Making Sense with Sam Harris - #139 — Sacred & Profane

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

Sam Harris gets together with Bill Maher and Larry Charles to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their film "Religulous." They discuss religion, politics, comedy, and other dangerous topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I am speaking with Bill Maher and Larry Charles. Bill, you all know, I trust. You know him principally from his HBO show, Real Time, which I've been on a few times over the years. Bill is certainly one of our most politically engaged comics. He still does a ton of stand-up,

and he's also an executive producer on Vice Media on HBO, and just a super productive guy. The occasion of this podcast was the 10th anniversary of his documentary, Religious, which was directed by my other guest, Larry Charles. Now, Larry has been hugely influential in comedy. He wrote for the Seinfeld show for the first five seasons. He also directed Sacha Baron Cohen's films, Borat and Bruno. He's also worked on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. He's just one of the 800-pound gorillas of comedy, and also a very nice guy. I'd never met him before, but it was a real pleasure to sit down

with him. And because we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Religious, the first half of our conversation or so is focused on the film. So I think you'll enjoy that part more if you've actually seen the film. It's not that you'll have no idea what's going on if you haven't, but I recommend that you watch it. It's very funny. And again, even if you've seen it before, you just can't believe where people are at on the topic of religion. It's really, it's quite a view of the human mind.

But otherwise, we touch several other topics. We're mostly focused on the state of comedy and public conversation in general and politics. It was fun to have an excuse to get these guys on the podcast. And now I bring you Bill Maher and Larry Charles. So I'm here with Bill Maher and Larry Charles, which is quite an honor. We've never met, Larry, so I'm going to start with you. Bill, you actually need no introduction on my show. I will introduce you, but it will be superfluous. Yeah, there's a few people out there going, who?

Yeah. So, Larry, I've been, I think, a bigger fan of yours than I realized because I read your bio in preparation for this conversation and realized that you've touched half of comedy. In a very inappropriate way. Yeah, yeah. So give us your potted bio, maybe from Seinfeld on? Because it's amazing. I think from Seinfeld, I thought that I was going to be a showrunner and make a lot of money and do that. And I did that for a few years and it was a lot of fun,

but I wasn't feeling any fulfillment at a certain point. And Larry David at one point came to me. I kind of had thought about directing for a long time. I was giving up on that dream as I sort of reached about 40. And Larry David literally came to me as he was doing Curb Your Enthusiasm,

he was starting that show and said hey why don't you direct one of these and I became a director uh so I'm a very lucky person and from there I met Bob Dylan uh which is a long story but yeah we wound up collaborating on a script we made a movie up but while we were writing the script I was thinking I'd go home every day and go you know I should be directing this movie and how am I going to ask Bob Dylan to direct this movie, you know? And one day I just kind of blurted it out and he went, okay. And then I directed that movie and then I moved in that direction.

I never made as much money again, but I wound up doing a lot of cool things like Religious as a result. Yeah, yeah. Wait, you didn't make money on Borat? No, nobody made money on Borat, believe it or not. I mean, I made some money on Borat eventually, but I was paid pretty much the minimum to do that movie. That movie wasn't even going to get made. I mean, they didn't know what they had.

It was done on a very low budget. We need to fire your attorney. Somebody made a lot of money. So Curb Your Enthusiasm as well. Yes, yes. But you've also dealt with a lot of great religious themes on Curb Your Enthusiasm as well. Yeah. So we're here. The happy occasion is dealt with a lot of great religious themes on Crippler Enthusiasm as well.

So we're here. The happy occasion is the 10th anniversary of Religious. Was it 9-11 that put religion as a problem on your radar in a way that it hadn't been? Or had you been vocally worried about it prior to then? Well, I think that's somewhat covered. I watched Religious. religious hadn't seen it really since we made it uh so it was a i tend not to look back at my work because all you could do is obsess on i should have said this i shouldn't have done that i shouldn't have said this or

but i think we did cover it in there that i was raised catholic and never liked that very much. My father stopped going to mass when I was a teenager, which was a hallelujah moment for me. And then for just the longest time, I didn't have Catholicism for sure. And I wasn't religious, but I didn't really think about it that much and i just had god in my life as like when i got in trouble oh please god get me out of this one but even i was one of those guys but into your 40s i think you say in the yeah and then at some point that became ridiculous and i realized i was making a fool of myself and just said no full-on and uh i don't know if 9-11 i don't remember that having a giant impact on me religious wise but but in terms of your perception of it being a social problem that you had to comment on now you had to be a vocal atheist talking about islam and right that certainly

did move that to the forefront of Of course, it also caused me to lose the show. I was, I had as a forum, but we were, we weren't off the air right away. We were on for another nine months and those are my favorite nine months of politically incorrect because we were able to do a more serious kind of show. And we did talk, uh, the country was in a more serious mood and we were able to not do the show with Kara Topp and Pauly Shore and do one with State Department officials and people like yourself. I didn't realize that. It took nine months to do that? Yes, the tragic events of 9-17, as we called it when I said the things that got me fired that we didn't go off the air

till June, end of June, 2002. Well, how did it gain traction after nine months? Was there a continuous drum beat to cancel you or just, I was never mad at ABC for, for canning us because it's a broadcast network and the advertisers didn't pull out. I was just mad at them because they lied and said, we lost our viewership and our ratings and our ratings never went down. The audience was not mad at me. We should remind people of what happened here. So you said the most frequent slur was that they were cowards, the 9-11 hijackers. Well, Dinesh D'Souza was the one who said it. And then I concurred. Of course, he was at a cab when the controversy came he did not want to be involved but he was the one who said these are he he went on a whole rant about it and i said

yeah you're right you know strictly speaking there is not a moral dimension to this they they stayed with the suicide mission that's not cowardly uh and then you know we were more cowardly we meaning the society not the military that's what my enemies chose to interpret it as. But everyone knew I didn't mean that. We were cowardly lobbing cruise missiles from thousands of miles away. And that was the end of that. But yeah, we were on for another nine months. And those were good months.

Those were good times. Did they hassle you during that time, ABC? I mean, did you know that eventually it was going to come to an end oh yeah i'm surprised also to hear that it went on nine months i don't think that's people's perception no i thought it just the guillotine came down right um no uh we had a contract and it was really to the end of the year but then we all agreed i wanted to get on to the next show i knew there was no future there. And I think one newspaper column referred to it as dead show walking, which is what it was,

but it was a good dead show walking. So liberated you in a way, in a way. Yes, it did. Yeah. So now had you guys been professionally connected before religious or how did you guys know?

We did not know each other personally. We had a lot of overlap in terms of friends and colleagues, but we had never hung out or met. And the great thing was once we did, it was very natural, as if we had known each other all those years. And I interviewed a number of directors, but I wanted to make a comedy.

And as I watched this movie last night, I realized, boy, this could have gone terrible with a director who didn't fit it. But, I mean, this is, it was the movie I wanted to make, but it really is like any movie. It's a director's movie. I mean, Larry made this movie with the cuts and the pacing. There's a lot that happens in the post-production. worked on it together but i give him so much credit because there's so much funny stuff that is the result of these quick intercuts and juxtapositions and just the the structure and uh it's not a job most jobs and showbiz i think yeah i could do that i couldn't do that i can't be a

director well thank you but i think again uh not to throw it back at you but that it was an amazing collaboration and a great synthesis of our sensibilities and one of the greatest projects I ever worked on also. Yeah, it was a joy from beginning to end. We did it with a band and we had so much fun doing it. Yeah, you look like you were having fun. And that's counting that I'm a terrible traveler. I don't like traveling, especially overseas. But having said all that, I'm so glad we did it and uh thanks for

celebrating it with us yeah so i just watched it again as well and i hadn't seen it since i mean it's been close to 10 years since i'd seen it and we were talking about this just before the we turned the mics on that the comedy holds up and that isn't often true. I mean, I would say probably half the time I go back to some cherished comedy, I'm just, you know, like to watch with, you know, with my wife who may not have seen it or with one of my daughters. It's just, I mean, it's just this stark encounter

with the idiot you used to be or, you know, some time that, some age of the earth that has elapsed. Everything just moves faster. Yeah. Try to watch a Hitchcock movie. We just did last night. Which one?

We walked out of North by Northwest. Walked out? And that's the best one? You only got to North. You couldn't get through North by? I mean, it wasn't terrible, but it was just, I mean, we've learned a lot about making movies in the intervening 60 years. And also people just had a, their brains, this is your field, you're a neuroscientist.

People's brains must have just been different. Yeah. Because they were perfectly okay with things moving so much. Glacial. Glacial. Yeah. I watched the man who, what's the H hitchcock movie he made like man who knew too much the man who knew too much yes and it is glacial that is the word for it it's like really

nothing goes on yeah it's so subtle i it's like wow people yeah all i kept thinking as i'm where's the suspense you know people were, yes, people were different. Very different. Also, there was fake kissing that I never noticed before. The fake kissing isn't even an attempt to simulate real kissing. They just touch their faces together. Neither is violence, right? We have too much violence now and it's too graphic, but then it was ridiculous. People were being killed without any struggle. And no blood, almost. Especially Indians, of course, in the Westerns. But that's another subject.

I think, if I may, I think the reason that religious is still fresh, there's a number of really good reasons for that. First of all, we're drawing on a thousands-of-year-old tradition with religion. So, in a way, it's kind of classic, classic subject that had never been touched humorously, satirically, in a nonfiction setting. I mean, Life of Brian is a brilliant movie also, but it's a fictional movie, and there have been other fictional comedies about religion. a documentary that tried to even be funny. How many documentaries are funny? So we had a very ambitious agenda, as it turned out,

to tackle religion, be funny about it, and make a funny documentary. And so the subject matter was always ripe and never tapped into. And as we know, not enough has changed since the movie's been made, so that those jokes still resonate today to a large degree. And also the subject matter.

We were ahead of the subject matter. I cited the stat on my show last Friday that when we made the movie, 16% of people said in the Pew poll that they were of no religion. And now that is in some polls as high as 26%. Yeah. So in a way, the movie's 10 years old and the public is still catching up to it that's true to the subject right so bill referenced the technique you use of intercutting archival images and it's pretty interesting because some of the shots that are landed against the interview subject

are landed off camera right so it's like so it, you're amplifying the fun that's being had at the person's expense. I mean, some of the blows land on camera because you and your interviews are pretty. For the most part, I would say that's true. Yeah, yeah. But like sometimes the person will be lying and you'll be subtitling their lives with like, he didn't, you know, he's not a doctor.

When there's lots of cutaways for one second to an old movie that's just completely forgotten. And I was laughing out loud. And in the case of people that are getting abused after the fact, we were very careful with our targets, you know. And the targets are hypocrites and liars. And wouldn't you love to do that in all of life to be able to subtitle when people are bullshitting you? So I felt like that was all justified. It was funny

and it was pointing out our our basic itinerary on this on this journey which was religion is really built on a lot of hypocrisy and lies and we were able to illuminate that constantly through the movie yeah so i don't think the viewer ever feels like you unless they happen to be religious i would imagine but i don't think the viewer ever feels that you take an unfair shot at the targets but i can imagine the targets did now how are you just not trailing a thousand lawsuits with shooting a film i guess i mean probably even worse the sasha baron cohen stuff right well in both cases we had people you you have people sign releases beforehand and um so they and they don't people don't read the fine print, frankly. And it says we could do anything we want

with what we're about to shoot. And that's what we do. We do anything we want with it. So we try to stay ethical. We try to stay above board. And, but the fact is that usually it's, it's the purpose of the interview, both with Bill and even with Sasha,

was to illuminate some sort of underlying truth that's being concealed. And it takes sometimes interrogation techniques, comic interrogation techniques, as Bill uses so expertly, like with the senator. You see people who are saying things they know are not true, but they're stuck because they're going to get voted out of office. And he doesn't let them off the hook. And that's one of the great things about him as a questioner, as an interviewer. So I felt like, yeah, this has to be hard-hitting,

but it'll pay off because it'll be really super funny also. I also was struck as I watched it that it is so not mean-spirited. Right. Because we're having a good time and we're laughing. And even when i'm there's a number of times when i'm basically saying to somebody in a way you're a fool or an idiot i say to that jesus guy yeah he's dead now really yes and we looked it up he wasn't resurrected he was not he was the second coming of christ and yet he died again okay this time of

like liver failure or something but you know he's he's jesus miranda and i say maybe you're the second coming of carmen miranda you should be you should have fruit on your head yeah instead of fruit in your head which is a terrible insult but he's laughing he was the guy who sued us the member if you don't know me by now singer right yes right uh right the uh preacher yeah you know he's i'm insulting him but it's with a laugh and he's laughing and you know it just makes you think they all know it's a crock yeah it's they're they're selling the invisible product i often you know i often tell people because, because people, I often say that I thought the people, I believe that the Vatican needs to be dissolved. You need to sell off the

assets. I mean, there's no way back from what's going on in the Catholic church right now, but the most intelligent people we've might've talked to in the entire journey were the priests at the Vatican, the Vatican priests were all PhDs, all know what's going on. Really smart guys, The Vatican priests were all PhDs, all know what's going on, really smart guys, the guys who defined for us where religion begins and where science begins and why they can't overlap. They were very, very rational men who have to sell this thing to the masses. And the one guy who we see outside the Vatican, but he's the one who took us in for that amazing tour exactly you had kicked out of the vatican yes well we weren't supposed to be in there in the first place that guy who we see who's saying to me that when i say doesn't this make you think oh of course everything makes me

think this is a crock i mean he was so upfront about it he like he should have been hosting this movie um but he was great he was the vatican latinist latinist yeah he did he he translated the uh the letters uh either from latin to english or english to latin maybe both but that was his job he lived down the hall from the pope and we were on that hall we were in that hallway no i i don't i remember him telling us that he met the pope the first week he was pope in 1979 and hadn't seen him or talked to him since right that was how much the pope cared we also drank with him up there yes we did we all took a couple of shots from his bottle yeah he looked like he was practiced in the art yes but he was quick to say christmas is ridiculous and if jesus was here he wouldn't live at the

vatican he'd live out in the hills with the poor people he was like he was an iconoclast standing right there in front of the vatican and even said people need their stories yeah i mean that's the ultimate mask drop to say people need their stories that's not supposed that's the magician going see the dub is right here he was like the pen and teller of the Vatican priests. Well, there was one guy you legitimately hated, though, the rabbi who, at one point, you make the Holocaust joke, you say, rabbi, never again. And then, I don't know if it was you off camera,

Larry off camera says something like, let's just get, and you said, no, I'm out. I can't stand another second. Not let him get a word in edgewise. Also, he had just met with Ahmadinejad. He did not think the state of Israel should exist. Right, that's right. And that the Holocaust was justified because the Jews had not been holy enough.

So there was a lot to not like about him. Yeah, and he was unpleasant. He didn't present it in a charming way, his point of view. He had this present it in a charming way. No. His point of view. He had this insane verbal tick where he would say, don't interrupt me. Yeah. Even in those moments where you had interjected your question in an appropriate silence, where you had not interrupted him. No.

He just like, whenever you started, he would say, don't interrupt me. Yeah. You interrupted his thoughts. Yeah. Bill, you cover your background a little bit. to his thoughts yeah bill you cover your background a little bit i mean you actually have the surprising the same surprising fact in your bio that hitch did that you discovered your mother was jewish late in life well how old were you 13 i was a hitch hitch was older than that he was like he was an adult when he learned this i mean so you were you're technically jewish according to the

jews did they ever uh yeah well that course, many times. And that always bothered me that other people are going to tell me what my religion is. And my mother was not a practicing Jew either. So it was culturally Jewish, and that's fine. And I'm a big supporter of the state of Israel, blah, blah, blah. But I never set foot in a temple to this day all my memories of religion are from catholicism and as my mother states in the beginning of the movie and that is always the highlight of the movie my mother for me because she's just so funny and uh she when i asked her first of all big shock for me and my sister we found out why this is the first time we ever asked her why did dad quit going to church because of birth

control we thought geez they weren't doing it anyway we didn't think that was an issue but when she basically said yeah we didn't think we needed to tell you and we thought some structure was better than none i thought that was very telling of the thought process of that era that no structure was just not to be considered she was certainly not a catholic although she pretended to take catholic lessons this was 1951 so she could marry my father but um yeah just you needed some some religion in your life yeah that was what i took away from that. Even though one I don't believe in and that's not good, but it's better than nothing and that's so different than what we were saying, which is certainly

not better than nothing, nothing better. That's still a very common notion, but it was, it was funny just to realize that you hadn't figured out that she wasn't going to church with you for a reason it was like a kind of family secret that wasn't it was in the open but you hadn't even noticed that it was a phenomenon so telling of why kids put up with anything in childhood because whatever you're so young you have nothing to compare it to so whatever is the norm you just think for you that's normal and that's why kids don't report abuse and a thousand other things because it's just always gone on i just never thought about it mom never went to church

she stayed home my sister and my father and i went and that was it and then it just came up in conversation one christmas when i was 13 and because i'm jew, well, that does explain a lot. So, Larry, what about your background? Do you have a religious indoctrination you're rebelling against? I do, and I think what Bill said, first of all, is really important because I think you see a lot of adults today who are very bright, very intelligent, very rational people, but they cling to this crazy idea because they have been indoctrinated as children.

And even though it doesn't make sense to their adult self, that childhood part of their brain clings to this idea of God and somehow there being some order, it's very, very hard to let go of. My parents were secular Jews. I grew up in Brighton Beach and was sent to the local Hebrew school, which happened to be a very orthodox Hebrew school. So I was immersed with these very orthodox rabbis who were like mean, like nuns, you know, hitting you and shutting down any discussions and punishing you and sending you into the big dark temple to sit by yourself and think about what you had done.

And so I kind of was really into the ritual and the darkness and the weirdness of it. But I also knew right off the bat, very early on during the bar mitzvah lessons, that it was kind of nonsense and it was kind of ridiculous. And, you know, I was into it on one level and I was also kind of stepping out of it. And by the time the bar mitzvah comes along, and my father would constantly remind me, my father had a lot of very reductionist philosophies of life, like do unto others and then split. That was one of his favorites. And he said, you know,

do the bar mitzvah and get the checks. Like that was his thing about the bar mitzvah. There was no spiritual dimension to it. So like a lot of kids, you know, we did the bar mitzvah, we got the checks, and I never went back into the temple after that. And most of my friends never went back either. Now I notice in adulthood that a lot of people are sort of starting to drift back because I think we were talking about a little bit about getting older and the fear starts to set in. And I see people starting to drift back in in a kind of way that they feel comfortable with, but still drifting back to the things that they rejected in religion.

Sometimes these are the same people who start watching fox news when they get into their 60s yeah i haven't noticed that phenomenon really oh i have yeah well i could name names some you would recognize because they're famous people who i knew 15 20 years ago as Hollywood liberals. Hadn't seen them in a long time. Talked to them. I remember one person, actor, you'd know who it was, and was telling me a couple of years ago, not only did Obama ruin America, he did it on purpose. I'm like, what? I thought you were blank, blank.

And all I could think is yeah he started watching fox news that happens that's a thing for people of a certain age yeah people looking for comfort in some way and right those are the things that give people comfort because they give you answers even though you may know on some level the false answers right it still answers and it helps you sort of move on i guess it's interesting to think about how the landscape has changed in the intervening years i think it was changing incrementally as you point out in that poll result that it seemed like secularism was winning some steady gains and that you know atheism was far more public and i was getting the sense that people were more visibly embarrassed by, I mean, just that you weren't meeting the same

kind of Bible thumper. And then we were making clear gains politically on things like gay marriage. It was unthinkable. We had a brief moment of it in California, then it got rolled back. And then all of a sudden it was the law of the land in like 15 minutes. And you got the sense that even fundamentalist Christians weren't poised to fight that particular culture war issue again. And then Trump happened and it's like religion is just kind of a variable we don't even have to talk about. And yet quietly behind the scenes, religious fundamentalists are getting a lot of what they want out of Trump. And it's, it's like, it's like, it's off, it's like, you know, it's off my radar. I'm not spending time talking about Christian theocracy. I'm

occasionally I'll hit the topic of Islam when, you know, something blows up, but it's kind of all Trump all the time. And yet out of the corner of my eye, I'm seeing the stealth theocrats in the U S just quietly kind of build their kingdom. In a larger sense, we are becoming, my analogy would be Saddam under Iraq, where a minority was ruling over a majority. The majority of this country is liberal. But because it's rigged, it actually is on their part with the electoral college, with gerrymandering, with voter suppression.

I mean, look at the Supreme Court as we see this play out in these weeks. The Supreme Court should be seven liberals because two people were appointed under George Bush who did not win the popular vote. Exactly. People forget that. And now Trump has gotten two. the popular vote. Exactly. People forget that. And now Trump has gotten to. So if the right person, if we had direct election, which we should, and the will of the people had put Al Gore and Hillary Clinton into office, the Supreme Court wouldn't even be in question. So in that sense, yes, you're right. The right wing and the evangelicals have enormous power, but they are a minority who are now, this is very dangerous for America as it was a seething pot under Saddam in Iraq. You had two thirds of the country who were Shiites ruled over by a third Sunnis.

And we're like a two thirds liberal country that's now going to be ruled what we are. We own nothing power-wise by this minority right-wing base. And they are, you're right, getting everything they want. I think if I may, I think there's like two forces at work also. To me, it seemed like from the day that Obama was inaugurated, the hate began to build. And the backlash was just, it was going to erupt in some way. And I think Trump is that eruption to some degree. I think also the evangelicals and the Christian right made a conscious decision somewhere along the line that they're tired of losing and they want to win and they will win at any cost. And they're willing to abandon all of their morality, their

false morality to win. And that's what they've done. And they've won. So I agree with Bill. I think this minority has kind of amassed itself and organized itself in such a way to really, as you called it before, a kind of a slow coup. Yeah. They keep their eye on the ball. They know how to organize on the local level, which they have done. They had a plan from 30 years ago to put this guy in the Supreme court, the heritage foundation, you know, they groom these people, they put them up through the system. They clerk for other judges. They know exactly what they're doing from the beginning. Well, what are the liberals doing?

You know, we're having a big gathering. Okay. We gathered, you know, we got our pussy hats on. We, we don't do that, that nuts and bolts stuff. We got to learn how to do that better if there's time, because it may be over now. I mean, we may never get it back. Power begets power as we see with Kavanaugh probably going on the court, you know, that'll, how long is that going to last for? A long time. Yeah. Yeah. It's a real concern that the left has pendulum swung into identity politics and a, its own kind of almost theocratic censoriousness around speech and white privilege and male privilege. And it's not to say those things don't exist and they're they're obviously appropriate targets of outrage with respect to every one of those variables but it is liberal outrage now or leftist outrage now is such a blunt tool it's hitting everything with

the same force you can see how that it's just if you call enough non-racists racist enough at at a certain point, they're going to say, well, fuck you. I'm going to vote for Trump, too. It's like, you're not my party anymore. And also, if I may, as Bill pointed out, I mean, we don't need to worry about Russian meddling. They have meddled with the elections all these years, using the Supreme Court, the gerrymandering. All these different things were used, the Electoral College, to guarantee the Republicans would have a larger percentage of the voters than they really earned. So I think the system is so broken, it seems like who's going to fix that? Just if ex-felons could have voted in Florida, many states.

It would be a blue state. Yeah, I mean, the one thing Republicans are creative about is cheating. They're geniuses at cheating. If they channeled any of that creative energy into anything else, they could fix all the problems in the world. But they're brilliant at it, like the way they chipped away at abortion rights. Who would have thought some of these things? You know, you can't have abortion here unless the hallways are eight feet wide.

And, you know, those kind of laws that they're always thinking up. All the environmental regulations get pulled back. Pruitt's gone. You see, the thing is, Pruitt's gone, but the environmental regulations keep on getting pulled back. We had this big moment of we were upset about the children being put in the detention centers. It's going on every single day since then, you know what I mean, in large numbers.

So it's overwhelming. And again, I think this is why people are looking for some kind of a simple, comfortable answer. And why do people retreat into simpler solutions to the problem instead of facing the fact that it's kind of out of control? Before I feel the tractor beam of current events pulling us off the topic of religiousness i want to go there i wanted to say one thing to your last question about you said you know in the last 10 years things have changed a lot and you know i always make the joke when people say religious and i take all the credit but i know it's it's really not because of religious it may have had a nice little moment i think the the big thing that made the difference in the last 10 years is Google. You know, Mitt Romney used to come to your house with a pamphlet.

That's as much as you could find out about Mormonism, and it sounded pretty good in the pamphlet. Scientology is a perfect example. You'd be in the religion 10 years before you found out about the nutty creation. Xenu. Right. Right. You didn't have to get to like level six or something. Well, that's the amazing Paul Haggis story.

Not to derail you, but do you know the Paul Haggis story? I think it was in Lawrence Wright's book. Going clear. Yeah. I mean, he was in like, whatever, 20 years. Right. And they finally give him the secret teachings in a you know he has to take a briefcase to essentially like a bank vault and

and contemplate them in solitude and he came a and it's all the just you know 70 trillion years ago right they're brought here on something that resembles dc8 and right thrown into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs and you know his summary of it was he thought he was given he was being given an insanity test right like he didn't know whether or not he should just laugh and then pass the test or accept this but that was what i'm saying is that you can look that up now it's all over the internet yeah it's true and at a certain point it wasn't you know and mormonism is just as well but they'll still deny it i mean the mormons will still deny that there's secret handshakes to get into heaven the scientologists will definitely

deny or you know what was great in religious lists is we were able to find clips uh like promotional footage that they shot animated pieces that sort of tell the origin myths of mormonism and scientology and those were they they were like Saturday morning cartoons, but they were real. And those were very, very telling. I thought they were great. And they were hilarious. Because it's just, here they are as it is, you know?

It's like, we don't have to play with that at all. How do you actually accomplish that as a director? Do you just, you have some researcher who is just scouring the world? I tend to myself generate a lot of the clip thoughts because I'm thinking all throughout what movies might be funny to draw on, what stuff we might need. And then, yeah, I have great researchers who go out and find those clips, get permission to use them, which is very tricky. We had all these Middle Eastern clips from various terrorist

organizations. It's very hard to get permission to use those things. So it's tricky, but that's how you do it. Yeah, that's a laborious process. And that's one of the things that makes the film so much different than just the normal, uncomfortable interview. You can just sprinkle it with hilarity, more or less on demand.

Is there anything you would, either of you would do differently or that you regret, or is there any place where you felt like you don't, because, because one thing, one thing I feel, I always regret. I mean,

just, you just can't, I don't know. We could do the whole movie over. Both of us, both of us could watch that movie and imagine doing the entire movie over from beginning to end. We could do another version of it today. Right.

It's the kind of thing where that's what happened then. Right. You know? It's the old thing. Art is never finished, just abandoned. Yeah. And we abandoned it at some point. And, you know, I'm so glad people still like it.

Yeah. at some point and you know i'm so glad people still like it yeah and i still like it but i can't i can't watch it without thinking yeah i could have been more eloquent there or i could have thought of three other better examples or i don't know i was getting up in the morning sam it was there had to be some jet lag bad food morning that was mornings there's not much time and there i am in megiddo at 8 a.m talking about the uh yeah the apocalypse right you know well the jesus land what i forget what it's called holy land amusement park you know disneyland for religious sadists i mean i mean the the crucifixion scene in there was insane i still can't believe that does it still exist do you think this thing holy land definitely yeah yeah and not only is it crazy but

it's like three times a day crazy yeah they do the show like you know the disneyland shows right over and over all day long i love that jesus yeah i hope he's getting paid well because he's earning his money i mean lebowski jesus yeah. He's like the Lebowski. Yes. He was the dude. Yeah, he was just perfect. But he was also a legit believer who wanted to argue with you. I mean, he came up with the best analogy of the Holy Trinity. He was the best theologian you went up against.

Yeah, it's true. But you know something? That's one of the great things about Bill also, if I may tip my hat further. He's a great listener. And he is not, as much as it might seem like he's got an agenda, he's very open-minded. And when people make good points all along the way in religiousness, when people make good points, he acknowledges that. He's not trying to trip them up. He's letting them speak.

And when they speak intelligently, he acknowledges that, and I think that's a very great quality. Yeah, most of the people, I mean, the trucker scene, you know, that one trucker walks out in the beginning. We thought he might be about to kill me, but luckily he went the other way out the door. But the other guys and I wound up being very friendly, and, you know, they prayed for me at the end,

and, I mean, it was actually kind of sweet yes exactly exactly what would you find yourself on camera going further in a adversarial direction than you would if the camera wasn't rolling like if you were just in a social situation with these people and and the topic of religion came, do you think that you would agree to disagree much earlier? Because I find myself at dinner parties rarely now, but it was more true 10 years ago. But I've gone to the mat with some people in just purely social situations just because what they're saying is dumb enough and strident enough that it just seems like, all right, this is a good time to dig in on this topic. But I could imagine if this was being captured for a documentary, I might want to go further because, listen, this is the war of ideas that's going to go public. I'm just wondering if you

notice a difference between your on-camera self and your off-camera self in these kinds of conversations well the good thing about me is really the same thing as the bad thing about me i'm not really any different yeah i would agree with that i don't agree with that i don't think you feel pressure to perform once the cameras are you yeah especially in that kind of movie in that kind of setting and i'd rather let the comedy speak for itself um i was doing a bit at the end of my show friday night to really at the end i plugged this because it was my tribute on real time for the 10th anniversary, and April Ryan was on the panel, and it came up before we even got to the end of the show, something about religion, and I said to her,

you know, you are not going to like this end of the show. And I could tell, you know, she's probably someone who goes to church every Sunday, and she does not want to hear Jesus insulted, and I was afraid she was going to, like, really not have a good time or say something even during the editorial and she wound up laughing so hard we have cutaways of her yeah you know and to me that is the greatest thing about humor is that laughter is involuntary

you cannot help it and when it comes out that, it must in some way say to your brain, ah, there's some truth there, because I laughed at that. It must be a little ridiculous, because me, this religious person on the panel, who doesn't really think that way, still laughed. So that's how I hope our message somehow got through to people who otherwise would not have appreciated it. And I have found out to be, by the way, I just don't go to dinner parties anymore. That would be my advice.

But I have found also in my travels that people, religious, even people who are religious people, as long as they have a sense of humor, they love the movie. Yes. I have never met anybody who had a sense of humor who didn't like that movie. I mean, it's a very pleasing movie in that respect and it's about the subject that they are interested in that's right that helps yeah was there any situation that you got into that beyond the the one trucker who exited in something that looked like it was approaching real anger was there anything that seemed dangerous or sketchy

that you because you were you were in the middle east and i mean what you went to the al-aqsa mosque and yeah all that seemed as far as it was on camera that all seemed totally fine no we got thrown out of so many places i mean you see it if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org once do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.