulation I have to impose on you so that your enterprise doesn't fuck it up for everybody.

00:10:01.000 Again, there's a tension here.

00:10:04.000 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?

00:10:22.000 And our online space has devolved into a polarized conversation about this landscape of trade-offs.

00:10:31.000 I agree with you that these media silos are contributing to the inability to take on the perspective of the opposing side.

00:10:41.000 And I think no one's more guilty of creating these spaces than what are commonly colloquially known as mainstream media spaces.

00:10:48.000 Just today we were Looking at a broadcast on MSNBC where it was openly posited and quite enthusiastically so that were Trump to win the election in 2024 that he would immediately declare himself president for life and therefore any opportunity to indict or indeed imprison Donald Trump will be lost forever.

00:11:10.000 So nothing less than the future of democracy hung in the balance in the forthcoming 2024

00:11:16.000 election. Now, this was the claims that were being made specifically on MSNBC, and in particular

00:11:23.000 it was Rachel Maddow. I feel like it perhaps would be more beneficial if what you want

00:11:27.000 to encourage is a rational discourse to engage in, to present rational arguments, and in

00:11:33.000 particular to be candid, open, and utterly transparent about the shortcomings of the

00:11:38.000 side that you yourself advocate for. If freedom of speech means anything, it means the freedom

00:11:43.000 of speech of your opponents. And I think we've seen over the last few years, terms like misinformation,

00:11:49.000 malinformation, and disinformation enter the public discourse, not solely because there

00:11:54.000 are now miracles around communication and technology that mean anyone with an idea and

00:11:58.000 a rhetorical flourish can reach previously unprecedented audiences, but also because

00:12:04.000 these new models precisely mean that centralising and controlling any particular narrative is

00:12:11.000 almost impossible, and the veracity of opposing information is indeed difficult to verify.

00:12:18.000 I completely agree with you that we can't have single-issue orators governing our space with Sturm, Drang and Bombast.

00:12:26.000 We do need to encourage, I would say, inclusive discourses where people are, as I said in my initial question, Deliberately favoring the views of their opponent, willing to see where they can concede, willing to accept that my freedom may at some point impede on your freedom.

00:12:47.000 What am I willing to sacrifice?

00:12:48.000 Now, these ideas are precisely the kind of things that I turn to meditation for, Sam, and I know that you're here in part to talk in depth about your meditation app, which I admire and I love and I use.

00:12:59.000 And I feel that there's precisely this kind of access to inner terrains that might provide us the ability

00:13:05.000 to move beyond these spaces.

00:13:06.000 One thing I'd also like to challenge, if I may, is that the distinction between left and right

00:13:13.000 devolving into periphery versus centre - to use Martin Guri's terms there from his book,

00:13:19.000 Revolt of the Public - is significant. What we have now is anti-authoritarianism

00:13:24.000 versus authoritarianism. I feel that once that gets mapped into a meaningful political system,

00:13:31.000 it's going to mean, to a degree, the devolution of power, further federalisation,

00:13:36.000 and an ability for communities to govern themselves.

00:13:39.000 I said a lot there, Sam, but I know you can handle it, so please let me know what that provokes.

00:13:45.000 Yeah, no, I would take that reframing certainly up to a point that, you know, as I said, left and right don't really cover the landscape very well at this point.

00:13:54.000 And so there is this This anti-authoritarianism, I would say, there's a contrarianism, there's an anti-establishment bias now, both on the right and the left.

00:14:06.000 There's a distrust of power, there's a distrust of institutions.

00:14:12.000 And it's understandable, because our institutions have failed us in obvious ways.

00:14:17.000 Certainly they have They've proven themselves, certainly at moments, untrustworthy.

00:14:24.000 So the loss of trust is understandable.

00:14:26.000 But what I would say is that the corrective we need is not to tear everything down.

00:14:32.000 We need institutions we can trust.

00:14:34.000 We need to figure out how to reboot our institutions so that they are trustworthy, so that they're worthy of trust, and so that people actually trust them.

00:14:42.000 And what I'm worried about now, given the online tools we have and the democratization of everything, And this almost, you know, apocalypse of contrarianism is that even if we had trustworthy institutions across the board, we couldn't get a majority of people to trust them on any one point.

00:15:04.000 Certainly not a point that is politically polarizing, right?

00:15:07.000 So if we have a new pandemic, how do we get 90% of people to trust the mainstream medical message about what the facts on the ground really are.

00:15:20.000 And how do we get people to trust government public health organizations as they give us up-to-the-minute information, insofar as they know it?

00:15:31.000 And again, the basis for distrust is totally understandable because we witnessed one pratfall after another during COVID.

00:15:38.000 But what I'm saying is that we absolutely need, and to speak locally in the U.S.

00:15:43.000 now, we need a CDC that we can trust.

00:15:47.000 We need an FDA that we can trust.

00:15:48.000 The fact that we feel that we can't trust these organizations is Absolutely corrosive to the maintenance of a healthy society.

00:15:59.000 And it certainly will put us in a position to fail once again to respond intelligently to the next pandemic.

00:16:06.000 And what I worry about, again, my concerns about COVID have, apart from the first few months, When no one really knew what the hell was going on.

00:16:16.000 My concerns about COVID have always been that it's a kind of dress rehearsal that we were obviously failing.

00:16:22.000 I worry that we're not learning the lessons of that failure.

00:16:25.000 Because I think it's just inevitable that we will one day have a pandemic that's quite

00:16:30.000 a bit worse.

00:16:31.000 And we will need to be able to respond with coherence and learn to cooperate at a global

00:16:39.000 scale.

00:16:40.000 And I'm not sure we're putting ourselves in a position to do that.

00:16:43.000 I do recall both in our nation and in yours, Sam, an incredible moment of goodwill at the

00:16:49.000 commencement of the pandemic period, where people sort of intuitively understood that

00:16:53.000 that we were facing something unprecedented.

00:16:56.000 And indeed, the principles of every measure, whether it's masking or lockdown or medications, is human life is, if not sacred, I'm aware of who I'm talking to, certainly valuable in a somewhat unique way, which if not sacred... I like sacred.

00:17:09.000 You can use sacred with me without apology.

00:17:11.000 Because if it isn't sacred, we're going to have to work out what the hell it is that makes human life so worthy of preservation.

00:17:18.000 So we'll go with sacred for the purposes of this conversation.

00:17:22.000 And any personal imposition is as nothing compared to our collective value and our joint duty to protect the vulnerable.

00:17:30.000 But of course, what we saw, and these are just a few points I'm tracking, and I know that you're a busy man, but I'm sure you're broadly aware of the kind of media that I engage with and convey, is that Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer, said it would be reprehensible if there were any profits made by Pfizer.

00:17:43.000 And I think we all know that there were profits made by Pfizer.

00:17:46.000 Their legal indemnity for any potential vaccine injury caused a lot of suspicion.

00:17:52.000 The very fact that the FDA is significantly funded by the pharmaceutical industry causes

00:17:56.000 a great many people concern, skepticism, and cynicism.

00:17:59.000 There are figures within the CDC, NIIH, that have a... Well, this is to one of our viewers

00:18:05.000 here on the Locals platform.

00:18:06.000 Primal Collins says that to get the kind of trust that we require, you would want no revolving

00:18:11.000 door between corporations and, in this instance, big pharma.

00:18:16.000 If you are right, and certainly across infinite time you are, that there will be another

00:18:24.000 pandemic.

00:18:25.000 I suppose, personally, what I would want is a real, transparent, candid mea culpa about, this is how we handled it.

00:18:33.000 This is what we did wrong.

00:18:34.000 This is what we'll never do again.

00:18:35.000 This is what we exploited.

00:18:37.000 This is how it was handled incorrectly.

00:18:38.000 These were people that were shamed, that shouldn't have been.

00:18:40.000 That should never have been said.

00:18:41.000 these companies should never have profited. Moderna should not have been invested in by a person who's now the Prime

00:18:47.000 Minister in the UK, set up a hedge fund that funded Moderna.

00:18:52.000 None of those companies should have profited from a disaster of this nature. Certainly public politicians

00:19:01.000 shouldn't have been partying during a time while the rest of us were locked down and we must radically redress the

00:19:03.000 the ability that Big Pharma has to influence policy, because I recognise that no one's

00:19:08.000 going to trust these government medical agencies until that's remedied. If that kind of conversation

00:19:15.000 took place, I think that would go some way towards it. Do you think that's a possibility,

00:19:20.000 and do you think that's a fair assessment?

00:19:22.000 I agree with the spirit of that. It would be hard to fashion a mea culpa so comprehensive

00:19:30.000 that it satisfied everyone who was waiting for it, because I think as a society, we're

00:19:36.000 going to disagree about what the facts are still. We're not in possession of the same

00:19:40.000 set of facts. If I were to ask you or your listeners how many people they think died

00:19:47.000 in America or the UK from COVID?

00:19:50.000 Right.

00:19:51.000 I think we would see something like a bell curve distribution of assumptions, and we would find it very difficult to agree, even just about that simple propositional claim.

00:20:02.000 Just how many people died from COVID?

00:20:04.000 We're suddenly going to have a conversation about the difference between dying from COVID and with COVID, and were people perversely incentivized to report deaths that were one versus the other?

00:20:16.000 But what you pointed to in your comments about pharma there are A set of perverse incentives that we have to worry about.

00:20:24.000 So, the profit motive in pharma is something that many of us, probably all of us when we look at it, are uncomfortable with.

00:20:35.000 But it's also not clear how to incentivize drug discovery in a way that works, that dissects out that perverse incentive.

00:20:44.000 So, yes, I was totally uncomfortable with the idea of a pharmaceutical company Enjoying windfall profits during a pandemic and racing vaccines to market, knowing that billions of dollars were waiting to hit the cash register.

00:21:00.000 It's easy to see what could go wrong with that.

00:21:03.000 Again, this is why we need an FDA and a CDC and other regulatory organizations we can trust.

00:21:09.000 Your revolving door comment is totally valid.

00:21:11.000 Except, the issue is, there are only so many domain experts.

00:21:17.000 What sort of jobs do they get when they transition?

00:21:20.000 Who do we want to be doing this research?

00:21:25.000 deciding about regulation apart from people who know all of the details of this research.

00:21:30.000 And you take a simple case, let's take it off COVID for a second because that's so highly

00:21:35.000 politicized, but take the fact that we as a society desperately need to create a new generation of

00:21:43.000 antibiotics, right? We have had, we've, you've...

00:21:46.000 For as long as you and I have been alive, we've lived in this bright, shiny moment where infectious disease has been radically curtailed by us having a very solid armamentarium of antibiotics that work.

00:22:03.000 If the first antibiotic doesn't work, there's one behind that, and there's one behind that, and there's one behind that.

00:22:03.000 Right?

00:22:08.000 But in the last, I don't know, 25, 30 years or so, we have witnessed this growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

00:22:18.000 And we know we don't have a good pipeline for developing new antibiotics.

00:22:22.000 The reason why we don't have a good pipeline is because the drug companies can't be appropriately incentivized to do the work and to spend the money to develop these drugs, because this next antibiotic, the seventh antibiotic in line, when all the other ones fail, when you get some weird lung infection, and you've gone through six antibiotics

00:22:42.000 and they haven't worked and we got one left, right?

00:22:45.000 That drug, whose name no one can pronounce, that is a drug that maybe you will take once

00:22:52.000 in your life for 10 days, right?

00:22:54.000 It's not like Prozac, where you're gonna take it for the rest of your life, or Viagra,

00:22:56.000 where you're gonna take it.

00:22:57.000 It's something that most people are never gonna take, and those of us who are unlucky enough to need it

00:23:03.000 will take it once for 10 days, right?

00:23:06.000 So there's not enough profit in this thing, and it takes a billion dollars to discover this drug,

00:23:11.000 right, and bring it to market.

00:23:13.000 So.

00:23:14.000 How do you get companies to do this?

00:23:17.000 And if we were going to make governments do this, how badly would they handle that project?

00:23:23.000 So, again, this is a problem of incentives and trade-offs, and we have to figure out how to untangle all this in a way that preserves public trust in institutions, and it is a hard problem.

00:23:35.000 It's astonishing to me that it was once the role of the left to offer aggressive critiques of those kind of models, and now they are entirely bereft of them, whether it's on the subject of war or the sort of immersive and disruptive power of Big Pharma.

00:23:49.000 It no longer seems to be there.

00:23:51.000 Whilst earlier on I did offer an alternative to those labels, as we discussed, it seems to me that any attacks on the militarism, particularly with regard to Ukraine-Russia

00:24:03.000 conflict, and the role of pharma and corporations more broadly seems to be coming

00:24:08.000 from the right. That's extraordinary for me with my own particular political and cultural

00:24:12.000 heritage. I'd also like to add, while I've got this opportunity, that I take neither Prozac nor

00:24:18.000 Viagra on a daily basis. It's at most once every other day. Chance would be a fine thing. We're

00:24:24.000 going to leave YouTube now, so if you're watching us on YouTube, please click the

00:24:29.000 link in the description to join us on Rumble, where I'll be asking Sam Harris about

00:24:33.000 the popularity of figures like Donald Trump, about whom he has spoken extensively, and

00:24:38.000 Robert F. Kennedy.

00:24:39.000 Why are we seeing this rise in populism?

00:24:41.000 If you want to see how Sam's going to respond to that question, click on the link.

00:24:44.000 Also, Sam's going to be giving away access to his Waking Up With Sam Harris meditation app,

00:24:50.000 which is fantastic. So join us over on Rumble. If you're watching us on Rumble, press the red

00:24:54.000 button and join us in our Locals conversation and consider becoming an awakened wonder where you get

00:24:59.000 access to all sorts of additional content and for a limited time only, a pair of underpants, which I

00:25:03.000 will be offering you in a moment or two, Sam. But first, I want to get your

00:25:08.000 perspective on the rise of populism and what that suggests about the decline in establishment

00:25:14.000 trust, which we've touched on.

00:25:16.000 I feel like Trump's a runaway leader in his own pie.

00:25:20.000 I feel like 80% of Republicans want to vote for Trump and something like 19 or 20% would vote for RFK in spite of the lack of mainstream media coverage of his campaign.

00:25:30.000 You have a significant number of Americans from across the political spectrum - narrow,

00:25:33.000 though I would contest that political spectrum is when you consider what's possible if you're

00:25:37.000 a regular meditator. What does this tell us about how bereft we've become of alternatives,

00:25:43.000 and what new ideas, what new conversations, and what new alliances need to emerge in this

00:25:49.000 new media space, and how this could evolve into new political movements? Perhaps if we start

00:25:54.000 with what you think underwrites the sudden surge in populism, whether it's left or right-wing.

00:26:02.000 Well, I think there are a few variables.

00:26:06.000 One is this siloing into echo chambers that has been enabled by the internet broadly, but social media in particular.

00:26:14.000 I think it's possible to stay in a silo now in a way that it simply wasn't a generation before, even though, yes, there was There was an opportunity to have your biases enshrined in just how you decided to use the media, you know, in the past.

00:26:34.000 But it's just gotten worse and worse to the point where there's almost no Darwinian corrective to misinformation and lies now.

00:26:44.000 Like, you really can swim in an ocean of lies for as long as you want, and nothing from the outside is going to intrude, or certainly need not intrude.

00:26:53.000 So you have these hermetically sealed spaces of information and misinformation.

00:26:59.000 And so we're not converging on anything like a fact-based discussion about anything of

00:27:08.000 importance now.

00:27:09.000 And so you take somebody like Trump, who to my eye is...

00:27:17.000 It's not an exaggeration to say it. 0.93

00:27:18.000 He is the most relentlessly dishonest person we have ever seen in public life. 0.69

00:27:24.000 He just lies at a velocity that doesn't even make any sense. 0.87

00:27:30.000 Many of his lies aren't even self-serving.

00:27:32.000 They don't serve his purpose.

00:27:34.000 It's just this automaticity that he distorts the truth.

00:27:39.000 He'll contradict himself in the span of 30 seconds.

00:27:43.000 He has cultivated an audience that simply doesn't care, right?

00:27:47.000 This is not an audience that likes him despite his failures of personal integrity.

00:27:53.000 It's an audience that mostly likes him because he is this chaos machine, right?

00:27:58.000 He's this kind of wrecking ball that is swinging through our institutions and our political norms and disrupting everything.

00:28:08.000 So the question really is, why do so many millions of Americans want to see everything disrupted in this way?

00:28:15.000 And it does come back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about distrust in institutions, some of which has been well-earned.

00:28:25.000 I think the role that wealth inequality and a sense of loss of opportunity is playing is rarely remarked upon.

00:28:33.000 It's amazing to me how little We grapple on either side of the political aisle that we grapple with the implications of wealth inequality now.

00:28:42.000 And so I think that is certainly a variable.

00:28:46.000 But it's not a straightforward one.

00:28:49.000 There are a lot of people who are not at the bottom of our economic stratum that support Trump or support the disruption of everything and support this kind of populism on the right.

00:29:04.000 I think it's I mean, for me, to the bright line with Trump and whatever you want to say about his character, and I've said many things about, you know, I've banged on for hours about Trump to the boredom of millions.

00:29:17.000 For me, there was a bright line that was crossed that I think everyone who cares about the future of democracy and the maintenance of American democracy in particular should acknowledge.

00:29:32.000 And it is this.

00:29:33.000 We had a sitting president Who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right?

00:29:38.000 And repeatedly, he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the run up to the 2020 election.

00:29:44.000 And lo and behold, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, based on the lies he told about that election.

00:29:52.000 Now, you can dispute some of this.

00:29:54.000 You know, a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump, Which for which there is no evidence.

00:30:02.000 You know, to the contrary, what was happening is he was trying to steal an election all the while claiming it was being stolen from him.

00:30:08.000 Believe that aside, even a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump has to admit that in the run up to the election, literally six months before the election was run, we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

00:30:25.000 Now, that single act, I would say, it was so corrosive.

00:30:30.000 It was such a violation of our most sacred political norms, our most sacred and useful political norm, right?

00:30:37.000 This is something that even Ronald Reagan, right?

00:30:41.000 Somebody who used to be a darling of everyone right of center.

00:30:45.000 acknowledge. He said this somewhere in the late '70s. He said, "The greatest miracle of our

00:30:52.000 country is the peaceful transfer of power. It is the thing that makes us the envy of the world.

00:30:57.000 It's the thing that if you're sitting in some developing dictatorship outside America's borders,

00:31:05.000 it is the basis for your envy of America, or at least it was traditionally, that we could

00:31:09.000 accomplish a peaceful transfer of power every four years, despite our political differences." 0.79

00:31:14.000 This is a video As far as I know, this is the first time in American history we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

00:31:21.000 And so that was such a dangerous desecration of our political landscape.

00:31:26.000 That I think it should make it impossible to support Trump.

00:31:31.000 Whatever else you think about any other political figure, whatever you think about Hunter Biden's laptop, there's nothing else that rises to that level of concern.

00:31:40.000 And that has always been at the center of my argument against endorsing Trump in any way.

00:31:46.000 This is what I feel is comparable.

00:31:49.000 Whilst the sort of ongoing questioning around the Biden family business deals, I'm sure to anyone who's already encamped within one of those partisan scenarios will just cling to their own rhetoric and their own pre-existing beliefs.

00:32:08.000 This is what my response is, which is Like live tautology, actually, because I'm going to give you the response now, is that now Biden is in office and this inequality is continuing and this polarisation is continuing.

00:32:24.000 And we are not seeing anyone say, look, we got carried away with Russiagate and that's probably really damaged your trust.

00:32:30.000 And over the course of the pandemic, we've seen a lot of shifting narratives and we have not been as transparent as we ought to have been.

00:32:36.000 And our lack of trust in institutions, as you have said, Sam, is something that needs to be addressed.

00:32:42.000 And I recognize now that this ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is hemorrhaging popularity and many of you query, is this the humanitarian war that many claim in order to stop the criminal Putin?

00:32:56.000 Or is this like so many other American wars, like the one in Iraq, like the one in Afghanistan, like the one in Korea, like all American wars up till now, actually motivated by unipolar objectives, a globalist corporate agenda, the advancing of the interests of the military-industrial complex, an explicit plan for BlackRock to rebuild Ukraine post-war, and your tax dollars are paying for it, and the only person that

00:33:22.000 Be it empty oratory and yet more lies, I recognise what you're saying about Trump. I'm certainly

00:33:30.000 not going to try and change your perspective on anything like that, because for me, none

00:33:33.000 of these figures are the answer. Radical systemic change has to be immediately discussed, and

00:33:37.000 we have to acknowledge that what's happening in media has to be replicated with what's

00:33:40.000 happening politically immediately. We have to find ways of altering our systems of governance

00:33:46.000 and having the maximum amount of democracy and access to power for ordinary people, rather

00:33:51.000 than this continual mudslinging.

00:33:52.000 I would say that one of the few people who's willing to say, this war must end, is Donald Trump.

00:33:58.000 If I was to extract the name and the face, Donald Trump, from his rhetoric around the war and how he would bring about a diplomatic solution, I would say, this is the only person who's talking sensibly.

00:34:06.000 And I just cannot extract everything I know about what happened in 2014 in that coup, about what Putin has publicly said about if there's any infringement on Crimea, about the complexities, about ethnicity within Ukrainian territory, all of that, and with great respect and love and solidarity and support for those suffering in Ukraine and for the half a million that have died in that conflict so far, for me, Dancing closer and closer to the apocalypse with dubious motivation, claiming once again that it's a humanitarian endeavour, seems outrageous to me.

00:34:41.000 And the fact that, for me, the fact that this is the alternative is a much bigger problem than anything Trump has done or said, because I do see him as an outlier, as an extraordinary public figure.

00:34:54.000 I see him primarily, and above all else, as a response to institutional corruption, entropy within our institutions.

00:35:01.000 When Biden is able to meet with his donors and say, nothing will fundamentally change when he succeeds Trump, and as he does succeed Trump, for all of your concerns about the lack of a peaceful transition, I would say that is the problem.

00:35:15.000 You know, if Donald Trump dies tomorrow, where are we?

00:35:19.000 Addressing the kind of systemic problems that I'm wrestling with, I think could meaningfully alter the dilemma that you and I are trying to tackle.

00:35:29.000 Well, I certainly have different priors than you do about the war in Ukraine, right?

00:35:35.000 So, for instance, left out of your analysis is what the Ukrainian people themselves say they want, right?

00:35:41.000 So, this is an autonomous, or it was an autonomous country.

00:35:48.000 It was attacked by their neighbor.

00:35:52.000 Right, and certainly it seems that most of the people in Ukraine were not eager to be absorbed by Russia.

00:36:01.000 They were eager to maintain their autonomy and their sovereignty as a society.

00:36:06.000 Now, I don't consider myself an expert on Ukraine.

00:36:11.000 I've gotten up to speed more or less as everyone else has in recent years.

00:36:16.000 I've spoken with purported experts on my podcast several times, somebody like Timothy Snyder,

00:36:22.000 who takes a very different view of this war than you just articulated,

00:36:26.000 very pro-defending the Ukraine view, and other people like Ann Applebaum.

00:36:33.000 These are people who are subject matter experts, but from, I would imagine, your point of view

00:36:39.000 and the point of view of your audience, and certainly Trump's point of view,

00:36:41.000 they're part of the blob that would be arguing for this war in the first place.

00:36:46.000 But I would just make a few simple points.

00:36:48.000 One is, we're not fighting this war, the Ukrainians are. 1.00

00:36:52.000 We are arming them.

00:36:54.000 So it's different than having American boots on the ground fighting this war.

00:36:58.000 And I would agree that that is a bright line we really should not cross.

00:37:02.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:37:04.000 The other point here is that I think this is, once again, a domain of trade-offs.

00:37:10.000 There's not, at every moment, clearly right and wrong answers to these very hard questions.

00:37:15.000 There's a trade-off between Giving in to nuclear blackmail and the whims of an authoritarian psychopath And not giving in to it and holding the line again, even in spite of threats to You know usher in the the end of the world To hold the line in defense of a rules-based international order now where whether we get that right or not is of some consequence, right?

00:37:43.000 I would argue that It is worth worrying about what Putin's going to do with his nukes as the temperature increases over there.

00:37:53.000 But it's also worth worrying that giving in to nuclear blackmail sets a terrible precedent.

00:37:58.000 Right.

00:38:00.000 So how we navigate that is is again, it's hard.

00:38:05.000 And what you want are not You want impetuous know-nothings steering the ship at that moment.

00:38:14.000 You want actual experts who understand the history of these kinds of conflicts and understand everyone's relevant capacities and lack thereof, understand what's likely to be bluffing, understand the incentives, understand what Putin's likely to do next.

00:38:33.000 And still, that's not a science.

00:38:37.000 The bigger picture here is, we should be very worried about the nuclear status quo.

00:38:37.000 That's an art.

00:38:42.000 The fact that we have a world that is, for as long as we've been alive, rigged to explode.

00:38:50.000 Forget about intentional nuclear war.

00:38:53.000 We have a world that can explode on the basis of misinformation and just sheer accident, right?

00:39:01.000 Just radars that malfunction can steer us into a nuclear conflict.

00:39:07.000 It's terrifying and it's something that we have to figure out how to address, but to treat Putin Like, he's just a normal actor with rational interests who we can deal with like any other leader of a free society.

00:39:22.000 It's just not accurate.

00:39:24.000 He is a person who murders his political opponents. 0.97

00:39:27.000 He murders journalists. 0.98

00:39:28.000 He's not a normally corrupt politician. 0.82

00:39:32.000 He's an autocrat.

00:39:33.000 And he's an autocrat who's armed with nuclear weapons who threatens to use them.

00:39:38.000 It's something that we have to treat as categorically different then we would treat a disagreement between us and France or

00:39:47.000 the UK, us being America in this case.

00:39:50.000 I do have a concern that pathologizing the opponents of the hegemony as maniacs,

00:40:01.000 whether that's Trump or Putin, is a shortcut to looking at some of the complex historical

00:40:07.000 arguments, notably including the infringement upon the - not treaty, but deal between the

00:40:14.000 former Soviet Union and America - not to infringe on former NATO territories. Of course, the rights

00:40:21.000 of the people of Ukraine are incredibly important. It is, after all, them that are living and dying.

00:40:26.000 Their intentions and their desire about their national sovereignty is utmost in everybody's

00:40:33.000 concerns and considerations.

00:40:35.000 Whilst you cited the people you had conversations with, I would cite Jeffrey Sachs, who came on here with a couple of other Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, who now would be lucky if they get a job on the internet with this curiously altering online space and media space.

00:40:50.000 What I feel It has to be our shared obligation, if indeed what we want is to bring people together who have currently opposing perspectives, is to critique and address the systems rather than the individuals involved.

00:41:05.000 Russia is a unique country, as perhaps all countries are, with a unique history.

00:41:10.000 This truly has the potential to be a global conflict and should be handled with extreme caution.

00:41:17.000 I would suggest that We have to be open to the possibility that the declared incentives and intentions of American unipolar interests are distinct from their actual interests.

00:41:32.000 Privately, it's pretty clear that it's been acknowledged that the Ukraine counter-offensive is not going well.

00:41:37.000 I think it's pretty plain that the military-industrial complex This asserts incredible power over the direction of American foreign policy.

00:41:47.000 I say that I would address this precisely how I would have looked at the conflict in Iraq.

00:41:52.000 Who is benefiting from this?

00:41:54.000 What are the relationships between military-industrial conflicts and then Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz?

00:41:58.000 Now, the hue and flag and mule and elephant may have switched, but I see the same subcutaneous interests apparently running the show.

00:42:07.000 Part of what we're discussing more broadly now, Sam, is that You could bring a host of perspectives and opinions.

00:42:13.000 I recognise you have a great deal of academic heft in your own particular area of expertise.

00:42:19.000 I occupy an entirely different space.

00:42:21.000 My intention is, I don't think that either political party is the answer.

00:42:27.000 I don't have any alliances.

00:42:29.000 The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models that allow us to forego the needless and irresolvable cultural conflicts that are currently dominating this space.

00:42:40.000 I think we have to get beyond our judgment of one another for individualism, whether that's from a right-wing libertarian perspective or a left-wing identity politics perspective.

00:42:49.000 I think we have to find a new way to navigate these spaces so that we can start Addressing the truly significant issues that define our times, which may be apocalyptic, regardless of how you approach this apocalypse.

00:43:03.000 That, too, would have a cultural flavour.

00:43:07.000 Yeah, my concern is that the starting point for addressing any of those problems is a fact-based discussion about what the problems themselves are, right?

00:43:17.000 So, for instance, if you think climate change is a hoax, right, and someone else thinks climate change is one of the most pressing problems we have to address as a society, somebody's wrong, right?

00:43:31.000 I mean, there's, you know, there's a, and there's a, There's a methodology by which we would resolve those differences, and this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.

00:43:47.000 I actually feel that even something as complex and hotly contested, ironically, as that issue could be resolved with this type of dialectic.

00:43:59.000 Do you agree that when looking for solutions for problems that affect all of us, we should Let's start by addressing the most powerful interests in the world that seem to benefit more than ordinary people.

00:44:11.000 Always check what the measures are that are suggested in order to solve these problems.

00:44:16.000 If the measures are, we are going to impede the freedoms of ordinary individuals as a priority.

00:44:22.000 We are going to tax ordinary people more highly. 0.69

00:44:25.000 That is going to engender cynicism.

00:44:26.000 And even the way the problem is described.

00:44:28.000 I think most people, particularly in our country, conservatism, the right-wing political movement, Is environmentalist.

00:44:35.000 They want to conserve the environment, England's green and pleasant lands.

00:44:39.000 Most Republicans are nationalist.

00:44:41.000 We can find ways of not like bludgeoning people with like my science versus your science.

00:44:47.000 Why did the inventors of MRNI vaccines get censored at the beginning of the pandemic?

00:44:52.000 Why did these Johns Hopkins experts get censored?

00:44:55.000 Why did these experts flourish?

00:44:56.000 You know, instead of going on and on ad infinitum about that.

00:44:59.000 We are going to have to live on this planet together.

00:45:03.000 It appears that there are a set of interests that continually benefit from crises.

00:45:07.000 Energy companies benefit when there's an energy crisis.

00:45:10.000 The military-industrial complex benefits when there's a war.

00:45:13.000 Big pharma benefits when there's a health crisis.

00:45:15.000 We have to address this.

00:45:16.000 We can't have an ongoing system that is punitive to ordinary people with every single advancing crisis.

00:45:24.000 That has to change, otherwise you're going to have ongoing cynicism and people, ordinary

00:45:28.000 people that wear different livery but have ultimately the same interest attacking one

00:45:32.000 another while nothing significantly changes.

00:45:35.000 In a sense, I think we have to find careful ways of moulding the clay of the argument

00:45:40.000 with the intention of resolution rather than the intention of winning.

00:45:44.000 That I think might be an important way that you and I, for example, could contribute.

00:45:53.000 I mean, what you're talking about are the effects of perverse incentives.

00:45:56.000 And it is, to my knowledge, no one has figured out a way to categorically clean this space up, right?

00:46:08.000 So again, I'll come back to the very simple and non-politicized example I brought up a few minutes ago.

00:46:15.000 Developing the next family of antibiotics, right?

00:46:18.000 It is massively resource intensive, right?

00:46:23.000 It costs a billion dollars to bring one new antibiotic to market.

00:46:29.000 Who do we incentivize to take to that risk?

00:46:31.000 Most of these drugs don't pan out, right?

00:46:33.000 So you're a company like Pfizer.

00:46:35.000 I would say we need a company like Pfizer to do that work, right?

00:46:39.000 The alternative is to say the government should do that work.

00:46:42.000 Now, the very same people who recoil from the perverse incentive of windfall profits to Pfizer when we have a

00:46:52.000 pandemic are some of the same people who will 0.99

00:46:56.000 laugh at the prospect of entrusting the government to develop our next generation of medical therapies.

00:47:03.000 There's this well understood principle that capitalism and the profit motive

00:47:10.000 and the free market are the best, among all the terrible ways to incentivize people,

00:47:15.000 they're the best ways we've discovered to incentivize creative people to get up early every

00:47:21.000 morning and make the personal sacrifices they have to make

00:47:24.000 so as to do the work that we need them to do to produce this new knowledge generation.

00:47:31.000 And if you think you're, and so there's some trade off between remunerating people for the risks they take

00:47:39.000 and the work they do and allowing, despite the obvious possibility of weird incentives,

00:47:49.000 allowing for people to get spectacularly wealthy when they get lucky based on their own intelligence, right?

00:47:56.000 They produce something that's immensely valuable to us, a new antibiotic.

00:48:01.000 And we should let them get rich, right?

00:48:03.000 And if you have an alternative to that, well, by all means express it.

00:48:07.000 But to my knowledge, we haven't found one.

00:48:10.000 I would like to express an alternative, but also outline a few things within your hypothesis.

00:48:14.000 No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable. This

00:48:19.000 tells us precisely the mentality that governs at Pfizer.

00:48:24.000 When indeed there is innovation, you might find that it came from BioNTech in Germany, who

00:48:29.000 were funded by the German taxpayers. You might find that Pfizer's profits were garnered

00:48:35.000 by charging the American taxpayers, who paid for that apparent Pfizer innovation, but actually

00:48:41.000 a BioNTech innovation anyway. 0.93

00:48:44.000 What I would say is, it's not like the government, you get a bunch of giddy, silly, owned, revolving 0.98

00:48:49.000 door civil servant corruptos in on the gig. 0.99

00:48:52.000 No.

00:48:52.000 The way that Pfizer would fund universities, the way that Shell Oil fund our exhibitions,

00:48:58.000 you would fund at the level of taxation in response to referenda, in response to a mandate

00:49:03.000 derived from the people of America or the country of relevance.

00:49:07.000 We want to spend this on developing this new antibiotic that we believe is going to help

00:49:12.000 people.

00:49:13.000 It's not going to be profitable for Big Pharma.

00:49:15.000 You saw how those guys carried on in the last few years, right?

00:49:18.000 Something needs to be radically re-evaluated.

00:49:20.000 We as sensible public intellectuals and true leaders are offering you an alternative.

00:49:25.000 We're going to in fact offer a one-time windfall tax that takes back the profits from Pfizer

00:49:30.000 and Moderna.

00:49:31.000 We're nationalising those companies right now and we will pay for our fine academic

00:49:35.000 academies at Stanford, John Hopkins, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge to do this research.

00:49:40.000 And when it works, and by God it will work, you who will benefit from it, not Pfizer,

00:49:46.000 not Moderna, you the good people of America.

00:49:49.000 Tuck the X in the box, we'll make sure we count every single vote.

00:49:52.000 That's what I would suggest, Sam.

00:49:55.000 But the very fact that that research isn't undertaken, of course, identifies the glitch in the machine that has to be addressed before all else.

00:50:04.000 Well, there is a glitch there.

00:50:05.000 The market is... Hold on one second.

00:50:07.000 I've got to silence the phone here.

00:50:10.000 Sam, we can use this opportunity to transition to the next part of our conversation.

00:50:15.000 Sam, I want to talk a little bit about... Actually, Russell, I need to make one point because I think it's very important.

00:50:21.000 There's a very strange double standard that we all feel in this space where we think It's somehow morally appropriate for someone to get spectacularly wealthy when they create the new iPhone.

00:50:35.000 Or they create a new, you know, block... That was funded by the government.

00:50:39.000 That was funded by taxpayers.

00:50:41.000 I don't think that's right either.

00:50:44.000 They're next on the list.

00:50:45.000 And Google.

00:50:46.000 All of them.

00:50:48.000 Unless you're going to stigmatize wealth itself, or private property itself, unless you're a communist... Gargantuan wealth!

00:50:53.000 Most people have this double standard.

00:50:55.000 Not communism.

00:50:56.000 No, no, no.

00:50:57.000 This is wrong.

00:50:57.000 I have to contest this, Sam.

00:51:00.000 I'm saying Google was funded by public money, so was iPhone, and the public should own it if they pay for it.

00:51:07.000 I think most people feel this.

00:51:08.000 Most capitalists feel this.

00:51:11.000 That there's a difference between getting wealthy by, if you're James Cameron and you create, you know, the Terminator franchise, right?

00:51:20.000 That's okay to get wealthy doing that.

00:51:23.000 Because we all want to see, you know, fun movies every summer, right?

00:51:26.000 So what could be wrong with that?

00:51:29.000 And yet the person who cures cancer shouldn't get wealthy, right?

00:51:33.000 There's something corrupting about getting wealthy in the service of a true benefit to humanity, right?

00:51:43.000 The person who's running a global relief organization that's responding to famines in Africa, the

00:51:50.000 CEO of that charity shouldn't be making $5 million a year, but the CEO of General Motors

00:51:57.000 should be, because how else are you going to recruit them?

00:52:00.000 And what we have with that double standard, we systematically recruit less talented people

00:52:03.000 we systematically recruit less talented people to solve our most pressing social

00:52:06.000 to solve our most pressing social and scientific problems, right?

00:52:08.000 and scientific problems, right?

00:52:12.000 So we give every smart, let me just lay on the plane here, we give every smart college

00:52:12.000 So we give every smart, let me just lay on the plane here.

00:52:16.000 We give every smart college student a forced choice between getting rich

00:52:21.000 by working for Goldman Sachs or following what might in fact be their ethical vocation

00:52:27.000 into philanthropy, but making an obvious economic sacrifice at the outset,

00:52:33.000 no matter how high they get in the organization running care or Doctors Without Borders,

00:52:40.000 they know they're not gonna get rich because there's a taboo around doing that.

00:52:44.000 And again, this is an incentive problem.

00:52:45.000 I think we probably want our smartest people working on our hardest problems,

00:52:50.000 and it's not obvious how to incentivize them apart from requiring that they be saints.

00:52:55.000 I think saints are in short supply.

00:52:59.000 because we are not organizing society to generate them.

00:53:02.000 Now, I would say that if we prioritise materialistic models, materialistic rewards and incentivisation models that are predicated on that modality, then we will be doubling down on this false progressivist mist and myth that's driving us ever further towards the kind of apocalypse That both of us, I think, sense he's coming in different ways.

00:53:24.000 You for this set of reasons, me for that set of reasons.

00:53:27.000 And I would say that, you know, let's face it, the main reason that we're having this conversation, Sam, other than both guys that like having a chat and we love the jujitsu and we can handle a gentle quarrel, Is to talk about your Waking Up app.

00:53:41.000 Now, what is the point of meditating if it is simply to make yourself a more efficient unit within a pre-established machine that's only going to evolve along predetermined lines?

00:53:51.000 The reason I meditate is because I believe in change.

00:53:53.000 I believe in the ability to change myself, to become a better man, to overcome my previous limitations, foibles and flaws.

00:54:00.000 And I believe in radical change for society.

00:54:02.000 And when I say radical change, I don't mean disruptive change that's going to hurt people.

00:54:05.000 I mean true progress, way inclusive progress, where we're able to look at the big picture and say,

00:54:11.000 whilst this aspect of the pandemic period was a reasonable error to have made,

00:54:16.000 this one appears like the type of error that benefited certain institutions and interests.

00:54:20.000 Whilst this part of the narrative is being excluded, perhaps in good faith,

00:54:24.000 it seems to me that this is being de-amplified precisely because it does offer a challenge

00:54:28.000 to globalist interests.

00:54:31.000 What I want is a society where you are absolutely free to believe whatever you want, I'm free to believe whatever I want, and we only need to argue where our shared interests are being challenged.

00:54:42.000 I reckon we would find that that's not so many issues as we might assume.

00:54:46.000 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.

00:54:53.000 I meditate in order to access Dimensions, framings, phenomena, frequencies, even space that is inaccessible to me if I remain within the rational, logistical, materialistic part of my mind.

00:55:08.000 Why do you meditate, Sam?

00:55:10.000 And why should we meditate?

00:55:13.000 Well, the main reason to meditate, I think there are two doorways into meditation and just finding it of interest and paying attention to it long enough to discover that there's a there there.

00:55:26.000 The first door could just be intellectual curiosity, wanting to know what's real about the nature of the mind.

00:55:33.000 I mean, it just makes sense if you want to understand yourself, better and the nature of your own experience better,

00:55:40.000 it makes sense to pay attention to it.

00:55:42.000 And meditation is really just the act of paying close attention

00:55:45.000 to what it's like to be you moment to moment.

00:55:47.000 So I think you can get there purely on the basis of intellectual interest.

00:55:52.000 But the most common route, and I think the route that is certainly more persuasive to most of us, is the doorway of psychological suffering.

00:56:03.000 Becoming interested in the mechanics of your own suffering.

00:56:08.000 Just how is it that thoughts about the past or the future can exert this overwhelmingly coercive influence on your

00:56:19.000 mood in the present, right? You think about something you regret or that embarrasses you, or you

00:56:25.000 think about something in the future that you're worried about, that produces anxiety. How is it

00:56:31.000 that that change in the character of your mind is accomplished and is it necessary, right?

00:56:37.000 Is there an alternative to that?

00:56:38.000 Is there a way of relating to the flow of thought such that you don't get pushed around in the same way?

00:56:45.000 And what is it that gets pushed around?

00:56:48.000 Is there a self in the middle of this storm that is actually vulnerable to changes in experience, or is there just experience?

00:56:59.000 And are you just identical to the totality of experience, moment to moment?

00:57:05.000 And so there's something to discover there about the mechanics of your own unhappiness.

00:57:11.000 And it really is freeing.

00:57:13.000 I mean, you really can be liberated from a certain kind of suffering that is truly unnecessary.

00:57:19.000 I mean, you know, if you take it far enough, You discover that virtually all of your psychological suffering has been unnecessary.

00:57:28.000 It's been a kind of dream, right?

00:57:31.000 It's very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it, right?

00:57:37.000 You're not in the situation you think you're in moment to moment.

00:57:41.000 And that discovery is quite freeing.

00:57:44.000 It's beautiful and as profound as anything I can imagine discussing.

00:57:51.000 If in this realm of consciousness you can discover that you're my entire identity and all our dilemmas and indeed all culture are a kind of construct relevant only within a particular framing or within a particular paradigm, what does that suggest about the nature of consciousness and awareness and do you ever query The perhaps unique status of consciousness, given the number of times it brings us to dead ends of inquiry, i.e.

00:58:23.000 where does it come from?

00:58:24.000 What is the significance of the presence of a conscious observer in some particular experimentation?

00:58:30.000 Obviously, most particularly in the instance of the double slit experiments and variations and progressions of that experiment.

00:58:36.000 The recent Nobel Prize in Physics discovered that there ultimately is no local reality, or at least posits that.

00:58:44.000 That's a pretty difficult thing to prove.

00:58:46.000 And I ask this, Sam, in particular in relation to what you've just said, that you can experientially and subjectively free yourself.

00:58:54.000 Like, you know, given the last half hour where you and I've gone, oh, I think this, I think that, or the war's this, the war's that, or the pandemic was this, pandemic's that, and both of us are saying, ultimately, it is all a construct, surely this will participate in the provision of a solution for the previous bloody 40 minutes?

00:59:12.000 Yes.

00:59:14.000 Well, I wish it were that easy.

00:59:15.000 I think much of it is... It's not easy, it's extremely difficult.

00:59:19.000 No, but even in success, I mean, just to take the examples of success where, you know, I've had... I was lucky enough to study with some of the greatest meditation teachers of the late 20th century.

00:59:32.000 I spent a lot of time in India and Nepal studying with people.

00:59:35.000 I mean, I had teachers who spent 20 years in a cave, right?

00:59:39.000 I mean, these wonderful Tibetan lamas who in the meditation space are analogous to the, you know,

00:59:45.000 Hirun and Henner we just spoke about in jujitsu, right?

00:59:47.000 You get on the mat with Hirun and Henner, and you know you're in the presence of knowledge

00:59:53.000 that you don't have, and a kind of refinement of technique and expertise that took,

00:59:59.000 certainly took 10,000 hours to accomplish, It might also require a certain kind of natural talent.

01:00:06.000 Maybe not everyone can be as good as the best people.

01:00:11.000 Certainly, if it's analogous to anything else in human life, there's a range for talent.

01:00:21.000 Many of these people, I would say all of these people, if I think of the greatest meditation masters I ever studied with, at least one of them might have thought the world was flat, right?

01:00:30.000 I mean, like these are people who are not educated.

01:00:35.000 With respect to 21st century science or politics or, you know, anything else we've been touching upon here.

01:00:41.000 And there's nothing about getting really good at untying the knot of self that necessarily gives you specific knowledge about any domain of expertise that we need to explore in order to solve our specific problems, right?

01:01:00.000 So just take like, what does it take to identify a pathogen that's jumping from bats into humans and make

01:01:08.000 that no longer be a problem? Or what is it going to take for us to solve the... Have a little

01:01:14.000 look around the Wuhan laboratory for infectious diseases and check out how it's funded and how

01:01:20.000 it's regulated. But Sam, more important than that, mate. I'm saying these are domains of relative

01:01:25.000 knowledge that have to be solved on their But to use your own argument, if you can undo the knot of self, then surely you will acknowledge that all that takes place on the material plane in this shared cultural space, which is nothing more than an amalgam of our shared cultural and personal experiences, the marketplace of ideas, the

01:01:42.000 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.

01:01:52.000 This is our shared experience.

01:01:55.000 To quote the Oscar, the famous quote around Schindler there, he who changes one life changes the world entire.

01:02:02.000 If we begin to change the prakriti The Prima Materia of reality, consciousness itself, we can of course adapt and evolve systems.

01:02:11.000 They will have to reflect those changes in reality.

01:02:14.000 Even you are talking about a shared hysteria when it comes to the phenomena of Donald Trump. 0.99

01:02:18.000 In spite of all this, he didn't do a peaceful transition, yet somehow he reaches deep down into the spiritual cojones of Pretty near 50% of Americans and they don't give a shit. 0.98

01:02:30.000 Now, if we can't find a way of hacking, bypassing this constant conflagration, we are doomed. 0.98

01:02:38.000 Otherwise, what is it?

01:02:39.000 50% are going to subjugate the other 50%? 0.62

01:02:41.000 Is that the solution?

01:02:41.000 Not going to happen, is it?

01:02:42.000 We're going to have a civil war?

01:02:43.000 Are we ever going to have an election in your country again that doesn't end with the other side going, oh, it was Russiagate, oh, it was stolen.

01:02:50.000 That's just, that's just the deal now.

01:02:52.000 So we have to find something else.

01:02:54.000 Where else is it going to come from?

01:02:56.000 This is a time to revivify the spiritual traditions and to note that all of these traditions emerge out of cultures where they believe in a deep, unitive experience.

01:03:06.000 That what you experience, and of course there's no way of proving this, and I'm sure that you as a sort of a, I don't mean this offensively, materialist rationalist, will say that you're in a Peace is a contrivance of neurological stuff that's highly personal and just within your personal skin.

01:03:21.000 And I would offer, what you experience in that meditative peace is what I experience in that meditative peace.

01:03:27.000 There is a true unity.

01:03:28.000 And from that place, from our shared humanity, the same way as skeletally you and I are more or less the same, in spite of our superficial cutaneous differences, we can find some archetypal unity to share together, to build upon.

01:03:42.000 Now, I know it doesn't That doesn't necessarily mean we're going to become experts in building nuclear power stations or whatever particular solution you or I might think we should pursue, but it does mean we might be able to establish a crucible of good intent based on that.

01:03:57.000 Otherwise, what is the point?

01:03:58.000 Personal peace while the world burns?

01:04:02.000 No, no, so I think there are two levels, at least two levels on which we have to address these existential problems, right?

01:04:09.000 One is the individual level, and the other is the level that you have addressed at various points here of systems and their consequences.

01:04:18.000 And these are fundamentally different, which is to say that no matter how good you get at playing the individual game of untangling your problems and untying your knots, again, you could spend 20 years in a cave and come out radiantly happy and filled with compassion and just having nothing but good intentions for the world, and yet, You have not done anything that necessarily has much greater significance until you can interface with a system level and make change at that level.

01:04:53.000 And the reason why the systems are so important, and I would argue that the greatest ethical and political changes we're going to make are going to be at the system level, because what we need are systems where Systems that make it easier and easier for ordinary, conflicted people to behave better and better, to behave more and more like saints.

01:05:16.000 And what we have are systems, very much of the time, that are so perversely incentivized that you essentially have to be a saint to behave like a normal human being, right?

01:05:29.000 I mean, take social media.

01:05:30.000 Take something like Twitter, or what used to be known as Twitter.

01:05:34.000 The reason why I left Twitter is I was experiencing it as a space where completely normal people were incentivized to behave like psychopaths.

01:05:44.000 I mean, I would look at my Twitter feed and I recognized, and it took me way too long to recognize this, but I recognized after some years That I was staring into a funhouse mirror where people were showing me their most grotesque faces.

01:06:01.000 And I just knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths in the world.

01:06:04.000 but I was seeing psychopath after psychopath in my Twitter feed, you know, coming from the left, 0.74

01:06:10.000 coming from the right, the most toxically dishonest behavior. 0.80

01:06:15.000 It was just gaslighting and insanity.

01:06:18.000 And I recognized that this was having an effect on me.

01:06:21.000 I didn't want to see, I didn't want this false advertisement

01:06:26.000 on an hourly basis to be getting into my head where I was forming an image of humanity

01:06:31.000 that I actually believe is inaccurate.

01:06:33.000 Right.

01:06:33.000 But yet people were behaving terribly in ways that they never would behave in person.

01:06:39.000 Right.

01:06:39.000 I knew it.

01:06:40.000 The reason why I knew it for sure is that I had met some of these people in person.

01:06:44.000 Right.

01:06:44.000 I had dinner with some of these people and yet they're professionally behaving like psychopaths because of the incentives that Twitter was delivering to them.

01:06:53.000 So.

01:06:54.000 My point is, Twitter's a system, you know, among many systems.

01:06:58.000 Social media is a system.

01:06:59.000 And what we need, in this case, we need a system of communication that is making it easier and easier for even normal people to have truly enlightened and enlightening conversations, where the wisdom is built into the system layer, right?

01:07:16.000 We have the opposite of that.

01:07:18.000 We have the corruption and the dishonesty and the bad incentives built into the system layer where you basically you have to be you know fucking Gandhi not to be an asshole on Twitter at least some of the time right and so that's In answer to your question, no matter how good you get at the meditation game privately and personally, no matter how ethical you get privately and personally, society is still going to be at the mercy of bad systems. 0.94

01:07:49.000 We have to play both games. 0.96

01:07:54.000 The reason why you play the individual game and commit so much time and attention to that

01:08:00.000 is because it is the closest point of contact to the difference between happiness and suffering

01:08:05.000 in your case.

01:08:06.000 When you wake up in the morning at four in the morning and are the prisoner of your thoughts, right?

01:08:12.000 Not only is the system not going to help you, your friends can't even help you.

01:08:18.000 Your family can't help you.

01:08:20.000 You are alone in the privacy of your own mind, right?

01:08:23.000 All of us are in solitary confinement all the time with respect to our own mind.

01:08:28.000 And only a technique like meditation that allows you to break the spell of your identification

01:08:35.000 with thought can help you there.

01:08:38.000 And that help does play out in how you are in the rest of your life.

01:08:41.000 But again, it's not going to solve our system-level problems if millions of us start meditating.

01:08:46.000 It just won't.

01:08:47.000 Well, there is actually some data that suggests that it will, funded by the David Lynch Foundation in Chicago, and I won't send you those studies because when this ends I'll bloody well forget this happened.

01:08:59.000 But Sam, now listen you beautiful man.

01:09:02.000 This is what I'm saying.

01:09:04.000 Perhaps the reason that these esoteric traditions have always existed, from the Rishis to the Sufis to the Saints, is because they intuit and perhaps even experience that subjectivity can be a portal to a universal experience.

01:09:20.000 But this transcendence of self that gives us relief from the incarceration of the ego, from the An enchilada of ever-carooming thoughts that become unbearable, ricocheting off the walls of the ego.

01:09:36.000 This can be undone through these practices, perhaps because we access an ulterior power.

01:09:43.000 Curious to me that each tradition has its own version, be it via the mantra or the breath, a way out.

01:09:51.000 The only way out is in.

01:09:53.000 It's curious too that these traditions often accrue moral and ethical principles that find perennial truth.

01:10:01.000 And this perennial truth, on a pragmatic level, Sam, on a pragmatic level, we should believe in this.

01:10:07.000 On a pragmatic level, we shouldn't We should apply the rigour of investigation and the zeal of faith to what we discover in those spaces.

01:10:18.000 Because what you said about that's the only place that can find you peace, you know, where you can find peace and succour, is not with a double C-O-U-R, not K-E-R. 0.99

01:10:29.000 Peace and succour is in that intimacy.

01:10:32.000 Semantics aside, it's no different from what anyone that believes in God would tell one another.

01:10:38.000 There within you, there is the deep imminence.

01:10:41.000 There is the imminent and transcendent, that peculiar paradox that plays out between waves and particles, plays out within you.

01:10:49.000 bear down in the Vedas we find in poetics that which could never be tracked through

01:10:53.000 materialistic observation, for we do not have the instruments when it comes to the apparently

01:10:59.000 external world, but within there are solutions. Now I believe, I have to believe, that this

01:11:06.000 will map onto reality. For reality, surely, is a projection of our faith and belief. If

01:11:12.000 it comes to design or culture or music, all things conceived of and constructed in this

01:11:17.000 space that can be a personal hell or a private heaven, can be projected out with via, via

01:11:24.000 the will. Via the will. You can will yourself to do many things but you can't will yourself

01:11:30.000 to will. And I feel that if personally and individually we endeavour in good faith to

01:11:36.000 find this new resource, this accessible and often ignored latent resource,

01:11:41.000 We can solve precisely the problem that you and I have been talking around.

01:11:45.000 How do we get beyond these silos?

01:11:46.000 How do we overcome this cultural cynicism?

01:11:48.000 How do we get beyond this cavalcade of my experts versus your experts?

01:11:52.000 My flag versus your flag? 0.88

01:11:54.000 By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.

01:11:58.000 And if we want to neglect that conclusion, then all we are going to do is sit On the fireside of Armageddon and just sort of say, well, I was right.

01:12:07.000 No, I was right.

01:12:08.000 And that doesn't seem like a nice way to go out.

01:12:10.000 I mean, I've got kids.

01:12:12.000 Mm hmm.

01:12:14.000 Well, so there's a reason why I resist the religious framing of these transcendent experiences.

01:12:20.000 I do not doubt the the importance and the accessibility of the transcendent experiences themselves, because I've had them and I have them.

01:12:29.000 And it's patently obvious to me That the ego, as it is generally experienced, is an illusion, right?

01:12:29.000 Right.

01:12:37.000 And on the other side of dispelling that illusion, there's this landscape of mind that is well worth exploring.

01:12:44.000 And meditation is one way to do that.

01:12:46.000 Psychedelics are another way. 0.97

01:12:47.000 There's a very interesting conversation to have about how those two projects are related.

01:12:56.000 But I would say that We should be slow to make metaphysical assertions about how all of this landscape of experience relates to the cosmos at large.

01:13:10.000 So it's like somebody like Deepak Chopra is very quick to say, okay, this experience of consciousness without ego

01:13:18.000 is what preceded the big bang, right?

01:13:21.000 Like he'll just jump into cosmology, right?

01:13:24.000 I see no reason to do that.

01:13:26.000 One, it doesn't seem intellectually honest for me to do that.

01:13:29.000 I mean, there's nothing about this insight into the freedom of consciousness prior to egocentricity.

01:13:37.000 There's nothing about that that tells you about quantum mechanics or about cosmology

01:13:41.000 or about the status of the singularity that preceded space-time, right?

01:13:46.000 Um, and--

01:13:47.000 And it doesn't resolve any of the paradoxes or disputes in any of those specific fields.

01:13:53.000 What it does do is tell you something very direct about what you are subjectively.

01:14:00.000 Like, there are objective claims we can make about human subjectivity.

01:14:05.000 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.

01:14:16.000 You can make claims about the way the mind is through direct experience.

01:14:21.000 For instance, you can make a claim about Impermanence, right?

01:14:27.000 Every state of mind you've ever had prior to this moment has arisen and passed away, right?

01:14:33.000 You know, the anger you felt two weeks ago isn't here anymore, right?

01:14:37.000 And if it comes back in the next moment, that's a newly arising phenomenon, which again, will pass away.

01:14:42.000 And the connection between the feeling and the thoughts is something that we can inspect from a first-person side and make objective claims about, right?

01:14:51.000 So, I'm not saying this is all a space where there's no truth.

01:14:58.000 There are very deep truths, first person truths to be discovered here,

01:15:01.000 but they're different truths than the truths of cosmology or physics.

01:15:05.000 Absolutely, of course, of course.

01:15:07.000 On that point, Sam, let me offer you this.

01:15:10.000 There are also medical claims about wellness, blood pressure, cardiovascular benefits that could be made that could not possibly have been medically understood by the people that conceived of these techniques, and yet somehow they knew.

01:15:27.000 I don't think that we can just extract these technologies from their traditions Without honouring and acknowledging many of what they declared to be the implications of this technology.

01:15:41.000 Particularly when they are such beautiful declarations!

01:15:45.000 Love, beauty, unity.

01:15:46.000 Now whilst you say that it's fanciful and doubtless conjecture to make cosmological claims on the basis of a person's subjective experience in meditation, It is similarly conjecture to say that there is nothing before the Big Bang.

01:16:00.000 There's exactly the same amount of proof.

01:16:03.000 One of them is optimistic, one of them is pessimistic.

01:16:06.000 see as much zeal and devoutness in the realm of materialism.

01:16:10.000 To some degree, it's been offered many times. Notable and brilliant atheists like yourself, Hitchens

01:16:17.000 and Dawkins - all men that I very much revere and respect. I know that you know stuff I

01:16:23.000 don't know. There is certainly a devoutness to the - I don't want to call it pessimism

01:16:28.000 because that's unfair in its pejorative, but the materialism and the rationalism and the insistence

01:16:34.000 that just because the - because what I offer is this.

01:16:37.000 There are realms and frequencies for which we do not have the instruments, but because we don't have the instruments, that doesn't mean the data isn't there.

01:16:45.000 And even someone much more popular and populist, in a different sense, figure like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox, friends of mine in science entertainment, say stuff like, if it can't be measured, it isn't there, and eventually we will be able to hold this knowledge.

01:17:01.000 But knowledge is limitless.

01:17:02.000 The potential for knowledge is infinite and we will remain finite. Yet in this space where we

01:17:08.000 transcend the personal self, I believe that we do exactly access a super state of possibilities.

01:17:15.000 If you can create a cultural bloody phenomenon like Pokemon Go, or Jesus Christ, the excitement

01:17:25.000 and fanfare around the Super Bowl, you can use this prima materia, this prakriti, to create

01:17:30.000 better cultures, particularly if there's a goodwill about it. And also I would say that down here in

01:17:35.000 this place we meet to the archetypes, we meet the perennial, we meet the eternal, we meet the

01:17:39.000 We meet stories, folklore, and dreams, which while being certainly housed within the metaphysical, have enough ubiquity, I would suggest, Sam, to warrant investigation.

01:17:49.000 And even if investigation isn't the right tool, maybe this short, abrupt, yet beautiful word, faith.

01:17:57.000 Hmm.

01:17:58.000 Well, so I take a slightly different line through this than the one you expect.

01:18:02.000 I'm not a devout materialist of the sort that you imagine.

01:18:07.000 I just see that There's a third option, which is to acknowledge what you don't know, right?

01:18:16.000 I think we all stand before an ocean of ignorance and we broadcast across that ocean rather often metaphysical claims that are unwarranted, right?

01:18:26.000 We do science on the seashore and we explore the ocean with respect to certain physicalist assumptions, but science is bigger than that.

01:18:39.000 Ultimately, if physicalism is limited, And it turns out to be untrue or partial or otherwise misleading.

01:18:46.000 There will be a rational accounting of how we wandered into error there, right?

01:18:53.000 It's not irrational to speculate that maybe mind is not what it seems, right?

01:18:59.000 And maybe it's dependency on the brain is not what it seems, right?

01:19:02.000 So, all of this is fair game.

01:19:05.000 But to pretend to know any specific thing to be true in this area, I think is intellectually dishonest.

01:19:12.000 Yeah.

01:19:13.000 And specifically, but this is the one piece that is truly seditious with respect to the religious project, which is the basis of my atheism.

01:19:24.000 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.

01:19:40.000 You read the Bible, And ask yourself, how hard would it have been for an omniscient being to have put in a single page of this text evidence of his omniscience?

01:19:52.000 It would be trivially easy to have done that.

01:19:54.000 And there's not a single passage like that in the Bible.

01:19:57.000 Everything in the Bible could have been written by a first century human being or somebody who lived in the fifth century B.C.

01:20:04.000 or 1000 B.C., depending on what book we're talking about.

01:20:08.000 And so it is with every other religious scripture.

01:20:11.000 So what we know is that the foundational claim, certainly of Abrahamic religion, of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the foundational claim that a specific book has a non-human origin, right?

01:20:25.000 That is the claim that gives you Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 0.92

01:20:29.000 We know that that claim is is specious and indefensible at this point in history.

01:20:37.000 And what we need, therefore, is a truly 21st century conversation about everything we've been talking about, about the possibility of self-transcendence, its implications for running a sane society.

01:20:47.000 How do we get billions of people to solve these coordination problems of cooperation and converge on common projects so as to not make themselves needlessly miserable?

01:20:56.000 All of this is a project that requires A 21st century intellectually honest framing.

01:21:03.000 And so the reason why I dispense with religion to begin that conversation is that all of our religious scriptures are intrinsically at odds with one another.

01:21:13.000 They're mutually incompatible.

01:21:15.000 They are, they are, they are, they're divisiveness is right there on the surface, right?

01:21:23.000 I mean, just take one example.

01:21:24.000 I mean, I hear, I see that you're resisting this claim.

01:21:26.000 Stop being a Bible Grinch.

01:21:27.000 You're Bible Grinching, you're Koran Grinching. 1.00

01:21:30.000 No, because I would say this.

01:21:31.000 Come on, you already know what you know.

01:21:34.000 If you're going to pander to the religious, if you're going to, if you're going to pander to the religious biases of traditional religious people, right?

01:21:41.000 If you're going to tell Muslims that they're not wrong to be Muslim and Christians that they're not wrong to be Christian, right? 0.96

01:21:47.000 These are totally valid projects.

01:21:48.000 I believe that they're right.

01:21:49.000 What you have done is, is enshrine a zero-sum contest between Muslims and Christians, because Islam and Christianity at their core are incompatible. 0.97

01:21:59.000 And I'll tell you why.

01:22:00.000 At their core, Jesus, every Christian, real Christian, asserts that Jesus was divine, and every real Muslim asserts that he wasn't. 1.00

01:22:10.000 How do you square that zero-sum contest?

01:22:13.000 You can't.

01:22:14.000 Honestly, you can't.

01:22:15.000 How I would do this is I would say that your unconscious framing, when you say from a 21st century perspective, enshrines the notion of progressivism, that we're at some current apex now, rather than a temporal gateway, a liminal space, where we, like the Hellenists who had to address the peculiar motions of the spheres, were precisely inverse to what they had ensumed.

01:22:36.000 Like those that preceded Galileo, who had to acknowledge that amidst the devices and new lenses, new realms have been uncovered.

01:22:44.000 We cannot judge the semantic devices by which these models and modalities are interpreted in the same way that we might adjudicate their cultural and social baggage.

01:22:59.000 I hope that they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited tool of language.

01:23:06.000 free of bats, because that's apparently the only way anyone can catch COVID. I hope that

01:23:11.000 they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited

01:23:18.000 tool of language. But I would say there is sufficient data in Buddhism, in Hinduism,

01:23:24.000 in Islam, in Judaism and Christianity to suggest that what we have to overcome is precisely

01:23:30.000 the individual that you have made a personal discovery about with your own meditative journey.

01:23:35.000 The cultural afflictions and inflections of a religion are an easy way to dismiss them, but I think what is lost in that analysis is real hope Real God.

01:23:46.000 And what I mean by God is love and the hope and possibility that somehow we can turn the tide of this thing.

01:23:54.000 For me, it doesn't matter if you are an atheist.

01:23:56.000 Some of my greatest teachers are atheists.

01:23:59.000 But what matters to me is that we revere and honour and re-sacralise the earth.

01:24:04.000 Otherwise, how do we save it?

01:24:06.000 Hello, everyone.

01:24:07.000 Nothing means anything.

01:24:08.000 You're in limitless space.

01:24:08.000 You're going to die.

01:24:09.000 Now, for God's sake, do something about climate change. 0.93

01:24:12.000 Why? 0.99

01:24:12.000 Who gives a fuck? 0.99

01:24:15.000 Because God is real. 0.99

01:24:16.000 You are God.

01:24:17.000 The Earth is real.

01:24:18.000 The Earth is God.

01:24:20.000 We are participating in a miracle right now.

01:24:23.000 Now sit down and meditate and learn to love and recognize that you are the number one problem in your life. 1.00

01:24:28.000 And then we can start overcoming some of this bullshit. 0.99

01:24:31.000 It doesn't matter if someone loves Trump. 0.99

01:24:32.000 It doesn't matter if someone hates Trump.

01:24:34.000 What matters is love itself. 1.00

01:24:35.000 Now, come on, let's get on with this bullshit. 0.97

01:24:37.000 Now, if we can't have that kind of conversation, we're just going to sit watching the plane go down, Sam, and just querying who the pilot was. 0.98

01:24:46.000 Is it consciousness itself?

01:24:47.000 Or was it CIA-sponsored agents that came out of Saudi Arabia?

01:24:53.000 Or did they come out of Iraq?

01:24:54.000 And what are we in this war for anyway, baby?

01:24:59.000 Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I agree with you about the power of love.

01:25:06.000 I totally agree with you about the primacy and the power of love, but we need to acknowledge that culture is a kind of operating system that we're all entangled with, and it's possible to have a pathological culture And I think you would agree that we're suffering from the pathologies of culture, and it is therefore possible to have love, real love, channeled in ways that are pathological, right?

01:25:37.000 I mean, just take, this is a topic I occasionally am forced to return to.

01:25:43.000 Happily, it's been many years since it's been in the news in a big way, but you take the link between between the doctrine of jihadism in Islam and suicidal terrorism.

01:25:56.000 The link is very direct, despite the fact that many people on the left would doubt it.

01:26:02.000 It's by no means all economics and politics driving people to be jihadists and suicidal terrorists in the Muslim world.

01:26:10.000 Ask yourself about the state of mind of a jihadist just before he pushes the button on his bomb when he's on a bus filled with non-combatants, or he's about to fly a plane into a building, or any other moment where he's about to commit a suicide.

01:26:26.000 What is, from the outside, I think appropriately judged as a suicidal atrocity.

01:26:32.000 I think it is actually quite likely that that person is experiencing real ecstasy, Real love, real love for his fellow Muslims, a real expectation of entering paradise, real faith, real joy.

01:26:47.000 My friend, what does that matter?

01:26:50.000 But Sam, I can recognise what you're saying, I'm not stupid, I've worked out the rest of this conversation. 0.98

01:26:53.000 Sam, what do you think the drone operator in Nevada is thinking when they bomb a bunch of Muslim kids in Iraq? 0.90

01:27:03.000 It's the same death, it's the same system, one set of deaths rationally undergirded, one set of deaths ecstatically undergirded.

01:27:11.000 What's the difference between ecstasy and rationalism?

01:27:13.000 Same dead children.

01:27:16.000 No, no, you're taking the wrong side of my point.

01:27:19.000 That's not the point I'm making.

01:27:20.000 My point is love isn't enough, right?

01:27:23.000 Because love can be channeled pathologically.

01:27:29.000 So love is absolutely necessary for a good life, but it's not sufficient, right?

01:27:36.000 A sense of community, a sense of solidarity with other human beings is, I would say, generally necessary for a good life.

01:27:44.000 It's not sufficient.

01:27:46.000 Right?

01:27:47.000 You can be feeling love and solidarity as a Nazi among Nazis. 0.81

01:27:52.000 Right?

01:27:52.000 That is a psychologically possible frame of mind.

01:27:56.000 We need to discourage Nazism. 0.97

01:27:58.000 It's not real love, actually.

01:27:59.000 It's not real love.

01:28:00.000 At the cultural level.

01:28:01.000 Sam, I'm going to contest that mad claim, because whilst I acknowledge... You don't think it's possible for a Nazi to love his children?

01:28:08.000 And love his wife?

01:28:10.000 And love Wagner?

01:28:11.000 I've looked a lot over Wagner at the end of the day.

01:28:14.000 This is what I would say.

01:28:14.000 The Nazis were clearly in their giddy genocide having a hell of a time.

01:28:19.000 But what I would suggest is if Nazis were instructed in the true nature of love, that that might have give them some recourse. 0.65

01:28:27.000 and some pause in their dreadful genocidal projects. And I would say there's more than

01:28:32.000 one way to skin a cat. The motives and psychological state of a jihadi, as opposed to the psychological 0.96

01:28:39.000 state of people running neat, neat, beautiful, little rational drones, is of no comfort to 0.94

01:28:46.000 those on the arse end of murder, whether it's rationally and state-sanctioned or whether

01:28:51.000 it's sanctioned by an ecstatic religious experience. 0.98

01:28:53.000 Listen, let's meditate together because it's late in my country and I've got to go home.

01:28:56.000 I've got like three kids.

01:28:58.000 My youngest kid's like four weeks.

01:28:59.000 Sleep is the ultimate meditation.

01:29:00.000 Yeah, and I will be actually meditating as well.

01:29:03.000 Should we do a quick meditation now?

01:29:04.000 Me and you, like you lead it.

01:29:06.000 Sure, oh sure.

01:29:07.000 We're going to leave now.

01:29:08.000 Those of us on our Locals platform, me and Sam are going to do a meditation.

01:29:12.000 Let us demonstrate that in spite of differences, we can find unity and peace in a meditative space.

01:29:17.000 You can join us by clicking the red link and joining us over on Locals.

01:29:21.000 Stay free!

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Stay Free - Russel Brand - September 08, 2023

Sam Harris (Wealth, Health & Debate)

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