The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

00:00:02.000 Four, three, two, one.

00:00:05.000 Boom! 0.99

00:00:05.000 And we're live. 0.99

00:00:06.000 Gentlemen, Sam, Majid, how are you?

00:00:08.000 Good, thanks.

00:00:08.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:09.000 Pleasure, Joe.

00:00:09.000 Thanks for coming here.

00:00:11.000 Yeah, I'm very happy to get you guys together.

00:00:13.000 I've been kind of looking to do this for at least two years, and finally it's arrived.

00:00:18.000 What's been your ultimate goal?

00:00:19.000 Like, what was it?

00:00:20.000 Well, he, I mean, Maja is just a superstar that needs more exposure.

00:00:25.000 I mean, he's like, he should be running half of civilization.

00:00:28.000 I mean, he's really just fantastically ethical.

00:00:30.000 That's one of those quotable things you can put on the back of a book, isn't it?

00:00:33.000 Yeah.

00:00:33.000 It's a good one.

00:00:34.000 Yeah, but you shouldn't put that one.

00:00:36.000 It has to be on the back of the book, for sure.

00:00:37.000 Definitely not on the front.

00:00:38.000 People read it and go, Superstar?

00:00:41.000 I can't blurb the book we wrote together, unfortunately.

00:00:44.000 That is an issue.

00:00:46.000 You're too kind, Sam.

00:00:46.000 Thank you.

00:00:47.000 It's very generous of you.

00:00:49.000 Are you suing the Southern Poverty Law Center?

00:00:53.000 Is that what's going on?

00:00:54.000 Yeah.

00:00:54.000 I, in fact, have an update for everybody, because, you know, we crowdfunded a lot of the early costs for the case against the Southern Party.

00:01:01.000 What did they do?

00:01:02.000 What is it based on?

00:01:03.000 Let me back up a bit.

00:01:04.000 Please.

00:01:05.000 Once upon a time, yours truly, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin.

00:01:11.000 Was listed in the United Kingdom on the Thomson Reuters World Check database under a category red terrorism designation, while at the same time being listed across the Atlantic in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist.

00:01:31.000 So I was both a Muslim terrorist and an anti-Muslim extremist.

00:01:35.000 According to two separate lists. 0.67

00:01:37.000 And of course, that speaks to some of the polarization in our times in how irrational this conversation around extremism, Islam, integration, Muslims in the West has become.

00:01:46.000 I sued Thomson Reuters World Check, the database.

00:01:49.000 This database is no joke.

00:01:51.000 It's like HSBC and many, many other banks use this database for background checks on whether clients can have a bank account with them.

00:01:59.000 So as a result of, for example, Thomson Reuters and their database, Quilliam, which is a counter-extremism organization I founded 10 years ago, had its bank account shut down in the United States because of the Thomson Reuters World Check database system that HSBC subscribes to.

00:02:15.000 Anyway, we sued them, they paid damages, they issued an apology, and they took my name off this terrorism designation list they have on their World Check database.

00:02:26.000 Maja, I think maybe you should back up further and just give your short form bio in terms of why would you ever be on a terrorist watch list?

00:02:34.000 I'll do that.

00:02:36.000 But at the same time, the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed me, as I said, as an anti-Muslim extremist.

00:02:39.000 So we are also...

00:02:46.000 I've just held a law firm on retainer, Claire Lock, and they were the ones that sued the Rolling Stone magazine for that college rape scandal. 0.87

00:02:55.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:02:56.000 Successfully got one that case.

00:02:58.000 Claire Lock, which is an announcement made here exclusively with you.

00:03:01.000 No one else knows this yet.

00:03:02.000 We have retained Claire Lock.

00:03:04.000 They are writing to the Southern Poverty Law Centre as we speak.

00:03:08.000 I think they've got wind of it, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, as of I think either yesterday or the day before.

00:03:13.000 They've removed the entire list that's been up there for two years.

00:03:17.000 They've removed the entire list, which also had Ayaan Hirsi Ali on it, and it's no longer available on their website.

00:03:23.000 Now, is there logic that if you're a critic of Islam, of radical fundamentalist Islam, that you are somehow or another a racist extremist?

00:03:34.000 So that's pretty much what they've said.

00:03:36.000 If you criticize Islam, Ayaan, myself, who have come from within the community, who have had that experience, that somehow that makes us anti-Muslim.

00:03:45.000 There are a number of logical errors involved in that logical leap.

00:03:50.000 Do they have any distinction?

00:03:52.000 Is there anything that they write that sort of points to why they would say that?

00:03:57.000 Honestly, the reasons they listed, one of them was that I had a bachelor party in a strip club a year before I got married.

00:04:03.000 That makes you an anti-Muslim extremist?

00:04:06.000 That was one of the reasons listed.

00:04:09.000 The 9-11 hijackers were in a strip club on 9-10, right?

00:04:15.000 They really listed that?

00:04:17.000 They actually listed that, which is part of the reason why we can prove malice, because what has that got to do with anything?

00:04:23.000 But that doesn't make any sense.

00:04:25.000 So that was a primary reason?

00:04:27.000 It was one of the three main reasons they originally listed and another one was again false.

00:04:33.000 They claimed that I had called for the criminalization of the face veil for Muslim women in the West, which wasn't true.

00:04:40.000 I had called for a policy to be adopted where in banks and airports where you are not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet, you also shouldn't be allowed to cover your face in the name of religion.

00:04:50.000 Which is very different to calling for the criminalization, per se, of the face veil.

00:04:54.000 That's like saying, you're not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet in a bank, so I believe in the criminalization of motorcycle helmets.

00:04:59.000 It's just absurd. 0.97

00:05:00.000 Yeah, it's ridiculous. 0.92

00:05:01.000 So it was a mischaracterization of my opinion. 0.86

00:05:04.000 So that's two.

00:05:05.000 Yep, and the other one, the reason they...

00:05:08.000 I can't even remember.

00:05:09.000 Because they kept changing their reasons.

00:05:10.000 The actual website has been... 0.98

00:05:12.000 We've got the archive, and they've been changing it each time people have been pointing out the stupidity of their allegations. 0.89

00:05:19.000 What is the Southern Poverty Law Center's... 0.89

00:05:42.000 And in some cases, to great effect.

00:05:45.000 And their concern, obviously, about extremist hate groups in the U.S. was totally valid.

00:05:53.000 And, I mean, it became, I mean, now that we see how morally confused they are, people have been shining a light on them, and they're this bloated organization that's been taking in way too much money, and it suffers from other signs of corruption or conflicts of interest.

00:06:11.000 Back in the day, you know, Morris Dees was, you know, bringing the KKK to court and bankrupting their various chapters, and that looked fantastic. 0.98

00:06:19.000 And now the social justice warrior, moral panic, moral stupidity virus has gotten into their brains, and they can't differentiate someone like Majid from a right-wing Christian neo-Nazi hater of Islam, 0.98

00:06:38.000 right, or hater of, you know, people from the Middle East. 0.99

00:06:42.000 And so it is with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

00:06:45.000 Ironically, you're off the website.

00:06:47.000 Now I'm on it.

00:06:48.000 I think I'm on it in a far more transitory way.

00:06:50.000 But the article that was written about my podcast with Charles Murray by Vox hit the Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Watch page.

00:06:58.000 And so there you had articles about neo-Nazi groups, articles about the Austin bomber, and then me and my podcast with Charles Murray.

00:07:07.000 I definitely want to talk about that, but I want to give people your background first.

00:07:12.000 The reason why you were on the list in the UK in the first place had to do with your actual background.

00:07:18.000 So I was born and raised in Essex in the United Kingdom, and I came of age in what I now refer to as the bad old days of racism in the United Kingdom.

00:07:27.000 Much has changed since then for the good.

00:07:29.000 But in those days, there were serious cases of violent racism that I faced.

00:07:36.000 Hammer attacks, machete attacks by actual neo-Nazis.

00:07:39.000 I mean, I've grown up.

00:07:40.000 This is the irony of this Southern Poverty Law Center listing.

00:07:43.000 I've grown up fighting neo-Nazis on the streets and they've been attacking me with hammers and machetes because of the color of my skin.

00:07:49.000 And you've got a bunch of white guys in Alabama designating me in the same breath as they would designate these neo-Nazis.

00:07:56.000 But that, when I grew up and having that experience, being falsely arrested by Essex police on a number of occasions, profiled while the genocide in Bosnia was unfolding against Muslims in Bosnia, I often say to an American audience when I'm speaking about this, we are now here with you on the West Coast in this beautiful new studio you have.

00:08:14.000 Congratulations.

00:08:15.000 Thank you.

00:08:16.000 And imagine a genocide was unfolding on the East Coast against a group of people with whom you identified.

00:08:22.000 And even if it's just on a human level, human beings, but, you know, even within that, a community identification would impact you in a way, for example, if you defined yourself as Jewish and there was a genocide, Against Jews on the other side of this very continent, of this very country, how it would impact you on the West Coast.

00:08:40.000 Well, Sarajeva from London, it takes us less time to fly from London to Bosnia than it does from New York to LA. And so it really had a profound impact on Muslims across Europe when that genocide was unfolding, and things were never the same again.

00:08:53.000 It radicalized an entire generation.

00:08:55.000 Of course, ideology had a lot to do with that, but the anger originally came from The genocide.

00:09:00.000 So at the age of 16, what with the domestic racism and the situation in Bosnia unfolding as it did, I joined Hezbo Tahrir, which is a non-terrorist, still legal in America and in Britain and across Europe,

00:09:16.000 Islamist organization.

00:09:17.000 It was the first of the global Islamist organizations that aspired to resurrect the notion of a caliphate, which we've subsequently seen to great damaging effect in the form of ISIS caliphate.

00:09:47.000 I mean, that's...

00:09:51.000 It sounds crazy.

00:09:52.000 That's what they believe.

00:09:53.000 And that's what they're very, very serious and intent on bringing about.

00:09:56.000 And now people, when I say that, believe me, because they've seen the ISIS experiment unfold. 0.95

00:10:02.000 But I joined a group that sought to do that through non-terroristic means at the age of 16. I ended up on the leadership of that organization in the UK, ended up co-founding that group in Pakistan in 1999, where I left the UK,

00:10:17.000 went to Pakistan, was among the first, the vanguard of British Pakistani members that went out there to set the group up.

00:10:24.000 There have been about three or four coup plots in Pakistan since, and army officers have been arrested for being members of this group, and many of them still in jail.

00:10:33.000 I spent a year in Pakistan, went back While studying for my degree in the University of London, I would fly on Saturdays and Sundays to Copenhagen in Denmark.

00:10:42.000 I co-founded the Danish-Pakistani chapter of this group.

00:10:46.000 And then the third year of my degree, because I was doing law and Arabic, resulted in me having to go to an Arab country for the language year.

00:10:54.000 And so I chose Egypt, and a day before the 9-11 attacks in 2001, I ended up in Egypt.

00:11:00.000 I went to Alexandria, enrolled in the University of Alexandria to study for the year of Arabic language, which was the third year of my degree.

00:11:08.000 Of course, 9-11 happened, and the climate changed, the security climate changed all over the world, something we didn't know about nor predicted.

00:11:16.000 And on the 1st of April 2002, my house in Alexandria was raided by the Egyptian state security.

00:11:24.000 I was blindfolded.

00:11:25.000 My hands were tied behind my back.

00:11:27.000 I was then driven through the desert into Cairo to the dungeon of the state security headquarters in a building known as Al-Jihaz, which was the main headquarters of Amin al-Dola, the internal state security.

00:11:40.000 We were held in the dungeons there for four days and they electrocuted most of the prisoners that they had there, tortured them, interrogated them.

00:11:48.000 On the fourth day, I was taken to a prison known as Masra Atora in Cairo, put into solitary confinement for about three and a half months, then charged, eventually sentenced to five years as a political prisoner under the Egyptian emergency law and served my full sentence there in Egypt.

00:12:08.000 I eventually left prison in 2006 and returned to the UK. So did Amnesty International get you out at all?

00:12:17.000 No, they only took an interest in you.

00:12:19.000 So they campaigned for my release.

00:12:21.000 Nobody got me out because I had to finish my full prison sentence.

00:12:24.000 But what changed me and led me to be the man that sits before you today is, you're right Sam, Amnesty's adoption of me and a few others in the case as prisoners of conscience Amnesty comes along and says,

00:13:03.000 So Amnesty adopted us as prisoners of conscience.

00:13:05.000 And I was 24 years old at the time, by the way.

00:13:08.000 So everything I've just described to you happened to me up until the age of 24 when I was imprisoned.

00:13:11.000 And it was the first time in my relatively young life.

00:13:16.000 I'm 40 now, right?

00:13:17.000 And I had never been defended by any mainstream Pillar of mainstream society in that way before nobody had spoken out for me and that had a real huge kind of emotional impact on my psyche I've said in my autobiography that where the Heart leads the mind can follow and so I was now willing to consider alternatives because of amnesty's work campaigning for me and so I spent the next four years in prison reading I'm re-reading Orwell,

00:13:46.000 every one of his books, reading Tolkien, reading classic English literature, studying Islamic theology, really trying to understand the world around me.

00:13:55.000 And I had four years to do so.

00:13:56.000 And I spent four years debating and discussing with Pretty much the founders of Egypt's main jihadist organizations who were in jail with me in this same prison, including the assassins of the former president, Anwar Sadat, who had been killed in 1981 because of his peace deal with Israel, and his assassins were in jail with me,

00:14:13.000 and they'd been in prison longer than I'd been alive.

00:14:15.000 And so they had some collective years of wisdom between them, and most of those jihadist prisoners I was in jail with had, over the course of those years, two decades and more, Change their views and reformed.

00:14:26.000 They were still conservative religious Muslims, something which I'm not, and I don't claim to be in my work at the moment.

00:14:33.000 But they were still religious Muslims, but they were no longer extremists, and they were no longer what I call Islamists, people that sought to implement their version of Islam over society.

00:14:43.000 And so they, in four years of constant debate and discussion with them, people that I knew had more wisdom than me, they've been in jail for longer than I've been alive, My views began slowly changing.

00:14:56.000 I read a lot of the books they wrote about changing their own views and why they changed.

00:15:00.000 And upon my release, I eventually, a good few months after my release, I had to leave the organization because I no longer believed in an ideology that I was once prepared to die for.

00:15:10.000 That is fascinating that the shift came about in jail speaking with assassins.

00:15:15.000 Yeah.

00:15:15.000 Among many others, yeah.

00:15:17.000 That is really incredible.

00:15:18.000 You would think that most people think that when someone goes to jail, usually whatever criminality that they have in them is cemented and hardened.

00:15:26.000 Yeah.

00:15:27.000 I don't know why mine is an exceptional case because most people, you're right.

00:15:31.000 Whether you look at Said Qutb, who's known as the founding father of modern-day jihadism, He started off like me, a non-terrorist Islamist, but in Egypt's jails.

00:15:40.000 In fact, the very jail I was held in, he was tortured, and he ended up becoming the godfather of modern-day terrorism through his book, Milestones, or Ma'alim Fattariq in Arabic.

00:15:50.000 And yet, in my case, for whatever reason, I kind of went that bit further to question everything I believed in.

00:15:59.000 But that's not normal.

00:16:00.000 In most cases, when you torture people in jail, it ends up hardening and ossifying that ideology and people become as angry as, you know, they become the monster that they were seeking to defeat.

00:16:10.000 So you get out of jail.

00:16:12.000 What do you do then?

00:16:13.000 So I left the group in 2007, and by 2008, in January, so I finished my degree.

00:16:18.000 I had one year left of my undergraduate degree.

00:16:20.000 I graduated, I did my master's at the London School of Economics in Political Theory, and while doing the master's, set up Quilliam.

00:16:28.000 And Quilliam, we bill as the world's first counter-extremism organization.

00:16:33.000 It was meant to be, we believe it is, bringing us back to the SPLC's allegation, a Muslim response to extremism from people that have lived it, been through it, My co-founders were Islamists themselves who changed like me.

00:16:47.000 Muslims, born and raised, come from the community to have a community-based response, a Muslim response to this growing problem of extremism.

00:16:57.000 And this was 10 years ago.

00:16:58.000 Of course, ISIS emerged since then, only demonstrating why this kind of response was needed.

00:17:02.000 And so for the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate somebody with my background, with that trajectory, with somebody who was prepared to die for this cause, and somebody who wanted to Address these problems as a muslim to call for reform for the good of my communities as opposed to against them You know at the end of the day it can only benefit muslim communities if extremism is put back in its box For them to then list someone like me as an anti-muslim extremist It just really does I think shine a light on the true absurdity of the situation we find

00:17:32.000 ourselves in absurdity and the lack of Real investigation or backing up their claims with actual facts and information.

00:17:43.000 And that brings me to your story with Charles Murray and Vox and Ezra Klein.

00:17:47.000 Well, let's linger here for a moment.

00:17:49.000 It's the same problem, but not only is it a lack of investigation, but when it gets pointed out, and I forgot the guy's name at the SPLC who was quarterback in this, but...

00:17:58.000 It wasn't Morris Dees, but it was someone high up.

00:18:00.000 Mark Podick?

00:18:01.000 The CEO, something, Cohen, I think.

00:18:06.000 I thought it was Mark Podick.

00:18:08.000 Anyways, he's listed in the – he's named in the Atlantic article that first put this on our radar.

00:18:13.000 But they just doubled down.

00:18:15.000 I mean the error cannot be pointed out clearly enough to trigger – I mean much less an apology – Any modulation of the claim.

00:18:25.000 People just double down in the face of obvious counter-evidence.

00:18:30.000 It's just not about a sincere engagement with the problem.

00:18:35.000 There's so many variables here that make it a really toxic environment, but one is that The locus of concern is never the individual.

00:18:46.000 It is the group.

00:18:47.000 It's the tribe.

00:18:50.000 They'll sacrifice any number of individuals to make the political case they want to make.

00:18:57.000 They're completely unrepentant when they're shown to get it wrong.

00:19:01.000 In your case and in Ayan's case, It's just such a grievous moral lapse because not only is the attack on you illegitimate, it actually raises your security concerns. 0.99

00:19:14.000 And it becomes a reference point for journalists who are confused.

00:19:23.000 It makes you radioactive from the point of view of mainstream journalists because they go to the Southern Poverty Law Center site to figure out who's worth talking to and they see a page where you're listed as an anti-Muslim extremist along with people who bear very little resemblance to you ideologically because there are probably a few people on there who I think we're good to go. 0.84

00:20:01.000 You know, anyone who would rival your voice on this topic.

00:20:04.000 So it's just mind-boggling.

00:20:06.000 It's very difficult.

00:20:07.000 Try to keep this mic closer.

00:20:08.000 Yeah, it's very difficult.

00:20:09.000 You can swing it toward you.

00:20:10.000 I can swing it.

00:20:11.000 So it's very difficult because I can't fully explain to anybody what it feels like to have lived an entire life from roughly the age of 14 being consumed by this issue of Muslims in the West and this question and originally getting it,

00:20:27.000 answering it in one way.

00:20:28.000 And then still being consumed by the topic, answering it in a different way, as I now do.

00:20:33.000 I can't describe to anybody how much emotionally the toll that it takes to have your whole life, have defined your whole life by trying to answer this question.

00:20:45.000 And because you care for it, because this is a question that concerns you.

00:20:50.000 When I joined the Islamist group I did, I was wrong and adopted some really nefarious ideas, but did so because I gave a damn and cared for a genocide that I saw unfolding and desperately wanted a solution. 0.99

00:21:01.000 So even when I became an Islamist, I did so out of care and love and concern for what I believed was my community under attack.

00:21:09.000 So to have a bunch of people come along And say that I am anti the very community that I believe, I have fought for all my life, you know, and my life has been consumed and defined by this.

00:21:22.000 It really is taking the one thing away from somebody that they have...

00:21:28.000 I mean, I went to jail for this thing.

00:21:31.000 People have died in front of my eyes from their torture wounds in prison because of this thing.

00:21:35.000 To have someone completely ignorant in that way, to bribe me Of being able to claim that I have stood for my community, but by instead saying that I'm anti that community. 1.00

00:21:47.000 It really does kind of make you feel like crap, Joe. 0.99

00:21:51.000 When did this start happening? 0.99

00:21:53.000 The moral panic that you've constantly discussed and the flippant sort of accusations without real...

00:22:01.000 Any real, solid, objective reasoning behind calling someone like you or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's the victim of female genital mutilation, to say that she's an anti-Muslim, that she's Islamophobic?

00:22:14.000 It seems to me, it's almost insane, but it seems to me to be prevalent.

00:22:20.000 This is something that is a common sentiment today that I don't recall ever seeing anything like this one or two decades ago.

00:22:30.000 You might have a better sense than I do, but it's become increasingly salient to me just because I've been doing this work for better or worse and colliding with these people more and more.

00:22:42.000 But it's definitely...

00:22:46.000 An export from some trends in intellectual life that go back, you know, 50 years or more.

00:22:52.000 I mean, it was what postmodernism did.

00:22:55.000 And I mean, you can go back further than that.

00:22:57.000 It's just that there's a framework, a kind of pseudo-intellectual framework, where facts can't be talked about as facts.

00:23:08.000 They're intrinsically political.

00:23:10.000 They intrinsically convey power disparities.

00:23:14.000 You know, science is just a tool of power sort of thinking.

00:23:18.000 And this goes back a ways, but it's now seemingly ascendant on the left in a way that is just fairly bewildering.

00:23:27.000 But it seems to be only two subjects, gender and race.

00:23:31.000 Those are the ones that get...

00:23:32.000 Those are the big ones.

00:23:33.000 I think it's...

00:23:34.000 I'm sure we could find more if we take a minute to think about it.

00:23:37.000 But those are...

00:23:39.000 Those certainly dwarf every other subject.

00:23:41.000 Those are the ones where there's a wall.

00:23:43.000 There's a wall that you can't get through with objective reasoning.

00:23:45.000 Gender, but this isn't quite race.

00:23:47.000 This is the...

00:23:48.000 I mean, it's drawing a lot of energy from concerns about racism.

00:23:53.000 Identity.

00:23:53.000 Yes.

00:23:55.000 The perception is that... 0.96

00:23:57.000 Muslims are a politically beleaguered minority that have to be... 1.00

00:24:03.000 So it is like...

00:24:05.000 I mean, people think it's racist to criticize Islam, as though that made any sense.

00:24:09.000 Ben Affleck being one.

00:24:11.000 But it is...

00:24:13.000 They're a minority in Los Angeles.

00:24:16.000 They're the second biggest religion on Earth. 0.82

00:24:19.000 We're talking about 1.7 billion people.

00:24:21.000 And the criticism of Muslim extremism, for the most part...

00:24:26.000 Is focused on societies where you have, in most cases, a majority Muslim population. 0.86

00:24:31.000 You have women and gays and free thinkers treated terribly.

00:24:36.000 And that is the center of the bullseye in terms of what one is criticizing when one talks about theocracy.

00:24:44.000 So there was a lot of this stuff, this paranoia, this irrational approach to this conversation that Sam suffered from.

00:24:57.000 When I first met him, I met Sam in New York at the Intelligence Squared debate that he...

00:25:04.000 So Ayan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray, who I believe you've had on this podcast, were on one side of a debate.

00:25:09.000 I was on the other side of this debate and the motion that we were debating was Islam is a religion of peace.

00:25:14.000 I was back then arguing what half of my true belief is because I actually don't believe it's a religion of peace or war.

00:25:21.000 It's just a religion that is interpreted in different ways.

00:25:23.000 But I had to pick a side.

00:25:25.000 And so I picked that side in defending the motion, and Ayan and Douglas were on the other side.

00:25:31.000 And there was a dinner afterwards for the speakers, and Sam was there.

00:25:35.000 Imagine you were there as Ayan's guest. 0.81

00:25:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:38.000 That went well, yeah.

00:25:40.000 I didn't know who he was.

00:25:42.000 And Ayan and I were locked in conversation, post-debate conversation.

00:25:46.000 And Ayan invited Sam to have his say.

00:25:50.000 And she said, I want to hear what Sam Harris has to say.

00:25:54.000 I think?

00:26:26.000 Thank you.

00:26:29.000 Thank you.

00:26:42.000 And so I look at Majid and he's at least 50 feet away from me.

00:26:47.000 And I mean, did you want me to say what I said?

00:26:50.000 Yeah, go for it.

00:26:51.000 So he had made moves in this debate that I considered intellectually dishonest.

00:26:57.000 And I mean, because he's playing a game.

00:26:59.000 And this is not a real conversation.

00:27:00.000 This is a formal academic style debate where You know, his job is not to leave his view open to influence by the other discussants.

00:27:08.000 He's making a case.

00:27:11.000 And I didn't know it at the time, but he felt unnaturally constrained by the format of the debate.

00:27:15.000 He had to argue that Islam is a religion of peace.

00:27:18.000 And some of the moves he made there I thought were dishonest.

00:27:21.000 And so I said, Majid, I remember this more or less verbatim because we talked about it and we've since transcribed it into a book.

00:27:33.000 I said, Majid, you know, everyone in this room recognizes that you have the hardest job in the world, and we're all very glad that you're doing it.

00:27:41.000 You have to somehow convince the next generation of Muslims that Islam really is a religion of peace, and that jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, and that martyrs don't get 72 virgins in paradise and all the rest. 0.99

00:27:56.000 And so my question for you is, is this...

00:27:59.000 Do you really believe that this is the case now?

00:28:03.000 Or do you think that pretending that it is the case is the method by which you'll make it the case?

00:28:09.000 If you just pretend long enough and hard enough, it'll become so.

00:28:13.000 And the actual line here was, and can you just be honest with us in the privacy of this room?

00:28:17.000 My final sentence was, we're not televised now.

00:28:20.000 Can you just be honest with us here?

00:28:23.000 So I responded immediately and said, are you calling me a liar?

00:28:27.000 So now there's like 70 people and I'm like into my second gin and tonic.

00:28:33.000 And he's giving me the sort of, you know, Middle Eastern stare down across, you know.

00:28:39.000 And he repeated it.

00:28:40.000 He said, no, no, I'm asking you just here where there's no cameras.

00:28:42.000 Can you just be honest with us?

00:28:43.000 And I said, are you calling me a liar?

00:28:45.000 And it didn't go too well at all.

00:28:47.000 Everyone on the table kind of went quiet.

00:28:49.000 And I didn't know who this guy was.

00:28:52.000 I'd never met him.

00:28:54.000 And I should have known who he was.

00:28:56.000 And then I think somebody very tactfully changed the conversation and just completely veered off this.

00:29:03.000 And I never spoke to him again for another, what was it?

00:29:06.000 A couple of years.

00:29:07.000 A couple of years.

00:29:07.000 We'd never crossed paths since then.

00:29:09.000 The reason I bring this up is that I was one of those guys that didn't want to entertain a conversation with Sam based upon the defensiveness when it came to this topic and and I think that actually it's important to say that to people that because you asked him a question about the Charles Murray situation a lot of people rather than actually wanting to engage with someone on the substance of their ideas I think in the climate we're in today,

00:29:33.000 they're engaging with people based upon their feelings.

00:29:36.000 And those feelings are valid, of course.

00:29:38.000 Everyone has the right to their feelings.

00:29:39.000 But we've got to try as hard as we can to detach those feelings.

00:29:43.000 Because that's clearly not what the principle of charity means.

00:29:46.000 You lend the person that you're speaking to the best possible interpretation of what they're saying and allow them to clarify what they mean as opposed to you putting into their mouths what they mean and telling them what they mean.

00:29:58.000 I learned that, you know, because then two years later, he reaches out to me and he says, I think we can try again.

00:30:04.000 You know, are you willing to have a conversation with me?

00:30:06.000 And I hadn't originally remembered it was the same guy.

00:30:09.000 Oh, that's funny.

00:30:10.000 I got my foot in the door just because you didn't know who I was.

00:30:13.000 And then we had this conversation, which it's a lesson for me because we had this conversation.

00:30:18.000 It's called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. 0.99

00:30:20.000 It's become a book, right?

00:30:22.000 Published by Harvard University Press.

00:30:23.000 We had this conversation that became a book that's been made into a film, which I think any couple of weeks now we hear some news on that.

00:30:29.000 Yeah, I don't know when that's coming up.

00:30:30.000 So we did a lecture tour of Australia, and the people who organized that made a documentary that we...

00:30:37.000 But therein lies this lesson to your question, and that is that I am somebody that didn't engage with him on the substance of his question, but actually...

00:30:46.000 Fired a misfire, an emotional misfire on what was really questioning his motives for asking the question rather than actually addressing the points he was making.

00:30:57.000 And I think that because I didn't remember who he was, I then started the conversation anew.

00:31:04.000 Without the memory of my original judgment on him.

00:31:06.000 And the conversation went really well.

00:31:08.000 So we've got to somehow be able to divorce ourselves from that background.

00:31:11.000 That can happen.

00:31:12.000 It can be done.

00:31:13.000 It takes people of strong character to try to abandon All preconceived notions from the past conversation.

00:31:21.000 Just start fresh.

00:31:23.000 Unfortunately, this example of a kind of a signal success has caused me to, in the end, kind of misspend a lot of energy just assuming that I can do this again.

00:31:35.000 Trying to replicate it.

00:31:35.000 I keep walking into another situation thinking this is possible.

00:31:39.000 Is that why you deleted Twitter?

00:31:41.000 Well, yeah, it's off my phone, yes.

00:31:43.000 So you haven't deleted your account?

00:31:45.000 No, I'm still on Twitter, but I will, based on this recent episode, I will use it differently.

00:31:50.000 I am fascinated by people and their struggles with social media, with like detaching from it, reattaching from it, getting addicted to it.

00:32:00.000 I mean, I know so many people that will look at their Twitter at like one o'clock in the morning before they go to bed and something pisses them off and then they can't sleep.

00:32:08.000 Yeah.

00:32:09.000 It's really common.

00:32:10.000 I don't consider myself someone who had a real pathology with it.

00:32:18.000 I have, I don't know, 6,000 tweets or 7,000 tweets over the course of...

00:32:25.000 I was not tweeting that much.

00:32:27.000 I was not even looking that much.

00:32:29.000 I was fairly disengaged and I've never used Facebook as a publishing channel.

00:32:36.000 I never engage with comments.

00:32:38.000 But I was looking enough and it was – one, it was clearly making me a worse person.

00:32:45.000 I mean I just – I was reacting to stuff that I didn't need to react to and it was amplifying certain criticisms and voices.

00:32:54.000 Which need not have been amplified.

00:32:56.000 And in this last case, it just turned a – it just created a huge kind of explosion in my life.

00:33:04.000 I was in the middle of a vacation, which I basically torpedoed because of what I saw on Twitter.

00:33:10.000 I mean it was just – it was like the perfect infomercial for why you don't want to be engaged with social media.

00:33:16.000 You torpedoed your vacation how?

00:33:18.000 Well, so I'm in the middle of, like, the first vacation I've taken with my family for a very long time.

00:33:22.000 It was at least a year.

00:33:23.000 Wow.

00:33:24.000 And so, you know, we're on Hawaii, and just, like, I'm supposed to put everything down to be the best father and husband I can be, right?

00:33:32.000 And that was my intention.

00:33:33.000 That's what was happening.

00:33:35.000 It happened for a good solid 24 hours.

00:33:40.000 And then I pick up my phone and I see that Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein had all attacked me in the space of an hour.

00:33:49.000 Oh no!

00:33:50.000 This goes out to millions of people.

00:33:52.000 And is this over what Joe was asking about the Charles Murray thing?

00:33:55.000 Yeah.

00:33:55.000 Yeah, well, the truth is I can't even see what – I didn't look at what Greenwald had done.

00:34:00.000 He was circulating somebody's video about me, how I'm – I think I'm a racist in that video.

00:34:07.000 Rez Aslan blocks me, so I can't even see what – he attacks me by name, but he blocks me, so I can't even see his export.

00:34:13.000 But I just saw the aftermath of that, you know, lots of notifications coming to me with both of us tagged.

00:34:21.000 And then Ezra published this – I suppose I should back up however painfully to describe what happened here.

00:34:28.000 But so I had Charles Murray on my podcast a year ago.

00:34:31.000 And Charles Murray is this social scientist who published The Bell Curve back in the 90s, which it was a book about IQ and success in Western societies like our own.

00:34:46.000 I think we're good to go.

00:35:06.000 A very high IQ and you're just pushing a plow next to your neighbor.

00:35:10.000 You had no real advantage.

00:35:11.000 But now you can start a hedge fund or you can start a software company and we're seeing this real shocking disparity in good fortune, really.

00:35:23.000 So he wrote this book.

00:35:25.000 It had a chapter on race which talked about the disparities in racial groups.

00:35:33.000 The statistically observed disparities.

00:35:35.000 Right.

00:35:36.000 And the claim about the source of those disparities was by even the standards of the time, but certainly the standards of today, Incredibly tepid, mealy-mouthed, just hand-waving.

00:35:50.000 It was not this, you know, here comes the Third Reich declaration of white supremacy. 0.64

00:35:56.000 It was undoubtedly there are environmental and genetic reasons for this, and we don't understand them.

00:36:04.000 It was just like – to think that it's one or the other, we're not in a position to know what the mix is of influences now.

00:36:13.000 And that is virtually any honest scientist's take on the matter and certainly today.

00:36:21.000 I mean it's only become more so.

00:36:24.000 But that went off like a nuclear bomb.

00:36:26.000 I mean, that was such a...

00:36:29.000 I mean, it's the most...

00:36:32.000 And at the time, I never read the book. 0.75

00:36:35.000 I just thought this had to be just racist poison.

00:36:37.000 Of course, Charles Murray would be vilified for... 0.73

00:36:40.000 And he's been vilified ever since.

00:36:42.000 And ever since, you know, I've ignored him.

00:36:44.000 Wasn't he deplatformed and assaulted recently?

00:36:47.000 Yeah.

00:36:47.000 So that's what happened.

00:36:48.000 So he went to Middlebury to give a talk, you know, 20 some odd years, 25 years after he wrote this book.

00:36:54.000 Oh, by the way, he's also listed by the Southern Bovdi Law Center.

00:36:57.000 And so that's what contributed to the deplatforming and the violent protest against him at Middlebury.

00:37:04.000 What's crazy is the whole thing is a propaganda for the superiority of the Asian race, and everyone's missing that. 0.90

00:37:09.000 Yeah, that's the flip side of it.

00:37:11.000 Then we're talking about white supremacy.

00:37:12.000 Asians are actually the ones who... 1.00

00:37:14.000 Far and above.

00:37:14.000 I mean, that's basically what his book proved.

00:37:17.000 And, you know, they're suing Harvard now.

00:37:19.000 There's a group of Asian students that are suing Harvard because they're discriminated against.

00:37:23.000 Because they're required to have higher scores.

00:37:25.000 Because they're assumed to be smarter.

00:37:27.000 So the standards for Asian students entering into Harvard is higher than white people.

00:37:32.000 Wow.

00:37:32.000 Yes.

00:37:33.000 Well, Asian privilege is a big problem. 0.57

00:37:36.000 Yeah.

00:37:36.000 Your grandfather was working on the railroads in California as an indentured servant, and all that privilege trickled down.

00:37:43.000 There's obviously a lot of factors that lead to IQ, to high IQ, but to ignore what those are, to ignore it completely, to just...

00:37:50.000 In the name of ideology, of course.

00:37:52.000 Yes, exactly.

00:37:53.000 Only ideology.

00:37:54.000 And this idea that you cannot look at statistics, you cannot look at facts.

00:37:58.000 And in your conversation with Ezra Klein, that's what I got, is that this is an ideological issue, and that you...

00:38:07.000 It's almost like an impossible subject to breach.

00:38:11.000 You can't even discuss the fact that certain races demonstrate low IQ and then let's look at what could be the cause of those.

00:38:20.000 Even discussing that somehow or another is so inherently racist that it must be ignored or must be silenced and that you must first concentrate on all the various injustices that have been done to those people who have this lower IQ. Yeah.

00:38:33.000 Well, let me just take a couple of minutes to close the various doors to hell that are now ajar based on what we've just said.

00:38:40.000 So you were on your holiday and you get all these notes.

00:38:43.000 Yeah.

00:38:43.000 So we'll just take a little more context.

00:38:45.000 So, yeah, as you said, Charles Murray went to Middlebury College and was deplatformed.

00:38:48.000 And he was not only deplatformed, so the usual deplatforming with the students turning their back to the speaker and shouting and not letting anything happen.

00:38:55.000 But...

00:38:56.000 The professor who invited him, who was a liberal professor who wanted to essentially debate him.

00:39:01.000 When they're leaving the hall, they both get physically attacked by a crowd of students.

00:39:08.000 Charles was not hurt.

00:39:15.000 I think she's a registered Democrat.

00:39:20.000 No doubt.

00:39:21.000 And they're driving out in an SUV that gets – I mean, someone pulls a stop sign out of the sidewalk and it's still got the concrete ball on the end of it and this SUV gets smashed with this concrete-laden stop sign.

00:39:33.000 I mean, this is happening at one of the most liberal, privileged colleges on earth.

00:39:40.000 It's nuts.

00:39:41.000 So anyway, that was the thing that put Murray on my radar after all these many years of my ignoring him.

00:39:46.000 And I had actually...

00:39:47.000 I felt guilty because I had...

00:39:50.000 I've declined to be a part of at least one project because his name was attached, right?

00:39:54.000 Because I just thought that this guy's radioactive. 0.57

00:39:56.000 He's got some white supremacist agenda. 0.90

00:39:58.000 I had believed the lies about him.

00:40:03.000 And then I saw this and I thought, okay, well, maybe he's the canary in the coal mine or certainly one of the canaries in the coal mine that I had ignored where, as you say, certain topics are considered so...

00:40:14.000 Politically fraught that you cannot discuss them no matter what is true.

00:40:18.000 There has to be a firewall between your conversation about reality and these sorts of facts.

00:40:28.000 So he's been suffering from having transgressed that boundary.

00:40:34.000 So I had him on the podcast Being fairly agnostic about his actual social policy commitments and his political concerns and just wanting to talk about the facts insofar as we touched them lightly.

00:40:52.000 I mean, I had zero interest in intelligence as measured by IQ, although it's an interesting subject, but I hadn't spent much time focused on that.

00:41:02.000 And I had truly zero interest in establishing differences between populations with respect to intelligence or anything else.

00:41:10.000 But I see what's coming.

00:41:13.000 I see the fact that the more we understand ourselves, genetically and environmentally, If we go looking, or even if we're not looking, we will discover differences between groups.

00:41:24.000 And the endgame for us as a species is not to deny that those differences exist or could possibly exist.

00:41:31.000 It's to...

00:41:34.000 Deny that they have real political implication.

00:41:37.000 The political framework we need is a commitment to equality across the board and a commitment to treating individuals as individuals.

00:41:48.000 The average of a population is meaningless with respect to you.

00:41:54.000 And that will always be so.

00:41:58.000 And whatever diversity of talents there is statistically in various populations, we want societies that simply don't care politically about that.

00:42:11.000 I mean, it's just not what – it's – Our political tolerance of one another and support of one another is not predicated on denying individual differences or even statistical differences across groups.

00:42:27.000 It can't be because we know that there are people walking around like...

00:42:32.000 You know, Elon Musk, who gets out of bed every morning and does the work of like 4,000 people, right?

00:42:38.000 And people who just are struggling to work at Starbucks and hold down a job.

00:42:43.000 And our political system, I mean, we don't say one person is more valuable politically.

00:42:51.000 And socially than another, even though one person is capable of doing massive things that most other people aren't.

00:42:59.000 It's, you know, when it comes time to write laws and create institutions that support human flourishing, we have to engineer tides that raise all the boats.

00:43:11.000 And so, you know, they're legitimate Debates about the social policies that will do that.

00:43:17.000 And there are legitimate debates about facts.

00:43:19.000 So we can debate scientific fact and the results of psychometric testing or behavioral genetics that are relevant to this question of intelligence.

00:43:31.000 And we can have a good faith debate about the data.

00:43:33.000 And then we can have a good faith debate about social policy that should follow from the data.

00:43:37.000 But what's happening on the left now is at either of those Tiers of conversation.

00:43:45.000 There are just straight up allegations of racism that hit you the moment you touch certain facts.

00:43:53.000 Can I say that what he's just summarized there, what I've heard, sounds to me as being more humane than the implications of the argument that the left who are opposing what Sam has just said are.

00:44:07.000 Because if you think about it, the implications of their argument would be they want to deny the facts because they're scared that those facts would, from which there would be derived a policy that would reflect those facts.

00:44:22.000 In other words, in their minds, they are marrying those two.

00:44:25.000 They are marrying the notion that if in statistical observance there are variances in IQs between groups, in their minds that means the policy should follow from that.

00:44:36.000 So, it's why they're resisting what he's saying, whereas what he's saying is there is no connection between what the policy should be and what the facts may be, because the kind of world we want to live in should aspire to equality, regardless of what the science is saying, because one is policy and one is science.

00:44:52.000 I freely agree with you on that, but I don't think that's necessarily exactly what they're saying.

00:44:56.000 I think what they're saying and what they're doing is they almost feel so guilty that any discussion whatsoever about race can't be held unless you repeatedly bring up all the instances of racism and suppression and discrimination that that group has suffered from.

00:45:13.000 It doesn't exist as a statistic island.

00:45:17.000 You have to bring everything in together.

00:45:20.000 If you don't do that, that's where their protest comes from.

00:45:23.000 And I think that was one of the things that I got from your conversation with Ezra Klein.

00:45:26.000 He wasn't willing to just discuss what's the implication of these issues and completely dismiss this fact that Asian people score far better.

00:45:36.000 It's almost as if they fear that by conceding on the data, It's almost as if they fear that the implication must necessarily follow that the policy will also be supremacist in that way.

00:45:48.000 I wonder.

00:45:49.000 I honestly think that what we talked about before is a big part of it.

00:45:52.000 It's ideological idea sport and that they're just volleying back.

00:45:56.000 I don't think they're willing to take...

00:45:58.000 I think one of the real strengths of character that you...

00:46:01.000 Demonstrate in a debate or any discussion of facts is when uncomfortable truths rear their ugly head that are counter to your personal position.

00:46:10.000 You have to be able to go, you got a really good point.

00:46:12.000 You've got a good point.

00:46:13.000 There's something to that.

00:46:14.000 I see what you're saying.

00:46:15.000 Okay, this is what my concern would be.

00:46:17.000 And this would be a rational, real conversation.

00:46:19.000 This is what I would worry about.

00:46:21.000 And then you would, I'm sure, say, absolutely.

00:46:23.000 I would worry about that as well.

00:46:25.000 And then you would have this sort of a discussion.

00:46:26.000 I didn't get that from that conversation you had.

00:46:28.000 I got ping pong.

00:46:30.000 I got boop, boop, boop, boop.

00:46:31.000 I got this rallying back and forth of ideas rather than two human beings not digging their heels into the sand just trying to look at the ideas and look at the statistics and look at these studies for what they are.

00:46:45.000 And look at Charles Murray and what he's gone through.

00:46:48.000 Should we be able to examine these statistical anomalies?

00:46:51.000 Should we be able to examine athletic superiority?

00:46:54.000 Should we be able to examine superiority that Asians show in mathematics and a lot of the sciences? 0.91

00:47:00.000 Should we?

00:47:00.000 Should we be able to?

00:47:01.000 Or should we just dig our heads in the sand?

00:47:03.000 Should we just let things sort themselves out and quietly ignore all the reality?

00:47:07.000 Yeah.

00:47:07.000 I don't know.

00:47:08.000 So I should say that I am...

00:47:11.000 I certainly understand people's fear that anyone who would go looking for racial difference is very likely motivated by something unethical or unsavory.

00:47:22.000 So you could imagine white supremacists being...

00:47:28.000 We're super enamored of the possibility that these data exist.

00:47:32.000 And they all.

00:47:32.000 Yes.

00:47:33.000 Well, until they look at the Asian statistics.

00:47:37.000 So I get that, right?

00:47:40.000 And there's some things that – and this was a question I had for Charles Murray on that podcast.

00:47:45.000 I said, like, why pay attention to any of this?

00:47:47.000 What is the upside?

00:47:49.000 In the infinity of interesting problems we can tackle scientifically, why focus on population differences?

00:47:57.000 And, you know, frankly, I didn't get a great answer from him.

00:48:00.000 His answer is, well, I think the best version of his answer, which I agree with, but still it may not justify certain uses of attention.

00:48:12.000 It's just that if you...

00:48:15.000 There's this massive bias that basically we're all working with a blank slate genetically, and therefore any difference you see among people is a matter of environment.

00:48:29.000 And so then you have people who have privileged environments and people who have environments where they're massively under-resourced, And so therefore, any different representation at the higher echelons of success and achievement and power in our society,

00:48:51.000 if there's 13% African Americans in the U.S., if you look at the top doctors in hospitals or the top academics or the...

00:49:01.000 You know, the Oscar winners or wherever you want to look for achievement.

00:49:06.000 If there are less than 13% African Americans in any one of those bins, that has to be the result of racism or systemic racism.

00:49:17.000 That is the leftward bias at this moment.

00:49:20.000 And so it is with Jews for anti-Semitism.

00:49:22.000 So it is for women. 1.00

00:49:24.000 There should be an equal representation of women, computer software engineers at Google. 1.00

00:49:32.000 And any lack, any disparity there must be the result of either just inequitable resources for, you know, kids in schools or somewhere along the way, or kind of a selection pressure from the top that,

00:49:49.000 you know, we don't like women at Google or blacks at the Oscars. 1.00

00:49:55.000 And so that's the—so Murray's concern is if you believe that— And, you know, this is not exactly what he said, but this is what I believe he thinks, but I could be putting some words into his mouth here.

00:50:08.000 But this is certainly what many other people on his side of the debate think.

00:50:11.000 If you believe that, you will consistently find racial bias and anti-Semitism and misogyny where it doesn't exist, right?

00:50:20.000 So, like, if you go to a hospital, and this is a real problem, like, you know, the academic departments in the medical schools, the best medical schools, are under massive pressure To find real diversity in representation at the highest level.

00:50:36.000 You need to find a head of cardiology who's black, right? 1.00

00:50:41.000 And the fact that you haven't done that is a sign that there's a problem with you and your organization and your process of hiring.

00:50:51.000 Now, if it's just the case, for whatever reason, that there are not many candidates, likely of less than 13% for that field, or to take the James DeBoer memo at Google, right?

00:51:03.000 If it just is the case that women, forget about this, this is beyond aptitude. 1.00

00:51:07.000 This just goes to interest.

00:51:08.000 If it's the case that women, for whatever reason, genetic or environmental, are less interested in being software engineers, on average, than men are, Then having 20% women coding software at Google is not Google's problem. 1.00

00:51:26.000 It's just the fact that this is what the population interests are.

00:51:32.000 No doubt racism still exists.

00:51:35.000 No doubt misogyny and sexism still exists. 0.51

00:51:38.000 And there's proof of this to be found as well.

00:51:41.000 But to assume an absolute uniformity of interest and aptitude in every population you could look at...

00:51:52.000 Is just scientifically irrational.

00:51:55.000 That would be a miracle if that were the case.

00:51:56.000 So at this stage, allow me to remind everybody, that was Sam summarizing what he thinks Charles Murray was saying as opposed to Sam summarizing his...

00:52:04.000 No, but that final point is just a true point.

00:52:07.000 There are genes, almost everything we care about.

00:52:21.000 It's your summary of his position in relationship to this fight against it.

00:52:28.000 The thing that I would add and the thing where there's some daylight between the two of me and him on my podcast is This is so toxic to be trafficking in population differences with respect to IQ. And it's not absolutely clear what social policies turn on really nailing down these differences.

00:52:55.000 So you could go to take an even more toxic example perhaps.

00:52:59.000 It's like you could decide the Roma in Europe, the gypsies. 0.99

00:53:04.000 This is like a very isolated, beleaguered community.

00:53:08.000 Who knows how inbred it is?

00:53:11.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:53:11.000 This is an outlier community.

00:53:15.000 Anyone who's going to want to do massive IQ testing on the Roma... 1.00

00:53:20.000 What's the point of doing that, right?

00:53:46.000 I think?

00:53:59.000 I think?

00:54:24.000 There's this sense that the only way to move forward toward equality is to lie about what is scientifically plausible and demonize anyone who won't lie with you.

00:54:37.000 That's the ideological.

00:54:40.000 This is a new thing, though, right?

00:54:42.000 I mean, relatively speaking, this hard-nosed stance from the left of the equality of outcome and the only reason why there wouldn't be 50% women or 50% black or 50% any—you just pick any marginalized group.

00:54:55.000 The only reason why it wouldn't be even across the board with all other races is because of discrimination.

00:55:00.000 This is a fairly new stance.

00:55:02.000 There were moments that were fairly well publicized.

00:55:05.000 I forget when Larry Summers got fired from Harvard.

00:55:08.000 Larry Summers was the president of Harvard and he's a famous economist.

00:55:13.000 And he gave a speech for which he was fired.

00:55:16.000 There might be a little more color as to why he was fired.

00:55:19.000 I mean, he was more fired because once the wheels started to come off, he had alienated enough people that he didn't have friends to kind of prop him up.

00:55:27.000 But the thing that pulled the wheels off was that he gave a speech and he said, we know there are differences in the bell curves that describe mathematical aptitude between men and women.

00:55:41.000 And this explains why there are many more top-flight male mathematicians and engineers than women. 1.00

00:55:48.000 And it's not that they even...

00:55:50.000 It's not that the means of the bell curves are different.

00:55:57.000 So the means could be the same, but there could be more variance so that the tails are thicker in the case of the male bell curve.

00:56:03.000 So at the absolute ends, both the low end and the high end, you have many more people.

00:56:08.000 So if you're going to ask, in the same size population, How many people do you have at the 99.999 percentile of aptitude in math, say?

00:56:22.000 It could be that you have, and there's a fair amount of data to show this, many more men at the tails than women, right? 0.93

00:56:29.000 And that's true for grandmasters in chess, right?

00:56:33.000 It's just, this is not a...

00:56:36.000 And it may be true for something like, you know, playing pool.

00:56:38.000 You know, I mean, they're just differences that may not be entirely environmental, almost certainly are not entirely environmental.

00:56:46.000 That is one.

00:56:47.000 It's a big issue in the world of pool.

00:56:50.000 Men and women play separately, and there's no reason physically why they shouldn't. 0.97

00:56:54.000 Right, but women are allowed to play in men's tournaments, but they never win. 0.88

00:56:59.000 Jean Baloukas was a woman who was, she was like one of the only women to ever compete and beat men.

00:57:06.000 She's like an extreme outlier. 1.00

00:57:07.000 And this was like, I want to say it was in the late 70s or the 80s.

00:57:11.000 And other than that, there's been a few women that have done well in tournaments, but when they come to major league professional pool tournaments, they're almost always won by men. 1.00

00:57:20.000 And when I say almost, I mean like 99.9%.

00:57:25.000 Commonwealth Games have been happening just over the last couple of weeks, and there was a male to female transgendered athlete in the weightlifting category who participated in the women's competition.

00:57:39.000 And the Commonwealth Games, at the time of her joining, hadn't yet put down a rule as to testosterone levels in the females competing. 0.89

00:57:49.000 And so this male to female transgendered person qualified in the female games and was, as you'd expect, winning in all of the games and was the frontrunner and destined to win the competition as a male to female transgendered person.

00:58:05.000 And the only reason, and it would have led to a huge crisis in the Commonwealth Games because...

00:58:10.000 There was some resistance to this notion.

00:58:13.000 And of course, the questions that arise, is this fair?

00:58:15.000 Men are born naturally with higher levels of testosterone, for example.

00:58:19.000 The only reason it didn't lead to crunch time, and that was the huge scandal of her winning, is that she injured herself in the competition. 0.99

00:58:27.000 And by sheer accident, Yeah, I saw that.

00:58:29.000 Well, I can expand on that a little bit because I've actually gone through this extensively because there was a woman who used to be a man who was competing in mixed martial arts against women and just beating the shit out of them. 0.92

00:58:40.000 And I was saying that this is a mistake.

00:58:43.000 And that you're looking at whether someone should be legally able to identify as a woman, portray themselves as a woman.

00:58:51.000 Absolutely.

00:58:51.000 Do you have the freedom to become a woman, in quotes, in our society?

00:58:55.000 Yes.

00:58:56.000 But you can't deny biological nature.

00:58:58.000 And there's physiological advantages to the male frame.

00:59:02.000 Specifically, when it comes to combat sports, that's my wheelhouse.

00:59:06.000 I'm an expert.

00:59:07.000 I understand there's a giant difference between the amount of power that a man and a woman can generate. 0.98

00:59:12.000 And if you're telling me that a guy living 30 years of his life as a man, that's essentially like a woman being on steroids for 30 years, then getting off and then having regular women being forced to compete with her and trying to pretend this is a level playing field. 0.90

00:59:28.000 It is not.

00:59:28.000 There's a difference in the shape of the hips, the size of the shoulder, the density of the bones.

00:59:33.000 The size of the fists.

00:59:35.000 That's a giant factor in your ability to generate power is the size of your fists.

00:59:40.000 It's also an ethical problem.

00:59:41.000 It's not just competition here.

00:59:42.000 You have girls getting beaten up by someone who used to be a man.

00:59:46.000 Yes.

00:59:46.000 But people...

00:59:48.000 Came down on me harder than anything that I've ever stood up for in my life. 1.00

00:59:52.000 Never in my life did I think there was going to be a situation where I said, hey, I don't think a guy should be able to get his penis removed and beat the shit out of women. 1.00

00:59:58.000 And then people are like, you're out of line. 1.00

01:00:00.000 But that's literally what happened.

01:00:02.000 That's literally the summary of the situation.

01:00:03.000 That's literally what happened.

01:00:04.000 This is a conversation that I had with a woman online during this whole thing.

01:00:10.000 She said, this person who had turned into a woman has always been a woman.

01:00:15.000 And I said, but she was a man for 30 years.

01:00:17.000 She goes, no, she's always been a woman. 0.99

01:00:19.000 I go, even when she had sex with a woman and fathered a kid? 0.99

01:00:23.000 And she says, yes, even then. 0.98

01:00:25.000 I go, well, we're done. 0.81

01:00:27.000 Because you're just talking nonsense.

01:00:28.000 That's ideology covering the facts, as they are.

01:00:32.000 She had a male physique.

01:00:34.000 This person who's arguing with me wants to claim this moral high ground of being the most progressive.

01:00:40.000 And they're always looking to step on top of anybody who's less progressive than men and proclaim superiority.

01:00:46.000 And this is the ideological sport.

01:00:49.000 This is the idea sport that you see when people are playing ping-pong with ideas.

01:00:54.000 They're not listening.

01:00:55.000 You need to listen to experts, especially when you're talking about martial arts.

01:01:02.000 The difference is so profound and the results are so critical.

01:01:06.000 Because you're talking about a sport where the objective goal, the goal is clear.

01:01:12.000 It's very clear. 0.99

01:01:13.000 Beat the fuck out of the other person in front of you. 0.98

01:01:15.000 So anything that would give you an advantage in beating the fuck out of that person should be really looked at very carefully and not thrown through the lens of this progressive ideological filter that we're going through right now. 0.99

01:01:27.000 Because that's what it is.

01:01:29.000 That's how people are looking at it.

01:01:30.000 It's with weightlifting as well.

01:01:32.000 When transgendered athletes going to weightlifting competitions, the male to female transgender athletes are overwhelmingly dominant.

01:01:41.000 I mean, is this a coincidence? 0.99

01:01:43.000 No, it's someone who had fucking testosterone pumping through their system and a Y chromosome their whole life. 0.99

01:01:50.000 And now all of a sudden we're supposed to say, no, she's a woman, she's dainty. 1.00

01:01:54.000 She's got size 14 feet. 1.00

01:01:56.000 She's got gorilla hands. 1.00

01:01:57.000 Like, what in the fuck are we doing here? 0.99

01:01:59.000 So, I think, as you said earlier, she is a woman, but for the purposes of competition against other women, you know, legally she's a woman at that stage, if she goes through that identity transition. 0.99

01:02:10.000 But I think we have to recognize, and I think even many traditional feminists are making this point, much to the anger of The trans community they're saying hold on you what you're doing in this way is actually we fought so hard and so long For these female spaces where we have a space of our own and now people that used to be men are coming into those spaces is actually quite literally Beating the crap out of us. 0.92

01:02:33.000 Yes faces.

01:02:33.000 Yes, you know whether it's but in boxing whether it's in weightlifting in martial arts.

01:02:38.000 They are By definition, they're dominating all of this.

01:02:41.000 Of course they are, for the reasons you've said.

01:02:43.000 And the experts that they're calling upon are almost all transition doctors, surgeons, or people that have transitioned themselves.

01:02:52.000 When they speak to actual board-certified endocrinologists, and some of them only do it off-record, but one of them...

01:02:58.000 I forget her name.

01:03:01.000 She was in one of the...

01:03:03.000 Big mixed martial arts publications, Ramona Krutzek, I believe is her name. 0.84

01:03:07.000 She's saying, not only does it, it actually, doing this transition, like from male to female, you're putting estrogen into the system.

01:03:18.000 So the bone density change that would ordinarily take place if you remove someone's testicles and stop the production of testosterone, Estrogen preserves bone density.

01:03:28.000 So you're actually retaining the male bone density.

01:03:31.000 There's so many problems with this.

01:03:33.000 And one of the other things they say, well, oh, the Olympics.

01:03:36.000 The Olympics allow it.

01:03:38.000 The Olympics are very ideologically based.

01:03:40.000 There's not a whole lot of science to this transition thing of allowing male to female athletes to compete in the Olympics.

01:03:48.000 There's an extreme amount of corruption in the Olympics as it is with the IOC being in bed with WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the way they handle this Russian scandal.

01:03:58.000 I mean, this Russian scandal that was highlighted in that fantastic documentary, Icarus.

01:04:02.000 Yeah, that was good. 1.00

01:04:03.000 Fucking crazy! 0.99

01:04:05.000 The Olympics are not to be trusted. 1.00

01:04:06.000 That is a gigantic multi-billion dollar business where the athletes get paid zero money.

01:04:11.000 It is inherently corrupt from the top down.

01:04:14.000 No doubt about it.

01:04:15.000 So to call upon them is to see who should be competing as a woman. 1.00

01:04:20.000 Fuck off! 1.00

01:04:21.000 They're not the experts. 1.00

01:04:22.000 This is not something that's been examined.

01:04:24.000 And this is coming from someone who one of my jobs is examining and commentating on fights.

01:04:30.000 That is a big part of what I do.

01:04:32.000 I understand fights. 0.99

01:04:33.000 And I know what it looks like when a man's beating the shit out of a woman. 1.00

01:04:36.000 And that's what it looked like when this person was fighting women. 1.00

01:04:38.000 There was a massive physical advantage.

01:04:41.000 Massive.

01:04:41.000 And not a skill advantage.

01:04:43.000 You mentioned something about the reaction that you got to that.

01:04:45.000 What was the trouble you got into?

01:04:46.000 Oh, people were so mad at me.

01:04:47.000 I mean, it was just so many, not only that, they took my words out of context, they quoted all these different gender transition doctors saying that there's no science behind this and the science behind it being totally fair and totally equal.

01:05:02.000 It's just not.

01:05:03.000 And people know it.

01:05:05.000 Everyone knows it.

01:05:06.000 They couldn't put Chris Cyborg against this guy and give him a run for his money?

01:05:09.000 Wrong way class?

01:05:10.000 That's the other way.

01:05:12.000 That's the other thing.

01:05:13.000 And we're dealing with a similar situation like that in Texas.

01:05:15.000 I don't know if you know about the girl.

01:05:17.000 She was born a girl.

01:05:19.000 She's transitioning to a boy in high school, taking testosterone. 0.77

01:05:23.000 But in Texas, they only allow her to compete as a girl.

01:05:25.000 So she's dominated the Texas State Wrestling Championship two years in a row. 1.00

01:05:29.000 And it's horrific, because she's on steroids. 1.00

01:05:32.000 She's on testosterone. 1.00

01:05:33.000 And they usually test for this kind of stuff.

01:05:35.000 Doesn't matter because they're testing chromosomal.

01:05:38.000 Yeah, she's a woman. 1.00

01:05:39.000 She was born a woman, right?

01:05:40.000 She's born a girl. 1.00

01:05:41.000 So because the fact that she's transitioning to be a boy, they don't give a shit. 0.99

01:05:45.000 You're a woman, you're not going to wrestle against men. 0.99

01:05:47.000 You're a girl, you're not going to wrestle against boys.

01:05:49.000 So they've allowed her under extreme protest.

01:05:51.000 I mean, it's terrible.

01:05:52.000 She wants to compete, or he, I should say, wants to compete as a boy.

01:05:56.000 They won't let him.

01:05:57.000 They say, no, you were born a girl.

01:05:59.000 You have to compete as a girl. 0.98

01:06:00.000 So when he competes, everybody boos.

01:06:03.000 It's awful. 1.00

01:06:04.000 It's fucking awful. 0.99

01:06:05.000 I mean, it's really devastating. 1.00

01:06:07.000 Question for you.

01:06:08.000 That way around, if it's female to male transition, somebody that used to be a woman That transitions to a man and wants to compete with the men, they don't have an advantage, do they? 1.00

01:06:19.000 They don't.

01:06:19.000 If they're allowed to compete with them.

01:06:20.000 They're at a disadvantage.

01:06:21.000 So if they win in that context, they've actually done really good.

01:06:24.000 Yes.

01:06:25.000 Look, women can beat men. 1.00

01:06:26.000 I mean, it happens all the time in jiu-jitsu.

01:06:29.000 Especially in jiu-jitsu in particular, because it's such a technique-based art.

01:06:33.000 But it is possible.

01:06:34.000 There's also a woman named Germaine Durandamy, who's a world-class mixed martial artist, who's a multiple-time world Muay Thai champion, who fought a man and knocked him out.

01:06:42.000 It's a crazy video.

01:06:43.000 All right.

01:06:43.000 She fought a real man and KO'd him with a straight right.

01:06:46.000 It is possible for them to win if their skill level is so far superior that it overcomes the inherent strength advantages.

01:06:54.000 But a woman-to-male transition would be at a severe disadvantage against a natural male.

01:06:59.000 So in that Texas case, they clearly have it wrong.

01:07:03.000 They should allow him to compete with the men.

01:07:06.000 And would you be, whereas I can, I think all three of us probably instinctively would resist the notion that a male to female athlete competes with other females because they'd have an advantage.

01:07:17.000 I would resist that, yes.

01:07:18.000 But would you be for a female to male athlete competing with men?

01:07:23.000 Yes, because I don't think there's an advantage.

01:07:25.000 There's no advantage.

01:07:26.000 But here's the problem.

01:07:27.000 And the consent is sort of running in the other direction there.

01:07:30.000 She is continually putting herself, or he is putting himself in harm's way, knowingly.

01:07:35.000 And I'm not opposed to a woman fighting a man, if she so chooses.

01:07:39.000 Like, I'm not opposed to bull riding.

01:07:41.000 If you want to...

01:07:42.000 I'm not...

01:07:45.000 Yeah.

01:07:50.000 Yeah.

01:07:59.000 The difference lies in just massive advantages.

01:08:03.000 There's a massive advantage in transitioning from male to female.

01:08:06.000 Female to male, here's the other problem.

01:08:08.000 Female to male, you have to take testosterone. 1.00

01:08:10.000 You can't legally take testosterone and compete.

01:08:13.000 It's been a giant issue in mixed martial arts because for the longest time there was a loophole.

01:08:18.000 And the loophole was testosterone therapy.

01:08:20.000 And they were allowing testosterone replacement therapy for male athletes that were either older or it was a...

01:08:29.000 A symptom of having pituitary gland damage, which comes from head trauma, which means really essentially your career should be over.

01:08:37.000 Your body's not producing hormones correctly.

01:08:39.000 And that's a very common issue with people that have been in war, people that have been blown up by IEDs, people that have been hit a lot, even soccer players a lot of times show diminished levels of testosterone and growth hormone because of pituitary gland damage.

01:08:54.000 So you wouldn't even allow that.

01:08:56.000 So a female to male would be in a whole other problem in combat sports because it's not legal for you to take testosterone and compete. 1.00

01:09:05.000 Well, to bring this full circle back to me, sitting at the pool, about to destroy my vacation on Twitter.

01:09:10.000 So how long did you spend working on this article?

01:09:14.000 Your wife must have hated you, Matt.

01:09:16.000 How much was she mad?

01:09:19.000 It was kind of the perfect storm, but there were a few things that relieved the pressure.

01:09:24.000 One is there was another family from our school.

01:09:26.000 So my daughter had a friend.

01:09:28.000 There was another couple that my wife could socialize with. 1.00

01:09:32.000 And having another couple there forced me to sort of put on my social face at dinner.

01:09:38.000 While you're itching to look at your tweet feed.

01:09:41.000 But the thing is, it's actually not...

01:09:42.000 You have that feeling.

01:09:43.000 It's horrible.

01:09:43.000 I don't really want to be here.

01:09:45.000 I want to look at my head.

01:09:45.000 That's so horrible.

01:09:47.000 But it's, I mean, it's not, I mean, to say it, to describe it that way, putting it on your social face, it actually changes your psychology.

01:09:53.000 I mean, like, if you have to drop your problem in order to be a normal, sane person with people you don't know all that well, you're actually a happier, more normal person.

01:10:01.000 If it had just been me and my wife at dinner while I'm dealing with this blow-up, it just, you know, it just never would have, the cloud wouldn't have left.

01:10:07.000 So, anyway, I... So I was trying not to engage, and so I didn't want to have to write anything new to deal with this – what I viewed as just an egregious attack on my intellectual and moral integrity.

01:10:25.000 And so when I saw this article from Klein – I realized I had this email exchange with him at the end of which I said, listen, if you continue to slander me, this had been like a year previously.

01:10:38.000 Is this the exchange he released?

01:10:40.000 I released this.

01:10:42.000 So I said at the end of this exchange, if you continue to slander me and if you misrepresent the reasons why we didn't do a podcast because we had talked publicly about… I think?

01:11:17.000 He had declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion defending me and Murray in Vox.

01:11:23.000 It was truly slanderous and misleading, everything he's published on this topic.

01:11:29.000 And he has a huge platform by which to do it.

01:11:32.000 Which I enjoy.

01:11:34.000 I really like Vox. 0.79

01:11:36.000 I've read Vox with pleasure as well.

01:11:38.000 But once you see how the sausage gets made on many of these things, once you're the news item, you can see that there's very little journalistic scruple in the background there.

01:11:50.000 I mean, I didn't want to have to spend my time on vacation writing a retort to this thing, but I felt like I had to respond.

01:12:00.000 And again, this is an illusion.

01:12:01.000 This is like a sheer confection of looking at Twitter.

01:12:05.000 If I hadn't been looking at Twitter, I wouldn't have felt I had to respond.

01:12:09.000 And so I responded in the laziest possible way, which I just published the email exchange because it's already written.

01:12:16.000 I don't have to write anything new.

01:12:17.000 I just hit send, essentially.

01:12:19.000 And of course, the rest of the world didn't know you're actually meant to be on vacation right now.

01:12:23.000 And so there's no context to them as to why you made this decision or that decision.

01:12:27.000 But worse still, I massively underestimated the amount of work even my own fans would have to do to understand why I was so angry in that email exchange. 0.91

01:12:37.000 So I came off like the angry bastard in the email exchange. 0.96

01:12:41.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:12:57.000 He was being totally disingenuous and evasive.

01:13:00.000 His responses, if I remember, they didn't match to his article, did they?

01:13:03.000 Not at all.

01:13:05.000 So I just kept getting more tuned up.

01:13:09.000 So I published this thing not realizing...

01:13:12.000 I mean it was definitely a mistake to publish the email exchange just pragmatically.

01:13:17.000 I don't think it was unethical because I told him I was going to do it in advance if he kept it up.

01:13:25.000 It was just – it was totally counterproductive because it was – Because he was far more reasonable in the email exchange than the original article.

01:13:33.000 Well, it seems like you've got to do a lot of work to understand.

01:13:35.000 Yeah, but the thing is he wasn't.

01:13:37.000 It was an appearance of reason, but it was not.

01:13:42.000 So we finally did this podcast a year hence.

01:13:48.000 This is now my last podcast.

01:13:50.000 It was now two weeks ago.

01:13:53.000 It was basically as bad as I was expecting, and I feel that I met the person who I thought I was dealing with in the email exchange.

01:14:02.000 And he was fundamentally unresponsive to any of my points.

01:14:06.000 And as you say, Joe, just trying to score political points toward his audience.

01:14:13.000 And the thing is, there are many asymmetries here.

01:14:18.000 One crucial one is that he has an audience that doesn't care about whether or not he's responsive to the thing that his opponent or interlocutor just said.

01:14:31.000 They're not tracking it by that metric.

01:14:33.000 They're tracking it by, are you making the political points that are massaging that outraged part of our brains?

01:14:41.000 Like, do you have your hands on our amygdala, and are you pushing the right buttons?

01:14:47.000 And so he's talking about racism and just white privilege.

01:14:52.000 And I'm granting him all of that.

01:14:54.000 I'm saying, listen, let me tell you why that's not relevant to my concerns and what happened here with Murray.

01:15:00.000 Everything you're going to say about the history of lynching, I'm going to grant you, right? 0.82

01:15:04.000 That's not the – we don't – there's no daylight between us there.

01:15:08.000 But the thing is, I have an audience.

01:15:11.000 That cares massively about following the logic of a conversation. 0.99

01:15:16.000 If somebody makes a point that is even close to being good in response to me, my audience is like, okay, Sam, what the fuck are you going to say to that? 0.85

01:15:26.000 And if I drop that ball, I lose massive points, right?

01:15:30.000 Whereas I'm often finding myself in conversation with people Who don't have to care about those kinds of audiences.

01:15:35.000 I mean, that was the one I had with this Omar Aziz, titled The Best Podcast Ever.

01:15:41.000 I mean, he knows his audience does not care about him honestly representing, in this case, the doctrine of Islam.

01:15:48.000 But who was that guy even?

01:15:49.000 I mean, at least Ezra Klein, you could say, okay, editor of Vox or whatever.

01:15:52.000 Where did you even find that guy?

01:15:54.000 On Twitter.

01:15:55.000 That's, again, the Twitter is the ruination of me.

01:15:57.000 He granted him a platform on his podcast.

01:15:59.000 Until this day, I don't even know who this bloke is.

01:16:01.000 Who this guy is. 0.99

01:16:02.000 He's some crazy guy. 0.99

01:16:03.000 He called me an anti-mobile. 0.99

01:16:04.000 What did he call me?

01:16:06.000 Because at one point he was going on about me being some form of enabler of your bigotry.

01:16:10.000 Yeah, well, I mean, you're an Uncle Tom to these guys.

01:16:13.000 Native informant or whatever it is.

01:16:16.000 But listen, Joe, I could see this is why it's so frustrating because I have pretty much memorized inside out, back to front, the Islamist ideological narrative. 0.92

01:16:24.000 And I could sit here right now and play that game with you, that game of ping pong, without conceding anything.

01:16:30.000 And this is where, you know... 0.93

01:16:32.000 I feel our conversation went really well because it was stripped away from all of that bullshit and we had a genuine conversation.

01:16:39.000 It's still to this day very easy for me to play the tune of The Islamist and score those points, especially because some of what I've been through. 0.77

01:16:50.000 And score those points and just get locked in a...

01:16:53.000 Essentially it's ego, but it's not an intellectual conversation.

01:16:57.000 It's a game of, you know, who is basically checking the right boxes in their own little confirmation bias to their own audience.

01:17:06.000 That doesn't interest me, but it's frustrating.

01:17:09.000 You're also the best person on the other side of that conversation now.

01:17:12.000 So there's a series of videos on YouTube.

01:17:15.000 I think it's called Merry Christmas, Mr. Islamist. 1.00

01:17:17.000 Mr. Islamist, yeah. 0.99

01:17:17.000 That's right. 0.99

01:17:18.000 It's still up on YouTube.

01:17:19.000 You can watch it.

01:17:20.000 Him pitted against people who are playing this game, Islamists and jihadists of various sorts.

01:17:28.000 Majid is meeting them on interview shows, mostly in the UK, where they're pretending to be more benign than they are, and Majid is finding the question that sort of pulls back the mask on the theocrat, and it's hilarious.

01:17:42.000 It's very funny.

01:17:43.000 That one video that you published on your blog, I've sent to dozens of my friends.

01:17:49.000 That one video where there's this guy and he's addressing this enormous group of people and he's talking about, is this radical Islam or is this Islam?

01:17:56.000 That was, I think, a conference in Norway that was just, I mean, these are just straight up Islamists and jihadists addressing a crowd of... 0.90

01:18:05.000 Seemingly mainstream Muslims in Norway, but by a show of hands, are we extremists if we think apostates should be killed? 0.89

01:18:13.000 It's stunning.

01:18:15.000 It's an amazing document. 0.91

01:18:16.000 Yeah, in respect to the way they want to treat homosexuals, apostates. 0.97

01:18:21.000 I mean, the whole thing.

01:18:22.000 Is this Islam or is this radical Islam?

01:18:25.000 Talking of ideology blinkering statistical data on the subject of homosexuality, so in the United Kingdom a poll was done last year asking, so there have been two polls gauging public Muslim attitudes towards gays.

01:18:39.000 The first asked how many Muslims in the UK find homosexuality morally acceptable.

01:18:45.000 And zero percent, this is by the way by a professional polling company, it's not just some student that's devised a poll on Twitter.

01:18:53.000 A professional polling company found that zero percent of British Muslims responded to a poll saying that they found homosexuality morally acceptable.

01:19:01.000 And then a year later, which is now last year, another poll was conducted.

01:19:06.000 And that was an ICM poll asking how many British Muslims believe that homosexuality should be criminalised or remain legal.

01:19:17.000 And I think it was roughly 52%, if my memory serves incorrectly, of British Muslims said that they would wish for homosexuality to be criminalised.

01:19:26.000 And of course, what does criminalisation of homosexuality mean under Sharia and traditional Islamic jurisprudence?

01:19:33.000 We know that it's punished by death.

01:19:37.000 So, this is scientific data from gauging, you know, attitudes, British Muslim attitudes towards homosexuality.

01:19:44.000 But the ideological blinkers will kick in and refuse to see that truth.

01:19:48.000 And these aren't Islamists.

01:19:49.000 Unfortunately, in my dialogue with Sam, we talk about this, that there are the Islamists who actively want to take over a country and enforce their version of Islam. 0.99

01:19:57.000 Then there's, underneath that, there's a A softer landing of very very conservative stroke fundamentalist attitudes that unfortunately have become widespread and here is an example of it that is being gauged by scientific polling methodology that tells us there's a problem and unfortunately if one were to speak in this way Especially in Europe.

01:20:18.000 One is received by my own political tribe, and that's liberals, center-left and further.

01:20:25.000 One is met with denial and called a bigot simply for relaying these facts.

01:20:32.000 A quarter of British Muslims, when asked about the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, a quarter of So this is what led you?

01:20:50.000 To be put on the southern poverty laws.

01:20:53.000 Speaking in these terms.

01:20:54.000 And unfortunately, it's reporting polling data.

01:20:56.000 And what it does for me is to say, this is why it's so important to address these issues, to have these conversations, to try and empower those Muslim voices that are seeking to challenge these sorts of attitudes and carve out a space.

01:21:10.000 And if...

01:21:11.000 If one can do that with Catholicism in Europe and go through a Reformation and end up with an Enlightenment and end up with secularism in the West, what I often say is American liberals are very happy challenging their own Bible Belt and yet we have a Quran Belt within our communities and if I'm attempting to replicate The equivalent of challenging the Bible Belt within Muslim communities, 0.98

01:21:33.000 it means addressing these issues.

01:21:35.000 And yet, they grant to themselves the right to challenge the Bible Belt within America. 0.99

01:21:40.000 And yet, if we were to challenge what I call the Quran Belt in Europe, we're suddenly called bigots, you know, and Islamophobes.

01:21:47.000 Is this static?

01:21:49.000 Has this been moving?

01:21:51.000 Has it been adjusting and changing?

01:21:52.000 Is there any sort of a recognition that there's an issue with this?

01:21:56.000 So, you know, the emergence of ISIS really did bring it to the fore.

01:22:00.000 And it really did quieten some of the voices.

01:22:03.000 It also did increase the hysteria from the far left, because they began panicking, thinking, actually, we're going to lose this debate.

01:22:09.000 And that's where I noticed I think we're good to go.

01:22:33.000 It's an insult to the Beatles, but it also diminishes the true horror of these guys.

01:22:37.000 You know, they called him Jihadi John.

01:22:38.000 But the ISIS execution is basically that entire cell of the media face of ISIS execution cell.

01:22:45.000 We're all British Muslims.

01:22:46.000 And that should tell you something that we've got the worst terrorist group educated.

01:22:50.000 I mean, the thing is university graduate like every variable that the far left wants to marshal to explain this phenomenon.

01:22:57.000 Lack of educational opportunity, lack of economic opportunity, lack of social integration, mental illness.

01:23:03.000 You can find people who had massive opportunity.

01:23:08.000 You weren't a jihadist, but you were an Islamist. 0.85

01:23:11.000 You're a person who can basically play any game he wants.

01:23:16.000 He's somebody who can run for political office.

01:23:20.000 He hasn't been elected yet, but he should be.

01:23:24.000 The quarterback of the football team in this context is a candidate for recruitment to ISIS. Think of it this way.

01:23:33.000 We've got the worst terrorist group in our lifetime, one can reasonably say, is ISIS. The worst terrorist group, at least in living memory, is ISIS. And the worst cell in ISIS, the execution cell, came from a fully developed I think we're 0.62

01:24:06.000 good to go.

01:24:08.000 And he turned against that country.

01:24:09.000 So he had every reason to like Britain.

01:24:11.000 Britain gave him a home, gave him a...

01:24:13.000 Actually, physically, bricks and mortar house, gave his family on social costs.

01:24:17.000 They gave him social housing.

01:24:18.000 They educated him.

01:24:19.000 He graduated from university.

01:24:20.000 And they liberated his father's country from an aggressor.

01:24:23.000 And this man turned against...

01:24:25.000 This country that helped him and his family and his nation.

01:24:28.000 Was he captured or did he die?

01:24:30.000 Oh, he's dead.

01:24:31.000 One of them has been captured, but he's currently being held in Turkey.

01:24:34.000 It would be fascinating to listen to his rationale.

01:24:39.000 The other one, I forgot his name, but he was just interviewed.

01:24:42.000 You don't get a lot out of him.

01:24:44.000 He was interviewed by a female Arab journalist.

01:24:46.000 Did you watch that?

01:24:47.000 Yeah, no, that was a very sullen and dismissive character.

01:24:52.000 He refused to talk about much.

01:24:54.000 He said, you know, these are accusations and allegations you're making, and I will wait to trial.

01:25:00.000 In the end, he kind of cut the interview short.

01:25:02.000 He seemed a little put out that she was a woman.

01:25:05.000 Oh, yeah.

01:25:05.000 So as I'm looking at you now, imagine she's the interviewer and she's asking me questions and I'm looking in this direction, in your direction.

01:25:12.000 He literally never laid eyes on her.

01:25:15.000 It was bad NLP. Yeah, it's so intense.

01:25:23.000 It's such a, like, as you say, radioactive subject, too.

01:25:27.000 It's just fascinating to watch white liberal progressives just scamper away from this.

01:25:33.000 Well, but the flip side of the ISIS thing has been the refugee crisis, which has made, which has really empowered both extremes, frankly, the far left and the far right. 0.57

01:25:44.000 So you have the far right...

01:25:47.000 Obviously, with the wind in their sails, worrying about this influx of people from the Middle East and beyond North Africa and just the change of culture in their societies. 0.87

01:26:00.000 And a lot of these concerns are plausible, but because only the far right and a few other decent people like Douglas Murray will talk about the plausible concerns.

01:26:11.000 The space has just been vacated.

01:26:13.000 So you just have the far-right populist politics being enabled, and then you have this delusional open borders left that won't talk about the dynamics of the problem.

01:26:25.000 I told Sam about this, but it bears repeating.

01:26:28.000 I was having a conversation with someone as an executive at YouTube and I asked them why.

01:26:32.000 Someone got a community guideline strike on their account because they posted up a video on their playlist that they enjoyed of Sam Harris and Douglas Murray engaged in a conversation.

01:26:43.000 I go, why would that get you a community guideline strike?

01:26:46.000 And this woman said, because it's hate speech. 1.00

01:26:49.000 I got a problem with the last name Murray apparently.

01:26:51.000 Charles Murray and Douglas Murray causing me problems.

01:26:53.000 Is this somebody who worked at YouTube?

01:26:54.000 Yes, she was a big executive at YouTube. 0.61

01:26:57.000 She said, it's hate speech.

01:26:58.000 And I told her, I go, did you listen to it?

01:27:01.000 I go, you didn't listen to it.

01:27:02.000 I go, this is stunning that you would just say it's hate speech.

01:27:04.000 That you would just be so dismissive of it so quickly.

01:27:07.000 And she talked to me as if I was her employee.

01:27:10.000 Like I was not allowed to question her and she was just going to say what she said and I was going to shut up.

01:27:15.000 And it was a fascinating conversation.

01:27:17.000 Was this here on your show?

01:27:18.000 No, this is in Hawaii on vacation.

01:27:20.000 No, but I did a podcast with Douglas and apparently it got flagged.

01:27:24.000 Someone else put it up on their account and it got flagged as hate speech.

01:27:27.000 As a community guide.

01:27:29.000 So it strikes.

01:27:29.000 You can get your account removed.

01:27:31.000 So I've got a phrase for this and I've been rallying for it on social media for a couple of months now.

01:27:36.000 I call it a digital blind spot.

01:27:39.000 There's a cultural bias on social media.

01:27:43.000 And it's intellectually lazy.

01:27:44.000 Because social media is essentially a Californian invention, right?

01:27:49.000 And we're in the home state of where most of this came from.

01:27:52.000 It's got a very Californian-based worldview, which cares a lot about white supremacy and doesn't care about many other forms of bigotry that exist out there in the rest of the world, which, by the way, is the majority of the world.

01:28:03.000 So on Twitter right now, of course, there's Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned.

01:28:09.000 Tommy Robinson has been banned, as in taken off.

01:28:11.000 Now, Twitter's a private company.

01:28:12.000 Tommy Robinson?

01:28:13.000 He's the former leader of the British English Defence League, which was at one time Europe's largest anti-Muslim street protest group.

01:28:20.000 I helped him leave that organization.

01:28:22.000 He's still got many views I completely disagree with.

01:28:24.000 But nevertheless, he doesn't support or nor advocate for terrorism.

01:28:29.000 Why was he removed?

01:28:30.000 Well, so, Twitter is a private company.

01:28:32.000 It can choose to remove whoever it wants for whatever reason, and we will judge it for its inconsistencies.

01:28:35.000 But he was ostensibly removed for hate speech, as was Milo Yiannopoulos.

01:28:39.000 Now, the point being that still, till this day, and before people misquote me and completely say that I'm now defending hate speech and their right to speak with hateful views on Twitter, this is my actual point, that till this day,

01:28:56.000 Did you know that Hezbollah, which is a known and recognized terrorist organization, so forget hate speech for a moment, a terrorist organization that believes in actually killing civilians, and Hamas, a known and recognized terrorist organization that believes in bombing babies on buses as a form of resistance,

01:29:15.000 they still have accounts on Twitter.

01:29:17.000 And my point is, this is the blind spot.

01:29:21.000 And I've flagged Twitter about this on many an occasion.

01:29:25.000 This is the cultural blind spot.

01:29:26.000 This is the digital blind spot. 1.00

01:29:28.000 The dude sitting in California, in wherever, who is monitoring this stuff, and it's probably more than one person, they don't give a shit that there's some brown person In the Gaza Strip that believes it's okay to kill Jewish babies. 1.00

01:29:42.000 They don't give a shit because it's a brown person saying it in the name of Islam. 0.99

01:29:47.000 What they care about is a non-violent yet says stupid things guy, because he's white, called Tommy Robinson in England or Milo Yiannapolis. 1.00

01:29:55.000 Saying stuff that they, obviously that touches their sensitivities. 0.96

01:29:59.000 And it's so intellectually lazy to flag that immediately and to bar it from social media because you're comfortable with it.

01:30:05.000 You recognize white supremacy.

01:30:06.000 It doesn't take any effort to recognize it.

01:30:08.000 You don't have to invest in studying this stuff to know what white supremacy is.

01:30:12.000 It takes a bit of effort to study brown people's ideas that you're unfamiliar with and recognize here's a terrorist organization that's freely operating on social media. 0.89

01:30:21.000 I know specifically on Twitter.

01:30:23.000 I've actually pulled up their handles. 0.84

01:30:25.000 I think one of the concerns that Twitter has, and I think this is a valid concern, is that when you have people that are saying hateful things and you have people that are saying whether it's white supremacy or whatever, even if it's stupid, the problem is there's a rallying cry of trolls that follow behind them and it builds up momentum and it gets pretty stunning. 0.81

01:30:44.000 And that was what was happening with Milo.

01:30:46.000 And by silencing Milo off Twitter, they have essentially removed him from the public discourse.

01:30:53.000 You don't hear Yeah, that's right.

01:30:55.000 Because of this.

01:30:56.000 Because of these things.

01:30:57.000 But imagine what that does in Arabic with the terrorist groups.

01:30:59.000 Yes.

01:31:00.000 Everything you've just said, by the way, I agree with.

01:31:02.000 And multiply that for groups that have infrastructure in multiple countries with actual organizational hierarchies and planned means of distributing their ideas across entire populations, physically fighting in wars right now, such as Hezbollah in Syria,

01:31:18.000 killing Sunni Muslim rebels, you know? 0.96

01:31:20.000 And so imagine that and the way you're able to rally a mob in Pakistan on blasphemy, as an example. 0.98

01:31:26.000 All it takes for some person on social media to accuse another person of blasphemy, and they're probably going to get killed the very next day.

01:31:32.000 And it happens all the time.

01:31:33.000 But because these Californian-based social media companies are unaware of the cultural implications of those sorts of organizations and groups, and listed terrorist groups, mind you, there's completely no barring on any of their activity.

01:31:47.000 There's also the same thing that you have with YouTube and with a lot of these other social media organizations and companies, is they don't have to respond or give you any reasons.

01:31:58.000 They can say it violates our terms, but what are those terms?

01:32:02.000 Those terms aren't even listed.

01:32:03.000 It would be vague, like no hate speech.

01:32:05.000 Okay, well, what's hate speech?

01:32:06.000 What are you saying?

01:32:08.000 What is your clear policy?

01:32:10.000 What are your guidelines?

01:32:12.000 How does someone avoid violating your guidelines?

01:32:14.000 They don't say.

01:32:15.000 And how is the President of the United States not violating those terms?

01:32:19.000 Well, demonetization is another way that they do it.

01:32:22.000 They'll remove the ability to put advertising on a conversation that they don't like.

01:32:27.000 And it doesn't have to be like my conversation with Douglas Murray was demonetized.

01:32:31.000 Without any explanation?

01:32:32.000 None.

01:32:33.000 Zero.

01:32:33.000 They don't have to.

01:32:34.000 Douglas is...

01:32:35.000 He's clearly flagged on their...

01:32:37.000 Oh, 100%.

01:32:38.000 Yeah.

01:32:39.000 But if you listen to the actual context of our conversation, there's nothing even remotely hateful about it.

01:32:45.000 Yeah.

01:32:46.000 Look, I mean, these are private companies.

01:32:48.000 They've got the right to choose whatever policy...

01:32:50.000 The only thing I would expect from a private company is show a consistent policy towards these things.

01:32:55.000 If you don't like hate speech, then ban brown people who are also advocating more than just the hate speech, but actually preaching violent terrorism. 1.00

01:33:02.000 Right.

01:33:03.000 Yeah, it's a strange time for this, man, because it's also a time where you can communicate so instantaneously.

01:33:11.000 It's fantastic in that regard.

01:33:12.000 You can get ideas out so quickly, but these hubs of information, like where the information gets distributed, are...

01:33:21.000 They're controlled by people that I don't think ever knew that they were going to have this sort of responsibility.

01:33:27.000 I think you're seeing that with Zuckerberg and these trials or the speeches that he's given in front of Congress.

01:33:33.000 When you see him on television talking about it, you get the sense that this is a guy that never prepared for this, had no idea this was going to happen, and then all of a sudden, from this simple social media platform that was supposed to be friends sharing photos and just talking about Girls.

01:33:50.000 Yeah, nonsense.

01:33:51.000 They were set up to pull women. 1.00

01:33:52.000 There was a lot of that, you know?

01:33:54.000 And what was Twitter?

01:33:55.000 I mean, Twitter was essentially just, you know, I mean, do you remember the old days of Twitter?

01:33:59.000 It would be, you would use your name, like, is doing this.

01:34:05.000 Like, under Sam Harris, like, Sam Harris is at the movies.

01:34:08.000 You would say that, almost as if you were in a third person.

01:34:11.000 That was the original form that people would use Twitter.

01:34:13.000 I would have come after that.

01:34:14.000 It was weird.

01:34:15.000 It was a weird way of talking and then people started just writing what they thought and it just became and then became ideology and then it became sharing links and interesting articles is a big part of it.

01:34:29.000 To me that's the only good part of it now.

01:34:34.000 I've just discovered that And that's most of my attachment to it.

01:34:39.000 I genuinely use it as a curated newsfeed because I follow interesting people.

01:34:45.000 They tweet interesting stuff and I consume it that way.

01:34:49.000 But noticing what's coming back at me in the at mentions, I put something out, you know, a podcast.

01:34:55.000 And then I look to see how it's being received on Twitter.

01:34:58.000 And I don't tend to do that in other forums.

01:35:01.000 I don't really look at Facebook comments much.

01:35:03.000 I don't look at YouTube.

01:35:05.000 I mean, YouTube is just a cesspool, right?

01:35:07.000 So even if they're for you, the comments are horrible.

01:35:11.000 Why is that?

01:35:13.000 It started on YouTube, I think, by the way.

01:35:16.000 Nastiness started on the YouTube comment threads and then spread everywhere else.

01:35:19.000 It's very strange.

01:35:20.000 But one thing I found, you can change your settings in Twitter where you screen out people who just have Twitter egg photos, they don't have a real photo.

01:35:31.000 You can screen out people who haven't had their email confirmed.

01:35:35.000 And I think I just did those two things.

01:35:38.000 And like 90% of the hate went away.

01:35:40.000 It was amazing.

01:35:41.000 Just doing that was an amazing filter.

01:35:44.000 That's what I should do, Sam.

01:35:44.000 Thank you for that.

01:35:45.000 You should do that.

01:35:46.000 Except I think it's better to not actually even look at what's coming back at you.

01:35:51.000 Well, you've taken it off your phone now.

01:35:52.000 I think so, too.

01:35:54.000 I think looking at it is just too risky.

01:35:56.000 My wife, Rachel, would be very happy with that.

01:35:58.000 I think she'd probably wish that I did the same thing.

01:36:01.000 Do you tweak on it, too?

01:36:02.000 Do you read things and get angry?

01:36:03.000 Well, I don't.

01:36:05.000 I like to think I don't react in this way, but I mean, I can't say that because actually probably I have sometimes.

01:36:11.000 But I get all that same kind of...

01:36:13.000 It's interesting because I took a stance on the Syria strikes.

01:36:17.000 What was your stance?

01:36:18.000 Well, I just think that, especially now in hindsight, where there are no casualties involved at all, there are only three injuries, I think we had to take a stance that...

01:36:29.000 I succeeded where Obama failed in making sure that red line was maintained, that the use of chemical weapons cannot be tolerated, even if it was symbolic, even if it was highly symbolic.

01:36:37.000 I think sometimes symbolism is important.

01:36:39.000 So I took that stance and it was- Got a lot of love on Twitter?

01:36:44.000 Well, yeah, of course, because actually that's against the grain.

01:36:46.000 Public opinion at the moment was against the strikes, and I fully acknowledged that when I took the stance.

01:36:50.000 But I argued a case, and I set the case out, and both on my Sky News show, I have a show, a co-host on The Pledge, and also on my radio show on LBC, I repeatedly argued for why I think it's important that we don't allow for chemical weapons that they use to become normalized in our world. 0.98

01:37:04.000 And so it was interesting because I posted the Sky News clip of me sort of talking to camera about my reasons for this.

01:37:11.000 And I have this screen grab of the reaction.

01:37:15.000 It's actually hilarious.

01:37:16.000 It's just a puddle of blood?

01:37:18.000 So it is the two extremes.

01:37:20.000 They actually started fighting with each other about who's right about their...

01:37:24.000 So I've said, look, here's a clip, why we must intervene in Syria after that chemical attack, blah, blah.

01:37:28.000 The first one is a guy with an actual swastika Nazi symbol on his profile.

01:37:32.000 Oh, wonderful.

01:37:33.000 And it says, you know, at Nordic Scott, there's his handle, Thomas James. 0.99

01:37:36.000 He says, Majid wants Britain to intervene in Syria because Putin and Assad are kicking his ISIS buddies asses. 0.99

01:37:42.000 End of story. 0.99

01:37:43.000 Right?

01:37:43.000 So there's a guy who's basically saying, my real reason for calling for that is because I'm supporting ISIS against the Assad regime.

01:37:48.000 The guy, immediately after, responds to him, and he's called At Lazdo, right? 0.99

01:37:53.000 And he says, what do you want about you Nazi dumbass? 0.99

01:37:56.000 Majid is funded by your lot. 1.00

01:37:57.000 He's a far-right Uncle Tom.

01:38:00.000 So they're fighting with each other.

01:38:02.000 They're actually, no, this is, is that on your, I don't know if that captures that, but they're arguing with each other over whether I'm in their, his camp or his camp.

01:38:09.000 Oh, wow.

01:38:10.000 And it's the far right and the far left, basically.

01:38:12.000 You either have the worst publicist in the world or the best one.

01:38:14.000 So I should, I think I should take myself out of that equation and let them fight each other.

01:38:17.000 It would be even better.

01:38:18.000 That's the move.

01:38:19.000 To set something like that up, set the far right and the far left against each other, and you can just sneak away while they're fighting.

01:38:27.000 That's how nuts it is. 0.97

01:38:31.000 The extremes are equally irrational, and the fact that you could be at the epicenter of both of their problems, that you're a covert jihadist and you're an anti-Muslim bigot,

01:38:48.000 It seems like there's more conspiracy theories in terms of what's someone's actual motivation for what they're saying now than ever before, too, because it's so easy to express them.

01:38:57.000 So someone could say, no, he's far right, or no, you're just trying to support ISIS. This ability to find some nefarious reason for your actions.

01:39:08.000 Well, again, it's reducing one's opinion to the lowest base, you know, dodgy motive as opposed to applying the principle of charity.

01:39:15.000 So if Joe says something...

01:39:17.000 Now, I can either sit here and actually think, no, I don't trust this guy, I don't respect him, and therefore I'm going to reduce his opinion to the worst possible interpretation that he could possibly mean and then use that against him.

01:39:28.000 Or I could continue to ask...

01:39:30.000 What you mean by that because I'm assuming you're a good decent human being in origin and perhaps you mean something that I haven't yet quite grasped and then ask you to clarify your own opinion in your own words and I think it's unfortunate that many of our conversations today in the far left is as guilty of it as the far right and they like to think they're not which is part of that righteousness that blinds them from actually committing this very same injustice they accuse the far right of committing and that is a it's the same bigotry in a mirror image I call it the bigotry of low expectations The low expectations they have that Muslims

01:40:00.000 are somehow unable to adhere to common, decent, liberal, secular, democratic values.

01:40:04.000 And so it's actually plaguing our conversations today.

01:40:08.000 If only we were able to strip away our ideological baggage in entering conversations and allow for, you know, that honest, honest conversation.

01:40:16.000 But, of course, we say that and then you try to replicate our success on a number of occasions and found yourself incredibly frustrated.

01:40:23.000 Well, you're a reasonable guy.

01:40:25.000 Well, it's – Unfortunately, I found the one reasonable person to have a fight with.

01:40:30.000 Well, it just seems like this is a side effect of this increased ability to communicate and that just – there's so much noise.

01:40:37.000 There's so much going on.

01:40:38.000 I mean, this is the most fantastic time for the distribution of information.

01:40:42.000 There's never been a time where it's so easy to distribute information in human history.

01:40:46.000 It's really crazy, but I don't think we know what to do with it.

01:40:48.000 And I think that when you deal with people who have such rigid ideologies and they find this incredibly easy ability to express these ideologies, there's just so much clashing.

01:40:58.000 There's just so much noise and nonsense.

01:41:01.000 And when someone says something that they know that they don't have to back up with facts because they know that their people who are on their position will support it.

01:41:10.000 You say the right keywords, you know, right privilege, whatever you want to say, and then boom...

01:41:15.000 You're gonna get a whole slew of people like those two people in your mentions battling it out with each other.

01:41:21.000 You're just like kind of picking fights and starting these little fires and letting other people go to war.

01:41:26.000 You know what I think we've done and it's again the advent of social media is that we I was speaking with my friend Mark about this and we've democratized truth and when you democratize truth in that way the earlier The thing you mentioned about sports, combat sports and your expertise in that field.

01:41:42.000 If I had come back at you and spoke at you with as much authority as you claim in your expertise with having absolutely no history in that expertise whatsoever and assumed that I have as equal right to An unresearched claim to truth,

01:41:59.000 in my opinion, as you do, and who has a lifetime of experience in that field.

01:42:05.000 Therein lies a problem, that I am arrogating to myself this notion, this kind of belief that my opinion, though of course I have an equally legal right to express it, but it doesn't mean it carries the same weight as your opinion when it comes to combat sports, and it shouldn't.

01:42:19.000 Unfortunately, I think what's happened with the advent of...

01:42:22.000 And worse still, you could add, you're expressing that opinion as a person of color, as a Pakistani. 0.79

01:42:28.000 As if that somehow, you know, yeah.

01:42:31.000 So therefore it's uncriticizable by you because it's his truth.

01:42:34.000 Otherwise you're a racist.

01:42:35.000 And that's the key word there. 0.96

01:42:36.000 It's my truth.

01:42:37.000 And so the problem with that is when you relativize truth in that way, then I can speak to you on an equal footing about combat sports, which only a mad person who hasn't had that history in combat sport would think, would arrogate to themselves the right to do so.

01:42:49.000 But social media, I think, has allowed for that to happen.

01:42:52.000 I gave a TED Talk in about, I think it was roughly 2011, about the dangers of this happening and social media dividing us all.

01:42:59.000 But I'd say now that if I were to pitch that TED Talk today, I did it at TED Global.

01:43:05.000 If I were to pitch that TED Talk today, it wouldn't be accepted because it's not something new now.

01:43:10.000 It's now people know how social media has divided us.

01:43:12.000 But back then...

01:43:14.000 It was new and innovative enough as an idea for TED Global to say, we want you to speak about this, and it's still up online.

01:43:20.000 But if people watched it today, they think, how on earth did that become a TED Talk?

01:43:23.000 Because there was this heady day back in, you know, five, six, seven years ago, this kind of hope-filled moment where everyone thought Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and generally social media and also tech companies were like the good guys, that these companies weren't actually companies,

01:43:40.000 that they were on our side against the corporate world.

01:43:43.000 And it turns out, I think we've just hit this moment.

01:43:45.000 You mentioned Zuckerberg.

01:43:46.000 I think we've culturally come to this moment now where, you know, I think symbolized by his testimony at Congress, that that honeymoon period is over.

01:43:54.000 People now view him, I think, quite firmly and squarely as a CEO of a very rich company, as opposed to A guy in my club that I'm friends with who's on my side against the world.

01:44:07.000 Google used to have that slogan, don't do evil.

01:44:11.000 Presumably they still have it.

01:44:14.000 The problem is the incentives are all wrong.

01:44:17.000 Actually, I was just at TED. To give you a sense of how far the rot has spread here, I found myself at a dinner sitting next to a neuroscientist Who thought that, and this Ezra Klein thing followed me around to TED,

01:44:32.000 because many people have listened to the podcast, and He thought Charles Murray should have been physically attacked at Middlebury.

01:44:40.000 This is a neuroscientist, academic, impeccable person otherwise.

01:44:47.000 I think he was, after we wound up having a fight at dinner over it, I think he was somewhat chagrined by having expressed that opinion.

01:44:54.000 But, I mean, that's how emotionally hijacked people are by this issue.

01:45:00.000 But it's a...

01:45:02.000 That's incredible.

01:45:03.000 That's the other thing that's new.

01:45:05.000 This is the other thing that's new.

01:45:06.000 The left advocating for violence.

01:45:08.000 This is very new.

01:45:10.000 I mean, I always felt like the left was non-violent.

01:45:15.000 The whole idea behind being progressive, like non-violence was a genuine aspect of that.

01:45:21.000 And free speech was.

01:45:22.000 Yeah.

01:45:23.000 Two things, yes.

01:45:24.000 Those are two things that have been sort of stopped.

01:45:27.000 That free speech is fine as long as you're not saying speech that I disagree with.

01:45:31.000 And non-violence, sure, unless we need to use violence.

01:45:35.000 Which is like, and the people that are saying it, like if you watch these Antifa people, like Jesus Christ, the most incompetent, violent people you've ever seen in your life.

01:45:44.000 It offends your sensibilities as an MMA guy. 1.00

01:45:47.000 For a person who's an expert in violence, this is fucking, you guys are terrible at it. 0.99

01:45:51.000 There's videos of these guys practicing. 1.00

01:45:53.000 There's videos of Antifa.

01:45:55.000 They got together and decided to train and prepare for violence.

01:46:00.000 And so they're doing these martial arts classes.

01:46:02.000 They have people teach them. 1.00

01:46:03.000 Like, holy shit! 1.00

01:46:04.000 Like, the average high school kid could fuck you guys up. 1.00

01:46:07.000 Like, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. 1.00

01:46:09.000 But it's almost like they realize that there's not that much danger in what they're doing. 0.95

01:46:16.000 And they can kind of play with danger.

01:46:18.000 They can play with violence.

01:46:19.000 They can put the masks on.

01:46:21.000 They're not in Israel.

01:46:23.000 They're not at the Gaza Strip. 1.00

01:46:25.000 Joe, they're a bunch of cowards. 0.98

01:46:26.000 There's a guy who went to my old university. 0.98

01:46:28.000 I graduated from SOAS before I did my masters at the LSE. SOAS has been embroiled in a strike at the moment.

01:46:33.000 The Students' Union has been supporting professors who are on strike and it's over pension and pension rights and a government refusing to raise their pension rights and whatever.

01:46:42.000 And some of the students came out in strike, far left students, defending the professors.

01:46:46.000 And they put forward a ring preventing students from attending their classes.

01:46:51.000 And a female black lecturer wanted to cross the strike lines to go in to teach her students. 1.00

01:46:58.000 A white male... 0.69

01:47:01.000 Public school educated, very, very middle class protester, far left, physically attacked her. 0.96

01:47:09.000 He physically attacked a female black professor. 0.89

01:47:12.000 So gone is suddenly, gone is the white privilege. 0.99

01:47:15.000 Gone is the male attacking a female.

01:47:17.000 You know, gone is all of that.

01:47:19.000 Gone is non-violence, all the above. 0.97

01:47:20.000 In the name of ideology, he legitimized and allowed himself to attack a black female. 0.96

01:47:25.000 By the way, oh, and she was also Muslim. 0.76

01:47:27.000 So she went to the press.

01:47:29.000 It's hilarious.

01:47:30.000 I would have thought she would have had the right spell.

01:47:32.000 She actually said that in her interview.

01:47:34.000 She said, I'm a black Muslim female and this white kid has just attacked me for wanting to teach my class. 0.93

01:47:38.000 This is crazy. 0.98

01:47:40.000 This is a crazy world we're in, man.

01:47:42.000 Are you optimistic about the future?

01:47:49.000 Yeah.

01:47:50.000 I say that because it's going to take a lifetime's work.

01:47:53.000 And I don't think that in our lifetime, much is going to change.

01:47:57.000 I think, you know, maybe for the next generation.

01:48:00.000 What is the picture of...

01:48:03.000 How do you conceive of your job at the moment?

01:48:05.000 And what is the status quo?

01:48:08.000 For instance...

01:48:09.000 ISIS, the Islamic State, is sort of fading from most people's memory now.

01:48:14.000 Even mine, I'm spending much less time thinking about it because it seems to have been beaten into submission.

01:48:20.000 So let me tell you a story.

01:48:20.000 I can answer this question with a story.

01:48:22.000 So Radical, which is my autobiography, has a US publication, right?

01:48:25.000 In the UK, it's Random House Penguin.

01:48:27.000 It's published by the biggest publishing house.

01:48:29.000 When I came to publish in the US, I approached publishing houses, but it was after bin Laden was killed.

01:48:36.000 And so when we approached 10, 20, whatever, publishing houses...

01:48:40.000 The problem solved?

01:48:40.000 They all said no.

01:48:41.000 They said the problem solved.

01:48:42.000 They said, we think, you know, we wish you'd come to us five years earlier, but problem solved now.

01:48:47.000 There's not a problem anymore.

01:48:48.000 And a bit like what you mentioned is sort of your expertise.

01:48:51.000 And I have been consumed by this subject all my life.

01:48:55.000 And there are a few people on this planet that I would take seriously on this subject.

01:49:00.000 Outside especially of Quilliam.

01:49:02.000 And there are other organizations.

01:49:03.000 They have some really good people, but I know them all.

01:49:05.000 And we regularly speak.

01:49:07.000 So I would say to all these publishing houses, I can assure you 100% this problem not only has not been solved, is going to come back around in a far worse way than you can ever have imagined.

01:49:18.000 This is before ISIS came along.

01:49:20.000 None of them believed me.

01:49:22.000 Of course, what then happened?

01:49:23.000 My book eventually got published by some very small publishing house in the US and has done quite well for them.

01:49:29.000 But the point of the story was this ISIS came around and people were suddenly like, oh my God, where did this come from?

01:49:35.000 Of course, those of us who had been monitoring the situation knew this was going to come back around very, very heavy.

01:49:41.000 Now that ISIS has been pushed back, and this is where this story is sort of the point of the story is, We've got to resist the temptation to believe the problem has been solved, because the organization known as ISIS, which is a bureaucracy, has been fought back.

01:49:55.000 But the ideology upon which that organization was built is still very much alive and it's still strong.

01:50:03.000 What Al-Qaeda did, while the whole world was focused on ISIS, was exploit that opportunity to rebuild and regroup.

01:50:10.000 And they've been rebuilding in Syria, Now they are stronger than they have ever been, even under Bin Laden, because for the first time in the history of that organization, they are firmly embedded within the Syrian population as a genuinely kind of viewed by the people that they were fighting on behalf of.

01:50:28.000 As a grassroots resistance organization, whereas before that they were seen as a terrorist group that was like a, you know, just like a vanguard.

01:50:35.000 They've embedded themselves in the Syrian population, in the Yemeni civil war.

01:50:39.000 They've embedded themselves in North Africa, East Africa, and in Pakistan.

01:50:43.000 And they are resurgent and they are grooming Hamza bin Laden, who is bin Laden's son, and they're grooming him for leadership.

01:50:50.000 And a time will come, maybe in a couple of months, maybe in a couple of years, where they announce Hamza bin Laden as a new leader We've got to remember that we never expected ISIS to emerge.

01:51:19.000 Al Qaeda will come back with a vengeance. 0.97

01:51:22.000 Jesus.

01:51:22.000 What is the politics between the remnants of ISIS and al-Qaeda?

01:51:29.000 Well, Hamza bin Laden's succession to the leadership solves that problem.

01:51:32.000 Because the ISIS guys were originally all al-Qaeda. 0.56

01:51:36.000 ISIS was al-Qaeda in Syria.

01:51:37.000 And they broke away after bin Laden died because they had pledged allegiance to bin Laden.

01:51:42.000 And the new leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri, is by all accounts a rather uncharismatic And, you know, he's a pediatrician.

01:51:49.000 He's not really a kind of...

01:51:51.000 Bin Laden had the charisma.

01:51:52.000 He's a pediatrician.

01:51:52.000 Yeah, he's Egyptian.

01:51:53.000 He's an Egyptian pediatrician from a very well-off Egyptian family, by the way.

01:51:57.000 Wow.

01:51:57.000 I think his grandfather was the Egyptian ambassador to the UN. Doctors and judges and pharmacists.

01:52:01.000 That's right.

01:52:02.000 Bin Laden clearly had the charisma, the wealth, the presence, the looks.

01:52:06.000 He had all of it that Zawahiri doesn't. 0.99

01:52:09.000 Zawahiri is, you know, compared to Bin Laden, it just doesn't, you know. 0.95

01:52:12.000 So if the guys that broke away from Al-Qaeda to form ISIS said to Zawahiri, the current leader, we pledged allegiance to Bin Laden.

01:52:18.000 We owe you nothing.

01:52:19.000 You're not our Amir, our leader. 0.99

01:52:22.000 If Hamza Bin Laden comes back as the leader of Al-Qaeda, it solves that problem.

01:52:27.000 Because those remnants of ISIS have a loyalty to the Bin Laden name and the Bin Laden family.

01:52:32.000 And they remember what they consider their glory days fighting under Bin Laden.

01:52:39.000 That's not nice to hear.

01:52:40.000 That's no good.

01:52:41.000 No, no, the problem has not gone away.

01:52:42.000 I can tell you that.

01:52:43.000 The problem is the ideology and it will not be dealt with until we deal with this ideology.

01:52:49.000 And it's why it's so dangerous to, you know, there was this awful term that I railed against.

01:52:54.000 It was so frustrating to see under Obama's presidency.

01:52:57.000 The US State Department officially adopted as their name for challenging this problem.

01:53:02.000 They adopted the term Al-Qaeda inspired extremism.

01:53:07.000 Of course it isn't, it isn't Al-Qaeda that inspired extremism, it's extremism that inspired Al-Qaeda. 0.78

01:53:13.000 And it's, for the purposes of political correctness, you adopt this term in the State Department, officially, that we're fighting, across the world, we are fighting Al-Qaeda-inspired extremism. 0.99

01:53:23.000 My former organisation, Hizb al-Tahrir, a caliphate-espousing organization that believes in their ideal caliphate that gay should be killed, adulteresses should be stoned to death. 0.96

01:53:33.000 They were there before al-Qaeda. 0.98

01:53:35.000 And this ideology has been there before al-Qaeda.

01:53:38.000 Al-Qaeda was one of a long line of groups that came as a result of the Islamist ideology.

01:53:42.000 And we've got to start focusing on the ideology itself, not the physical groups that spring up from it.

01:53:48.000 As you point out, there's another layer to the ideology that is even more well-subscribed that presents social and political problems.

01:53:58.000 So as you said, there are conservative Muslims who don't support al-Qaeda.

01:54:03.000 They're not jihadists.

01:54:04.000 They would honestly say... 1.00

01:54:06.000 Bin Laden doesn't represent my brand of Islam, but these are still people who will say that homosexuals should be killed. 0.97

01:54:17.000 Apparent allies against, quote, extremism can still be people with religiously mandated social attitudes that just cannot be assimilated in cosmopolitan societies.

01:54:29.000 So, people who are – worse than Al-Qaeda-inspired extremism, there's just this notion that on the left – and this came out of Obama's mouth and it came out of Clinton's mouth and it's largely why she wasn't president – It's just generic extremism,

01:54:50.000 right?

01:54:51.000 So that like in the same sentence that you have to worry about the caliphate, you have to talk about abortion doctors being killed in the US once every 15 years.

01:55:01.000 So, of course, you remember because President Obama refused to use the word Islamist extremism.

01:55:05.000 Of course, Trump has the other problem.

01:55:06.000 He thinks that by like Rumpelstiltskin, by repeating it enough, you've solved the problem.

01:55:10.000 But actually, one of the elements in which he was correctly critical of Obama Was, and I was at the time, vocally critical of Obama's reluctance to use the word Islamist extremism.

01:55:21.000 And we've got no problem.

01:55:23.000 When we talk about, you know, when we talk about white supremacist ideology, we don't mean that all white people are supremacists.

01:55:31.000 You know, what we're doing here is actually attributing precisely, specifically, what the ideology is and believes in, white supremacy.

01:55:39.000 Likewise, Islamists, you know, it's important so we can identify that ideology, still while not calling it Islam.

01:55:47.000 Right?

01:55:47.000 So we're still giving a bit of a leeway there for everybody else, all the other Muslims.

01:55:51.000 But to call it Islamist extremism is to recognize that it's an offshoot of Islam.

01:55:55.000 It's a manifestation, extreme or otherwise, of Islam. 0.99

01:55:58.000 And thereby, we are acknowledging that its justifications are in Islamic scripture, as well as, of course, a multiplicity of other causes, grievances and what have you.

01:56:06.000 But we cannot ignore that it also rests On justifications that are derived from the Islamic scripture.

01:56:12.000 I mean, I can cite for the Arabic that tells you in the Quran itself to cut the hand of the thief or to lash the adulterer.

01:56:19.000 You know, these are, or I quote the hadith or the saying of the prophet that says, kill the person that changes their religion. 0.95

01:56:24.000 This is scripture.

01:56:26.000 And so, of course, there are other factors involved as well.

01:56:28.000 But one of the factors that gives rise to this is the unreformed scripture that these extremists cite.

01:56:35.000 And so we have to acknowledge that Islam has a role to play I often say that, you know, because again under the Obama presidency, it was frustrating that the common refrain was to say that Islam, this has nothing to do with Islam.

01:56:47.000 It's as absurd as arguing that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism.

01:56:51.000 He went even further at one point.

01:56:53.000 Didn't he at one point say that not only does this have nothing to do with Islam, this has less to do with Islam than any other religion.

01:56:59.000 It was just, he bent over backwards.

01:57:01.000 It's like saying the Crusades have nothing to do with Christianity.

01:57:05.000 Gentlemen, unfortunately, I have to wrap this up.

01:57:07.000 But I really appreciate you guys coming on.

01:57:09.000 It was a real pleasure to meet you.

01:57:12.000 And your book?

01:57:14.000 The book is Islam and the Future of Tolerance.

01:57:16.000 And actually, the one thing we do have to announce is we're going to Sydney and Auckland.

01:57:22.000 The two of us and Douglas Murray and both Weinstein brothers.

01:57:26.000 Oh, it's toxic!

01:57:27.000 We're going to wreck those towns.

01:57:29.000 Oh, my goodness.

01:57:30.000 We're going to have...

01:57:31.000 Are you doing a live podcast?

01:57:32.000 A day-long conference.

01:57:33.000 I think you want to use their first names, Sam, because I think...

01:57:35.000 Brett and Eric?

01:57:36.000 Yeah, Brett Steins.

01:57:37.000 Not the other one.

01:57:38.000 They're Steins, not Steins.

01:57:40.000 Yeah, yeah, that's right.

01:57:41.000 It's okay.

01:57:42.000 It's okay.

01:57:42.000 No, but it'll be great to get both of them together.

01:57:44.000 That rarely happens.

01:57:45.000 Yeah, those guys are awesome.

01:57:46.000 I'm really grateful to meet both of them, and you as well.

01:57:49.000 Thank you, guys.

01:57:49.000 Thanks, Jake.

01:57:50.000 I really appreciate it.

01:57:50.000 Cheers.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 18, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

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