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Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day what's up J how it going very well thank you for having me it's good to be here so I got the request to be when it said Multiverse and new atheism I'm like what a combination that is let's talk nice yeah so I think like it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the Multiverse right uh it tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff but I think there's a at the moment we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society we're like stuck in this idea of scientism the view that science can solve all these problems and questions so you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins um Steven Hawking Brian Cox they all say something along the lines of like philosophy is's dead so just before we get into the Multiverse it's probably best to say like what philosophy is and sort of what the point of of talking about the multiverses so this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to like what they take philosophy to be because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider project one of the ideas that I love is this one by uh the late great British philosopher Mary mitchley she Likens philosophy to a kind of Plumbing right so like we have these conversations in our societies and like these conversations are flowing going around and likewise we have these pipes running underneath our houses keeping the water flowing but occasionally it gets clogged and so the philosopher needs to pull up the floorboards see what the clog is and help the conversation Move Along again so these are things like what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech or what it means to say that a gene is selfish so that's I see like the primary job of the philosopher something we're all doing every day like trying to understand the concepts we're using but then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term like let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics biology and and the Arts and let's try and get a big picture of the world and if we're missing a piece of
the puzzle let's have our best guess about what that piece could be so I take that to be the project and so the questions that come out of that the questions that philosophy asks are things like why is there something a universe rather than nothing no Universe like why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life where does Consciousness come from like when I make a moral statement like the Holocaust is bad is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad like are they the same kind of statement is that the same bad I'm using right but the big question and to get to the Multiverse now is the big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question the French Algerian Al the French Algerian philosopher Albert Kimu said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living like so my question is what's the point of all this is existence on the whole a good thing should we be happy and pleased to be alive and what's the purpose of life and so that's where the Multiverse new atheism and um these Arguments for for theism all come in into into the project I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of science just that reductionist perspective the idea that thinking about things and developing for lack of a better term a philosophy de developing your own personal philosophy taking from the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting unique view of the world that we live in the idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly yeah it's silly like they get away with saying these things like I think you get it though right like science splits the atom it puts the man on the moon like so it seems like going to solve all these problems but right but the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the splitting of the Adam all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by yeah they had to have something that allowed them to have the discipline the discipline to commit to commit to their schooling to follow through with the project they uh especially think about oppenheimer's struggle that he had with this thing that he had created that was was
ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands of Liv if not the entire human race itself right which was very deeply based yeah in philosophy like his perspective and his struggles with it I mean if he was just like an automaton like some you know sociopathic just super Alzheimer's guy or you know that didn't not Al autism guy rather that didn't think at all about no concept at all about empathy no concept at all about our perspective in in the he would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs like that's science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking and how does that not come out of philosophy well that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally right we've got this movement in the early 2000s dennet Dawkins Harris uh Hitchens who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11th terorist attack and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond like criticism but then once that project and like once they embark on that project and they criticize religion there isn't really anything left there like they don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics and when they try to do it it's lacking something's missing so I see that as like the reason why new atheism is going out of favor why it's becoming unfashionable because it can't answer those questions well I think it becomes almost as dogmatic as as religion itself like Atheism in a lot of ways is kind of a Rel they're committed to this idea that there is nothing else yeah you know I just don't understand how you could do that without enough if you're a person who you view the world based in he is so [ __ ] loud dude cut off just like Marshall and uh and Carl were having a wrestling match for about 15 minutes and poor little Carl was over there also one of the hottest days of the year without airon so really going hard for the Pan um I was where I was I before I distracted uh so I just think that the these people sort of looked at this as religion is all this superstitious nonsense that these people have concocted and and put together over years to keep people in line yeah and science is something that we can prove and see and you know there
is no God there is no but just how do you know you do not know it's a crazy thing to say you have such a limited perspective just in terms of the universe itself we only see what we see on our planet and the tiny amount that we can reach out into this and you know they can look back 13 billion years but like what are they looking at they're looking at like Bright Lights like little dots and they understand this is a Galaxy and but it's like how big is this [ __ ] thing where did it come from what's going on you don't know what is the purpose is this a grand test are you a part of some very bizarre Journey that the soul has to go through in this environment before it expands and goes into the next Dimension next phase of existence who [ __ ] knows you don't know we do know that people die we do know that people have near-death experiences and these very bizarre uh moments where they come back from the dead and have very similar accounts of something happening about encountering like I I had Sebastian young uh on the the podcast the other day and he was uh Sebastian younger and he was explaining um how when he almost died he had an internal bleeding and uh he saw his father his father came to the bed with him and was talking to him it was like this very bizarre thing like we don't really know we we really don't know what life is we don't know what Consciousness is we don't so we're being arrogant and I think unfortunately brilliant people that are so used to schooling people in debates like Christopher Hitchens like Sam Harris so these guys are so good at making religious zealots look like buffoons right and you get real good at that and you just sort of think that look I got it down these [ __ ] religious people they don't know what the [ __ ] going on yeah but you're you're involved in a religion as bizarre as it seems just like wokeism is a religion just like far right ideology as a religion I'm I'm not sure about putting like religion on those things in particular but cult like yeah cult they might be cult they might have some aspects which are they're ideological captured people but I think to have a religion you do need to have like a belief in what Christians s Jews and Muslims take to be the perfect being like God has to be by definition perfect
and if you think that being exists then I think you certainly qualify for for having a religion what about scientology I guess that's a cult but in our country it's they they actually want a lawsuit it's bad uh it's it's a bad classification I used to have a joke about it where I said that uh a cult is created by one guy and that guy knows it's [ __ ] in a religion that guy's dead that's good well okay let's say this though on behalf of religion right I think the two best things going for it aren't the like for me the the sense of community and the cultural aspects they don't appeal to me I could think of anything more boring than spending my Sunday singing hymns and doing that no that's that's not for me there's so many other things that that you can do to find Community to find fulfillment you could recognize how some people would find engagement with it enjoyment from it but I think in terms of like philosophical Arguments for thinking it's true like the one you mentioned a moment ago like where this all came from like science can't get to that question the the calam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular it just goes everything that begins to exist has a cause the universe began to exist therefore it needs cause and then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be and it would have to be something outside of time and space with the power and knowledge to bring this into being and that that might not be that might get you all the way to God that's a really strong reason for believing in God and the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong and likewise like the argument from fine-tuning which is gaining traction again uh the physicist sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature like 26 of them have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form he calculates that the initial low entry point of the universe had to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding and you wrote down one digit every second you'd still be writing out that number now like that number is so astronomically huge that the of us being
here are incredible and when we're thinking of probability theory if we're looking at the best explanation for that then I think you know those that posit the existence of God have the better hand like I'm not religious but I think we have to put our hands up and go no to those two problems they've got really strong Arguments for believing in God but you know people like like Dawkins people like Hitchens and the like even dennet I think Harris is a little bit more uh I guess sympathetic stick to those arguments than the other three but you know they're not serious about following the arguments they're not serious about going wherever they take them like you say there's a there's a there is a dogmatism there yeah that they're they're not open-minded enough on these points well I think the dogmatism a lot of it is like the the all the public discourse that we've seen that you can watch on YouTube between um atheists and religious Scholars it generally turns into a debate they're they're almost all debates and almost all of these debates are in a sense intellectual competitions yeah right and so it's like if you give a cop an incentive to arrest people he's going to find reasons to arrest people yeah yeah right and if you have a person that is getting social credit you're getting notoriety a agulation from schooling these religious people from mocking what you think are ridiculous ideas that are superstitious you you that part it becomes a part of yourself yeah right it becomes a part of your identity and then I think your unwillingness to engage in the mystery of all this it speaks to that I think that's that's the origin of it I think it becomes a competition with people that their ideas are correct and that these ideas that they've held for a long time they want to defend those ideas instead of going huh I I am of the opinion that I am not my ideas and I think it's a really important thing to say because I think more people should try this out maybe it's not for you but it's my personal philosophy I am not married to my ideas they're just ideas and they come in my head and they go and a lot of times while I'm saying them I do it on the podcast all the time I go wait a minute that doesn't make sense because this I don't want to be that
buffoon that's connected to the first [ __ ] that comes out of my mouth and I think that happens with a lot of people um I I also think the idea that there's no God that there's nothing thing I think the universe might be God I and I don't think it was born I think it's probably always been here and I think sir Roger penrose's latest work uh he he seems to think that the Big Bang is just one of a series of these events I don't want to paraphrase because I know I'll [ __ ] it up but his position is not that that was the beginning that there's Pro this is probably a series of these things that have gone on in eternity and that they the INF the infinite nature of the universe is probably something that even mathematically even if you get the most genius people they're probably going to struggle to understand something that has no boundaries that has never been we have biological limitations we are born and we die and I think we try to impose those upon things and I and there's some things you can like oh we know this tree grew 2,000 years ago how crazy you know oh we know this planet formed you know 4 billion years ago but there's something things we we really just we don't have the capacity to really put it into perspective we don't we don't know there's just too much we don't know they're starting to think now the universe is quite a bit older than they thought it was before because of the observations of these galaxies by the James web uh telescope so now there's there's certain people that are these controversial ideas they're throwing around about like 22 billion years old or 20 3 billion years old oh well no it's interesting what you say first of all like about us being like so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments it's always baffled me that people can care about their like their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they they're willing to die on these Hills and refusing to they counting their their wins and not their losses I just had a two and a half hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about you know his motivations for being religious you know I so I basically sketched out the my broad argument which is atheism's shortcomings or it can't answer the two problems we've just spoke about why there's
something rather than nothing fine-tuning but then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection like What a wicked thing to do to create create the rules of the game to be that to have intelligent life it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years like if God exists then like God's a psychopath right if that's what God didn't have to do that it's logically and metaphysically possible for God to create it as the Christians thought God did in the Garden of Eden 5,000 years ago that is way more compatible with the perfectly good God hypothesis right than what we're currently experiencing but then when I asked Jordan about this again I don't think he's he's serious again about you know following the evidence and argument you know he he he just digs down he he he builds a trench he uh he says like I said what do you think of the it's called the systemic problem of evil why would God create the system and he goes we just need to keep working on it it's like no you need to suspend belief in something what did he mean by that the evidence you need to keep working on it like we just need to crack on with the problem Oh and try to solve it yeah but like you know we've been trying to solve it in between 1960 and 1998 3,600 articles and books were published on the problem of evil like people are working on it and it's not going anywhere like the systemic problem of evil the god hypothesis but then it's this weird place right you've got these arguments that an atheistic view can't solve but then you've got this big problem for belief in God and like you say this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask well maybe we need a different concept of God like the universe yeah so this is uh pantheism the idea that God and the universe are identical okay and panentheism is the view where the universe is in God but there's this extra layer of God which is like heaven or the thing that brought it inter I'm glad there's a word for it because I just been saying the universe is godism I'll go with that now you the interesting thing about pantheism is
like is it worthy of the name God like the universe because if it's just nature-loving atheism then that doesn't get you far but I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious like there is some will or agency underlying the the things that we interact with then I think that gets you pretty close to a a concept of God do you think it there we have an egocentric perspective of Consciousness that it only applies to things that move and that things that can express themselves like perhap like there's the reason why I think people don't want to buy houses where people were murdered right because because they think the Consciousness is still like lingering yeah like there's something there there's something there there's a memory in that house of a horrible thing like if you bought a house from a horrible person wouldn't you kind of like I almost bought a um a building that was run by a cult yeah and uh I did I knew it was run by a cult because my friend told me about it he's like you my friend I was building a comedy club and uh my friend Ron White is hilarious comedian he told me about this great theater that was for sale I should buy that theater and so I okay and I look into it yeah I used to be owned by a cult oh great I go sign all these paperwork and then my friend Adam calls me up he goes hey did you watch the documentary on that cult I'm like oh God there's a documentary and in watching the documentary it was so sad to me to watch these people that for decades were deceived and led by this person and at the end of it they're weeping and crying they've lost their life their life like 20 plus years of their life have been dedicated to this charlatan who was uh he was a hypnotist and a gay porn star who was teaching yoga in West Hollywood and convinced all these people to do this I had to get out of that building I'm like there's no way there's not enough sage in the world that I can like get rid of all the demon I mean how much all the Vic around I felt like there like The Comedy Store in Hollywood used to be C's nightclub which was Bugsy seagull's nightclub and a bunch of people were murdered there like provable definitely and it kind of feels like it there but this the idea though that probably everywhere in the whole world
there's been some creature that's died right I don't feel weird sat here or like when you get like a you know you get a record or something or you're listening to it on like Spotify or something like a a song but you know the person who's made that song has done something Dreadful like you get that same kind of feeling then so maybe it is like a like maybe the simpler explanation is something like you know it's your association with these things it's just a these Connections in your brain going bad thing this building right and you break it's shortcut Evolution speak I think both I think both things but I think there's places that do have like my stepfather went to Gettysburg and he he's not a a religious person and he's not woo woo he's a very intelligent Hardline person who believes in facts and who's like there's something there he goes the sadness it's like you feel it the death of all those people in this place like it it stained the place but my my point is not that my point is that perhaps everything has some sort of a Consciousness we just have this egocentric perspective of what Consciousness means because to living things it it has ego it has biological needs human reward systems they're all in play social structures and the the value of status and we're moving around through this grid of other beings and we call that Consciousness because that is our experience with it but maybe this table has Consciousness maybe cloth has conscious maybe rocks have Consciousness they just don't have an ability to express themselves and they don't have this language and culture and all this other stuff that we connect to Consciousness but that it is is an integral part of everything in the universe and if the universe is God the universe creating all these things it is essentially a creation machine right it creates Stars it creates galaxies it creates supernovas to create carbon based life all these different things that happen yeah they all all created by this process it's just not a guy in the sky and a robe and I think the dogmatic perspective that a lot of religious zealots put to these ancient texts is look we don't trust what people in the 1950s thought about
Dentistry why why the [ __ ] do we trust people from 2,000 years ago what they thought about God it's it's kind of a crazy thing because either one one of two things is either true either this is God's word and God is a psychopath yeah or this is the the hand of human beings that is writing down an oral tradition of over a thousand years and trying to put in perspective what steps that we have to apply to our civilization in order to move towards a more loving and prosperous place which is what God wants but yeah I I think all those things about evil like I think maybe the evil is what we need to see to respond to become better and maybe this is this Grand evolutionary process that's going on with the human Spirit and the human psyche if you look at trends like if you study pinker's work if you go back to you know anytime recorded history versus today today is less violent less discriminatory less racist more more open to you know equal rights amongst the Sexes and genders and sexual orientation we're way better now than we were like Allan Turing from the Turing test went to he he got arrested for being gay they put him on hormone blockers he wind up killing himself because it was illegal to be gay the the man who invented the ability like he came up with the the the concept of the ability to detect whether or not artificial intelligence is real that guy was tortured by human philosophy and human perspective yeah I think pink is right on all of these metrics everything's better now than it was and if you want to combine that with like a process theology in which God is identical to the world and the world's getting better and it's better to like start a business go broke pull yourself up again and then succeed then it is just to have the best thing to win the lottery when you're 10 yeah right so that that Taps into our intuitions about what it is to develop a great character and have you know a better world you might think but I I suppose like pre 1859 before the On the Origin of Species in Darwin I think actually theism was the reasonable worldview to have like this idea of this God outside of time and space and you can run all of these they call them like theodes and defenses like reasons why God allows evil to exist right I think when you think about
like the evils that like events um like you know like the wars and all the diseases that are in our country in our world you sort of go well I can see how some of these defenses like you need hurricanes for Hurricane Relief funds or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something right 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 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 old the Earth is but actually if God is responsible for this process that seems like a bigger stain on God's record so you can see why they're reluctant to accept something maybe it's the only way maybe this process of natural selection and of constant Improvement and what we call Evolution maybe is the only way do you think it I I wor worry though that like when you do the maths whether it can be justified we're talking like trillions of uncountable animals like if you forever into time sorts itself out well it's it's kind of getting better right but like if I was to say to you like you know I can 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 I'd say that was a stupid Choice Jo like it's a weird Choice cuz we've definitely done that we've definitely done that for makeup test you know I mean they've done some wild [ __ ] 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 that's real number 70% of cows it's 98% yeah it's 99% of chickens and and 98% of turkeys um and about the same for pigs like people people are but you see the Jos there right you've got people that think it's wrong but they're doing otherwise well it's not that they're doing otherwise they can compartmentalize because factory farming
we talked about this yesterday they have AG gag laws a couple days ago with Russell Crow rather um AG gag laws prevent people from detailing the horrific conditions if film it if you're work you're like this isri I'm to fil out this place you go to jail which isane yeah it should it should be a crime it should be like animal cruelty like Russell Crow was in here the other day and he keeps 200 head of cattle and is he has a ranch in the the bush in Australia and the way he described the way he takes care of these animals the way you know they gently move them into new pastures and they live this idilic life until and he's like and the meat is better you feel about the whole thing it's like I've heard him say something about this before where he goes like but ultimately it's because it tastes better so although like I'm happy he's doing it right this is a this is no comparison to factory farming and if all the farming that was out there in the world was like Russell crows then it's not just because it tastes better that's not yeah do you think he do you think he's got like the yes he cares about them he does did he talk about how he like ends their lives he didn't I didn't ask I should have but he was going on a r I didn't want to interrupt I wanted to know if they did the you know No Country for Old Men bolt to the Head well right that apparently that's instantaneous like take yeah take the comparison right it like would you rather have your nose cut off your children taken away from you be stuffed in a cage for your life and pumped full of hormones and then be electrocuted or have your throat slit or would you rather run around in the field with your your family and then one day the lights just go out well one day the lights are going to go out anyway this is part of the thing they don't live very long on their own like they're kind of like dogs like I don't know what a cow's maximum age is what's what's the maximum age of a cow let's guess I'm going say 18 what do you think cuz that's like a golden retriever if you give him all the right food apparently I want I'm skeptical so if it goes average as C if it's going to be like wild cow maybe 15 16 years yeah but wild cows where are they so wild cows are an interesting thing because
domestic cattle is a completely different strain of cattle and when we let them go wild they become what we call scrub blls M and scrub Bulls are the most dangerous animal you can encounter in the Australian bush oh really yeah Asian buffalos are dangerous but scrub bulls will [ __ ] 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 and anything that comes in I've heard countless stories of men you know camping in the bush getting gored by scrub Bulls they're crazy looking too they develop all these weird colors and they look really cool never SE they they kind of like you know how pigs they go through a metamorphosis when they go feral do 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 their snout extends their their tusks grow their hair gets thicker they become bores 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 especially in the fatory Farms as well they're they're definitely not going to live much longer there are they because of the no well they kill them quicker too because they plump them up fast with antibiotics and they get them fat just more like chronically obese basically totally ill and that's the best stuff the best stuff is the super ill cow you got say 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 the it it's interesting so I don't know like when he's obviously killing the these cows right um but if if is he doing it right towards the end of the life then it seems like there's 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 the vet pulls out of [ __ ] crossbow or a gun or something right right cuz you go no there's a better way you can do this like have you not You' run out of injections or something like the the Greek for that euthanasia means good death there are better ways of doing it do you think it's better to use
a poison that you inject into their veins than a bolt to the brain my suspicion is is yes why slows down the heart you can't see them struggling in a in a sense of like they they don't exhibit features that look like they're they're in pain or they're fighting that heart slows down the brain slowly shuts down well you you'd expect them to you know to to resist in some certain way maybe 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 Our concern is blood yeah our concern is seeing trauma and so we're not seeing it's all internal you know poison kills you in a horrible way I mean the probably the last moments are probably deeply painful and very confusing where your body's shutting down or you're dying it's more of like a cultural thing that we don't want our pets shut rather than have injections we see it's less sck I don't want to shoot my pet I I don't want to see your head shot I mean God imagine seeing Carl get shot that' 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 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 like are morally valuable I love this uh thought experiment by the philosopher Tom Reagan he he asks you like imagine you're on a Lifeboat with let's say a 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 uh the golden retriever depends on who the person is I haven't met any yeah if it's Hitler and my dog Hitler's going for a swim you know well it's just do that right it's random default you know you do that but but let's be real yeah I throw I throw Hitler in 100% I'm going to kill Hitler with my bare hands then I'm going to throw them in the water 100% well all right it's not it's not Hill 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 Marshal it's some random golden retriever I love all golden retrievers I'm killing the Hitler over every [ __ ] golden retriever that's ever been born def 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 I went on a a date with this this girl in in London once and I asked her this thought experiment I said what would you do and then she said I I'd killed the golden retriever and 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 I'll kill a million of them and you kind of go like that's not that's not cool like and then one person starts disappointing you and lies to you and you're like I should have [ __ ] kept those dogs alive yeah well this it's just you and this dude and you live mean you have a bond with that guy forever you killed your dog for him exactly well this this girl I was on a date with she said she' kill an infinite number of Golden Retrievers because she was Catholic and I think an infinite number of of suffering in the ending of Life say that you say that you probably you get through like 50 you got made a real mistake yeah you'd probably shoot yourself if you watch him whimper on the ground in pain you'd 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 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 it's not going to be clear exactly how many as long as you pick not zero yeah I think everyone well minus a few people I think if someone says infinite something's gone wrong in they're thinking I think that's absurd well I think that's just them talking think that serious yeah there's no way you believe that there's no way you know what infinite golden retrievers like that's [ __ ] 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 yeah um and you know they they say I have to eat this much meat or maybe they're just eat meat and nothing else that's me and you s you you just eat meat yeah you you don't eat anything apart from meat a very little other than meat okay this is good right yeah I eat fruit and I eat meat okay and occasionally I'll eat something else else I'll have spaghetti or a sandwich every now and then but for the most part eat mostly meat so th those people who like yourself who maybe it's uh like 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 but I think when 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 uh reconsider and I think given the uh if you pick a number then you have to you have to make a call on that I think it's not a zero some game I I I don't think it's uh morally reprehensible to eat meat but I do know that an animal has to die yeah um what I've 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 and uh so I I'd watched too many of these ped documentaries I'd seen too many things about factory farming I was like this is disgusting it would freak me out and I was like okay I either have to come to grips of 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 had tried being a vegetarian for a brief amount of time in my life when I was like uh I guess I was 18 I was when I was fighting I was I was having a really hard time cuz I was still growing I was having a really hard time making a lower weight class that I was competing in and there was other people in my team that were competing in the higher weight class and it was 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 there different vegetarian world no one knew [ __ ] so I was just eating salads and I felt like I felt terrible yeah felt terrible and then uh I had a conversation with my instructor and he was just like you're just getting bigger you need to move up yeah and I started eating meat immediately I gained 10 PBS in like three weeks I 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 densed 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 yeah um this but I think of hunting as I'm dipping my toe into the natural world and I'm going out into the wild where these things live they're they're not in a cage why you what's that is it a bow a crossbow I use a bow uh when I first started I started using a rifle I shot that mu deer that sits on the table that was the first deer that I ever shot oh Jesus that was in 2012 I'll I'll look this way um and I decided when I was eating that mu deer it's all on film we did it for a television show called meat eater my friend Stephen ryell host and um when I was eating that deer by the fire I was like this is what I'm doing forever I'm doing this it was it like it ignited parts of my DNA it gave me an understanding of the cycle of Life instant 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 you showing dead fish on your Instagram if 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 up a dead deer people kind of freak out yeah I bet hold up a dead bear people go [ __ ] crazy well okay here here's a couple of things right so I think you're probably well you speaks to your own experience right that you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it Taps into our history when you uh when you hunt especially with a bow like 10,000 years
ago the first bows come about and you know there's imagine it was thrilling for them now and it's it's then and it's thrilling still now to do it same reason like paintball or like laser tag and and War can be fun right people enjoy it people going off the first world war thought it was a great sport sure um maybe it it Taps even deeper than that because it's the food we were eating in in the early days I think the the worry okay let's think about the ethics though right so I I think it's it's not comparable to factory farming again like this this this is this is split in hairs really in compar I don't think we even have to compare these things we just talk about the merits of or the the the ethics of what we're doing so two things come to mind right the 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 a spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a a bullet to the back of the head a crossbow and a and a bow are going to be somewhere between them and so they're going to be better ways to hunt than not 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 would you Age hunting with guns is absolutely the most effective way okay yeah 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 hundreds of hours at 74 yards just grouping into this small area about the size of a grapefruit are you good you pretty yeah I'm very good practice a lot when you hunt uh it's like elk yeah when you hunt elk do you you you know do you do you kill the animal without much suffering would you say well the last one that I killed died in 10 seconds he was dead in 10 seconds he literally ran up to the top of a hill it took like not even 10 seconds it 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 they you either hit them in the heart or you hit them through both lungs
if they're alive for 30 seconds it's a lot generally but there's been 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 you try to get a second arrow and to them to take them out any 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 be the dire of starvation they'll freeze to death or more likely they'll get eaten by cats well okay so here's here's where I agree with you right is that when people eat again you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming but I think this is you know the philosopher Arthur shophow said that um on Earth humans are the devils and animals are the tortured Souls right that that Rings Truth for me right this this is the worst thing we could have done in terms of like production of our food in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating so I 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 right 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 of the fact that this is you're you're paying a supermarket hit man okay is it you not a murderer if you hire someone to get murdered it seems like you're a murderer seems like you'd go to jail as a murderer it's the same thing if you go to the grocery store and you buy a T-bone and steak Yeah you paid a supermarket Hitman he just assumed you were going to pay him so he did the work before he got the money from you yeah and like you wanted that cow dead right pschological like ation or like there the same reason why RAF bombers will drop a bomb on a clouded City but not go down there and shoot a mother on a child right but even though they are 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 like if you're just operating a little PS4 or PS5 controller and you're
zooming some drone I mean 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 [ __ ] wild cuz that's the best way to do it you get these kids that are you're playing Call of Duty eight 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 and in their head when they lay in bed at night they know that well it seems like it's an interesting one right we just did a the 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 you're using guns than when it's hand-to-hand combat and even in the second world war like um fieldwork showed that it was about a little more complic 20 or 30% of people were actually Jo weap 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 but there's a that's the view how but how nutty is that what what does that feel like when you're a Nevada and you're operating something that's in Iraq or wherever in Yemen and you're 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 their PTSD you find an article on it because there was something that I'd 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 and 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 a it's in comparison to somewhere yeah somewhere in compar it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 plus percent some estimations are 90% of Civ it's hard to tell cuz what'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 they'll give you a a lower
number than probably Israel and then the people that were attacked will give you a higher number than Israel and so you have to sort this out like like a good example is um remember the New York Times reported that the um Israelis had blew up a hospital M and it was on the front page of the New York time New York Times and they had been told that you know 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 according like the UN and stuff are pretty damn High though oh they're horrible no no no the no I'm yeah but this specific example one specific example numbers are the numbers are terrifying it's but just looking at from an article uh New York Times about they're like PTSD and what not this was like just because they're 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 of the some left the operations floor in tears others attempted suicide and the military failed to realize the full impact despite hundreds of missions Captain larsson's personal file Under The Heading combat service only offers a single word none drone crew members said in interviews that while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground it still carves deep scars in many ways it's more intense said Neil uh shunan a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019 uh 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 you see the remorse and 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 so it's a that's awful
horrific very intense thing yeah but it it's it's akin to buying a steak in the store well I think like a weird way the things that are are relevant morally speaking the same things there yeah like it's do you eat only vegetables yeah it like a it's a it it's a vegan diet well it's a you know it's like a 98 or 97% especially when traveling and stuff when you can't seem to find seem to find things I think the perception is and there's a lot of gotcha stuff right in terms of um when people say they've got vegetarian or vegan diets the idea that they're going to be eliminating suffering entirely from their diets it's impossible that's not what anyone thinks is happening you hear like crop death arguments and stuff like this right which sure we don't tread much water monocrop agriculture which is a horrific loss of life like 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 yeah and then the monocrop agriculture kills the environment because it destroys the top soil the top soil is destroyed and like most farms in this country we have to por [ __ ] 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 there's all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this I don't know any um serious like philosopher of 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 there are going to be better ways to do it than not but you know often get asked about like tofu um so or like uh our soy production so 77% of global soy production goes towards feeding non-human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating uh 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 so 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 here's I think an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side 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 often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non-animal rights such as the catholicos 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 let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case that wouldn't get God 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 um 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals let's assume 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 in politics like the founding father 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 right and I think God probably like they're never going to do that they're never stick all the chickens in a [ __ ] warehouse and stack them on yep we will if you let us get away with it and then we develop laws which say you can't film those things yeah yeah I there's a problem with animal intelligence right animals are sensient they're they're they they have instincts they they love they're young there's also a problem with plant intelligence and plant intelligence I think the emerging science 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 it's not how many I of Interest how many did you pick in terms of like how many golden retrievers you were going to Chuck out the boat until you Chuck the human being out depends on the person I can't say if it's just a random person you don't know them any person walking down the street in Austin today he's talking like tens hundreds no thousands he's talking no like fewer yeah like less than 10 I'm not going to kill 20 dogs for some dude
I don't know you me f depends on me I don't know man I love my dog so much I I shouldn't pick a golden retriever that's can't it's like I can't even if I get upset at him I feel bad um it'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'd kill Hitler over a snake yeah but anyway think no I probably wouldn't I'd probably bring him back so people could study him I think if I could was sure that I could capture him alive and and get him in front of the press just to see to what the [ __ ] happened yeah how the [ __ ] did you do this like what what com I don't goddamn Norman you should give me money for this Norman oler we've been talking about his book uh over and over again the past couple weeks yes since he's been here but Hitler was cranked up on all kinds of [ __ ] and so the Nazis they were all on methamphetamines Hitler was on oxycodone apparently yeah thinking he could live long he was worried he was going to die right vegetarian diet to make sure he could I just finished not just vegetarian but terrible vegetarian diet ate mostly like bread and sugar yeah yeah you've got to do it right but he certainly didn't I've just finished Ian Kershaw's book on Hitler it's like a over a thousand Pages it's a real good read like 40h hour read um so if you're interested in like you got to be careful leaving those around your house you I I I bought it my dad for his birthday and he was there in the restaurant showing it's a real problem like you you can't do that you do you know um what we're talking about with animal intelligence and and and plant intelligence and human intelligence like yeah for for sure the way we're doing it now is wrong I think we would all agree to that um if 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 gonna have predators everywhere and Because unless you do have predators everywhere you're GNA have car accidents that you would never imagine train accidents you there's a guy Nam um uh [ __ ] why am I blanking on his name uh American coyote Dan Flores Dan Flores uh
this I forget where is your professor out of he studies the history of animals and uh Dan Flores had he wrote a paper called I think it's called buffalo ecology something what was it Buffalo diplomacy Buffalo ecology he thinks that's it genius guy he thinks the reason why when they came across the Great Plains and there was millions and millions of Buffalo he thinks the reason why is because 90% of the Native Americans were killed by the plague oh wow this is his his thought like because the earliest settlers in the 1400s the 1500 they didn't see that many Buffalo yeah 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 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 eat their meat and then nomadically travel with them and they kept their population in check when 90% of Native Americans were dead Dan Flores believed that led to this insane overpopulation problem of Buffalo where you see millions of them in fields cuz that doesn't exist anywhere in nature unless there's a problem yeah and that problem is a lack of predators and the Predators at that time being the Native American Hunter yeah I think if if you go like if you take it to its logical conclusion then we can't even on The View which which I hold which is like hedonistic utilitarianism the idea that the moral 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 like a sort of Mayhem well it's not just that you would have to control their population somehow you'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 and the like right but to what length when do you how many do you let breed how many do you you have to have population control wildli biologists let me explain something about hunting areas right so like if you're going to go to this place in
Montana where we went and Hunt hunted mule deer Wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas and they know roughly the exact amount of deer that are in this area right okay and they know them they they have a less accurate number of predators particularly stealthy Predators like Mountain liines pretty good with Wolves but even then in in high density areas very difficult to really fill figure it out but 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 um 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 acers and in that there are x amount of thousands of deer and you will allow 100 Hunters into that area and out of those 100 Hunters there'll be maybe a 10 to 15% success rate right right so you are thinking that these hunters will trim 10 deer 20 deer whatever it is for this partic and there's a bunch of different areas like this all over the country but they're all tightly managed and 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 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's called an over-the-counter tag because these are areas with they're difficult to get to there's 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 10 miles in you camp out you live under the stars and you get your food yeah and 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 r or you're going to bring in mountain lions and mountain lions can't kill Buffalo so 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 [ __ ] 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 NB like a new book just as for Animals she she argues that like these things as you say are a problem you can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control and she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and and keeps down populations in like animal sanctuaries if you like and I was thinking recently like there's a lot of arguments for human like reparations like when a full group is harmed by another group that we think that they're owed something um whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in in North West Africa you know we think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should write that wrong just not don't know the you know the details don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher but let's say that's a view that people hold as they do well 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 now it 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 says the argument to reduce it as much as possible if that ends up being like having to add predators to a sort of um 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 a 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 I don't because they're they're going to make all these animals suffer and if you get killed by wolves oh that's a rough one that's a rough the worst is killed by bears because they just eat you they just hold you down and start pulling you apart like a salmon bet so if we want to really eliminate suffering perhaps we should eliminate all of the Predators or just put them in zoos where they'll suffer but they're evil and then because 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 you're 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 will remember them and I can erase the thing I did from my memory you might still think what I did was wrong because that person saw themselves as having a future had projects they were working on and I stopped their flourishing in some sense like that unless they're Hitler unless they're Hitler it's a good one to stop but again you probably would want to bring them back and then when it comes to non-human animals the same's 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 I think the same's true of the creatures which are hunted or 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 one of the things that so you check the like how do you know the age of you can see you could tell by the way they look they they get bigger their their head looks different their face looks different live for what's the I've killed them that are 11
years old that's really old really old he probably his teeth were all worn down 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 uh 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 huge mountain line uh but I've seen other Predators you see a lot of coyotes and they do spot wolves there too there's Bears there we see bears but that death is so much worse than a hunter's death yeah most probably yeah and 100% And it's going to happen they're not living forever and what I'm doing is I'm dipping my toe into the wild world and through considerable effort bringing back meat yeah to bring this back to like uh you know that fundamental question we began with like on the whole is existence a good thing should we be happy and pleased with this world and it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or you know especially forced to do these things like if we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that again like this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good God would do so 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 lines for hundreds of thousands of years but it's the process which according to Christians 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 and a perfectly good God 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 what did they say that The Optimist says this is the best possible world and the pessimist hopes it's not the case I think even the evils of this world exist to incite outrage and for us to do better I I think this 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 and Yeah that's the that's us right not but that's us and animals that's the reason why the [ __ ] elk is 900 lbs and built like a super athlete it's because it has to get the [ __ ] away from Mountain lines if it didn't it would never look like that yeah it would never become an elk it would not become this Majestic thing with horns growing out of its [ __ ] 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 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 them their bones scattered all over the place so they've been killed and ripped apart yeah I mean I thought there's still a sense in which the like doing good like when a a non-human animal like sacrifices himself for their young or something like it like there has to be something they're going towards in order for it to be good in the same way fre better at being elk to avoid that and that what that's what leads to Natural SE like uh like 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 nonhuman animal 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 it doesn't have this inner chat it doesn't choose reflect and there's going to be a lot of non-human animals which that's the case for so that sort of like character development theodicy or defense won't work for them like especially if they're you know that 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 to develop like their individual lives seem like they're 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 he could have made that could have made that the case but unless God is truly
all knowing and us with our primate minds are trying to 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 animal well 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 that's when it really becomes a problem like the passenger pigeon disappeared why cuz 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 in 4 Ines 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 of years because it's a successful form same as sharks successful form doesn't need to evolve human 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 separated oursel from the natural world so we're 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 our our view of our perspective of the world but we're still in the natural world we're still beasts right there's no distinction between when you go hunting you really get a sense of that you really understand you're you're in the natural world yeah well here here's the thought right which is in terms of like cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and 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 Ong the same lines when I spoke to him and I think in that case you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words or you know 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 so 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 with this hypothesis here's the evidence we have against it but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem so 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 the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that we are looking for for meaning of like uh Shakespeare wouldn't be right for someone English to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quoting Shakespeare so you'll have to excuse me Shakespeare says if essentially if there's no God then life is like a tale told by an idiot it signifies nothing oo like there's so amazing think that guy was so good so many years ago like if uh so the agnostic life is like this and a lot of my thought here comes from Albert Kimu which everyone should should read he says that um 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 I.E one day you're going about your life Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and you sort of start to think like what's the point of all this what's the meaning it almost seems like it is a tale told by an idiot right and like maybe it isn't meaningful I'm
not a part of this big plan and and you sort of at 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 belief in God but then have this honest search for finding meaning a moral value like there's a this isn't the kind of notion of the Absurd that physicists keep talking about like again this is when you know I won't talk about physics and sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy and he sort of getting a little bit frustrated like you've 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 or 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 live for 13 billion years it doesn't seem to have any effect on how more meaningful your life is your life still lacks that fundamental purpose so like how big you are and how long you last I don't think you have an in complex if you were the universe Dr Manhattan same with the Multiverse or like simulation Theory right if I've just been watching this um on the over here the the Umbrella Academy I was watching that on the FL oh yeah my daughter loves that show yeah it sound like a burn then but no she loves it it is good anyway like they're in like a Multiverse and their lives like they're still going about their lives like they matter or imagine we're in a simulation it would like imagine 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 thing we need to be doing isn't just like down with this new atheism that's flippant and uh doesn't offer us any like can't solve these big problems and LAX answers to the fundamental questions and it isn't just to gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it but it's to try and like create ourselves a a patchwork uh like blanket to keep us warm in the in the void of meaninglessness right well we inherently
know that it feels better to be a good person we know it you know it feels better to have good friends and good community and be someone that people can rely on and count on we know like there's a general direction that makes us feel good to go in that way and I think that's the 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 too caught up in religious dogmatism and we get too 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 and apparently an incredibly difficult language to to read and comprehend and to translate when you're going back to like ancient Hebrew you're trying to translate that into English like how much is lost there like what did these PE and also what where what was the original story where the [ __ ] did all this come from like who what was the the original guy that told what was the experience that he actually had we're guessing because of people I I used to say about the Bible it was just a joke I don't really mean this if you're a Bible fanatic that people are full of [ __ ] and that story sucks like that's all you have to do is look at it like people are full of [ __ ] 100% we know it's a fact The Greatest Story Ever Told you don't you don't well it's like listen the president of the United States was just on TV the other day lying this people are full of [ __ ] they lie all the time we know they lie we catch them lying did you have you seen the the Trump clip when he's asked about his favorite Bible verse have you seen that yeah what did he say can we Jamie are we allowed to get the what did he say it was I don't think he has one he doesn't have one he didn't come along with a but yeah um I would have said Ezekiel here's just to wrap up like the like the fining 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 we got to put our airphones on we hear Trump on gay rights you mention the Bible 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 uh verses are and why I wouldn't want to get into it because to me that's very personal you know when I talk about the Bible it's very personal so I don't want to get into vers I don't want to get into there's no verse that means a lot to you that you think about or sight the Bible means a lot to me but I don't want to get into specifics even to cite a verse that you like no I don't want to do that an Old Testament guy or a new testament guy uh probably I think it's just Inc Old Testament got to go old son new testament's been monkeyed with right even the New Testament it's all fascinating to me I am I am not a an anti-religious person I think I was when I was younger I was uh I went to Catholic school when I was a little boy and I decided that religion was [ __ ] because they were mean but that was just you know me being six uh but then as I I was raised by hippies but as I've gotten older I I kind of have a belief that the arrogance of atheism is just as bad as the arrogance of the religious zealot and that this whole thing is a massive mystery and to pretend that it's not is to we're we're we're going to hamstring all of these conversations we're going to put Shackles on all of our debate and 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 like I don't know how you view the world and the only way for me to find out how you view the world is for me to ask you and not berate you for your opinions but try try to like get it out of you like but what about this challenge you with other perspectives how does he feel about that where how did you like sometimes you can get very quickly to how deep a person's perspective on an issue is which just a couple of questions because you see their what they espouse what they say and and a lot of times that aligns with very particular ideologies whether it's right-wing or leftwing yeah and then you a couple of questions deep you know you start asking about opposing viewpoints and why do people think this way and do you think that perhaps it's this do you think it's perhap 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 we 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 we like to decide that we are correct and then we defend from that position instead of just looking at these ideas like I think one of the things that happened with atheism is that it did become like a philos 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 isn't exactly they were basically forming a new religion it was adorable it was adorable to see that these patterns of thinking just seem to be inherent to human beings yeah like the tribal cultural rituals tribal cultural philosophies their their their 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 uh church because you don't like going to that I actually like it I Church you just told me that the Bible one most boring stories it's not boring I didn't say it was boring are you one of the worst stories no no no I said people are full of [ __ ] and that story sucks oh the story s the story like the story of I used to do a joke about uh Noah and the Ark that if you told that I can't even do the same joke anymore but if you T told it to five you do the same joke
because I used to say [ __ ] okay if you tot to a uh I think I said uh a 5-year-old kid you know obviously with mental problems he's going to find holes in that story he's going to go wait a minute there's two of each animals animals other animals and you know the punch Lal I'm not that [ __ ] but this idea that we have about these stories I think is that they happen exactly as written and I I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about real events that took place a long time ago and were 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 you literally have people deciding what is going to be and not going to be in it so there's 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 well this is this is what's dangerous right and this is what's uh like not just confused but careless about some of this thinking when you go my team thinks this and I'm just going to I'm 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 um like conservative commentators like like Ben Shapiro think that like eating non-human animals is morally wrong but they you know they care 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 the 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 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 it's like take Peterson's view because we spoke about taking that leap of faith right after I had this ation with him he he tweeted like an hour later 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 well I think we see that in with people right people that don't have a meaningful life and just seek pleasure all the time are miserable CU they're missing they're missing that part of the equation meaning yeah that's essentially his view was like that he tried to pull them apart and afterwards he tweeted something like what uses happy us when we have mountains to move which is a nice Nan quote but it's a nice bumper or something or fridge magnet but don't think we should live our lives by it I gave him 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'd go that's not the kind of meaning I thought that's not what I had in mind I don't want that kind of meaning but this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter and they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure like that's a that's a be for disaster like you you can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose and meaning you know this is you have to 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 like he offers arguments let's take Peterson for an 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 in the US for example the uh Southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s but your population's growing it's disappearing in 2001 in the UK we had 70% of people ident identifying as Christian now it's less than half and you're about that now in the in the US you're just 23 years behind and it's the same Trend religion's disappearing and it needs to evolve philosophically you
need a proper philosophical defense of it people like Bill Craig do a good job I don't see 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 well 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 T evangelists these people that fill out Arenas and they fly around in private jets and drive around in rolls-royces and and and brag about their stuff yeah you know I told one tell Tel evangelist saying he has a private check because it it means he's closer to God and God can hear his prayers quicker one of the guys what was that guy's name Richard Copeland is that his name the guy that was confronting he was confronted by this woman that was asking him cuz she had heard that he said that he didn't want to fly commercial cuz then he would be flying with demons uh and so she says to him like do you think that the passengers and commercial airlines are listen to this K copel here Kenneth Copeland here put your put youres on Commercial 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 why do you think that no no listen to me just a second course 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 to me isn't it true that you want to fly commercial so that you can fly in luxury how 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 listen I paid you kind of caught me off guard here okay certainly well look at eyes come out here I'd like to give you a chance to to catch your breath and and have a conversation we don't want to we don't want to catch off guard I Love Inside Edition you got to get this now hey you listening to me my my why thanks
Inside Edition is oh yeah now thank you Lord help me just let me let me pray this well let me let me just ask you a really simple question better A lot of people think it's Unbecoming 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 let's see this the latest figure just came out uh I don't trust any men with fingernails like people to the Lord Jesus Christ 122 people let me give you another example 122 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 Tyler Perry and I didn't pay anywhere Tyler is 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 barely a human I want to get to the demons because people are very concerned about that com go chance here Inside Edition I love your eyes and uh God here's what happened we flew in 21 days 70 hours 40,000 miles touched five continents and preached face to face personally with 125,000 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 God but principalities and powers can you explain what you meant by that that by that term then just 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 do you think that people that fly commercial are demons
you give me a chance to talk sweetheart I'll explain this to you but it's a Biblical thing it's a spiritual thing it doesn't have anything to do with people people I love people Jesus loves people okay we can kill it we get it he's like he's been possessed by a demon isn't it to that his eyes when he like jumps up for defense so that's part of the problem that we have with religion in this country because we have factory farming religion too they skipped all the verses about like selling all you stuff giving it to the poor not fitting through the eye of a needle yeah he skipped everything right he went right to private jat Tyler Per G me such a great deal he's such a great guy God you can tell that he's he's just fumbling isn't he just trying to find anything the eyes on that guy like good Lord if I wanted to if you wanted to show me like an AI generated vision of a guy who looks like he's possessed H wild wild behind the eye maybe it's wild with the Lord I think uh here's um here's something I think the atheist does need to ConEd though right I was just thinking about it as what look those [ __ ] eyes look at those [ __ ] eyes Jesus that would scare the [ __ ] out of me I think the theists if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God right and we talking about all this evil which we've just explored maybe we can jump and bring the Multiverse in on this as well is that you know if you're a up at the University of Oklahoma which it's not too far from here is it it's like five or six hours Oklahoma University Eugene nagasa working there has 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 like 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 uh traditional Christianity so when IUN 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 right or mixed or maybe I have to be pessimistic I think this is the like this is the the difficulty of it all is that again to give another quote from Kimu that I love he says um I've always felt as if I was
living on the high seas threatened at the height of Royal happiness right so you're in this moment where you think actually my life's pretty good and then you remember all of the 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 or and that's that this is I mentioned like that notion of the Absurd from it's nagle's idea like I wish I was bigger and that I I last longer maybe that resonates with few people maybe that's just Thomas Nagel is that right the the real problem that of the Absurd and the meaningless of life for us as agnostics and atheists is we desire or want meaning from the world but the world sits there cold dark and empty it doesn't respond to us it's like having it's worse than having a a parent that doesn't care about you or a 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 um Michael house 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 and you sort of feel that and you go like all right that is the the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world right but that I think is Kimu says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide they kid themselves and think that that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis they don't want to feel that feeling like it's a really uncomfortable feeling you know there's uh there's three great books by Kimu which I highly recommend one The Outsider or the stranger a lot of high school students read this book and the main character starts off his his mom's just dies and he doesn't care and then he goes to the beach and just shoots some 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's indifference he doesn't like that's what
it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world in his next in one of his next books the the fall the characters trying to find meaning or or better put trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins again is I think this is a huge problem for ICS 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 like we have to live with it I think as someone who's never embraced Christianity I have no idea what that's like what a gift that is to do something bad and be forgiven by God from it and so seems like a great life hack yeah it does can I push back on this idea that the world's meaningless though yeah this cold and meaningless and uncaring well if you're a human being all you truly know is human experiences right you 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 there'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 a fun time with friends a vacation uh things that you like to do for a living philosophical Pursuits I'm sure in your what all kinds of different things people find meaning in and they they enjo 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 no you one of the things that makes meaning so wonderful when you do find it in world is that so much of life feels like there's no meaning 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 your whatever you do for a living that's unusually rewarding you you are one of the lucky people that's on the right frequency and that's that frequency is 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 that 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 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 I think that's exactly right but it's a different kind of meaning to the to the one which the world ultimately lacks so like call one meaning with the like an uppercase M like meaning with a capital M yeah yeah so if you mean the world or as human beings human beings as well like if God exists for the the abrahamic believer they believe that there's ultimate meaning a a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout their lives until 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 you are you you are you in the way with 100% you are you 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 depends like again when you strip away all of these judeo-christian principles we're left trying to find worthwhile meanings to non-w worthwhile ones so let's say you said the meaning of your life Joe was like uh 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 but imagine 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 true 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 there's a problem 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 right the reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right and you're doing something which I'm not willing to concede that it doesn't have meaning what the world doesn't have meaning oh like as a whole yeah I think it's moving in a in a direction and I 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 and you visited Earth I've said this before so I apologize people have heard it and you looked at us you would say well what does this thing do well it makes better things it's all does makes sense that's all they do and everything that's hardwired into people uh just think about the stupid things that are hardwired into people like materialism like you can't keep these things why why are you piling up things and you're 80 years old why you buying why is Kenneth copelan buying a Jet right what what is it well materialism forces Innovation because you always want the latest and the greatest things it's a it's a 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 I mean it's it's it's few every 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 9 minutes they just you're not sponsored by Samsung no but they just it was just a new article that just came out that they were uh talking about in terms of uh 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 that's what I think we're here for I want to separate like the meaning though there from like the thing we do
right there's a there's Define meaning well in in the thing that you're you're giving there it's a like it's called like the isort fallacy right it is the case that certain things do this thing so they ought to be doing it more so like 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 the meaning or the purpose of them or their Natures isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past right so when 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 right that's it's imposed from elsewhere like it's quite odd to think about what it would be like outside of religious beliefs because that's the problem of agnostic ISM right it's it's an absence or better put I keep saying that it's the world is meaningless what I really mean is it's seemingly meaningless like it's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be like 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 the the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is I think as you mentioned earlier like you're quite a fan of these like pantheistic views where the world is moving towards like a purposeful end which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and and the like like so if you hold that forew then yeah it looks like life can have a meaning if the there is a Consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with then yeah if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process and it can 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 that is the view right hence why embrace the agnosticism it seems like meaning is a very human Centric concept like that meaning to us means that something makes sense that it's Noble and ethical and moral and it's the right way it's the most intelligent way to advance and and and
exist and that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning too but I would push back on the whole thing if aliens came and found primitive man just eating berries yeah um it depends on how primitive right like even if you discover chimpanzees in the Congo and you go and and study them like that uh chimp Nation documentary on Netflix they they have a very interesting social structure they they have alpha males and they have bonds between the other males and they have neighboring tribes they fight over resources yeah like you'd be fascinated and if you went further ahead a few million years and how that they've developed tools and now they figured out how to skin animals and throw Spears you'd be like oh I see where this is going like their meaning is to continue getting better at this then they develop metal energy then they they figure out combustion engines how to harness electricity and like whoa okay now we're cooking the these things have a meaning it's just all the the chaos to us because we're personally attached to other human beings and we see all the the the terrible things that are happening all over the world and not just terrible for you know 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 [ __ ] insane and and you would say well this thing is making a better version of itself it's going to make an artificial life and it's it's probably going to happen within our lifetime and that might be 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 then continue to do so and it will eventually have the UN unimaginable power to harness every single element that exists in the universe yeah this View's pretty close to I think you've had it on the show before Philip Goff who's my colleague at Durham his um currently defending a view just like this right 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 um 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 it come like the meaning there for for goth would be something like the world is in a better State of Affairs than what it was before and 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 on this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be well let me push back against that because what about Buddhist monks that spend their entire life celibate just medit ating in a room what what are they are they is their experience less meaningful they're aing here's the they're actually communicating with what they believe is God my this they weren't the people I had in mind when I said people sat on their ass doing nothing well they are sitting on their ass doing nothing though yeah okay I'll bite the bullet I'll say like there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a buest monks out on your ass doing doing nothing although here's the value of what they are doing right some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world which which is a unified field of Consciousness so hypothetically if something like Go's view of this fundamental Consciousness is right and the budus monks tap into this and they tell all of the mates in in the town and they all come to see it to be true and they all contribute towards it then that is Meaningful if 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 see that as being as meaningful as being an NHS worker or fighting you know fighting to defend your country or something like this I mean there's a classic versions of of stories right like the the King's son the wealthy Kid that never had to do
anything just sits around getting grapes fed to him like GH what a piece of [ __ ] you know like we know like we 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 yeah well or like when you've like kids right if if they're sat around doing nothing just playing video games something you go get outside stop we say stop wasting your life right there is something better for you to be doing something for you to contribute towards in 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 like philosophy of mind and Consciousness which is let's say like T you think you like 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 like this Consciousness there's this quali or being or experience people like shopen Hower say that because we don't know the inner nature of things and it's uh gayen strawson here at um 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 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 dec combination problem which goes something like this you 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 right 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 experienes 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 underlying everything how
does that big God like Godlike mind DEC combine into little Minds like why is my experience not your exper why is it here rather than there and it doesn't seem like although we might have some like knee-jerk reaction answer to that question like philosophically we can't draw the boundary like the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when I'm saying that the whole thing is let let's explore it like what would be the reasons why we would have individual experiences and a collective Consciousness you could have reasons for it as in like let's say what would be the benefits of having individual experiences there could be benefit benefits and there could be reasons for it like in terms of let's let's paint this pantheistic picture of of again the the reason and and the goal of the universe in life like if I see myself as here rather than there you know it's May perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the the value of it as an individual you know actually TR to think about it I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart um 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 they just want to buy private jets and look after themselves May that's a better world think that it motivates activity it motivates movement and to have all these different Consciousness like competing with each other and comparing to each other that this motivates people when you meet people and your what is inspiration right when you meet someone you're inspired by them you it make literally makes you a better person it can make you better to see a great musician play it could you 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 and that all these different examples of people we admire like God I wish I was more like that guy try to be more like that person you know what I I used to say all the time aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid just actually become that guy like
it's possible right if you could fake it for a little while you know when you're 21 years old trying to pick up a girl aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get late drunk well why are you drunk you're drunk because you it loosens your inhibitions you become more Jolly you're fun be the person yeah okay the these are good reasons for perhaps why like 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 others if we're a part of this big Global mind well that competition has to exists all throughout nature right there's no way that the mountain lion and the deer can share our Consciousness because the deer be like don't eat me what the [ __ ] are you doing man why you eating me and they 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 there are no prey and then life does not Advance this get 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 like you say all able to do lots of different things um there's I I saw this uh 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 en public opinion of it you learn more about the brain it's is like his neuralink stuff and you'll 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 pans psychism 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 like me and you but in the the origin of the world and
the Big Bang it was just hydrogen so what hydrogen gets more and more complex until it gets gives rise to Consciousness and he sort of he gave this uh 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 the Hat when there's not really a rabbit or it's everywhere and I think given that you can hear me and see me now and you this is what day cart's Kito ergo sum is 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 you know been embraced by 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 boring terminological one so you can tell me just shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary but 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 like you can't have a unicorn with no horn on its head like uni coru one 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 so what we're seeing is people embracing I think this is Go'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 Virgin 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 Godlike at the essence of it all I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out like theisms on the decline
are he 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 copelan yeah 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 um or what what's the reason for it everything's separated I mean everything in the world right everything in this room is constructed of atoms and most of it is empty space but yet some of it is a table and some of it is a microphone and some of it is you and some of it is me so if you look fractally at what the observable universe that what we're aware of in terms of like what exists physically right we're we're aware of subatomic particles we don't understand them we're aware of them we know they blink in and out of exist spooky action in a 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 in 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 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 everything 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 yeah I I mean I think that seems to be that's the the general view I think that it's the Zeitgeist of the time it's the feeling of the age that we we think in in such a way but there is still that movement and this this is isn't my view I just want to shed light on like an alternative idea which is you know go back to Parmenides the presocratic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion that we live in this block Universe this big one thing and have you heard of Zeno's Paradox you've done this one before no no what's that Zeno's Paradox is great so you've got a got two like um see
these two cups here and to go from for 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 like there's always another halfway point 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 right right but theoretically if you 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 uh in every step of the way yeah every step of the way like um is it Hercules or somebody racing a turtle maybe it's not Hercules yeah you got it Achilles yeah Achilles there you go so the 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 halfway 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 so 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 like heroclitus 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 did but did they understand Evolution back then no not by long shot so did they no but not by long shots so so we should we still be listening to them it seems like seems like that's not true well take uh like Einstein tells us and this is let's do bring in the Multiverse for this too right Einstein told us that space is like stretchable right so it expands um so we have the moment of the big bang and the universe or existence as a whole we might say space and time um 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 one or two later so 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 PES infinitely there are worlds though and I think the real question we want to ask there are a bunch of these Multiverse views we spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy Mary Midgley clarifying these Concepts this is an idea my friend Ellie Robson 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 Shan Carol on the show he's fantastic and you I've spoken to him about the um his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics yeah you got views 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 but 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 you know little girls are born they're tortured for their whole lives they're executed and right there are universes 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 an 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 [ __ ] worried like this is a horrible State of Affairs if there are all of these worlds if you actually believe believe that they exist you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and and being all excited about existence like we should uh we should be really concerned but we're really concerned about things that we're
not even sure exist that are horrific yeah well you should be you know what I'm saying like that's existential angst to the power of a thousand there's a couple of problems there right well there's 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 the 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 count we concentrate on the negatives yeah you know to sit around and Ponder the Multiverse being an infinite number of evil civilizations destroying themselves and torturing themselves okay let's how is that any different than thinking about demons how how's it any you know how's it any different than thinking about you know the the the Puppet Masters of of the universe controlling all of our minds yeah it's like it's it's just mental masturbation like there's 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 like the trip that we're on right now is Earth 2025 Western Civilization pretty [ __ ] 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 you could sit around all day and think oh but in other multiverses people are just getting eaten by other people maybe well it's it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that like if you it's it just
means that you can't when you contemplate all of existence think that it's an overall good thing so in that sense don't know we don't know what it is really don't know for the Multiverse the sure the there's so there's there's probably an infinite number of multi if if the Multiverse exists and if there's not a limited number of universes but it's an infinite number of universes it's probably an infinite number uses that are universes that are also [ __ ] 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 if we know that there's Stellar nurseries we know that you know how planets get born and stars and we we're very aware there's this process going on why would we assume this process is completed and perfected maybe this process is also moving in a in a better Direction constantly just like human life is just like human civilization is maybe that's something that exists every 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 let's just let's let's pretend it's it's true right and so you've got infinite pleasure happiness and infinite suffering and pain so I think once you do you you minus one from the other you've got a neutral set of existence like let's just let let's say this so on balance it's about the same so if if you're a a pantheist and you believe in the god of uh the Multiverse if you Embrace Multiverse theism then you can't believe that God is good in the same way there's also a problem which is you 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 you might think that explain that again say that again well you might think that like some people say uh 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 theory is true 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 you can't change the overall value of existence I still think and I'm with you on this I'm I'm I'm sort of following the the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out F but you know 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 and the world it seems like that's what our job is yeah it seems like get what you keep referring to as meaning that's where we get meaning yeah I think that's fine there's there's other problems though that seem to fall out of this as well right which is like we have uh a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual subjective conscious Minds you know when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today as the same person born like 31 years ago and the same person and the halfway point between that again to go back to Zeno like how's the 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 your stream of Consciousness reemerges or if it was yeah like if you if you say Joe Rogan is that stream of Consciousness that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now right and that stops because you drift off that would mean your stream of Consciousness has ended think of it like sleep when you go into like um en Ren sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences let's say you would die according to that view or the reviews and philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity Joe Rogan is the person that believes I know that uh that Marshall is golden retriever is fantastic and that I don't know like that Consciousness is the fundamental
nature of stuff but then if I would to strip those beliefs away from you the psychological continuity of you would say Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore cuz I don't exist anymore yeah I get get you that drifting off thing doesn't make sense to me CU drifting off is just a failure to connect yeah but you're still conscious it's not like I'm dead like everything goes black and I I don't know anything I'm thinking about other things my stream of conscious just just stop paying attention to you when I if I dripped off I never drift off entirely I to SLE you having yeah but when you sleep you have it right yeah but when you sleep you dream like 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 oh that's good that that will do right but what is going on like why do we have such vivid dreams like what is going on with with Consciousness in in regards to REM sleep we don't totally understand that we don't really know what that is it's a bit of a even then it might seem like a bit of a problem right take out like cop and paste teleportation to really put it out there you know I copy all of the the parts of you I destroy them and recreate them elsewhere right like Star Trek yeah the Star Trek's I don't know much star it's different it's different on Star Trek I don't it's not copying this sounds so fuing nerdy yeah I'm really embarrassed well it's not copy and paste but it's like they they take you and they beam you to another planet you don't ex here anymore you exist over there but some nerd told me that when they're being beam you like start yeah or I shouldn't 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 um teleport cut and paste no it's not cut oh it's cut it's cut and paste here okay so it would be cut and paste I copy you I recreate you be copy and paste if I made another Joe Rogan and then we've got the problem that sort of Paul Rudd has in that Netflix show which is great uh living with yourself have you seen that oh no I haven't is he a clone of himself yeah he he that you can't give that power dictators like if you can like yeah you know when I was
talking to KW and he was talking about downloading Consciousness into computers I'm like what's to stop someone from doing that a thousand times what's to stop someone from making an army of Donald Trumps like how you can't you can't stop if you could do it once you could keep doing it going especially as technology advances oh it's it's a gold the the Paul red one he they recreate him but as a better version of himself to all of his friends want to hang out with the other one his wife wants to be with them yeah no he just kill himself he's already here I wonder if he shot himself in the head he would just be that other guy in in Star Trek what happens is you carry on having experiences they be me someone told me there's an episode where you see what it's like to be teleported and 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 right but on the copy and cut and paste version it would be that second well it is interesting question because if 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 they this bizarre vessel that can no longer communicate and then then we'll realize like oh we [ __ ] up we got to go find out where that guy's Consciousness got dropped off along the journey I think it probably does get dropped off it probably does it needs the same capacity that to begin with you you're probably an antenna for Consciousness an antenna for it yeah you're probably you're 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 cuz I've I've been unpacking like philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these views right what's your motivation for like I'm not sure if this is your view but even like entertaining it right it might seem like a they call them like Just So Stories right in philosophy right you can tell a about what it might be but why take that tale you're telling seriously um 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 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 Mel together and I think the individual the 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 and 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 yeah the worst they can do to you in prison is put you in solitary confinement yeah I couldn't think of uh much worse it's we're social animals right so we do we do look for that but that's still something you need something 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 but 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 mo 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 psychedelic experiences that we're all sharing some sort of Consciousness some very bizarre connection that we don't totally understand and that um the biological vehicle that we have that carries around the soul has these motivations and you will battle with these motivations order to do the greater good there a parallel with religious experience I think so I think most religious experiences have their root in psychedelic experiences have their root like even the people like Paul on his road to Damascus or Saul 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 tryptamine H if you think about burning the bush right and that's one of the ways that they consume psychedelic drugs is they burn them and the acacia tree is very rich in dimethyl tryptamine which is a very potent um psychedelic drug and there's there's countless uh depictions of uh psilocybin mushrooms uh both in in ancient Egypt and in cultures all over the world and there's mushroom ritual that occurred there's there's the sacred Mushroom in the Bible John Marco allegro's book about the Dead Sea Scrolls where he thought that the entire Christian religion had its Origins and fertility rituals and and uh psychedelic mushroom therapy that they were all having these rituals and consuming these mushrooms that's the ucini Mysteries that they all got together and drank some sort of a potion the the cookie on that was a psychedelic potion and they they devised democracy and they figured out all sorts of very unusual philosophies from from these psychedelic experiences yeah do you think then and what makes you think that on the one case let's say someone takes a drug and they think that there's a fundamental conscious unifying mind behind the cosmos right that's person a person B has it and they see like the Easter 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 not more reasonable I think each 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 uh you know loss of job loss of family and you have this
experience and you just freak the [ __ ] out which can happen too it seems that people have those experiences perhaps without those obvious triggers as well though right in the literature I do U work with the center for inner experience at Durham University some cool work from Jules Evans on this um 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 um do you remember what they took no not off the top of my head they say that uh a third of people who have long-term effects from the the psychedelics maybe you can pull this up uh Jamie uh Joel Evans the the guy's name a third of people have negative effects lasting longer than than a year one third of the entire group of 700 yeah and and one six have it for longer than three years and what were these effects like feeling the sunlight of on them and shaking with Terror uh seeing things that aren't there extreme forms of anxiety like what do they give these people acid well perhaps I'm not sure well this is the this is the thing I think I'm concerned with as a um we you know same kind of stuff when we're talking about free speech like who the [ __ ] not in favor of free speech every every wants Free Speech but people want tow the line differentes so we need a nu discuss about where that line is similarly with psychedelics what we see are writers um 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 that they don't mention the 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 Alistar Hardy Research Center asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them right um and the researchers were really surprised like alist 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 uh like the last 30 40 years or so I think this dat was collected in the ' 80s maybe and these people had they been diagnosed with any mental illnesses um the the data like they just asked for them to account to give their examples of these experiences but what's notable is first of all the phrase religious experience and it being negative is kind kind of like oxymoronic yeah we don't 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 to 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 Zer asrian J people who were Jewish we consider them significant minorities add all those groups together to the I think it's in between maybe one or two million people have had negative religious experiences and lay out the all the boring maths in a in a bucker had out the sh and say like look my my point there was if you're a Christian then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones 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 right but the 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 they're they're scared they're 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 who whose lives have fallen apart because of it I was read the study it was just a survey but I thought this was very interesting
based participants were actively still take psychedelic drugs in response 33 34 54.9% said yes and 246 40.5% 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 taken 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 in total 89. 7% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement this is good so are we taken from that 10% of people say that we shouldn't be so take that does it does make sense though that you know human beings vary so much biologically yeah and we vary so much psychologically you vary by what what your experiences have been on this planet up to the point where we take the drugs where you're at in your life yeah 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 what what biological problems you may have like the unique to yourself that makes you either allergic to these things or having an extreme response or a negative response what medications you may be taking that you don't know interfere with them we talked about that yesterday with proac MAO inhibitors uh there's a bunch of things that people take that will profoundly uh imp the way these drugs I'm I'm sure they probably screened for those at least some of them when they did those studies but I don't think there's anything in this life that's 100% good um I think uh most medications have side effects even ones that have been hugely beneficial and save countless lives yeah they have side effects and and some people are allergic to them and some people they just biologically don't don't agree with them I think that's the case with psychedelics as well well I think I I want to just make it clear right so that sort of formed a an overall view on it which which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've I've given there it's that I don't want to say that people ought not to be using them or stuff like that I think controlled circumstances oh no I don't think you are saying that yeah yeah so so I think that I don't I don't deny the positive things that come
from this no I think what you're saying is very important but 76 billion euron there right and we don't know what they're all doing yeah and everybody is coming into it with a [ __ ] different set of baggage yeah some some of that baggage you can't carry up the hill yeah I think it's important to differentiate as well and this happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion is um 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 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 but I still think that there is a there's a big amount of data there about these negative experiences which just aren't reported that aren't in the aren't in our date logs and I'd be interested to know just how many there are and you know how how severe they are when people sort of 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 push back from the Psychedelic community if they want to discuss it like all zealots you know they're psychedelic zealots I think um the that's the real problem is the illegal nature of them and the fact that I mean even just recently they denied uh FDA denied uh MDMA to be used in clinical settings for veterans they they have to do more tests with maps which is very unfortunate because that 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 psych logically deal with these things um 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 I just think is unreasonable and I think that the real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being governed by people that have never taken them yeah they don't really understand what we're even talking about you know and I think
that I'm not saying it's the Panacea for all but I'm saying it's a tool and I I think it's been a tremendous tool to a lot of individuals they've experienced some extreme changes of pers 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 um I think that can't denied and I think it's uh another thing that's here to help us evolve that's what I think I think that's good I I mean I'd like it to be the case that they were all like that right uh I I know a friend who's over in Australia who's uh you know abandoned his family after taking these and ran off with a 70-year-old man this guy's like 30 living in a mud hut now what was he like before that just like me me and you right now just like me are you sure just from the outside and all right but thing is it's not on the outside it's psychologically that's really like where how does how strong is that person's foundation in the world like well I had a a housemate when I was at University who was you know seemed from all measures grounded I 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 like 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 cuz he was just he' lost his mind wow like these um this hor I like to talked to that guy before all this [ __ ] went South and see how loony he was already I I knew a dude was a little bit Looney and then he delved very heavily into the world of psychedelics and he became schizophrenic I suspected he was already schizophrenic before that he was like he had it under containment uh but then he went nuts and just thought that everything was a scop and it was very strange very strange to talk to him you know thought everyone was a government agent very weird yeah just weird weird interface and he had slipped completely into the world of paranoia almost inexorably I don't know how You' pull the guy back to make him a normal person
again or and again I don't know if he was a normal person before I don't I don't you know I didn't know him that well but I know as well right um I think they're like every other tool you could Abus all tools you know I think um there's there's a a lack of understanding of what the again the doses the the correct way to consume it what the biological factors that your unique biology yeah 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 like if you're going to do this like you need to speak to Med like some kind again it's about legalization it's about SA fuse imagine being a shaman and uh you have to deal with these [ __ ] Wahoos taking a propeller plane over to your country just to see what you no idea what's wrong with these people you're dosing them up with iasa in the middle of the Jungle there's Jaguars and snakes out there these people are freaking out I bet their 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 [ __ ] Marbles and are cooked forever after that I don't know well it's it's the same kind of again this is back to like the point of philosophy getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes psychedelics or I mentioned Free Speech a moment ago right this is something which is like huge in our in our culture at the moment I was at your comedy club on uh on Monday seeing I've never seen kill Tony before but pretty fun yeah I really enjoyed it it was great fun and afterwards a few of guys in the in the bar afterwards were asking like what I'm talking to you about and um they started talking about Free Speech cuz I'm from the the obviously from the UK and wanted to know whether I supported K starma as if K starma was like this like this uh he like ma or something I was like there's no comparison he's like you're like Marxist there now they right I was like no it's not quite like that well we're terrified of everything going in that direction over here especially in Texas it's like
a um 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 just wild people play music drinking all the time that's Texas for real well I didn't think uh I didn't think it was going to be like this the people the people in Austin are some of the best people in the last five days that I've came across there it's a got a great Vibe this city has a very hopeful Vibe and that sucks for me when I go back to Los Angeles CU that was my home for so long but whenever I go back it does not feel like I do not feel that Vibe but is that me is that my you know are there people that are like thriving and loving LA right now with all the craziness and the chaos perhaps and maybe if I was a young man you know maybe if I was 25 again and I moved to LA again now I'd be like this is crazy I love this [ __ ] up place this is awesome maybe I would I probably would knowing me but the 57y old me is like uhuh that place is ruined yeah well it seems like I'm not sure if this happens in the UK as well especially with the like we've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and and stuff as of late those three poor girls girls that lost their lives in and Southport um you know and there's it's a it's a huge shame CU this is what people wanted to talk to me about the bar right that you know the big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to like Rob shops and like firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with Innocent women and children in there right like um 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 everyone just goes it's like George or Els 1984 or something like it's like uh you 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 like free speech isn't an absolute like right in the US or in Europe right there are all you can't um share you can't engage in like slander there laws against that you
can't share sexually 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 but it's a violation of privacy of the child and it's also endangers them yeah so it's against the law and so so it's not as simple as free speech that 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 IM so you don't want to include if you want to include images plays you can't do Sy you can't put 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 and 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 El right but I would I would say that those people are 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 especially when you read about the actual history of the war and you go hey maybe this could have been [ __ ] prevented you know like and if people weren't so blindly Allegiant to this idea of going over there and fighting yeah and my intuition is in that case that that that was the wrong way to to legislate against um but there are like when would you think Free Speech would be a good thing to stop well this is what what what would be the boundary this is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the the show because comedians are often uh you know the strongest Defenders of free speech right it's an interesting conversation is 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 uh ability to have conscious experiences the potential to flourish be happy and experience pleasure so 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 Stewart Mill argued that free speech should be allowed in every s 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 people famously say like so you can't shout fire in a crowded theater like 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 you 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 need it to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person okay so in that case you might go yes so it breaches the harm principle John Stewart Mill gives the example of um I think he's like a corn dealer and saying like you can write in a newspaper like the corn dealer is like a you know he's the worst he's exploiting us all 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 dealer's house and maybe that one's a little bit bit more tricky cuz there's more there the Harm's not as direct right 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 theater one of your comedians actually said uh I'd shout theer in a crowded fire I thought that's funny it's I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire if there was one but when you know when people are already setting fire to cars mosques hotels dragging people out of taxis and beating them up if you go online and say everyone come to this hotel let's burn it down I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as you get ining violence that's ining violence that's illegal so in that case I think but people people aren't saying that right we're just we're stuck in this these
sweeping Snappy statements which are it's like all Wells 1984 it's it's like uh 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're can carry on being stuck in this uh 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 crowded theater those are things are illegal he legislates again you can't do things that are illegal every you can have very controversial and unpopular opinions yeah and you're allowed to do that and that 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 include some things that a lot of people disagreed with like uh transgender athletes in sports criticizing them would get you banned um criticizing the lockdowns would get you banned um saying anything negative about the MRNA vaccines we get you banned and then we found out the FBI was involved and they were asking Twitter to censor posts and there was just so much [ __ ] 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 what's best for them what makes their life more convenient what makes their 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 tow the line and that is what got scary and that's what scar about government controlled speech yeah and I think that's what people are scared about in the UK when you see people saying things they shouldn't be saying but they're saying them on Facebook and they're getting arrested and they're dealing like 20 months in jail I haven't found an there might well be a more Fringe example I think it's like 20 maybe Jamie you can live F atck me here maybe up to about 30ish people have been prosecuted for stuff they've put online in the UK recently I think 3,000 have been arrested have they 3,000
arrested it's a it's a very very strange story right it's a it's like what that encompasses it's like too broad right is that what it is it got repeated over and over again for like the last few years a few people might have been arrested but there's a really egregious example recently of a video there's a video of a guy handing down a uh a sentence to a man who put something up on Facebook you you know I think I think bad behavior should be it should be rightfully like everyone in the community that agrees it's bad behavior they should shun that person they should not want shun them not want to connect with them not engage with them uh you know we've got the the right-wing [ __ ] in our country uh he's not in our country I think he's in a in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment Tommy Robinson who's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence right I'm not aware of of him I know the name but I don't I'm not aware of his history well same like we should shun people he tweeted something along the lines recently I'm going to paraphrase it and and JY I'd be really grateful if you could fat cheat this one because uh I might be liable if I get the he he essentially said that people in Palestine are um or the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists inbreds and parasites and given what's going on like there right now right I don't know anyone on the right who thinks who uses such obviously degrading language and that person's not being shed he's having more attention than ever he's he's got his record Outreach right now so that's not illegal what he said um I'm not sure if it's illegal did he say it online or did he say it in a statement somewhere he sh he said it on a on a tweet oh he said it on a tweet yeah he put it on a tweet uh replying to somebody at some point and again this as far as my knowledge that's ex that's roughly what was said I should say that it sucks that there's idiots that will agree with those kind of think well what what's going on this is an interesting you know I'm 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 yeah I agree and there's very very very
few people I won't have a conversation with but when we're continually platforming someone like him in a moment like this that does raise questions and Peterson ad him on once I think he's having on on again recently that's sort of thing the opposite of is peton aware of the things that he said i' I'd be surprised if do you have contact with Jordan yeah I'd be surprised if he you should tell him and see what he says about it I mean a quick when 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 like that's not true in terms of like the big Ser the big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things Rucker bregman so but is there an increase in violence well take uh Rook G bregman did you know the Utopia for realists guy he's a big proponent of universal basic incoming we should find out what Tommy Robinson's quote actually was before we go on so we don't get in trouble I know what he's got a lot of quotes that are apparently in I was trying to find that just try to just just Google that exact what he said I tried to and I wasn't coming up I'll show you what I was getting okay show us show us what you're getting just in Cas I don't know this um tweets from Cypress viewed 50 million times to day had something about Bo he's got a face you [ __ ] hate doesn't he he's got a face from peaky blindness you know by order of the peaky blindness he looks like that right uh so what do we got here what did he say that specific tweet this was something about a stabbing somewhere um what did it but what does he say again it doesn't even have does it say what he says no let me see if say something about the tweet and it has a partial quote I can see if I can I can dig it at the same time in look for it see if you can find it it says uh farri protesters have stabbed by m have been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke in a post to Reed 2.7 million views Stafford police said that two men had been hit by an object but no stabbings have been reported take um that's not what he was asking yeah that's not the same one find TW I'll just turning this on now as we're going the big Point here though
when we're looking at this is some stepen pink has 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 Rook bregman points out wonderfully in his book Utopia for realist 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 like they're less likely to be filling up our prisons Than People is this people that come over illegal as well as people that migrate legally is it all the same is it lumped in together it might be lumped in together that's in again we we fact check and 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 right yeah not not assimilating not adopting the English language not adopting the culture I'm going to have to to multitask no worries but I so 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 um attacks on people's lives and the current state in saying that even if he's completely wrong I'm not sure I'm going to be my my honest full my fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal I don't know if that kind of dehum it's like it's morally abhorent it's something we should we should reject and condemn but 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 you should know that that's not that's that's reasonable and what we should do is I mean the the age-old anecdote is you combat bad speech with good speech you know you combat bad speech with better speech you you have those people debate people that can lay things out yeah in a way that it makes a a very compelling argument that they're Incorrect and then people can
watch remember when I was a kid um my high school had a debate between Barney Frank who was a I don't remember I don't think he was a congressman at the time I don't know Massachusetts but he was like I think he was the first openly gay politician in the country and he was dating a guy from the Moral Majority who was this uh right-wing group at the time so this is like the 1980s and I was in high school and the guy had like an American flag pin on his lapel and and you know he spoke and said all of his stuff and and then Barney Frank kind of annihilated him and it was interesting for me it was fascinating to watch these two no one booed or his 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 I was like wow this is kind of cool like 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 should and should not be legal look Preposterous yeah mean I've I've interviewed a lot of people nowh near is the amount of people that you've managed to interview over the last how long have you've been doing this how many years 15 years 15 and like three or four times a week over 15 years as well so a hell of a lot um so I've been going like nine years but interviews like once a month or something right so nowhere near the amount of people and what 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 right 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 because I know you've been like there's been previous things right with people have
said that you've uh 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 yeah 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 I will look into that and I will try to look at it from their perspective as well I'll try to find out how did this person come to this conclusion why do they believe this what is the best way to approach this how do I do this Civ 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 Comba you know when people are involved in arguments and combative situations they get very tense and it's very difficult it becomes you against them it's like I try to like get as far away from that sort of sensibility as possible and just have the I just want to just tell me what you think and I'll try to Steelman it I'll try to like figure it out and then I'll say what I think yeah and I have to know where they stand first I have to really understand like why why they come to that conclusion I've had some disagreements with people about some pretty pretty important issues and that you you got to let that person Express themselves you got 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 [ __ ] hours which is crazy how long we've been going for so three hours now yeah three hours um yeah so it's like it's an interesting way to see how a person views the world yeah well I I think maybe so what we do to avoid like that problem because we're just doing philosophy as well well right we're just doing the philosophy podcast and we say to them we're just sticking with like this book or this paper and so we can we got like four researchers working on this and we know all the ins and outs of it like the back of our hand right so we can give like the audience member the the best anasis they can they can get without having to go and do it themselves when you're doing like such a broad project like this on so many
different topics yeah like uh you know that it's impossible right to be able to do that but I wonder if you think genuine interest and curious to 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 all like specialize in a different thing in order to analyze or do you think that having this General uh public facing podcast which has not an area of speciality with people talking about things which are you know um you know some cases dangerous right or like are important at least like is this is the situation better when we have lots of hosts on 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 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 what 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 I have no understanding of it at all and 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 yeah the thing about that is you're not going to get as many people to listen to it but you'll get millions of people listen to this conversation between you and me so the benefit of that is then dis ignite someone's curiosity and if we only do a cursory examination of whatever the subject is if I I really not qualified to really delve into it now this person is excited about it and they can expand check out your podcast or other podcast it's good for the
greater ecosystem of of podcast and just of General discourse so it's 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 I know and live in the middle of nowhere you should do whatever you feel like doing you know and I think that's the best message that I can give to people you should you should live your life in the the way that you want to live your life and if you are inspired and motivated and uh if something changes in the way you view the world based on a conversation that some people have on a podcast and 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 with 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 the job and start counting grass or if they I just want someone to give up and think it's all meaning no it's in like counting grass instead of helping it's not 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 I don't know why anybody chooses what they CH 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't be because so many people like art that I think is dog [ __ ] so 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 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 is 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 will be well no I'm I'm fundamentally here for for a reason which is that a lot of the things we're talking about especially um today are just like things that are underrepresented in like Legacy Media like uh especially like non human animal rights stuff I find that you know when I've tried to talk about it and whether it's um you know BBC or the podcast and stuff that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too
divisive um like two weeks ago I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on on because I was going to be defending on 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 who consume these creatures and it's sort of like stupid it's a conversation yeah precisely and that that's a that's a shame as well with agnosticism too like there's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious and 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 antifa or you're a proud boy yeah we're nuts we're nuts but we're sorting through it um listen man thank you very much for being here I really 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 Sim's philosophy you can get to my site where everything sort of is uh the podcast IO the panai cast um it means casting thought everywhere and reverse and that's all about all kinds of philosophy uh two bucks out this year philosophers on guard two in a year damn both on God as well uh so first one's philosophers on God 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's that doesn't show that I don't have a horse in the race I'm not ideologically driven I don't know what I don't think any of us should have a horse in the race thank you very much I appreciate you bye everybody [Music]