Making Sense with Sam Harris - #24 — Ask Me Anything 2

Episode Date: January 4, 2016

Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about Islamism, free will, honesty, vegetarianism, why he doesn’t publish more in academic journals, and other 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 Okay, well I'm going to do a Ask Me Anything podcast this time around. Now, as some of you know, I often set out to do these and then answer one question for 20 minutes or more and don't get very far. And I'm afraid that's what's going to happen this time around. I'll answer a few questions in a rather long-winded way and then hopefully do some rapid fire answers and get through many of your questions. I must say I really appreciate the response I get whenever I go out for questions. I get hundreds. Honestly, I can't even read all of your questions,

but I've read many of them, and it's very hard to choose. I'll just work through them, but I also have to do a little housekeeping in this podcast, so I will start with that. First, I'm recording this podcast on New Year's Day, so Happy New Year, everyone, I'm recording this podcast on New Year's Day, so Happy New Year everyone. And I ended the year in contentious fashion on Twitter. I don't know why I use Twitter. If I treated Twitter the way I treat Facebook, I would never have any of these entanglements that I so often discuss with you. I would never notice what was being said about me or what sort of skirmishes I was being dragged into.

And therefore, I'd never be tempted to respond. So it's a, perhaps deserves some rethinking whether it's worth my paying attention. But as I'll tell you in a moment, at least two of my upcoming guests are coming on the podcast simply because of some Twitter incident. And so that's certainly interesting. It keeps me forever uncertain whether I should be using this technology. But in any case, as for my upcoming guests, I have actually three of the guests coming up are coming up entirely as a result of Twitter. So you could figure out whether it's a blessing or a curse at this point. I'll soon be speaking with Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL who was recently interviewed on Tim Ferriss' podcast first, and then Joe Rogan's. And I encourage you to listen to both those interviews. That's literally five hours of interview with Jocko. He is just a fascinating guy, and I certainly would have always loved to

have him on my podcast. And it occurred to me to reach out to him, except I just heard literally five hours of him on two of my friends' podcasts, and it just seemed I wasn't quite sure what there would be to add to that conversation. And Jocko now has his own podcast. At Joe Rogan's insistence, he started a podcast immediately and is banging those out. And the guy is great. But on Twitter, we got thrown together and people were encouraging him to come on my podcast and he said he'd be happy to do it. And so here we are. So I'll be speaking to him in the coming weeks. And I look forward to that. And I'll try to find a fundamentally new line through the conversation so that we can get to some of his insight and experience that he didn't have a chance to share with Tim and Joe, and that should be fun.

I'll also be speaking with Scotty Reitz, who's a former SWAT operator. He was the lead weapons and tactics instructor for LAPD SWAT and now trains people in the use of firearms. And I'm going to talk to Scotty about violence and self-defense and firearms and gun control and also what it's like to be a cop and the misuses of force that we've all seen of late from cops, and just to get into all of those politically sensitive but interesting areas. And Scotty, I think, will be a great person to do it with. Jocko and Scotty will come close together,

and that will be, we can call that violence week on the Waking Up podcast. I'll also be speaking with Mariam Namazi, the ex-Muslim reformer based in the UK who many of you probably know. You've probably seen video of her. I've circulated video of her before. And this was also Twitter-born. There was an incident of what I considered friendly fire where she went after me for what I think is a misunderstanding of my views on profiling. And I've always thought Mariam was great, but she more or less slammed me as a bigot, as far as I could tell on Twitter. And so I reached out to her, and she's agreed to come on the podcast. And we'll try to rectify that situation. Whether or not we succeed,

we'll try to rectify that situation. Whether or not we succeed, Mariam's is a voice you all should hear, and I will bring her to you. There was also another Twitter-borne collision, not so friendly fire, with someone who I'd never heard of, a young Muslim, probably soon to be lawyer, he's getting his JD at Yale. He's a writer who wrote a truly withering book review in Salon about my book with Majid. And he hated the book, seems to hate Majid, but especially hates me. And hatred really isn't too strong a word. People were hurling this review at me on Twitter. As you know, I don't tend to read Salon. So anyway, I read it. Needless to say, I don't agree with it. But I reached out to,

I don't know if his name is pronounced Omer Omar. I will find out from him. Let's call him Omer. That's how it's spelled. I reached out to him on Twitter and he agreed to come on the podcast. And so I anticipate that being a difficult conversation. And my interest is, as I've said before, in trying to figure out how to have hard conversations, how to start very far apart in a conversation and figure out how to converge, or at the very least, agree to disagree on specific points in a way that is not entangled with personal hostility and misunderstanding. And that admittedly is a challenge that not everyone is up to. And so it's, you know, I tried it with Noam Chomsky, and I'll be trying it with other people. My conversation with Majid was also an example of that, and I didn't know how it was going to turn out, and it became hugely productive.

So I'm going to be running similar psychological and conversational experiments on my podcast, and Omer will be one. Also, I'll be speaking with Jonathan Haidt, who many of you know. He's a very influential psychologist with whom I've disagreed in the past and in a none-too-friendly way, I might add. And so that is another instance of my reaching out to somebody who has taken some very hard shots at me in the past. And I've returned fire, and we're going to see if we can have a civil and useful conversation on important topics. That'll be coming sometime in February, I think. And also, I will have Steve Pinker on at some point, and I have a few other guests lined up, so there will be interesting conversations coming your way.

I feel the need to apologize once again for the level of congestion I'm bringing to the mic now. I have two young girls, each of whom seems to be striving to win the Patient Zero Award for bringing new colds into the world. I don't know if they're out there playing with ducks in a pond or where they're getting these viruses, but they're bringing them to daddy. So I bring them to you in a substandard audio performance. So bear with me there. So many of you noticed various Twitter controversies and wanted me to address them. Here's the first with Fareed Zakaria, the CNN and Washington Post journalist. He sent out a tweet about a week ago endorsing a truly terrible piece of Islamist propaganda. And so the tweet read, my book of the week, who speaks for Islam? What a billion Muslims really think? That's the

title of the book. And then he calls it an essential voice of reason. Now, this book was written by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed. And apologies again, I don't know exactly how to pronounce Dahlia's last name. I will say Mogahed. It's probably not right. Esposito runs a Middle East Studies Center at Georgetown, and Mogahed works for Gallup, the famous polling organization that published this book that Zakaria was recommending. So I tweeted in response, Witness the capture of academia, Esposito, polling, Gallup, and journalism, Zakaria, by rank Islamism. Now, many people took this tweet to be a sign that I had gone off the deep end by alleging some kind of stealth Islamist takeover of our institutions. Well, there is an attempted

Islamist takeover of our institutions, and it's not especially stealthy. But to be clear, I wasn't claiming that Zakaria is an Islamist. Rather, I think he's probably been deceived by Islamist misinformation, of which there's an endless supply. And there is no question he's spreading such misinformation by pushing this book. And nor do I think Esposito is an Islamist, because to my knowledge, he's not even a Muslim. But everything I've seen him publish about Islam has been, if not a lie, a half-truth. He's someone who I've called a Muslim apologist in the past, and his center at Georgetown is funded with tens of millions of dollars by the Saudi government.

It's the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, and its function appears to be to whitewash Islam in general and the obscenity of Saudi Wahhabi Islam in particular. Now, I was frankly unfamiliar with Mogaheddin. She's the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. I just happened to have seen her on Meet the Press a few days before, sitting beside my friend Azrin Omani, the eminently rational journalist and Muslim reformer. And more or less every word out of Mogahed's mouth was, again, a lie or a half-truth that seemed calculated to deceive a secular audience. She was saying things like the members of ISIS aren't religious, and that they have no theological or popular support and there's no correlation between being a religious Muslim and being a jihadist. In fact, the correlation is negative according to Mogahed. You're more

likely to be a jihadist if you're not a devout Muslim. These statements are completely dishonest. I did a little digging on Mogahed and from what I can tell, it seems that she has some affinity for, if not direct connection to, the Muslim Brotherhood, as do many people who claim to be Muslim moderates in our society. And it's very annoying that only people on the political right, and many of whom are dogmatic Christians or Jews, seem to have the time or the temperament to point this out. A group like the Council on American Islamic Relations, CARE, which seems to be the most influential Muslim civil rights organization, was a direct offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and has been supportive of terrorist organizations like Hamas. Is it connected with these organizations now? I don't know. Do its members

even know? It could be like Scientology, where you don't know how crazy the organization is until you're deep in it. But I can tell you one thing for certain. This is an organization that systematically lies about Islam and demonizes its critics and tries to make life as difficult as possible for people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And again, this group is treated like the Muslim ACLU by the press. It's insane. Both Esposito and Mogahed are darlings of this organization, as is Glenn Greenwald, as you know. So whatever her connections,

Mogahed practices some of the worst forms of Islamist obscurantism and identity politics. She describes jihadism as a purely political phenomenon that has no connection to religious doctrine or belief. And needless to say, it's always arising out of that vast reservoir of, quote, legitimate grievances that Muslims have against the West. And she's also an Obama appointee. She sits on the president's advisory council on faith-based and neighborhood partnerships. And she's one of the people who had a hand in writing President Obama's famous Cairo speech. Again, I'm painfully aware that despairing over facts like these makes one sound like a right-wing crackpot. So to be clear, I'm an Obama supporter. I voted for him both times.

I will almost certainly vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall, because I don't see any other conceivable choice, though I have to hold my nose over her obscurantism on this issue in particular. But it isn't crazy to worry that Islamists are gaming our system, because they quite obviously are. Now, again, I don't know for sure whether Mogahed is an Islamist. She wears the hijab and says some very dishonest things about Islam in general and Sharia law in particular. Still, she may just be a useful idiot like her colleague John Esposito. The line here can be difficult to find, and it may not even be important to find it. It's the ideas and their influence rather than the people conveying the ideas that I'm worried about.

conveying the ideas that I'm worried about. This is also not to say that ideologically motivated people, even Islamists, couldn't produce an honest poll or a book based on such a poll. And I certainly wasn't discounting the contents of the book because its authors strike me as nefarious and dishonest people. For instance, let's just flip this around. If I were to produce a poll of religious public opinion, perhaps hiring an organization like Gallup or Pew to run it, here are two things about which I am certain. I'm certain I could do this honestly and make every effort to produce a poll that was well-designed and scientifically valid. I'm also certain that religious people and their apologists would reject its findings, whatever they happen to be, because of my history as a critic of religion.

I have made no secret of my views on religious faith. I think religion, I think faith-based religion, is dangerous and divisive bullshit. And I think Islam is the worst of the lot. So it would be totally understandable and also wrong for a religious person to reject a Gallup poll of religious opinion that I was associated with. So to be clear, I am not doing that in reverse. When Esposito and Mogahed's book came out in 2007, I bought it and I read it. And I found it so obviously misleading as to not even be worth discussing. But now Fareed Zakaria is pushing it eight years later as to not even be worth discussing.

But now Fareed Zakaria is pushing it eight years later, as his pick of the week and as a, quote, essential voice of reason. And it should be disturbing that Zakaria can't see the flaws in this book, because again, they are so obvious. So what's wrong with the book? Well, first it purports to be an unprecedented and thoroughly scientific poll of Muslim public opinion, but the authors don't show any data. And the ways they discuss their data, along with the kinds of questions they thought to

ask in their poll, and the questions they declined to ask, prove that they were after a certain result, which was to make Muslim opinion look totally benign. They want you to believe that Islam is just like any other religion, and that Muslims worldwide are just like any other group of religious people. Now the book isn't entirely filled with lies. The authors admit, for instance, that the imagined link between poverty and lack of education and terrorism, or support for terrorism, is a myth. They admit that the most radicalized people in the Muslim world tend to be middle class and educated. In fact,

according to Esposito and Mogahed, the politically radicalized tend to be more satisfied with their financial situations and believe their standard of living is improving and are more optimistic about their futures in general than the so-called moderates are. Which proves that the remedies that many secular liberals imagine exist for extremism in the Muslim world, that is more education and economic opportunity, are not remedies at all. As I've been saying for years, I don't know how many more engineers have to fly planes into buildings or devote their lives to waging jihad in other ways, for us to get it through our heads that the lack of education and economic opportunity

isn't the cause of Muslim extremism. But even in making this concession, Esposito and Mogahed reveal that getting Islam off the hook is their goal. Their point is to say that the backgrounds of terrorists are so diverse as to fully exonerate religion. There's the usual tendentious nonsense about how the 9-11 hijackers went to strip clubs, for instance, which according to Esposito and Mogahed proves that they weren't really religious. Majid and I dealt with this lie in our book. They also point out that most jihadists aren't graduates from madrasas. This is a point that Scott Atran makes all the time, as though this suggests a lack of connection between sincere religious belief in Islamic doctrine and jihadism.

They even go so far as to intimate that the academic backgrounds of prominent jihadists suggest that almost anything could make one a jihadist. So bin Laden, for instance, was, quote, trained in management, economics, and engineering. It's like, who knows which of these streams of information could have radicalized him? This is pure obscurantism. But this isn't the worst part of the book. The worst part comes down to the questions that were asked, as well as those that weren't asked, and the way the results are discussed. So one of the most egregious examples

can be found in the question that Esposito and Moga had used to differentiate what they call radicals from quote moderates. They report that only seven percent of Muslims worldwide consider the 9-11 attacks to be quote completely justified. And then they go on to say therefore that nine in ten, And then they go on to say, therefore, that 9 in 10, 93%, quote, believe the attacks were not justified. And they call these people moderates. Incidentally, the press ran with this, reporting that 93% of Muslims, or 9 in 10, the world over, are, quote, moderate. Well, if you know anything about anything, you should be feeling a little queasy at this point. I took one look at this line that only 7% of Muslims consider the 9-11 attacks to be quote completely justified. So 9 and 10 are moderates.

And I knew I was being lied to by sinister people or being misled by useful idiots. Again, I can't claim to know which of these categories Esposito and Mogahed fall into. Okay, so the first thing to point out is that even if true, even if this most sanguine of interpretations of this pseudo data is true, 7% of Muslims believing that the atrocities of 9-11 were completely justified is a problem that should not be minimized. The authors equate this with 91 million people. Okay, that book came out in 2007.

Today, it's more like 112 million people. Recall what we're talking about here. We're talking about the intentional murder of 3,000 innocent noncombatants at a time that preceded our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. We're talking about 112 million people who think that burning thousands of people alive in the Twin Towers was completely justified. That's already a huge reservoir of murderous lunacy. But of course, the real problem is that the 7% figure is totally misleading, and intentionally so.

We can tell from the wording, quote, completely justified, that Gallup used a scale in its poll, from 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, where completely justified and completely unjustified were at the tail ends. There was almost certainly a choice of somewhat justified or mostly justified or both that many people picked, and there was certainly a choice of don't know or no opinion. Think of all those people who couldn't say that the attacks of 9-11 were completely unjustified, but said rather they were mostly justified or somewhat justified or said they didn't know. These people are being described as moderates. And there's another problem with using this particular question as the dividing line between moderates and extremists.

particular question as the dividing line between moderates and extremists. As many of you know, and as Esposito and Mogahed surely know, vast numbers of Muslims think that Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks of 9-11 because there were 4,000 Jews who didn't show up to work that day. Millions of Muslims believe that the Mossad and the CIA conspired to bring down the World Trade Center as a pretext to invade Muslim lands. In fact, one poll indicated that 16% of Americans believe something like this. It's the whole 9-11 truth movement, right? So using this question in this way rigged the game. And again, Esposito and Mogahed almost certainly know this. And they know that if they had asked questions about apostasy or blasphemy or the rights of women and homosexuals and polytheists, or whether infidels deserve to spend eternity in hellfire, the results of their polling would have been appalling. And every poll of Muslim public opinion that has been run on these questions produces appalling results.

And again, it literally took me five seconds to see the problem here. Why didn't Fareed Zakaria see it? He is a journalist who covers these issues. He doesn't want to see it. Even this fictional 7% is talked about in the book in a way that is obviously tendentious and misleading. They say, for instance, that, quote, Again, the burden is upon the West to behave better and show respect to people who think

the attacks of September 11th were, quote, completely justified. And again, remember, these attacks came before we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Justified for what? Ask yourself that. I should say, I invited Dahlia Mogahed on the podcast after a little sniping on Twitter, I invited Dahlia Mogahed on the podcast after a little sniping on Twitter, and she declined. But I would have been happy to speak with her. I've seen her promulgate what I now call the narrative narrative. And basically everyone is doing this now from President Obama on down. And it's understandable in some ways, but it's also scary. So pay attention here. The idea I'm about to describe is almost unrivaled in its strangeness. And yet those hearing it for the first time, to say nothing of those who espouse it, never seem to notice that something out of the ordinary is being said.

Now you've heard this idea before, and I will venture to guess that you did not notice how strange and indeed terrifying a claim was being made. The idea is this. In fighting ISIS or in resisting the spread of Islamic theocracy generally, we must at all costs avoid, quote, we must at all costs avoid, quote, confirming the narrative of Islamic extremists. The fear is that any focus on the religion of Islam or its adherents, profiling at TSA, intelligence gathering at mosques, or merely acknowledging that we are at war not with generic terrorism, but with Islamic terrorism, will drive many more Muslims to support the jihadists. Now think about what is

actually being alleged here. Think about the underlying pessimism, if not paranoia, of this claim. Let's use an analogy. Let's say you're a bald white man, and unluckily for you, there happens to be a global insurgency of neo-Nazi skinheads terrorizing a hundred countries. Most white men are perfectly peaceful, of course. But this insurgency has grown so captivating to a minority of them that no city on earth is truly safe. Bald white men have blown up planes and buses and burned embassies and even murdered innocent children by the hundreds. And we have spent trillions of dollars trying to contain the damage.

Many of these bald white men are seeking to acquire nuclear materials so that they can detonate dirty bombs or even atomic ones in the capitals of Europe and the United States. And to make matters worse, many of these men are avowedly suicidal and therefore cannot be deterred. Now imagine hearing presidents and prime ministers and newspaper columnists and even your fellow bald white men express the fear that merely acknowledging the whiteness and baldness of neo-Nazi skinheads would so oppress and alienate other bald white men that they too would begin murdering innocent people.

Imagine being told that at all costs we must not confirm the narrative of the neo-Nazis by acknowledging that white bald men emblazoned with swastikas are of greater interest from a security point of view than elderly Hawaiian women. This is the situation we're in. You might be somewhat confused by the racial characteristics of this analogy. Obviously, Islam is not a race. But most people appear to believe that by honestly describing the link between the doctrine of

Islam and jihadism, and therefore admitting that Islam is of special concern in a way that Anglicanism and Mormonism aren't, that we will provoke otherwise peaceful Muslims to such a degree that they will become jihadists or support them. Now, this is either one of the most pessimistic and uncharitable things ever said about a community, or it's true. And if it's the former, we should stop saying it. And if it's the latter, we should be talking about nothing else and obliging Muslims to talk about nothing else.

Where are these Muslims, who are just like you and me, in valuing freedom of speech and secular tolerance and scientific rationality, who want their daughters to grow up to be fully self-actualized members of society, who aren't afraid of cartoons, who think gays should be free to marry, but who, if subjected to an extra glance at the airport or a visit from the FBI at their mosque will be, quote, radicalized and helplessly driven to support ISIS. They're just like you and me now, but say the wrong thing about Islam on television

and they'll start supporting a group that decapitates journalists and aid workers, rapes women by the tens of thousands, and throws gays from rooftops. That is what is being claimed, and it is absolutely shocking, doubly so because no one is admitting or seeming to even notice what a shocking claim it is. And again, I don't know what is true here. It could be a totally reasonable fear, or it could be pure paranoia, But I'm pretty sure the difference matters.

So that's all I have to say about that particular book and Contra Tomp on Twitter. Again, it is highly inconvenient that worrying about the spread of Islamist ideology and the deception that covers its spread immediately puts people in mind of the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy and right-wing conspiracy theories. You have to follow the plot here.

I am always talking about the necessity that freedom of speech and freedom of thought be safeguarded. You should be free to think and say whatever you want to say. And the people who are trying to write blasphemy laws, whether actually or effectively, in the way they're stigmatizing the criticism of Islam as tantamount to bigotry and xenophobia and even racism, these people are undermining the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought. There is no analogy to the Red Scare here. But it is, I just confess, highly inconvenient that the New York Times doesn't do a proper analysis of where the sympathies of people like Mogahed and Esposito are. like Mogahed and Esposito are. And they don't talk about the corrupting influence of Saudi money,

money from a regime that is theologically indistinguishable from ISIS, flooding our academic institutions and funding mosques worldwide and supplying them with literature that demonizes infidels and polytheists and, needless to say, Jews. So this is not conspiracy theory time. demonizes infidels and polytheists and, needless to say, Jews. So, this is not conspiracy theory time. This is just the nefarious work of Islamists that is in plain view for anyone who wants to see it, but unfortunately,

most of the people who want to see it are on the right wing. So, you do a Google search on someone like Dahlia Mogahead and you're immediately dumped onto Front Page Magazine and the Weekly Standard and other conservative publications. That's because the liberal publications are not doing their job and many of them are doing the other job of obscurantism. And you have a place like Salon that gets this wrong almost as a matter of principle. Okay, so on to more of your actual questions. What progress have you made toward becoming vegetarian or vegan? So this question arises from my podcast. I think it was the second podcast I did with Paul Bloom, where we sort of just stumbled into an

intervention I performed on both of us around the topic of the ethics of eating meat. One of us asked the other, what would be on your short list for things that will just mortify our descendants on our behalf? The way we look back on Thomas Jefferson, and we're just aghast that he couldn't see the wrongness of slavery. We have this supremely ethical and intelligent person who still couldn't see what an abomination slavery was. So what analogous blind spots do we have? And what will our descendants be scandalized by when they look back on us? our descendants be scandalized by when they look back on us. And on both of our short lists was the horror show of factory farming. And neither of us could defend it. Both of us participated in this machinery of death. And we both admitted that it's only because it's out of sight and out of mind

that we were able to do so. And neither of us could defend eating meat under these circumstances, and nor could we defend delegating the acquisition of meat to others in this way. So we did kind of stumble into an intervention of sorts. Then I threw Paul under the bus by saying, well, I'm willing to make a change in my diet, and I don't know what kind of moral monster you are that you aren't. But in any case, that was a fun conversation. And at that point, I asked vegetarian and vegan listeners to send me resources and help me idiot-proof the process of getting off of meat. And I made that appeal because I had been a vegetarian for six years at one point and became anemic and just decided it was not a healthy diet for me. So yes, I have a little to report, but not enough that I want to go into it in any depth. But I can say that since that conversation, I have been a vegetarian, and now that's, I think that's about four months ago. And I did some blood work recently and

strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, my lipid profile, my cholesterol and triglycerides have gotten worse on a vegetarian diet. And I think that's largely because, not because I'm eating more dairy and eggs, and yes, I'm aware of the ethical concerns around dairy and eggs, but because I'm probably eating more carbohydrates. And so, you know, there's the bread and the pasta and the rice and all the rest that's tweaking my blood sugar, and that has an unhappy effect on lipids. I'm still working with this. I'm still a vegetarian. I am an aspiring vegan. I'll keep trying to find my way through this science experiment without making food preparation and eating a new religion for myself or the center of my life. I have to be realistic about what I

can do here, and I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. So at the very least, I'm convinced about the ethical problem of eating meat. The eggs I buy claim to be impeccable ethically. Every chicken has something like 108 square feet of pasture to run on, and I am aware that that doesn't answer the concern of what happens to the male chicks born in their hatcheries. But I'm still not convinced that I can be a healthy vegan at this point. But I'm going to try to be convinced. So again, this is a slow unwinding of my carnivore lifestyle. But in any case, I've made the big change, which is I no longer eat meat, chicken, or fish. I suppose you could even make the case that eating fish, given our current system, is more ethical than continuing to eat dairy and eggs.

I would be interested to know how you vegans and vegetarians view that. I did have one idea for a short book or a long blog article where I could go through the comparative neuroanatomy of various species, as well as what we know about the likely basis of consciousness and pain and suffering in various animal brains, and try to make some intelligent ranking of the likely harm done at each stage. So is it, you know, is it worse to kill a cow than a fish? Is it worse to kill a pig than a cow? Can you really eat oysters and other bivalves without any concern that they may be suffering? This might be interesting to look at at some point. Take a fair amount of time to do it right, but in any case, that's at the back of my mind to look at.

Next question. This one's from Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, who many of you know is the ex-Muslim Iraqi reformer and a voice of reason. He was recently on Dave Rubin's show and gave a great interview there. And he was one of the people I consulted on my book with Majid, and he gave some very helpful notes. He's great. Anyway, he asks, if the Islamic reformation slash modernization movement doesn't succeed, what do you think should be the alternative? And that's an extraordinarily difficult question. I think I can't answer it. I don't think there is an alternative. If Islamic reform slash modernization doesn't succeed, we will have a continuous source of conflict with free speech and tolerance of diversity

and gender equality and a respect for science. I think it will work at some point because it will become so painful and untenable that it will just have to work. I don't know how much blood will be spilled or how many pendulum swings toward reactionary governments we'll see in Europe and even in the United States. I don't know how many Donald Trump campaigns we'll have to endure. Again, I'm not especially worried that there's going to be a Trump presidency, but it's conceivable and it's conceivable because of this, but it has to succeed. Or at the very least, Islam has to become like Christianity in the United States. That's a problem that's big enough for me to have written a short book about it, Letter to a Christian Nation, but it's comparatively a tolerable problem. Once we get there, once the Middle East is like the Bible Belt, then we'll have the luxury of trying to fine-tune things and wondering what the far future might look like. Okay, another question. This is a longish

question that I got by email, and it contains a criticism, but I thought it was good, so I'll read the whole thing. Here's my question with some context and setup. Do you think your reliance on hypotheticals and thought experiments has become a hindrance to making headway in discourse on important issues, in particular the threat of Islamic terrorism? Generally speaking, how big a role should thought experiments and hypotheticals play in discussing key issues. It seems that lately you've given several gifts to your detractors, namely the statement about Ben Carson. While I understand your position in stating that you'd support him over Chomsky on the point of terrorism only, I still think this was a disastrous tactical error that didn't need to be made. Your point could have been made in any number of ways that didn't involve taking an

absurd position, voting for Carson under any metric, on a situation that will never actually happen, Chomsky running for president. Imagine a person that had not heard of your work until seeing that statement. Do you think they'd be more or less likely to dig deeper and fully explore the nuance of your views or write you off as a crackpot? If the goal is to win the war of ideas, it seems like tactics like this might be doing you more harm than good. The non-starter with Chomsky and the war of ideas, it seems like tactics like this might be doing you more harm than good. The non-starter with Chomsky and the defense of torture in certain circumstances are other areas where relying on thought experiments and hypotheticals did not seem to win many supporters. The name is Jason Teufel. Thank you, Jason.

Well, I agree. I think it's probably, in the specific instances you cite, counterproductive. And perhaps I should be more disciplined in how I screen for those statements which wind up being counterproductive or easily used to mislead people about my views. The Ben Carson thing is very obvious, though I couched it with so many caveats and so much context that one really had to be totally malicious to spread the meme that I support Ben Carson for president. But of course, I have critics who are just that malicious. Someone like Max Blumenthal did just that. The issue is when people are that malicious in their use of ellipses, they can defame you with

any statement. But I take your point. They may not notice that you were talking about anything until you make a statement of the sort I made about Carson. And the net result of that one certainly was not helpful. On the question of thought experiments, I notice now I offered one at the top and talking about the narrative narrative. They do serve the purpose, if the analogy one is drawing is correct, of clarifying people's thinking

and getting down to first principles. Using a thought experiment or an analogy, however surprising, can break the spell for people in a way that just talking more and more about the complex details of events in the world can't. So yeah, I would be reluctant to say that thought experiments and hypotheticals shouldn't be used, but I think more care is needed in resorting to them, perhaps, or at least justifying their use. And I didn't think that kind of care was needed in the case

of talking with someone like Chomsky, because obviously he's a celebrated academic who understands what is going on when someone resorts to a hypothetical in order to get at first principles. He's also someone who seems inclined to deliberately miss the point when he thinks it will serve his side of the argument. I have to factor in the price I pay for being so on my guard in conversations like the one I was having with Douglas Murray that I wind up just not having useful conversations and not branching out into areas that are ethically interesting and consequential, where my views may prompt someone to think differently in important ways than they thought before. I find it thrilling

when someone raises a point that I find I'm uncomfortable with and I'm being led helplessly in the direction of something that I find destabilizing to my cherished opinions. And I can't see any errors that being made and yet I don't like where I'm being taken. I find that absolutely thrilling. I find those moments some of the best moments in intellectual life. And I've been told by many of you that I managed to do that for you. So I would be reluctant to stop doing that. I'd be reluctant to speak more like a politician than I do. But I would be the first to admit that I may have caused myself more headaches than I should have by not being more careful than I've been.

headaches than I should have by not being more careful than I've been. So I don't do a lot of censoring of what I think or how I say things, but increasingly I find that I do some because, again, if I didn't care whether I was misrepresented, it would be a lot easier. And getting off of Twitter would be one way not to care, because I seem to only see these things on Twitter. But as I said as well, I also see some useful things on Twitter, and some of the upcoming conversations I will have on this podcast are a result of what I've seen there. So there may be no perfect solution. I'll just keep trying to find my way as I eat nothing but vegetables. Next question. This is a similar one, actually.

Obviously, it's your, quote, controversial views that gain the most notoriety. However, the importance of an idea and how much attention it receives are only loosely related. Some ideas, arguably such as your stance on profiling, may turn out to be relatively unimportant, regardless of how reasonable or well-reasoned it is. Worse, it could be actively unhelpful. Such topics can be so explosive and your position may not condense to tweet length that it can easily be used by opponents to denigrate you. In this regard, sharing such ideas could detract from more critical points. In what way should the imagined repercussions affect what you decide to

publicly share? If you believe something to be true, would it be moral to withhold it? In this respect, is there such a thing as a noble lie of omission? Are there ideas you've decided against sharing? What are they? That's interesting. Share them now. And are there views of yours that you believe don't get enough attention? And this is from Jordan. Thank you, Jordan. Again, yeah, I think there, and I once wrote an article, I believe it was entitled, Why I'd Rather Not Speak About Torture, on my blog. And I said there, or somewhere, that I once had an epiphany that, you know, not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself. And that is still true. I still think that's true. And I notice certain people abide by this precept much better than I do and have commensurately easy lives as

a result. I would put someone like Steve Pinker in this category. This is not true of somebody like Richard Dawkins, who gets down in the trenches in the same way that I do. Part of this is the ideas themselves, right? So that there are topics like profiling, for instance, where I just think it's ethically both interesting and important to figure out what we think on this topic. I mean, get this wrong in any significant way and people will die. People by what? The hundreds? The thousands? It's truly important that we figure this out. So yeah, I'm reluctant to say that I shouldn't touch those topics. But in hindsight, I can say that yeah, some of them have been just more

trouble than they're worth. And as I think I've said on this podcast at least once, I tore up the best book contract. 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.