Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

00:01four three two one boom and we're live gentlemen Sam Majid how are you good thing to meet you pleasure Joe yes for coming here yeah I'm very happy to get you guys together and that was I've been kind of looking to do this for at least two years and finally it's arrived what's been your ultimate goal like what was it well he mantra is just a superstar that needs more exposure I mean he's like this is like he should be running half of civilization I mean he's really for sure definitely not in the front people who read it and go superstar I can't blur up the book we wrote together unfortunately so yeah that is an issue too kind Sam thank you it's very generously um are you are you you suing the Southern Poverty Law Center is that what's going on yeah in fact have an update for everybody because you know we crowdfunded a lot of the early costs for the case against the southern part

01:01of what did they do what is it that covered please once upon a time yours truly a British Muslim of Pakistani origin was listed in the United Kingdom on the thomson reuters world check database under a category red terrorism designation while at the same time being listed across the atlantic in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti Muslim extremists so I was both a Muslim terrorist and an anti Muslim extremist according to two separate lists and of course that speaks to some of the polarization in our times in how irrational this conversation around extremism Islam integration Muslims in the West has become I sued Thomson Reuters we'll check the database this database is no joke it's like HSBC and many many other banks use this database for background checks on where the clients can have a bank account with them so as a result of for example

02:00Thomson Reuters and their database Quilliam which is a counter extremism organization I founded 10 years ago had its bank account shut down in the United States because of the Thomson Reuters wall check database sister that hsbc subscribes to anyway we sued them they pay damages they issued an apology and they took my name off this terrorism designation list they have on their world check database module I think maybe you should back up further and just give that your kind of your short form bio in terms of why would you ever be on a terrorist watch list I'll do that but at the same time the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed me as a citizen anti Muslim extremist so we are also taking legal action against them and I will get to your point but I think just want to say that the I've just held a law firm on retainer Clare Locke and they were the ones that

02:51sued the Rolling Stone magazine for that College rape yeah that's right successfully got one that case Claire lock which is an announcement made here exclusively with you no one else knows this yet we have retained Claire lock they are writing to the Southern Poverty Law Center as we speak I think they've got wind of it the Southern Poverty Law Center as of I think either yesterday or the day before they've removed the entire list that's been up there for two years they've removed the entire list which also had a on her CLE on it and it's no longer available on their website now is there logic that of you're a critic of Islam of radical fundamentalist Islam that you are somehow or another a racist extremist that's so that's pretty much what they've said if you criticize Islam I am myself who have come from within the community I've had that experience that

03:42somehow that makes us anti Muslim there are a number of logical errors involved in that logical leap that they've made do they have any distinction Reiser is there anything that they're right that sort of points to why they would say that one of them honestly the reasons they listed one of them was that I had a bachelor party in a strip club a year before I got married that makes you an anti Muslim extremist that was one of the reasons listed by 9/11 hijackers were those that really really listed that they actually listed that which is part of the reason why we can prove malice because what has that got to do with anything that's a but that doesn't yeah that doesn't make any sense yeah so that was a primary reason it was one of the three main reasons that he listed and another one was again false they claimed that I had called for the criminalization of the face veil for

04:37Muslim women in the West which wasn't true I had called for a policy to be adopted where in banks and airports where ye are not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet you also shouldn't be allowed to cover your face in the name of religion which is very different to calling for the criminalization per se of the face felt that's like saying you're not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet in the bank so I believe in the criminalization of motorcyle well it's absurd yeah it's predict it was a mischaracterization of my opinion the audits - yep and the other one the the the reason they because they kept changing their reasons the actual website has been we've got the archive and it's been they've been changing it each time people have been pointing out the stupidity of their allegations so why do they exist what is the Southern Poverty Law Center's this is a painful

05:22irony because if you roll back the clock now you know 20 or some odd years they're reasons to exist were great I mean that this was the the flagship organization that was suing the KKK and you know sovereign citizens and just that the far-right you know white nationalist Christian nationalist movements in the US and in in some cases to create effect and their and their concern obviously about you know extremist hate groups in the US was totally valid and I mean it was it became I mean now now that we see how morally confused they are people have been shining a light on them and they and they've there's this bloated organization that's been taken in way too much money and they're I mean it's not it suffers from other signs of corruption or conflicts of interest but back in the day you know Morris Dees was you know bringing the KKK to court and bankrupt in their various chapters and

06:18that looked fantastic and now the social justice warrior moral panic moral stupidity virus has gotten into their brains and they can't differentiate someone like Maajid from a right-wing christian neo-nazi a hater of Islam right or hater of you know people from the Middle East and and so it is with ayaan Hirsi Ali and i'ma now ironically you're off the website now I'm on it I think I'm on it in a far more transitory way but the the the article that was written about my podcast with charles murray by Vox hit the Southern Poverty Law Center hate watch page and so there you had articles about neo-nazi groups articles about the Austin bomber and then me and and my podcast with charles murray i definitely want to talk about that but i want to give people your background first reason why you were on the list in the UK in the first place had to do with your

07:16actual background mmm-hmm so i was born and raised in essex in the united kingdom and i came of age in what i now refer to as the bad old days of racism in the united kingdom much has changed since then for their good but in those days there were serious cases of violent racism that i faced hammer attacks machete attacks by actual neo-nazis I mean I've grown up this is the irony of this Southern Poverty Law Center listing I've grown up fighting neo-nazis on the streets and they've been attacking me with hammers and machetes because of the color of my skin and you're a bunch of white guys in Alabama designating me in the same breath as they would designate designate these neo-nazis but that when I grew up and having that experience being falsely arrested by Essex police on a number of occasions profiled while the genocide in Bosnia was unfolding against Muslims in Bosnia I often say to

08:08an American audience what I'm speaking about this we are now here with you on the west coast in this beautiful new studio you have congratulations and imagine a genocide was unfolding on the East Coast against a group of people with whom you identified and even if it's just on a human level human beings but you know even within that a community identification would impact you in a way for example if you define yourself as Jewish and there was a genocide against Jews on the other side of this very continent of this very country how it would impact you on on the west coast well sorry over Sarajevo from London it takes us less time to fly from London to Bosnia than it does from New York to LA and so it really had a profound impact on Muslims across Europe when that genocide was unfolding and things were never the same again it radicalized an entire generation of course ideology had

08:56a lot to do with that but the anger originally came from the genocide so at the age of 16 what with the domestic racism and the situation in in Bosnia unfolding as it did I joined his battalion which is a non terrorist still legal in America and in Britain and across Europe Islamist organization it was the first of the global Islamist organizations that aspired to resurrect the notion of a Caliphate which we've subsequently seen too great damaging effect in the form of Isis Caliphate and their method of coming to power was by infiltrating militaries in muslim-majority countries recruiting army officers and then instigating military Coos whether that be in Turkey in Pakistan in Egypt these are the countries they they targeted and the rain would be turned through the military coup set up this Caliphate which would then be an expansionist Caliphate and would conquer the world

09:50and that's it sounds crazy that's what they believe and that's what they're very very serious and intent on bringing about and now people and I say that believe me because they've seen the ISIS experiment unfold but I joined a group that sought to do that through non terroristic means at the age of 16 I entered ended up on the leadership of that organization in the UK ended up co-founding that group in Pakistan in 1999 where I went I left the UK went to Pakistan was among the first the vanguard of British Pakistani members that went out there to set the group up they've been about three or four coup plots in Pakistan since and army officers have been arrested for being members of this group and many of them still in jail I spent a year in Pakistan went back while studying for my degree in the University of London I would fly Monday would fly on Saturdays and

10:40Sundays to Copenhagen and Denmark I co-founded the Danish Pakistani chapter of this group and then the third year of my degree because I was doing law and Arabic resulted in me having to go to an Arab country for the language here and so I chose Egypt and a day before the 9/11 attacks in 2001 iron in Egypt I went to Alexandria enrolled in the university of Alexandria to study for the year of Arabic language which was the third year of my degree of course 9/11 happened and the climate changed the security climate changed all over the world something we didn't know about nor predicted and on the 1st of April 2002 my house in Alexandria was raided by the Egyptian state security I was blindfolded my hands were tied behind my back I was then driven through the desert into Cairo to the dungeon of the state security headquarters in a building known as as she has which was the main

11:36headquarters of Amman Abdallah the internal state security we were held in the dungeons there for four days and they electrocuted most of the prisoners that they had there tortured them interrogated them on the fourth day I was taken to a prison known as Maserati Tora in Cairo put into solitary confinement for about three and half months then charged eventually sentenced to five years as a political prisoner under the Egyptian emergency law and served my full sentence there in Egypt eventually left prison in 2006 and returned to the UK so they didn't Amnesty International get you out at all or they know they only look an interest in so that you have a payment for my release nobody got me out cuz I to finish my full prison sentence but what changed me and led to me to be the man that sits before you today is your rights am amnesties adoption of me and and a few others in the case as

12:36prisoners of conscience and they took the very brave and bold step now looking back at it because keep in mind the context here this is Bush was president Tony Blair was Prime Minister and we were in the thick of the war on terror we were in the middle of it and amnesty amnesty comes along and says we disagree with everything this guy stands for but they don't believe in using violence to bring their Caliphate about and so we will defend their right to say stupid things and they shouldn't be in prison they certainly should have been tortured for it so amnesty adopted us as prisoners of conscience and I was 24 years old at the time by the way so everything I've just described you happened to me up until the age of 24 when I was in prison and it was the first time in my relatively young life from 40 now right and I had never been defended by any mainstream pillar of mainstream society

13:22in that way before nobody had spoken out for me and that had a real huge kind of emotional impact on my psyche I've said in my autobiography that where the heart leads the mind can follow and so I was now willing to consider alternatives because of them cease work campaigning for me and so I spent the next 4 years in prison reading rereading Orwell every one of these books reading Tolkien reading classic English literature studying Islamic theology really trying to understand the world around me and I had four years to do so and I spent four years debating and discussing with pretty much the founders of Aegis mein jihadist organizations who were in jail with me in the same prison including the assassins or the former President Anwar Sadat who had been killed in 1981 because of his peace deal with Israel and his assassins were in jail with me and they'd been in prison longer than

14:14I've been alive and so they had some collective years of wisdom between them and most of those jihadist prisoners I was in jail with had over the course of those years two decades and more changed their views and reformed they were still conservative religious Muslims something which I am NOT and I never I don't claim to be in my in my work at the moment but they were still religious Muslims but there were no longer extremists and they were no longer what I call Islamists people that sought to implement their version of Islam over Society and so they in four years of constant debate and discussion with them people that I knew had more wisdom than me they've been in jail for longer than I've been alive my views began slowly changing I read a lot of the books they wrote about changing their own views and why they changed and upon my release I eventually

15:03a good few months after my release I had to leave the organization because I no longer believed in an ideology that I was once prepared to die for that is fascinating that the shift came about in jail speaking with assassins yeah among many others hear that I mean that is really incredible you would think that most people think that when someone goes to jail usually whatever criminality that they have in is cemented in the hardened yeah I'm I don't know why mine is an exceptional case cuz most people you're right whether you look at Sayed cut-up who's known as the founding father of modern-day jihadism he started off like me a non terrorist Islamist but in Egypt's jails in fact the very Jedi was held in he was tortured and he ended up becoming the Godfather of modern-day terrorism through his book milestones or muharram for three up in in Arabic and

15:49yet that in my case for whatever reason you know it I kind of went that bit further to question everything I believed in but that's not normal no in most cases when you torture people in jail it ends up hardening and ossifying that ideology and people become as angry as you know they become the monster that they were seeking to defeat so you get out of jail what do you do then so I left the group in 2007 and by 2008 in January so I finished my degree I had one year left of my undergraduate degree I I did my masters at the London School of Economics in political theory and while doing the masters set up Quilliam and Quilliam we bill as the world's first counter extremism organization it was meant to be we believe it is bringing us back to the SPLC allocation a Muslim response to extremism from people that have lived it and been through it my co-founders were Islamists

16:45themselves had changed like me muslims born and raised come from the community to have a community-based response a muslim response to this growing problem of extremism and this was ten years ago and cause Isis emerged since then only demonstrating why this kind of response was needed and so for the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate somebody with my background with that trajectory with somebody who was prepared to die for this cause and so somebody who wanted to address these problems as a Muslim to call for reform for the good of my communities as opposed to against them you know at the end of the day it can only benefit Muslim communities if extremism is put back in its box for them to then list someone like me as an anti Muslim extremist it just really does I think shine a light on the true absurdity of the situation we find ourselves in absurdity and the lack of

17:36real investigation or backing up their claims with actual facts and information and that brings me to your story with Charles Murray and Vaux and Ezra Klein was linger here for a moment sure it's the same problem but not only is it a lack of investigation but when it gets pointed out I forgot the guys name at the SPLC who was quarterbacking this but it wasn't Morris Dees but it was someone high up with Mark Potok or the CEO uh something Cohen I think is the it's anyways he's listed in the he's named in the Atlantic article at first put this on our radar but he they just doubled down I mean the error cannot be pointed out clearly enough to trigger much less an apology a any modulation of the claim they just people just double down in the face of a obvious counter evidence and that's it's it's just not about a sincere engagement with the problem and there's and there's this there's so many

18:37variables here that make it make it a really toxic environment but one is that the the locus of concern is never the individual it is the group it's the tribe and so you can see it it's like they'll sacrifice any number of individuals to make the political case they want to make so they they don't they're completely unrepentant when they're shown to get it wrong and so in your case and anions case it's just such a grievous moral lapse because not only is it is the attack on you illegitimate it actually raises your security concerns and it it it becomes a reference point for journalists who are confused who can't follow the plot or don't have the time to fact check everything it makes you radio actor from the point of view of mainstream journalists because either they go to the Southern Poverty Law Center site to figure out who's worth talking to and

19:33they see a page where you're listed as a anti-muslim extremist along with people who they are very little resemblance to you ideologically because they're probably a few people on there who who could be described as anti Muslim extremists and you know the here are the 10 people you don't need to talk to on about this problem whereas you are actually one of the most valuable voices I mean objectively one of the most valuable voices but probably you know I can probably count on two fingers you know you know anyone who would rival your voice on this topic so it's it's just mind boggling it's very difficult trying to keep this mic it's very difficult you can swing it toward I can swing it so it's very difficult because some ikonics I can't fully explain to anybody what it feels like to have lived an entire life from roughly the age of 14 being consumed by this issue of Muslims in the

20:24West and this question and originally getting it answering it in one way and then still being consumed by the topic answering it in a different way as I now do I can't describe to anybody how much emotionally the toll that it takes to have your whole life have defined your whole life by trying to answer this question and because you care for it because this is a question that concerns you when I join the Islamist group I did I was wrong and adopted some really nefarious ideas but did so because I gave a damn and cared for a genocide that I saw unfolding and desperately wanted a solution so even when I became an Islamist I did so out of care and love and concern for what I believe was my community under attack so to have a bunch of people come along and say that I am anti the very community that I've believed I have fought for all my life you know and have diff and my

21:20life has been consumed and defined by this it really is taking the one thing away from somebody that they have I mean I I went to jail for this thing I have you know people have died in front of my eyes from their torture wounds in prison because of this thing to have someone completely ignorant in that way to deprive me of having the being able to claim that I have stood for my community but by instead saying now I'm anti that community it really does kind of make you feel like crap Joe wait when did this start happening this the moral panic that you've constantly discussed in these are the flippant sort of accusations without real any real solid objective reasoning behind calling someone like you or ayaan Hirsi Ali who's the victim of female genital mutilation to say that she's an anti Muslim she's Islamophobic is it seems to me it's almost insane but it

22:18seems to me to be prevalent this is something that is it's a common sentiment today that I don't recall ever seeing anything like this one or two decades ago yeah yeah I know you might have a better sense definitely I do but I don't it's become increasingly salient to me just because I've been doing this work for better or worse and colliding with these people more and more but it's it's definitely an export from some trends in intellectual life that go back you know 50 years or more I mean they way so what post-modernism did and I mean you can go back further than that it's just that there's a there's a a framework a kind of pseudo intellectual framework where facts can't be talked about as facts they're they're intrinsically political they intrinsically convey power disparities you know science is just a tool of power sort of thinking and this goes back a

23:19ways but it is it's now seemingly ascendant on the left in a way that is is just fairly bewildering but it seems to be only two subjects gender and race those no ones that get those are the big ones I think it's I'm sure we could find more if we take a minute to think about it but there those are those are those certainly dwarfed every other those are the ones where there's a wall there's a wall that you can't get through with objective or gender but this isn't quite race this is the it it's drawn a lot of energy from raises concerns about racism identity it is it's a the perception is is that Muslims are a politically beleaguered minority that have to be so it is like it is a great amid people think there's you know it's racist to criticize Islamist that made any sense I mean you know Ben Affleck being one but it is you know this is their minority in Los Angeles they're

24:16not a mine over there the second biggest religion on earth this is it we're talking about 1.7 billion people and there and the criticism of Muslim extremism for the most part is focused on societies where you have them in most cases a majority Muslim population you have women and gays and and freethinkers treated terribly and that's that that is the you know the center of the bullseye in terms of you know what what one is criticizing when one talks about you know theocracy so I there was a lot of this stuff there's some this paranoia this son of irrational approach to this conversation that Sam suffered from and when when when I first met him I met in New York at the intelligence squared debate that he that so a on her CLE and Douglas Murray who I believe you've had YES on this podcast were on one side of a debate I was on the other side of this debate and the motion that we were

25:11debating was Islam is a religion of peace I was back then arguing what half of my true belief is because I actually don't believe it's a religion of peace or war it's just a religion that is interpreted in different ways but I had to pick a side and so I picked that side in defending the motion and ion and Douglas were on the other side and there was a there was a dinner afterwards for the speakers and Sam was there I imagine you were there is a ons guest yeah and so it's my I didn't know who he was and they on and I were locked in conversation post debate conversation and I on invited Sam to to have his say and she said I want to hear what Sam Harris has to say and so but the context is relevant so we're at so we've had a public if you seen these intelligence squared debate that are they're very well produced online I don't know that they're televised anywhere but they're

26:02online they're they get a great theater in Manhattan and you know it's an audience maybe a thousand people and they and John Donvan the journalist is the the impresario and but then this was a dinner afterwards for the organizers and the participants been there maybe 70 people in a you know the the back room of a restaurant and Maude and I were not at the same table thankfully we were like 50 feet away from each other but facing each other and so he was at the table with ion and the other speakers and at one point that everyone's getting debriefed about how this went and ion says why I Sam Harris is here I'd like to hear what he has to say about the debate and so I look at ma jet and he's at least 50 feet away from me and I mean did you want me to say what so I would say so he had made moves in this debate that I considered intellectually dishonest and and I mean he because he's

26:58playing a game and this is not a real conversation this is a formal academic style debate where you know his job is not to leave his view open to influence by the other discussions he's making a case and I didn't know it at the time but he felt unnaturally constrained by the format of the debate he had to argue that Islam is a religion of peace and some of the moves he made there I thought were dishonest and so I said ma Jude I remember this more or less verbatim because we talked about anyway since transcribed it into a book but I said ma j'tia you know everyone in this room recognizes that you have the hardest job in the world and we're all very glad that you're doing it you have to somehow convince the next generation of Muslims that Islam really is a religion of peace and the jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle and that the martyrs don't get 72 virgins in paradise

27:54and all the rest and so my question for you is is this do you really believe that this is the case now or do you do you think that pretending that is that is the case is the method by which you will make it the case that if you just pretend long enough and hard enough it'll become so and the extra line here was and can you just be honest with us but I find my final sentence was and you know you know we're not on we're not televised now can you just be honest with us here and so there so I responded immediately and said are you calling me a liar and so now there's like 70 we have 70 people and I'm like into my second gin and tonic and and and he's given me the the sort of you know middle-eastern stare down across it so he repeats it I said no no I'm asking just here that where there's no cameras can you just be honest with us and I said are you calling me a liar and it didn't go

28:46too well at all the entire everyone on the table kind of went quiet and and I didn't know who this guy was I never met him and and I should have known who he was and and then I think somebody very tactfully changed the conversation and just completely veered off this and I'd never I never spoke to him again for another what was it a couple of years a couple years I'd never cross paths in center the reason I bring this up is that I was one of those guys that didn't want to entertain a conversation with Sam based upon the defensiveness when it came to this topic and and I think that actually it's important to say that to people that because you asked him a question about the Charles Mario situation a lot of people rather than actually wanting to engage with someone on the substance of their ideas that I think in the climate we're in today that they're engaging with people based upon

29:35their on their feelings and those feelings are valid of course everyone has the right to their feelings but we've got to try as hard as we can to detach those feelings from because that's clearly not what you know if the principle of charity means you lend the person that you're speaking to the best possible interpretation of what they're saying and and allow them to clarify what they mean as opposed to you putting into their mouths what what they mean and telling them what they mean I learnt that you know because then two years later he reaches out to me and he says I think we can try again you know are you willing to have a conversation with me and and I hadn't originally remembered it was the same guy so that's fine I got my foot in the door just because he didn't know who I was and then we had this conversation which it's a lesson for me because we had this conversation

30:17it's it's it's called Islam in the future of tolerance it's it's become a book right published by Harvard University Press we had this conversation that became a book that's been made into a film which I think any couple of weeks now we hear some news on that yeah I don't know one that it's coming out with that so we do days a lecture tour of Australia and the people who organized that made a documentary that week but they realized this lesson to your question and that is that I am somebody that didn't engage with him on the substance of his question but actually fired a misfire an emotional misfire on on on what was really questioning and his motives for asking the question rather than actually addressing addressing the points he was making and I think that when I because I didn't rember who he was I then started the conversation anew without the memory of

31:05my original judgment on him hmm and the conversation went really well so we've got some he'll be able to divorce ourselves on that background that can't happen I mean it can be done it's just it takes people of strong character to try to like abandon all preconceived notions from the past conversation just start fresh yeah unfortunately this example of a kind of a signal success has has caused me to in the end kind of miss spend a lot of energy just assuming that's it I can't keep thinking I keep walking into another situation thinking this is possible is that why you deleted Twitter so you haven't deleted your account no I'm still on Twitter but I I will based on this recent episode I is a damn fascinated by people and their struggles with social media with like detaching from it reattaching from it getting addicted to it I mean I know so many people that will look at their Twitter

32:03at like 1 o'clock in the morning before they go to bed and something pisses them off and then they can't sleep yeah oh yeah really common I was not I don't consider myself someone who had a a real pathology with it I was you know I have I don't know 6,000 tweets or 7,000 tweets over the course of many years so I'm not I was not tweeting that much I was not even looking that much I was I was fairly disengaged and I've never used Facebook as I've never I just used Facebook as kind of a publishing channel I never engaged with comments but I was looking enough and it it was one was clearly making me a worse person imagine it was I was I was reacting to stuff that I didn't need to react to and it was amplifying certain McCrystal isms and and voices which need not have been amplified and in this in this last case it just turned a it just created a huge kind of explosion in my life I was in

33:05the middle of a vacation which I basically torpedoed the because of what I saw on Twitter and it was just it was like the perfect infomercial for why you don't want to be he told you our vacation how well so I'm in the middle of it like the first vacation taken with my family for in a very long time was at least a year and Wow and what you do so I you know we're on Hawaii and just like I'm supposed to put everything down to be the best father and husband I can be right and that was my intention that's what was happening it happened for a good solid 24 hours and then I pick up my phone and I see that that Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein had all attacked me in the space of an hour oh no it goes out to millions of people is this over that what he was Austria was asking about the charles murray thing yeah yeah well I true that I can't even see what I didn't

33:58look at what Greenwald had done he was circulating somebody's video about me how I'm I think I'm a racist in that video Reza Aslan blocks me so I can't even see what if he attacks me by name but he blocks me so I can't even see what his but so I just saw the the aftermath of that you know lots of stuff you know lots of notifications coming to me with both of us tagged and then Ezra published this message I suppose I should back up however painfully to describe what happened here but so I had charles murray on my podcast a year ago and charles murray is this this social scientist who published the bell curve back in the 90s which it was a a book about IQ and and success in in western societies like our own and it's a book where he worries a lot about the cognitive stratification of society we have a society that is selecting more and more for a narrow band of talents

34:54that are very well fairly well captured by what we call IQ and there is a kind of winner-take-all situation where people are really you know 500 years ago if you had a a very high IQ and you're just pushing a plough next to your neighbor you had no real advantage but now you can start a hedge fund or you can start a software company and we're seeing the this this real shocking disparity and in good fortune really so he wrote this book it had a chapter on race which talked about the disparities in in racial groups I observe disparities right and the claim about the source of those disparities was by even the standards of the time but certainly the standards of today an incredibly tepid mealy-mouthed just hand-waving it was not this you know here comes the Third Reich declaration of white supremacy it was undoubtedly there are environmental and genetic reasons for this and we

36:03don't understand them you know it was like to think that is one or the other we're not in a position to know what the mixes of influences now and that is virtually any honest scientists take on the matter and certainly today and it's only become more so but that went off like a nuclear bomb I mean that was just so that was such a I mean it's it's the most I saw at the time I never read the book I just thought this had to be just racist cause Marie would be vilified for films and he's been vilified ever since and ever since you know I've ignored him there's any deep platformed and was assaulted recent yeah so that's what happened so he went to Middlebury to give a talk you know 20-some odd years 25 years after he wrote this book oh by the way he's also listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center oh and so that that that's what contributed to the D platforming and the violent protests

37:02against him at Middlebury what's crazy is the whole thing is a propaganda for the superiority of the Asian race and everyone's talking about white supremacy decisions are the ones far and above I mean that's basically what his book proved and you know they're suing Harvard now there's a group of Asian students that are suing Harvard because they're discriminated against because they're required to have higher scores because they're assumed to be smarter so their standards for Asian students entering into Harvard is higher than white people Wow yes while Asian privilege has a big problem yeah your grandfather was working on the railroads in California as an indentured servant and all that privilege trickled down there's obviously a lot of factors that lead to IQ to hierarchy but to ignore what those are to ignore it completely to disinvite all of you yes exactly only ideology and

37:54this idea that you cannot look at statistics you cannot look at facts and in your conversation with ezra's charles that sort of as a recline rather that's what I got is that this is this is an ideological issue and that you you it's almost like an impossible subject to breach like you can't even discuss the fact that certain races demonstrate low IQ and then let's look at what could be the cause of those even discussing that somehow another is so inherently racist that it must be ignored or must be silenced and that you you must first concentrate on all the various and justices that have been done to those people who have this lower IQ yeah well let me just take a couple of minutes to close the various doors to hell that are now ajar based on what we've just said on your holiday and you get it yeah so we'll just take a little more context so yeah as you said Charles Murray went to

38:47Middlebury College and was D platformed and he was not only the platform so the usual D platform and with the students turning their back to the speaker and shout in and not let anything happen but the professor who invited him who was a liberal professor who wanted to essentially debate him she was attacked when they're leaving the hall they both get physically attacked by a crowd of students charles was was not hurt his host this female professor got a concussion and a neck injury that that still persists and this is now more than a year later so it's like sure that she was a registered devil arm by this no doubt and and they're driving out in an SUV where that gets I mean someone pulls a stop sign out of the the sidewalk and I still got the concrete ball on the end of it and that this SUV gets smashed with this you know concrete Laden stop sign I mean this was this is happening

39:35at one of the most liberal privileged colleges on earth it's nuts so anyway that was the thing that put Murray on my radar after all these many years of my ignoring him and I had actually I felt guilty because I had declined to be a part of at least one project because his name was attached right because I just thought that this guy is radioactive he's got some white supremacist agenda I had believed the the the the lies about him and then I saw this I thought okay well maybe he's the canary in the coal mine or certainly one of the Canaries in the coal mine that I had ignored where the as you say there's a certain topics are considered so politically fraught that you cannot discuss them no matter what is true like it's just a you know there has to be a firewall between your conversation about reality and these sorts of facts and so you know he so he's been you know suffering from having

40:32transgressed that boundary and so I had him on the on the podcast being fairly agnostic about his his actual social policy commitments and his political concerns and just wanting to talk about you know the facts and so far as we touch them lightly may had zero interest in intelligence as measured by IQ although I mean it's an interesting subject but I hadn't you know I hadn't spent much time focused on that and I had truly zero interest in establishing differences between populations with respect to intelligence or anything else but I see what's coming I see the fact that that the the more we understand ourselves genetically and environmentally the more we will if we go looking or even if we're not looking we will discover differences between groups and the endgame for us as a species is not to deny that those differences exist or could possibly exist it's to deny that they have real

41:35political implication I mean with the political implica lurk we need is a commitment to to equality across the board and a commitment to treating individuals as individuals there's nobody who's that the average of a population is meaningless with respect to you and that will always be so and and whatever you know and whatever diversity of talents there is statistically in various populations we want societies that simply don't care politically about that I mean that's just it's just not what we its they are our political tolerance of one another in support of one another is not predicated on denying individual differences or even statistical differences across groups it can't be because we know that there are people walking around like you know Elon Musk who gets out of bed in the every morning does the work of like 4,000 people right and people who just are struggling to

42:41work at Starbucks and hold down a job and our political system I mean we don't say one person is more valuable politically and socially than another even though one person is capable of doing massive things that that many most other people aren't it's you know when it comes time to to write laws and create institutions that protect you that that support human flourishing we we have to engineer times that raise all the boats and so you know and and you know they're legitimate debates about the social policies that will do that but and they're legitimate debates about facts so we can debate scientific fact and and you know the the results of you know psychometric testing or or behavioral genetics that are relevant to this question of intelligence and we can have a good faith debate about the data and then we can have a good faith debate about social policy that should follow

43:37from the data but what's happening on the left now is on either at either of those tiers of conversation there are just straight-up allegations of racism that hit you the moment you touch certain a certain fact can I say that that what he just summarized that when I've heard it sounds to me as being more humane than the implications of the argument that the left who are opposing what Sam has just said ah because if you think about it the implications of their argument would be they're what they want to deny the facts because they're scared that those facts would from which there would be derived a policy that would reflect those facts and other words in their minds they are marrying those two they are marrying the notion that if in statistical observance there are variances in IQs between groups in their minds that means the policy should follow from that so it's

44:36why they're resisting what he's saying whereas what he's saying is there is no connection between what the policy should be and what the facts may be because of the kind of world we want to live in should aspire to equality regardless of what the science is saying because one is policy and one is science I freely agree with you on that but I don't think that's necessarily exactly what they're saying well I think what they're saying is what they're doing is they almost feel so guilty that any discussion whatsoever about race can't be held unless you repeatedly bring up all the instances of racism and suppression that in discrimination that that group has suffered from it's like you can't it doesn't exist as a statistic island you have to bring everything in together if you don't do that that's where their protest comes from and I think that was one of the things

45:24that I got from your conversation with Ezra Klein he wasn't willing to just discuss what's the implication of these issues and completely dismiss this this fact that Asian people score far better there it's not there's nothing but it's always fair that by conceding on the data it's almost as if they fear that the implication must necessarily follow that the policy will also be supremacist in that way hmm I wonder I honestly think that what we talked about before is a big part of it this is ideological an idea sport and that they're just volleying back I don't think they're willing to take I think one of the real strengths of character that you demonstrate in a debate or any discussion of faxes when uncomfortable truths rear their ugly head that are counter to your or your personal position you have to be able to go you got a really good point you've got a

46:13good point there's something to that I see what you're saying okay this is what my concern would be and this would be a rational real conversation this is what I would worry about and then you would I'm sure say absolutely I would worry about that as well and then you would have this sort of a discussion I didn't get that from that conversation you had I got ping pong I got I got this rallying back and forth of ideas rather than two human beings not digging their heels into the sand just trying to look at the ideas and look at the statistics and look at these studies for what they are and look at charles murray and what he's gone through and should we be able to examine these statistical anomalies should be able to examine athletic superiority should we be able to examine superiority that asians show and mathematics and a lot of the sciences should we should we be able to or should

47:01we just dig our heads in the city should we just let things sort themselves out and quietly ignore all the reality yeah I don't know what so I should say that I am I certainly understand people's fear that if you could that anyone who would go looking for racial difference is very likely motivate and motivated by something unethical or unsavory right so like like you could imagine you know white supremacists being being super enamored of this the possibility that these days is yes and they are yes and so they look at the Asians too so so that's like I get that right and there is there's some things that and this was the question I had for charles murray on them on that podcast i said like why pay attention to any of this what is the upside in the in the infinity of interesting problems we can tackle scientifically why focus on population differences and you know frankly i

47:58didn't get a great answer from him i mean yesterday his answer his answer is well I think the best version of his answer which I agree with but still it may not justify certain certain uses of attention it's just that if you there's this massive bias that basically we're all working with a blank slate you know genetically and therefore any difference you see among people is a matter of environment and so so then you have people who have privileged environments and people who have environments that that where they're massively under-resourced and so therefore any different representation at the you know the higher echelons of success and achievement and power in our society you know if there's 13% African Americans in the u.s. if you look at the top doctors in hospitals or the top academics or the you know the Oscar winners or whatever you know whatever you want to look for

49:04for for achievement if there are less than 13% African Americans in any one of those bins that has to be the result of racism or systemic racism that is the left the leftward bias at this moment and it and so it is with Jews for anti-semitism so it is to women you know there should be an equal representation of women you know computer software engineers at Google and any lack of any disparity there must be the result of either just inequitable resources for you know kids in schools or somewhere along the way or a pound of a selection pressure from the top that you know we do you know we don't like women in at Google or blacks at the Oscars and so that's the so Murray's concern is if you believe that and I'm you know this it's not exactly what he said but this is this is what I believe he thinks but I could be putting some words into his mouth here but there's certainly what

50:08many other people on his side of the debate thing if you believe that you will can consistently find racial bias and anti-semitism and misogyny where it doesn't exist right so like if you if you go looking if you go to a hospital and this is a real problem you that they're like like you know the academic departments in the medical schools at the best medical schools are under massive pressure to find like real diversity in representation at the highest level you need to find a head of Cardiology who's black right and if you and you end the fact that you haven't done that is a sign that there's a problem with you and your organization and your process of hiring now if it's just the case for whatever reason that there are not many candidates likely of less than 13% for that field or to take the you know the James d'amore memo at Google right if it just is the case that women forget about

51:05this is this is beyond aptitude this just goes to interest if it's the case that women for whatever reason genetic and but or environmental are less interested in being software engineers on average than men are then you then having you know twenty percent women coding software at Google is not the probably's not Google's problem it's just the fact that this is that the popular what the population the interests are now we should no doubt racism still exists no doubt misogyny and sexism still exist there there are I mean that and there's proof of this to be found as well but if to assume an absolute uniformity of humor of interest and aptitude in every population you could look at is just scientifically irrational that would be a miracle if that was it so at this stage allow me to remind everybody that was Sam's summarizing what he thinks Charles Mari

52:01was saying as opposed to Sam what no no that final point it's just a true point there jeans almost everything we care about are massively influenced by genes not a hundred percent of what I've seen happen to you though is that people have taken your summaries of other people Charles Murray's position you it's your summary of his position in relationship to this this fight against it the thing that I would add and the thing were there's some daylight between the two of me and him on my podcast is this is so toxic to be trafficking in population differences with respect to IQ that and and it's not it's not absolutely clear what Social Policy is turn on really nailing down these differences I mean so you could go I mean to take it even more toxic as an example it's like you could decide you know the Roma in Europe the gypsies like this is like a very isolated beleaguered you

53:07know community who knows how inbred it is I mean I don't know it's just this is a this is an outlier community like anyone who's gonna want to do you know massive IQ testing on the Roma what's the what's the point of doing that right like you know it's like your it seems like a just a kind of political time bomb to devote resources in that way because we know that the policy you want whatever any whatever this the mean IQ is of any group the policy you want is to give everyone whatever opportunities they can avail themselves of so we want we want people to have the best schools they can use and then we'll find people who need to be in more remedial schools for whatever reason or you know people like you know they'll be one population that has ten times the amount of dyslexia then another population say and they'll be undoubtedly genetic reasons for that you know there may be

54:05environmental reasons for that as well but there's we need to be able to cater to all of those needs with just there's this fundamental commitment to goodwill and equality without being panicked that we'll find stuff that just blows everything up but on the left there there's the sense that the only way to move forward toward equality is to lie about what is scientifically pause applause a bowl and demonize anyone who won't lie with you mmm that's the ideological point yeah this is a new thing though right I mean relatively speaking this this hard-nosed dance from the left of the equality of outcome and and the only reason why there wouldn't be 50% women or 50% black or 50% any you just pick any marginalized group the only reason why wouldn't be even across the board with all other races is because of discrimination this is a fairly new stance I mean there were

55:02there were moments that were fairly well publicized that I don't forget when Larry Summers got fired from Harvard so Larry Summers was the president of Harvard and he's a famous economist and he gave a speech for what she was fired there might be a little more color as to why he was fired I mean it was more fired because he he wants the the wheels started to come off he didn't he had alienated enough people that he didn't have friends to kind of prop him up but but the thing that pulled the wheels off was that he gave a speech and he said we know there are our differences in in the the bell curves that describe you know mathematical aptitude between men and women and this explains why there are many more top-flight male mathematicians and engineers than women and it's not that they even it's not that the the means of the the of the bell curves are different

55:56so the means could be the same but there could be more variant so that the tails are thicker in the case of the male bit poker so at the absolute ends both of the low end and the high end you have many more people so you know if you're gonna ask you know what's the in the same size population how many people do you have at the 99.999% aisle of aptitude in math say it could be that you have and there's a fair amount of data to show this many more men at the tails than women right and and that's true for grandmasters in chess right it's just the it's just this is not a and it may be true for something like you know playing pool you know I mean they're they're just differences and that may not be entirely environmental almost certainly or not entirely environmental that is one right it's a big issue in the world of pool men and women play separately and there's no reason

56:52physically why they should yeah it's not a strength game right but women are allowed to play in men's tournaments but they never win right gene be Lucas was a woman who's she was like one of the only women ever compete and beat men she's like an extreme outlier and this was like I want to say was in the late seventies in the 80s and and other than that there's been a few women that have done well in tournaments but when they come to major league professional pool tournaments they're almost always won by men and I'm when I say almost I mean like 99.9 percent so it was a games have been happening as we it was just over the last couple of weeks and there was a male to female transgendered athlete in the weightlifting category that's a whole nother boy participated in the women's competition yes and the Commonwealth Games at the time of her joining hadn't yet put down a rule asked

57:46the testosterone levels in the females competing and so this male to female transgendered person qualified in the female games and was as you'd expect winning in all of the games and was the front-runner and destined to win the competition as a male to female transgendered person and the only reason and it would have led to a huge crisis in the Commonwealth Games because there was some resistance to this notion and of course the questions that arise is this fair men are born naturally with higher levels of testosterone for example the only reason it didn't lead to the crunch time and that was the huge scandal of of her winning is that she injured herself in the competition and by sheer accident yeah I saw that I can expand on that a little bit because I've actually gone through this extensively because there was a woman who was used to be a man was competing in mixed

58:37martial arts against women and just beating the out of them and I and I was saying that this is this is a mistake and that you're you're looking at whether someone should be legally able to identify as a woman portray themselves as a woman absolutely do you have the freedom to become a woman in quotes in our society yes but you can't deny biological nature and there's physiological advantages to the male frame there's it's specifically when it comes to combat sports that's my wheelhouse I'm an expert I understand there's a giant difference between the amount of power that a man and a woman can generate and if you're telling me that a guy living thirty years of his life as a man that's that's essentially like a woman being on steroids for 30 years then getting off and then having regular women being forced to compete with her and trying to pretend this a level playing field

59:28it is not there's a difference in the shape of the hips the size of the shoulder the density of the bones the size the fists wet that's a giant factor and your ability to generate power is size of your fists it's also an ethical problem it's not just a competition here is he have girls getting beaten up by someone who used to be a man yes but people came down on me harder than anything that I've ever stood up for in my life never in my life - I think there's gonna be a situation when I said hey I don't think the guy should be able to get his penis removed and beat the out of women and then people like you're out of line but that's what happened this is a conversation that I had with a woman online this one what during this whole thing she said she this person who had turned into a woman has always been a woman and I said but she was a man for 30 years she goes no

60:18she's always been a woman I go even when she had sex with a woman and fathered a kid and she says yes even then I go well we're done yeah because you're just talking nonsense that's a neurology cover exact the facts as they are that she had a male physique this person always arguing with me wants to claim this moral high ground of being the most progressive and they're always looking step on top of anybody who's less progressive than then and complained and proclaimed superiority and this is the ideological sport this is the idea sport that that you see with what people are playing just ping-pong with ideas they're not listening you you need to listen to experts in in that when you especially talk about martial arts there's a did the the difference is so profound and the results are so critical because you're talking about a sport where the objective goal the goal is

61:11clear it's very clear beat the out of the other person in front of you yeah so anything that would give you an advantage in beating the out of that person should be really looked at very carefully and not to thrown through the the lens of this progressive ideological filter that we're going through right now because that's that's what it is I mean that's how people are looking at it it's with weightlifting as well when transgendered athletes going to weightlifting competitions the male to female transgender athletes are overwhelmingly dominant I mean is this is this a coincidence or it's no it's someone who had testosterone pumping through their system and a y-chromosome their whole life and now all of a sudden we're supposed to say no she's a woman she's dainty she's got size 14 feet she's got gorilla hands like the he doing sir so I think as you said

62:01earlier it's she is a woman but for the purposes of competition yeah against other women you know legally she's a woman at that stage right if she goes through that identity transition but I think we have to recognize and I think even many traditional feminists are making this point you match to the anger of the trans community they're saying hold on your what you're doing in this way is actually we fought so hard and so long for these female spaces where we have a space of our own and now people that used to be men are coming into those spaces and actually quite literally beating the crap out of us yes yes you know whether it's in boxing whether it's in weightlifting in martial arts they are - by definition they're dominating all this of course they are for the reasons you said experts that they're calling upon or almost all transition doctors surgeons or people

62:50that have transitioned themselves when they speak to actual board-certified endocrinologist some of the only do it off record but one of them forget her name she was in one of the big mixed martial arts publications Ramona cross sick I believe is her name she's saying no not only does it it it actually doing this transition like from male to female you're forcing your you're putting estrogen into the system so the bone density change that would ordinarily take place if you remove someone's testicles and stop that just the production of testosterone estrogen preserves bone density so you're actually retaining the male bone density there's so many problems with this and that and that one of the other things they say well oh the Olympics the Olympics allow it the Olympics are very ideologically based there's not a whole lot of science to this to this transition thing of allowing male to

63:45female athletes to compete in the Olympics and there's a stream amount of corruption in the Olympics as it is with the IOC being in bed with wada the world anti-doping agency and the way they handle this Russian scandal I mean this Russian scandal that was highlighted in that fantastic documentary Icarus yeah I was like they're crazy the Olympics are not to be trusted that is a gigantic multi-billion dollar business where the athletes get paid zero money it is inherently corrupt from the top down no doubt about it so to call upon them is to see who should be competing as a woman off they're not the experts this is this is not something that's been examined and this is coming from someone who one of my jobs is examining and commentating on fights that is a big part of what I do I understand fights and I know what it looks like when a man's beating the

64:35out of a woman and that's what it looked like when this person was fighting women it was there was a massive physical advantage massive and not a scintilla advantage what was the way you mention something about the reaction that you go to that what was the trouble you gonna tell people are so mad at me I mean it was just so many not only that they took my words out of context they quoted of all these different gender transition doctors at saying that there's no science behind this and the science behind it being totally fair and totally equal it's just not and people know it everyone knows it they could they couldn't put Chris cyborg against this guy and give him a run for his money wrong way classer that's the other way that's the other thing and we're dealing with a similar situation like that in Texas I don't know about the girl who was which was born a girl she's

65:19transitioning to a boy in high school taking testosterone but in Texas they only allow her to compete as a girl so she's dominated the Texas State wrestling championship two years in a row and it's horrific because she's on steroids she's on testosterone and it doesn't matter because they're testing chromosome yeah she's a woman she was born a woman right she's born a girl so because the fact that she's transitioning to be a boy they don't give a you're a woman you're not gonna wrestle against men you're a girl you're not gonna wrestle against boys so they've allowed her under extreme protest mitts terrible she wants to compete or he I should say wants to compete as a boy they won't let him they say no you were born a girl you have to compete as a girl so when he competes everybody boos it's awesome it's awful I mean it's it's it's really that question for you that way around if it's

66:09female to male transition somebody that used to be a woman that transitions to a man and wants to compete with the men they don't have it zone you're allowed to read of this advance if they win in that context they actually done really good yes right look women can beat men yeah I mean it happens all the time in jujitsu there's especially in jujitsu in particularly because it's such a technique based art but it is possible there's there's also a woman named Germaine jaronda me who's world-class mixed martial artist who's multiple time world Muay Thai champion who fought a man and knocked him out it's a crazy video she was a real man ko time with a straight right it's it is possible for them to win if their skill level is so far superior that it overcomes the inherent strength advantages but a woman - male transition would be at a severe disadvantage

66:58against the natural man so would you be so in that Texas case they clearly have it wrong they should allow they should allow him to compete with yes and would you be whereas I can I think all three of us probably instinctively would resist the notion that a female that a male to female athlete competes with other females because they'd have enough quad resist that yes but would you be for a female to male athlete competing with men yes because I don't think there's no there's no better but here's the problem and again the consent is sort of running in the other he is continually putting herself or he's putting her right in my way knowingly and I'm not opposed to a woman fighting a man if she so chooses like I'm not opposed to bull riding yeah if you wanted I'm not you know lobbying to get bull riding outlawed but if you want to be so stupid that you climb on top of a 2,000 pound angry

67:49animal go for it yeah you should be able to do whatever you want I think you should be able to jump out of fairly good air on airplanes if you want to parachute you should be able to risk your life parachuting the difference lies in just massive advantages and that there's a massive advantage in transitioning from male to female female to male here's the other problem female to male you have to take testosterone you can't legally take testosterone and compete it's been a giant issue in mixed martial arts because for the longest time there was a loophole and the loophole was testosterone therapy and they were allowing testosterone replacement therapy for male athletes that were either older or it's it was a it was a symptom of having pituitary gland which comes from head trauma which come which means really essentially your career should be over yeah your your

68:37body's not producing hormones correctly and that's a very common issue with people that have been in war people that have been blown up by IEDs people that have been hit a lot even soccer players a lot of times there's show diminished levels of testosterone and growth hormone because of to eteri gland damage so you wouldn't even allow that so a female to male would be in a whole nother problem in combat sports because it's not legal for you to take testosterone and compete to bring this full circle back to me sitting at the pool destroy about to destroy my vacation on twitter how long did you spend working on this article what another thing it's so again this was your wife must hate to do that how much does she matter well it was kind of the perfect storm but there were there were a few things that that relieve the pressure one is there was another family

69:25from our school so they're like well mark my daughter had a friend that said that we that my wife could socialize with and having another couple there forced me to sort of put on my social phase at dinner and and I mean it's not to say to describe it that way he's putting on your social phase it actually changes your psychology I mean like if you have if you if you have to drop your problem in order to be a normal sane person with people you don't know all that well you're actually a happier more normal person if it had just been me and my wife at dinner while I'm dealing with this blow up it just you know it's just never would've the cloud wouldn't wouldn't have left so anyway I I was trying so I was trying not to engage and so I didn't want to have to write anything new to deal with this the this what I viewed is just an egregious attack on on my intellectual and moral

70:23integrity and so when I saw this article from Klein I realize I had this email exchange with him at the end of which I said listen if you if you continue to slander me this is ahead for like a year previously because there's been released I released so so I said but I said the end of this exchange if you continue to slander me and if you misrepresent the reasons why we didn't do a podcast because we we had had talked publicly about maybe sorting this out on a podcast a year ago but I found the exchange with him by emails so in such bad faith I found him so evasive and dishonest and again just plain ideological ping-pong as you said and not actually engaging my points that I said listen if you if you lie about this and you keep slandering me I'm just gonna publish this email because because I think the world should see how you operate as a journalist and as an editor

71:17like he he had declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion defending me and Marie an inbox I mean he it was just it was truly you know slanderous and misleading everything he's published on this topic and he has a huge platform I wish to do it so which I enjoy I really like what oh yeah no I mean if I I've red fox with pleasure as well but it is it it you know once you see how the sausage gets made on many of these things once you're the news item you can see that there's very little journalistic scruple in the in the background there so I I was lit man I didn't want to have to spend my time on vacation writing a retort to this thing but I felt like I had to respond and again this is an illusion there's like a sheer confection of looking at Twitter if I hadn't been looking at Twitter I wouldn't have felt I had to respond and so I responded in the laziest possible

72:12way which I just published the email exchange because it's already written I don't have to write anything you know I just live those hits and essentially and of course the rest of the world didn't know you're actually meant to be on vacation right now and so there's no context to them as to why you were still III massively underestimated the amount of work even my own fans would have to do to understand why I was so angry in that email exchange so I came off like the angry bastard in the email exchange and he came off as this you know just open-minded ready to dialog guy whereas if you follow the plot and you saw what he had published about me and and Murray previously this thing that has hit is now on the hate watch page of SPLC he was being totally disingenuous and Ave and just these responses you remember they didn't match to his article did they not not at all and it was this

73:04thing it was so yeah so I just kept getting more tuned up and and so I published this thing not realizing not I mean I you know it was definitely mistake to publish the email exchange just just pragmatically not I don't think it was unethical because I told him I was going to do it in advance if he kept he kept it up it was just it was totally counterproductive because it was if he was far more reasonable emaddix people in the original article what seems like he that do a lot of work - yeah yeah thing is he wasn't it was suited he was it was it was a an appearance of reason but it was it was not and then which so we finally did this podcast a year hence you know this is now my last podcast is now you know two weeks ago and you know it was basically as bad as I was expecting and I basic I feel that I met the person who I thought I was dealing with in the

74:01email exchange and he was fundamentally unresponsive to any of my points and you know as you say Joe just trying to score political points to his toward his audience and the thing is he has a what's that mean there's many there many asymmetries here but one crucial one is that he has an audience that doesn't care about whether or not he's responsive to the thing that his his opponent or interlocutor just said right it's they're not tracking it by that metric they're tracking it by are you making the political points you win it that are going that are massaging that you know outrage part of our brains like our ego do you have your hands on our amygdala you know and and are you pushing the right buttons and so he's talking about racism and you know just the white privilege and I'm granting him all of that I'm said listen like let me tell you why that's not relevant to my

74:58concerns and what happened here with Murray I'm gonna I'm everything you're gonna say about the history of lynching I'm gonna grant you right that's not the we don't there's no daylight between us there and but the thing is I have an audience that is that care is massively about following the logical conversation if somebody makes a point in frustrating that is even close to being a good in response to me my audience is like you know okay Sam what the are you gonna say to that yes right and if and if I drop that ball I I lose massive points right whereas I'm often finding myself in conversation with people who don't have to care about those kinds of audience that was the one I had one with this Omar Aziz oh well that was title the best podcast ever I mean he knows his audience does not care about him honestly representing in this case the doctrine of Islam who was that guy even

75:49I mean Ali says right fine you could say okay editor of ox or whatever where did you even find that Connie's podcast until this day I don't even know who this bloke is this guy is some crazy guy me and auntie me it was because at one point he was going on about me being some form of enabler of your bigotry and yeah well yeah be your own Uncle Tom yeah I could see this is that this is why it's so frustrating because I have pretty much memorized inside out back to front these lannister ideological narrative and I could sit here right now and play that game with you the game of ping pong yeah without conceding anything and this is where you know I feel our conversation went really well because it was stripped away from all of that and we had a genuine conversation it still to this day very easy for me to to play the tune of the Islamist and score those points

76:47especially because some of what I've been through yeah and score those points and just get locked in a essentially it's ego but it's it's a it's it's it's not an intellectual conversation it's a it's it's a game of you know who's who is basically checking the right boxes in their own little confirmation bias to their own audience that doesn't interest me but it's frustrating you're also you're also the best person on the other side of that conversation now so there's a series of videos on YouTube I think it's called Merry Christmas mr. Islamist yeah that's right and so on YouTube you can look at him hit it against people who are playing this game you know Islamists and and jihadis of various sorts you and that he modest is meeting them on your interview shows you mostly in the UK where they're pretending to be more benign than they are and that it monitors you know finding the question

77:38that sort of pulls back the mask on the theocrats hilarious it's it's very fun well you're that one video that you publish on your blog I've sent to dozens of my friends the one video where there's this guy and he's addressing this enormous group of people and he's talking about is this radical Islam or is this Islam that was I think a conference in Norway yeah that was just I mean he's not straight up in Islamist jihadist addressing a crowd of seemingly mainstream Muslims in Norway and but he just by show of hands you know is it you know are we extremists if we think apostates or COPD it's it's pretty it's stunning it's an amazing document in yeah in respect to the way they want to treat homosexuals apostates I mean the whole thing is is this Islam or is this radical Islam talking of ideology blinking statistical data on the subject of homosexuality so in the United

78:31Kingdom a poll was done last year asking so there have been two polls gauging public Muslim attitudes towards gays the first asked how many Muslims in the UK find homosexuality morally acceptable and zero percent this is by the way by a professional polling company it's not just some student that's devised a poll on Twitter a professional polling company found that zero percent of British Muslims responded to a poll saying that they found homosexuality morally acceptable and then a year later which now last year another poll was was conducted and that was an ICM poll asking whether British Mazda how many British Muslims believed the homosexuality should be criminalized or remain legal and I think it was roughly 52% 52% if my memory serves incorrectly said of British Muslims said that they would wish for homosexuality to be criminalized and of course what does

79:27criminalization of homosexuality mean under Sharia and traditional Islamic jurisprudence we know that it's punished by death so these are these this is scientific data from gauging you know attitudes British Muslim attitudes towards homosexuality but the ideological blinkers will will kick in and refuse to see that truth and these aren't Islamists unfortunately my dialogue with Sam we talked about this that there are the Islamists who want to who actively want to take over a country and enforce their version of Islam then there's underneath that there's a softer landing of very very conservative stroked fundamentalist attitudes that unfortunately have become widespread and here is an example of it that is that is being gauged by scientific polling methodology that tells us there's a problem and unfortunately if one were to speak in this way especially in in

80:18Europe one is received by my own political tribe and that's liberals center-left and further one is met with denial and called a bigot simply for relaying these facts a quarter of British Muslims when asked about the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris a quarter said that those attacks are justifiable they sympathized with the attackers as opposed to the victims who were the staff at the Charlie Hebdo offices so this is what led you to be put on the southern sovereign speaking in these terms and unfortunately it's reporting polling data and what it does for me is to say this is why it's so important to address these issues to have these conversations to try and empower those Muslim voices that are seeking to challenge this sort of these sorts of attitudes and and carve out a space and if you know if if one can do that with Catholicism in Europe and go

81:14through a Reformation and end up with an Enlightenment and end up with secularism in the West what I often say is American liberals are very happy challenging their own Bible Belt and yet we have a Quran Belt within our communities and if I'm attempting to replicate the equivalent of challenging the Bible Belt within Muslim communities it means addressing these issues and yet they grant to themselves the right to challenge the Bible Belt within America and yet if we were to challenge what I call the Quran belt in Europe we suddenly called bigots you know and Islamophobes is this is this static has this been moving has it been adjusting and changing is there any sort of a recognition that there's an issue with this so you know the emergence of Isis really did bring it to the fore and it really did quieten some of the voices it also did increase the hysteria from the far left because they

82:06began panicking thinking actually we're gonna lose this debate and that's where I noticed their labeling became even stronger but the emergence of Isis did wake up a lot of people to to the challenges we're facing here because so many European born and raised Muslims went over to join Isis and of course think about it in this sense the most infamous and notorious execution cell that I think were erroneously called the the jihadi Beatles in the press because actually it really does it's an insult to the Beatles but it was a diminishes the true horror you have these guys you know they called him jihadi John and but the ISIS execution is basically that entire cell of the the media face of Isis execution cell were all British Muslims and that should tell you something that we've got the worst terrorist group educator I mean the thing is university graduate like every

82:52variable that the the far left wants to marshal to explain this phenomenon like lack of educational opportunity lack of Economic Opportunity lack of social integration mental illness a you you can all you can find people who had massive opportunity I mean City were I mean you weren't a jihadist but you were an Islamist but let me you're a person who that's right and basically play any game he want to mere you like it is he's he's he's somebody who back to the Superman he can run he can run for political office he hasn't been elected yet but he you know he should be I mean this is the quarterback of the football team in the the this context he is a candidate for a recruitment wealth I think a think of it this way we've got the worst terrorist group in our lifetime it one can reasonably say is Isis right the worst terrorist group at least in living memory is Isis and the worst cell

83:42analysis the execution cell came from a fully developed for want of a better term first world country and that was Britain and mohammed emwazi the leader of that execution cell graduated from the University of Westminster was given as a young child was given political asylum by Britain because his family were Kuwaiti and they fled the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein the country that the West liberated and he turned against that country so he had every reason to like Britain Britain gave my home gave him a actually physically bricks-and-mortar house gave his family on social costs they gave him social housing they educated he graduated from University and they liberated his father's country from an aggressor and this man turned against this country that helped him and his family and his nation was he captured or did he's dead what one of them has been captured but

84:32he's currently being held in Turkey would it would be fascinating to listen to his rationale it's not so that the other why I forgot his name but he was just interviewed you know you don't get a lot out of him he was interviewed by female Arab journalists so on and dismissive character he refused to talk about much he said you know these are accurate accusations and allegations you're making and I will wait to trial in the end he kind of cut the interview short he seemed a little put out that she was a woman oh yeah he did so as I'm looking at you now imagine she's the interview and and and and she's asking me questions and I'm looking in this direction she literally never laid eyes on her it's so intense it's such it like as you say radioactive subject to just it's it's just fascinating to watch white liberal progressives just scamper away from this well but the flip the flip

85:34side of the ISIS thing has been the refugee crisis which has made which has really empowered both extremes frankly that the far left and the far right so you have the far right you obviously with the wind in their sails worrying about this influx of people from the Middle East and and you know and beyond North Africa and just the change of culture in their societies and a lot of these concerns are plausible but because only the far right and a few other decent people like Douglas Murray will talk about the plausible concerns the space has just been vacated so you just have the far right but if our far-right populist politics being and enabled and then you have this delusional open borders left that won't we've got to talk about the huge problem I told Sam about this but it bears repeating I was having a conversation with someone as an executive at YouTube

86:30and I asked them why someone got a Community Guidelines strike on their account because they posted up a video on their playlist that they enjoyed of Sam Harris and Douglas Murray engaged in a conversation I go why would that get you a Community Guidelines strike and this woman said because it's hate speech I got a problem with the last you see sorry apparently Douglas Murray caused me problems somebody worked yes she was a big executive equate YouTube she said it's hate speech and I told her I go did you listen to it I go you didn't listen to it I go this is stunning that you would just say it's hate speech then you just be so dismissive of it so quickly and she talked to me as if I was her employee like I was not allowed to question her and she was just gonna say what she said and I was gonna shut up and it was a fascinating conversation no no no why on

87:19vacation no but it was I did a podcast with Douglas and apparently it got flagged someone else put it up on their account and I got flagged as hate speech and strikes you can get your account removed so I've got a phrase for this and I've been I've been rallying for it on social media for a couple of months now and I call it a digital blind spot there's a cultural bias on social media where because of and it's intellectually lazy because because social media is essentially a Californian invention right and we're in the home state of where most of this came from it's got a very Californian based worldview which cares a lot about white supremacy and doesn't care about many other forms of bigotry that exist out there in the rest of the world which by the way is the majority of the world so on Twitter right now of course there's Miley Annapolis has been banned

88:08Tommy Robinson has been banned as in taken off now Twitter's a private camere onsen he's the former leader of the British English Defence League which was at one time Europe's largest anti-muslim street protest group I helped him leave that organization is still what many views I completely agree with but nevertheless he doesn't support or nor advocate for terrorism why was he removed well so Twitter is a private company it can choose to remove whoever it wants for whatever reason and we will judge it for us inconsistencies but he was ostensibly removed for hate speech as was Milo unitless now the point being that still till this day and before people misquote me and completely say that I'm now defending hate speech and and it's and their right to speak with hateful views on Twitter this is my actual point that till this day did you know that Hezbollah which is

88:58a known and recognized terrorist organization so forget hate speech for a moment a terrorist organization that believes in actually killing civilians and Hamas a known and recognized terrorist organization that believes in bombing babies on buses as a form of resistance they still have accounts on Twitter and my point is is that this is the this is the blind spot you know that and I've flagged Twitter about this on many an occasion this is the cultural blind spot this is the digital blind spot that the dude sitting in California in wherever who is monitoring this stuff and it's probably more than one person they don't give a that there's some Brown person in the Gaza Strip that believes it's okay to kill Jewish babies they don't give a because it's a brown person saying it in the name of Islam what they care about is a non-violent yet says stupid things guy because he's

89:52white called Tommy Robinson in England or Milo u Annapolis saying stuff that they obviously that touches their sensitivities and it's so intellectually lazy to flag that immediately and to bar it from social media because you're comfortable with it you recognize white supremacy it doesn't take any effort to recognize it you don't have to invest in studying this stuff to know what white supremacy is it takes a bit of effort to study brown people's ideas that you're unfamiliar with and recognize here's a terrorist organization that's freely operating on social media I know specifically on Twitter I've actually pulled up their handles I think one of the concerns that Twitter has and I think this is a valid concern is that when you have people there saying hateful things and you have people that are saying whether it's white supremacy or whatever even if it's stupid yeah

90:37problem is there's a rallying cry of trolls that follow behind them and it builds up momentum and it gets pretty stunning and that was what was happening with Milo and by silencing Milo off Twitter they have essentially removed him from the public discourse you don't hear about him what's right because of this because of these things but imagine what that does in Arabic with the terrorist groups yes but there's there everything you've just said by the way I agree with and multiply that for groups that have infrastructure in multiple countries with actual organizational hierarchies and planned means of distributing their ideas across entire populations physically fighting in Wars right now such as Hezbollah in Syria killing Sunni Muslim rebels you know and so imagine that and the and the way you're able to rally a mob in Pakistan on blasphemy as an example all it takes

91:27for some person on social media to accuse another person or blasphemy and they're probably gonna get killed the very next day where and it happens all the time but but because these californian based social media companies are unaware of of the of the cultural implications of those sorts of organizations and groups and listed terrorist groups mind you they are there's completely no no barring on any of their activity there's also the same thing that you have with YouTube and with a lot of these other social media organizations and companies is they don't have to respond or give you any reasons they can say it violates our Terms but what are those terms those terms aren't even listed it would be vague like no hate speech okay well what's hate speech like what do you say like what is what are you what is your clear policy what are your guidelines how does someone avoid violating your

92:14guidelines they don't say yeah and how is the president the United States not of not violating those yeah well the monetization is another way that they do it they'll remove the ability to put advertising on a conversation that they don't like and it doesn't have to be like my conversation with Douglas Murray was Dumont's not without any explanation none zero then we have Douglas his he's yeah but if you've listened to our act the actual context of our conversation there's nothing even remotely remotely hateful about it yeah yeah I mean these are private companies they've got the right to to choose whatever policy the only thing I would expect from a private company show a consistent policy towards these things you know if you don't like hate speech then Brown Band Brown people who are also advocating more than just the hate speech but actually preaching

93:01violent terrorism right yeah it's a strange time for this man because it's it's also a time where it's you can communicate so instantaneously it's fantastic in that regard you can get ideas out so quickly but these hubs of information like where the information gets distributed are they're controlled by people that I don't think ever knew that they were going to have this sort of responsibility I don't think I think you're seeing that with Zuckerberg and these trials or the the the speeches that he's given in front of Congress like when you see him on television talking about it you get the sense that this is a guy that never prepared for this had no idea this was going to happen and then all of a sudden from this simple social media platform that was supposed to be friends sharing photos and just talking about girls yeah no sense of yeah put women there's a lot

93:53of that you know but I mean - and what was Twitter I mean Twitter was essentially just you know I mean you remember the old days of Twitter it would be you would use your name it like is doing this like Sam under Sam Harris like Sam Harris is at the movies you would say that almost if you were in a third person that was the original form that people would use Twitter come after that it was weird it was a weird way of talking and then people started just writing what they thought yeah and it just became and then became ideology and then it became sharing links sharing links and interesting articles is a big part of it but to me that's the only good part of it now like I got like I've just discovered that and that was as most of my attachment to it I genuinely use it to ask you as a curated news because I follow interesting people they say they tweet interesting stuff and I

94:47and I consumed it that way but noticing what's coming back at me in the at mansion so I put something out you know with my podcast and then I look to see how it's being received on Twitter and I don't tend to do that in other forums I don't really look at facebook comments much I don't look at YouTube on YouTube it's just a cesspool right I mean so so even if therefore you that the comments are horrible nastiness started on the youtube comment friends it's and then spread everywhere else very strange but so I but one thing I found that you you can change that your settings in Twitter where you you screen out people who don't have you know just have Twitter egg photos they don't have a real photo you can screen out people who haven't had their email confirmed and I think I just did those two things and like 90% of the hate went away it was amazing like it just just doing that thank you

95:45for you should do that except I'm think it's better to not actually even look at what's coming back at you well you've taken it off your phone no I think so too I think looking looking at it - virus my wife Rachel will be very happy with that I think she'd probably wish that I did the city you tweak on it to do you think I don't react sometimes I like to think I don't react in this way but I mean I can't I can't say that cuz actually probably I have sometimes but but you know I get all that same kind of I get it's interesting because I took I took a stance on the serious strikes and that's your stance well I just think that um especially now in hindsight we're there now no casualties involved at all there are only three injuries I think we had to take a stance that succeeded where Obama failed in in making sure that redline was maintained that the use of chemical weapons cannot

96:34be tolerated even if it was symbolic even it was highly symbolic I think sometimes symbolism is important so I took that stance and it wasn't got a lot of love on Twitter oh yeah of course because it's actually that's against the grain public opinion at the moment is is it was against the strikes and I fully acknowledge that when I took the stance right but I argued a case and I set the case out and both on my sky news show i have a show a co-host on the pledge and also on my radio show on LBC I repeatedly argue for why I think is important that we don't allow for chemical weapons and they used to become normalized in our world and so it was interesting because I posted the sky news clip of me sort of talking to camera about my reasons for this and and I have this screen grab of the reaction it's just a puddle of blood so it is the two extremes completely they actually

97:21started fighting with each other about who's right about her so I've said look there here's a clip why we must intervene is here after that come up with that blah blah first one is a guy with an actual swastika Nazi symbol on his profile and it says you know that Nordic Scot as his handle Thomas James he says Majid wants Britain to intervene in Syria because Putin and Assad are kicking his Isis buddies arses end of story right so there's a guy is basically saying what my real reason for calling for that is because I'm supporting Isis against the Assad regime the guy immediately after responds to him and it's called at last oh right and he says what are you on about you Nazi dumbest Majid is funded by you're not he's a far I Uncle Tom captures that but they're arguing with each other over whether I'm in there cut his camp or his camp basically you never have the worst

98:12publicist in the world or the best one so I should I think I should take myself out of that equation let them find each other it would be even better really that's the move just set something like that up set the far right and the far left against each other and you could just like sneak away while they're fighting yeah that's how nuts it is I mean the the kind of horses you know the extremes are I mean they're equally irrational and the fact that you could be at the epicenter of each prompt of both of their problems yeah you're Europe covert jihadist and you're an anti-muslim bigot it seems like there's more conspiracy theories in in terms of like what someone's actual motivation for what they're saying now than ever before to because it's so easy to express them so someone could say no you know he's far-right or no you're you're you're just trying to support Isis yeah

99:03like this this is this ability to like find some nefarious reason for your actions but again it's reducing one's opinion to the lowest yes base you know dodgy motive as opposed to applying the principle of charity so if Joe says something now I can either sit her and actually think no I don't trust this guy I don't respect him and therefore I'm gonna reduce his opinion to the worst possible interpretation that he could possibly mean and then use that against him or I could continue to ask what you mean by that because I'm assuming you're a good decent human being in origin and perhaps you mean something that I haven't yet quite grasped and then I'll see to clarify your own opinion in your own words and I think it's unfortunate that many of our conversations today and the far left is as guilty of it as the far right and they like to think they're not which is part of that righteousness

99:47that blinds them from actually committing this very same injustice they accuse the far right of committing and that is a it's the same bigotry in in a mirror image I call it the bigotry of low expectations the low expectations they have that Muslims are somehow unable to adhere to a common decent liberal secular democratic values and so it's actually plaguing our conversation stay if only we were able to strip away our ideological baggage in entering conversations and and allow for you know that honest honest conversation but of course we say that and then you try to replicate our success on a number of occasions and found yourself incredibly frustrated well you know unfortunately I found the one reasonable person to have a fight with well it just seems like this is a side effect of this increased ability to communicate and that just there's so much noise and there's so

100:37much going on I mean it is the most fantastic time for the distribution of information there's never been time yeah where it's so easy to distribute information in human history it's really crazy but I don't think we know what to do with it and I think that when you deal with people who have such rigid ideologies and they find this incredibly easy ability to express these ideologies there's just so much clashing it's just so much so much noise and nonsense and when someone says something that they know that they don't have to back up with facts because they know that they're there people were on their position will support it you say the right keywords you know right and privilege whatever you want to say and then boom you're gonna get a whole slew of people like those two people in your your mentions battling it out with each other you're just like kind of picking

101:22fights and starting these little fires and letting other people go to war you know what I think we've done and it's again the advent of social media is that we I was speaking with my friend Mark about this and we've democratized truth and when you democratize truth in that way the earlier thing you mentioned about sports that sports and your expertise in their field if I had come back at you and spoke at you with as much authority as you claim in your expertise with having absolutely no history in that expertise whatsoever and assumed that I have as equal right to an unresearched claim to truth in my opinion as you do and who has a lifetime of experience in that field therein lies a problem that I am arrogating to myself this notion this this this kind of belief that my opinion though I've got of course I have an equally legal right to express it but it

102:15doesn't mean it carries the same weight as your opinion when it comes to combat sports and it shouldn't unfortunately I think what's happened with the and were still you could add you're expressing that opinion as a person of color or as therefore it Sun criticize about by you because his truth otherwise you're racist and it's my task the key word that it's my truth you know and so the problem with that is when you relativize truth in that way is it there now I can speak to you on on an equal footing about combat sports which only a mad person who hasn't had that history in combats what would think would arrogate to themselves a right to do so but social media I think has allowed for that to happen I gave a TED talking about I think it was roughly 2011 about the the dangers of this happening and social media dividing us all but I'd say now that that's if I were to pitch that

103:02TED talk today I did it that Ted global if I were to pitch that TED talk today it wouldn't be accepted because it's not something new now it's it's now people know that how social medias has divided us but back then it was new and innovative art in offer as an idea for Ted global to say we want you to speak about this on and it's still up online but if people watched it today they'd think how on earth did that become a TED talk um because there was this heady day back in you know five six seven years ago this kind of hope filled moment where everyone thought Google Facebook and Twitter and generally social media and also tech companies were like the good guys that these companies weren't actually companies that they were on our side against the corporate world and it turns out I think we've just hit this moment he mentioned Zuckerberg we I think we've culturally come to this

103:47moment now where you know I think symbolized by his testimony of Congress that those that honeymoon period is over people now view him I think quite firmly and squarely as a CEO of a very rich company as opposed to a guy in my club that I'm friends with who's on my side against the world you know and that's how Google used to have that slogan don't do evil they still have it I mean the problem is the the incentives are all wrong and I'm sorry I was just at Ted and well they give you a sense of how far the rot has spread here so I was I found myself at a dinner sitting next to a neuroscientist who thought that it was and this Ezra Klein thing followed me around to Ted and I saw because many people have listened to the podcast and he thought Charles Marie should have been physically attacked at Middlebury this is a nurse is a neuroscientist academic you know what you're like a

104:45impeccable person otherwise I think he was after we wound up having a fight at dinner over it I think he was somewhat chagrined by having expressed that opinion but I mean that's how how emotionally hijacked people are by this issue and but it's a that's incredible it was the other thing that's new this is the other thing that's no the left advocating for violence this is very new yeah yeah I mean I always felt like the the left was nonviolent the the whole idea behind being progressive like non-violence was was a genuine aspect of that and free speech yeah two things yes those are two things that have been sort of stopped that this free speech is fine as long as you're not saying speech that I disagree with and non-violence sure unless we need to use violence which is like and the people that are saying it like if you watch these nt4 people like Jesus Christ the most incompetent

105:41violent people you've ever seen in your life these guys practicing there's videos of anti feh they had they got together and decided to train and prepare for violence and so they're doing these martial arts classes they have people teach them like holy like the average high school kid could you guys up like this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life but it's almost like they're they realize that there's not that much danger in what they're doing and they can kind of play with danger they can play with violence they can put the masks on there that you know they're not in Israel they're check out the Gaza Strip show they're a bunch of cowards he's a guy there's a guy he went to my old Universe I graduated from so ask before I did my masters at the LSE so s has been embroiled in a strike at the moment as the Students Union has been supporting professors who are on strike

106:36and it's over pension and pension rights in a refused government refusing to raise their pension rights and whatever and some of the students came out in strike far-left students defending the professors and they put up they put forward a ring preventing students from attending their classes and an a female black lecturer wanted to cross the strike lines to go in to teach her students a white male public school educated very very middle class protester far left physically attacked her he physically attacked a female black professor so gone is suddenly gone is the white privilege gone is the male attacking a female you know gone is all of that is non-violence all the above the name of ideology he legitimized and allowed himself to attack of black female by the way oh and she was also Muslim black female this white kid is just attack for wanting to teach my

107:38class this is crazy this is crazy crazy world we're in man this is do you are you optimistic about the future yeah I say that because it's going to take a lifetime's work and I don't think that in our lifetime much is gonna change I think you know maybe for the next generation what is it the picture of how do you conceive of your job at the moment and what what is the status quo I mean so say for instance Isis the Islamic state is sort of fading from most people's memory now I mean there's you know the even mine I'm spending much less time thinking about it because it seems to fit so let me tell you story in into submission can answer this question with a story so radical which is my autobiography has a u.s. publication right in the UK it's Random House Penguin it's published by the biggest publishing house when I came to publish in the US I approached

108:32publishing houses but it was after bin Laden was killed and so when we approached ten twenty whatever publishing houses the problem solved they all said no they say the problem solved they said we think you know we wish you'd come to us five years earlier but problem solved now there's not a problem anymore and and a bit like what you mentioned is sort of your expertise and and I I have been consumed by this subject all my life and there are a few people on this planet that I would take seriously on this subject outside especially of Quilliam and there are other organizations they have some really good people but I know them all and we regularly speak so I would say to all these publishing houses I can assure you 100% this problem not only has not been solved it's gonna come back around in a far worse way than you can ever have imagined this is before Isis came

109:19along none of them believed me of course what then happened my cookbook eventually got published by some very small publishing house in the US and has done quite well for them but the point of the story was this Isis came around and people were suddenly like oh my god where did this come from of course those of us who had been monitoring the situation knew this was going to come back around very very heavy now the ISIS had been pushed back and and this is where this story is sort of the point of the story is we've got to resist the temptation to believe the problem has been solved because the the organization known as Isis which is an a bureaucracy has been fought back but the ideology upon which that organization was built is still very much alive and it's still strong um what al Qaeda did while the whole world was focused on Isis was exploit that opportunity to rebuild and

110:10regroup and they've been rebuilding in Syria now they are stronger than they have ever been even under bin Laden because for the first time in the history of that organization they are firmly embedded within the Syrian population as they genuinely kind of viewed by the people that they were fighting on behalf of as a grassroots resistance organization whereas up before that they were seen as a a tear group that was like a you know just like a vanguard they've embedded themselves in the Syrian population in the Yemeni Civil War they've embedded themselves in North Africa East Africa and in Pakistan and they are resurgent and they are grooming Hamza Bin Ladin who has been add-in son and they're grooming him for leadership and and a time will come maybe in a couple of months maybe in a couple of years where they announce Hamza bin Laden as a new leader of

110:56al-qaeda currently it's Ayman Zawahiri when they do that once their grooming has been complete and assuming hamza isn't killed up until then all of the fragments of what remains of isis will probably rejoin al qaeda under hamza bin Laden and you'll have a stronger than ever before al-qaeda organization and we've got to we've got to remember that we never expected Isis to emerge alqaeda will come back with a vengeance what is the the politics between the remnants of Isis and al Qaeda well Hamza bin Laden's succession to the leadership solves that problem of the biggest the Isis guys well originally all al Qaeda Isis was al Qaeda in Syria and they broke away after bin Laden died because they didn't they had pledged allegiance to bin Laden and the new leader of al Qaeda Ayman Zawahiri is by all accounts a rather uncharismatic and you know he's a he's a pediatrician he's

111:49not really a kind of bin Laden had the Korea's media Trish yeah he's a kid he's Egyptian as an Egyptian pediatrician from a very well-off Egyptian family by the way I think his grandfather ambassador bin Laden clearly had the charisma the wealth the presence the looks he had all of it that saguaro he doesn't as worries you know compared to bin Laden he just doesn't you know say if the guys that broke away from Al Qaeda's forum Isis said to suwari the current leader we pledged allegiance to bin Laden we are you nothing you're not our Emir our leader if humza bin Laden comes back into as the leader of al Qaeda it solves that problem because those remnants of Isis have a loyalty to the bin Laden name and their bin Laden family and they remember what they consider their glory days fighting under under bin Laden that's not nice to hear no no the problem has

112:41not gone away I can tell you that the problem and the problem is the ideology and it will not be dealt with until we deal with this ideology and it's why it's so dangerous too you know there was this awful term that I railed against it was so frustrating to see under Obama's presidency the US State Department officially adopted as their name for challenging this problem they adopted the term al Qaeda inspired extremism of course it isn't it isn't al Qaeda that it inspired extremism its extremism that inspired al Qaeda and it is for the purposes of political correctness you've got this term and the State Department officially that we're fighting across the world we are fighting al Qaeda inspired extremism my former organization his but to hire a Caliphate espousing organization that believes in their ideal caliphate that gays should be killed adulterous he should be stoned to death

113:33they were there before al Qaeda and this ideology has been there before al Qaeda al Qaeda was one of a long line of groups that came as a result of the Islamist ideology and we've got to start focusing on the ideology itself not the physical groups that spring up from it because they can change their name as you point out there's a another layer to the ideology that is also that is even more well subscribed that presents social and political problems so freely so as you said there are conservative Muslims who don't support al Qaeda they're not jihadist they can they would honestly say bin Laden doesn't represent my brand of Islam but these are still people who will who will say that homosexuals should be killed that's nice oh so it's like there's apparent allies against quote extremism can still be people so with with religiously mandated social attitudes that just cannot be

114:26assimilated in cosmopolitan societies so people who are and it may be worse worse than worse than al-qaeda inspired extremism there's just this notion that on the left and and this was this came out of Obama's mouth and it came out of Clinton's mouth and largely why she wasn't president it's not it's just a generic extremism right so that like in the same sentence that you have to worry about the caliphate you have to talk about abortion doctors being killed in the u.s. once every fifteen years so you might cost you remember because that President Obama refused to use the word Islamist extremism Trump has the other problem he thinks that bite like Rumpelstiltskin by repeating it enough you've solved the problem you know but but actually one of the elements in which he was correctly critical of Obama was and I was at the time vocally critical of Obama's reluctance to use the word Islamist

115:19extremism and we've got no problem when we talk about you know when we talk about white supremacist ideology we don't mean that all white people are supremacists you know what we're doing here is actually attributing precisely specifically what the ideology is and believes in white supremacy and likewise Islamist you know it's important so we can identify that ideology still while not calling it Islam right so we're still giving a bit of a leeway there for everybody else all the other Muslims but to call it Islamist extremism is to recognize that it's an offshoot of Islam it's a manifestation extreme or otherwise of Islam and thereby we are acknowledging that its justifications are in Islamic Scripture as well as of course a multiplicity of other causes grievances and what-have-you but we cannot ignore that it also rests on justifications that are derived from the

116:11Islamic Scripture I mean I can cite for the Arabic that tells you in the Koran itself to cut the hand of a thief or to lash the adulterer you know these are they all quote the hadith or the saying of the Prophet that says kill the person that changes their religion this is scripture and so of course there are other factors involved as well but one of the factors that gives rise to this is the unreformed scripture that these extremists cite and so we have to acknowledge that Islam has a role to play I often say that you know because again under the Obama presidency it was frustrating that the common refrain was to say that Islam this has nothing to do with Islam this is absurd as arguing that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism he went even further at one point didn't he at one point say that not only does this have nothing to do with his mom this has less

116:57to do with Islam than any other wouldn't tell him it was just he bent over backwards it's not saying the Crusades have nothing dude Christianity yeah Oh gentlemen unfortunately I have to wrap this up but I really appreciate you guys coming on it was in your book the book is Islam in the future of tolerance and actually we're the one thing we do have to announce is we're going to Sydney and Auckland yeah two of us and Douglas Murray and both Weinstein brothers we're gonna we're gonna wreck those towns oh my goodness we're gonna have a podcast a day long calm I think you want to use that first name because I think okay no but great to get both of them together that room yeah those guys are awesome yeah I'm really grateful to meet both of them and you as well thank you guys thank you appreciate is