Jack Symes

I'm going to have to multitask.

I think during the violence upon people who are Muslim in the UK, attacks on mosques, attacks on people's lives, and the current state in Palestine.

My honest, full, my fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal. I don't know if that kind of dehuman, it's like, it's morally abhorrent. It's something we should we should reject and condemn. But should it be legislated against? I'm not sure.

What's clear, though, is that people to me that are sharing those ideas, people who are platforming that person, helping that idea spread, are doing something again that doesn't have to be legislated against. But we should condemn as morally wrong as well. We should say you ought not do that because you should know that that's not right. That's reasonable.

Yeah. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people. Nowhere near as the amount of people that you've managed to interview over the last... How long have you been doing this? How many years? 15 years. 15 years. And like three or four times a week over 15 years as well. So a hell of a lot. So I've been going nine years, but interviews like once a month or something, right?

So nowhere near the amount of people.

And what I've thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something, we don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that might be needed. Right.

And so I wonder if you've got any views on like, What the moral responsibility is or what the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just like say, read up on like a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something.

So I know you've been like there's been previous things, right, where people have said that you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail. Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem.

Well, I think maybe what we do to avoid that problem, because we're just doing philosophy as well, right? We're just doing a philosophy podcast, and we say to them, we're just sticking with this book or this paper. And so we've got four researchers working on this, and we know all the ins and outs of it, like the back of our hand.

So we can give the audience member the best analysis they can get without having to go and do it themselves. When you're doing such a broad project like this on so many different topics, it's impossible to be able to do that. But I wonder if you think, I'm genuinely interested and curious to hear your thoughts on it.

Is a better situation for our public discourse a media in which we've got lots of different, let's say podcasts, for example, lots of different podcasts, lots of different hosts who all specialize in a different thing in order to analyze?

Having this general public facing podcast, which has not an area of speciality with people talking about things which are, you know, in some cases dangerous, right? Or like are important at least. Like is this is the situation better when we have lots of hosts on lots of topics and lots of podcasts? Or is it when we've got a general podcast which is covering all of these topics, right?

So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, I've just listened to this person for two or three hours. I should leave my church or like, I don't know, go out and live in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe. If someone listens to this and decides to quit their job and start counting grass or something. I just don't want someone to give up and think it's all meaningful. No, as in like counting grass instead of helping people. It's not your fault.

Well, I'm fundamentally here for a reason, which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just things that are underrepresented in legacy media. Yeah. Especially like non-human animal rights stuff. I find that when I've tried to talk about it and whether it's BBC or podcasts and stuff that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive.

Like two weeks ago, I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending non-human animal rights. So they changed the topic of it. Because, well, they don't want to upset people who are in the audience who consume these creatures. That's stupid. It's stupid. It's a conversation. Yeah, precisely. And that's a shame. As well with agnosticism, too.

There's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious. And we've got this public conversation, which is you're either like the Pope or Jordan Peterson or you're like one of the four horsemen of new atheism. And leaves out all of these people in the middle who was like trying to search for that.

I really enjoyed the conversation.

Cool. So if you just search Jack Symes philosophy, you can get to my site where everything sort of is. The podcast I do is the Panpsychast. It means casting thought everywhere in reverse. And that's all about all kinds of philosophy. Two books out this year, Philosophers on Guard. Two in a year. Damn. Both on guard as well. So first one's Philosophers on Guard, talking about existence.