#2193 - Jack Symes

27:24Or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something. All of these, I think they probably work for humans. But then I don't think since then, and maybe this is a part of the reason why people or Christians, especially in this country, are fearful of evolution by natural selection. Maybe it's not because they just care so much about their history of the world, which would seem a little bit weird to me that they... That's the hill they want to die on, like how are the earthers? But actually if God is responsible for this process, that seems like a big stain on God's record. So you can see why they're reluctant to accept something.

27:58Maybe it's the only way. Maybe this process of natural selection and of constant improvement and what we call evolution, maybe it's the only way. Do you think it... I worry though that when you do the maths, whether it can be justified, we're talking like trillions of uncountable animals. Like if you... Forever. Yeah, it's a time. Especially in sorts itself out. Well, it's kind of getting better, right? But like if I was to say to you, like, you know, I can spawn a person here next to us now. But to do it, I'm going to execute 50 chimpanzees right there. Like if you said yes, I think... I'd say that that was just a stupid choice to do.

28:36It's a weird choice because we've definitely done that. We've definitely done that for makeup. Well, we've tested it. Yeah, I said, you know, I mean, they've done some wild shit with animals, unfortunately. Yeah. Well, this ties in, like, I think people think this though, that the problem cuts deep. Like when you ask people, like 90 % of people in the UK think that keeping animals in cages is cruel. 50 % of people in the US think that. Yet 98 .5 % of chickens, turkeys and pigs are kept in factory farms. Is that real number? 70 % of cows? It's 98%. Yeah. It's 99 % of chickens and 98 % of turkeys and about the same for pigs.

29:16Like people... But you see the juxtaposition there, right? You've got people that think it's wrong, but they're doing otherwise. Well, it's something that they're doing otherwise. They can compartmentalize because... This episode is brought to you by Buffalo Trace Distillery. Actually, have some Buffalo Trace cigars here. They just sent me. One of the world's most award -winning distilleries that's been making whiskey the same way for more than 200 years. Made as a tribute to the rugged, free -spirited pioneers who blaze their own trail to new frontiers. It embodies the perfectly untamed spirit of independence.

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30:42Franklin County, Kentucky, Buffalo Trace, American, family -owned, independent and perfectly untamed. Factory farming, we talked about this yesterday, they have ag gag laws a couple days ago with Russell Crowe, rather. Ag gag laws prevent people from detailing the horrific conditions which these animals live in. If you film it, if you're a worker there and you're like, this is horrific, I'm going to film this and out this place, you'll go to jail. Which is insane. It should be a crime. It should be like animal cruelty. Like Russell Crowe was in here the other day and he keeps 200 head of cattle and he has a ranch in the bush in Australia.

31:23And the way he described the way he takes care of these animals, the way they gently move them in a new pastures, they live this idyllic life until he's like, in the meat is better, you feel better about the whole thing. I've heard him say something about this before where he goes, but ultimately it's because it tastes better. So although I'm happy he's doing it, right? This is no comparison to factory farming. And if all the farming that was out there in the world was like Russell Crowe's then... It's not just because it tastes better. Do you think he's got the... Yes, he cares about them. Did he talk about how he ends their lives?

31:58He didn't, I didn't ask. I should have, but he was going on a rant, I didn't want to interrupt. I wanted to know if they did the no -country -for -old man bolt to the head. Well, right, that could be... Apparently that's instantaneous. Like, take the comparison, right? Would you rather have your nose cut off, your children taken away from you, be stuffed in a cage for your life, and pump full of hormones, and then be electrocuted or have your throat slit? Or would you rather run around in the field with your family, and then one day the lights just go out? Well, one day the lights are going to go out anyway.

32:29It's not too different than the thing. But there is a question. You don't live very long on their own. Like, they're kind of like dogs. I don't know what a cow's maximum age is. What's the maximum age of a cow? Let's guess. I'm going to say 18. What do you think? Because that's like a golden retriever if you give them all the right food. Apparently. I'm skeptical, because if it goes average, it's going to be wild cow, maybe 15, 16 years. Yeah, but wild cows, where are they? So wild cows are an interesting thing, because domestic cattle are completely different strain of cattle. And when we let them go wild, they become what we call scrub bulls.

33:03And scrub bulls are the most dangerous animal you can encounter in the Australian bush. Oh, really? Yeah. Asian buffaloes are dangerous, but scrub bulls will fuck you up. They're like those bulls that people ride except they're wild. So they're completely feral, and they're there to breed and to protect their cows. And anything that comes in. I've heard countless stories of men camping in the bush getting gourd by scrub bulls. They're crazy looking too. They develop all these weird colors, and they look really cool. They kind of like, you know how pigs, they go through a metamorphosis when they go feral.

33:40Do you know that process? It's really quick. It's like six weeks. Once a pig is feral for six weeks, and just running wild in the woods, they start changing. They're snout extends, their tusks grow, their hair gets thicker. They become boars. They become what we think of as a classic wild boar. And those are the same species of animal, which is very bizarre. That happens with bulls too. Well, especially in the factory farms as well. The definitely don't gonna live much longer there, are they? No, they kill them quicker too, because they plump them up fast with antibiotics, and they get them fat.

34:13Just more with chronicly obese, basically. Yeah, totally ill. And that's the best stuff. The best stuff is the super ill cow. You got, uh, it's like 15 to 20 years. Oh, there you go. There you go. So the dairy industry really, really allows cows to live past five. They're sent to slaughter soon after production level drops, yikes. Well, it's interesting. So I don't know like when he's obviously killing these cows, right? But if, is he doing it right towards the end of the life, then it seems like it's, it might still be wrong in a sense though, right? There's a reason why when we take our, our dogs to the vets to be euthanized, that you don't get there and the vet pulls out of fucking crossbutt or a gun or something, right?

34:56Right. Because you go, no, there's a better way you can do this. Like, I mean, you've run out of injections or something. Like the, the Greek for the euthanasia means good death. There are many ways of doing it. Do you think it's better to use a poison that injects into veins that are bolted to the brain? My suspicion is, is yes. Why? It slows down the heart. Right, but you can't see them struggling in a sense of like they don't exhibit features that look like they're in pain or they're fighting. So it's better to slow down the brain, slowly shuts down. Well, you'd expect them to, you know, to resist in some certain way.

35:33Maybe there's not much difference between them. I don't think there's any difference. The bolt of the brain is instantaneous. Yeah. The, our concern is blood. Yeah. Our concern is seeing trauma. And so we're not seeing it's all internal. Yeah. You know, poison kills you in a horrible way. I mean, there's probably the last moments are probably deeply painful and very confusing. Well, your body's shutting down or you're dying. See, thinking it's more of like a cultural thing that we don't want to have pets shot rather than have injections. Yeah. I mean, we see it less than you guys don't want to shoot my pet.

36:01I don't want to see your pet shot. I mean, God, imagine seeing Carl get shot. That'd be horrific. But there's no, I mean, there's no difference between Carl getting an injection that kills him either. It's, it's just our own sensibilities. It's an ending of life and the most effective, quickest way that causes the least amount of pain should be what we strive for. Yeah. No, definitely. But that still, I think we both agree on this, right? That the factory farming is the, like, the overwhelming amount of meat we're consuming is that. Yeah. And people feel, and we think this. We know that non -human animals are morally valuable.

36:38I love this thought experiment by the philosopher Tom Reagan. He asks you, like, imagine you're on a lifeboat with, let's say, a golden retriever and another human being. And you've got to throw one out and you get to keep the other one in. Right. And so everyone throws out the golden retriever. Depends on who the person is. I haven't met any. It was Hitler in my dog Hitler was going for a swim. You know, but it's just like I would do that. It's putting them default, you know, Joe Blacks. But let's be real. I throw, I throw Hitler in. 100%. I'm going to kill Hitler with my bare hands, then I'm going to throw him in the water.

37:12100%. Well, all right. It's not, it's not Hitler. I might eat him. You don't know who this guy is. Me and the dog might eat him. It's not, it's not your, it's not Marshall. It's some random golden retriever. I love all golden retrievers. I'm killing Hitler over every fucking golden retriever that's ever been born. If it's a default person, you don't know who this is. Okay. Well, then it becomes a problem. Yeah. Then I, I mean, I want that person to live too. Tom, I went on a date with this, this girl in London once and I asked her this little experiment. I said, what would you do? And then she said, I killed a golden retriever.

37:42And then I did the Tom Reagan thought experiment said, well, how about if it was five golden retrievers? 10, 100, a thousand. Tom Reagan goes, oh, can a million of them? And you kind of go like, that's not, that's not cool. You know, one person starts disappointing you and lies to you and you're like, oh, I should have fucked up those dogs alive. Yeah. Well, this is that. But it's just you and this dude. And you let me give a bond with that guy forever. Yeah. You killed your dog for him. Exactly. Well, this, this girl's on a date with she said she'd kill an infinite number of golden retrievers because she was Catholic.

38:14And I think an infinite number of suffering in the ending of life. You say that. You say that. You probably think that you have to get through like 50 you got to pay the real mistake. Yeah, you probably shoot yourself. You watch them whimper on the ground and you probably shoot yourself. The interesting thing is as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non -human animals have a comparable value to human beings. And you have to draw the line somewhere. There's going to be a rough like number. It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves or water droplets make a cloud.

38:43It's not going to be clear exactly how many. But it's not zero. It's not zero. Yeah. So I think everyone, well, minus a few people. I think if someone says infinite something's gone by and they're thinking, I think that's absurd. Well, I think that's just them talking. You're never in this area. Yeah. There's no way you believe that. There's no way you know what infinite golden retrievers look like? That's fucking crazy. Kill that guy. Well, you know, I've got great sympathy for people who like you've probably heard this before. People give like health reasons for why they still consume non -human animals.

39:14Yeah. And, you know, they say, I have to eat this much meat or maybe they just eat me and nothing else. That's me. And you just eat meat. Yeah. You don't eat anything apart from me. They very little other than meat. Okay. It's just good. Yeah. I eat fruit and I eat meat. Okay. And occasionally I'll eat something else. I'll have spaghetti or sandwich every now and then. But for the most part, eat mostly meat. So those people who like you sell food, maybe it's like help whatever health reason it is, they still, you know, some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook. Like as if they, because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like.

39:55But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go, like, is what I'm doing, like morally right? Is this something I should reconsider? And I think given the, if you pick a number, then you have to, you have to make a call on that. I think it's not a zero sum game. I don't think it's morally reprehensible to eat meat, but I do know that an animal has to die. What I prefer, there was a few years back in 2012 that I decided that I was either going to become vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter.

40:33And so I, I had watched too many of these PETA documentaries. I had seen too many things about factory farming. I'm like, this is disgusting. It would freak me out. And I was like, okay, I either have to come to grips with what it means to kill an animal and eat it. And if I can't handle that, if I don't like that, then I'll just become a vegetarian. I tried being a vegetarian for a brief amount of time in my life when I was like, I guess I was 18. I was, when I was fighting, I was, I was having a really hard time because I was still growing. I was having a really hard time making a lower weight class that I was competing in.

41:09And there was other people in my team that were competing in the higher weight class. And it was a real problem. So I tried being a vegetarian for a while. I don't think I did it the best way. I don't think I was really intelligent about it. Again, I was 18. And this was like 1985 somewhere around that. Different vegetarian wealth. No one knew shit. So I was just eating salads and I felt like, I felt terrible. I felt terrible. And then I had a conversation with my instructor and he was just like, you're just getting bigger. You need to move up. And I started eating meat immediately. I gained 10 pounds in like three weeks.

41:43I felt like a completely different human being. I felt like I had all this energy. I was just, I think I was malnourished before and I was just going on drive. But I do think that there are very different body types. And there's very different requirements that certain people have when it comes to protein. I think animal protein is the most dense, most nutrient -packed protein and food that's available for human beings. And I think it probably has something to do why we became human beings in the first place. But I think of hunting as I am dipping my toe into the natural world. And I'm going out into the wild where these things live.

42:24They're not in a cage. What you understand? What's that? Is it a bow, a crossbow? I use a bow. When I first started, I started using a rifle. I shot that mule deer that sits on the table. That was the first deer that I ever shot. I'm Jesus. That was in 2012. I'll let this be. And I decided when I was eating that mule deer, it's all on film. We did it for a television show called Meat Eater. My friends Steven Rinello host. And when I was eating that deer by fire, I was like, this is what I'm doing forever. I'm doing this. It was like, it ignited parts of my DNA. It gave me an understanding of the cycle of life instantaneously in a way that was like fishing does that a little bit, but this is like that times a thousand, which is why people don't have a problem with showing dead fish on your Instagram.

43:12If you hold like a dead bass, look at the bass I caught. Everybody's like, good job. Nice fish. You're going to eat that fish. You hold a bit dead deer. People kind of freak out. Yeah, but hold a bit dead bear. People go fucking crazy. Well, okay. Here's a couple of things. I think you're probably, well, you speak to your own experience, right? That you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it taps into our histories when you hunt, especially with a bow, like a 10 ,000 years ago, the first bow has come about. And you know, imagine it was thrilling for them now and it's then and it's thrilling still now to do it.

43:44Same reason, like paintball or like laser tag and war can be fun, right? People enjoy it. People going after the first world war thought it was a great sport. Sure. Maybe it taps even deeper than that because it's the food we're eating in the early days. I think the worry, okay, let's think about the ethics though, right? So I think it's not comparable to factory farming again. This is, this is splitting hairs really in comparison. Why don't we even have to compare these things? We just talk about the merits of or the, the, the ethics of what we're doing. Good. So two things come into mind, right?

44:19The first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting. Like if I hunt with a spear and you'll know more about this than me, the spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head. Right. Right. A crossbow and a, and a bow are going to be somewhere between them. Right. So they're going to be better ways to hunt than not. Yeah. So maybe perhaps I wonder what you think of this. On the whole, when you run the numbers on, in terms of probability that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even those.

44:51Would you agree with that? Yeah, hunting with guns is absolutely the most effective way. Okay. Yeah. Good. In order for you to be equally effective hunting with a bow, it requires a lot more work. Yeah. It requires intense amount of practice hours and hours every day. I practice at 74 yards every day. Do you? Hundreds of arrows. It's 74 yards just grouping into this small area above the size of a grapefruit. Are you good? Are you pretty happy? Yeah. Very good. Yeah. When you hunt elk, do you know, do you kill the animal without much? What did you say? Well, the last one that I killed died in 10 seconds.

45:29He was dead in 10 seconds. He literally ran up to the top of the hill. It took like not even 10 seconds. I was like, whack the arrow hits, run, run, run, boom, dead because of an accurate shot placement. If you shoot an animal accurately, they die instantaneously. They die very quickly. They hit them in the heart or they hit them through both lungs. If they're alive for 30 seconds, it's a lot. Yeah. Generally, but there's spent times where it might take 30 minutes for them to die. They just lay down and you see them moving a little bit and you sneak in and try to get a second arrow into them to take them out.

46:04Any way they die by a hunter is infinitely more humane than how they will die in the wild and they will all die in the wild. They will all get old and they will do the diostarvation. They'll freeze to death or more likely they'll get eaten by cats. Here's where I agree with you. Is that when people eat, again, you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls. That rings truth to me. This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of production of our food in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating.

46:45I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms which the overwhelming majority people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on. What they're doing is way worse. I think people just say that because they want to have a moral high ground and they haven't looked into it enough. If they did, they would have to come to grips with the fact that this is... You're paying a supermarket hitman, okay? Is it... You use not a murderer if you hire someone to get murdered? It seems like you're a murderer. It seems like you go to jail as a murderer.

47:17It's the same thing. If you go to the grocery store and you buy a tea -bone steak, you pay it a supermarket hitman. He just assumed you were going to pay him so he did the work before he got the money from you. You wanted that cow dead, right? It's like a logical explanation. Or like, it's the same reason why R .F. bombers will drop a bomb on the clouded city but not go down there and shoot a mother and a child, right? But even though... Well, high at the R .F. Even drone pilots have severe PTSD. Do they? Yes. Yeah, there's a very specific kind of it because it's like this... You're not totally connected to the act but you know what you did and then you'll be haunted.

47:57If you're just operating a little PS4 or PS5 controller and you're zooming some... That's kind of how what they do it with, right? Don't they use like game controllers? They use game controllers, which is so fucking wild. Because that's the best way to do it. You get these kids that are... You're playing Call of Duty 8 hours a day and then that kid goes and becomes a part of the drone program. That's your assassins. That's your ultimate killers. And these guys are doing it for real. They're using... They're playing a video game but real human beings are dying in their head. When they lay a bed at night, they know that.

48:29Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right? We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act. So more killings when using guns than when it's hand -to -hand combat. Even in the second world war, like field work show that it was about... It's a little more complex. 20 or 30 % of people... I was just a little joystick. So it's a little more complicated than a PS4 or PS5 thing. But it does have like a joystick, just like a simulator. Yeah. Like a flight simulator is what it looks like.

49:02But that's the view. But how nutty is that? What does that feel like when you're in Nevada and you're operating something that's in Iraq or wherever in Yemen? And you've got a drone flying over some compound and you're just shooting hellfire missiles into human beings based on metadata. Yeah. I'd be interested to know how much... Like, how severe that PCS is. See if you can find an article on it because there was something that I had read about it really recently. Because there's a thought right, which is we seem to be outraged at the use of drones. But it takes one less person out of the fight.

49:38And so it seems if you're doing like a utilitarian calculation that it's going to be better on the whole. No, no, it's not because the amount of civilians that die are very high. It's in comparison to not... In comparison to not... Yeah, somewhere in comparison... It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 % plus percent. Some estimations are 90 % of the... It's hard to tell. Because what it's been explained to me by people in the military is that the people... First of all, the government will undercut the number. They'll give you a lower number than probably Israel. And then the people that were attacked will give you a higher number than Israel.

50:12And so you have to sort this out. Like a good example is... Remember the New York Times reported that the Israelis had blew up a hospital. And it was on the front page of the New York Times. And they had been told that 500 people were dead or 5 ,000. I forget the number. Yeah. The reality was the bomb hit the parking lot and 50 people died. But they had been told it was a much worse scenario. They reported it not knowing... The numbers, the coins like the U .N. stuff are pretty damn high. Oh, they're horrible. No, no, no. But in this specific example... One specific example. Numbers are... The numbers are terrifying.

50:50We're just looking at... It's from an article... New York Times about... They're like PTSD and whatnot. This was just like... Because they not deployed. They seldom got the same recovery periods or mental health screenings as other fighters. Instead, they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war. Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to realize the full impact. Despite hundreds of missions, Captain Larson's personal file under the head and combat service only offers a single word.

51:25None. Drone crew members said in interviews that while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground, it still cars deep scars. In many ways, it's more intense than Neil Schuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks, and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death.

52:02You see the remorse in the burial. People often think this job is going to be like a video game. And I have to warn them. There is no reset button. Yeah. It's a horrific, very intense thing.

52:18It's a kin to buying a steak in the store. Well, I think the things that are relevant morally speaking are the same things. Do you eat only vegetables? It's a vegan diet. It's like a 98 % and 97%. Especially when traveling and stuff when you can't seem to find things. I think the perception is, and there's a lot of gotchas stuff. In terms of when people say they've got vegetarian or vegan diets, the idea that they're going to be eliminating suffering entirely from their diets is impossible. That's not what anyone thinks is happening. You hear crop death arguments and stuff like this. Sure. We don't try much water.

52:59Monocrop agriculture, which is a horrific loss of life. If you're buying corn or grain, most likely you're getting it from monocrop agriculture. And they kill thousands of animals to do that. They poison the ground. They poison bugs. If you consider insects, life forms, they kill millions. They kill groundhogs, gophers, anything that gets in the way. And then the monocrop agriculture kills the environment because it destroys the topsoil. The topsoil is destroyed. And most farms in this country, we have to pour shit on the ground in order for it to be able to sustain life. Well, the vegan needs to be or the utilitarian or, you know, all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this.

53:41I don't know any serious philosopher of moral philosophy or ethics that runs a good argument, which says that the lives of non -human animals, their pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter. So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well or the pain and suffering that goes into it. They're all going to be better ways to do it than not. But, you know, I often get asked about tofu, so, or like a soy production. So, 77 % of global soy production goes towards feeding non -human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating. A bunch of it's used for like biofuels and stuff, but only 7 % of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings.

54:24So, if we look at like the vegan's contribution to that right, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for. But here's, I think, an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to aside, because you hear loads of different arguments like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff. As if it's going to get in and often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non -animal rights, such as the catagos mentioned a moment ago, don't matter. But think of this. Like, if it was the case that we're forced to do these things, and we can't do otherwise, to sustain the people we have, we have to kill animals.

55:04Let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case. That wouldn't get got off the hook if God's forcing us to do that. Like, here's life. To enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it? Like, 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals. Well, it's assumed that God didn't conceive of factory farming, and this is like a loophole created by human beings because I think it is. I think it's just like, it's like money and politics. Like, the founding fathers didn't see that coming. They didn't see social media coming. They didn't see a lot of things that are interfering with this concept of self -government.

55:38And I think God, probably like, they're never going to do that. They're never going to stick all the chickens in a fucking warehouse and stack them up. We will. If you let us get away with it, and then we develop laws, you can't film those things. Yeah. Yeah. There's a problem with animal intelligence, right? Animals are sentient. They have instincts. They love their young. There is also a problem with plant intelligence. And plant intelligence, I think, the emergence of plant intelligence is fascinating. I don't want to say they're the same thing as people. Just like I don't want to say a golden retriever is the same thing as a person in a boat.

56:13Yeah. It's not. How many, how many interests, how many did you pick in terms of like, how many golden retrievers you were going to chuck out the boat until you chucked the human being out? Depends on the person. I can't say. It's just a random person. You don't know them. Any person walking down the street in Austin today. He's looking like tens hundreds. No. He's looking thousands. No. Like fewer. Yeah. Like less than 10. I'm not going to kill 20 dogs for some dude. I don't know. You know, I don't know, man. I love my dog so much. I shouldn't think of golden retrieving that. It's like I can't even if I get upset at him, I feel bad.

56:52It's, it's you can't just say a random person. Like I said, if it was Hitler, I'd kill Hitler for sure. I kill Hitler over a snake. Yeah. But with the problem, I'd kill him anyway. We think I probably wouldn't. I probably bring a back so people could study him. I think if I could, I was sure that I could capture him alive and get him in front of the press. Just to see what the fuck happened. Yeah. How the fuck did you do this? Like what what? What? I don't know. God damn Norman. She gave me money for this. Norman Oler. We've been talking about his book over and over again in the past couple of weeks.

57:26Yes. Since he's been here. But Hitler was cranked up on all kinds of shit. Yeah. So were the Nazis. They were all on meth and fed means Hitler was on oxycodone apparently. Yeah. I think he could live long. He was worried he was going to die, right? Vegetarian diet. Yeah. I'm sure he could just finish. Not just vegetarian, but terrible vegetarian diet. It mostly bread and sugar. Yeah. You've got to do it right. But he certainly didn't. I've just finished a Ian Kershaw's book on Hitler. It's like a over a thousand pages. It's a real good read like 40 hour read. So if you're interested in like, you got to be careful leaving those around your house.

57:57I put it in my dad for his birthday and he's there in the restaurant showing. It's a real problem. Like you can't do that. But you know, what we're talking about with animal intelligence and plant intelligence and human intelligence. Like, yeah. For sure, the way we're doing it now is wrong. I think we would all agree to that. If you could wave a magic wand and let all the animals be free and no one eats them anymore, you're going to have chaos. You're going to have real chaos. First of all, you're going to have massive overpopulation and you're going to have predators everywhere. And because unless you do have predators everywhere, you're going to have car accidents that you would never imagine.

58:40Train accidents. Yeah. There's a guy named, why am I blanking on his name? American coyote. Dan Flores. Dan Flores, I forget where is your professor out of. He studies the history of animals. And Dan Flores, he wrote a paper called, I think it's called Buffalo ecology, something. What was it? Buffalo diplomacy, Buffalo ecology. He thinks that's a genius guy. He thinks the reason why when they came across the Great Plains and there was millions and millions of Buffalo. I think the reason why is because 90 % of the Native Americans were killed by the plague. Oh, wow. This is his thought like because the earliest settlers in the 1400s and 1500s, they didn't see that many Buffalo.

59:28Yeah. It wasn't like they didn't even report them. There were many accounts where they didn't even report them. Why? Because the Native Americans lived off them and they kept their population in check. The Buffalo have a very long gestation period. Right? They're an enormous animal. And if you can kill one, it takes a long time to replace that one. So they would travel around, track the Buffalo, kill them, live off them, use their skins, eat their meat, and then nomatically travel with them. And they kept their population in check. When 90 % of Native Americans were dead, Dan Flores believes that led to this insane overpopulation problem of Buffalo where you see millions of them in fields.

1:00:07Because that doesn't exist anywhere in nature. Unless there's a problem. And that problem is a lack of predators and the predators at that time being the Native American hunter. Yeah. I think if you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't even on the view which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the morally relevant facts are paying pleasure, happiness, suffering. Right? If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around. That's going to, as you say, create a sort of mayhem. Well, it's not just that. You would have to control their population somehow.

1:00:43You'd have to give them birth control. You'd have to, that seems, I mean, that's in my view, that's okay to give them birth control in the like. To what length? How many do you let breed? How many do you, you have to have population control? You can have wildlife biologists. Let me explain something about hunting areas. So like if you're going to go to this place in Montana where we went and hunted mule deer, wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas and they know roughly the exact amount of deer that are in this area. And they know the less accurate number of predators, particularly stealthy predators like mountain lions, pretty good with wolves, but even then in high density areas, very difficult to really figure it out.

1:01:25But they get the numbers of the deer and then based on some very exact science, they calculate the amount of hunters who will be allotted tags. So like say if you apply for a limited draw entry place, so limited draw entry is like say maybe you have an allocated piece of land that's, you know, X amount of thousands of acres. And in that there are X amount of thousands of deer and you will allow 100 hunters into that area and add those 100 hunters, there'll be maybe a 10 to 15 % success rate. So you are thinking that these hunters will trim 10 deer, 20 deer, whatever it is for this particular, and there's a bunch of different areas like this all over the country, but they're all tightly managed.

1:02:12And the wildlife biologists that do that in the United States, it's a beautiful and incredible thing because it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world where you have public land, where people, the United States and all the people living in the United States own this land, this is our land. And you can go out on that land and in some places you don't even have to have a tag, you get what it's called an over the counter tag. Because these are areas with, they're difficult to get to, there's, you know, plentiful deer, they don't have to worry about you depopulating. And so you get a tag and you go out, you go five, six, ten miles in, you camp out, you live under the stars and you get your food.

1:02:50And you can do that in this country and you can do that because these wildlife biologists have a very keen understanding of the amount of animals that are sustainable in the area and the amount of hunters they can allow to hunt in these areas. That's how it's done. If you don't do that and if you just have animals run free, you get the buffalo when there's millions of them on the fields and you're going to have to kill some of them because they're going to get diseased because they don't have any food. They're going to starve to death. It's going to be, or you're going to bring in mountain lions and mountain lions can't kill buffalo.

1:03:18So you're going to have to bring in wolves. You're going to have to bring in big cats. You're going to have to bring in all kinds of things that eat things to keep them in line. Then you've got fucking wild nature taking place everywhere in the world that there's not a city. And even in cities, you're going to have it. You have coyotes in New York City right now. Well, okay, this is good. I think Martha Nusparman, or a canoe book, just as for animals, she argues that these things, as you say, are a problem you can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control.

1:03:48She thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in animal sanctuaries, if you like. I was thinking recently, there's a lot of arguments for human reparations. When a full group is harmed by another group, we think that they're owed something. Whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in North West Africa, we think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should write that wrong. I don't know the details don't concern myself like a reparations philosopher, but let's say that's a view that people hold as they do.

1:04:30Well, if you take non -human animals to be like these subjects which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure or happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group. And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group, then that group owes them some, like the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible. That might be just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day to day of it. It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can to the argument to reduce it as much as possible.

1:05:09If that ends up being like having to add predators to a sort of, you know, into that situation, then then so be it. But perhaps there's a, you know, with the right time and money, you can find the way of doing it without as much suffering. So to speak. So if the goal is just completely to eliminate suffering, why don't we kill all the predators? Yeah, so they're gonna make all these animal suffer. And if you get killed by wolves, oh, that's a rough one. That's a rough, the worst is kill by bearers, cause they just eat you. They just hold you down and start pulling you apart like a salmon. So if we want to really eliminate suffering, perhaps we should eliminate all of the predators or just put them in zoos where they all suffer, but they're evil.

1:05:51And then cause they just kill and eat, that's all they do. Well, there's a question of like, what's wrong with death, which is at the heart of this? So it might not just be like the hedonistic properties have just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, or somehow wronging them. So like if I was to hypothetically, you know, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier, and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one would remember them. And I can erase that thing I did for my memory.

1:06:25You might still think what I did was wrong, because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects that were working on, and I stopped their flourishing in some sense like, unless they're Hitler, unless they're Hitler, then it's a good one to start. But again, you probably would want to bring them back. And then when it comes to non -human animals, the same is true, right? The dog looks forward to their dinner in the evening, they look forward to the walk, they bury their bone. These are creatures with complex inner lives, which see their futures or know that they will exist in the future.

1:06:56I think the same is true of the creatures which are hunter -drawer in the farms, and so simply, painless killing might not be everything there, removing the potential for future happiness and pleasure also seems to be morally relevant. Well, you know, when you hunt animals, you hunt mature animals. One of those that... So you check the... How do you know the age of... You could see, you could tell by the way they look, they get bigger, their head looks different, their long face looks different. Lift full, what's that? I've killed them that are 11 years old, that's really old. Really old. He probably...

1:07:29His teeth were all worn down to almost nothing. He probably had another year or two left if he was lucky. And again, their death is horrific. The death that they have from wild predators is terrifying. There's not too many... I hunt in Utah every year, and you know, we see cats there. I saw the biggest cat I've ever seen in my life there. It's a huge mountain line. But I've seen other predators, you see a lot of coyotes, and they do spot wolves there. Two of their bears there, we see bears. But that death is so much worse than a hunter's death. Yeah, most probably. And all 100 % and it's gonna happen.

1:08:07They're not living forever. And what I'm doing is I'm dipping my toe into the wild world. And through considerable effort, bring you back meat. Yeah, to bring this back to like that fundamental question we began with. Like, on the whole, as existence a good thing, should we be happy and pleased with this world? Right. It seems like the perfectly good guard hypothesis goes out the window or, you know, especially if we're forced to do these things. Like, we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that. Again, like, this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good guard would do.

1:08:40So if you're an atheist... Why not? Isn't that this is the process? The reason why the elk is so fast and strong is because it's been avoiding mountain lions for hundreds of thousands of years. But it's the process which according to Christian's Jews and Muslims that God created and God can do anything with the following qualifier, it has to be logically or metaphysically possible. So there are possible worlds without evolution by natural selection. Like those things are entirely possible. Right. And a perfectly good guard would have to bring about the best possible states of affairs. But maybe this is the best possible state of affairs to achieve a desired goal.

1:09:16Well, it's what they say, but the optimist says this is the best possible world and the pessimist hopes it's not the case. Yeah, I think even the evils of this world exist to incite outrage and for us to do better. I think there's constant struggle of good and evil is maybe even necessary for us to keep moving in the right general direction. Through rigorous debate and deceit and lies and propaganda and having your dreams shattered and figuring it out. Yeah, that's us right now. That's us and animals. That's the reason why the elk is 900 pounds and built like a super athlete. It's because it has to get the fuck away from outlines.

1:09:55If it didn't, it would never look like that. It would never become an elk. It would not become this majestic thing with horns growing out of its fucking head. It's got literal weapons growing out of its head. And they're competing with each other with these weapons and killing each other. We find dead elk all the time. They find them every year. They're stabbed in the rib cage by other elk. And they die a horrible death and they get torn apart by coyotes and bears when they're down. You find their bones scattered all over the place so they've been killed and ripped apart. There's still a sense in which they're doing good.

1:10:32When a non -human animal sacrifices themselves with their younger or something. There has to be something they're going towards in order for it to be good. And they're getting better at being elk to avoid that. That's what leads to a natural selection. There's going to be a significant number of non -human animals that don't have what we call free will. Which is the power and freedom to do otherwise. The power and choice to do A rather than B. There are some non -human animals that just act. The raindrop lands on the bird's beak. It just instinct, it turns, sees what's there. It doesn't think what was that.

1:11:08It doesn't have this inner chat. It doesn't choose reflects. There's going to be a lot of non -human animals, which that's the case for. So that sort of like character development, theodity or defense, won't work for them. Especially if they're, you know, it doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it. For all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop. Their individual life seemed like there again, cases of gratuitous, i .e. unnecessary evil. But the point fundamentally is this, right? God could have made it so that these creatures that don't have free will and that can't develop their characters don't suffer.

1:11:52He could have made that the case. But unless God is truly all -knowing and us with our primate minds are trying to make sense out of this thing that ultimately will make sense when we reach the end of our journey. And that this whole process is complicated and vicious and evil as it seems to be with predator and prey and natural selection. And what you're this talking about like with birds and different animals, they don't have to, they figured out a niche. They could fly. They move around. They basically got it nailed, right? To keep their populations high, not that difficult unless people come along with shotguns.

1:12:27That's when it really becomes a problem like the passenger pigeon disappeared. Why? Because we ate them all. You know, we shot them all. But when you look at animals in the wild, when they have a very successful model, they don't change. That's crocodiles. They have a very successful model. The model is, this thing doesn't need to eat for a year, it can go underwater for hours, it can stay perfectly still and forages of water, knows exactly where the animals are and explodes and eats them and kills them. And it's been in that same form for millions and millions years because it's a successful form, same as sharks, successful form doesn't need to evolve.

1:13:03Human beings live in the most comprehensive and bizarre environment. First of all, we figured out how to shelter and once we did that, we became weak. We figured out agriculture, we became weaker, we developed cities, we completely separate ourselves from the natural world. So we think of ourselves as different than all these other processes that are happening because we've elevated in our own eyes beyond this, beyond the natural realm, into this world of morals and ethics and philosophy and our view of our perspective of the world. But we're still in the natural world. We're still beasts. We're just stinging between ways.

1:13:36And when you go hunting, you really get a sense of that. You really understand. You're in the natural world. Well, here's the thought, right, which is in terms of like caching this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs. Is that when you look at the system and you mentioned a second ago, like maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this. Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him. I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words or William James is the philosopher has this example of a mountaineer who's got like this gap they need to jump over a storm behind them.

1:14:14So it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump or the runner who has to believe they're going to win the 100 meter race. It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence. I think these arguments work for like psychological states, but you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable that there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true. Right. So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief is to go here, we have some really good arguments for this hypothesis. Here's the evidence we have against it, but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem.

1:14:52So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace like some form of agnosticism where we go, how can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless? And that's the, that's to go back to the start of our discussion there. It's like the failure of New Atheism hasn't been able to address that. We are looking for, for meaning like Shakespeare wouldn't be right for someone English to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quote in Shakespeare. And it's he'll have to excuse me. Shakespeare says, if essentially if there's no God, then life is like a tale told by an idiot.

1:15:26It signifies nothing. Like this. And amazing that guy was so good. So many years ago. So the agnostic life is like this. And a lot of my thought here comes from Albert Camus, which everyone should read. He says that we've, I wonder if you've had a feeling or experience like this, because this is sort of like what got me on my philosophical journey. He says, one day the stage set collapses and everything begins in that weariness with a tinge of excitement. IE one day you're going about your life. Monday choose to Wednesday Thursday. And you sort of start to think like, what's the point of all this?

1:16:03What's the meaning? It all seems like it is a tale told by an idiot. And like maybe it isn't meaningful. I'm not a part of this big plan. And you sort of a loss. But there's an excitement there too. Like the openness of being the gift of meaninglessness. So I think the reasonable thing for us to do in the light of those arguments we've spoken about is to suspend and be agnostic about the way we're doing. And we're not going to be in the light of the belief in God, but then have this honest search for finding meaning and moral value. Like there's a, this isn't the kind of notion of the absurd that physicists keep talking about.

1:16:37Like again, this is when I won't talk about physics. And sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy and you sort of get a little bit frustrated. Like you probably heard people say things like this. Like in comparison to the vast cosmos in which I exist, I feel so small and meaningless. Like in comparison to the 13 .8 billion years in which I've existed. Like my 70 if I'm lucky feels like it doesn't really matter. But like imagine if you were really big, like the size of the universe. Imagine you live for 13 billion years. It doesn't seem to have any effect on how more meaningful your life is.

1:17:12Your life still lacks that fundamental purpose. So like how big you are. But if you're as long you last. I don't think you have an answer complex. If you were the universe. Same with Dr. Manhattan. Same with the multiverse or like simulation theory. Right. If I've just been watching the some on the fly over here, the umbrella academy. I was watching that on the fly. Oh yeah, my daughter loves our show. Yeah. It sounded like a burn. No, it loves it. It is good. Anyway, like they're in like a multiverse and their life like they're still going about their lives like they matter or imagine we're in a simulation.

1:17:46Imagine the fundamental nature of stuff is ones and zeros rather than particles or consciousness. Right. It all still matters. So I think the project of agnosticism and the thing we need to be doing isn't just like digging down with this new atheism that's flippant and doesn't offer us any like can't solve these big problems. And lacks answers to the fundamental questions. And it isn't just a gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it. But it's to try and like create ourselves a patchwork like blanket to keep us warm in the void of meanlessness. Right. Well, we inherently know that it feels better to be a good person.

1:18:29We know it. We know it feels better to have good friends and good community and be someone that people can rely on and count on. We know it like there's a general direction that makes us feel good to go in that way. And I think that's the guiding light of whatever this power is that wants us to become a better version of what we are is. Yeah. That's that's what forces forces that that action. I think we get to caught up in religious dogmatism and we get to caught up in these literal interpretations of ancient texts, which are not even in the original language they were written in, which is so bizarre.

1:19:09And apparently an incredibly difficult language to read and comprehend and to translate when you're going back to like ancient Hebrew. We're trying to translate that into English. Like how much is lost there? Like what did these people? And also what where what was the original story? Because of people people I used to say about the Bible and it was just a joke. I don't really mean this if you're a Bible fanatic that people are full of shit and that story sucks. Like that's all you have to do is look at it. Like people are full of shit. 100 % we know it's a fact. That's the greatest story ever told you don't you don't like listen.

1:19:50The president of the United States is just on TV the other day lying. This people are full of shit. They lie all the time. We know they lie. We catch them. If he's seen the Trump clip when he's asked about his favorite Bible verse. What did he say? Can we jam your rely to get the what he say it was? I don't think he has one. He doesn't have one. No, he didn't come on with a feeble. Seeking it. But yeah, like Sam. I was at a Zekule. It is just a wrap up like the like the finding meaning part. I think you're right. Like we can still even if there's no God and there's no ultimate. Oh, here we go.

1:20:20We got to put our hair for us on here. Trump on gay rights. You've been talking about how it's your favorite book. And you said I think last night in Iowa. Some people are surprised that you say that. I'm wondering what one or two of your most favorite Bible verses are. I wouldn't want to get into it because to me that's very personal. You know when I talk about the Bible is very personal. So I don't want to get into. I don't want to get into. No, I mean a lot to you that you think a better site. The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics. Even to side a verse. No, I don't want to do that.

1:20:50I mean, Old Testament guy or New Testament probably. Yeah, Old Testament. You got to go old son. New Testament's been monkey with. Right. Even the New Testament. It's all fascinating to me. I am I am not an anti religious person. I think I was when I was younger. I was I went to Catholic school when I was a little boy and I decided that religion was bullshit because there were mean. But that was just you know me being six. But then as I was raised by hippies, but as I've gotten older, I kind of have a belief that the arrogance of atheism is just as bad as the arrogance of the religious zealot.

1:21:32And that this whole thing is a massive mystery. And to pretend that it's not is to. We're we're going to hamstring all of these conversations. We're going to put shackles on all of our debate in all all of our conversations where we're trying to figure out what's real and what's not real and what's the shared experience that we all have. I don't know how you view the world. The only way for me to find out how you view the world is for me to ask you and not be right you for your opinions, but try to like get it out of you. But what about this challenge you with other perspectives? How does he feel about that?

1:22:10Where how did you like sometimes you can get very quickly to how deep a person's perspective on an issue is with just a couple of questions. Because you see there what they espouse what they say and a lot of times that it aligns with very particular ideologies whether it's right wing or left wing. And then you a couple of questions deep. You know you started asking about opposing viewpoints and why do people think this way? And do you think that it perhaps it's this these things perhaps and then you can get to how much they have actually thought about it. And the moment people become dogmatic the moment people become ideologically captured by a very specific group of things that you've adopted as your opinions because it aligns with science.

1:22:54We saw that during the pandemic this trust the science idea which science like what is science science is not a consensus. It's a bunch of different people looking at data and trying to come to and when you know that that's hamstrung and you know that that's captured that's not science anymore. You know there's propaganda involved you know there's lies this is not science. This is a business and it utilizes science and you're caught up in an ideological debate about a thing that you should be completely objective about but you're not because it's just like all the other things that human beings do.

1:23:27So we like to decide that we are correct and that we defend from that position. Instead of just looking at these ideas like I think one of the things that happen with atheism is that it did become like a lot. Remember when they had atheism plus do you remember that? Do you remember that? Oh it was wonderful. So they had atheism and then they had these like social justice warriors that came out with atheism plus and it was atheism attached to a whole bunch of ideas about like ways to behave things that they value. It's like a humanist Bible as well as an example. Exactly. They were basically forming a new religion.

1:24:05It was adorable. It was adorable to see that these patterns of thinking just seemed to be inherent to human beings. Like the tribal cultural rituals, tribal cultural philosophies, their myth of the origins of things that they all accept as their own. It's like an identifying factor that cohesively connects groups which is why like you said that you didn't enjoy church because you don't like going to that. I actually like it. I think church. You just told me that the Bible is one of the most boring stories. It's not boring. I didn't say it was boring. Oh he's one of the worst stories. No no no.

1:24:40I said people are full of shit and that story sucks. Oh the story. The story is like the story of I used to do a joke about Noah and the arc that if you told that I can't even do the same joke anymore. But if you told it to five you do the same joke because I just say retarded. If you told it to a I think I said a five year old kid you know obviously with mental problems. He's going to find holes in that story. He's going to go away. There's two of each animals animals eat other animals and you know the punchline was I'm not that retarded. But this idea that we have about these stories I think is that they happen exactly as written.

1:25:19And I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about real events that took place a long time ago and we're told in an oral tradition. It's just what would what really happened is very difficult to say and when you have the hand of man when you have human beings especially in the New Testament. You know I mean you literally have people deciding what is going to be and not going to be in it. So this human beings deciding what is going to be in the Bible which is insane. That's insane as it is. It doesn't mean that the things that are in there aren't representatives of the most recent version of telling a tale that probably did happen.

1:25:54This is what's dangerous and this is what's not just confused but careless about some of this thinking when you go my team thinks this and I'm just going to double down on it even though I've got reasons against this position. I'm still going to be defending the position of my group. So people like conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro think that eating on human animals is morally wrong but they're you know they're carrying on doing it. I think probably because it's part of like what their team does when I spoke to Peterson you know he conceded that that problem we spoke about a moment ago.

1:26:29The problem of systemic evil in nature was a massive problem for the God hypothesis and as we said he thinks you should just crack on and carry on working on it. But there's a sense in which it's okay if your view isn't affecting anybody right you can have a false belief and you're entitled to that that freedom of conscience to think something as long as it's not bringing about and breaching. The harm principle but there's a sense in which like take Peterson's view because we spoke about taking that leap of faith right after I had this conversation with him he tweeted like an hour later he I was arguing that my view is that happiness and pleasure has to correspond to a purposeful life right that if your life is meaningful it also has to involve a flourishing or happiness and pleasure.

1:27:13Well I think we see that with people right people that don't have a meaningful life and just seek pleasure all the time are miserable because they're missing that part of the equation that's what he's meaning. Yeah that's essentially his view was like that he tried to pull them apart and after he tweeted something like what use is happiness when we have mountains to move which is a nice Nietzschean quote but it's a nice bumper sigur or something or a fridge magnet but they should live allies by it. I gave this example I said suppose God came down to us and said here's the meaning of life like create war spread disease commit genocide right you go that's not the kind of meaning I thought that's not what I had in mind right on that kind of meaning.

1:27:50But this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter and they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure like that's a recipe for disaster like you can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose in meaning. You know this is just look at the 20th century right to see how when people think they know what ought to be done despite all the pain and suffering they cause like how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities. Yeah so this this idea that we should just carry on you know sticking with thinking beforehand and this ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things right he ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith.

1:28:33Like he offers arguments take pieces for example again like people are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment people are writing books saying this person's going to save our faith which is going extinct. You know in the US for example the southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s but your population is growing it's disappearing in 2001 in the UK we had 70 % of people identifying as Christian now it's less than half and you're about that now in the US you just 23 years behind and it's the same trend religions disappearing and it needs to evolve philosophically you need a proper philosophical defense of it people like Bill Gray do a good job but it's here why we can't just keep holding him up for the Christians but this same old just bet your soul on it just go for it take the leap of faith is the thing and the reason why Christianity is going out of favor.

1:29:26Well we have some real bad examples of it in this country too we have some real distortions you know like fact the factory farming version of Christianity. What kind of stuff? Televangelists these people that fill out arenas and they fly around a private jet and drive around and roll's voices and and brag about their stuff you know. That's sort of one tell of televangelist saying he has a private jet because it means he's closest to God and God can hear his prayers quick. What are the guys? Was that guy's name Richard Copeland is that his name? The guy that was confronted he was confronted by this woman that was asking him because she had heard that he said that he didn't want to fly commercial because then he would be flying with demons.

1:30:10And so she says to him like do you think that the passengers and commercial airlines or do you listen to this? He's Copeland here. Can it's Copeland here. Put your travels on. Commercials why you don't want to fly commercial why have you said that you won't fly commercial you said that it's like getting into a tube with a bunch of demons. Why do you think that? No listen to me just saying not the people. The main reason is because of the need. If if I flew commercial I'd have to stop 65 % of what I'm doing. That's really the main. Isn't it true that you want to fly commercial so that you can fly in luxury?

1:30:52How much money did you pay for Tyler Perry's Gulf Stream jet for example? Well for example that's really none of your business but isn't it the business of your donors? I've paid.

1:31:07You kind of caught me off guard here okay. Look at his eyes. I'd like to give you a chance to catch your breath and have a conversation. We don't want to we don't want to catch an off guard. I love inside addition. You got to get this now. Hey you listen to me. My my why I think inside addition is oh yeah. Now thank you Lord help me. Let me pray. Let me just ask you a really simple. It gets better. Here goes. It's becoming for a preacher to live a life of luxury and to fly around in private jets. What's your response to that? Very simple. It takes a lot of money to do what we do. We have brought over a hundred.

1:31:52Let's see. This the latest figures just came out. I don't trust any men with fingernails like that. Let me give you another example. 120 million last May. I was scheduled for Legos Nigeria as a long ways. I had a week off and I was scheduled for Peru. And I prayed about it and I thought I'm not missing that dedication in Jerusalem without the airplane that we have that I bought from town or Perry. And I didn't pay any more. Tyler's one of the greatest guy. He made it. He made that airplane so cheap for me. I couldn't help but buy it. Well my question then what was barely a human being? I want to get to the demons because people are very concerned about that.

1:32:47Here goes. Here goes dark. Here inside addition. I love your eyes. And here's what happened. We flew in 21 days, 70 hours, 40 ,000 miles, touched five continents and preached face to face personally with a hundred and 25 ,000 people. Do you ever do you ever use your private jets to go visit your vacation homes for example? Yes. I do. Okay. Again getting back to the comment. You said that you don't like to fly commercial because you don't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons. Do you really believe that human beings are demons? No, I do not. And don't you ever say I did. We wrestle not with flesh and blood but principalities and powers.

1:33:51Can you explain what you meant by that by that term? Just explain because it's really simple. You said you didn't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons. What did you mean? The well, let me ask you. You think that people that fly commercial or demons give me a chance to talk sweetheart. I'll explain this to you. But it's a bit more than a minute so far. It doesn't have anything to do with people. People. I love people. Jesus loves people. Okay, we kill it. We get it. It's like he's been possessed by a demon. Isn't it? It's eyes when he like jumps up the defense. So that's part of the problem that we have with religion in this country.

1:34:31It's like we have factory farming religion too. It's kept all the verses about like selling all these stuff, giving it to the poor, not fitting through the eye of a needle. Yeah, he skipped everything. Right. You went right to private jet. Tyler Perry came. He said, you're a great deal. He said you're a great guy. God, you can tell that he's a he's just fumbling isn't he just trying to find anything to say? The eyes on that guy. Like, good lord. If I wanted to, if you want to show me like an AI generated vision of a guy who looks like he's possessed. Well, wild wild behind that. Maybe it's wild with the Lord.

1:35:03I think his here's something I think the atheist does need to concede though. I was just thinking about it as well. Jesus, that would scare the shit out of me. I think the theist. If they think they've got a good reason to believe in God. And we talk about all this evil, which we've just explored. Maybe we can jump and bring them all to verse in on this as well is that. Now, if you're up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here, is it? It's like five or six hours. Yeah. Probably. Eugen Nagasawa working there. It's got this brilliant argument where he says, given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimists.

1:35:45Like you can't be happy and pleased to be alive and think the world is a good place and believe in all of the evil that you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity. So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world. I can say that the world is neutral at best, or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic. I think this is the difficulty of it all. Again, to give another quote from Kamu that I love, he says, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas threatened at the height of royal happiness.

1:36:27So you're in this moment where you think, actually my life's pretty good. And then you remember all of the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all. And you sort of left like, that's the state for the atheist. And that's that this is a mentioned like that notion of the absurd from its Nagel's idea. Like I wish I was bigger and I last longer. And maybe that resonates for a few people. Maybe I should just say that it's on this Nagel. The real problem of the absurd and the meaninglessness of life for us as agnostic serenetias is we desire or want meaning from the world.

1:37:06But the world sits there cold, dark and empty. It doesn't respond to us. It's like having is worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you. Because at least they're there, right? The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that that love and affection. The universe we ask for meaning we ask for purpose and it doesn't respond. I love this quote from Michael Housecutter from Liverpool who used to be my head of department. He says this notion of the absurd rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons, here be cold and dark and emptiness.

1:37:45And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the whole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world. But that I think is Camus says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide. They kid themselves and think that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis. They don't want to feel that feeling. It's a really uncomfortable feeling. There's three great books by Camus which I recommend one the outsider or the stranger, a lot of high school students read this book. And the main character starts off his mom's just dies and he doesn't care.

1:38:27And then he goes to the beach and just shoots and random guy and he doesn't care. And then he's put on death row and he dies and he still doesn't care. And you're reading it as a reader like, what's wrong with this guy? But he's mirroring the world in difference. He doesn't like that's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world in his next one of his next books the fall. The characters trying to find meaning or better put trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins. Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists. When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all forgiving father figure to take that away from us.

1:39:08Like we have to live with it. I think it's someone who's never embraced Christianity. I have no idea what that's like and what a gift that is to do something bad and be forgiven by God from it. And so there's a great life hack. Can I push back on this idea that the world's meaningless though? Yeah, that's cold and meaningless and uncaring. Well, if you're a human being, all you truly know is human experiences. You know your experiences in the world and you know there's part of the world. There's parts of the world that at any given time are cruel and terrible, but there's also parts of the world that are wonderful.

1:39:45There's things that you do find meaning in. Like I assume you find meaning in this conversation. You find meaning in a great dinner date, fun time with friends, a vacation, things that you like to do for a living, philosophical pursuits, I'm sure. And you're all kinds of different things people find meaning in and they enjoy and love and they have happy moments. And you know you go for a hike in the mountains and it's beautiful and you feel spiritually enriched by touching nature. There's meaning out there. It's not just not like the lottery. It's not like you don't just get all of it all at once and that's all you get and you live in a utopian world.

1:40:23No, one of the things that makes meaning so wonderful when you do find it in this world is that so much of life feels like there's no meaning. It feels like you don't connect to it. So when you do connect to something, whether it's groups of people, your family, your loved ones, your friends, whatever you do for a living that's unusually rewarding, you are one of the lucky people that's on the right frequency. And that's that frequencies what we should all gravitate towards and try to attain. I think the problem with a lot of things that are written is that they're written from an individual's perspective and that person might have been depressed.

1:40:58That person might not have had a good connection to their community or to friends or to loved ones. They might not have had a great personality. They might not have been a fun person to be around so they didn't really attract a lot of people that wanted to have good times with them. We do find tremendous meaning in this life. We do. It's just not everywhere. And you got to look for it. You got to work for it. And once you get it, you got to maintain it. I think that's exactly right. But it's a different kind of meaning to the one which the world ultimately lacks. So like call one meaning with a like an uppercase, like meaning with a capital.

1:41:31So the world is all meaning. Yeah. So if you mean the world or as human beings, as well, like if God exists for the Abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist. And we'll be completed throughout their lives into the end of their life. What we're talking about or you're describing there is what you might call like not the meaning, but like a meaning within life. And there's a problem here, which is you are the only thing that you're aware of that interfaces with this universe that you're consciously connected to. You are you.

1:42:09You are you. You are you. The you that's talking out of your mouth right now is the only you that interfaces with your world. If you find meaning in that world, the world has meaning. Yeah, but it depends like again, when you strip away all of these Judeo Christian principles, we're left trying to find worthwhile meanings to non worthwhile one. So let's say you said the meaning of your life, Joe, was like counting blades of grass on your front garden. Right. And I said, my meaning was like being a doctor and helping people. I would hope there's other things other than counting blades of grass.

1:42:43Imagine you thought that right. Imagine you said the meaning of your life was counting blades of grass. And I said mine was helping people with like medical care. I have the more meaningful life, but if what you're saying, if it's like there's no ultimate meaning and all meanings are just created by the person like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful. We need some kind of way differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile. And so there's a problem that I think we can solve that problem, which is although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning, we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering.

1:43:22Right. The reason mind's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right and you're doing something which I'm not willing to to see that doesn't have meaning. But the world is not meeting. Like as a whole. Yeah. I think it's moving in a direction. And I think it's moving in a very specific direction with the apex predator, which is human beings. And I think if you looked at if you were an alien, you visited Earth, I said this before, so I apologize, people heard it. And you looked at us, you would say, well, what does this thing do? Well, it makes better things. It's all it makes better sense.

1:43:54It's all they do. And everything that's hardwired into people. Just think about the stupid things that are hardwired into people like materialism. Like you can't keep these things. Why are you piling up things in your 80 years old? Why buying it? Why is Kenneth Copeland buying a jet? Right. What is it? Well, materialism forces innovation because you always want the latest and the greatest things. It's one of the many motivations. Status is attached to these things as well. That's another motivation that pushes innovation. If I looked at us from another perspective, I was another life form. I'd say it makes technology and it makes better technology every year with a fever pitch.

1:44:30Every year there's a new phone, every year there's better computers, every year there's better chips. Samsung just came out with a new battery that is going to be on EVs that has a 600 mile range and charges in nine minutes. They just not sponsored by Samsung. No, but it was just a new article that just came out that they were talking about in terms of game changers, in terms of technological innovation. That's what we do. We do it constantly. I think that means we make our artificial life. And that's what I think we're here for. I want to separate the meaning though there from the thing we do.

1:45:03There's a defined meaning. Well, in the thing that you're giving there, it's called the is -or -falacy. It is the case that certain things do this thing. So they ought to be doing it more. So you might run a similar argument. Imagine you come down to Earth as aliens ages ago, let's say like 30 ,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food. What are the humans? They just eat sugary food. That's their meaning. That's their purpose or something. You'd go, no, like the meaning or the purpose of them or their natures isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past.

1:45:39When I'm talking about meaning, I'm saying in the context of Christian beliefs, it's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you. It's imposed from elsewhere. It's quite odd to think about what it would be like outside of religious beliefs because that's the problem of agnosticism. It's an absence or a better put. I keep saying that the world is meaningless. What I really mean is it's seemingly meaningless. It's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be. Or it feels like it ought to be. So it's not the case that the world is meaningless. But I think maybe our disagreement here or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is, I think as you mentioned earlier, you're quite a fan of these pantheistic views where the world is moving towards a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and the like.

1:46:37So if you hold that view, then it looks like life can have a meaning. If there is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with, then if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process, it could be meaningful. But there are problems with that view too. So I don't want to like, I don't want to cash out and go, that is the fear. Right. Hence why embrace the agnosticism. It seems like meaning is a very human centric concept. Meaning to us means that something makes sense that it's noble and ethical and moral. It's the right way. It's the most intelligent way to advance and exist.

1:47:20And that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning to. But I would push back on the whole thing if aliens came and found primitive man just eating berries. It depends on how primitive. Even if you discover chimpanzees in the Congo and you go and study them like that, a chimnation documentary on Netflix, they have a very interesting social structure. They have alpha males and they have bonds between the other males and they have neighboring tribes. They fight over resources. Like you'd be fascinated. And if you went further ahead a few million years and saw that they've developed tools. So now they figured out how to scan animals and throw spears.

1:48:02He'd be like, oh, I see where this is going. Like their meaning is to continue getting better at this than they develop metallurgy. Then they figure out combustion engines, how to harness electricity and like, whoa, okay, now we're cooking. These things have a meaning. It's just all the chaos to us because we're personally attached to other human beings. And we see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world. And not just terrible for violence that other human beings commit to, but also just what we're doing to the earth itself. Like in terms of natural resources. What we're doing to the ocean is fucking insane.

1:48:39And you would say, well, this thing is making a better version of itself. It's going to make an artificial life. And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime. And that might be the progression of life everywhere in the universe. And that might be what God really is. We might intelligent life and creativity might be a seed of God. And then if it keeps going and this biological life gives birth to digital life that can make better versions of itself instantaneously. And they continue to do so. And it will eventually have the unimaginable power to harness every single element that exists in the universe.

1:49:21This view is pretty close to it. I think you've added on the show before Philip Goff, who's my colleague at Durham. He's currently defending a view just like this. He thinks that the fundamental nature of the world is consciousness that is identical to what we should describe as God. And that this is a process by which we're becoming making the world better. And we have parts to play in that. And that's what constitutes a meaningful life. So I sort of got two problems. That's the thing that you keep saying that meaningful. Like it come, like the meaning there for Goff would be something like the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before.

1:50:01And if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful. If you're sat on your ass not doing anything and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then your life isn't as meaningful as the person. So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful and symmetric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants. It's end to me. Let me push back and say that because what about Buddhist monks that spend their entire life celibate just meditating in a room? What's that? Are they? Is there experience less meaningful?

1:50:35Is there a achieving? There is the essentially communicating with what they believe is God. One of the people I had in mind when I said people sat on the grass doing nothing. Well, they are sitting on the grass doing nothing though. Okay, I'll bite the bullet. I'll say, like there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a Buddhist monk sat on your ass doing. Although here's the value of what they are doing. Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world which is a unified field of consciousness. So hypothetically, if something like Goff's view of this fundamental consciousness is right and the Buddhist monks tap into us and they tell all of the mates in the town and they all come to see it to be true and they all contribute towards it, then that is meaningful.

1:51:21If you sit on your ass in a cave doing absolutely bugger all for your whole life, you never tell anybody about it. Then I don't see that as meaningful as being an NHS worker or finding to defend your country or something like this. I mean, there's a classic versions of stories, right? Like the king's son, the wealthy kid that never had to do anything to sit around getting grapes to bed to him. Like, what a piece of shit. We know that we would like as human beings, we would like things to continue to move in a better direction. Every presidential campaign in the United States is all about making it a better place.

1:51:57When you're kids, right? If they're sat around doing nothing just playing video games, something, you go, go outside, stop. We say stop wasting your life, right? There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards, individually and holistically. But the problem, I think, and why I don't embrace this for you myself is that there's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say, you contemplate your own being, let's say, and you look inside of yourself. What's it like to be a physical entity, and you look inside your mind, and there's this consciousness, there's this qualia or being or experience?

1:52:39People like Shopenhauer say that, because we don't know the inner nature of things, and it's Galen Strauss and here at University of Texas, Austin says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics. It doesn't tell you about, it tells you what things do but not what things are. So let's say, for the sake of argument, underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness, and then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion, and you say that as a whole, all of the universe is one big conscious mind. You've got a problem there, which is either the combination problem or the decomposition problem, which goes somewhere like this.

1:53:17You take all of these little conscious particles in the table, like how do they add up to one unified mind, like they do in my brain? I don't have loads of little experiences going on now. I have one coherent stream of consciousness seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights. It's not like there's loads of little conscious experiences happening. So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience? And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness and lying everything, how does that big god -like mind decompine into little minds?

1:53:55Why is my experience not your experience? Why is it here rather than there? And it doesn't seem like, although we might have some knee -jerk reaction, answers to that question, philosophically, we can't draw the boundary. The skull in my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when I'm saying that the whole thing is going to happen. It's an explorer. What would be the reasons why we would have individual experiences and a collective consciousness? You could have reasons for it, let's say. Yeah, having individual experiences. There could be benefits and there could be reasons for it. In terms of, let's paint this pantheistic picture of again the reason and the goal of the universe in life.

1:54:39If I see myself as here rather than there, it may perhaps allow me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual. It's time to think about it. I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart. Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place, despite the fact that they just want to buy private jets and look after themselves. Don't think that it motivates activity, it motivates movement and to have all these different consciousness competing with each other and comparing to each other.

1:55:18This motivates people when you meet people and what is inspiration? When you meet someone you're inspired by them. It literally makes you a better person. It can make you better to see a great musician play. You leave inspired. You might go home and write something, you might be in the middle of a novel and write something completely connected to your experience that you had watching that concert. All these different examples of people we admire, I wish I was more like that guy. Try to be more like that person. I used to say all the time, aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid.

1:55:55Does actually become that guy. It's possible. If you could fake it for a little while, when you're 21 years old trying to pick up a girl. I aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid. Drunk. Well, why are you drunk? You drunk because it loosens your inhibitions, you become more jolly. You're a fun person. These are good reasons for perhaps why you break up the mind in that way. But they don't tell us how. They tell us why the universe would want to do it. But still, it doesn't carve out the boundaries between why our experiences are different from each other's if we're a part of this big global mind.

1:56:31Well, that competition has to exist all throughout nature. There's no way that the mountain lion and the deer can share consciousness. Because the deer will be like, don't eat me. What the fuck are you doing? Why are you eating me? And they have to be an individual for them to compete. They have to have their own needs and their own desires. And then this is how natural selection works. Because if it doesn't happen, then there are no predators or no prey. And then life does not advance. This still gives you a good why, like a really strong why. It seems that the better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like loads of individual minds.

1:57:08Like you say, all able to do lots of different things. I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right? And I was quite surprised because in the past I came, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool. And I remember showing them one of these clips and it was of Musk talking about like the origins of consciousness. And I was using it as like, this is like the general public opinion of it. You learn more about the brain. It's just like his neuralink stuff and you solve the problem. And we spoke about like how that won't happen. But recently he came out and said something I thought was really interesting, which is essentially the view we're talking about here.

1:57:41Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere. He said, well, in order to have consciousness, there need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds, let me know. But in the origin of the world and the big bang, it was just hydrogen. So what hydrogen gets more and more complex is like it gives rise to consciousness. And he sort of gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now. He said, either consciousness is nowhere as in it's just an illusion. It's a trick of the brain. It's pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there's not really a rabbit.

1:58:18Or it's everywhere. And I think given that you can hear me and see me now. And this is what Descartes, Cogito, Ergo, Summers, right? You're 100 % confident that you are conscious right now. So it's not a non -existent thing. So following that reasoning, which is being embraced by public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience. But leaving aside the how the big mind can break itself up, there is still a question, this might be a bit of a bore in terms of logical answer. You can tell me just shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary corner.

1:58:57But it's the idea that I spoke about earlier that all theists think that God is the perfect being. If God exists, God has to be perfect. You can have a unicorn with no horn on its head. Like you need corn, you want horn, a unicorn has to have one horn. In the same way a triangle needs three corners, God needs to be perfect. But on this definition, it seems like God isn't perfect. At the beginning of time, if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect then. There was a greater being that God could have been. And even in the fullness of time, perhaps God won't be as perfect as the being which is described by Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

1:59:35So what we're seeing is people embracing, I think this is God's term as well. I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him. He's describing himself as a heretical Christian. So to be a Christian, he thinks, you don't need to believe in the version birth. You don't need to believe in the resurrection. You don't need to believe that God's perfect. But you can still believe that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of and that there is something God -like at the essence of it all. I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out. Theasams on the decline.

2:00:06Always just speaking about the numbers. The problem with this new idea is that someone's going to be at the head of it. That person's going to be like Kenneth Copeland. It's just a human thing that we do. And to push back on this question of why God would want to have the consciousness is all separated, or what's the reason for it, everything separated. Everything in the world, everything in this room is constructed of atoms. Most of it is empty space. But yet some of it is a table, some of it is a microphone, some of it is you, and some of it is me. So if you look fructally at the observable universe, what we're aware of in terms of what exists physically.

2:00:50We're aware of subatomic particles. We don't understand them. We're aware of them. We know they're blinking and out of existence. Spooky action at distance. It's magic stuff. It's wild things. That's the very nature of the matter of the world in which we find ourselves conscious of. And then as you expand through that every single thing, even plants and animals and everything is an individual. It's all individuals. And that process of all these things being individuals seems to be a part of this expansion and growth and a part of natural selection and a part of evolution and a part of this constant state of improvement.

2:01:27Everything is moving towards a state of deeper and deeper complexity. Everything improves. The elk gets big muscles to run away from the wolves. And all these things happen in order for these beings to prosper and survive and to keep this healthy balance as this weird ape develops electronics. I think that seems to be the general view I think that it's the zeitgeist of the time. It's the feeling of the age that we think in such a way. But there is still that movement. And this is my view. I just want to shed light on an alternative idea, which is go back to parminities, the pre -secretic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion that we live in this block universe.

2:02:11This big one thing. If you had a Zeno's paradox, you've done this one. No, no, what's that? Zeno's paradox is great. So you've got two like see these two cups here. Let's go from that cup to reach that one. It needs to go from point A to point B, say in the middle. And then to get another half, it has to do another half journey from point B to point C. And that goes on infinitely for Zeno. There's always another half way points in between point A and point B, because you need to keep making these half journeys, which seems ridiculous because we quite clearly can move the cup next to the other one.

2:02:47But theoretically, if time and space is infinitely divisible, then you can always make another half journey in between point A and point B. He gives the example of like, in every step of the way. Yeah, every step of the way. Is it hercules or somebody racing a turtle? Maybe it's not hercules. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, Achilles. There you go. So the turtle and Achilles are having a race. And the idea is like for Achilles to get to the finish line, Achilles needs to go half way. But then he needs to get three quarters of the way. And then there's another half point between three quarters in the full way, and it will go on and on and on and on.

2:03:24So the answer to the question who wins the race out of Achilles and the turtle is neither of them win. It's a draw. No one can finish the race. But we quite clearly finish races. We quite clearly move the cups next to each other. So Zeno thought, and people at Heraclitus thought as well, that this means that it's all an illusion. Like the idea of change and motion isn't actually something that's out there in the world. It can't be possible. So when you're seeing change and motion, what are you seeing? But did they understand evolution back then? No, not by a long shot. No, but not by a long shot.

2:03:57So we should we still be listening to them. It seems like that's not true. Well, take Einstein tells us, and this is let's do bring in the multiverse for this to write Einstein told us that space is like stretchable. Right. So it expands. So we have the moment of the Big Bang and the universe or existence as a whole, we might say space and time evolves according to the law of inflation. So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space. And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created or wanted to later.

2:04:37So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized. So there's worlds according to this view where we're having this conversation in Spanish or God forbid French right or was a very nearby possible world where we're having this conversation in Italian, German or Japanese right exactly the same words exactly the same part. Yeah, infinitely there are worlds though. And I think the real question we want to ask. There are a bunch of these multiverse views.

2:05:12We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy, Mary midgely clarifying these concepts. This is an idea my friend, Ellie, Robsen convinced me of recently that it's a really important job in philosophy. We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse. We keep using the word, but you've had Sean Carroll on the show. He's fantastic and I've spoken to him about the his many worlds and surpassation of quantum mechanics. Yeah, you've got the use in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility the easiest one to illustrate. It's just this inflation model that I've just given.

2:05:43But what we really want to know is why this like matters like does this change the value of the world because there are universes where little girls are born then torture for their whole lives. They're executed and repeats right through a universe is where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better right. So there are good universes too, but on the whole that means you've got an uncountable number and uncountable number of bad universes and an uncountable number of good universes. So I think if the multiverse theory is actually true as agnostics or atheists, we should be really fucking worried like this is a horrible state of affairs.

2:06:23If there are all of these worlds, if you actually believe that they exist, you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and being all excited about existence. We should be really concerned, but we're really concerned about things that would not even sure exist that are horrific. Yeah, well, you should be. I don't say like that's existential eggs to the power of a thousand. Well, there's a couple of problems there, right? Well, there's three big problems that come out of it. The main one which you've just linked to is like if you're trying to weigh up the overall value of existence is the world, i .e.

2:06:58the multiverse, a good thing on the whole or a bad thing. And I think if you say that there is, let's just say it's infinite, even though it might not be. If you say there's infinite suffering and infinite goodness, that doesn't seem like you can be optimistic. You'd have to go on the whole, the existence is like neutral mixed or maybe it's bad. Maybe you don't want a city where everyone's getting tortured next door to a city where everyone's living a blissful life. But in our own experience on earth, horrific things and beautiful things are happening simultaneously. And generally speaking, more beautiful things than horrific, but we concentrate on the negatives.

2:07:36To sit around and ponder the multiverse being an infinite number of evil civilizations destroying themselves and torturing themselves. How is that any different than thinking about demons? How is that any different than thinking about the puppet masters of the universe controlling all of our minds? It's just mental masturbation. There's no way you're going to know whether or not there's a multiverse of people suffering. So to not be happy in this beautiful existence because perhaps there's a multiverse in which infinite suffering is occurring seems to me to be a giant waste of an amazing trip.

2:08:19Like the trip that we're on right now is earth 2025 western civilization. Pretty fucking cool. Pretty cool. And I think your job is if you're so fortunate that you're in this position to enjoy this very bizarre place in history where it's the strangest time perhaps ever. That human beings have been alive and we're going through it. You could sit around all day and think, oh, but in other multiverse people are just getting eaten by other people maybe. It's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that like if you it's just means that you can't when you contemplate all of existence think that it's an overall good thing.

2:08:59So in that sense, we don't know we don't know what it is. For the multivestitious. Sure. If it don't. There's so there's there's probably an infinite number of multivestit if the multiverse exists. And if there's not a limited number of universes, but it's an infinite number of universes is probably an infinite number of uses that are universes that are also fucking amazing. Yeah. It's probably they're all probably all competing just like all life is on this planet. And what if the universe is constantly in a state of evolution itself? Why would we limit that to physical things that we we can currently observe?

2:09:33If we know that there's stellar nurseries, we know that you know we're help planets get born in stars and we were very aware of this process going on. Why do we assume this process is completed and perfected? Maybe this process is also moving in a better direction constantly just like human life is just like human civilization is maybe that's something that exists everywhere in the universe and that the universe itself is advancing to a more powerful state or a better state. Well, this is good. So let's say entertain the multiverse view and let's just let's pretend it's true. Right. And so you've got infinite pleasure happiness and infinite suffering and pain.

2:10:15Right. So I think when you do you know you minus one from the other you've got a neutral set of existence. Let's just let's say this. Sure. So it on balance. It's about the same. So if you're a pantheist and you believe in the god of the multiverse if you embrace multiverse theism, then you can't believe that God is good in the same way. It's also a problem which is you mentioned something like the process, right? But there are worlds in which this process has already been realized. It doesn't really matter if our world reaches that or not in the grand scheme of calculating the amount of good and bad in the world.

2:10:54You might think that explain that again. Well, you might think that like some people say stuff like this, right? They go, I want to like stop eating meat or stop taking long haul flights. But really when it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter whether I buy that chicken or take that flight. It's not going to impact the overall good and bad that's in the world. It's a drop in a huge ocean that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of it. If the multiverse theories truth, something like that hits a little bit harder. If your goal is to make existence as a whole greater or better, then it's nothing compared to the infinite suffering and pain that's already out there.

2:11:33You can't change the overall value of existence. I still think and I'm with you on this. I'm sort of following the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out fully. But now we've said that. I still think there's a point in being moral in developing your own character, sorting out your own house or community or country or continent and the world. It seems like that's what our job is. It seems like that's where we still work out what you keep referring to as meaning. That's what we get meaning. I think that's fine. There's other problems though that seem to fall out of this as well. We have a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual subjective conscious minds.

2:12:14When we try and think about what it is for me to be me today is the same person born 31 years ago and the same person and the halfway point between that again to go back to Zeno. How am I the same person throughout time? I think the best answer to this is something like I have the same capacity for conscious experience. If it was stream of consciousness, that would mean every time you drift off during me talking now, then you would die and you'd be born again when you had stream of consciousness re -emerges. If you say Joe Rogan is that stream of consciousness, that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now and that stops because you drift off, that would mean your stream of consciousness is ended.

2:12:59Think of it like sleep. When you go into like N -Ren sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences, let's say, you would die according to that view. Or the reviews in philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity. Joe Rogan is the person that believes that Marshall is golden retriever is fantastic and that consciousness is the fundamental nature of stuff. But then if I were to strip those beliefs away from you, the psychological continuity view would say Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore. I don't exist anymore. I can't you, I think it's like that, but I don't give you conscious.

2:13:37Drifting off thing doesn't make sense to me because drifting off is just a failure to connect. Yeah, but you're still conscious. It's not like I'm dead. Everything goes black and I don't know anything. I'm thinking about other things. My stream of consciousness is to stop paying attention to you. If I drift off, I never drift off entirely. You don't have a point of sleep. When you sleep, you have it, right? Yeah, but when you sleep, you dream. What is going on there? We don't even understand that. You don't think there's ever a moment when you don't have an experience. Well, you don't have a conscious experience because you're not conscious.

2:14:10That will do. What is going on? Why do we have such vivid dreams? What is going on with consciousness in regards to REM sleep? We don't totally understand that. We don't really know what that is. It's a bit of an even then, it might seem like a bit of a problem, right? Take out like copy and paste teleportation to really put it out there. I copy all of the parts of you, I destroy them and recreate them elsewhere. Start track. Yeah, the Star Trek. I don't know. It's different on Star Trek. It's not copy and paste, but it's like they take you and they beam you to another planet. Yeah, they beam you here anymore, but you exist over there.

2:14:52But some nerd told me that when the beam beam, do you like Star Trek? Yeah, sure. I should call you. It's okay. I was a kid. So when you're getting beamed around in Star Trek, it's not copy and paste teleportation. It's cut and paste. It's cut and paste here. It would be cut and paste. I copy you or recreate you. The copy and paste have made another Joe Rogan. Then we've got the problem that Paul Rud has in that Netflix show, which is great. Living with yourself. Oh, no, I haven't. It's gold. You can't give that power to dictators. When I was talking to Kurzweil and he was talking about downloading consciousness into computers, I was like, what's to stop someone from doing that a thousand times?

2:15:35What's to stop someone from making an army of Donald Trump's? Yeah, you can't stop. If you can do it once, you can keep doing it, especially as technology advances. It's gold, the Paul Rud won. They recreate him, but as a better version of him. Oh, no. So all of his friends want to hang out with the other one. These wifefuls to be with him. Oh, no. He just kills all. He's already here. I wonder if he shot himself in the head. He would just be that other guy. In Star Trek, what happens is you carry on having experiences. Someone told me there's an episode where you see what it's like to be teleported.

2:16:10And it's just like this world of things and lights around you. So it's not like the lights go out even for a split second. But on the copying or cut and paste version, it would be that second. Well, it is an interesting question because consciousness is not local. And you download someone. Like what, you know, if you do move, if you do take someone out of this physical existence and put them somewhere, but then they don't have a soul. This bizarre vessel that can no longer communicate. And then then we'll realize like, oh, we fucked up. Yeah, we got to go find out where that guy's consciousness got dropped off along the journey.

2:16:46I think it probably does get dropped off. It probably does. It needs the same capacity that's begin with. You're probably an antenna for consciousness. And antenna for it. Yeah, you're probably a physical thing with a lot of biological requirements that's connected to some sort of consciousness that sees itself as an individual but is completely connected to all the life forms around it. What makes you, because I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these things. What's your motivation for, like, I'm not sure if this is your view, but even entertaining it, right? You might seem like a, like, the call them like just so stories, right, in philosophy, right?

2:17:25You can tell a tale about what it might be, but why take that tale you're telling seriously? First of all, not completely connected to this, but I think it's possible that what consciousness is is almost like a giant motherboard. And we are all connected to that motherboard as individuals, but that we share this one thing together. And I think we're really become aware of that when there's, when the community comes together, when there's a tragedy, when there's an event, something happens, we all mind meld together. And I think the individual, the biological entity that is you and that is me, has all of these requirements that it has to meet in order to stay alive and to move forward and to progress in their civilization and culture.

2:18:11And that this is a different thing than the entire consciousness that we share, but we share it with each other so much so that we can't be alone. I mean, people that go are alone for too long go crazy. The worst thing can do to in prison is put you in solitary confinement. Yeah, I can think of much worse. So we're social animals, right? So we do, we do look for it, but that's still something you need some it's stronger there, right? So you go, we want to connect with people, we want to form these communities and bonds in the face of tragedy, we come together and we support each other and we we empathize with each other and we love and support each other.

2:18:47But like on a deep philosophical level, I'm still seeing the world through my eyes and not your eyes, right? So why think that gives us a reason to think that there is this unifying experience or mind that occupies all of space and time, right? What's the motivation for thinking something like that? It's just a thought that it may be the case. It's not of, I'm sure that that's what's going on. And also this is a sort of a universal sentiment that gets told by people that have profound psychological experiences that we're all sharing some sort of consciousness, some very bizarre connection that we don't totally understand.

2:19:27And that the biological vehicle that we have that carries around the soul has these motivations and you will battle with these motivations or to do the greater good. You'll battle with the parallel with religious experiences. Yeah, I think most religious experiences have their root and psychedelic experiences have that root like in the people like Paul on his road to Damascus or so. Well, certainly Moses in the burning bush. In fact, scholars in Jerusalem, they believe that what that was a metaphor was burning a bush that contained dimethyl trip to mean. Hmm. If you think about burning the bush, right?

2:20:03And that's one of the ways that they consume psychedelic drugs is they burn them and the Acacia tree is very rich in dimethyl trip to mean, which is a very potent psychedelic drug. And there's countless depictions of psilocybin mushrooms, both in ancient Egypt and in cultures all over the world. There's mushroom rituals that occurred. There's the sacred mushroom in the Bible, John Markrolegros book about the Dead Sea Scrolls where he thought that the entire Christian religion had its origins and fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom therapy that they were all having these rituals and consuming these mushrooms.

2:20:43That's the Illusinean mysteries that they all got together and drank some sort of a potion, the kookyon that was a psychedelic potion and the devised democracy and they figured out all sorts of very unusual philosophies from these psychedelic experiences. Yeah, do you think them and what makes you think that on the one case, let's say someone takes a drug and they think that there is a fundamental conscious unifying mind behind the cosmos, right? Person A, person B has it and they see like these to bunny or something running down the road. What makes given that they have the same cause, person A's religious experience caused by psychedelics in this case, more reasonable than person B's?

2:21:28Not more reasonable. I think each experience is probably valid and maybe person B that sees the Easter bunny, he doesn't have the capacity for whatever reason like his psychology is not strong enough to grasp the entire possibility of everything that all of this is connected and they freak out and they compartmentalize and that's one of the things that happens to people that have bad trips, right? Bad trips are essentially you trying to control an experience that's uncontrollable and or maybe you go into that trip with a significant level of anxiety, maybe the loss of a loved one, a devastating moment in your life, you know, loss of job, loss of family and you have this experience and you just freak the fuck out, which can happen too.

2:22:10It seems that people have those experiences, perhaps without those obvious triggers as well though, right? In the literature, I do work with the Center for Inner Experience at Durham University, some cool work from Jules Evans on this, looks at people who have had like long term negative effects because of taking psychedelics, he takes like 700 people because they're pretty under reported, the data doesn't reflect them very well. Do you remember what they took? No, not the top of my head. They say that a third of people who have long term effects from the psychedelics, maybe you can pull this up, Jamie, Jules Evans, the guy's name.

2:22:52A third of people have negative effects lasting longer than a year when they... One third of the entire group of 700? Yeah, and one sixth have it for longer than three years. And what with these effects? Like feeling the sunlight on them and shaking with terror, seeing things that aren't there, extreme forms of anxiety. What does it give these people, acid? Well, perhaps, I'm not sure. This is the thing I think I'm concerned with as a... Same kind of stuff when we talk about free speech. Who the fuck is not in favor of free speech? Everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line in different places.

2:23:30So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is. Similarly with psychedelics, what we see are writers, philosophers, documentary makers, just give this blanket statement about them being good, but don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives. Like you see these documentaries on Netflix, right? There's don't mention the bad things that happen to people. And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they have certain similar comparable analogous properties about them. Then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data. The Alistair Hardy Research Center asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them, right?

2:24:13And the researchers were really surprised. Like Alistair Hardy himself said, I didn't think 5 % of these were going to be people seeing the devil or having Satan watch over their baby every night or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell, terrified for the next several years. These are religious experiences from people from what year was this? This is like the last 30, 40 years or so. I think the state was collecting the 80s maybe. And these people had been diagnosed with any mental illnesses? The data, they just ask for them to give their examples of these experiences.

2:24:50But what's notable is, first of all, the phrase religious experience and it being negative is kind of like oxymoronic. Right, we never thought of that. Yeah, we do. And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff. So let's say if it's about 5%, and that's a modest generalization, right, given they didn't ask for it, let's say it's about 5%, and then you take the number of people that have claimed have had religious experiences, then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are Zerastrian, James, people who are Jewish, we consider them significant minorities, add all those groups together to the, I think it's over in between maybe 1 or 2 million people have had negative religious experiences, and lay out all the boring maths and a bucket had out the share and say like, look, my point there was, if you're a Christian, then you sort of got to accept the facts that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones.

2:25:49Or if you want to accept religious experiences, you can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian. But the deeper point there is like, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences. And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well. They're scared, they're ashamed, they don't want to talk about the negative. In my life, I've probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs.

2:26:23Who's life is full in a pot because of it. Zerastrian, through this study, it was just a survey, but I thought this was very interesting. Participants were active, they still take psychedelic drugs in response, 334 .54 .9 % said yes, and 246 .45 % said no. 28 did not respond to the question. They were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement. I believe that the insights and healing gained from psychedelics when taking in supportive settings are worth the risks involved. The frequencies across the four response points to this question strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, are shown in figure two.

2:26:57In total, 89 .7 % agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. This is good. We take them from that 10 % of people say they shouldn't be. It does make sense though that human beings vary so much biologically. And we vary so much psychologically. You vary by what your experiences have been on this planet up to the point we take the drugs, where you're at in your life. I think the real problem is that they've been illegal for so long. We haven't been able to study what the correct dosages are, what biological problems you may have, unique to yourself that makes you allergic to these things or having an extreme response, or negative response, but medications you may be taking.

2:27:44You don't know, interfere with them. We talked about that yesterday with ProZAC, M -A -O inhibitors. There's a bunch of things that people take that will profoundly impact the way these drugs. I'm sure they probably screened for those, at least some of them when they did those studies. I don't think there's anything in this life that's 100 % good. I think most medications have side effects, even ones that have been hugely beneficial and save countless lives. They have side effects. And some people are allergic to them. And some people just biologically don't agree with them. I think that's the case with psychedelics as well.

2:28:22I want to make it clear right. I've sort of formed an overall view on it, which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've given there. What don't want to say that people ought not to be using them or stuff like that? I think controlled circumstances. No, I don't think you are saying that. I think that I don't deny the positive things that come from this. I think what you're saying is very important. There's 76 billion neurons there, right? And we don't know what they're all doing. Everybody is coming into it with a fucking different set of baggage. Some of that baggage you can't carry up the hill.

2:28:58It's important to differentiate as well. This happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion. We differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is really bad things happen to me. So I'm abandoning my belief. And compared to the evidential problem, which is let's look at the big data. Does that give me a reason not to believe? And I recognize that as a person that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part, that people that I care about have been, their lives have been ruined because of this. But then I look at the big data, and I think on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally.

2:29:32But I still think that there is a big amount of data there about these negative experiences, which you just aren't reported that aren't in our data slugs. And I've been interested to know just how many there are, and how severe they are when people have these. I'm sure there's quite a few that people don't want to talk about. And I bet they get a lot of pushback from the psychedelic community if they want to discuss it. Like all zealots, there's psychedelic zealots. And I think that's the real problem is the illegal nature of them. And the fact that, I mean, even just recently, they denied FDA, denied MDMA to be used in clinical settings for veterans.

2:30:13They have to do more tests with maps, which is very unfortunate because that particular type of therapy has been very beneficial for people, especially veterans, who've seen the horrors of war, and to come back and try to psychologically deal with these things. To have some tools that we know are effective, be denied, to these people that went overseas and served, and saw these horrific things, and experienced these horrific things, and I just think it's unreasonable. And I think that the real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being covered by people that have never taken them.

2:30:46Yeah. And they don't really understand what we're even talking about. And I think that, I'm not saying it's the panacea for all, but I'm saying it's a tool. And I think it's been a tremendous tool to a lot of individuals. They've experienced some extreme changes of perspective and of their own personal connection to the world through these things that are very, very beneficial. Change, I know multiple people that have just become completely different human beings after psychedelic experiences, and much better, much more caring, abandoned, whatever chip they had on their shoulder. And I think that can't be denied, and I think it's another thing that's here to help us evolve.

2:31:29That's what I think. Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I'd like it to be the case that they were all like that, right? I know a friend who's over in Australia who's abandoned his family after taking these, and ran off with a seven -year -old man, this guy's like thirsty, living in a mud hut now. What was he like before that? Just like me, me and you right now. Just like me, really? I'm sure. Just from the outside, I know what that is. Right, but the thing is, it's not on the outside. It's psychologically that's really like, how strong is that person's foundation in the world? Well, I had a housemate when I was at university who was, you know, seemed from all measures grounded.

2:32:09I was happy enough to live in the room next to him, and I was, you know, we got along just like good friends. And, you know, he started taking psychedelics. We left university. It's six months later. He started a Facebook live feed, and this guy was like just masturbating in front of all of his friends and family, because he'd lost his mind. Well, like these, there's a horrendous talk to that guy before all this shit went south and see how loony he was already. I knew a dude was a little bit loony, and then he delved very heavily into the world of psychedelics, and he became schizophrenic. I suspect that he was already schizophrenic before that he was like, he had it under containment.

2:32:46But then he went nuts and just thought that everything was a sia up, and it was very strange. Very strange to talk to him. You know, I thought everyone was a government agent. Very weird, just weird, weird interface, and he had slipped completely into the world of paranoia, almost inexorably. I don't know how you'd pull the guy back to make up a normal person again, or, and again, I don't know if he was a normal person before. I don't, you know, I didn't know him that well, but I know he's deteriorated. He's hard to know yourself as well, right? I think that like every other tool, you get abused all tools, you know?

2:33:21I think there's a lack of understanding of what the, again, the doses, the correct way to consume it, what the biological factors that your unique biology, the way it might interfere with this experience. Yeah, I just think all the things we've just said there, right, is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation about this stuff. Just at the start of your documentary, just say, don't do this. Like, if you're going to do this, like you need to speak to a med, like, again, it's about legalization, it's about safe use. Imagine being a shaman, and you have to deal with these fucking wahoo's, taking a propeller plane over to your country, just to see what jobs are taking place.

2:34:04What's wrong with these people? You're dosing them up with Iowasca in the middle of the jungle, there's jaguars and snakes out there. These people are freaking out. I bet they're version of, I bet I would love to know, like if we had like real good data on these shaman adventures where people go to the jungle, like how many of them lose their fucking marbles? Or cooked forever after that. I don't know. It's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, we're getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes psychedelics. I mentioned free speech a moment ago, right?

2:34:35This is something which is huge in our culture at the moment. Why is it your comedy club on Monday seeing, I've never seen Killtony before, but... Pretty fun. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was great fun. Afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards were asking what I'm talking to you about, and they started talking about free speech because I'm from the, obviously from the UK and wanted to know whether I supported Kiss, Nama, or Ziff, Kiss, Nama was like this. Like this is like Mal or something. I was like, there's no comparison. You're like, Marxist there now, are they right? I was like, no, it's not quite like that.

2:35:10We're terrified of everything going in that direction. Yeah, especially in Texas. It's like, Texas is the last frontier. You think so? This is what America, like Texas is what the rest of the world thinks America is. A bunch of freedom -loving people with guns. But just wild people play music, drink it all the time. That's Texas for real. I didn't think... I didn't think it was going to be like this. It's the people that Austin, some of the best people in the last five days, that I've came across. It's a great vibe. The city has a very hopeful vibe. And that sucks for me when I go back to Los Angeles because that was my home for so long.

2:35:47Whenever I go back, it does not feel like I do not feel that vibe. But is that me? Is that my... Are there people that are thriving and loving LA right now with all the craziness in the chaos? Perhaps. And maybe if I was a young man, maybe if I was 25 again and I moved to LA again now, I'd be like, this is crazy. I love this fucked up place. This is awesome. Maybe I would. I probably would. Knowing me. But the 57 -year -old me is like, uh -uh. That place is ruined. Yeah, well, it seems like I'm not sure if it happens in the UK as well. Especially with the... Like we've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and stuff as a flight.

2:36:23Those three poor girls that lost their lives and Southport. And it's a huge shame because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar, right? The big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to rob shops and like fire bomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right? Like every single politician in the UK condemns them. Less than 5 % of people in the UK even sympathize with them, right? But there's an interesting question that comes out of that, which we're not talking about, which is the line of free speech, right?

2:37:00Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something. Like it's like you can't be open with your thoughts. And it's been interesting being here and experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment, which is, you know, I think there are free speeches in an absolute like right in the US or in Europe, right? The rule, you can't share, you can't engage in like slander, you just laws against that, you can't share sexual explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of freedom of expression, which might come under freedom of speech, especially if you're in a violation of privacy of the child and it's also dangerous, then.

2:37:42Yeah. So it's against the law. And so it's not as simple as free speech. That takes it to a completely different level because you're talking about images of innocent people. Well, if you were to take, um, okay, let's take, take an image. So you don't want to include, if you want to include images, plays, we can't dox symbols. You can't put, you can't make threats. All those things are illegal. You can't threaten violence. You can't like display a Nazi flag on your front lawn. Right. You might be able to do that. Some places. Well, it was interesting in the US. It was 1919 when someone was, uh, the, the high court, Supreme Court, legislated against somebody for spreading anti -war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the US more generally.

2:38:24And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case. Right. So there are things you might think that free speech is like intrinsically valuable. The thing which is more important than anything. Right. But I would, I would say that those people were wrong and that if someone did have an opposition to the war, if you want to have a healthy society, you have to let those people express themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I, especially when you read about the actual history of the war and you go, hey, maybe this could have been fucking prevented.

2:38:53You know, like, and if people weren't so blindly allegiance to this idea of going over there and fighting. Yeah. And my intuition is in that case, that that was the wrong way to legislate against. But there are like, when would you think free speech would be a good thing to stop? Well, this is what I, what would be the boundary? This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the show because comedians are often, you know, the strongest defenders of free speech. Right. For sure. It's an interesting conversation. Is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences, the potential to flourish, be happy and experience pleasure.

2:39:38So I take even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be. It is still subject to those other things. So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single single scenario, except when it breaches the harm principle. And so the interesting question we need to ask is when does something breach the harm principle? So we, people famously say like, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre. If you know by shouting fire that there's going to be a stampede and two people will die, thought experiments, pretend those are the rules.

2:40:17You shout fire, two people will die. Should we punish that person for doing it, knowing that those two people would die. And you sort of go, I think it's fairly reasonable. More maybe it's, it doesn't have to be 100 % the case. We just need to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person. So in that case, you might go, yes. So it breaches the harm principle. John Stuart Mill gives the example of things like a corn dealer and saying like, you can write in a newspaper like the corn dealers, like, you know, he's the worst. He's exploiting a soul. That's the reason we're hungry. But then he says you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealers house.

2:40:53And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky because there's more, there's the harms not as direct. But what we're seeing is public intellectuals who back to our conversation earlier, like, I'm a part of this team that just defends free speech no matter what. Like, even the most valiant defender of free speech might go, don't shout fire in a crowd of theatre. One of your comedians actually said, our shout theatre and a crowded fire. I thought that was funny. So I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire. But when, you know, when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxes and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel, let's burn it down.

2:41:38I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as signing violence. So in that case, I think, but people, people aren't saying that, right? We're just, we're stuck in this, the sweeping snappy statements, which are, it's like all wells in 1984. It's like, it's either anti -free speech. It's like, no, tell me what kind of free speech you want to defend and why you want to defend it. Or else we could carry on being stuck in this. Well, the way Elon treats Twitter is whatever is illegal. You can't do things that are illegal. You can't threaten people. You can't yell fire in a crowd of theatre. Those are things that are illegal.

2:42:11It legislates again. You can't do things that are illegal. You can have very controversial and unpopular opinions. And you're allowed to do that. And that was what got you banned from Twitter before. But the problem with that is we found out through Twitter that they expanded that and kept expanding that to include some things that a lot of people disagreed with. Like transgender athletes in sports criticizing them, we get you banned. Criticizing the lockdowns, we get you banned. Saying anything negative about the mRNA vaccines, we get you banned. And then we found out the FBI was involved. They were asking Twitter to censor posts.

2:42:52And there was just so much shit involved that made you go, well, this is not good. This is not free speech. And this is, this is actually dangerous to a society. If you let the government dictate what people can and can't say. Because they will do it to their best convenience. Like what's best for them? What makes their life more convenient? What makes their job easier? What makes it easier to control people? Tell people what to do and punish people that don't listen. Because if you lock them up, then you will automatically incentivize other people to toe the line. And that is what got scary. And that's what's scary about government control speech.

2:43:26And I think that's what people are scared about in the UK. When you see people saying things they shouldn't be saying, they're saying it on Facebook and they're getting arrested. And they're doing like 20 months in jail. I haven't found in there might well be a more fringe example. I think it's like 20 maybe Jamie, you can lie fact check me here. Maybe up to about 30 -ish people have been prosecuted for stuff that put online in the UK recently. I think 3000 have been arrested. I think 3000 have been arrested. No, it's a very strange story. It's like what that encompasses is like too broad, right?

2:44:00Is that what it is? It got repeated over and over again for like the last few years. A few people might have been arrested. There's a really greaseless example recently of a video. There's a video of a guy handing down a sentence to a man who puts something up on Facebook. I think bad behavior should be rightfully everyone in the community that agrees it's bad behavior. They should shine that person. They should not want to shine them. Not want to connect with them. Not engage with them. We've got the right wing Fagginhead country. He's not in our country. He's in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment.

2:44:46Tommy Robinson, he's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence. I'm not aware of him. I know the name but I'm not aware of his history. We should shine people. He tweeted something along the lines recently. I'm going to paraphrase and Jamie, I'd be really grateful if you could fact check this one because I might be liable if I get to get the answer. He essentially said that people in Palestine are or the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists, imbreds and parasites. Given what's going on there right now, I don't know anyone on the right who uses such obviously degrading language.

2:45:29That person's not being shown. He's having more attention than ever. He's got his record outreach right now. That's not illegal. I'm not sure if it's illegal. Did he say it online? Did he say it in a statement? He said it on a tweet. He put it on a tweet, replying to somebody at some point. Again, as far as my knowledge, that's roughly what we said. It sucks that there's idiots that will agree with those kind of things. What's going on? This is an interesting, I'm pretty liberal when it comes to platforming and speaking to people who we disagree with. I think it's a real shame we get really polarized when we stop talking to people we disagree with.

2:46:06There's very, very, very few people who won't have a conversation with. But when we're continually platforming someone like him in a moment like this, that does raise questions. Peter sends that in on once. I think he's having on again recently. The opposite of something. Peter's in aware of the things that he said. I'd be surprised if you have contact with Jordan. I'd be surprised if he should tell him. When Tommy Robinson says something like the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country. A quick Google would reveal to Jordan that that's not true in terms of the big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely.

2:46:50Culturally to be doing these things. Rucker Breggman. Is there an increase in violence? Well, take Rucker Breggman. Did you know the utopia for realists guy? He's a big proponent of universal basic income. I'm going to find out what Tommy Robinson's brought us for. Yeah. So we don't get in trouble. He's got a lot of quotes that are apparently in. Just trying to find out. Just trying to just use Google that exact what he said. I tried to and I wasn't coming up. I'll show you what I was getting. Okay. Shows. Shows what you're getting. Just a few tweets from Cypress viewed 50 million times a day.

2:47:24This had something about it. Boy, he's got a face you fucking hate, doesn't he? He's got a face from Peaky Blindness. Yeah. By order the Peaky Blindness. He looks like that, right? So what do we got here? What did he say? That specific tweet. This was something about a stabbing somewhere. What did it, but what does he say? Again, it doesn't even have it. Does he say what he says? No. Let me see if something on the tweet has a partial quote. I can see if I can dig it at the same time. Okay. Just look for it. So you can find it. It says claim far right protesters have stabbed by, have been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke.

2:48:00And opposed to receive 2 .7 million views. Police said that two men had been hit by an object, but no stabbing has been reported. Take them. That's not what he was asking. Yeah, that's not the same one. So you can find it. I'll just churning this on now as we're going. The big point here, though, when we're looking at this is some Stephen Pinkers or always emphasizing, right? The idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like he does, and cherry picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas. Right. We should look at the big data. Rucker Breggman points out wonderfully in these books.

2:48:33You've talked to Freelace that people that come to the US, for example, first generation migrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native population. The same is true for their children as well in the US, and the same stories in the UK. They're less likely to be filling up our prisons. Is this people that come over illegally as well as people that migrate illegally? Is it all the same? Is it lumped in together? It might be lumped in together. That's, again, we fact check in. I think the fear that people have is people that are coming here or coming to your country or going wherever illegally and altering the culture.

2:49:10Right? Yeah. Not assimilating, not adopting the English language, not adopting the culture. I'm going to have to... It's okay. No worries, but I see you think that that kind of talk should be illegal? I think during the violence upon people who are Muslim in the UK, attacks on mosques, attacks on people's lives, and... But it can't stay in Palestine. That even if he's completely wrong. I'm not sure... It's saying... I'm going to be able to think... My honest, fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal. I don't know if that kind of dehumour is morally apparent. It's something we should reject and condemn.

2:49:57But should it be legislated against? I'm not sure. What's clear, though, is that people, to me, that are sharing those ideas, people who are platforming that person, helping that idea spread, are doing something again that doesn't have to be legislated against, but we should condemn as morally wrong as well. We should say, you ought not do that. That's very... Because you should know that that's not... That's reasonable. What we should do is... I mean, the age -old anecdote is you combat bad speech with good speech. You know, you combat bad speech with better speech. You have those people debate people that can lay things out in a way that makes a very compelling argument, they're incorrect.

2:50:38And then people could watch. I remember when I was a kid, my high school had a debate between Barney Frank, who was... I don't remember. I don't think he was a congressman at the time. I don't know. A mass chews its... But I think he was the first openly gay politician in the country. And he was debating a guy from the moral majority, who was this right -wing group at the time. So this is like the 1980s in I was in high school. And the guy had like an American flag pin on his lapel. And you know, he spoke and said all the stuff. And then Barney Frank kind of annihilated him. And it was interesting.

2:51:12For me, it was fascinating to watch these two... No one booed or hissed or pulled fire alarms. They let this one guy speak his mind. And then they let this other guy speak his mind. And we got a sense of who was correct. And in my eyes, at the time, Barney Frank was correct. And you know, I was probably 15 years old. And I was like, wow, this is kind of cool. It was interesting to see this person just with his view of the world. Make the other person's view of the world look foolish. And make his very sort of rigid definitions of what shouldn't should not be legal. Look, preposterous. Yeah. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people.

2:51:50Know when nearest amount of people that you've managed to interview over the last time, how long you've been doing this? How many years? 15 years. And like three or four times a week over 15 years as well. So I have a lot. So I've been going nine years, but interviews once a month or something right. So nowhere near the amount of people. And what I've thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something, we don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that's that might be needed.

2:52:29Right. And so I wonder if you've got any views on like what the moral responsibility is or what the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just like say, read up on like a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something. So no, you've been like, there's been previous things right where people have said that you've, like you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail. Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem. You know, it depends. Like if someone's known for a very specific stance that they take on something that I don't agree with, yeah, we'll look into that.

2:53:03And I will try to look at it from their perspective as well. I'll try to find out how do this person come to this conclusion? Why do they believe this? What is the best way to approach this? How do I do this civilly? So I get the most out of them. I want them to feel comfortable while they're explaining this. I don't want them to feel pressured and combative. You know, when people are involved in arguments and combative situations they get very tense and it's very difficult. That it becomes you against them. I try to get as far away from that sort of sensibility as possible. I just want to tell me what you think and I'll try to steal man it.

2:53:35I'll try to figure it out. And then I'll say what I think. And I have to know where they stand first. I have to really understand why they come to that conclusion. I've had some disagreements with people about some pretty important issues. And you've got to let that person express themselves. You've got to figure out, but the beautiful thing about a podcast as opposed to almost any other form of media is that no one is telling us what to do. It's just you and me having this conversation we only met for like 10 minutes before. We sat down and then we talked for three fucking hours. How long have we been going for?

2:54:10Three hours now. Yeah, three hours. Yeah, so it's like it's an interesting way to see how person views the world. Yeah, well, I think maybe so what we do to avoid like that pranks. We're just doing philosophy as well, right? Right. We're just doing a philosophy podcast and we say to them we're just sticking with like this book or this paper. Okay. And so we can we've got a four researchers working on this and we know all the ins and outs of it. It's like the back of our hand. Right. So we can give like the audience member the best analysis they can they can get without having to go and do it themselves.

2:54:42When you're doing such a broad project like this on so many different topics. Yeah. Like, you know, it's impossible, right? To be able to do that. But I wonder if you think a genuinely interesting curious to hear your thoughts on it is a better situation for our public discourse. A media in which we've got lots of different, like let's say podcasts, for example, lots of different podcasts, lots of different hosts who are like specializing a different thing in auto analyze. Or do you think that having this general public facing podcast which has not an area of specialty with people talking about things which are, you know, you know, in some take cases dangerous, right?

2:55:25Or like, are important at least. Like is this is the situation better when we have lots of hosts, lots of topics and lots of podcasts. Or is it when we've got a general podcast, which is covering all of these topics, right? Well, first of all, we have lots of podcasts and lots of hosts. It's just this one's the most popular for some strange reason, but that's not my fault. I mean, I can't alter it because it's too popular. That's ridiculous. Like one of the reasons why it's popular is I talk to a bunch of different people about a bunch of different things. And some people I am just eternally curious and have no understanding of it at all.

2:56:06And I want it laid out to me. And then other things I have very strong opinions about. And I want to know why a person thinks differently or how they came to their conclusions. Or maybe there's a person that I really admire. I want to understand their mindset. Maybe it's someone who's got some very fascinating esoteric information. And I want to learn it. You know, it's the podcast is entirely based on what I'm interested in. Yeah. So that's how I do it. And there's a lot of podcasts that are experts in a very particular field. And they talk only about that very particular thing. The thing about that is you're not going to get as many people.

2:56:41They'll listen to it. But you'll get millions of people listening to this conversation you knew and me. So the benefit of that is then disliked night someone's curiosity. And if we only do a cursory examination of whatever the subject is, if I really not qualified to really delve into it, now this person is excited about it. And they can expand, check out your podcast, your other podcast. It's good for the greater ecosystem of podcast. And just of general discourse. So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, I've just listened to this person for two or three hours. I should leave my church or like, go and live in the middle of the night.

2:57:17You should do whatever you feel like doing. And I think that's the best message that I can give to people. You should live your life in the way that you want to live your life. And if you are inspired and motivated and if something changes in the way you view the world based on a conversation that some people have in a podcast, then that's good. That's good. As long as it's beneficial to you, it's good. And we should all sort of try to acquire these conversations and experiences of the people because it elevates our own understanding of ourselves and how we interact with each other. Maybe. If someone listens to this and decides to quit their job and stop.

2:57:52I don't think you're going to grasp something. If they just want to give up and think it's not your fault. It's all meaning, no, it's in like counting grass instead of helping your fault. If they do that, it's not your fault. Like, that's their path for whatever reason. And I don't know, I don't know why anybody chooses what they choose. I don't know how you think. I don't know what things smell like to you. I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing that your view of the world is similar to my view of the world. And that's just a guess. And it can be because so many people like art that I think is dog shit.

2:58:19So many people listen to music that I can't stand. Obviously, we're getting different things out of this world. Obviously. And I don't mind that. I think that's a good thing. I think it's a good thing that there's a lot of stuff that I don't like because a lot of people that don't like me. Great. Good. And the more popular you get, the greater surface area of people that hate you will be. Well, no, I'm fundamentally here for a reason which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just like things that are underrepresented in legacy media, especially non -human animal rights stuff.

2:58:54I find that when I've tried to talk about it and whether it's BBC or the podcast and stuff, that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive. Like two weeks ago I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending non -human animal rights. So they changed the topic of it because well, they don't want to upset people who are in the audience who consume these creatures. And it's sort of stupid. It's a conversation. Yeah, precisely. And that's a shame. It's well with agnosticism too. There's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious.

2:59:31And we've got this public conversation which is you're either like the Pope or Jordan Peterson or you're like one of the force horsemen of New atheism and leaves out all of these people in the middle who was like trying to search for that. You're either intifor your proud boy. Yeah, we're nuts. We're nuts but we're sorting through it. Listen man, thank you very much for being here. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was a lot of fun. Tell people how they can find your stuff, website, all that stuff. Cool. So if you just search Jack Symes philosophy, you can get to my site where everything sort of is.

3:00:03The podcast I do is the Panpsychast. It means casting thought everywhere and reverse and that's all about all kinds of philosophy. Two books out this year. Philosophers on guard. Two in a year. Damn. Both on guard as well. So first one's philosophers on guard talking about existence. And the second one is defeating the evil God challenge in defense of God's goodness. So I spend that book defending the existence of God despite being an agnostic. So that doesn't show that I don't have a horse in the race. I'm not I've lost you driven. I don't know why I don't think anybody should have a horse in the race.

3:00:40Thank you very much. I appreciate you. Thank you. Bye everybody.