Making Sense with Sam Harris - #26 — The Logic of Violence

Episode Date: January 19, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with retired Navy SEAL and author, Jocko Willink. They discuss U.S. foreign policy, war, human evil, 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. episodes 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'll be speaking with Jocko Willink. Jocko is a former Navy SEAL. He was a Navy SEAL for 20 years and commanded a unit of SEALs in the Battle of Ramadi, which is often acknowledged to be the toughest battle in our war in Iraq. And the unit he commanded became the most decorated special operations unit in that war. Jocko is also a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and really is just a rare

authority on violence, its application in the world, the practical reality of it, the ethical imperative of it in certain circumstances. So it was a great privilege to speak to Jocko. I found our two hours together extremely useful, and I hope you feel the same way. I now give you Jocko Willink. So I'm here with Jocko Willink. Jocko, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me on. First of all, congratulations on everything. You are exploding.

Your book has exploded. Your podcast, the Jocko podcast, has exploded, all in very quick succession. So the world has decided it needs more Jocko. That's awesome. I'm very happy for you. It's interesting to watch unfold. Like most people, I first heard of you on the Tim Ferriss podcast. And then very shortly after that, did one with Joe Rogan.

And I would just say to our listeners, if you haven't heard those interviews, those are actually five hours of interviews, I think two with Tim and three with Joe, I recommend that you do that because I'm going to make a serious effort here not to duplicate those interviews. And those interviews were just awesome. So, you know, Jocko and I will wait for you. Go off and listen to five hours of Tim and Joe, and we'll be right here. So your book, which also we're not going to talk about much,

but which I love, I'm about two-thirds the way through it, is called Extreme Ownership. And this is now part of a, really a wave of Navy SEAL books. I've read a few of the other ones, American Sniper and Lone Survivor, and I think a couple of others. But what's unique about your book is that this is not just a battlefield memoir. You are very explicitly relating the lessons learned as a commander of Navy SEALs to business and leadership in general. And so that's a very unique angle. And I recommend that people, again, read that book. And this

conversation will be no substitute for reading that book. One question on that is, there has been traditionally a taboo around SEALs writing books and even talking about their careers. Has the taboo been lifted? Or did you have to be very careful in how you approached writing the book? And have some of these other books not been so careful? I mean, what's happening with enjoyed and believed was you are a quiet professional. That was the ethos of how we carried ourselves. So this idea of the quiet professional, you know, you do your job, you do what you're supposed to do, obviously doesn't entail writing books about what you do. entail writing books about what you do. Now, starting in the 90s, a guy named Richard Marcinko,

Dick Marcinko, wrote a book called Rogue Warrior. And this was after he had had a little bit of a rough exit from the Navy and had gotten in some trouble. And that book was huge. And it definitely was, I would say, looked down upon by people within the community, within the SEAL teams that, you know, this guy, you shouldn't go write a book. And so that's what I grew up with. Now, since the 9-11 and the war on terror has happened, obviously there's been more books by SEALs, by special operations guys across the board, by military people. So I think that there's just people want to know what we do and how we do it. And when I say we, I mean people in the military. And I think that's why there's been some more books published on this subject for Leif and I. Leif is the person that I wrote the book with. He's another SEAL. We worked together on our last, on my last deployment to Iraq. And we both ended up in positions where

we were teaching leadership inside the SEAL teams. He was teaching it to the junior officers that were coming out of the basic SEAL pipeline. And I was teaching it to the more advanced SEALs that were actually in platoons getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. So we had crystallized this knowledge from deployment and we doctrinalized it really not to the full extent that we probably should have, but guys were always asking us, Hey, do you have these lessons learned written down anywhere? And eventually we did put them down. But then when we got out, we, we both left the military. We both started working with, we formed a company. We were working with various businesses

and the businesses that we were helping with their leadership started asking the same question. Do you have this written down? Is there any documentation on this? And eventually we said, okay, we got to write this stuff down. And that's what we did. And that's what ended up being the book. Well, again, it's a fascinating book and a fusion of a war memoir with just the principles of leadership and just a straight up business book. So I recommend you guys check it out. But we're not going to talk about any of that. I want to talk about violence. I want to talk about violence really at every scale, from war to personal self-defense. I think we'll probably focus on war mostly, but you really strike me as someone who's in a unique position to give a very informed opinion on violence at every scale. And although you're probably not an authority now, if you ever were one, on what it's like to feel vulnerable as a man in our society.

I mean, you're not a prime candidate for a mugging, unless it's going to be Hicks and Gracie and his five friends mugging you in the parking lot. So you may be out of touch with certain realities that people confront in their lives. But for everything from just being a jujitsu black belt to being a Navy SEAL who saw serious combat, there's just violence at every scale. And even between those two extremes, there's law enforcement, which I heard you describe, I think it was in your book or in one of those interviews, maybe both, that part of your deployment to Iraq had the character of Baghdad SWAT, right? So it was less war-making and more just sort of order-making. And that comes with its own constraints, ethical and tactical. And so let's just fill in a little bit of your background for people who did not take the

assignment and go listen to five hours of you with Joe and Tim. When did you join the military and did you actually know you wanted to be a SEAL going in or was that a later development? Yes, I knew I wanted to join the SEAL teams. I wanted to be some kind of a commando my whole life since I was a little kid, since I can remember wanting to do anything significant. I wanted to be some kind of a commando, some kind of a soldier. And as I researched, and research is a strong word, as I found more out about the military, eventually I found out about the SEAL teams, and it was allegedly the hardest and the most difficult. And so that's what I went into. I think people know a fair amount about the SEALs at this point, again, because of all the books and the

related films, but just give me the lay of the land here. So is it in fact the single most elite force in the military, or are there analogous special ops forces in the other branches that are every bit as rigorous, or is there some actual hierarchy that's acknowledged even by non-SEALs that SEAL training is, for whatever reason, pushing people to the highest standard of training? You know, every branch of the military has some form of special operations. I've worked with all of them. They're all tough guys. They're all great guys.

And I think everyone has a mutual respect for each other and for the different training that we all go through. And it's all relatively similar. I would say if there's anything that, that separates again, this doesn't make it better or worse, but one thing that the, the SEAL teams does and the basic SEAL training has is water and a lot of water work. And actually, if you hear Tim Ferriss talking about doing some of this water training that he's done, it's, it's a real challenge for some people. And, and no doubt working in the water definitely makes you better at things. Because if you and I were going to go take down a building, I could train you to do that in a pretty short period of time. And you already know how to shoot, so we'd go over some basic tactics.

And it's not that hard. If I said, okay, before we go to take down this building, we're going to go in a boat. And we're going to swim across the beach in big waves. We're going to get to dry land. We're going to make our guns work again. We're going to make sure our radios are still waterproof. Then we're going to patrol in wet and cold. And then we're going to take down the building.

It's a lot harder. That's all there is to it. So the water is definitely a, it provides a level of challenge that is very distinct to the SEAL teams. Now you guys haven't been seeing a lot of water, though, lately, right? It seems like the water training has been wasted in our recent engagement. It absolutely has been. I would say it hasn't been wasted, though,

because when you have to perform something in the water all the time, when you do it on dry land, it's a lot easier. Right. So the training wasn't wasted. It was taken advantage of. But to your question, all the different military branches, the Marine Corps, the Army, the Air Force, they all have their special operations unit. They all train hard. They're all great guys. They I think the best example is the special forces, the Green Berets. They're more focused on going and working with counterinsurgency situations with local forces, and they're very advanced in languages. So the SEAL teams were really bad at languages

in terms of the number of guys we have that speak other languages. And in the Green Berets, they have a lot more people that speak more languages. So that's a mission that they're going to excel at. Whereas we, we're more of a direct action force or a special reconnaissance force. Is there any military skill that is focused to a greater degree in one special ops community more than another? I mean, for instance, like sniping, is there a brand of sniper that is acknowledged to be more trained than any other, or snipers across each of those disciplines get more or less interchangeable?

This is like asking a Yankees fan who's better, the Yankees or the Red Sox, or is this- Well, I can tell you that the snipers that I've worked with from the SEAL teams are outstanding. And the SEAL sniper training course is an unbelievably hard course, an unbelievably hard course that actually has a pretty significant attrition rate. And it's just a great course. The SEAL snipers are great. Everyone, the Army, the Marine Corps, we're always all focusing.

We go to each other's schools. So I believe that they all produce good people, really solid people. And yes, I'm being politically sensitive to my answers to this question. Yeah. And I've just noticed that you've been in describing working with other ordinary soldiers and even reservists, you've been incredibly respectful and grateful. And I mean, it's just, you have made no secret of how indispensable their bravery was in the Battle of Ramadi and in the other engagements you fought in. And it was really great to hear in those other interviews. Well, that one I would not hold back on at all. The bravery and the professionalism of our American

soldiers that I work with and Marines was just Phenomenal and humbling to be around them and again when you deal with special operations guys This is what we want to do. This is this is what we love to do. It's what we want to do This you can ask any SEAL They'll tell you the same thing they want to do since they were a little kid, etc Etc, etc a regular soldier now some of them are professional soldiers That's what they always wanted to do But a lot of them are just people that that's a phase of their life that they're in. And so to ask these people going through a phase of their

life that they're expecting to go out of in a year or two years to ask them to do these extraordinarily risky things that take an immense amount of courage and bravery and to watch them step up and do this over and over and over again despite casualties and losses and pressure. It's very humbling and amazing to watch and that's why I would never hold back when talking about the American servicemen and women that I worked with. Bravery is this maybe unique emotion in that you can't fake it because faking it is actually bravery. If you're terrified and you're merely acting brave and going through the motions and putting yourself in harm's way, that is what bravery is, right? I mean, there are other emotions where the

counterfeit version of it is in fact a counterfeit, but it's the real thing if you're terrified and you're then doing the thing that you're terrified to do. Yes. Yes. To fake bravery is in fact to be brave. They used to tell us false motivation is better than no motivation. In other words, it's better to be, yes, I'm excited to do this, even though you're not. I don't know if I believe that or not, but I kind of do. I kind of do. And I would see people's motivation turn as they falsified their motivation for whatever reason. And then they become, you know what, let's do this. Let's get this done. Well, you talk about that in the book and elsewhere, even on your own podcast, you talk about in the face of being told the most deplorable thing about what is about to happen or likely

to happen on a patrol, you habitually say good or is another good day or what's the actual phrase you were using? Well, the one that I just talked about on a recent podcast was good. Yeah. And this was one of my subordinate leaders, one of my brothers, actually one of my good friends. And he pointed out to me that whenever something was going bad, for instance, he'd say, oh, we got this intel that on this target we're going on to, there's going to be all kinds of IEDs. And they're saying there's going to be dozens of enemy fighters. And I'd say, oh, we got this intel that on this target we're going on to. There's going to be all kinds of IEDs. And they're saying there's going to be dozens of enemy fighters. And I'd say, good.

You know, that means we have an opportunity to get after it. And yeah, so you definitely get in that mindset where you look at the challenges as being a good thing. So actually, I was going to ask you this later, but it seems relevant here. And again, I'm kind of creeping up on what I consider our main topic here. But what explains the lack of this attitude and the lack of success that we've seen among, as most people know, was then lost to the Islamic State and now was just recaptured like yesterday. I think we have like, or the Iraqi army has like 80% of it under control. But there were descriptions of, I think this might have been in Mosul, but you know, 18,000 Iraqi troops melting away in the face of 400 ISIS fighters. And there have been similar things with the Afghan troops, with the Taliban.

Now, presumably this is the same population of people, except for perhaps some percentage of foreign recruits to the side of the ISIS and the Taliban. We're talking about Afghans and Iraqis in both cases, but the troops that we have trained often just show such low morale or such an unwillingness to engage the insurgencies in those countries. Can you say something about that? Because from a civilian side, it begins to look a little mysterious what's happening there. You fought alongside Iraqis, and you've put your life in the hands of Iraqis. You've fought, you've risked your life for Iraqis. And I know you don't want to cast aspersions upon Iraqis and Iraqi troops in general

but what explains this I mean again 400 ISIS troops and 18,000 Iraqi soldiers disappearing can you explain that to me? Yes I can war is a test of will

and that's it. And when you have 10,000 or 18,000 or 100,000 troops that do not have the will, and there's two pieces to this will, and I've said this before, so I don't mean to rehash, but it is the answer. You have to have the will to kill people. That is what war is. And you are going to kill the enemy. That is what your goal is, is to kill them. And when you kill the enemy, because the nature of war is confusing and there's the fog of war and it's an imperfect situation, you are going

to kill innocent people. This is another part of war that is horrible and ugly and it is factual this is what is going to happen so when you engage in war you must have the will to kill you're going to focus as much as you can obviously on the enemy but there will be innocent bystanders there will be women there will be children that are going to die because this decision has been made that a war has to be fought. On top of that will to kill, you also have to have the will to die. That means on an individual level, that means your friends, the people you're with, that means that you have to have that will. And so what happens when you have these ISIS fighters that through their mental state that they're in, they have clearly demonstrated that they have the will to kill everyone, innocent, civilian, women, children.

They have that will because of their belief in martyrdom. they obviously have the will to die. Now you take the Iraqi soldiers and, well, they don't have those strong beliefs. And part of it is because they don't have yet, maybe they'll never will, maybe they've had flashes of it, but they don't have this unified feeling of unity around the nation of Iraq, where they consider themselves an Iraqi first. Whereas, you know, they consider themselves, you know, their religious sect, their tribe, their family. There's a lot of other things in there besides being Iraqi. So when this fight is a will, it's the will of ISIS and what their beliefs are against not so strong of a will of Iraq. This is what happens. You bring up a good point about just the role that religious sectarianism plays there because you have a Sunni Shia problem in particular in Iraq,

which certainly erodes almost all the Sunni will to fight against ISIS because they perceive themselves to be at the mercy of the predominantly Shia government. And by the way, you gave me a nice out on this question and said, you know, I don't want you to sit here and disparage the Iraqi soldiers. And I have not even the remotest close level of respect that I have for the American soldiers. I mean, the Iraqi soldiers, we saw them do all kinds of horrible things. We had companies of Iraqi soldiers quit. We had battalions of Iraqis. This is when I was there. Battalions of Iraqi soldiers, five or 600 soldiers say, we're not fighting anymore. So that did not, I have no problem saying that. These are facts. Yeah. In your book, you describe one raid where you literally had to physically push and drag

Iraqi soldiers with you through the door in the middle of a hostage rescue. This is the core of what I want to talk about. I perceive in my audience and certainly in Joe Rogan's audience and in our political environment in general, and it is disproportionately a problem among liberals of whom I count myself among, just pervasive doubts about the legitimacy of violence in any context. Is war ever necessary? And I think there are many people who have a default answer to that question, which is no, that it's always an ethical failure on some level. And it strikes me that when you have the most civilized people disproportionately doubting that war is ever necessary, that you have a problem defending civilization at a certain point against its genuine enemies. at a certain point against its genuine enemies. And these doubts are not, they're understandable on some level. So for instance, I heard you talk on your podcast, you expressed great admiration,

which I share for Dan Carlin's podcast, in particular, his series on World War I, Countdown to Armageddon. And listeners, if you have not heard Dan Carlin on World War I, your other assignment, which will now take you 20 hours, is to go listen to that. I've repeatedly called that a masterpiece, and it really is. sacrifice of human life and wealth. I mean, you had a generation of young men in Europe just fed into a meat grinder for no apparent purpose. You have them fighting for months on end to capture another hundred yards of farmland, you know, to move their trenches forward. And even more horribly, this whole escapade was engaged from the point of just this delusional idealism about war. You just had this romantic idea about how glorious it was going to be to go to war. And then they get there and they're just pulverized.

And people, I think, draw the wrong lesson from this. And people draw the lesson that basically this is what war always is, right? It's always this pointless. It's always this unnecessary. There's always a kind of moral equivalence to both sides, where it's just sort of the needless sacrifice of human life on both sides. And there are no bad guys, really. So there are two moments in your podcast with Rogan that I just want to revisit. And I think we're going to have to make a few passes on this before I'm satisfied that we have performed an exorcism on the ghost of pacifism and cynicism. But at one point, you talked about fighting for our freedom over there.

And what I detect in Joe's audience is just a tsunami of cynicism on that point. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? You're not fighting for our freedom or anyone's freedom over there. This was a misbegot. And this was just the prosecution of, at best, selfish national interests where we harm innocent people. And you just spoke about the unavoidability of collateral damage, and that is an excruciating fact of war at this point. And it's only becoming more excruciating. In fact, it's so excruciating, we're so aware of the costs of war, even though we conceal them from ourselves, that one wonders whether we are up to fighting certain necessary wars given those costs.

Could we bomb Dresden now? I mean, I think you could argue the bombing of Dresden was not necessary to win World War II, but we did things in fighting that necessary war, which now we would find totally indefensible because we have so much more information. So fighting for our freedom is one concept that I want to talk about. And there was another moment in Rogan's podcast where you talked about this shibboleth of liberal anti-war speak, which is that you can't bomb an idea, right? And you said, well, no, actually, you can bomb an idea. So let's talk about that for a moment. I think this notion of you and our

military fighting for freedom in Iraq can be defended, even if you think the war in Iraq was on balance, absolutely unwise, right? That it was the wrong war to fight. And I think a case can be made that it was the wrong war to fight. I would like to know what you think about that. But I think that even if you were going to bracket the conversation by saying, listen, we should never have gone into Iraq given the outcome or given the misinformation or lies about WMD, even in that context, you can argue that you were fighting for freedom and that on the ground in Iraq, you were trying to make life better for Iraqis who didn't want to live in this internecine hell realm of civil war. in a war that in hindsight doesn't look ideal, and this notion of you just can't bomb an idea. War is not the answer to ISIS or fascism or anything else that ails us.

As I talked about on Joe Rogan being on the ground in Iraq with Iraqi people, they wanted us to be there. they wanted us to be there. They wanted us to help them and to provide them with security. And they want to live in peace and stability. And there is no doubt in my mind about that. And that is what we were doing there on the ground, fighting to help these people. And in the beginning, it was obviously to get rid of Saddam Hussein and that regime. But by the time 2006 rolled around, now there was an insurgency and it was ISIS. And they wanted to take control of Ramadi and they actually had control of Ramadi, but they were enslaving the people, brutalizing them, raping them, murdering them, torturing them. That is what was happening.

And we went in and stopped that from happening and gave them back their freedom. We didn't impose any government on them. We didn't take any oil from them. We gave them the opportunity for peace and stability in there, in that city and, and peace and stability in that city and in Iraq. So that is what we did. Yeah. One thing I would point out here is that even if you think that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq, I'm on record here as being neither for nor against the war. I've always said that I didn't know what I thought about the war in Iraq, except for the fact that it looked like a dangerous distraction from the war in Afghanistan that we looked like we could very well botch. And that in retrospect, it looks like a disaster, given the rise of ISIS and given the way we left. But even if you're going to say that,

if you're going to say, with the benefit of hindsight, we should not have gone into Iraq, you are obliged to admit ethically how depressing a claim that is. Because what you're claiming is we had this hostage situation where Saddam Hussein is keeping a nation of 30 million people hostage to just a horrific totalitarian government. And what you're saying is that Iraqi society was so fractured along religious lines that it required a dictator of this barbarity to keep the lid on the sectarian civil war that then exploded when we took the lid off and left. And that's a very depressing claim about the state of religious sectarianism, and it certainly doesn't make the influence of religious certainty on the ground there look good.

One thing to interject on that is, when you talk about the people of Iraq and how this sectarian violence was waiting to explode, and you see that on TV sometimes, it's the equivalent of seeing a riot in America and thinking, well, that's what America is because we'd go do operations in Baghdad and there's normal life happening. Not everyone is bent on this, this, you know, religious violence. They're not, they're normal. They're there. I

shouldn't say normal, but there's people that their focus in their life is not their religion. Their focus in life is selling more cars or making more bottles or doing whatever it is they're doing, raising their kids and getting to school. And that's what their focus is. That's what a majority of Iraq is. And it's very easy to lose sight of that when what we see on the news is sectarian violence, is one side of the shelves and fixing one of the cars that they're working on. That is what is happening in Iraq. And we so often lose sight of that, that Iraq is not the very small percentage of people that are fully engaged in this sort of political or religious strife. The vast majority of people are people like in America, where if you go down

Main Street, USA, what are they doing? They're living their life. They're trying to pursue happiness. That's what Iraq is. And unfortunately, what we see, and it gives us the impression that that's what all of Iraq is, what we see is a bunch of people bent on violence. And that is not what Iraq is. I'm glad you said that because that even makes this admission even more excruciating. And it's worth pointing out. So you have people, totally normal people who really do just want to live free and self-actualized lives. They're not looking to stone people to death for adultery. And they're not looking to wage jihad against apostates within their own society or export their jihad to the rest of the world. And so you're talking about

people just like you and me, who by dint of just sheer bad luck, they've been born into a society where their intellectual interests and their desire for freedom are just smashed at every turn by, one, the dictator who's keeping a lid on sectarian violence, and two, the sectarian violence that is ready to rise up and destroy everything. So then you're saying that we, whether we as America or we as the rest of the civilized world, can't go in there and offer any help to these people. And that in retrospect, it looks like the wrong thing to have attempted it. So that is, if you're going to be critical of the war in Iraq, you have to just own the fact that, yes, you're saying that these are hostage crises for which we don't have a remedy. And some people are unlucky. You're unlucky to be a girl born in Afghanistan. But I, as a peacenik, am in principle against anyone trying to come in and rescue you because of the cost, because of collateral damage. And I think, you know, collateral damage is such an ugly fact on every level. It's just it's ugly that it's impossible to wage war in such a way so as to not kill innocent people.

It's ugly that it's impossible to wage war in such a way so as to not kill innocent people. And it's totally understandable that it produces more enemies for us on some level. and you just had half your family blown up in a drone strike, that that would make you, in some basic sense, irretrievably at odds with the people who did that to you, whether or not you had any sympathy for jihadism. So talk a little bit more about collateral damage and, I mean, how you think about it in terms of the legitimacy of trying to do good with force in the world, given that you really can't avoid collateral damage. You can't completely avoid collateral damage. But I'll tell you what, America goes through extreme lengths to absolutely minimize collateral damage.

The amount of risk that gets taken by American forces to avoid collateral damage is immense. And they avoid it on a regular basis. I mean, we don't carpet bomb anymore. We don't do Dresden anymore. We don't do that. To get bombs dropped in the city of Ramadi was an extremely difficult task to get done because of the threat of collateral damage. Despite being fired on from a building, you know where these enemy are and they're inflicting damage and killing people, but yet there's unknown areas around it, so therefore we're not gonna drop a bomb on it.

We do that all the time. We are very, very judicious in the way we execute operations. Now, that being said, because war is imperfect, there are situations where innocent people die. Yes, that does said, because war is imperfect, there are situations where innocent people die. Yes, that, that does happen and it's awful and it's horrible. And, you know, this idea that now we've created even more terrorists, I think is, um, I don't think that's, I think that's a, it's, it's, it's a case that could be made, but it's not the 100%.

And you don't, for every innocent person that dies, that you go and you, you know, we actually approach those families and we go and explain to them what happened. And we give them money and we try and help them rebuild whatever went wrong. That is what America does when we make these mistakes. So I think we just kill these people and they're, and that's it. No, we go in and try and repair the damage as much as we can. Of course, we can't bring back loved ones, but we try to make this up and explain the situation. And so there's not a 100% conversion rate of you killed my brother by accident while we were being, you know, terrorized by ISIS. And in the crossfire, my brother got killed. And I think it came from America. And now therefore, I'm going to wage jihad against America. That's not a that's not a 100% conversion rate. In fact, I would tell you

that it's probably a much lower conversion rate than you would think. These people are at war, they've been at war, they understand what war is. They know that war is imperfect, but ISIS doesn't even come back and make those apologies. They don't come back and say, we're sorry. They don't come back and say, let us rebuild your house. Let us give you some financial support for the son that you lost, who was providing this income to your family. That's fine. Let us take care of you. ISIS doesn't do that. ISIS causes collateral damage all over the place. And so I think it's a little bit of a stretch to think that there's this 100% conversion rate. And I think that the conversion rate is actually small enough that it makes it, it's hard to say it's worth it,

but we take calculated risks with collateral damage and we have to. Otherwise, we can't do anything. You cannot execute a war with zero risk of collateral damage. It cannot happen. I would love for it to happen, but it cannot happen. So therefore, you have to mitigate the risk as much as possible and go forward. That's the way it works. Yeah. And it just seems to me that when you're talking about situations of moral emergency of this sort, so you have ISIS raping women by the tens of thousands and crucifying children and burying people alive. And this goes to the issue of moral equivalence or the lack thereof. I mean, people imagine that we are no better than our enemies in this case,

even in this case. I mean, and in some sense, people, you know, I confront people who think we're worse than our enemies because we made them, right? We created ISIS because we went into Iraq. We used to fund al-Qaeda against the Soviets, right? So somehow this causes them to lose sight of the very different human projects we have advertised here. And again, this comes down to human intentions. Like, what kind of world do you want to build? If I gave you a magic wand and you could just create the world as you saw fit, I have no doubt that you would create just abundance everywhere for everybody, right? So there'd be a Starbucks on every corner and there'd be a jujitsu school on every corner and people would just be able to live out their dreams. And I would do that. And the people who got us into these various wars, many of whom have been demonized to an extraordinary degree, and many of whom who I

share very few political principles with, you know, someone like Dick Cheney, right? I think if you gave him a magic wand, he would not create a hell realm for people in the Middle East. He would make the Middle East more or less like Nebraska or Florida. And you ask yourself, what would Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi do with a magic wand? He is telling us what he would do with every fucking video, right? They're making no secret of the vision of life that they are aspiring to. And again, it's important to point this out, that there is no moral equivalence here. The kinds of just rapacious evil you see in an ISIS video is not an accident.

It's not an aberration of their program. It's not their version of the My Lai Massacre. It's not the thing that they have to go back and apologize to their society for and say, I don't know how we did this, but we were pushed into extremists and there's a lot of soul searching necessary. No, no. Every journalist put in an orange jumpsuit and murdered is a absolutely fine point on a vision of life that they are not keeping secret. In fact, this is part of their recruitment material. This is PR for them. This is what they think, and in fact know, will successfully bring like-minded people to their shores to fight alongside them. And again, this is a minority of the Muslim community

worldwide. This is not synonymous with Islam, but this is a global jihadist insurgency that we're confronting in many places. So I guess I want to just linger for a moment on, again, this is a quote from your interview with Joe, this notion of you can't bomb an idea. So if you can't bomb this idea out of them, by definition, force is not the appropriate response to ISIS because ISIS is an idea. What do you have to say to that? Good luck. Set up a series of debates with ISIS and try and use our logic to defeat them. Is that the other proposal? What is the alternative? There's an assumption that ISIS is the hardest example to absorb by this line of thinking. But generally speaking, people think that our own selfish behavior on the world stage,

our own unapologetic theft of or just commandeering of resources, has created people with, quote, legitimate grievances all over the world, especially in the Muslim world now. And ISIS is on some level an expression of those legitimate grievances. And if we were better actors, if we were more apologetic, if we shared more wealth more of the time, if we just got out of Muslim lands entirely, right, if we were not protecting the Saudis, we were not over there in any sense, if we just kept our culture to ourselves, then we would discover that everyone wants the same thing out of life

on some level and that this violence would no longer be directed at us. We have created this because we are in some sense, I mean, literally people will say, you know, the US is the greatest terrorist organization in world history. Again, this is like, this is the center of Joe's demographic. I mean, this is the kind of thing I get thrown at me whenever I talk to him on his podcast. This is what Noam Chomsky has done to the human mind at the global scale. So the thing I wanted to bring you back to is this notion that you can't bomb an idea. As you pointed out with Joe, Nazism was an idea. Slavery was an idea in the United States held too tenaciously. The military nationalism of Japan was an idea. After those wars, which were,

as you point out, bombing on a scale that now we can't even contemplate, right? And probably shouldn't contemplate. Germany and Japan are our friends, right? I mean, the idea of Nazism was successfully bombed out of Germany. Yes. And let's not forget that both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany would never have stopped their drive to take over the entire world. They didn't have a border that they were going to. They were going for world domination. So, yeah, we had to stop them. And there was only one way that they were going to be stopped, and that is through the use of force and violence. The other thing to point out there is that you could see our intentions, our fundamentally benign intentions for the world and even for our enemies in the aftermath of those wars. Because what do we do to Germany and Japan? Did we just go in and start raping people and steal their land and enslave them? We rebuilt them into financial superpowers. We wanted peaceful collaborators, economically and culturally.

And there's no question that's what we want in the Middle East, too. So let's just zero on the notion of pacifism here, because I find it very frustrating to encounter pacifism. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

including bonus episodes, NAMAs, 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.