The Joe Rogan Experience - #192 - Sam Harris

Episode Date: March 8, 2012

Joe sits down with Sam Harris.

Is that it? Yeah. Did you start? Did you launch? Yeah, that was the meow. Guess what? No sponsors. Just fucking cue the music.

Can I give you a dollar at least? Yes. Give me a buck. All right, cool. Hit it. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night.

All day. Yeah, we havean podcast by night, all day. Yeah, we have music. It's ridiculous, but it makes me feel like something's actually happening. Sam Harris, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining me, man. This is really cool. This is an excellent opportunity. The internets are abuzz. I've gotten more response for this as far as questions for you than I think any any guests we've ever had great well

I'm very happy to be here I'm happy here too man I've watched a lot of your videos online I've enjoyed every one of them and I liken some of those debates that you get into with those old Gracie in action videos uh-huh have you ever seen those old Gracie in action videos I'm not entirely sure though I know the ones you're talking about I've seen a lot of Gracie material yeah well the Gracie in action videos are really the first videos that Horian Gracie, Horian Gracie who's Hitlio's son, you know, Hoist's brother, is a brilliant businessman. And he realized that all he needed to do was put together a series of real life encounters between a trained jiu-jitsu practitioner and some guy who thinks he knows how to fight,

he's sure he knows how to fight. And then he just gets mangled every time, every single fight. But this wasn't the Gracie challenge at all? Well, they've got a bunch of them. There's Gracie in Action 1 and 2. It's basically just compilations of home videos that they have of really, for martial artists, really brilliant stuff to watch because until the Gracies came along,

nobody really knew that there was one guy out there that could just sort of manhandle people like that and just strangle them and choke them that there was one martial art that was so superior when it came to a grappling situation that you would watch those and you'd almost feel bad for the guy getting strangled but not really that's how i feel when i watch a lot of your debates well that's that's very high praise i can tell you it's not as satisfying in the debate format as it is on the mat. Oh, I'm sure. Because no one ever taps. Exactly.

It's like you're fighting an army of zombies that they've lost, but they can't be forced to admit that they've lost. It must be a very bizarre thing for you because as far as people who have spent hours and hours debating publicly, debating the merits or the idea of religion, you might be top ten on YouTube of all the different information that's available. Have you ever seen anybody in all these different debates you've been in where you knock something into their head and you see a light go off like, holy shit, what if you're right? Do you ever get that?

Well, it's hard to see in real time. People are pretty good about not having epiphanies in real time in front of you. So you can see people get uncomfortable, and you can see them want to make a lateral move to a new subject. Because there's a lot of, one of the great strategies, or one of the less noble but effective strategies of debate is to, if you've lost a point, you don't concede it, you just kind of move on to something else and hope no one notices. And in a formal debate format, there's often no mechanism for your opponent

to score that as conquered ground because you can't address each other in real time. So it's like I talk for 10 minutes someone else talks for 10 minutes the moderator doesn't necessarily interrupt us and we the two discussions can't actually address one another so a formal debates are actually ironically the kind of the worst format to actually prove who's right because it's like fighting someone you know you're separated by's right because it's like fighting someone, you know, you're separated by, it's like boxing, you know, it's like you get a clinch and the ref separates you and so you can't really test every tool in that context and so you can just kind of

talk past each other and not address the thing that was brought up 10 minutes ago, and it never really gets scored. So it's amazingly unsatisfying even when you feel like you have said exactly what you should have said. Because they just won't buy it. It's just like fighting with fog. No one ever falls down. just like fighting with fog, you know, it's like, no one never, no one ever falls down. And, and it's occasionally you, you, you score, you score a blow that, you know, the audience has noticed, but even then the audience is partitioned into, you know, the, the, your side and the other side. And it's amazing how, um, invulnerable people's prejudices and biases are to, to argument.

So it'd be, it also becomes a team, you know, becomes something that defines you. You know, a lot of people are defined by their ideas, especially when it comes to their religion or their politics. You know, they're defined by them to the point where they, like, act within certain parameters because they think that's what you're supposed to do if you're on this team. Right. People like that for some. I mean, it's a weird, creepy desire that we have to become part of a team and defend that team.

And I think that happens when it gets into religious arguments. It's like you're not just attacking an idea that someone planted in their head. You're attacking how they define themselves. Yeah, yeah. It is. It's people's extended identity. Yeah, I'm a Windows user. Yeah, yeah. It's like It's people's extended identity. Yeah, I'm a Windows user. Yeah, yeah. It's like I'm a Christian, I'm a Catholic, and it becomes

you know, it really becomes a big part of how they view, and if you want to take that away from them, it's like, you know. Yeah, so you can see that when you're having the discussion, it's especially obvious in a debate format, because basically nobody has any hope that either side is going to change their mind in the context of the debate.

I mean, they've come there to represent their views, and they've got so much invested in doing that as well as they can that even if their mind was changed, they're not going to admit it. So it's not really an honest discussion. changed, they're not going to admit it. So it's not really an honest discussion. But when you are having an honest discussion, let's say, you know, one-on-one with somebody of deep conviction about faith, you can see the kind of the emotional hijacking of the conversation on their side very quickly. It's like, it's basically like debating whether their wife is attractive or something. I mean, it's just like it goes to something at the core and it's no longer about the ideas or evidence or, or, um, and so that is, it's one skill which, uh, admittedly I, I don't have, uh, such a firm grasp on, but one skill to acquire just as a person is to figure out how to have these conversations where you're, where you're,

you're being as rational and, and intellectually honest as possible, but you're actually making the right jujitsu moves around people's emotional response because it's just... Well, you do it with comedy. Well, yeah. That's what's brilliant about comedy. Yeah. You do it with comedy.

Well, yeah. I've seen you do it. You compared Elvis being alive and knowing that Elvis is alive, feeling that he's alive. It was really very funny how you did it. It was the perfect way to do it because you did it very politely. There was no name calling. You didn't get all shouty. Yeah, yeah.

But that is what is brilliant about pure comedy. if you make someone laugh at themselves or at the, or, or the idea that, that they would otherwise defend, um, you know, you've, that, that actually is a visible sign that you have, you have made contact, you know,

because it's, and, and you don't get, you don't get that when you, when you're playing it totally straight. And so the comedy is very powerful. Yeah. And also,

obviously you're restricted in the language that you can use in these things. Right. It's, um, it is, uh, a fascinating sort also, obviously, you're restricted in the language that you can use in these things. Right, right. It is a fascinating sort of an exchange. It's fascinating to watch the psychological wheels spin, you know, when people really get behind an idea, whether it's religion or whatever the fuck it is, when they really get behind it to the point where, you know, they're not budging at all. They're not thinking at all. They're attached and married to it yeah it's very dangerous right i mean isn't it oh well yeah insofar as someone really believes something and the beliefs have

any point of contact with behavior and the rest of physical reality i think it's it's it's the most consequential thing i think what people believe believe is that is the lever that moves most things in our world. It's politics. It's public policy. It's the laws we write and the laws we choose to truly defend. They're all just ideas that have a certain number of subscribers. a certain number of subscribers. Is it possible that religion in its form is useful for some people because they're just, whether it's psychologically they need some scaffolding, whether it's, you know, to use

it as a tool, not to use it to control anyone, but to use it as like a personal growth tool. Do you ever look at it like that? Well, insofar as it can be taken out of the belief space. So there's the doctrinal belief-based part of religion, which is where people are making claims about reality on bad evidence. And that's just a problem. I mean, so far as you're pretending to be certain about something you shouldn't be certain about and then teaching your kids to do that, that's just a problem for our conversation with one another as human beings. There's all this other stuff that people are attached to

that isn't inherently problematic. So they like the music, they like the buildings, they like the style, they like the artwork, they like to think about certain historic figures who they have this sort of emotional bonding with. They love the stories about Jesus in the New Testament. And all of that is – some of that could be intrinsically good. I mean, if you get the right – you get beautiful buildings and beautiful music and a reason to come together and holidays. And so I think we actually want something very much like that in secular culture. And we, and we, I think are suffering from the fact that we don't have an obvious alternative, a secular, reasonable, reasonable alternative

to that, that we can just point religious people to and say, you know, how come you're not doing that? You know, this, This has everything you want without the bullshit. That's very important. And if someone tried to form some sort of a secular group like that, it would quickly devolve into being a cult, most likely. Yeah, depending on... It would become someone trying to fuck everybody's wife. Right.

Well, if you had someone at the top, well, that comes when someone's at the top who has the eternal wisdom and is imparting it to you. And part of that process of dispensation is to fuck your wife. There's actually a story I think I had told in EndNote, the end of faith. I knew some guys who brought out a guru from India who they just thought was just the quite literally the Messiah who's he was a sort of kind of naked yogi I mean yogi who just wore this little you know little almost like a speedo yeah like and long jetta you know long dreadlocks and he's kind of this kind of gorgeous 25 year old the

Indian sadhu who was silent so he wouldn't you never speak so the only wisdom is very kind of low bandwidth teaching. The only wisdom you're going to get from him is what he could write out on like an 8x10 chalkboard. So he'd write these, you know, just gnomic little sentences in response to your questions. And he was a really good drummer. So he would lead these kirtans, these devotional chanting sessions where he would drum and people would get quite out of their minds and happy. And so they were just worshiping this guy.

They brought him out. And at a certain point, he, I don't know how he must have communicated this on his chalkboard, he said he needed to start sleeping with the various, you know, as luck would have it, the most beautiful wives of his devotees. And so he was doing that. But the breaking point came when the one guy who was his host, whose wife was sleeping with him, gave him Haagen-Dazs. The sadhu wanted to eat Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream with cashews for breakfast. So that was like someone gave him Haagen-Dazs and it blew his mind.

And so he needed this for breakfast. So this guy was walking through the, you know, like the Ralph's freezer aisle in the morning getting a resupply of vanilla ice cream. And that was the moment. That was the final straw where he realized okay this guy is is is just just that was it we're just we're just this guy's tool

and they just sent him back to india you know he's like put the ice cream back on the shelf that's hilarious pack your bags yeah yeah no it wasn't everybody's wife it wasn't the wife it was the it was the haagen-dazs that's ridiculous so what did the haagen-dazs just represent something so silly that it couldn't be argued? It was just too obviously carnal. You know, like there's no tantra. You might be doing tantra with my wife, but you're not doing tantra with the Haagen-Dazs for breakfast. It's obviously carnal.

Ice cream being carnal, that's very funny. Yeah, man. I mean, I think it's just the primate instinct when any man is in any position where he's got ultimate power over a group of people. It's a terrible idea. Yeah. That's why everybody's afraid of what's going on right now in terms of, you know, government and new laws that are being passed every day. It gets kind of spooky.

It's like, how much control do you really need over people? I understand that, you know, we're in troublesome times. I understand that we're at war, but how much control does the government really deserve over people? Do we really need to be in the situation we're in right now? Well, I'm for the most part I'm kind of a libertarian on this

subject. I get a lot of flack from libertarians based on the 5% where I depart from classic libertarianism. Like national defense authorization. Well, I just think the principle is that peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone. If you're not harming other people and you're not stealing from them,

and you're honoring your contracts, we can define what all that means. But if you are not infringing on other people's happiness, stealing from them. You're honoring your contracts. We can define what all that means. But if you are not infringing on other people's happiness, then you should have the right to be left alone. And what that means is we as a society shouldn't want the police to kick in the door of a peaceful, honest person to stop him from doing from whatever it is he's doing, smoking pot or whatever victimless crime is currently illegal. And if you draw the line there, I think you get a very sane response or a very sane idea of the limits of state power. And it's, yeah, it's all about mitigating harm and keeping people safe. Now, obviously, there's a tradeoff between freedom and risk.

So there's a tension between, let's say, the right to privacy and finding actual terrorists. So it's like if we wanted to maximize, we're going to find everyone who's a terrorist, well, then we would just, there'd be no such thing as privacy and the government could read all our email and look in our windows, et cetera. So there's a tension there and we have to keep finding the sweet spot.

But it's a tension that everyone should recognize. So do you think that these new laws that are being passed like the NDAA So do you think that these new laws that are being passed, like the NDAA, do you think that that's the idea is that as the population increases, is crime going to keep up or pick up to a point where they're going to need something like this? I mean, when you think of someone being able to detain people without warrants and not even have to inform their family, that could be an American citizen. I mean, at what point in time would that be effective you know yeah I don't see and again this is not really my area to have a very strong opinion so uh you know I would be

open to any counter argument on this but I've never seen the the um the wisdom or necessity of infringing on our existing laws to fight the war on terror. So the idea that the people at Guantanamo, I understand that different things apply on a battlefield and in a crime-fighting scenario in the States, but why people don't have the right to counsel or the right to see the evidence against them? I just, it seems like it's crazy if they're guilty, you know, let, let the truth shine on the, on the data. Well, what always hurt is that we were always, you know, growing up, there was always a problem with Russia and there was always this idea that

we could go to war with Russia, but there was a really strong belief amongst people that we were the good guys, that we did all good guy stuff only, that America was making sure the rest of the world didn't start speaking German or Japanese or any crazy. It doesn't feel like that anymore. Now it seems like as the age of information has gotten us to this 2012 date, like where we're at right now, it's so easy to get information. People are just so much more cynical about their intentions.

So if you see laws like this, like what's the motivation to crack down more on civil liberties? Is it just to make it easier for them? I mean, is it to create bigger government? I mean, what is the motivation for that? bigger government? What is the motivation for that? Well, it is fear and some perception of the necessity of taking the friction out of the system, the system that would keep us safe or respond

to an attack or detect an attack. And it's understandable. When you think about what the president's daily briefing must look like, it's got to be absolutely terrifying. And the reality of the prospect of nuclear terrorism, once you actually just put those goggles on and say, yes, nuclear nonproliferation is more or less a lost cause. The technology is spreading. the material is spreading. You've got 30,000 out of work scientists in the former Soviet Union

who are not taken care of, who have every economic incentive to not be entirely ethical. So if you feel, as many people do, that it's just a matter of time that a nuke in some form gets into the hands of terrorists and we have a massively porous border. The joke is if you want to get nukes into the U.S., you just hide it in a bale of marijuana. I mean, it's like we can't fight the war on drugs. So the idea that we can keep everything out is pretty much a pipe dream. So when you start thinking about the idea of a nuke going off in a major American city and forget

about the loss of life, just what would that do to the world economy? It's easy to see how the paranoia ramps up. So I don't, it's a hard, these are obviously hard calls to make for anyone. And you're going to look, just imagine the day after an act of terrorism, orders of magnitude bigger than September 11th, to have to talk about the reasons why we didn't do all these things that we could have done to keep us safe. So I'm very much, I mean, I share your concerns about infringing on civil liberties, but it's just, it's scary. The way you look at it, it's like, it's scarier on the other side. It's scary, the threat is scarier.

I think the threat of nuclear terrorism is quite real, and anyone who thinks that it's not or that's just fear mongering I just think it's not reading the books or papers of experts whose job it is to actually worry about this. It's just not a it's a real problem. So the question is in the face of that, what do you do? And I'm as annoyed as... The thing you don't do is force everyone to take their shoes off in airports until the end of time.

I mean, we're so inefficient in how we... Filter. We filter. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a big problem. It's a problem I actually don't know that much about. I mean, my file on what we should do is pretty thin, but it's pretty clear that every time I'm in an airport and I see some old Norwegian lady who obviously is not a terrorist

submitting to the same search as somebody who looks like Osama bin Laden, it seems like a misallocation of attentional resources. Yeah, it seems ridiculous. Yeah. It's just the idea behind it. And you know what else freaks me out is all the fucking radiation. How much radiation are those big body scanners? Is that something to be concerned about?

I don't know. But I would be concerned that the manufacturers are not entirely candid about or even cognizant of the health effects of them. So I don't know. I mean, I haven't seen the data on them. But, yeah, you want to minimize the amount of x-rays you get. But every time you go on a plane, you're getting dosed. So it's not – I don't know how it compares to the actual plane flight.

How much time a day do you think about nuclear terrorism? Because if I was as convinced as you are – No, it's not even every day. I put it out of my mind like anyone else. Yeah. Well, no, it's just – it's, the truth is, I believe, if you ask me rationally how big a risk do I think it is, I think it's a big risk.

It's not a one in a hundred risk. I think it's, you know. 50-50? Well, that's what, you know, experts like Graham Allison think in this next decade. He wrote his book about, I wrote his book about five years ago, but he thought like next 10 or 20 year period, the chance of a nuke going off in a major American city was like 50-50,

not one in a hundred. And no one really criticized him for that. A panel of experts, I think, came up with 30%, right? So it's, but again, you're not, you're not hearing the people say, no, it's one in a thousand. Yeah, 30% is terrifying. It's terrifying. And, and yet I don't feel that I have, I don't really live with that piece of software humming on the hard drive very much. I haven't integrated that into my sense of daily risk. So it's not entirely, I haven't responded entirely rationally to that information. Well, with all the different books that you've written about religion

and all the different debates that you've gotten into with people about it, I mean, you can't have a rosy view of how this is going to turn out. Do you? Do you think it's possible that the human race can pull out of this crazy dilemma we're in right now and move to the next level? Yeah. For sure? Well, I just don't. The truth is I actually don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism very much. I think by default I'm slightly pessimistic.

But you've got to live life. And we all are just sort of trying to find our way toward the high points of well-being. And I think culture can change quickly. I think culture can change quickly. It's easy to deny how risky our situation is, and I think that we shouldn't do that. But it's also easy to overlook how quickly we can get our act together. And so when you look at just how, I mean, the example for me is the change in views of race in the United States. I mean, when you roll back the clock even 70 years, there was just the level of racism in this country was just unrecognizable. It's not that racism isn't still a problem, but people were being lynched. You know, and there would, you know, senators would come out and get their photo taken in front of the dangling body.

I mean, it was just insanity. It's amazing when you think of how little time has passed since then and now. That is a very good point. Racism probably is the one thing that we've made the biggest amount of progress. Yeah. Yeah, as far as culturally, yeah. And it's undeniable progress. And it's progress of a sort that it's very hard to picture what would cause us to roll that back. I mean, it feels like those are gains, just gains in terms of...

Understanding. Yeah, that we can't lose. I don't think we've fully felt the impact of the Internet on culture either, because the first couple generations who grew up exclusively with full access to information like that they haven't really reached adulthood yet yeah and once you know once these kids that grew up with the internet their entire life and constantly having access to new ideas that aren't you know not regional people that they have to talk to people in their neighborhood people in their state but instead being able to talk to people all over the world and get watch a lot of your shit online, watch a lot of different lectures

online. I mean, that kind of, there was nothing like that when we were kids. The impact of that generation, I think that's going to be pretty substantial. When the kids now, I think that's going to be the next big leap of cultural evolution, the internet kids, when they become adults and start running shit. I think it's just the attitude online, does not mirror the attitude that that's expressed in in laws and the ideas that people have about about uh about our society yeah yeah i i'm a little worried i think it it goes i can go either way there i think the Internet enables two very different and antagonistic processes.

On the one hand, it allows you to cancel bad ideas very quickly. It's very hard to lie about yourself or about anything given access to information. So that's very good. And it connects people, and people can see how other people live and all of that breaks down barriers between people but it also amplifies certain voices in a way that never would have happened before and they're just terrible voices

so for instance global jihad the phenomenon of exporting Al-Qaeda style Islam to the rest of the world more or or less without friction, is entirely an Internet phenomenon. It's very hard to see that happening the way it has in the last 10 years without the Internet. with his crazy idea can create a little subculture on the internet and you have this walled garden where people can just talk endlessly in a very self-confirming way whether it's whether it's certain conspiracy theories or or just you know racist right you know racist subgroups whatever and that you just you just get in there and you never get out and and you find enough people who are echoing back your bad ideas that you and you never the other problem is you never meet these people yeah and then and then

also the the the the the role of anonymity online i think is it's pretty destructive i mean if you have ever read a youtube comment thread which i'm sure you have it's just the most poisonous it's amazing yeah it's amazing it's uh if you ran into people like that in real life you'd want to have a sword yeah you'd want to just be hacking through them everywhere you went yeah i don't know i i i see your point makes makes a big uh the the anonymity makes a big difference and you know the having a lack of any any sort of repercussions for shitty behavior you know that's not natural for. That's not natural for humans. It's not natural for humans to be able to affect each other with ideas,

without social cues, without feeling the emotions of someone whose feelings you're hurting. To be able to do it like this is just so cunty is what it is. And it's not even just internet comment threads or even anonymity. I find it with email. It's like everyone's, this is now trivial to point out, but everyone has sent the email that they shouldn't have sent and watched this, even a very good relationship,

unravel based on the fact that there's, you're not being modulated by facial cues when you're saying, when you're dropping these bombs on your friend or your brother or whatever and it just it's just you know it escalates on the other hand it's a good way to tell someone they're fucking yes well i happen to actually to get all the information in one place yeah be in a room with them and you know have them argue with you about it you know in that sense right yeah so when when you look at the possibility of nuclear terrorism and uh you know you're you're a fairly young guy you know and you look at all this this insanity and chaos in the world what way do you think is going to be the way out of this is it a technological solution

i mean what's what's going to elevate people or make people's ideas evolve to the point where they realize that, you know, these ideas are completely ridiculous. Nuclear war is absolutely ridiculous. It can't even be on the table. It can't be an option for anyone in the world. What's going to get us to that? Well, that's a big question.

I think one piece of it is, so actually this connects back with something you said, this idea that we are the good guys and that our enemies aren't. There's not actually moral parity between the two sides in these conflicts. I think that's still true. You know, Guantanamo Bay can make it as bad as you want it. It's still true that we're the good guys in this particular conflict. And now, I wish we were better than we are. And there's obviously some bad guys on our

side in any given moment. But I think the one thing we have to get past is this, the kind of moral relativism that you tend to hear from the left. And I'm very much on the left in almost every respect. But this disempowering idea that we, so for instance, to talk about nuclear bombs, you know, we should, what gives us the right to have nuclear bombs if, you know, if we are going to have them, Iran should have them. You know, we should, what gives us the right to have nuclear bombs? You know, if we are going to have them, Iran should have them. You know, we have no argument to keep Iran nuclear free if we keep bombs ourselves. Well, we're very different from Iran at this moment. We're not, you know, our president doesn't get in front of the microphone and say that he's going to wipe out and turn a country into a lake of fire.

And he's not waiting for the Messiah to come back and rapture everybody. Now, if we had a sufficiently crazy president, well, then all of a sudden we would have a similar liability. But we're not prone to use nuclear bombs in a flagrantly crazy, apocalyptic way. And from everything Iran says, they certainly seem capable of being just as crazy as we could fear. And so that's a difference that we have to just acknowledge. And so it matters who gets the bombs. And if people who are quite zealous to die, people who are literally happy to set off the bomb in their laps just for the pleasure of setting it off, that's a very different kind of mind to be engaged with. And it raises the stakes.

These people are not rational. And it raises the stakes. These people are not rational. I'm not saying the entire Muslim world fits this description, but there are people who are not rational actors based on their ideology. I mean, they want to get to paradise. They think you win if you blow the place up at the right moment. And the moment you take on board that certain people actually believe that, then you have to play a different game with respect to the risk that they pose.

So what we should do, I think we need to, one, acknowledge that there are very different moments of tension in this world. Those where we're dealing with rational actors and those where we're dealing with either completely irrational actors or actors where they have an ideology that's motivating them to do things that should be unthinkable. Well, I completely agree with you that we have to be aware of religious zealots and we have to be aware of crazy people willing to blow themselves up, but you've got to wonder why they're mad at us in the first place. And I agree that for the most part, I mean, I think our idea still sort of holds that we're the good guy in comparison to the rest of the world.

Does that mean you have to be a certain amount of evil just to keep up, you know, just to compete? I mean, is that what's fucked up with our foreign policy? Is that why we go into places like Iraq with false information about weapons of mass destruction where there's a clear motivation to get in there? Well, I think Iraq, I'm not going to defend Iraq. That, I think, was a stupid war to fight. But that's... But going into Afghanistan...

But that just ended, you know what I'm saying? But look at Afghanistan as the clearer case because we really, I think, had to go in after September 11th. So you think we had to go in to control al-Qaeda? Well, it was rational to go in and try to kill Osama bin Laden and the rest of the people who brought us September 11th. And September 11th, to some degree, was a price paid for never having dealt with these people in the first place. I mean, when you listen to the chatter on their side about how we were a paper tiger,

that they could blow up the coal, they could blow up embassies in Kenya, we got bombed in Lebanon and we just left. I mean, so we were scared of conflict after Vietnam. And that was noticeable to everyone on their side. And so to some degree, this problem was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So you think it's possible September 11th happened because we didn't invade Iraq earlier, because we didn't go into Afghanistan earlier? Well, no, we didn't deal with the threat of jihadi terrorism earlier.

Weren't they upset in the first place because we have troops on their land? Well, you've got to be precise about exactly why that's offensive. When you look at why Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda were upset, it was not because it was not a nationalistic concern of, you know, we're proud Saudis and our... It was holy land, right? This was a theological grievance. I mean, they were, Osama bin Laden was already out of sorts with the Saudi government at that point, and he's... Osama and anyone else enamored of this whole notion of global jihad want a global caliphate. I mean, this is the idea that we're living in a perverse time where Islam has been derogated and subjugated and has not yet triumphed.

And it has a mandate to triumph in this world. and it has a mandate to triumph in this world. And so if you really believe that, if you believe that you have to fight to spread the true faith for the glory of God in this life and win the game, you know, Genghis Khan style, or more relevantly, Muhammad style in this life, that dictates a certain kind of grandiosity and arrogance and expansionism.

And people like Osama bin Laden really believe that. And he was free to live a very different life than he lived. He didn't have to spend his time in caves scheming to defeat the great Satan. He could have just been chilling in Paris. I mean, he had a lot of money and a lot of opportunity. Do you buy the official story, how they killed him and threw him in the ocean?

I haven't thought about what might not be true in it, but it seemed, I basically, I buy the official story that we went in and killed him and what happened to his body, or why, I'm not sure. I think we didn't... I think it would be amazing if he was dead a long time ago and they just concocted a crazy hero rescue story,

Jessica Lynch story. No, no. I think that would be... I think the... No, because there would have been so many other... If you were going to fake something like that First of all, it's just so hard to fake anything We couldn't fake Jessica Lynch

You know, it's like People's, this is what's wrong with most Why fake it with helicopters, right? Why do it like that? And it's, there's just too These things Operations like that go wrong Spectacularly, and everyone knows about it

And they go right sometimes and it's very difficult to fake it the Pakistanis aren't acting like we faked it you know they're just pissed that we actually successfully got in there SEAL Team 6 style and got out so but the problem with any

conspiracy of that sort and especially a bigger one like a 9-11 truth style conspiracy is that sort, and especially a bigger one like a 9-11 truth-style conspiracy, is that it just takes so much perfect collaboration to bring it off. And we know that people are so bad at that. We know that interests don't align so perfectly. We know that there's always somebody who just wants to sell their story to a tabloid, or feels guilty about the part they played.

Most likely. They're getting divorced, and they just can't stop talking. And Bill Clinton couldn't keep a semen-stained dress off of the news. It's like that's the simplest thing. He's just like the president of the United States with a terrified intern, and this is going to wreck his presidency. And he still couldn't keep the dress a secret. Well, he couldn't keep that dress,

but how many freaks do you think he banged while he was president? That guy was just whipping out his dick left and right. What if it was thousands? I think there easily could have been. That's probably why he doesn't talk about it. Once you're a freak, you're a freak. And when you're a freak of the highest order where you want to be the king of the world

and you're whipping your dick out in meetings, he would meet with women and just whip his dick out right run out of the room screaming yeah that guy did that shit a lot yeah but he couldn't but but again we happen to know about that we know about one no we know they did september 11th every other month yeah but you read um well they know he did get a few girls he got mad at him hitch wrote a great book um no one left to lie to the triangulations of william jeff Clinton. Really? He just took him down hard. You say Hitch, Christopher Hitchens. Yeah, for about short books, like 150 pages.

Really? Brutal. And I don't, you know, I just, it's, you'll never quite think about Clinton the same way. I mean, it just puts a fine point on everything you just said. And it's, yeah, it's pretty brutal. He has a tinge of ego that when he talks talks it always makes me wonder what he's really like you know when i'll say thing you know they have these big political speeches they didn't do this we did this when we the democrat we did this and we did that and you know sort of bragging about stuff it's like it's very unleader like

at this stage of the the game right when you go and look into his past dealings, like I read The Strange Death of Vince Foster. That's a creepy goddamn book. I'd like to go back and reread that. He's a guy who was somehow involved in that crazy real estate deal that they were with and they found him. He shot himself but there was no blood at the scene

so it was clear that his body had been moved. Yeah, see that's the kind of, again, I'm not saying no one has ever murdered or no one ever conspires. But it's just so easy to manufacture details like that that are then impossible to debunk. Like, so how do we know there was no blood at the scene? How do we know that some 18-year-old didn't just say that on his website? And now that's the meme that gets spread. And now you have it in your head that there was no blood at the scene.

Right, true. that's the meme that gets spread. And now you have it in your head that there was no blood at the scene. But so much, so many conspiracies seem to be engineered by that kind of chatter. And then, but if you and I wanted to say, okay, we're going to devote the next month of our lives to just knocking down each

one of those points. How would we do it? I mean, so you're going to have to travel to find out whether there was blood at the scene and talk to the local cops. Even then you wouldn't know, right? You wouldn't know.

And it's just endless, endless sinkhole of energy, and yet it just takes a second to set that fire. And that's what actually happens in debate, too. There are certain people who you debate on the subject of religion who know that they can start many small fires. They're given eight minutes for their side, and they can set 30 small fires they're given eight minutes for their side and they can set 30 small fires half-truths, untruths, stuff that you really should respond to because it's just

false. But it takes you so long to put the fires out that you just can basically put half of them out and then you haven't said any of what you came to say and then they just come back and say well he didn't put out fires three four eight and nine and so he's clearly conceded my points and and it's just a it's a debating game right Dinesh D'Souza is an egregious uh uh example of that technique um it's just if you ever see

he did a debate with um Daniel Dennett uh which really didn't serve Dan very well because it was a technique that was quite effective. He's a fast talker, and he can just make a mess, and it would take you an hour and a half to clean it up. But I absolutely agree with you on everything you said. But do you think that there are real conspiracies? Do you think that every one of these things is bullshit? I mean, people clearly do conspire, right? Enron was clearly a conspiracy. It might have been a conspiracy that we entered into the Iraq war under false pretenses.

I mean, it might have been a conspiracy. The Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, that might have been a big conspiracy. Yeah, there's no question that from time to time, powerful people get into some star chamber and twirl their mustaches and conspire. I think that probably happens. But it's just hard to bring it off, and you should never...

Assume that's the case. And there's an adage on this subject that you never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence or something like that. It's just so obvious. The incompetence factor in many of these situations is so high and so obvious.

As it is almost everywhere. Especially in government. With September 11th, it's just the crushing variable. We were just not prepared to deal with that kind of problem. And anyone who thinks this was a conspiracy thinks that at least hundreds, probably thousands of people woke up one day, perfectly normal people, people in the FAA, people in the military, people in government, woke up perfect psychopaths willing without, with a clear conscience to murder 3,000 of their innocent neighbors. And not just, you know, not, this wasn't Tuskegee, this wasn't the poor and

disenfranchised and, you know, of a race that you're not fond of this is you know these are some of those powerful people in our society just just blown up one day and all of this was perfectly attuned to leave the person at the top of the conspiracy presumably George Bush sitting reading my pet goat when the whole thing kicked off. I mean, it's just ridiculous. And then as a pretext to go into Iraq, if, first of all, it would have been so much easier to think of a pretext to go into Iraq, but why make it look like that we got bombed or attacked by Saudis and Yemenis and Egyptians, which in fact is what it looks like.

So you're saying as a motivation to do it. Yeah, I mean, the general idea is— We did it on purpose so that we could go to war with Iraq. Yeah, if you're thinking about sort of the false flag operation thesis, that we wanted to go to Iraq and steal their oil, and we're perfectly evil and perfectly Machiavellian and could bring this whole thing off without any leaks to this day. Ten years hence, no one has come forward and said, this is the part I played in

and I feel terrible about it. And yet we botched it in these huge ways where we had to go to Afghanistan before Iraq and we really didn't want to go to Afghanistan. No one suggests we actually wanted to be running around Tora Bora fighting the Taliban. And we go to Iraq. That worked out well. I mean, the idea that that was the easiest way to get their oil is crazy. It would have been far cheaper to buy it.

But it makes no sense in the shape of it. Isn't the argument that we wanted to control Iraq? I mean, that we wanted to take over and control their oil, which we kind of do now, right? But we wanted, so if we just wanted to go into Iraq to create, let's buy the idea that people conspire and that actually certain people in our government are willing to run a false flag operation so that we can go into Iraq. Okay. What would you have done? a false flag operation so that we can go into Iraq.

What would you have done? You would have shot down one of our planes over Iraq, which we wouldn't even have needed that because Saddam was shooting in our planes. We had a no-fly zone in force for 10 years, and Saddam was, the war wasn't over as far as he was concerned. He just kept shooting at planes. He didn't hit any, so let him hit one. And then we would go in.

But killing 3,000 people in downtown Manhattan, people who are well-connected and sending the global economy into a tailspin, it just doesn't have the right shape of it. I completely agree with you that it would take way too many people to plan it out, most likely. And when I look at it, I just see someone's going to tell, there's just too many things that have to be coordinated. Too many people are going to start talking. I agree with you that it's much more likely incompetence. But

there was definitely a motivation to go into Iraq. They wanted to go into Iraq already. That's something they had been planning on even before September 11th, like looking for motivation. So it's possible, right, that this incompetent government allowed this attack to take place and then they capitalized on it. But what was their motivation to go to Iraq in the first place?

If they weren't going over there to try to control the oil, then why were they so desperate to go to Iraq? Because it was pretty clear that they wanted to. Well, I think, and again, to some degree I'm talking out of my depth here because I'm not really a policy guy, but the argument which was made publicly at the time by many so-called neocons is that Iraq was the perfect test case to create a vibrant democracy in the heart of the Arab world. I mean, this is a basically educated population. We completely underestimated the level of sectarianism

there. But again, that is easily ascribed to incompetence. I mean, we were sending in 23-year-old friends of Bush with no expertise at all just because they were the nephew of somebody who had donated to the campaign. And all of a sudden these people are in charge of some major piece of the machine of how to create a democracy in Iraq. I mean, the level of – to read any of those books about what we did in Iraq is to just, above everything else, just to come face to face with a shocking degree of incompetence. So we're the good guys, we're just incompetent. Well, I mean, look who he had in the Oval Office at that moment. I mean, you know, there's a lot of words come to mind when you think about Bush, and

competence is not one of them. Well, you know, Bush is a strange case, you know. I mean, obviously he's not the smartest guy in the world. But when you look at the policies that he put into place, it's really similar to what Obama's doing. It's not much difference at all. DAVID BATTS- Right.

I mean, I think there are crucial differences. But two important things. One is that Obama has inherited the world that Bush helped make. So Obama's got the hardest job on planet Earth at the moment. So you blame Bush for the whole Iraq mess, or his administration at least? Yeah, well, we didn't have to go into Iraq. And it was, we could have, arguably we had to go into Afghanistan. We could have—arguably, we had to go into Afghanistan.

I mean, I think our approach to fighting the war on terror is fundamentally ill-conceived. I don't see why we need to be fighting wars and taking credit for fighting wars. I mean, this should, from my point of view, be all covert, all just... Navy SEALs and stuff? Yeah, I mean, insofar as all the... Sneaky assassination type shit? There may be situations where that's not possible, but I don't see why we need to be... We should fight the war on terror as an international crime problem and that has occasional military solutions.

But from my point of view, people, you know, jihadis in al-Qaeda should just have been disappearing and no one takes credit for it. Why should we ever say we did it? You know, yes, we did it. And now there's a possible blowback to that. And, I mean, the reality is, you know, whenever you whenever you put navy seals on the ground and let them shoot they or or drop bombs from you know predator drones you're going to be killing some number of innocent people and that's terrible and the terrible truth is there's no alternative to that I mean we unless you're going to be a pacifist that you're going to run the risk of

killing innocent people when you have to fight certain conflicts. And so that's, I just don't see any... Do you ever look at it from their point of view? Do you ever look at it from, try to look at it from the Al-Qaeda's point of view, the Taliban's point of view, the point of view of someone who is watching this giant military machine coming in and raping their country's national resources

and stealing minerals and what's going on in Afghanistan. Think about Afghanistan for a moment. What is the point of view of a woman in a burqa in Afghanistan? Now, from my point of view, it's very likely, whether she knows it or not, there is a much better life she could be living. You know, the average life expectancy in Afghanistan for women is 44 years. It's got the highest, almost the highest maternal mortality and infant mortality in the world. It's, you know, most women are illiterate. It's just, it's a terrible life for women. So one of the real, when we think of having to leave Afghanistan, one of the real ethical problems,

from my point of view, is we're just abandoning them to the Taliban. We're abandoning the women to the Taliban. And if there was a way to actually help them, we would have a moral obligation to do it. The problem is it's so costly to do. It's so intrusive to do and so many people shoot at you or blow themselves up while you do it that it's completely impractical to do. So I think we have a real problem ethically to just abandon women to getting their noses cut off because they decided not to marry the octogenarian that their father sold them to. Well, you know, obviously I don't agree with any of that stuff or any of those social restrictions that they put on,

but do you really think that we should have troops overseas to try to reinforce our moral standards on this country that's a mess? I mean, should we really do that? I think we... Is that what we're doing, though? No, but I think we need... Well, we are attempting to do that, but it's just not doable. Do you really think that's our motivation, though?

To some degree. But what about the amount of money that they're pulling out of there? What about the amount of money that they're making just in minerals? Well, let me sidestep that for a second and just talk about what I think the end game is. The end game is to have a global civilization that actually works. And what would that look like? It would look like more or less what it looks like in any country. Now, whether you have a world government that achieves this or some

federation of states that works better than certainly than the UN, you need to have, you know, if girls were getting their noses cut off and being forced to live in burkas in Florida, it would be a crime problem. And we would send in police to force people to treat their daughters better or treat their wives better. And that's necessary and appropriate. It's just there's no mechanism that allows us to do that as a matter of international law.

And so we clearly have to get to a time where when you have a hostage crisis where an entire country is held hostage by some lunatic or a group of lunatics in the government, the matter of national sovereignty is not an issue. I mean, who cares about the national sovereignty of North Korea? That's a hostage situation. Well, that's a really interesting point because we negotiate with North Korea and we give them money and we're not even thinking about going over there. We give them money out of compassion to alleviate starvation. Why aren't we going over there? Because they have nukes.

Is that what it is? And they have so much artillery pointed at South Korea, and the distance is so small that nukes aside, it would just be a disaster. But again, that's an argument for not letting these failed states and deranged states get too strong. deranged states get too strong. We need a way to convince the entire civilized world of functional democracies to apply quasi-global pressure to any one of these regions, demanding that they get their act together.

pressure to any one of these regions demanding that they get their act together. And Afghanistan is definitely a place that, where it would be compassionate if we could come in, you know, if we could, if every, if Russia and China and everyone else could get on the same page with us and we could all agree, all right, the women of Afghanistan, we actually need to help you. So how are we going to do this? The first pass, any guy who's throwing battery acid in the face of little girls because they want to go to school, we're going to deal with that guy as the sociopath that he is.

And if it just so happens that there's a culture of those guys and they call themselves the Taliban, we're going to deal with the Taliban as a gang of sociopaths. But again, we tried it on our own, more or less on our own, and the results have been terrible. And the results have been terrible because of the, largely because of the role that religious thinking plays there. I mean, you know, you burn a Koran by accident and basically the war is almost over and well lost because everyone takes to the streets and begins killing people. You know, there's nothing more inflammatory than trespassing on their religious sensitivities. And, you know, if you accidentally bomb a wedding and kill 50 children, you don't get the response we recently got with, you know, this Quran incident. And so

it's just, it's not, we're not dealing with a culture that can have a sane discussion about the proper goals of human life and how to safeguard human happiness. So in your mind, we need to be the police of the world. We're the only ones who know what's right. We're the only ones who are going to enforce it. We're the good guys, and so we need to go over there. America, I guess? The military industrial complex that runs America?

I mean, what is it no it's who's we we is um well just just look at again take take one piece that you you agreed on are the gains we've made socially and culturally and morally around uh racism so we have we're at least seeing the daylight on the subject of race in this country. Now, so then we have the benefit of a kind of a running start ahead of South Africa, and we see they've got their apartheid thing going on, and we begin, it takes us a while, but we begin to apply pressure to them, you know, boycotting trade with South Africa or blocking trade. And that has an effect. Now, that's if you could get the entire world on the same page on each of these questions.

I mean, so the treatment of women is even a bigger variable than notions of race. Because here you're talking about fully half of the human population. So wherever they're treating women terribly, that's a, and systematically, not just by accident, but because there's some ideology that women can be treated terribly, that's a human rights problem

that every society that has a robust conception of human rights can figure out how to apply pressure to. Now, you know, stopping trade may not be enough. Uh, and, and then you, you, you have all of these other secondary effects of when you apply sanctions to a country, then women and everyone and kids and everyone else suffer. And so it's such a blunt instrument. We don't have good tools to deal with these problems. I could see it as a justification, one of many, as to why a part of the world was run by bad people with bad ideas. But I don't think that's the motivation to go there. I don't think that's the main motivation to go there. I just don't believe that the army would act that way,

that they would spend so much money to go somewhere to save some women. I don't buy it. Well, I'm not saying it's the only motivation, but it's... But it's one that you think is being a primary one. Well, again, I just would have to focus on any specific conflict we're talking about. But when you ask yourself why there are soldiers who have done multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and feel committed to the project and feel reasonably good about what they've done. Why do they feel that way?

Why don't they get up every morning feeling like they're completely wasting their life and taking massive risks for no reason at all? Well, you know, I'd have to interview each individual one to find out what their motivation was. But I look at Afghanistan as a giant money-making effort. I look at how much money they're making in minerals, and I don't think they send tanks to save women. I don't believe that.

It's not a money... It's the most... These two... Afghanistan and Iraq have been the most costly things we've... Sure. ... blundered, blunders we've made in... ... for the taxpayers and for the American people, but aren't huge military companies like, like,

uh, uh, Hal Burton and, and people that rebuild these places and people that, uh, contractors, there's a lot of money being spent, right?

Well, yeah, there, there are companies make money in times of war. Yeah. I mean, so the people who make bullets make money when they get to sell bullets. But in terms of the cost to our economy in general

and the cost in the lives of the men and women in our military serving over there, so everyone who, none of the soldiers are extracting wealth from the ground in Afghanistan or extracting oil. And yet, when you hear them talk about their experience,

what you don't hear is a litany of, we never should have done that. That was a complete waste of time. I can't believe that our government has done this. Wow, that's not true at all. I hear a lot of people online

that are soldiers, former soldiers, that have a lot of those stories. No, there's some of that. You can't say you never hear because you do. No, I'm not saying, but it's not all of what you hear. What you also hear is an experience of really trying to, you know, building schools or building infrastructure

and really trying to help a democracy grow in these places. Now, it is such a thankless job. And, I mean, again, don't mistake me for being optimistic or at all sanguine about what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it's been a disaster. But you think ultimately it's a good idea? No. Well, Iraq, no.

Afghanistan, I think it was absolutely essential that we do something. Now, clearly, we did it badly from day one, committing far too few troops and letting our proxies do it for us and do it badly, and Osama bin Laden got away. But you see it as a war of culture. You see it to get bad people out of control of a country, that they could potentially be dangerous to us. It was worth the preemptive strike. Well, again, let's just sort of talk about the big picture.

If you're a pacifist, you think we should never do anything like this. You never pull out a gun and start shooting or threaten to shoot because nothing is worth killing for. Now, I'm not a pacifist. I think if we all took a Gandhian response to these problems and just got on our Facebook page and made a lot of noise, that there are certain enemies we could have and do have who will just inherit the earth.

I mean, so the thugs will win in that case. Gandhi, you know, Gandhi's nonviolence worked against the British because the British were the British and they had enough of a conscience not to just kill everybody. It wouldn't have worked against Hitler. And Gandhi actually knew that. So if you're not going to be a pacifist, then the question is just when do you pull out the guns? And we can then have an intelligent discussion about whether it made any sense to pull out the guns vis-a-vis Iraq or Afghanistan. And then it's just a pragmatic question of when you do it and how it's best to do it.

So I can agree with that. I can agree that we need guns because they're bad people in the world. We need an army. We need a military because they're bad people in the world. But then when you look about our actions that define what our purpose is with this army, look at our two main define what our purpose is with this army. Look at our two main campaigns, Iraq and Afghanistan. You've admitted they're both complete fuck-ups and disasters. So if that's the case, how do you think the rest of the world would look at us?

Why wouldn't they be upset with us? It seems to me that these campaigns have done far more to hurt the way the rest of the world wants to treat us than anything else we could have ever done gone going to these places and blowing up buildings and killing human how many hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in iraq and how many people are dying every day in afghanistan do you think about the numbers that have been piled up just the actual raw statistics as as motivation for these people well i think it's think paradoxically it's had both effects. It has, because look at,

if we didn't go into certain situations, so it's like when Libya was kicking off, the resistance was desperate for us to come in, and we looked at the mealy-mouthed approach we took, just sort of letting our allies to take the lead. That looked a little bit like cowardice. And and we got a lot of grief for not actually being active enough to help help prop up the Libyan. Right. But that's a pretty extreme case.

You've got a guy who's been a dictator forever and the people literally are. But Saddam Hussein was the same case. But the people were not riding in the streets. Because he was a better dictator. I mean, it's like it was worse, arguably worse in Iraq. There were more reasons to go in. The people were, there was every expectation that the people, enough of the people were ready to be rid of Saddam that we could have been greeted as friends.

And yeah, it was a disaster uh because mainly because we underestimated the level of sectarian violence that was was going to begin the moment we took the lid off and um I mean again that's just just incompet. But it's not. So when you have Sunni Muslims who are going to blow up a Shia mosque. People didn't even know about that before they went in, did they? Well, a lot of people didn't. But we didn't even know the difference between Sunni and Shia. you had this you know bloopers of of our uh you know white house press conferences where where they're getting people's affiliation wrong and not even thinking they're interchangeable do you think that these debates that you've had with all these like fiercely religious people have they

given you more of a pessimistic thought or idea on how how we need to handle people in other parts of the world where their entire cultures are run by religion? I mean, do you lose a bit of hope for rational conversations to the point where you're like, you know what? You have to engage militarily. There's no other options. You're never going to get by with debate. You're never going to get by with rational thought. You're never going to get by with reason. You're never going to get by with rational thought. You're never going to get by with reason. You're talking about cultures that want to murder you for burning some pages accidentally. You're talking about culture that wants to murder you for drawing their guy.

Right, right. Yeah, well, I think it's not partitioned so easily by state, but I view it as kind of concentric circles. So, again, we're talking about Islam here for the moment. You have this sort of center of the bullseye of doctrinal, crazy, global jihadist Islam, where, yeah, I think, you know, Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like thinking, that's just a deal breaker. I mean, so we're at war with that subset of the Muslim world and they are it's not our idea that we're at war with them they're at war with us

they'd endlessly talk about it we're innocent we've done nothing we have done they are running a very different game in their heads it's not about land it's not about the Palestinians it's not about it is they're living they've got these 7th century

or 14th century goggles that they're looking at the world through. And, you know, if we if we pipe Baywatch over on the satellite dish, that's a an offense that they're willing to die for. I mean, it's just it's a very different game they're playing there. You've got to imagine what it's like to really believe in paradise. I mean, to really want to get there, to know that if you blow yourself up killing infidels, you're going to get there and you're going to get everyone you love there. There's just this velvet rope in front of paradise and you're going to walk right past because the angel's going to lift it up for you. And the way to get there is to be a jihadi. It's like being James Bond who's going to get 72 virgins in paradise.

And you have got no other problems in life you need to worry about. You don't have to worry about getting an education or getting a job or making it work in this world or building a civil society. You just have to play your side of the game right and die in the right circumstances. But how many of those are there? How many people are like that that we're talking about? Well, I think there are tens of thousands of people who went to training camps in Afghanistan. So again, concentric circles. So the center of the bullseye, let's say that's just half of a percent of the Muslim world.

So half a percent is a, you know, 1% of humanity is schizophrenic. So half a percent is a tiny segment of any population. Half a percent is a tiny segment of any population. There's no idea so crazy that only half a percent of Americans believe in it. You know, if you ask people. Flat Earth. Yeah, yeah. So you're going to get more than half a percent. But even half a percent.

What is that? It's like, you know, it's millions of, of, of people who, who are just the diehard of the diehard. Now, um, there's 1.4 billion Muslims. Um, so.

So you think it's possible that half a percent of them. Oh, no, I think, I think it's, I think it's, well, it's worse because,

so let's say, so let's say there's, there's potentially, let's say there's potentially a million jihadis, right? I think it's probably worse than that, but, but let's say. Yeah, but let's just say, wow, let's say there's potentially a million jihadis, right? I think it's probably worse than that. Really? Yeah.

Wow. But when you say just define it, you mean guys who are willing to become suicide bombers? Yes. More than a million? Well, I think that wouldn't be a crazy guess. of knowing apart from the fact that there's like in every Muslim country, it's 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, depending on the country, up to 70% who think suicide bombing is a good thing. Wow.

Right? So it's not. When you run the poll, which has been done by Pew and other organizations, and you start asking people, do you think suicide bombing in defense of Islam is ever justifiable? And yes, sometimes, rarely, and never are the possible responses. The number of yeses and sometimes gives you, if not a majority, a significant minority of every Muslim country. I mean, even in the UK, you would get something like 20, 25% of young Muslims thinking that it's justifiable. And you'd get that immediately after the suicide bombings in London.

These polls have been run. Do you want to live under Sharia law? You get like 30% in the UK among Muslims, 18 to 24. Now, so one question is, do people actually believe what they say they believe when you are taking a poll? And what does it actually mean to say yes to that? How does that inform your life?

So let's just dial it all the way down to half a percent. Okay? Everyone else is just bluffing. Half a percent is still what, with the spread of, of, of weapons of, of high yield, you know, whether it's, it's nuclear weapons or biological weapons, half a percent of any significant population, it can do a lot of damage. And so we just, it's something that, we have to win a war of ideas ultimately. And we have to discredit these ideas

so that the next generation doesn't find it so easy to believe these things. But how do they accept us? How do they accept anything, any real solution coming from us when they know what we did in Iraq, when they know what we did in Afghanistan, when they know what a fuckery

we've made out of the whole thing, when they know how much rampant corruption there is, when they know how much missing money there is? How do they ever look at this as anything other than a money grab? How do they ever look at it as like, oh, these are the Americans that are going to teach us how to live?

How could anybody accept that? Well, it's not. But when you look at again, it's just necessary. It doesn't matter how they accept it. We just have to do it anyway. When you're talking about the center of the bullseye, these people are truly unpersuadable. There was nothing we were going to do that was going to get Osama bin Laden to say, you know, I had you guys all wrong. We're friends now. And I mean, so I think a certain percentage of people are unpersuadable. And the force or the threat of force is the only game to play.

And then what we have to do is win a war of ideas around that first circle where they become marginalized, sufficiently marginalized, and not supported within their society. Arguably, that has happened to some degree even with how chaotic Afghanistan and Iraq look. Well, there's certainly been more penetration than there was like 50 or 60 years ago, but the majority of the population is still like really deep into their culture.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they have a weird setup. They only have one city. Kabul's the only real city, right? And Afghanistan is just filled with like tribes, right? Essentially. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't been there,

so I'm again speaking yeah i've only read third hand but a bunch of yeah um heard mccain talk about it where he i think believe one of his quotes was that it's run the same way as it was when alexander the great was around right and some of that tribalism isn't strictly a religious problem it's a i mean it says tribalism is a problem and religious tribalism is a problem. Any ideology that fundamentally divides one group from another and prevents them from recognizing their common humanity is a problem. And so not all of that's religious. Some of it's racist, some of it's but the role that religion plays in confounding this, our best intentions, so even if we only had our best intentions and they were not mingled with our worst intentions,

even if it was not about, even if we would just go into Rwanda to help people, even though they don't have oil and we've got no national security interest, but they take out the machetes and start killing their neighbors, and we're going to put our lives on the line to just stop the violence. The problem is there's no elegant way to do it. You wind up killing innocent people. You can't commit enough resources to build a civil society. It takes too long to teach people what they should want.

It's just a hard problem. So you sort of reconcile our military actions. You reconcile the corruption, all the fuck-ups. You say all the fuck-ups. They are what they are, and there's nothing we can do about them now. But what's important is we keep these crazy people from developing nuclear bombs and from attacking us because the very real possibility of nuclear terrorism to you is far more important than whatever mistakes or corruption that we've put out as a country

that have gotten these people to have this sort of a perception of us. I think, well, I can't sign on to all of that because I think our screw-ups have been huge. And I think we have a huge moral debt to all the people we have accidentally blown up. I mean, obviously collateral damage is a huge problem. accidentally blown up. I mean, obviously collateral damage is a huge problem. And I think we are, and it's been a problem in every war we've ever fought.

I mean, one of the things we've now, which is an advantage on the one hand, but also a disadvantage, is that there's so much more transparency. We know so much more about the bad stuff we do, whether inadvertent or not, that we didn't know this in World War II. We're bombing Dresden and incinerating hundreds of thousands of people, innocent bystanders for the most part,

non-military targets. Arguably, we should never have done that. But we arguably couldn't do that now, given how much given given what the images would do to us on the nightly news. And so and I think that's all to the good. I think we should I think we should understand the cost of war more than we do. And we should understand how horrible collateral damage is more than we do. How do you feel about WikiLeaks? collateral damage is more than we do.

How do you feel about WikiLeaks? Well, I think Assange is just, he's a creepy bastard. So it's hard to, I mean, I like transparency. I think the journalistic aspect of it to some degree was legitimate. But I think it's also also if you're going to release certain secrets shouldn't be released certain secrets are there because they're keeping people safe and to release those secrets uh irresponsibly is to put people uh in harm's way and so it so it was a it's a very mixed thing how did you feel about the initial video that he released collateral murder the one that showed the guys in the helicopters shooting the people on the ground.

And a car full of children and them saying, well, they shouldn't have brought their kids. Right, right. horrible but but maybe inevitable is that we're just not wired to kind of understand the consequences of our actions once we can fight war remotely you know it's just I mean that you have if we were just fighting every it was all just you know bayonets there's a there's the kind of inescapability of the horror of war but the moment you can fly something, you're sitting in your office park outside of Las Vegas, and you're flying a Predator drone 13,000 miles away. I'm not suggesting those guys don't have a hard time sleeping at night, some of them,

but it's a very different kind of violence. sleeping at night, some of them, but it's a very different kind of violence. And one of the scariest things about technology is that it uncouples us from our emotions, from the reality of the consequences of our actions, so that the most harmful things aren't actually the most disturbing things. You know, so if you, this is an example actually I used in I think the end of faith. If you hear that your grandfather fought in World War II and he dropped bombs. He was a bomber pilot and he dropped bombs over Dresden. That's one kind of level of abstraction of his actions that doesn't really disturb you

about him. And it needn't have disturbed him and he's at 30,000 feet dropping bombs not really getting what he's doing but if you hear granddad killed a woman and her kids with a shovel all of a sudden he's the scariest guy I've ever heard of and probably he's couldn't sleep for the rest of his life either because it takes a very different kind of person to to do that but the guy dropping bombs killed far many more women and children than the guy with the shovel and and and so so that that um it's fascinating isn't it and then now we're moving into drones yeah and so it was even more so we need the the burden is to figure out how to have an appropriate emotional response to reality and to be guided by. It's not to say that our emotions are always the perfect guide.

I mean, there may be ways in which we are wired to have a strong response to something that we should just get over, and we're not wired to have an appropriately emotional response to something that really is a massive danger. And so our perception of risk and our perception of harm is not what it needs to be for us to make intelligent decisions and compassionate decisions in these kinds of conflicts. Did you agree with the video being released? Did you think it was a bad idea?

For morale, for the cause? Well, it's hard to separate that from everything else that has happened. As far as WikiLeaks, you mean? Yeah, yeah. So I think WikiLeaks, the truth is I don't even know the ultimate consequences of WikiLeaks. It would just matter what the consequences actually are. But isn't transparency good?

Yeah, but... Up to a certain point. But do I think Obama should be forced at his next press conference to just share his White House briefing with the world? No. I mean, I think he... There are certain things that I understand that he and people like him need to know that I don't need to know.

And if I knew and blogged about it, I would be harming our national security. So, yeah, no, I'm not for the just unlimited distribution of secrets. Yeah, yeah. So you allow them to have certain secrets just for national security? Well, it's just clearly we need that. Yeah, absolutely. We would be paralyzed. I agree with that 100%.

Sure, absolutely, right? If there's bad guys. But to what level? Like at what point? You know, that's where it's weird. How do you make the distinction? How do you decide that they shouldn't be able to have certain secrets that may in fact be damaging to American civilians or

we might disagree with it. It might change the way we feel about a president or our policy. It's probably not that complicated, though. I don't think so. No, it's probably pretty basic. It's probably like, all right, we should definitely not tell them about where nuclear warheads throughout the United States are located everywhere. Yeah, you would think so.

But I think it's a lot more complicated than that. overheads throughout the United States are located everywhere. Yeah, you would think so, but I think it's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, well, again, there are tradeoffs between some of these things where it's just hard to really be satisfied that you've hit the right answer because it's the—so, for instance, going through security in the airport, there's this issue of fairness, you know, and there's this issue of intelligent use of attentional resources. So the fairness would say, yes, frisk the 75-year-old woman

who looks like she just got out of her evangelical church just as much as you frisk the guy who just prayed on his knees to Mecca before passing through security. It's only fair to be blind to those otherwise salient differences between them. But it's stupid, too, when you know that the person who's going to blow himself up on the plane is a jihadi and not an ordinary-looking old woman. and not an ordinary-looking old woman. So, again, what are the consequences of being starkly unfair, where you just profile nakedly and say, yes, without apology, we profile. If you're Muslim, we are going to subject you to a harrowing search at the airport because we're worried about your brothers.

We have to find a balance. We're struggling to find a balance between those two things. And I think we're, in the current environment, I think we're wise to err on the side of being fair and I think you would want us to err in that direction, to be fair and to be transparent and to be... But that's what's so scary about something like nuclear terrorism. One thing has to happen, and all of a sudden we'll all be desperate

for a level of security that will radically transform our lives. And it'll be, again, it could be completely out of scale with the actual damage. So if a nuke went off in Los Angeles and killed 100,000 people, so a small nuke killed 100,000 people and rendered some area uninhabitable for a while, while that would be such a a rattling event that it we would all be demanding huge changes and we would be forfeiting our civil liberties happily with both hands as was clearly evident after 9-11 after 9-11 right but this would be orders of magnitude worse and yet it would be rational to say well listen you know 400,000 people say, well, listen, you know, 400,000 people died of heart disease last year. You know, no one is forfeiting their civil liberties or going nuts over that figure. We're talking about 100,000 people who, you know,

what is the real risk we're talking about? Well, there's a sudden death over a long, slow, self-administered death. Even if that would be, over a long, slow, self-administered death. Even if that would be... Even if we... I'm not saying that's the right way to look at it, but even if you could show a commensurate body count from some other source... Actually, Bill Maher once made this point,

where I think he was talking about Hurricane Katrina. He said, look at what happened with Hurricane Katrina and the billions of dollars in cost and a thousand lives lost. If a terrorist had done this, we would completely freak out as a nation because it's the weather. We basically can't get our act together and don't really worry about it. That difference in response is something we have to be cognizant of. And so one reason, one rational reason to want to protect against certain especially salient events like nuclear terrorism is because we are guaranteed to overreact in such a way that the consequences will be horrendous,

just economic consequences. That's a very good point. So your point is cut back on civil liberties so that we don't have to cut back on them in the future when the shit hits the fan. Well, to some degree that's an argument. You're not committed to it, but it's an argument. Yeah, but cut back on them. And again, I wouldn't phrase it in terms of cutting back on civil liberties,

Cut back on them, and again, I wouldn't phrase it in terms of cutting back on civil liberties, but it comes back to moments like airport security for me. It's like, how much security do I want when I get on an airplane? I want intelligence security, and I also want fairness, and I'm willing to put up with a certain level of inconvenience to know that basically this is being done sanely. Now, do I want huge inconvenience? Do I want to be bombarded with x-rays? Do I want to have to take my clothes off every time I get on a plane? No, but it's just, we have, as a society, there's something very corrosive about the signs that these efforts are ineffectual and not being done intelligently.

I mean, if we could all just see an airport security protocol that just looked right, you know, where it's just, you know, then I think everyone would understand why we had to do it. But it looks so wrong and it feels so wrong. And it doesn't feel like it's improving. It's just like they're figuring out the system better. And this is an easier way to do it. Less intrusive. There is no easier way to do it. And I'm not even putting myself. It's like, I'm not fine you know i don't actually look i don't think i look like i'm

al-qaeda but but i don't look i i'm not as benign a i mean i once saw a little girl when this when we first got the the the shoe bomber effect and we were all having to take off our shoes. I saw, you know, I saw a three-year-old girl in her, you know, whatever, whatever those, what are those black and white shoes that little girls wear are called? Jellies? Bugs? I don't know. There's some older school name.

Anyway, she was like holding up a line. She was being forced to take her shoes off. She was terrified. It was like her first flight, you know, and like the parents were being traumatized. And it was just the most insane misapplication of human resources. And meanwhile, that was a flight where I had accidentally taken a bag that I used to keep a gun in. And I went through security with a double handful of bullets, just inadvertently, right?

So I'm getting through with bullets, and they're looking at this girl like she's Al-Qaeda. Al Gore got frisked. Do you remember that? No. Yeah, Al Gore made a big deal out of it because he was flying commercial on one of these flights and he got frisked. I was like, what the fuck, man?

How ridiculous is that? That's a symbolic demonstration of fairness. Yeah, it is, I guess. At a certain point in time, though, you go, come on, you think the ex-president, the ex-vice president is going to become a suicide bomber? Is that what we're looking at here? Yeah, yeah. So it's that kind of thing that I think is corrosive. And the missteps and failures we've had at the level of foreign policy

and in fighting wars have been corrosive for the same reason. It's just the ineptitude and the unacknowledged and unanticipated costs. And it's all just, yeah, it is very hard to be idealistic or feel like anything is being done right. But again, think of just what Obama's got to deal with when he drinks his first cup of coffee in the morning. They're getting information from a world of intelligence which is

struggling to quantify certain risks and there is no question that there are people who are desperate to blow up whole cities in this country because not because they have said they have a long list of rational grievances

against our foreign policy but because they're fighting a cosmic war. And that's just something we have to absorb, as bizarre a fact as it is. So you think for most people it's almost impossible to sort of understand their mindset, to really put yourself into their shoes. It's virtually impossible to really have that kind of a crazed, deep belief. I don't find it actually, I feel like I can put myself in their shoes. If I read the Quran, and I read the Hadith,

and I read what people like Osama Bin Laden say about their intentions and why they're doing what they're doing, you watch a few suicide videos, you know, last testament videos of suicide bombers. You just have to imagine what it would be like if you really believed that this was the structure of the universe where this human life that we, that people like us really value is

just this irredeemable, fallen, really revolting circumstance of separation from God and it's just this anteroom to the better place that you get into if you live this way and die in the right way at the right time. And eternity awaits.

Eternity where all the good people get to be happy forever awaits. Now, why would you want to stick around here? I have to talk about this more, but I also have to pee. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my headphones down, and I'm going to ask you a question when we get back, though. How the fuck does anything get fixed? How do we fix this? If you were the grand social engineer of the universe, think about that.

I will follow you. So now what do we do while you pee? Brian will talk to you. Okay. Hey, how's it going? Okay. Sorry, I'm just readjusting everything. So is this something that you fell into?

Did you think like this growing up? Or did you have somebody that inspired your beliefs and the way that you think? And I guess your stance on everything? Or have you always been interested in it? that you think and like your, your, I guess your stance on everything, you know, or did you, have you always been interested in it or? Well, I've always been, I've been interested in,

um, religious experience. Right. I mean, why, just what it means for people personally and just what the possibilities are. As a, as a teenager,

I just, you know, I was as interested in just what are the limits of reality as anyone else. And so to some degree, my research there has been scientific and now increasingly scientific. But early on, I was interested in religion as a possible account of what's true. And I was also interested in the kinds of experiences that the founders of the world's religions have had or seem to have had.

So I'm interested in the kind of experience that would get Jesus talking like Jesus or Buddha talking like Buddha. And I've sought those experiences with drugs and meditation. And it's absolutely clear to me that there is a range of experience there that is hugely motivating and real and accessible and has been traditionally described only in religious language and seems to cash out the crazy claims of the various religions. So if you're a devout Muslim and you start having the kinds of experiences that we've had on acid or that people have had

in intensive meditation retreats, they get framed in very much in doctrinal ways. So it seems to justify your infatuation with this one revelation, a revelation which is intrinsically divisive, which argues that you should hate everyone who's not in the fold. So clearly we need a way of talking about

these kinds of experiences and valuing them, which is just as generalizable and scalable as the larger conversation of reason and science-based thinking about the nature of reality, and therefore it's not in principle divisive. One of the things that McKenna always said in describing the difference between religion and the psychedelic experience is that in the psychedelic experience, you don't have to believe anything right just go on in and you'll you're going to experience it whether you like it or not you're going to get hit by it how you interpret it and how you disseminate it inside your own head it's one thing but it's not like

a religious experience in that you don't have to believe yeah oh yeah which is probably the beauty of it because you know the ego wants you to hold back to all and can retain all control of your your faculties at any given time you don't want to relinquish control to some sort of a foreign substance some sort of a drug some sort of a thing that you know you're going to give up your whole body and your mind for three hours fuck that that's too long you know that freaks people out yeah but it freaks me you, it freaks people out with good reason because there is a chaos factor to psychedelics, which you don't get doing yoga. Now, I mean, that's their power and their peril because the other thing that McKenna said, which is obviously quite true, which is that if you teach someone to meditate,

you teach them to do yoga or you tell them to do whatever spiritual discipline you think is so potent, based on their talents or based on their happenstance or, or nothing might happen. I mean, they just might get bored. They, it doesn't matter if they do it for an hour or a week, it's not necessarily going to move them. for an hour or a week, it's not necessarily going to move them. But if you give them 100 micrograms of LSD or a sufficient dose of anything in that family, there is just no question something's going to happen. Now, it could be very pleasant. It could be very unpleasant. It could be mixed.

But there is going to be a break with their ordinary consensus trance of egoity. And that's a huge shortcut. But the problem is it does just sort of just puts you in a slingshot, and you're not quite sure where it's pointed, and then you're going there. So it's a method, but you think that meditation is probably an equally effective method if you really follow it through. I mean, I think of meditation the same way I think of martial arts. You know, I could teach you a spinning wheel kick.

I could show you it. And you might not ever be able to do it right. You might not have the flexibility, the coordination, whether it's mental flexibility. You might not be able to focus on it enough or be intense enough or spend it, be disciplined enough to stretch yourself enough to pull something off. But you can't say that another person can't pull it off. It is possible to pull it off. It's possible to be an expert at it.

But out of all the people that you teach this, like Kundalini or some intense form of meditation where you achieve altered states of consciousness, how many people are going to have the focus, the drive, the discipline? How many people are going to put in the time and the numbers to actually pull off an altered state? I have never done it. Well, I completely agree with that except there's one caveat, which is I think the center of the bullseye of altered states of meditation is not so altered. It's actually the thing that you want to realize from a contemplative point of view is not actually the

same as the full kaleidoscope of effects you get from psychedelics. It's not just, and this is a distinction I made I think again in the end of faith, between the content of consciousness and realizing a specific property of the nature of consciousness. And there's no question that in our ordinary waking consciousness that the content, the spectrum of content is trimmed down. I mean, we have, you know, there's just a kind of a feeling of it's all solid and it's just me here in my body. I'm kind of locked in my head and it's you over there.

And there's no, the energy of the situation is quite limited. Yeah, and there are not too many surprises. I mean, we have all kind of been taught neurologically to just perceive ourselves in the world. You give someone LSD or psilocybin or mescaline, and that begins to change radically, and it changes for everyone. And it can be terrifying. It can be incredibly blissful. be terrifying it can be incredibly blissful um and but what happens is people are flooded with new content and new feelings of meaning and new feel and and new uh um just the energetics change so you tell you put your hand on a tree and you feel like the the buzz of kind of living contact with a tree in which you have never felt in your life.

All of that kind of the more aspect that you get with psychedelics isn't really what isn't the point of meditation. And it comes with meditation. So if you go on, you know, a three month retreat where you're just meditating 18 hours a day and every time your mind gets lost in thought you come back to the practice whether it's you know mindfulness like vipassana meditation or whatever it is it could be yoga that you know being in a pressure cooker of intensive retreat can give you that some experience of more i've never quite had it like what you get in a psychedelic experience. How close have you come? Well, it's not the... You can certainly get what you get with MDMA. I mean, like the full-blown empathic, unconditional love thing.

You've had that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Wow. And they're actually practiced within Buddhism. There are practices that are just tuned to that so the practice of loving kindness called meta in poly it's just you're just you're just trying to stoke that emotion and you're just you're just thinking it's it's a it's a very simple practice you you bring to mind people you love you're not not romantic love but just but people who you just, you know, your best friend, say. And you just meditate on that person and you just think thoughts of well-wishing for them.

Just may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, and just connect with your wish for that person's happiness. And you just train that up. The crucial piece is once you get concentrated, once your mind is no longer wandering into the chatter of just distraction, and you can actually focus, you get the feeling going and you can focus on the actual practice, then you can do it then it just it gets kindled and then you're feeling very much what you feel on ecstasy where there's just this it becomes it becomes like like ecstasy the moment you move it off because you start with someone who

is very easy to love like your best friend and then then the practice evolves and then you move it to a neutral person, and then you even move it to an enemy. Whoa. And so then you get it. Then it's just broad spectrum, you know, 360, I love, I wish everyone happiness. That's the goal of the practice.

But wishing with a totally focused mind that is not lost in thought. I mean, the truth is just having a concentrated mind that's not getting lost in thought is just intrinsically pleasurable. It's intrinsically blissful. It's sort of like the emotional base note of all the good drug experiences. the emotional base note of all the good drug experiences, it's like the opiate happy feeling comes just with concentration. It doesn't even matter what you're concentrated on.

If you're just concentrated on a— Buddhists do practices where they'll just focus on a colored disc, and they reach levels of concentration. So you're just focusing on a piece of, a swatch of red and you're reaching states of consciousness that are just extraordinarily blissful. Wow, that's awesome. But again, that's not the ultimate point of meditation. Concentration is just a tool to use to actually glimpse something about the nature of consciousness.

And so this comes back to what I was saying before, that the actual goal, and this is a difference between just getting more content and getting the wisdom that comes with recognizing something about consciousness. and getting the wisdom that comes with recognizing something about consciousness. The goal is to recognize that ordinary consciousness, without anything getting psychedelic, is a circumstance of genuine freedom. The sense of being a neurotic self, locked in the head, worried about what other people are thinking, that can be cut through fully so that it's just gone. I mean, so that you can recognize the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness. And that can happen without any of the pyrotechnics. It can happen without the rush of energy in the body.

It can happen without the rush of energy in the body. It can happen without the colors changing. It can happen without any luminosity of any kind. It's just like you don't feel like you've taken a drug. Your awareness is crystal clear. It's compatible with ordinary behavior. You can drive a car. You can, if someone says, can you pass the salt, you don't, you're not this dazzled, stoned person who can't find the salt. You, you're, you're fully here and integrated. And yet the center has dropped out of experience and you can just, only the world remains in some sense. You're no longer on this side of it. Obsessing personally or even just

even the the sense of subject object perception even just it's like there's there's a way of looking you take any object and there's a way of looking at it as an object where i feel like I'm over here looking at it. And then there's also a way of still seeing it, but seeing it so clearly that you're no longer, you're no longer the seer. You're no longer the, on the outside or on the inside looking out. There's just seeing, there's just a totality.

This is some karate kid type shit. You're like become the cap. No, but it's not becoming the cap. It's just seeing there's just a totality this is some karate kid type shit you're like become the cap that's what it's no but it's not becoming the cap it's just become the world become the whole world yeah the whole become whatever you focus on yeah become become the become most of us feel like we are having an experience like there's there's our experience there's the world of our experience and then there's us over here having the experience you know like we're on the outside looking in, or we're kind of looking over our own shoulder. There's a distance.

There's a subject, and then there's all the objects. And it's possible to collapse that distance in a way that doesn't require any psychedelic explosion. any psychedelic explosion. And that is the, from a meditational point of view, that is the center of the bullseye. You want to find that intrinsic property of consciousness and then you meditate on that.

I mean, then you just, you drop your distraction and you fall back into that space of just being open and aware. And then it doesn't matter what happens. Then it doesn't matter whether you feel bliss or you don't. You're not waiting for the meditation to get good. You're not trying to have an experience that you had yesterday that you lost

and you're trying to get back to it. So all of the seeking that tends to come in people's spiritual lives where they're just trying to get someplace, the irony is the seeking is your problem. You know, trying to become happy, trying to, positing a goal and then seeking it from a contemplative point of view is the trap that you want to avoid. You mean as far as like behavior is concerned? You mean as far as, I mean, you don't mean that as far as like behavior is concerned you mean as far as i mean you don't

mean that as far as like goal setting in life right no i mean no i mean there's certainly a place for goal setting how do you have this attitude and still write your books no no i mean how's it possible yeah no no i'm not i'm not i'm not nullifying all purpose-based behavior obviously but but from a contemplative point of view like So the question is, what is available to realize now, in the present moment, that is liberating? So it's just me, neurotic me,

unhappy me, me who's disappointed with yesterday. What can I do right now to be free? Is that even possible? Does that question even make any sense? Now some people would say well that doesn't make any sense. You are just a monkey or you're just an ape with various needs and desires and

you can be as happy as you can be but there's nothing really profound to be realized about the nature of consciousness in the present. There's just you believing in certain things, wanting certain things, etc. That's just not true. Now, it's completely rational

that many people think it's true because they haven't had certain kinds of experiences, but the truth is and this is a truth that inconveniently for our sake, is only really ever acknowledged in the context of religion. The truth is there actually is something more profound to realize about the present moment. And you get one look at that truth through the psychedelic experience because it's just you being neurotic and someone hands you a tab of acid and all of a sudden you are awash in an ocean of new content that is

is completely profound and and i mean you've had no idea life could be so rich rich now if you have a bad experience you have you have a bad experience and that's that's something else but if you have a bad experience you have you have a bad experience and that's that's something else but if you have a good psychedelic experience where you feel like jesus that proves to you that it's possible to be much much deeper and happier and fulfilled than you than you realized i read that you had had a very similar experience to me the first time you did MDMA. And that was a real behavior-changing experience for me. And I remember when I did it,

I really couldn't stop thinking after it was over, like, why can't people be like that all the time? What an incredible world it would be if people thought like that all the time? What an incredible world it would be if people thought like that all the time. Would anything ever get done? I don't know. But, you know, boy, human interaction would be blissful all the time. Yeah, no, I mean, and again,

I keep feeling just a civic responsibility to bracket all of my enthusiasm for psychedelics with the warning that I think some of them are just biochemically more risky or riskier than others, and some are just psychologically risky. And it's possible to have a bad experience and to really regret taking any of these drugs. Well, if you have a hard time with reality, I say stay the fuck away from psychedelics. But even if you don't, or even if you've had nothing but good experiences,

you can suddenly start having bad experiences. I mean, that was my course. I took MDMA a few times. I took psilocybin a few times. I took acid a dozen times or so. And I had, for the most part just especially with

with lsd i had 10 perfect experiences where you know afterwards it was just it was unthinkable to me that anyone ever had a bad trip i didn't even know what that i couldn't even see the direction you would head to have a bad trip. Did anything change in your life before you had the bad trip? I don't know what the process was. Insecurity? No, I mean, but it's just but then

I think this is, I don't know I don't have any science to go on here, but anecdotally I think this is a reasonably common experience where once you've had a bad trip, then the door is slightly ajar there and you can find your way there in a way kind of reliably. So I approach psychedelics with more caution now and it's been years since I've done anything. But it's not that I wouldn't do it again.

I probably would, but I would just, I would pick my moment wisely because I, you know, as good as the good trips were, the bad trips were just as bad. And, and it's. Well, the legal situation is very unfortunate because if it was legal, then we can have people that were experts on it that were professionals and they could distribute it and they could do it properly into the right environment and we'd have you know protocol and and the correct things to do if someone is having a bad trip and they're in the you know the safety and comfort of professionals and people that can let them know that everything's going to be fine sort of steer it in one way or another you know that's all something the the potential uh growth experiences we're all missing out on those because of the illegality of it.

But I agree with you that you should be really careful about anything you do, especially I know people that they just, you know, they get on Xanax and they lose their mind. You know, I know people that just things that seem to be mild and acceptable. I know people can't drink. You know, everyone's mind is very different biochemically, the way it reacts to different substances. know some people can't smile we were talking about this before I know people that have given them pot and they swear

there's something in it they swear this is not pot this is you're drugging me and so no it's just pot man it's just your your your setups different there's a certain amount of immunity that I've developed that you you don't have you know tolerance rather right I think it that I've developed that you don't have. Right. Tolerance, rather. Right. I think it's really unfortunate, though, that we can't experiment with these things. They aren't like, you know, at a university level, that this isn't like normal. People are quietly doing research on basically everything now. I don't know if there's anything that you can't do research with at the moment, but it all is pretty quiet.

But they're doing MDMA research, and actually the— I was at TED, and someone who's somewhat close to this research told me that they've been having such success with two sessions of MDMA therapy for PTSD that the military is now looking at using MDMA for... Yeah, I'd heard about that. Like a two- or three-session protocol, which sort of... I think the jury's still out on the neurotoxicity of MDMA. I think it's...

I mean, there have been studies on both sides. But if it's just two sessions and you get some huge response rate for PTSD. Um, and that, that sort of gets around the neurotoxicity question because it's not, it's not so toxic that you can't do it a few times or even a few more times than that.

Um, but yeah, so, so anyway, I, I'm not a psychedelics or, or truly indispensable for me at a certain time in my life in terms of just I was so I was a hard enough case and skeptical enough that there was anything worth realizing through introspection that it took just getting hurled over the wall for me to realize that there was any more to the world. And then that gave me a basis from which to practice meditation and look into these things.

What do you think is happening in the psychedelic experience? I've heard the broad spectrum of you're just changing the brain chemistry, you're adding in a different element. It creates hallucinations. And because of those hallucinations, you get these profound feelings, and you can learn and grow from those feelings. Two, it's a radio, and you're tuning into another life form that only communicates with you through eating it.

It's from another planet, and that's why there's a logos. That's why when you take especially high doses of mushrooms, you'll have a language. Whether it's's internal or not you don't really know i mean it could all be you know how much of if you can see any of that stuff i mean how much of that is just firing against the different parts of your brain that causes it causes visions i mean what do you think is happening in a psychedelic experience? Well, so I blogged about this. I wrote an article titled Drugs and the Meaning of Life. And so I, in a footnote, I differentiated those two kinds of psychedelic experience because there is this there is the one experience which is again personal even if it's even if it's transpersonal it doesn't put you in dialogue with anything else or doesn't seem to put you in dialogue with anything else

and that's the only kind I've ever had I've never had the experience where you're the Terrence McKenna style i'm now in the presence of the other talking oh really and receiving information that that i couldn't have had any other way or i don't think i could have had any other way so that so for people who've had that experience it seems rational to say that that it's putting you in touch with an other in some sense it's not just you it's not just an expanded you or just the universe without you be without your ego involved. It's actually putting somebody else's attention on you. And now you're in dialogue.

Now, that's that's an experience I haven't had. And so I can't really. But the thing is that the test of the validity of that experience is pretty straightforward I mean if you're getting information that you couldn't have any other way that should be provable and one of the

the fishy things about Terrence's account of these states is that at many moments he claimed to be getting, he really did claim to have a compelling experience of being in dialogue with a kind of omniscient other. So he would, I don't know if you read his book, True Hallucinations. So he's in the Amazon, he's walking around, and he's had more mushrooms than any person in human history. And he is in dialogue with, it's a very readable book, very fun read, some very out there ideas in there.

And so I'm going to falsify by summarizing what he was claiming to be in dialogue with. But he's in dialogue with some omniscient other. And it's just so he's pointing to a species of plant that he doesn't know the name of. Terrence had a lot of botanical knowledge, but he's pointing to plants that he doesn't know the name of. And he claimed he's just getting the Latin name in his head beamed to him by the other right now that would be a he he it's been a little while since i looked at the book but if you're of a scientific frame of mind you actually want to establish whether this is more than just your experience that's the kind of thing that is very testable i mean you could say

listen i had you know i didn't know any of these plants, and I've never taken a course in botany, or I'm going to give the same dose to someone who I really know doesn't know a damn thing about botany, and we're going to see how many of these species of plants he can name. And that's just, I mean, that would be, it's as easy as testing psychic phenomenon in an ordinary sense. Sure, if you could attach it scientifically. If you could just get information. If it was just one unique experience, though.

But it's just. Did he remember any of those names? Or did he forget them all? Well, yeah, he didn't. So Terrence was so smart. but he was not the most rigorous at the margins of his rap on what is real. He was more poet than scientist when he would get to some of these crucial moments.

And so, yeah, I haven't seen in his work any effort to be really rigorous and say, okay, I had this experience where I was getting information that I know was not my own content. It was not based on prior learning, and it was not just merely imagined. It was real information. And here is how I went about trying to authenticate that it was real information. Because he talks about just being able to close his eyes and see alien civilizations.

Obviously, that's hard to authenticate. But see historical periods and see... He used to say that? Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. What book is that in? It was in some of his talks. Oh, he's probably high as fuck.

Yeah, so obviously it's possible to be completely stoned and have these wild experiences that are basically just dreams or hypnagogic images. Unless you can bring back those Latin names. Yeah, if you can't bring back something that's clearly information, then my feeling is there's no reason to claim that it is. You can claim that this is... The one thing that's indisputable is that people can have a range of experience

that is incredibly beautiful and life-changing. And then a certain percentage of people feel the need to tell a metaphysical story about the significance of those experiences. And religion is in the business of enshrining specific metaphysical stories as the ultimate truth. We know they can't all be true because they're all mutually canceling, which is to say if Christianity is true, Islam is false, and vice versa. Christianity is true, Islam is false, and vice versa. But the psychedelic experience falls under the same rubric.

I mean, you can have all of these experiences and not know what they mean and be very humble about what you don't know and still value the experiences. Or you can say, oh, no, I'm in contact with the Pleiadians, and they live in a star system, and they're sending messages, blah, blah, blah. And then you're just part of the cacophony of New Age claims that are unsubstantiated. So I didn't know that he had claimed that. That is really pretty funny. But one of the things that he did claim was that he was high on mushrooms, and they were communicating with him, telling him to create a map of time out of the I Ching. That's something he worked on.

Yeah, it was a whole time wave. That's another thing. He played some mathematical game with the King Wen sequence and the I Ching. I don't think he did it. I don't think he was alone for this. I think he found some mathematically talented or crazy grad student to help him with this game. But he got some pattern of novelty.

But again, how you define novelty is so sketchy. And I never wanted to go down that particular rabbit hole with him. But yeah, if the world ends in eight months or whatever it is, as he predicted, or the singularity happened, or something huge, what he predicted is the asymptotic achievement of novelty on December 21, 2012. Whatever that means, it's going to be the most novel day in the history of the universe, and nothing will be the same.

So if December 22 dawns, and basically we've just had another news cycle and it's just Fox News versus CNN, we'll know that that novelty theory was wrong. And then there'll be the percentage of devotees who just think it's kind of time shifted in some crucial way. He's fun to follow because he was such an entertaining speaker. And I think that was part of the problem. The problem was that he was so entertaining and engaging that, you know, he sort of was a prisoner to his gift. And his gift was to tell these compelling stories. And if the story wasn't so compelling, well, move things around and make it compelling.

And unfortunately, I really found out recently because of people on my message board kind of illuminated this to me. He changed the end date. The December 21st, 2012 end date that he always said was that he magically arrived at with his mathematical program, which was to the day the same end date of the long count of the Mayan calendar. Brian, you got to throw that fucking stupid clock away, man. That shit's annoying. Ridiculous meow clock. You're a grown man.

But apparently it was really in November. It wasn't. His original calculations were in November. And then when he found out about the end date of the Mayan calendar, then he just shifted it a month. Which is so convenient. But it's ridiculous because he used to say

to the day. So he was a great speaker. It was really cool ideas. A lot of fun to follow. But when you do that much, ridiculous because he used to say to the day so he was a great speaker it was i mean really really cool ideas a lot of fun to follow but when you do that much mushrooms you know reality must become like a slippery fish in your hand you know really really difficult to constantly have control of yeah yeah no that i mean it is a bit of a liability when you say it so well, you can get carried away with just the experience of saying it that well. outside influence, which is kind of inexplicable given how crazy some of his ideas were, is born of just the quality of his writing. Freud was a great writer.

It's just the whole mythology he created for what's going on in our heads. Fascinating. Yeah, it's fascinating. But so much of it is... Cocaine-based. It should have been obviously bogus, but he was a damn good writer.

Yeah, well, to this day, people, you know, talk about Freudian slips, you know, that somehow there's dick going on in the back of your mind all day. Well, it's not that it isn't. I mean, there are... There's a lot of unconscious processing going on. Sure.

And, I mean mean that's actually the the subject of my current book very short book on on free will is speaks to that that it's just the sense that we have of being the kind of the conscious authors of our thoughts and actions we know is false now it's not false in in the Freudian sense that we've got the id and the superego and the ego at war and it's all being driven from behind by a kind of intelligence that's consciously editing what we can consciously know. But most of what's going on in the brain is unconscious. And most of it's not even potentially conscious.

And that actually explains a lot of the change you get with psychedelics because you change the biochemistry enough, you're playing with the margin of what's conscious and what's potentially conscious. And we are potentially conscious of a lot of things we don't tend to be conscious of and that it completely transforms our experience. But there's a lot that we're not just potentially conscious of that the brain is doing and it is

everything we are conscious of is dependent upon all of that work. So for instance the fact that you are hearing my words as words right now because you speak English and I'm speaking in English, and you're parsing, so I'm making sounds, and you're just, you're not making any special effort to hear words, you're just hearing words. In fact, you couldn't not hear words if you tried, and they're just, the words are coming, and you're understanding them, and I'm going to get to the end of this sentence sometime, and we'll both recognize that it was more or less grammatically correct all of that is happening unconsciously and you're not and and you're just conscious of understanding what

I'm saying or not based on whether I'm following the rules of English grammar or not but I'm not I'm not aware of what's allowing me to follow the rules. You're not aware of what's allowing you to detect my errors. And the truth is, from a conscious perspective, I don't know how I get to the end of the sentence. I mean, this is really like all of this experience of talking is riding atop a machinery that I can't inspect. And when it fails, it's a surprise, and I don't know why it failed.

And so that's just talking about parsing speech, but all of our thinking and behaving and wanting and doing, all of our inner life is made of unconscious processing of that sort. And so there are experiments where you can show that people, when you think you have consciously decided to do something, your brain is actually committed to doing it half a second or some seconds before you're, while you still think you're making up your mind so this really nullifies a conventional notion of free will because you're you know if you say you give me two buttons to push and i can push either one i want and i can push them when i

want and you just tell me to make up my mind and i go back and forth and back and forth and say i'm going to push the left one it's a completely free choice I did it no one forced me to do it the truth is if you were recording from my scalp with EEG or looking with fMRI at brain function you could detect that before I thought I was committed because I because in these experiments, subjects watch a clock, so I'm watching the hands of a clock or watching random numbers appear on a screen, and my only goal is to just look at when I've decided, when I'm committed.

I go back and forth between left and right, left and right, and then I say, okay, that's the hands of the six. I'm going to go left. All the experiments show that for some decisions, several seconds before, we could tell from the brain whether the subject was going to go left or right. So your subjective sense of being truly upstream of your decision-making process is a false one. The only problem I have with that is twofold. One is that if you're going to study something like that and you make a clear study where there's a red and a green

and you have to make a choice as to which one and you monitor the subject's brain, is that real? Is that real life? I mean, it's a fucking test. I mean, how do we know what's going on in a real-life scenario? How do we know that there's not a lot of overthinking going on? How do we know there's not a lot of shit going on behind the scenes? Like, in this sort of a situation, because you're setting up this test.

Right. Could psychedelics change free will? If a psychedelic experience changes your whole tune, could it literally change what decisions you would automatically make? I mean, if there is no free will, a free will is just your mind, for whatever reason, goes left or right based on morals or ethics or what feels right or what feels wrong. In that sense, wouldn't psychedelics be able to change free will? Well, I think free will is a truly incoherent concept. Right, it's a crazy word.

It just doesn't make any sense. A placeholder. a truly incoherent concept. It's a crazy word. It's a placeholder. We have causality, and no one has ever described a way in which mental or physical events can arise that make sense of this idea of free will, of being the true

locus of the causes of your thoughts and actions. And this is, most people think that we have this, that there's a mystery here, that we have this subjective experience of free will, but we can't map it on to a notion of physical cause and effect. But I think if you look closely, you realize you don't even have this subjective experience of free will. So if I ask you,

you know, think of an MMA fighter. Okay. Okay. So did you get one? Yes. Okay. Who'd you think of? George St. Pierre. Okay. So now why didn't you think of Matt Hughes? Okay. So whatever story you're going to tell now is meaningless, right? So the truth is you're not in a position to know why you thought of George St. Pierre. Right. And so, okay, there are all these MMA fighters whose names you know,

and you know them as well as you know George St. Pierre's name. You could have thought of Overeem or, I mean, there's hundreds you could have thought of, right? Right. And let's say you thought of a few, and then you settled on one for the purposes of telling me. So you thought of, so you got Hughes, and you got Overeem, you got St. Pierre, and then I said, well, who was it?

And you say, well, St. Pierre, right? You can't explain why you fixated on him as opposed to Hughes or whoever the other candidates were in your mind. All of that's being driven from behind unconsciously. And there's no way to ever, even if it wasn't, even if there was no time lag, even if we knew that the neurophysiology and the conscious thought were truly simultaneous, so there was no part of your brain that was going George St. Pierre before you were aware of it. Right.

It's still a mystery as to why it is what it is. Right, but that's sort of an answer to a question with no consequence. When it comes to something with consequences, isn't there free will then when someone contemplates the results of their actions? I mean, isn't that what we really truly consider to be free will? As you look at something, should I hit this old lady with my car?

No, I should not because I have free will. I mean, even if there's some sort of a decision that had greenlit in your brain seconds earlier than that, no, we're not going to run over this old lady. Sort of that's free will, right? I mean, what leads someone to murder someone? Is every murderer innocent because they don't have free will? Are they an accumulation of their past histories

and their emotional responses to various stimuli, good or bad, in their environment that's led them down this road and here they are in this moment in time in this physical altercation and they murder somebody. Do they not have free will? Right. Yeah, so all good concerns. Clearly there's a difference between voluntary and involuntary action,

and so we can talk about that difference without ever invoking free will. So there are the things I choose to do, and I'm reaching for the water because I want to pick it up, and that's different from me accidentally knocking it over or or so so and and those differences matter so if you intentionally shot me that's one thing you're a murderer an attempted murder if you're if you accidentally shot me because you were cleaning your gun there was no intent and that says a lot of you're a very different person in the world.

You're not the person who intentionally shot me. So we don't have to worry about you in the same way. So for the purposes of our legal system, the difference between intent and lack of intent is huge, but it's huge because it says a lot about what someone's likely to do in the future. says a lot about what someone's likely to do in the future. The payoff is that there are, one, I think, understanding that the incoherence of free will does subtly change your morality and would

change our legal system in small but crucial ways. Because it changes your morality because you have to acknowledge that there's a huge role for luck in this world that is morally relevant that we don't acknowledge. So you are not responsible for the fact that you have your genes, that you were born into this society, that you've had your life experience, that your brain, you didn't make your brain. Your brain is in exactly the state it's in based on no, it's not an accomplishment of

yours, right? And you can't take credit for the fact that you're not a psychopath. You are lucky that you're not a psychopath on some basic level. You would be unlucky to have the genes and the life experience that would make you want to get up tomorrow morning and kill kids. Do you think that sort of a pathology is inherently genetic?

Do you think that's environmental? Is it a combination? It's significantly genetic, but it's a combination of environment, but you didn't pick your environment either. But it's not something that someone can avoid based on a bunch of different circumstances happening to them. Yeah, so I'm not negating the role of

human effort and human intention. We can change ourselves. We can get in shape. We can learn new skills. We can improve relationships. Everything about what people want to do with their lives can be conserved. But the truth is

some people are much luckier than others. Absolutely. And no one can take credit for the fact that they're intelligent, that they're good looking. You say this, but what about the secret? Right, yes.

Talk about dangerous nonsense. Did that drive you crazy when that was all coming out? That was the most irresponsible thing in the world. Oprah's boosting of that book was journalistically irresponsible in a way that few things. It was amazing watching people run with it, though. People that were convinced that all of a sudden they were going to create their life with their imagination. Right. people run with it though people that were convinced that all of a sudden they were going to create their life with their imagination right but sort of there is some sort of an impact that your thoughts and mind have on the real world oh no it's positive energy psychic energy there's

something there yeah if you're a nice person and you're thinking nice thoughts about people they're going to notice that and like you and that's that becomes a self-fulfilling loop i mean you are like if you if you are an angry person who's always noticing what's wrong with the people around you, that's very hard to keep to yourself. And people begin to treat you a certain way and it becomes self-fulfilling. So you think it's entirely social as far as the consequences of thought? Well, I wouldn't attribute any spooky level to it. It's all understandable.

Have you ever seen mass prayers where they work on a certain thing and everybody together try to pool up their energy? It would be so easy to demonstrate that and and there's been so much prayer um that i mean it's just it's you know i mean this is what the great um the website why does god hate amputees i mean it's it because so so you have all these people who believe they've been healed through intercessory prayer of their cancer and all these other diseases that are self-limiting. You never hear of somebody who's prayed to grow back an arm and said, look, here's a picture of me without an arm, and now they're both back.

I'm like the human salamander. If prayer worked, you'd be able to pray for lost arms well that you say that but what if prayer only works a really tiny bit and you got to get a lot of people involved so just boost your immune system oh no i mean it's just not it's not perfect it's not magic is there is there power in thought but it is billed as magic yes it is billed as magic but i can do whatever he wants okay god if we're talking about god I'm talking about groups of people praying for things. I'm talking about using their energy of their thoughts. I'm not really talking about invoking a higher power.

I'm just talking about... Okay, but they think they are. So maybe I was tilting that... But with Art Bell, you remember that show? Art Bell, Coast to Coast, werewolves at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're driving on AM radio? Right. I believe he did some sort of a test where he tried to they tried to influence something whether it's weather or something with you know a gigantic mind meld but it wasn't it wasn't a religious thing i think the idea was it can you get a

bunch of people to concentrate on something and do we have like the most minute ability to influence things and together we could do something measurable but I don't know if anybody ever do anything well there are a lot of people who have done research of that kind and what they claim is just that these these micro departures these micro effects that when you aggregate them over many many trials represent huge statistical departures from chance and many most people in the skeptic community find that completely unpersuasive. Have you looked into it at all, like random number generator influence? Yeah, so I haven't, apart from just reading a couple of books,

like Dean Radin's book on the conscious universe, what you come down to there are just meta-analyses of someone's statistics and the concern on the part of skeptics that there are frauds involved or there's just a file drawer effect where people are not reporting their failures and they are reporting the positive results. And so there's just what you should, what you should be able to find is if these are real abilities that really matter in terms of...

Tangible results. You should find someone who can come into the lab and demonstrate telepathy or clairvoyance or whatever the thing is you're interested in. So that it's really... It should survive the presence of a skeptic like James Randy, who's a professional magician who knows how to fake these mentalist games. You should be able to test it in, so actually I spoke to Rupert Sheldrake about this once,

because do you know? Sure, yeah, Morphic Res. Yeah. So he's a big advocate of the scientific testing of these phenomenon. But he's very he's a believer. He's a he's a he's a real believer. And he's he's published essays or articles on, you know, pets that know when their owners are going to come home and so he's got the camera on the dog and the owner's headed home and he's got them time synced and showing the effect of the dog getting up at the right

time and he's very into the idea of democratizing science where you can get thousands of people doing these tests on their own and showing some effect but what he hasn't wanted to do is just actually submit to james randy's challenge of showing up and doing an experiment that will survive the the the scrutiny of professional magicians and i'll just

allow this thing to be and and i it's just, you know, people find James Randi's skepticism so unpleasant that they think that that would nullify the experiment somehow, or they're not going to submit to it. But, I mean, James Randi has put up a million dollars to anyone who can show some positive result. Now, no doubt he's not the easiest guy to deal with. If you actually, you know, if you he's not the easiest guy to deal with. If you actually, you know, if you are committed to the reality of psychic phenomenon and you have to go in and meet

with James Randi and design an experiment, I'm sure he's going to make you jump through hoops that you feel like you don't have to jump through. But it would be trivially easy to design a valid experiment that could demonstrate these effects. And so I'm open-minded that this stuff is possible, but it's fishy that people should just come forward and demonstrate the effect. Well, what is Rupert's claims? I mean, is it that every single time a dog knows? Rupert's claim was that he doesn't think science should be decided by contest, essentially. It's like, that's not how you do science. You don't do science to answer a million dollar challenge put up by a magician.

And that's a, okay, I understand his aesthetic objection or his interpersonal objection to working with a cranky person like Randy, but cranky not in the flaky sense, but cranky just in the, you know, he's a. Confrontational. Yeah, he's confrontational. But given how the whole field of parapsychology and, you know, psi studies is treated like intellectual pornography, given how discredited it is in the view of mainstream science, if there's an effect there and you've got a protocol that has demonstrated it,

just come forward and do it in every context where you can shine light on it and just prove it. And Sheldrake has never done this. Well, not to anyone's satisfaction that can move the conversation forward. He says there's many people who say they've done it, but when you actually look at what they... What hasn't happened is you haven't you haven't discovered people with with where there's a really strong effect where you get one person

who's like I you know the Tiger Woods of mind reading right where you or where they can actually show a departure from from chance that is huge in a say in their own trial what you get is if you get 6,000 people staring at a random number generator trying to make it depart to the high side as opposed to the low side, you get people saying that there was this tiny effect. So it should have been 50-50. It was actually 51% over all those trials. And that, when you do the stats on it, is, you know, you would expect a 1 in 10 billion due to chance. That's just, that's subject to many kind of experimenter problems

that people are right to worry about, which is, one, you didn't, I mean, people have been caught not reporting their failed experiments. I mean, there's kind of a true believer syndrome that happens even in certain wings. I mean, there's a phenomenon of scientific fraud across science, which is a problem we guard against. But it's also been true of parapsychology as well. Do you think it's possible that people have these certain senses that have not evolved yet? And that that's why, like, sometimes, you know, you know someone's going to call you and you pick up the phone and it's them. You know, there's weird non-duplicatable, that's not a word.

There's weird experiences that you can't duplicate. You know, there's random weird things that can't be controlled, but sometimes the right frequency kicks in and you catch a radio station from San Diego when you're in San Francisco and it doesn't make any sense and it only lasts for a little while. Is it possible? Do you believe, like, have you ever had personal experiences where, you know, you knew someone was staring at you and you looked and they were. You knew the phone was going to ring and it did. Oh, yeah. A lot. Is that all bullshit? Well, no, it's not bullshit, but a huge component and perhaps the component that explains all of those experiences is what's called sampling bias, where you notice all the hits and you don't notice the non-hits.

You don't notice all the time you pick up the phone and you had no idea who was calling you, which is most of the time. Right. And this is before caller ID, obviously. Caller ID has ruled out this sort of… Rule of the synchronicity movement. Yeah, this psychic phenomenon. But so we're not, we're just, we know we don't keep track.

One, the hits are salient to us and the and the failures aren't. And so and religious people do this all the time. God always gets credit for the good things he does, but he doesn't get scored for all the the disasters he fails to prevent. So, you know, a bus crashes and everyone's dead except one little girl. And it's a it's God's miracle that, you know, she walked away. But what about all the dead people you know so of course um and so the the non-hits always outweigh the hits and if you actually do so the and the classic demonstration of this which is still shocking to people is is

the um it's called the the the hot hand fallacy in basketball, the idea that people get on a shooting streak. You know, Michael Jordan, he would shoot two outside jumpers. And when he goes up for his third, there's this sense both in him and in the audience that he's actually more likely to make that third shot having made those prior two because he's just on a roll. So that whole feeling of being on a roll in basketball has been studied because what's amazing about professional sports like basketball is the statistics are like every single game that has ever been played

is completely broken down. We know every shot and every basket and every rebound basket and and every rebound and so so statisticians could just sit down and analyze is there such a thing as the hot hand is it actually true that if a guy has made three jumpers in a row he's more likely to make the fourth or is the fourth truly independent of everything that's gone before and they just they found that despite the personal experience of being on a role and despite the fact that we feel like we've all seen someone on a role there's really no such thing as being on a role in basketball now there may be other sports where it's different but there's so much there's so much chaos and so much uncertainty in once that ball leaves your hand

uh it's it's it's a it's a low percentage enough phenomenon that it is actually insensitive to. Statistical analysis. No, it's insensitive to the fact that you feel great and everything is going well for you and you just sank two baskets and you go up to sink a third. That third is you're no more likely to sink that third than you were if it was your first one. Or you just failed to – you just missed two, and then you go up for the third. So do you completely discount the player's comfort? Like when they feel like they're in the zone, that doesn't exist? I mean, what is the zone?

I mean, isn't it just a state of mind created by confidence? They're having an experience. I mean, so what's amazing about this is this is – So no one's ever more likely to make a basket? Is that what you're saying? Even though they're confident and they make the basket knowing that they're going to make the basket? Statistically, you say that that doesn't...

Yes. There's no sign of... And this, again... So it's a myth. This research is probably 10 years old or so, so maybe something's happened in the last decade. Jeremy Lin just fucked up the whole thing. Yeah, right, exactly.

But my understanding is there is zero evidence of what's called the hot hand in basketball. So literally it is a subjective error that everyone feels powerfully. And so given that, just map that on to all of our psychic, so-called psychic experiences, where you feel like you knew who was going to call. We're just... It's just luck. Yeah, it's just... There's going to be some...

How do you know, though? How do you know it's just luck? How do you know it's not either or? How do you know it's not... Sometimes there's a brief... It should be testable. When you're testing it, by placing an experiment on anything,

don't you automatically alter the results of it? Especially when you're talking about something so ethereal as an idea of a friend and then boom, there's an email in your box. You haven't talked to them in years. I'm just playing devil's advocate here because I don't believe in it. But I don't know that I don't believe in it either. So here's one weird experience like that that I've had, which, I mean, statistically, it seems completely beyond the pale, but it's, again, there are going to be low probability events

that happen every day. And so, you know, I know a guy who went, for instance, his college girlfriend broke up with him and went to Europe, and he was convinced the relationship wasn't over and he decided he was going to go to europe to find her right so he's like 18 right not a crazy guy just really romantic guy and it was not a scary breakup so anyway nice story they got back together but um what happened is so he goes so it's just only an 18 year old could get it into his head to do this

he gets on a plane he doesn't even know which country she went to oh my god so he just goes to europe right he goes to spain because he speaks spanish and he's like he's like 10 days into his trip and so he's in barcelona and some tourists hand him other tourists hand him a camera and said will you take our picture? And he picks up the camera and he's taking a picture and into frame walks his ex-girlfriend. Right? So he's found, like within 10 days, he just found

her in, so what are the chances of that happening? Well, it's pretty small, right? But that stuff happens to people. It would be a miracle if low probability events never happened. It would be a miracle if no one in human history ever had a story like that to tell. Yes, right.

So we're in a system where there's bound to be very low probability events. Or it's just not fully evolved and and this kid went on his instincts, and he tapped into the information in the universe, and he knew instinctively where to go. And he met his sweetheart like a goddamn Sandra Bullock movie. If it's an ability that anyone should care about, it should be testable. It should be strong enough that we can test it. But how can you test something when it's a unique event

that very rarely takes place, completely uncontrollable, and it's something that's just almost like a natural phenomenon that rarely occurs? I mean, how are you going to put something in a testing environment, in the environment of a laboratory, and see if it really does make sense that you think

about someone who can call you? It might be Shell Drake who's doing this. There's a test of the phone call phenomenon where people can subscribe to get their... They get a call. They enlist their five closest people in their lives and to call them at random intervals. I guess they disable their caller ID or whatever. And you can just set this up so that... It's still not a true moment because they're acting on an experiment.

I mean, how do you know that someone calling you might not just be calling you because they tapped into this idea of loving you and this idea of missing you, and that is the tune that breaks through all the way to you and causes you to look at your phone right when they tune in? That's not replicatable. Replicatable? That's not a word. Yeah.

Replicable. Replicable. Replicable, yeah. It's not, not a word. Yeah. Replicable? Replicable. Replicable, yeah. It's not, I mean, you know what I'm saying? I mean, it's the idea of unique events isn't disproven by experimenting with it. Look, I don't know that it's true that sometimes you know when someone is calling. But I've had the experience myself. But I haven't had it in years.

Right. It's been years and years since I knew who was going to call me and I looked at it. But I do remember it having it happen in my life several times. What if it's something that just, you know, on a fucking summer solstice, the planets are aligned, your own biology, you have a certain amount of water in your system, and boom, there's a certain amount of love and the thought gets through. Is that possible? Well, sure, it's possible. But the question is, even if it's true, given this description, it doesn't really seem to matter. Because it's not fascinating. No, but it's not a matter of just, it's not a sign of how connected you are with the person. Because sometimes you know it's somebody you don't even like, right?

with the person because sometimes you know it's somebody you don't even like, right? It's not a measure of how crucial it is that they reach you at that moment because sometimes it's completely trivial. And then other times when someone really had to get a hold of you because your dad was sick, they couldn't find you and you were just blissfully ignorant of the fact that the closest person in your life is having a medical emergency, right? Well, no one's saying that it works all the time and that because it works on a blue moon that it can't, you know. But then that's not working.

Well, it's not that it's not working. It just doesn't work all the time. It's a rare event. Is it possible that there are rare events like that? Or do you think it's all just much more likely scientifically to be just... Well, given what we're talking about now, this is all much more likely to be coincidence. I mean, it's just—you don't have that many people in your life you think about. You think about them, and you don't have that many people in your life who call you.

I mean, we just actually run the numbers on this. One problem is that we have very bad intuitions of probability. So have you heard of the birthday party problem? No. So if I got a room, put you in a room of just random strangers, right? How many would I have to have in the room for you to be confident that two people in the room had the same birthday? So you'd be willing to bet. So I'll bet you. It would have to be the same birthday. Jesus. So you'd be willing to bet. I'll bet you.

It would have to be thousands for me. Okay. And that would just be a guess. Okay, so that's basically everyone's guess. That it's just, there's 365 days in the year. We've got to get two people on the same day. That's going to be a lot of people, right? The truth is, and this is just a fact,

that if you get 23 people in the room you have crossed the 50 threshold so that it's more likely than not that two of them have the same birthday that's amazing 23 people now the reason now what's crucial to understand is that it's it's the crucial piece and this actually to, this deflates so many conspiracy theories and other bad ideas, is that it's absolutely crucial that we didn't specify which birthday, right? So it's any two birthdays, it's any single birthday, any two people and any single birthday. 23 people, that's amazing. And that changes the game entirely.

single birthday. 23 people. That's amazing. And that changes the game entirely. But if I said, how many people do I need in a room to find one with my birthday, that changes it. Right. But any two people on any given birthday, it's 23 people. Yeah, if you go with just your birthday, that's thousands.

That would have to be thousands. I don't know what that would be. But anyway, that's... So anyway, our intuitions... Our intuitions are bad about probability. And so when you look at 9-11 truth stuff, it's so much about finding these little anomalies that strike people as intuitively highly unlikely

and in desperate need of explanation, whereas you can always look at anything you look at after the fact can be described as a miracle. So like I could say to you, what are the chances that all of the wires and objects on this desk would be exactly in this position on this day? Isn't that a creationist argument for the evolution of the wires and objects on this desk would be exactly in this position on this day. Well, isn't that a creationist argument for the evolution of the eyeball? Like, how is it possible?

Yeah, well, but at least there's actually more to talk about there. It is kind of inscrutable how this stuff happens through genetic mutation and environmental pressure. But we can tell that story. But this is just post hoc, after the fact, I say, this is just inexplicable. The wires are tangled in exactly this way. If you were going to kind of randomly do this again, you'd never get them in this position.

But of course, it's completely meaningless. The wires have to be some way. They just happen them in this position. But, of course, it's completely meaningless. There's not – the wires have to be some way. They just happen to be this way. And I'm putting a completely gratuitous burden on you to explain the fact that they're just this way. And so in any situation, certainly in a situation as complicated as September 11th, you're going to see all these anomalies. So the fact that, how do you explain the fact that, you know, on that day the Navy was running a fighter jet test and we had F-16s that were out over the ocean or whatever. Whatever the thing is, you know, they only run that test, you know,

two days a year and they were running it that day. If it wasn't that anomaly, you'd find some other anomaly. As long as you're picking after the fact, you can always find something weird that is in desperate need of explanation. Have there been studies that have proven statistics on people knowing that people are watching them? I've heard there's been studies done. People say if you had Rupert Sheldrake on here, he would say yes. But you would say no.

I'm not close enough to the research to have any sense. To some degree. It's not substantiated, though? Well, you just have to take people at their word. So I've talked to Rupert. I don't think Rupert is a don't think he's a conscious fraud. I think he's a smart guy. He's a very earnest guy.

Is he lying about what he thinks he knows or is he self-deceived or has he been deceived by unscrupulous people? Confirmation bias. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's just the problem is that it's so fringe and so many people want to believe it's true that it's easy to worry that it hasn't really been fully, you know, the bushes haven't been beaten hard enough to find all the errors and the biases and the frauds. and the frauds. But if there's a real phenomenon there, it should be testable. And it shouldn't be vulnerable to the slightest quirk of, oh, that experimenter had a bad vibe or was too skeptical, and therefore it killed the effect. Especially when you're talking about people who actually claim.

So that's not real. Is it possible that someone could be the experimenter could have a bad vibe and be too skeptical And that is negative energy You could set up an experiment where The experimenter was 5,000 miles away Or had really good vibes You could put the true believers in

Kind of the coach You could put a completely friendly coach Who was Sylvia Brown Crazy, fraudulent, psychic Sylvia Brown, she could be there working her magic and just helping. You could surround them with only true believers if you wanted to. You could design the experiment in such a way. So you could make the vibes as nice as you want.

It's just that that's anyone who's – there's a fundamentally unscientific attitude you get from many, many people in this area of the human conversation, which is science is reductionistic. It's it's hypercritical. It's life destroying. It's there's this whole area of truth that science in principle can't touch. And that's just not true. It's like if it's a real phenomenon, science is the best way to touch it. There's certain things that it's hard to figure out how you would do the experiments, hard to figure out how to get it in the lab. And how to get it to where the person who's doing the experiment is not being influenced

by the fact you're experimenting on them. Yes, exactly. So there's certain, so you know, the scientific research I've done is with functional magnetic resonance imaging, where you have to put people in an MRI scanner, and it's, it hugely limits what you can study, because there's, people can't move, you know, if you move, you destroy the image so you've got to lie in a clattering machine motionless and do some cognitive task that you can do looking at computer goggles or you know looking at a mirror and across your feet out into the room it limits so so brain scanning

experiment is hugely limited. You can't put somebody on their bike and have them ride off into the distance while scanning their brain. But those things aside, you can, and here we're not talking about experiments with those kinds of limitations. If people have an ability to know who's calling on the phone, if there's even one guy on planet Earth who has this ability, it should be, we could easily design an experiment that would demonstrate that.

And the people who claim, I mean, there are people who really claim these abilities. They claim it on a repeatable basis. Yeah, there are people who, well, they're the sort of kind of shyster, Western, New Age psychics who, I'm not sure, but I imagine they just never submit to being tested for obvious reasons. And then there's the Buddhist, Hindu, yogi, contemplative world where people imagine that great meditators have developed these abilities. And even some of the meditators will, you know, wink, wink, suggest that they probably have these abilities but are just too humble to demonstrate them. And there's sort of a kind of religious taboo against demonstrating them or or or

challenging them or submitting them to test but in yeah in the in the in the contemplative world among buddhists and and indian yogis there's actually a straightforward path to developing these skills i mean there's just a recipe you You could go into your, you know, you could go ask the Dalai Lama, how could I learn to read people's minds? He has an answer to that question. I mean, it's not like, well, it's just a matter of whether you're gifted or not. No, there's actually, this is like, you can get, you can basically get a PhD in reading people's minds among Buddhists and Hindus. So the people who've done that, why don't they get tested? It's not because what they're claiming is not an ability to make a random number generator jump slightly if they've got 5,000 people sitting next to them

also doing it. They claim just huge abilities are possible for meditators who've reached certain levels of concentration. I mean, there are people who... The stories are as crazy as anything you've heard. What about, like, remote viewing? That's probably the craziest shit of all time, right? Has that ever been disproven? That's clearly disproven?

Well, it's just vague enough. Well, first of all, there are magicians, like... What's the British magician Darren Brown. I've got to pee again. I forgot to pee. I'm drinking these gigantic things. I'm so non-psychic that I forgot I had to pee. That's how in touch I am with my physical reality.

This has been a really fascinating conversation, man. We could go on for hours and hours. How long was that? Almost three hours. No, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. We're five minutes away from three hours.

Well, I hope we didn't kill our audience. No, are you kidding, man? People love this shit. Look, I think your devotion to the scientific method and exploring everything is very admirable. It's very interesting and unique, and we've never had anybody on the show that breaks things down in that way before.

It's really been really cool. Follow him on Twitter, SamHarrisOrg, and check out all of his books, from Letter to a Christian Nation, was the first one that I ever read, to End of Faith, and what is the most recent one? The Moral Landscape, and Free Will is the most recent one. And Free Will is the PDF.

It's a downloadable, small... No, that's... Line was a short essay that... That's a new one. Yeah, a book is the most recent one. And Free Will is the PDF. It's a downloadable, small. No, that's Line was a short essay. That's a new one. Yeah, a book on the ethics of line. Is it SamHarris.org? Is that the best place to go to for everything? Yep. Dude, we've got to do this again, man.

We didn't even touch jujitsu. It was a real pleasure. We didn't talk about martial arts. We got all up in jihad and a little bit of drugs. It was great, man. Yeah. Awesome, awesome time. We could do this over and over again.

So, ladies and gentlemen, that's it. Follow him. Buy his stuff. Sam Harris is the fucking man. It was great, man. Yeah. Awesome, awesome time. We could do this over and over again. So, ladies and gentlemen, that's it. Follow him, buy his stuff. Sam Harris is the fucking man and the show's over. Thanks, everybody. See you soon. See you this week.

We got a lot of people coming up. Who the fuck do we got, Brian? At the Ice House? Yeah, we got Joey Diaz doing a podcast on Friday. Felicia Munch. Jason Silva's coming back on Tuesday. Aubrey Marcus is coming back next week.

Yay! We got a lot of people, too. We've got a lot of people. All right. We love you, bitches. Thanks for everything. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you.