Sam Harris Reflects On His Relationship With Jordan Peterson

I think there's an awful lot of people who want to see that public relationship between you and him rekindled well it hasn't I mean to my eye it is not uh been broken I mean I like Jordan I mean I think this is just this is what I imagined because I have not had any dialogue with him in in a couple years but um I mean Jordan and I disagree fundamentally about religion I think and we've debated that you know Ad nauseam and we've probably got like 12 hours you know on the mic in various venues debating that um and that was fun and I'm always happy to talk to him um and I think he while we disagree I think he has really helped millions of people I mean I think he's there's no question I've I I know what it's like to be with him at an event and to hear from the people who who are you know hear from his fans and my fans side by side sitting at a table for an hour after an event where we you know had a debate in front of 8 000 people um and there's a slightly different flavor to the people whose lives we've changed right he's he's intersected with a with a different group of people at a different point in their lives than I have for the most how do you categorize that difference well I mean to a significant degree is people moving in two opposite directions I mean like they're they're the people who were stuck with a religious worldview stuck I mean literally in many cases traumatized by a fear of hell that had been inculcated into them by their religious parents but were enamored enough of Enlightenment values and secular rationality and science so as to have the this the spell break to some significant degree and they needed some language to to help kind of Midwife their delivery into a into the clear light of of reason right and they also needed so and this is where Richard and I have kind of have had different jobs I mean Richard is just critiquing religion and counterposing it with all that's wonderful about science right and so for him the the spiritual attitude that is on offer when you once you leave religion behind and you know you know close the church doors behind you is are the beauty of Nature and just amazement at you know everything we are learning and may yet learn about the way the world works and the way that the mind works and um I mean we are nothing to use Newton's image I mean it's like we are children on a seashore playing with shells and the vast ocean of of ignorance and potential knowledge it just awaits our our inspection um for me that's not good enough right what I mean by spirituality has in fact nothing to do with the amazement that you feel when you look up at the Milky Way right it's like that that's that's great but that's just not that's just not the the real opportunity on offer and that's not what's going to prepare us to die you know and that's not what's going to really console you at four in the morning when you wake up feeling bad about your life and not sure how you can be happy in this world right um so I'm much more so I I'm convinced that at the core of every religion there was there were real transformative and and Transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature and traditions that have grown up around that religion so there really was you know presumably there really was a person you know in history by the name of Jesus who had this effect on the people around him and said you know something like what he has purported to have said in the Bible and I can I can understand all of that as a a absolutely predictable result of certain ways of of paying attention that are available to every human being now you know then now then and now um which allow you to recognize that that this ego you take yourself to be is an illusion and it allows you to recognize that unconditional love is actually a possibility right like you can it's possible to just feel Shattered by your love for all sentient beings and to just to bask in the profundity of that way of being and that's on the menu and whether you have to just whether you have to go into a cave and meditate for a month to find that or you take MDMA or you have there are ways to perturb your nervous system such that the testimony of Someone Like Jesus or Buddha is not is obviously not a fraud it's obviously not a confession of Psychopathology it's obviously not a delusion about you know belief-based illusion about what happens after death or about invisible parts of the universe and you know populated by Angels or deities you don't have to believe in anything on empirical in order to experience that range of of positive experience you just have to learn to use your attention in the right ways and and if you can't do that you know there are you know psychedelics offer a an imperfect method yeah I mean it's definitely reliable it's a reliable glimpse of something that is different enough uh assuming you have a positive experience I mean you can have a different enough negative experience that will convince you of something else but if you have a different enough extraordinarily positive experience you'll be convinced that okay what whatever the possibilities of sustaining that may or may not be it is just clear that this experience is possible because I just had it right I just had it for four hours and I can no longer imagine that human consciousness is is in principle confined to and the the mediocre bandwidth I tend to experience when I'm just checking my email and then checking Twitter and then worrying about my future all right I actually I actually don't think I I actually closed the loop on what um I want to say about Jordan there though so Jordan Jordan and I differ in he wants to support a much more traditional picture of the utility and even necessity of religious thinking and religious identity and and that way of giving meaning to one's life through traditional stories and stories which I think true a literal belief in can't be justified based on what we have come to understand about science and um I just think that the burden is on us at this point in history to find a truly non-sectarian way of telling herself a story about what we value and what is possible right and and so and we do that in other areas of our lives and the science is one very clear place we do that where there's just there is no to say that you know there's American Science versus Chinese science and it's just that's just not science like so science is at a layer more fundamental than those cultural differences um and so it has to be with a with something like ethics and spirituality you can't talk in the end you can't you shouldn't be able to talk about Christian ethics or Christian spiritual insight and Jordan's not convinced of that or he's apparently not convinced of that and so you know that that's what we still disagree about but I think the final I think the thing the thing I wanted to say was that so you you will seem to allude to some sort of breach between us which I certainly don't feel and have an experience I can only imagine though that in his world given given what was happening to me on Twitter when I left he perceives me as somebody who has just um gone off the rails in some way right because like he he in his world and this is this is what was so amazing to see um when I was looking at Twitter when I when I made this to if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation where I commented on the hunter Biden laptop thing uh on a podcast a clip from that podcast got exported to you know apparently every planet in the solar system and um it had an enormous effect right of center right so so right of Center I had just destroyed my career right I'm hearing from people like oh my God are you okay right and in my world and in every channel I care about literally nothing had happened right and so but in but Jordan lives in the world where I just kind of torched everything so I can only imagine that he has some view of my I mean he the truth is I would expect him to be genuinely confused about what I believe about things like free speech or you know any of the relevant variables there unless he happens to listen to my podcast which you know I don't know whether or not he does I think the uh potential breach that I was talking about was more just that there is a hunger for you and him to speak I think that you've both been formative to a lot of people's intellectual Journeys in one form or another and uh I I think people are hoping that there is uh yet more juice to squeeze from your conjoined lemons and however way yeah that happens well I'm always happy to talk to him I think you know I think the thing that got into my head is someone sent me a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe were talking about me and Jordan seemed to be talking about me as like a cautionary tale like look what can happen to somebody and and Joe said something like oh I still have hope for Sam and they're in my view they are in this contrarian Echo chamber right where you know mRNA vaccines are terrifying covet was no big deal January 6 was maybe a non-event right um the libtards are trying to ruin everything and there's a whole picture of sort of audience capture and and information skewing there which I understand I mean that's sort of how like if I look to my left I can see all that uh but if you're only there there's just a lot of half truths you know kind of ricocheting around that Echo chamber which um yeah it is I'm happy to talk to both those guys but it's just they're not in the in the lane I'm in and trying to maintain You know despite the Crosswinds trying to maintain a straight course in there's that's only half the story right so it's um and I just think people are genuinely confused now because two things are true we have lost trust in the the normal channels of information and in normal institutions postcode you know during coven and post covid um for obvious reasons but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust right and we're not going to navigate This Moment by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters right it's just not good enough but we might try yeah in other news this episode is brought to you by eight sleep eight sleeps pod cover is keeping me alive in the middle of summer in Austin Texas at the moment good sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer and being too hot or too cold is a guaranteed way to ruin your night's sleep the Pod cover from eight sleep will actively cool and heat each different side of the bed based on yours and your partner's sleep stages it is a complete Game Changer and if you're waking up in the morning feeling groggy and not sufficiently rested it is quite likely that temperature is the culprit and all of this is fixed with the Pod cover from eight sleep it slips over the top of your existing mattress just like a mattress topper but gives you all of the biometric scanning it'll tell you how 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Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 595,179

Keywords: modern wisdom, chris williamson, Chris Williamson modern wisdom, modern wisdom podcast, chriswillx, Chris Williamson Modern Wisdom Podcast, Sam Harris, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, Harris and Williamson Conversation, Reflecting on Jordan Peterson, Harris and Peterson Relationship, Philosophical Discussions, Sam Harris and Chris Williamson Talk, Intellectual Thought, Harris Peterson Interactions, Understanding Perspectives, Harris and Peterson Views, Thoughtful Reflections

Id: s0Q0zUBpZ4I

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023