In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, our conversation with Sam Harris, the intellectual, neurologist, writer, and thinker, creator of the Waking Up With Sam Harris app, and creator of The Waking up With Samantha Harris Podcast, is all about how we can all work together to create a better world. In this episode, we talk about: Why we need to get beyond experts versus your experts How we can get beyond a cavalcade of my experts vs your experts, my flag vs your flag and why we should let them get rich no matter where they are in the economic hierarchy And much, much more! Stay Free with Russell Brand is a podcast by comedian, actor, writer and podcaster Russell Brand based in London, England, and produced by Russell Brand. Stay Free! Visit stayfreewithrussellcrane.co.uk for tickets to Russell's upcoming live show at Wembley Park Theatre on the 16th September. To get tickets go to russellbrown.live/StayFree with Russell and find out more about the show, go to stayfree.co/stayingfree with russellandwondr.uk or tweet me to let me know what you thought of this episode! and what you're looking forward to in the coming weeks! Timestamps: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12) 13) 15) 16) 17) 18) 19) 21) 26) 27) 28) 29) 30) 31) 32) 35) 36) 37) 38) 39) Theme Music by Ian Dorsch Intro Music by Jeffree Starrett 41) 41) 42) 45) 45) 46) 46) 47) 47) 45 Theme by Ian McLeod 48) 49) 51) Music by Brian McDade 46 47 45 Theme Song by Ian BJJ 56) , Theme by , 51 6 Music by 6 , 6 , 5 & 6] 1 4 5 , 7 44
00:00:01.000Over 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.
00:00:11.000How do you bring down the system while bringing up children?
00:00:15.000Can't sleep! Can't f***ing sleep! Sleep's what I have, it's in the morning now!
00:00:20.000How do you try to bring down Bear Grylls while you're on Running Wild with Bear Grylls?
00:00:24.000And Bear Grylls is much better at that stuff than you.
00:00:27.000How do we find new ways of challenging authority while trying to live normal lives?
00:00:33.000So I'll be doing stand-up, breathwork, meditation, as well as conducting polls and votes because I believe democracy works.
00:00:40.000Are you happy with your current government?
00:01:09.000Thanks for joining me for a very special episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:01:13.000It's our conversation with Sam Harris, the intellectual, neurologist, writer and thinker, creator of the Waking Up With Sam Harris app.
00:01:23.000He 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.
00:01:33.000Now, of course, this conversation has already gone viral, particularly for those of you that watch it on Locals.
00:01:39.000You can watch these things first if you are an AwakendWonder and a member of our Locals community.
00:01:46.000Now, 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.
00:01:57.000This has gone viral for a reason, because it was a great conversation.
00:02:00.000But if you stay all the way to the end, to the bit in Locals, you'll see that we meditate together.
00:02:04.000And even after quite a hot conversation, we find peace together.
00:02:09.000Also, there's a fantastic episode of Here's the News where we look at Biden's new drug
00:02:12.000negotiations and whether or not he really beat Big Pharma.
00:02:15.000You won't believe Kamala Harris's grandstanding speech and how it contrasts with the
00:02:20.000muted regulations and legislations that have been passed. Outrageous claims there. You're
00:02:25.000going to love all of it. But without further ado, let's move straight into our conversation with
00:02:30.000Sam Harris. Remember, if you're watching this on Rumble, give us a Rumble, press the
00:02:33.000red button at the bottom of your screens right now and become an Awake and Wonder
00:02:37.000like the people that are watching this live. That's how they do those screen grabs and let it
00:02:54.000I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way.
00:02:59.000How do we get beyond this cavalcade of my experts versus your experts, my flag versus your flag?
00:03:04.000By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.
00:03:10.000There's a methodology by which we would resolve those differences and this shattering of our information space is making it very difficult to apply that methodology.
00:03:20.000The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models.
00:03:24.000No one is conducting that research at Pfizer precisely because it isn't profitable.
00:03:29.000Have a little look around the Wuhan Laboratory for Infectious Diseases and check out how it's funded and how it's regulated.
00:04:15.000When I met you, I remember in LA, you introduced me to Hiron Gracie, who became my BJJ teacher, along with my teacher, Chris Clear, over here in the UK.
00:04:29.000I'm now a Purple Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
00:04:34.000No, I have not rolled since COVID, actually.
00:04:38.000Yeah, 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.
00:04:50.000You know, I just was getting neck injuries and hip injuries, and so I just, I mean, and through no fault of Hiron's, obviously.
00:04:57.000I mean, he's, He's the perfect person to roll with.
00:05:00.000It's just gravity at a certain point is not your friend.
00:05:20.000Like, right now, my knee hurts a little bit, my left knee, and my left shoulder hurts a little bit.
00:05:26.000What I try to do when rolling is, very near the beginning of the session, establish a rapport with my opponent that I hope will translate into them, on some level, holding back slightly.
00:05:39.000Yeah, well, I mean, listen, at some point, I was only rolling with Jiron, right?
00:05:44.000So, I mean, obviously, he has nothing to prove.
00:05:58.000I ascribe it to bad luck and bad genes.
00:06:01.000Mate, as this online space continues to evolve, the relationship that you have with Jordan Peterson, where two people with opposing views, with perfectly valid perspectives on both sides, has somehow been mapped onto the entire internet space, but perhaps without the congeniality and goodwill that I assume exists between you and Jordan. I wonder what your fears are as we
00:06:27.000increasingly find ourselves in some irresolvable cultural polemic that seems to be fuelled
00:06:37.000by a will to impose, centralise, to accrue authority, to defeat without grace the opponent.
00:06:46.000How do you feel about this advancing space and how can we engage in conversations with people we
00:06:54.000How can we take on board the views of those we disagree with and advance a mutual conversation?
00:07:00.000Or do we just accept now that centralised democracies such as America and the UK are finished and we have to start moving towards decentralised cultural and political models because there's just too much agitation elsewise?
00:07:13.000Well, I share your concern about all this.
00:07:16.000I'm not sure you and I would view the remedies in the same way,
00:07:21.000but I'm just going to sketch out what I think the remedy is.
00:07:24.000I think we need to collectively develop the ability to worry about more than one thing at a time, right?
00:07:35.000So what I keep confronting are people who focus on one part of a troubling dichotomy.
00:07:43.000Take the tension between censorship, which I know you're worried about, and misinformation.
00:07:51.000Right now, I would acknowledge that free speech is almost an intrinsic good.
00:07:56.000It's certainly the best error-correcting mechanism we have, and that we should protect it at almost any cost, certainly politically.
00:08:06.000And yet there is this tension between misinformation and really waking up in a society that's one day ungovernable on the basis of misinformation, where we just cannot converge on a fact-based discussion about anything because people are so siloed into their delusional echo chambers.
00:08:23.000And on the other side, our efforts to correct for misinformation, which increasingly look like censorship and increasing their intention with Again, the almost intrinsic good of free speech, which we protect much better here in America than you do over there in the UK.
00:08:42.000So, what I'm continually finding are people, you know, we can talk about the left and right poles of the political spectrum as shorthand, it is not perfectly accurate now, but people on the left and the right can only focus on one of these bright shiny objects at a time, right?
00:08:59.000They'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?
00:09:14.000So, 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.
00:09:28.000And, you know, or a trade-off between individualism and a commitment to the common good, right?
00:09:34.000I 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.
00:09:45.000If we respect your right to put smoke in the air above everything else, we have undermined my right to breathe clean air.
00:10:04.000What 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?
00:10:22.000And our online space has devolved into a polarized conversation about this landscape of trade-offs.
00:10:31.000I agree with you that these media silos are contributing to the inability to take on the perspective of the opposing side.
00:10:41.000And I think no one's more guilty of creating these spaces than what are commonly colloquially known as mainstream media spaces.
00:10:48.000Just today we were Looking at a broadcast on MSNBC where it was openly posited and quite enthusiastically so that were Trump to win the election in 2024 that he would immediately declare himself president for life and therefore any opportunity to indict or indeed imprison Donald Trump will be lost forever.
00:11:10.000So nothing less than the future of democracy hung in the balance in the forthcoming 2024
00:11:16.000election. Now, this was the claims that were being made specifically on MSNBC, and in particular
00:11:23.000it was Rachel Maddow. I feel like it perhaps would be more beneficial if what you want
00:11:27.000to encourage is a rational discourse to engage in, to present rational arguments, and in
00:11:33.000particular to be candid, open, and utterly transparent about the shortcomings of the
00:11:38.000side that you yourself advocate for. If freedom of speech means anything, it means the freedom
00:11:43.000of speech of your opponents. And I think we've seen over the last few years, terms like misinformation,
00:11:49.000malinformation, and disinformation enter the public discourse, not solely because there
00:11:54.000are now miracles around communication and technology that mean anyone with an idea and
00:11:58.000a rhetorical flourish can reach previously unprecedented audiences, but also because
00:12:04.000these new models precisely mean that centralising and controlling any particular narrative is
00:12:11.000almost impossible, and the veracity of opposing information is indeed difficult to verify.
00:12:18.000I completely agree with you that we can't have single-issue orators governing our space with Sturm, Drang and Bombast.
00:12:26.000We 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.
00:12:48.000Now, these ideas are precisely the kind of things that I turn to meditation for, Sam, and I know that you're here in part to talk in depth about your meditation app, which I admire and I love and I use.
00:12:59.000And I feel that there's precisely this kind of access to inner terrains that might provide us the ability
00:13:06.000One thing I'd also like to challenge, if I may, is that the distinction between left and right
00:13:13.000devolving into periphery versus centre - to use Martin Guri's terms there from his book,
00:13:19.000Revolt of the Public - is significant. What we have now is anti-authoritarianism
00:13:24.000versus authoritarianism. I feel that once that gets mapped into a meaningful political system,
00:13:31.000it's going to mean, to a degree, the devolution of power, further federalisation,
00:13:36.000and an ability for communities to govern themselves.
00:13:39.000I said a lot there, Sam, but I know you can handle it, so please let me know what that provokes.
00:13:45.000Yeah, 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.
00:13:54.000And 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.
00:14:06.000There's a distrust of power, there's a distrust of institutions.
00:14:12.000And it's understandable, because our institutions have failed us in obvious ways.
00:14:17.000Certainly they have They've proven themselves, certainly at moments, untrustworthy.
00:14:24.000So the loss of trust is understandable.
00:14:26.000But what I would say is that the corrective we need is not to tear everything down.
00:14:34.000We need to figure out how to reboot our institutions so that they are trustworthy, so that they're worthy of trust, and so that people actually trust them.
00:14:42.000And what I'm worried about now, given the online tools we have and the democratization of everything, And this almost, you know, apocalypse of contrarianism is that even if we had trustworthy institutions across the board, we couldn't get a majority of people to trust them on any one point.
00:15:04.000Certainly not a point that is politically polarizing, right?
00:15:07.000So if we have a new pandemic, how do we get 90% of people to trust the mainstream medical message about what the facts on the ground really are.
00:15:20.000And how do we get people to trust government public health organizations as they give us up-to-the-minute information, insofar as they know it?
00:15:31.000And again, the basis for distrust is totally understandable because we witnessed one pratfall after another during COVID.
00:15:38.000But what I'm saying is that we absolutely need, and to speak locally in the U.S.
00:15:48.000The fact that we feel that we can't trust these organizations is Absolutely corrosive to the maintenance of a healthy society.
00:15:59.000And it certainly will put us in a position to fail once again to respond intelligently to the next pandemic.
00:16:06.000And what I worry about, again, my concerns about COVID have, apart from the first few months, When no one really knew what the hell was going on.
00:16:16.000My concerns about COVID have always been that it's a kind of dress rehearsal that we were obviously failing.
00:16:22.000I worry that we're not learning the lessons of that failure.
00:16:25.000Because I think it's just inevitable that we will one day have a pandemic that's quite
00:16:40.000And I'm not sure we're putting ourselves in a position to do that.
00:16:43.000I do recall both in our nation and in yours, Sam, an incredible moment of goodwill at the
00:16:49.000commencement of the pandemic period, where people sort of intuitively understood that
00:16:53.000that we were facing something unprecedented.
00:16:56.000And indeed, the principles of every measure, whether it's masking or lockdown or medications, is human life is, if not sacred, I'm aware of who I'm talking to, certainly valuable in a somewhat unique way, which if not sacred... I like sacred.
00:17:09.000You can use sacred with me without apology.
00:17:11.000Because if it isn't sacred, we're going to have to work out what the hell it is that makes human life so worthy of preservation.
00:17:18.000So we'll go with sacred for the purposes of this conversation.
00:17:22.000And any personal imposition is as nothing compared to our collective value and our joint duty to protect the vulnerable.
00:17:30.000But of course, what we saw, and these are just a few points I'm tracking, and I know that you're a busy man, but I'm sure you're broadly aware of the kind of media that I engage with and convey, is that Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer, said it would be reprehensible if there were any profits made by Pfizer.
00:17:43.000And I think we all know that there were profits made by Pfizer.
00:17:46.000Their legal indemnity for any potential vaccine injury caused a lot of suspicion.
00:17:52.000The very fact that the FDA is significantly funded by the pharmaceutical industry causes
00:17:56.000a great many people concern, skepticism, and cynicism.
00:17:59.000There are figures within the CDC, NIIH, that have a... Well, this is to one of our viewers
00:19:51.000I think we would see something like a bell curve distribution of assumptions, and we would find it very difficult to agree, even just about that simple propositional claim.
00:20:04.000We'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?
00:20:16.000But what you pointed to in your comments about pharma there are A set of perverse incentives that we have to worry about.
00:20:24.000So, the profit motive in pharma is something that many of us, probably all of us when we look at it, are uncomfortable with.
00:20:35.000But it's also not clear how to incentivize drug discovery in a way that works, that dissects out that perverse incentive.
00:20:44.000So, yes, I was totally uncomfortable with the idea of a pharmaceutical company Enjoying windfall profits during a pandemic and racing vaccines to market, knowing that billions of dollars were waiting to hit the cash register.
00:21:00.000It's easy to see what could go wrong with that.
00:21:03.000Again, this is why we need an FDA and a CDC and other regulatory organizations we can trust.
00:21:09.000Your revolving door comment is totally valid.
00:21:11.000Except, the issue is, there are only so many domain experts.
00:21:17.000What sort of jobs do they get when they transition?
00:21:20.000Who do we want to be doing this research?
00:21:25.000deciding about regulation apart from people who know all of the details of this research.
00:21:30.000And you take a simple case, let's take it off COVID for a second because that's so highly
00:21:35.000politicized, but take the fact that we as a society desperately need to create a new generation of
00:21:43.000antibiotics, right? We have had, we've, you've...
00:21:46.000For as long as you and I have been alive, we've lived in this bright, shiny moment where infectious disease has been radically curtailed by us having a very solid armamentarium of antibiotics that work.
00:22:03.000If the first antibiotic doesn't work, there's one behind that, and there's one behind that, and there's one behind that.
00:22:08.000But in the last, I don't know, 25, 30 years or so, we have witnessed this growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
00:22:18.000And we know we don't have a good pipeline for developing new antibiotics.
00:22:22.000The reason why we don't have a good pipeline is because the drug companies can't be appropriately incentivized to do the work and to spend the money to develop these drugs, because this next antibiotic, 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
00:22:42.000and they haven't worked and we got one left, right?
00:22:45.000That drug, whose name no one can pronounce, that is a drug that maybe you will take once
00:23:17.000And if we were going to make governments do this, how badly would they handle that project?
00:23:23.000So, again, this is a problem of incentives and trade-offs, and we have to figure out how to untangle all this in a way that preserves public trust in institutions, and it is a hard problem.
00:23:35.000It'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.
00:23:51.000Whilst 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
00:24:03.000conflict, and the role of pharma and corporations more broadly seems to be coming
00:24:08.000from the right. That's extraordinary for me with my own particular political and cultural
00:24:12.000heritage. I'd also like to add, while I've got this opportunity, that I take neither Prozac nor
00:24:18.000Viagra on a daily basis. It's at most once every other day. Chance would be a fine thing. We're
00:24:24.000going to leave YouTube now, so if you're watching us on YouTube, please click the
00:24:29.000link in the description to join us on Rumble, where I'll be asking Sam Harris about
00:24:33.000the popularity of figures like Donald Trump, about whom he has spoken extensively, and
00:25:16.000I feel like Trump's a runaway leader in his own pie.
00:25:20.000I 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.
00:25:30.000You have a significant number of Americans from across the political spectrum - narrow,
00:25:33.000though I would contest that political spectrum is when you consider what's possible if you're
00:25:37.000a regular meditator. What does this tell us about how bereft we've become of alternatives,
00:25:43.000and what new ideas, what new conversations, and what new alliances need to emerge in this
00:25:49.000new media space, and how this could evolve into new political movements? Perhaps if we start
00:25:54.000with what you think underwrites the sudden surge in populism, whether it's left or right-wing.
00:26:02.000Well, I think there are a few variables.
00:26:06.000One is this siloing into echo chambers that has been enabled by the internet broadly, but social media in particular.
00:26:14.000I think it's possible to stay in a silo now in a way that it simply wasn't a generation before, even though, yes, there was There was an opportunity to have your biases enshrined in just how you decided to use the media, you know, in the past.
00:26:34.000But it's just gotten worse and worse to the point where there's almost no Darwinian corrective to misinformation and lies now.
00:26:44.000Like, you really can swim in an ocean of lies for as long as you want, and nothing from the outside is going to intrude, or certainly need not intrude.
00:26:53.000So you have these hermetically sealed spaces of information and misinformation.
00:26:59.000And so we're not converging on anything like a fact-based discussion about anything of
00:27:34.000It's just this automaticity that he distorts the truth.
00:27:39.000He'll contradict himself in the span of 30 seconds.
00:27:43.000He has cultivated an audience that simply doesn't care, right?
00:27:47.000This is not an audience that likes him despite his failures of personal integrity.
00:27:53.000It's an audience that mostly likes him because he is this chaos machine, right?
00:27:58.000He's this kind of wrecking ball that is swinging through our institutions and our political norms and disrupting everything.
00:28:08.000So the question really is, why do so many millions of Americans want to see everything disrupted in this way?
00:28:15.000And it does come back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about distrust in institutions, some of which has been well-earned.
00:28:25.000I think the role that wealth inequality and a sense of loss of opportunity is playing is rarely remarked upon.
00:28:33.000It's amazing to me how little We grapple on either side of the political aisle that we grapple with the implications of wealth inequality now.
00:28:42.000And so I think that is certainly a variable.
00:28:49.000There 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.
00:29:04.000I think it's I mean, for me, to the bright line with Trump and whatever you want to say about his character, and I've said many things about, you know, I've banged on for hours about Trump to the boredom of millions.
00:29:17.000For me, there was a bright line that was crossed that I think everyone who cares about the future of democracy and the maintenance of American democracy in particular should acknowledge.
00:29:54.000You know, a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump, Which for which there is no evidence.
00:30:02.000You know, to the contrary, what was happening is he was trying to steal an election all the while claiming it was being stolen from him.
00:30:08.000Believe that aside, even a partisan who believes that the election was stolen from Trump has to admit that in the run up to the election, literally six months before the election was run, we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
00:30:25.000Now, that single act, I would say, it was so corrosive.
00:30:30.000It was such a violation of our most sacred political norms, our most sacred and useful political norm, right?
00:30:37.000This is something that even Ronald Reagan, right?
00:30:41.000Somebody who used to be a darling of everyone right of center.
00:30:45.000acknowledge. He said this somewhere in the late '70s. He said, "The greatest miracle of our
00:30:52.000country is the peaceful transfer of power. It is the thing that makes us the envy of the world.
00:30:57.000It's the thing that if you're sitting in some developing dictatorship outside America's borders,
00:31:05.000it is the basis for your envy of America, or at least it was traditionally, that we could
00:31:09.000accomplish a peaceful transfer of power every four years, despite our political differences."
00:31:14.000This 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.
00:31:21.000And so that was such a dangerous desecration of our political landscape.
00:31:26.000That I think it should make it impossible to support Trump.
00:31:31.000Whatever else you think about any other political figure, whatever you think about Hunter Biden's laptop, there's nothing else that rises to that level of concern.
00:31:40.000And that has always been at the center of my argument against endorsing Trump in any way.
00:31:49.000Whilst the sort of ongoing questioning around the Biden family business deals, I'm sure to anyone who's already encamped within one of those partisan scenarios will just cling to their own rhetoric and their own pre-existing beliefs.
00:32:08.000This 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.
00:32:24.000And we are not seeing anyone say, look, we got carried away with Russiagate and that's probably really damaged your trust.
00:32:30.000And over the course of the pandemic, we've seen a lot of shifting narratives and we have not been as transparent as we ought to have been.
00:32:36.000And our lack of trust in institutions, as you have said, Sam, is something that needs to be addressed.
00:32:42.000And 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?
00:32:56.000Or 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
00:33:22.000Be it empty oratory and yet more lies, I recognise what you're saying about Trump. I'm certainly
00:33:30.000not going to try and change your perspective on anything like that, because for me, none
00:33:33.000of these figures are the answer. Radical systemic change has to be immediately discussed, and
00:33:37.000we have to acknowledge that what's happening in media has to be replicated with what's
00:33:40.000happening politically immediately. We have to find ways of altering our systems of governance
00:33:46.000and having the maximum amount of democracy and access to power for ordinary people, rather
00:33:52.000I would say that one of the few people who's willing to say, this war must end, is Donald Trump.
00:33:58.000If 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.
00:34:06.000And 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.
00:34:41.000And the fact that, for me, the fact that this is the alternative is a much bigger problem than anything Trump has done or said, because I do see him as an outlier, as an extraordinary public figure.
00:34:54.000I see him primarily, and above all else, as a response to institutional corruption, entropy within our institutions.
00:35:01.000When Biden is able to meet with his donors and say, nothing will fundamentally change when he succeeds Trump, and as he does succeed Trump, for all of your concerns about the lack of a peaceful transition, I would say that is the problem.
00:35:15.000You know, if Donald Trump dies tomorrow, where are we?
00:35:19.000Addressing the kind of systemic problems that I'm wrestling with, I think could meaningfully alter the dilemma that you and I are trying to tackle.
00:35:29.000Well, I certainly have different priors than you do about the war in Ukraine, right?
00:35:35.000So, for instance, left out of your analysis is what the Ukrainian people themselves say they want, right?
00:35:41.000So, this is an autonomous, or it was an autonomous country.
00:37:04.000The other point here is that I think this is, once again, a domain of trade-offs.
00:37:10.000There's not, at every moment, clearly right and wrong answers to these very hard questions.
00:37:15.000There's a trade-off between Giving in to nuclear blackmail and the whims of an authoritarian psychopath And not giving in to it and holding the line 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?
00:37:43.000I would argue that It is worth worrying about what Putin's going to do with his nukes as the temperature increases over there.
00:37:53.000But it's also worth worrying that giving in to nuclear blackmail sets a terrible precedent.
00:38:00.000So how we navigate that is is again, it's hard.
00:38:05.000And what you want are not You want impetuous know-nothings steering the ship at that moment.
00:38:14.000You 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.
00:38:53.000We have a world that can explode on the basis of misinformation and just sheer accident, right?
00:39:01.000Just radars that malfunction can steer us into a nuclear conflict.
00:39:07.000It's terrifying and it's something that we have to figure out how to address, but to treat Putin Like, he's just a normal actor with rational interests who we can deal with like any other leader of a free society.
00:40:35.000Whilst 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.
00:40:50.000What 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.
00:41:05.000Russia is a unique country, as perhaps all countries are, with a unique history.
00:41:10.000This truly has the potential to be a global conflict and should be handled with extreme caution.
00:41:17.000I 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.
00:41:32.000Privately, it's pretty clear that it's been acknowledged that the Ukraine counter-offensive is not going well.
00:41:37.000I think it's pretty plain that the military-industrial complex This asserts incredible power over the direction of American foreign policy.
00:41:47.000I say that I would address this precisely how I would have looked at the conflict in Iraq.
00:42:29.000The thing that I intuit is we are on the precipice of new models that allow us to forego the needless and irresolvable cultural conflicts that are currently dominating this space.
00:42:40.000I think we have to get beyond our judgment of one another for individualism, whether that's from a right-wing libertarian perspective or a left-wing identity politics perspective.
00:42:49.000I think we have to find a new way to navigate these spaces so that we can start Addressing the truly significant issues that define our times, which may be apocalyptic, regardless of how you approach this apocalypse.
00:43:03.000That, too, would have a cultural flavour.
00:43:07.000Yeah, my concern is that the starting point for addressing any of those problems is a fact-based discussion about what the problems themselves are, right?
00:43:17.000So, 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?
00:43:31.000I 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.
00:43:47.000I actually feel that even something as complex and hotly contested, ironically, as that issue could be resolved with this type of dialectic.
00:43:59.000Do 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.
00:44:11.000Always check what the measures are that are suggested in order to solve these problems.
00:44:16.000If the measures are, we are going to impede the freedoms of ordinary individuals as a priority.
00:44:22.000We are going to tax ordinary people more highly.
00:49:55.000But 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.
00:50:10.000Sam, we can use this opportunity to transition to the next part of our conversation.
00:50:15.000Sam, I want to talk a little bit about... Actually, Russell, I need to make one point because I think it's very important.
00:50:21.000There's a very strange double standard that we all feel in this space where we think It's somehow morally appropriate for someone to get spectacularly wealthy when they create the new iPhone.
00:50:35.000Or they create a new, you know, block... That was funded by the government.
00:52:59.000because we are not organizing society to generate them.
00:53:02.000Now, I would say that if we prioritise materialistic models, materialistic rewards and incentivisation models that are predicated on that modality, then we will be doubling down on this false progressivist 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.
00:53:24.000You for this set of reasons, me for that set of reasons.
00:53:27.000And I would say that, you know, let's face it, the main reason that we're having this conversation, Sam, other than both guys that like having a chat and we love the jujitsu and we can handle a gentle quarrel, Is to talk about your Waking Up app.
00:53:41.000Now, what is the point of meditating if it is simply to make yourself a more efficient unit within a pre-established machine that's only going to evolve along predetermined lines?
00:53:51.000The reason I meditate is because I believe in change.
00:53:53.000I believe in the ability to change myself, to become a better man, to overcome my previous limitations, foibles and flaws.
00:54:00.000And I believe in radical change for society.
00:54:02.000And when I say radical change, I don't mean disruptive change that's going to hurt people.
00:54:05.000I mean true progress, way inclusive progress, where we're able to look at the big picture and say,
00:54:11.000whilst this aspect of the pandemic period was a reasonable error to have made,
00:54:16.000this one appears like the type of error that benefited certain institutions and interests.
00:54:20.000Whilst this part of the narrative is being excluded, perhaps in good faith,
00:54:24.000it seems to me that this is being de-amplified precisely because it does offer a challenge
00:54:31.000What I want is a society where you are absolutely free to believe whatever you want, I'm free to believe whatever I want, and we only need to argue where our shared interests are being challenged.
00:54:42.000I reckon we would find that that's not so many issues as we might assume.
00:54:46.000One of the ways we might get there, and where surely we agree, is on the subject of meditation and by the method of meditation.
00:54:53.000I meditate in order to access Dimensions, framings, phenomena, frequencies, even space that is inaccessible to me if I remain within the rational, logistical, materialistic part of my mind.
00:55:13.000Well, the main reason to meditate, I think there are two doorways into meditation and just finding it of interest and paying attention to it long enough to discover that there's a there there.
00:55:26.000The first door could just be intellectual curiosity, wanting to know what's real about the nature of the mind.
00:55:33.000I mean, it just makes sense if you want to understand yourself, better and the nature of your own experience better,
00:55:40.000it makes sense to pay attention to it.
00:55:42.000And meditation is really just the act of paying close attention
00:55:45.000to what it's like to be you moment to moment.
00:55:47.000So I think you can get there purely on the basis of intellectual interest.
00:55:52.000But the most common route, and I think the route that is certainly more persuasive to most of us, is the doorway of psychological suffering.
00:56:03.000Becoming interested in the mechanics of your own suffering.
00:56:08.000Just how is it that thoughts about the past or the future can exert this overwhelmingly coercive influence on your
00:56:19.000mood in the present, right? You think about something you regret or that embarrasses you, or you
00:56:25.000think about something in the future that you're worried about, that produces anxiety. How is it
00:56:31.000that that change in the character of your mind is accomplished and is it necessary, right?
00:57:44.000It's beautiful and as profound as anything I can imagine discussing.
00:57:51.000If in this realm of consciousness you can discover that you're my entire identity and all our dilemmas and indeed all culture are a kind of construct relevant only within a particular framing or within a particular paradigm, what does that suggest about the nature of consciousness and awareness and do you ever query The perhaps unique status of consciousness, given the number of times it brings us to dead ends of inquiry, i.e.
00:58:24.000What is the significance of the presence of a conscious observer in some particular experimentation?
00:58:30.000Obviously, most particularly in the instance of the double slit experiments and variations and progressions of that experiment.
00:58:36.000The recent Nobel Prize in Physics discovered that there ultimately is no local reality, or at least posits that.
00:58:44.000That's a pretty difficult thing to prove.
00:58:46.000And I ask this, Sam, in particular in relation to what you've just said, that you can experientially and subjectively free yourself.
00:58:54.000Like, you know, given the last half hour where you and I've gone, oh, I think this, I think that, or the war's this, the war's that, or the pandemic was this, pandemic's that, 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?
00:59:15.000I think much of it is... It's not easy, it's extremely difficult.
00:59:19.000No, 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.
00:59:32.000I spent a lot of time in India and Nepal studying with people.
00:59:35.000I mean, I had teachers who spent 20 years in a cave, right?
00:59:39.000I mean, these wonderful Tibetan lamas who in the meditation space are analogous to the, you know,
00:59:45.000Hirun and Henner we just spoke about in jujitsu, right?
00:59:47.000You get on the mat with Hirun and Henner, and you know you're in the presence of knowledge
00:59:53.000that you don't have, and a kind of refinement of technique and expertise that took,
00:59:59.000certainly took 10,000 hours to accomplish, It might also require a certain kind of natural talent.
01:00:06.000Maybe not everyone can be as good as the best people.
01:00:11.000Certainly, if it's analogous to anything else in human life, there's a range for talent.
01:00:21.000Many of these people, I would say all of these people, if I think of the greatest meditation masters I ever studied with, at least one of them might have thought the world was flat, right?
01:00:30.000I mean, like these are people who are not educated.
01:00:35.000With respect to 21st century science or politics or, you know, anything else we've been touching upon here.
01:00:41.000And 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?
01:01:00.000So just take like, what does it take to identify a pathogen that's jumping from bats into humans and make
01:01:08.000that no longer be a problem? Or what is it going to take for us to solve the... Have a little
01:01:14.000look around the Wuhan laboratory for infectious diseases and check out how it's funded and how
01:01:20.000it's regulated. But Sam, more important than that, mate. I'm saying these are domains of relative
01:01:25.000knowledge 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
01:01:42.000Media 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.
01:01:55.000To quote the Oscar, the famous quote around Schindler there, he who changes one life changes the world entire.
01:02:02.000If we begin to change the prakriti The Prima Materia of reality, consciousness itself, we can of course adapt and evolve systems.
01:02:11.000They will have to reflect those changes in reality.
01:02:14.000Even you are talking about a shared hysteria when it comes to the phenomena of Donald Trump.
01:02:18.000In spite of all this, he didn't do a peaceful transition, yet somehow he reaches deep down into the spiritual cojones of Pretty near 50% of Americans and they don't give a shit.
01:02:30.000Now, if we can't find a way of hacking, bypassing this constant conflagration, we are doomed.
01:02:43.000Are 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.
01:02:50.000That's just, that's just the deal now.
01:02:56.000This is a time to revivify the spiritual traditions and to note that all of these traditions emerge out of cultures where they believe in a deep, unitive experience.
01:03:06.000That what you experience, and of course there's no way of proving this, and I'm sure that you as a sort of a, I don't mean this offensively, materialist rationalist, will say that you're in a Peace is a contrivance of neurological stuff that's highly personal and just within your personal skin.
01:03:21.000And I would offer, what you experience in that meditative peace is what I experience in that meditative peace.
01:03:28.000And from that place, from our shared humanity, the same way as skeletally you and I are more or less the same, in spite of our superficial cutaneous differences, we can find some archetypal unity to share together, to build upon.
01:03:42.000Now, 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.
01:04:02.000No, no, so I think there are two levels, at least two levels on which we have to address these existential problems, right?
01:04:09.000One is the individual level, and the other is the level that you have addressed at various points here of systems and their consequences.
01:04:18.000And these are fundamentally different, which is to say that no matter how good you get at playing the individual game of untangling your problems and untying your knots, again, you could spend 20 years in a cave and come out radiantly happy and filled with compassion and just having nothing but good intentions for the world, and yet, You have not done anything that necessarily has much greater significance until you can interface with a system level and make change at that level.
01:04:53.000And the reason why the systems are so important, and I would argue that the greatest ethical and political changes we're going to make are going to be at the system level, because what we need are systems where Systems that make it easier and easier for ordinary, conflicted people to behave better and better, to behave more and more like saints.
01:05:16.000And what we have are systems, very much of the time, that are so perversely incentivized that you essentially have to be a saint to behave like a normal human being, right?
01:05:30.000Take something like Twitter, or what used to be known as Twitter.
01:05:34.000The reason why I left Twitter is I was experiencing it as a space where completely normal people were incentivized to behave like psychopaths.
01:05:44.000I mean, I would look at my Twitter feed and I recognized, and it took me way too long to recognize this, but I recognized after some years That I was staring into a funhouse mirror where people were showing me their most grotesque faces.
01:06:01.000And I just knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths in the world.
01:06:04.000but I was seeing psychopath after psychopath in my Twitter feed, you know, coming from the left,
01:06:10.000coming from the right, the most toxically dishonest behavior.
01:06:44.000I 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.
01:06:59.000And what we need, in this case, we need a system of communication that is making it easier and easier for even normal people to have truly enlightened and enlightening conversations, where the wisdom is built into the system layer, right?
01:07:18.000We have the corruption and the dishonesty and the bad incentives built into the system layer where you basically you have to be you know fucking Gandhi not to be an asshole on Twitter at least some of the time right 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.
01:08:47.000Well, 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.
01:08:59.000But Sam, now listen you beautiful man.
01:09:04.000Perhaps the reason that these esoteric traditions have always existed, from the Rishis to the Sufis to the Saints, is because they intuit and perhaps even experience that subjectivity can be a portal to a universal experience.
01:09:20.000But this transcendence of self that gives us relief from the incarceration of the ego, from the An enchilada of ever-carooming thoughts that become unbearable, ricocheting off the walls of the ego.
01:09:36.000This can be undone through these practices, perhaps because we access an ulterior power.
01:09:43.000Curious to me that each tradition has its own version, be it via the mantra or the breath, a way out.
01:09:53.000It's curious too that these traditions often accrue moral and ethical principles that find perennial truth.
01:10:01.000And this perennial truth, on a pragmatic level, Sam, on a pragmatic level, we should believe in this.
01:10:07.000On 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.
01:10:18.000Because what you said about that's the only place that can find you peace, you know, where you can find peace and succour, is not with a double C-O-U-R, not K-E-R.
01:10:29.000Peace and succour is in that intimacy.
01:10:32.000Semantics aside, it's no different from what anyone that believes in God would tell one another.
01:10:38.000There within you, there is the deep imminence.
01:10:41.000There is the imminent and transcendent, that peculiar paradox that plays out between waves and particles, plays out within you.
01:10:49.000bear down in the Vedas we find in poetics that which could never be tracked through
01:10:53.000materialistic observation, for we do not have the instruments when it comes to the apparently
01:10:59.000external world, but within there are solutions. Now I believe, I have to believe, that this
01:11:06.000will map onto reality. For reality, surely, is a projection of our faith and belief. If
01:11:12.000it comes to design or culture or music, all things conceived of and constructed in this
01:11:17.000space that can be a personal hell or a private heaven, can be projected out with via, via
01:11:24.000the will. Via the will. You can will yourself to do many things but you can't will yourself
01:11:30.000to will. And I feel that if personally and individually we endeavour in good faith to
01:11:36.000find this new resource, this accessible and often ignored latent resource,
01:11:41.000We can solve precisely the problem that you and I have been talking around.
01:11:54.000By acknowledging that we are all an expression of one unitary force.
01:11:58.000And if we want to neglect that conclusion, then all we are going to do is sit On the fireside of Armageddon and just sort of say, well, I was right.
01:12:47.000There's a very interesting conversation to have about how those two projects are related.
01:12:56.000But I would say that We should be slow to make metaphysical assertions about how all of this landscape of experience relates to the cosmos at large.
01:13:10.000So it's like somebody like Deepak Chopra is very quick to say, okay, this experience of consciousness without ego
01:13:47.000And it doesn't resolve any of the paradoxes or disputes in any of those specific fields.
01:13:53.000What it does do is tell you something very direct about what you are subjectively.
01:14:00.000Like, there are objective claims we can make about human subjectivity.
01:14:05.000There'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.
01:14:16.000You can make claims about the way the mind is through direct experience.
01:14:21.000For instance, you can make a claim about Impermanence, right?
01:14:27.000Every state of mind you've ever had prior to this moment has arisen and passed away, right?
01:14:33.000You know, the anger you felt two weeks ago isn't here anymore, right?
01:14:37.000And if it comes back in the next moment, that's a newly arising phenomenon, which again, will pass away.
01:14:42.000And the connection between the feeling and the thoughts is something that we can inspect from a first-person side and make objective claims about, right?
01:14:51.000So, I'm not saying this is all a space where there's no truth.
01:14:58.000There are very deep truths, first person truths to be discovered here,
01:15:01.000but they're different truths than the truths of cosmology or physics.
01:15:07.000On that point, Sam, let me offer you this.
01:15:10.000There 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.
01:15:27.000I 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.
01:15:41.000Particularly when they are such beautiful declarations!
01:15:46.000Now 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.
01:16:00.000There's exactly the same amount of proof.
01:16:03.000One of them is optimistic, one of them is pessimistic.
01:16:06.000see as much zeal and devoutness in the realm of materialism.
01:16:10.000To some degree, it's been offered many times. Notable and brilliant atheists like yourself, Hitchens
01:16:17.000and Dawkins - all men that I very much revere and respect. I know that you know stuff I
01:16:23.000don't know. There is certainly a devoutness to the - I don't want to call it pessimism
01:16:28.000because that's unfair in its pejorative, but the materialism and the rationalism and the insistence
01:16:34.000that just because the - because what I offer is this.
01:16:37.000There 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.
01:16:45.000And even someone much more popular and populist, in a different sense, figure like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox, friends of mine in science entertainment, say stuff like, if it can't be measured, it isn't there, and eventually we will be able to hold this knowledge.
01:17:02.000The potential for knowledge is infinite and we will remain finite. Yet in this space where we
01:17:08.000transcend the personal self, I believe that we do exactly access a super state of possibilities.
01:17:15.000If you can create a cultural bloody phenomenon like Pokemon Go, or Jesus Christ, the excitement
01:17:25.000and fanfare around the Super Bowl, you can use this prima materia, this prakriti, to create
01:17:30.000better cultures, particularly if there's a goodwill about it. And also I would say that down here in
01:17:35.000this place we meet to the archetypes, we meet the perennial, we meet the eternal, we meet the
01:17:39.000We meet stories, folklore, and dreams, which while being certainly housed within the metaphysical, have enough ubiquity, I would suggest, Sam, to warrant investigation.
01:17:49.000And even if investigation isn't the right tool, maybe this short, abrupt, yet beautiful word, faith.
01:17:58.000Well, so I take a slightly different line through this than the one you expect.
01:18:02.000I'm not a devout materialist of the sort that you imagine.
01:18:07.000I just see that There's a third option, which is to acknowledge what you don't know, right?
01:18:16.000I think we all stand before an ocean of ignorance and we broadcast across that ocean rather often metaphysical claims that are unwarranted, right?
01:18:26.000We do science on the seashore and we explore the ocean with respect to certain physicalist assumptions, but science is bigger than that.
01:18:39.000Ultimately, if physicalism is limited, And it turns out to be untrue or partial or otherwise misleading.
01:18:46.000There will be a rational accounting of how we wandered into error there, right?
01:18:53.000It's not irrational to speculate that maybe mind is not what it seems, right?
01:18:59.000And maybe it's dependency on the brain is not what it seems, right?
01:19:13.000And specifically, but this is the one piece that is truly seditious with respect to the religious project, which is the basis of my atheism.
01:19:24.000One 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.
01:19:40.000You read the Bible, And ask yourself, how hard would it have been for an omniscient being to have put in a single page of this text evidence of his omniscience?
01:19:52.000It would be trivially easy to have done that.
01:19:54.000And there's not a single passage like that in the Bible.
01:19:57.000Everything in the Bible could have been written by a first century human being or somebody who lived in the fifth century B.C.
01:20:04.000or 1000 B.C., depending on what book we're talking about.
01:20:08.000And so it is with every other religious scripture.
01:20:11.000So what we know is that the foundational claim, certainly of Abrahamic religion, of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the foundational claim that a specific book has a non-human origin, right?
01:20:25.000That is the claim that gives you Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
01:20:29.000We know that that claim is is specious and indefensible at this point in history.
01:20:37.000And what we need, therefore, is a truly 21st century conversation about everything we've been talking about, about the possibility of self-transcendence, its implications for running a sane society.
01:20:47.000How do we get billions of people to solve these coordination problems of cooperation and converge on common projects so as to not make themselves needlessly miserable?
01:20:56.000All of this is a project that requires A 21st century intellectually honest framing.
01:21:03.000And so the reason why I dispense with religion to begin that conversation is that all of our religious scriptures are intrinsically at odds with one another.
01:21:31.000Come on, you already know what you know.
01:21:34.000If 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?
01:21:41.000If you're going to tell Muslims that they're not wrong to be Muslim and Christians that they're not wrong to be Christian, right?
01:21:49.000What you have done is, is enshrine a zero-sum contest between Muslims and Christians, because Islam and Christianity at their core are incompatible.
01:22:15.000How I would do this is I would say that your unconscious framing, when you say from a 21st century perspective, enshrines the notion of progressivism, that we're at some current apex now, rather than a temporal gateway, a liminal space, where we, like the Hellenists who had to address the peculiar motions of the spheres, were precisely inverse to what they had ensumed.
01:22:36.000Like those that preceded Galileo, who had to acknowledge that amidst the devices and new lenses, new realms have been uncovered.
01:22:44.000We cannot judge the semantic devices by which these models and modalities are interpreted in the same way that we might adjudicate their cultural and social baggage.
01:22:59.000I hope that they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited tool of language.
01:23:06.000free of bats, because that's apparently the only way anyone can catch COVID. I hope that
01:23:11.000they may not have been able to describe and delineate those experiences using the limited
01:23:18.000tool of language. But I would say there is sufficient data in Buddhism, in Hinduism,
01:23:24.000in Islam, in Judaism and Christianity to suggest that what we have to overcome is precisely
01:23:30.000the individual that you have made a personal discovery about with your own meditative journey.
01:23:35.000The cultural afflictions and inflections of a religion are an easy way to dismiss them, but I think what is lost in that analysis is real hope Real God.
01:23:46.000And what I mean by God is love and the hope and possibility that somehow we can turn the tide of this thing.
01:23:54.000For me, it doesn't matter if you are an atheist.
01:23:56.000Some of my greatest teachers are atheists.
01:23:59.000But what matters to me is that we revere and honour and re-sacralise the earth.
01:24:35.000Now, come on, let's get on with this bullshit.
01:24:37.000Now, 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.
01:24:54.000And what are we in this war for anyway, baby?
01:24:59.000Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I agree with you about the power of love.
01:25:06.000I totally agree with you about the primacy and the power of love, but we need to acknowledge that culture is a kind of operating system that we're all entangled with, and it's possible to have a pathological culture 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?
01:25:37.000I mean, just take, this is a topic I occasionally am forced to return to.
01:25:43.000Happily, 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.
01:25:56.000The link is very direct, despite the fact that many people on the left would doubt it.
01:26:02.000It's by no means all economics and politics driving people to be jihadists and suicidal terrorists in the Muslim world.
01:26:10.000Ask yourself about the state of mind of a jihadist just before he pushes the button on his bomb when he's on a bus filled with non-combatants, or he's about to fly a plane into a building, or any other moment where he's about to commit a suicide.
01:26:26.000What is, from the outside, I think appropriately judged as a suicidal atrocity.
01:26:32.000I 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.
01:29:58.000Cordyceps to support physical performance.
01:30:01.000Chaga and reishi to support your immune system.
01:30:04.000And cinnamon, dirty Christmassy filth, for antioxidants.
01:30:08.000It tastes like masala chai and cacao made a really healthy lolly baby.
01:30:13.000Mud water is Whole30 approved, thank God.
01:30:16.000100% USDA organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan and kosher certified.
01:30:24.000Mud water donates monthly to the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics as they believe the country is in a mental health epidemic and sees psychedelics as a useful tool for individuals with depression, PTSD, anxiety and other mental health experiences.
01:30:37.000To get 15% off, go to mudwater.com forward slash community.