The Joe Rogan Experience - #410 - Sam Harris

Episode Date: October 30, 2013

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape.

Tell me what's up. For folks who were just tuning in on Ustream, we just started talking about Sam Harris, the big fat Islamophobe. What is that, man? Is that because they're brown? Is that because people are trying to be super progressive? It's a very dangerous irony and double standard. It's one of the most disturbing phenomenon, I think, just to be found on the landscape now. For folks tuning in on Ustream, just to keep you up to date, we were talking about how you can make fun of Christianity

with no problems whatsoever. Make fun of Mormonism, nobody cares, but if you make fun of Islam, progressive people will call you Islamophobic. Yeah, it's a combination of very understandable fears of racism and xenophobia. So we have this, we're obviously trailing a legacy that we should be mortified by, a legacy of slavery and colonialism. And all of that is something we should have a critical distance from and not want to recapitulate in any form.

And so it's important to be mindful of that, obviously. But there's this combination of white guilt and political correctness and just sheer Stockholm syndrome in some people that has made it impossible to criticize Islam without being branded a racist. And Islam, traditional, if you're not going to buy traditional, then conservative. If you're not going to buy conservative, then extremist. There's some version of Islam that is the most odious ideology operative now. It is leading directly to the immiseration of millions of people. And the moment you try to really draw a straight line, and myriad straight lines exist between that phenomenon and the actual doctrine of Islam, the actual idea said, handed down from Muhammad,

you're accused of bigotry and you're put right next to Michelle Bachman and anyone else on the right who obviously you can't ally with in any sense. So it's very troubling because you have those whole websites and magazines like Salon and Alternet and even The Nation that just reflexively demonize anyone who has said anything about Islam, the religion, that's negative. And it's a double standard we're going to have to overcome. Salon goes hard. They go hard with the progressive silliness.

I mean, they got mad at Patton Oswald for making a joke about someone making a joke about Chinese accents. It was so stupid. It made them look so petty, pedantic and silly. It's just like, what are you guys doing? Like, there's a lot of like real issues going on in the world. There's a lot of real things to think about in this day and age. Yeah. I wrote a blog post about Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old girl who was at 15 shot by the Taliban and was up for the Nobel Prize, which she didn't win, but should have. And my blog post

was totally praiseworthy of her. I said, she's the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She should have won the Nobel Prize. She's elegant, eloquent and brave. And the headline in Salon was, Sam Harris slurs Malala. And my slur was not basically accepting her view of Islam as the canonical Islam because she's not an atheist and and they thought I was sort of co-opting her as an atheist which obviously wasn't doing so it's just it's incredibly frustrating because so many smart people or otherwise smart people are taken in by this because people really want to believe that all

religions are the same and that all religions are the same and that people everywhere are the same and want the same things. And if we just got our act together on the world stage, if we just ceased to exploit people and we ceased to be selfish and we just pulled back all the drones, everyone would behave the same way. We would have rational actors everywhere. And there's just no evidence for that. And there's just as much evidence as you could possibly want to find for the antithesis, which is there are some people who are in a death cult who are certain of paradise and very eager to get there, and there's no talking to them.

And then there's a much vaster number of people around them who support them, who are not jihadists, but who are basically aligned with them in terms of their worldview. So we have to win a war of ideas and we have to win a war and we have to be honest about it. Yeah, we certainly do. And there's this weird thing going on right now in Saudi Arabia where women are protesting the right to drive. They're all driving. And this is a big issue. And it's crazy that in 2013, and that is directly related to do. It's just amazing. If you're a woman, to get behind the wheel of a car in Saudi Arabia is a life-disorienting risk to make that kind of social protest. So if at best they're behind us by whatever, 50 years, 75 years in certain social epiphanies. So if you roll back the clock in the U.S. and look at racism, we don't really have the same analogous religious brainwashing. But if you look at racism in the U.S., what was going on in the teens and 20s and 30s

is just unthinkable now. I mean, just lynchings and newspaper editorials that were starkly racist. I mean, there are newspaper editorials, not op-eds, but actually the editorial of the New York Times and the LA Times in 1910, 1915, that read exactly like a KKK pamphlet. I mean, just mind-boggling. So at the very least, we have societies that have to catch up in their attitudes towards women and homosexuals and pluralism and atheism. And we have to facilitate that process by not caving in when free speech issues come up. So when someone draws a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad

and people start burning embassies, the move on our side can't be to apologize for cartooning and to become self-critical and masochistic about, you know, why is it that we had these cartoonists that did this terrible thing? And that's essentially what we did. And we pulled all... No magazine, with the exception of one, Free Inquiry, in the U.S. published those cartoons.

They were totally benign cartoons. You probably saw them. They're available online. But we practiced self-censorship to a degree that is just astonishing and really just harmful to this conflict, both the hot and cold conflict that we're having. It's caricature. It's like a caricature of overblown reaction that you get from someone that maybe is put in a situation where they want to always use this as an excuse for why things are. Like, it's racism, man. This is racism.

Or you just hate women. Like there's a bunch of these like, oh, you're Islamophobic. It's like, boom, they throw that on you, this wet blanket. And it's a weird thing because you call it a cult, and I agree with you, but that's a very controversial thing to say. If you say that, people get very upset with you. But the reality is somebody's in a cult okay if you got 20 different whatever how many different religions that are practiced worldwide i don't know how many how many other well probably hundreds

but just there's a handful of main ones we care about but yeah the main ones we care about okay let's just say there's only four someone's in a cult someone's lying some they have four different stories so what's going on who's telling the truth someone's in a cult someone's lying some they have four different stories so what's going on who's telling the truth someone's in a cult and no one's willing to admit that this part of course everyone believes the other people are in a cult but just the cognitive dissonance allow uh involved in picking some ancient ideology and thinking at some point in time somebody actually had a conversation with the divine wrote it down verbatim and it's perfect and it's never been touched by the hand of man or distorted it's it's weird that you get that from something like salon

and that's essentially what they're doing by calling you islamophobic yeah they're endorsing this idea that this wacky cult that makes you kill people they draw a picture of their guy women aren't allowed to drive cars suicide bombing in this day and age is like very very common and religious-based. Sure, that's the most extreme faction of that religion, and there's many people that are moderate Muslims who despise that as much as we do. But still, it's an ideology, and ideologies are real problems. Yeah. Well, the dispute is that the link that I'm drawing and that many other people draw between that behavior and the religion is being challenged. So the people who would brand me as an Islamophobe would say that this behavior has nothing to do with Islam in principle.

That, one, you have extremists in every religion and they all misbehave, or bad people will do bad things anyway, and religion is always a pretext. And that is just not true. The scary phenomenon, I think the most scary phenomenon really to be witnessed anywhere is that you can have psychologically healthy, rational, otherwise competent and capable and charismatic people who have other opportunities in life, you know, the quarterback of the football team can become a jihadist given the right ideas. And if you just admit to yourself that certain people actually believe in paradise and believe that there's a specific way to get there that entails violent defense of the faith, then it becomes totally rational to behave this way. Then you and I would be flying planes into buildings

if we actually believe this. It doesn't matter what other opportunities you have in life. And the thing that most secular liberals can't get their minds around is that people actually believe in paradise. People actually believe that a certain book was dictated by the creator of the universe, and it has provided a blueprint and a moral framework that many, many people, millions of people, believe is perfect and unchallengeable for all time. And then once you admit that, you just have to look at the blueprint. And this particular blueprint says a lot about a holy war and fighting the infidel and subjugating the infidel and killing apostates. So if you convert to Islam now on this show and then by the end of the show say, yeah, I thought better of it. I don't feel like being a Muslim anymore. I'm unconverting.

That is a crime punishable by death. And that's not extremist Islam. That's not, I was in a training camp in Afghanistan with 10,000 other lunatics, Islam. That is plain vanilla Islam. Now, you can sort of dicker around the edges of that dogma by saying- You're dead to me? No, you can't go that far, unfortunately. Not dead, but you're dead to me?

You can say, well, the person has to speak out against the faith. Oh, I see. Or repeatedly. He has to be an obnoxious apostate. But what you don't get are millions and millions of Muslims who belong to some bona fide tradition of Islam who say, oh, no, apostasy is fine. You should be free to change your mind about the faith. And we don't care if you were once a Muslim and now you've become a Hindu or you were once a Muslim and now you've become a Christian or an atheist.

That is fine with us. If that existed, well, then you could just point to that brand of Islam and say, well, go over there, guys. That's the Islam we should be encouraging. But we have to, and clearly we have to figure out some way to massage the faith into conformity with that kind of pluralism and secularism. But it's just not there. And for magazines like Salon to pretend that killing apostates has no connection to the real religion of Islam is just pure delusion,

and it's a dangerous one. It's also dangerous just to have a very strict ideology, to have a thing that not just you're supposed to do because the culture wants you to do it, but because God wants you to. That's weird. It's dumb. It's weird. It's insane. If you think that in 2013, with the kind of access to information we have,

that we really believe that someone actually wrote this stuff down from the divine, it's craziness. Christianity, whether it's Mormonism. Mormonism is hilarious. Mormonism and Scientology are my two favorites because we know the guy who made them. Right. And we know they were the con men. Well, not just con men. We know way too much about them. Yeah. I yeah I mean L Ron Hubbard was a fucking science

fiction author he made a science fiction religion I mean it's really beautiful in a way it's hilariously beautiful and someone like me who appreciates the folly of life I I can appreciate that in a big way I mean it's just it's it's like endless comedy it's just so stupid yeah yeah what is it though why do we need something but why do we need something? But why does everybody need something? But the the it's crucial that you acknowledge the difference between the various ideologies on offer, because just have just believe believing that your worldview has come from God is not necessarily a deal breaker in terms of living in a global civil society if that

worldview prescribes lots of benign things. I mean, so if you think God told you to be a vegetarian and never harm anyone and learn everything you can about science and mathematics and economics and become a really energetic contributor to civil society. If that's your religion, well, then you're never going to show up on anyone's radar as a dangerous person. It's just the main religions on offer don't have that kind of – those kinds of ideas. of those kinds of ideas. And they have first century and Iron Age platitudes and strictures that have now been canonized in these books. And there's no way to rewrite the books. You can't edit the books. People effectively edit the books by ignoring the most barbarous stuff

in there. But there's no way to say we're going to, we as Muslims or as Christians, stuff in there. But there's no way to say we're going to, we as Muslims or as Christians, are going to craft a new scripture that's in line with all that we've come to learn about the universe and follow that as though it were the word of God, because they would know they were making it up. And that's not satisfying. Christians are funny because they ignore things conveniently. Like I've met so many Christians that have Christian Bible quote tattoos. Like, did you read that thing? You're not supposed to do that. You're not even supposed to write on yourself.

You're not even supposed to use a magic marker. And here you are getting a tattoo of a Bible quote. That's like, you know, God's like, Jesus Christ, did you pay attention to what I said? Well, it's a long book. Unfortunately, the Koran is not as long a book. You can read the Koran in a weekend. It's a much shorter book. You read the Bible cover to cover, it takes you not as long a book. You can read the Koran in a weekend. It's a much shorter book. You read the Bible cover to cover, it takes you a month and a half.

But you read the Koran, it's a much more unified document. And there's not – you can't cherry pick it. You can cherry pick it a little bit, but you can't cherry pick it in quite the same way. You can't just take Jesus and half his moods the way you can as a Christian and say, well, it's all about turning the other cheek and I don't care about hell and I don't care about any of these culture war issues. You just can't – you really can't do that with Islam. And that's why this fusion of the religion and the politics is so difficult to break because it's explicit and there's just no – there's no render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's in the Quran as there is in the Bible. My favorite religion is Mormons. They're the nicest people.

Yeah. They're so sweet. Yeah. Like every time I've had a Mormon neighbor or, you know, meet Mormons, they're the nicest people. They're almost like childlike in their belief, like childlike in their approach to religion. Like my wife has a friend who's a Mormon. i went out to dinner with her and her husband and uh somewhere along the line the subject of higher power came up and she was grilling me like do you believe in a higher power and you know basically i said well i don't not believe i don't know i mean who the fuck knows

she's like you don't know if you don't know how do you sleep at night right for her like someone had to tell her so she could tuck herself in the bed. Like a little kid, like my five-year-old. Like, sweetie, God's watching over you and everything's going to be okay. Okay. Like, now I can go to sleep. For her, it was very childlike. She's a fucking 40-year-old woman. She had this childlike, narrow tunnel of thinking that she prescribed to.

Ex-Mormons are awesome because there's no group of people that are more energetic in their atheism than I've met than ex-Mormons because they're coming out of this thing that is just so obviously made up. I mean, it's like you got Joseph Smith as a dowser and a con man and just getting it on with everyone's wife and just making up the principles. He gets new revelations to appease his jealous wife. He goes into the closet and God tells him that he's got to have more hot girls. So it's just there in the floodlights of history to be inspected. And so once they get out of it and they see just that they're trailing all this nonsense, they're very fun to talk to. What is it about people that we need, or some people need that? They need that. They need an ideology. They need a framework. They need a scaffolding

to live their life on. They can't just free ball it. They can't just go, who knows, let's just figure out what we already know and apply that to wonder. They can't do that. They can't just go, who knows? Let's just figure out what we already know and apply that to wonder. They can't do that. They need an answer. Well, I wouldn't be the first to observe that death has something to do with it. This anxiety about what it all means in light of the fact that it all apparently ends is really a defense against grief. These beliefs, a belief in paradise, is really the only thing you can tell yourself or tell another person or tell your child in died. And so what are you going to say to yourself or to the people around you? What can they say to you that is just not only takes the sting out slightly, but it's just perfectly consoling, if you could believe it. It's this proposition that you're going to meet again in some perfect place and you're going to spend eternity there and be perfectly happy.

All you have to do is believe the right things in the meantime and not screw up too badly as a homosexual or whatever else is on the checklist of don'ts and you will get there and you'll be reunited with everyone you care about. And that is, there is no secular or atheist or rational alternative to that. And that's a bullet I think we just have to bite. At the graveside of a child, the atheist doesn't have something to say that says, this is not a problem. Your tears are wasted. that says, this is not a problem.

Your tears are wasted. And Christians and Muslims and Mormons and basically everyone who posits a heaven that is assured based on the right beliefs, they do have something to say that the crowd buys into. And there's no question that it relieves that suffering. Now, I think it comes with a host of other problems that even that trade-off is not worth it. I mean, even if we grant that a certain kind of suffering is relieved there, there's other kinds of suffering that spring up. People are not

learning how to grieve. They're not learning how to teach their children to grieve. They're not learning intellectual honesty. And they're mired in a way of thinking that is causing them constantly to collide with reality in unfortunate ways. They actually don't get what they want in life because they're believing things that just don't line up with how the world works. And so I think it is, if you look closely, you can see that even that, you know, the best thing, I mean, the baby in the bathwater of faith is still dysfunctional. The Mormon friend, she applied for a real estate license and didn't get it. She failed the test.

She was upset. She's like, I'm a good person. Why didn't I get it? I'm doing all the right things and I'm a good person. That's what she kept saying. It's like being around a crazy person. She just believes that if you do God's word, good things are going to happen to you. I'm a good person.

Why didn't I get this? Meanwhile, not looking at the fact that she's rich as fuck, lives in a great house, has healthy kids. There's all this wonderful stuff going on in your life. Maybe you just didn't apply yourself enough to this whole real estate thing. So it's nothing to do with God failing you. Right. Do you think that religion is something that's allowing human beings to make this jump from animals to enlightened, connected beings. It seems to me that with the connection that we're enjoying through technology,

through the internet, and through the access of information, it seems to me that we're slowly but surely dissolving all the boundaries between people and information. And we're going to have much more truth about life and death and the very origins of the universe in 100 years or 1,000 years than we had 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. And I always wonder if, like, religion is something that's allowed us to keep our shit together just long enough for some really fucking smart dudes to figure out the internet. Keep our shit together. Just, like, keep together morally give give these fucking crazy apes some sort of an excuse or a reason to live and you know so they don't just go marauding and jump off clips out of despair and give them something that that allows them to continue the work and that work being being society ultimately moving towards some sort of technological innovation zero point. You know, like everything we do, whether it's cell phones or laptops or cars, every year it's better.

No one ever goes, we're good. This cell phone I have, this Galaxy Note, no one's ever going to look at this and go, this thing's perfect. Okay, we're done. We don't ever have to make another cell phone again. We're going to continue to move forward, faster speeds, more connections, more apps, more things that they can do, holograms, time travel, whatever the fuck it's going to be. We're never going to stop. And it almost, sometimes I wonder if what religion is, is just like some sort of a scaffolding that lets us

build society on. Yeah, I actually don't view it that way. I think it's – there are people who think that religion paid evolutionary dividends because it allowed large groups of people, large groups of dimly related people, not just family but larger tribes, to cohere in a way that they couldn't otherwise. just family, but larger tribes, to cohere in a way that they couldn't otherwise. So the way to get a bunch of strangers to cohere is to put a big idol in the corner and say, you know, anyone who trespasses the god is going to be killed, and we're going to commit a sacrifice of a few kids, you know, every month or so, and keep everyone in line, And outsiders who come into our world who don't understand our taboos and our precepts are going to be easily recognizable as outsiders. And so there's a long list of things that people think religion may have given our ancestors.

That may be true. I happen to think that religion, most of what explains religion, is just more fundamental cognitive and emotional mechanisms that have nothing in principle to do with religion and which have also given us science and reason and everything else that is recognizable as human cognition. So I think the most rudimentary piece here is belief formation. You and I and every other human being who is neurologically intact has learned, comes into this world equipped to represent reality in language and to trade in those representations and to give them credence to one or another degree. So you tell me where this studio is. I believe you. It's just language, right? And the language got me here. My belief in the language got

me here. If I thought that I had transcribed the address wrong, that belief would have caused me to call you and make sure I got the address. I mean, these are all just ones and zeros in our computer at the moment. But virtually the totality of our worldview is linguistically mediated in this way. Everything is not a matter of direct sensory perception in each moment. So religion is just part of that. in each moment. So religion is just part of that. It's the set of beliefs people form for which they have very loose evidentiary criteria and which govern all these no-go areas for science. What happens after death? What is the meaning of life? What's the most important thing to live for? And I think actually reason can capture all of those conversations as well,

and it is in the process of doing it. But it really is just a matter of believing certain propositions and the rules by which we vet those beliefs when we are in conversation with one another. And the problem with faith is that it really operates as the permission people give one another to believe things strongly without evidence. And we don't give that permission in any other area of our lives. We don't give that permission in science. We don't give it in politics, insofar as we're practicing politics that anyone can tolerate. And it's that, that permission, the taboo around criticizing

that faith is something we're hopefully getting over. We're going to have to get over it because it is the reason why people oppose gay marriage. It is the reason why people want laws that make blasphemy a criminal offense. And so that's, it's just, insofar as you actually believe something, it can't help but show up in the public sphere. People think beliefs are private. They're only private if there's nothing in your life or in the environment that is calling them out. But the moment that they are relevant to your behavior, they can't help but inform your behavior insofar as you actually believe them. And that's, it's just, I mean, this is an example I gave in one of my books, but it's like a belief, a true belief in the efficacy of prayer is dangerous. If you, insofar as you really believe it, you're going to be tempted to rely on prayer.

You're going to be tempted to rely on prayer for your children. You've got these people who won't take their children to doctors because they think prayer is going to work. I mean, imagine if you had a pilot who's trying to land the plane with prayer. I mean, it's clear that,'s clear that it's a ridiculous example because we think no one would ever do that. But in some sense, people do that in situations where the stakes are just as high. And certainly everyone who's waging jihad

thinks that their belief in paradise is true. And it's the credence they give to that real, just pure language in the mind that is so dangerous. Did religion ever play an important function in society? Did it ever allow people to get past the barbarian ways and apply some sort of moral and ethical rules to society? Did it ever have any function or any positive benefit that maybe wouldn't have come about if people were just a bunch of savage tribal people? Well, yeah, you can say that it did, but I look at it from the other side. So for instance, when you say that, when you look at all the good things Christians have done under the ages of Christianity,

Christians have done under the ages of Christianity, occasionally you can point to something in the doctrine of Christianity that seems to be the operative variable. So if that doctrine were different, behavior would be different. But for the most part, what you see is just people being people, trying to get what they want out of life. They're building bridges and they're learning about disease and they're trying to develop scientific principles. And it just so happens they're all Christians doing this. And Christianity doesn't really get credit for the birth of science. It shouldn't get credit for the birth of science. It shouldn't get credit for all the bridges we built or the roads we paved. It's just there was no one else to do the job in Europe.

Everyone was a Christian. Everyone came into this world and was indoctrinated into a worldview that they got on mother's knee. And there was no other worldview on offer. So, I mean, it's just as true to say that virtually everyone who ever fought a war or saved a life or built a bridge did it in complete ignorance of Darwinian evolution, right? That doesn't mean that ignorance of Darwinian evolution was the crucial variable there or is a good thing or is something we should want to promote or something we should safeguard. It just so happens that prior to 1859, this notion of evolution was not an idea that had appeared in anyone's head. And so there was no alternative but to not know anything about evolution. Now, we could have gotten, you could draw a line from ancient Greece and give us a civilization with a very rich dialogue about ethics and about social norms that would not have needed to invoke the war

god of Abraham. I mean, like Plato could have given us the basis to think rationally about the good life and, you know, Plato and everyone like him in ancient Greece. And that is a stream of ideas that is unencumbered by this notion of maybe there's an invisible monster out in the desert who wants a human sacrifice from time to time, and maybe had a son who died for our sins. So I don't think it's actually, even if religion has seemed to do it in certain circumstances, I don't think it was actually a necessary piece. I think we are so deeply wired as social creatures to care about ethics

that ethics was going to show up anyway. So Christian ethics was not necessary. Just Christian and Jewish and Muslim ethics were not a necessary scaffold for us. But there's also examples of dehumanization of the other, really common examples, for us. But there's also examples of dehumanization of the other, you know, really common examples, the way societies are allowed to look at their enemy as not being human and commit horrible atrocities because of that. There's a ton of examples of that. Well, that's our default. Yes. Our default is the guys over in the next valley, we don't know them. So chimps have that, right? So chimps will band together in war parties and

kill other chimps who are not part of their tribe if they happen to outnumber them. And that is a behavior that clearly tribalistic, xenophobic violence is clearly something we are good at and do reflexively in a state of nature. So yeah, that's where we start. So we overcome that by extending the circle of our economic relationships, our cultural relationships, our peaceful collaboration with strangers, that's what civilization is. Civilization is a machine to get us to peacefully collaborate with strangers. And the frontal cortex of every human brain is a machine that allows for that collaboration. And if you damage that in an individual, you get a... I mean, there's many different pathologies there, but one is psychopathy. I mean, if you have the right damage to your brain, you are someone

who sees no basis for collaboration. You don't feel empathy for other people. You either don't care that you make them suffer or you actually take sadistic pleasure in making them suffer. The very basis for trust breaks down in relation to such a person. What I would argue is that there are actually cultures that are, for all intents and purposes, psychopathic, in which you can put perfectly normal individuals, people who are neurologically intact, who don't have any of the anatomical problems of psychopaths, but put them into a system of poorly aligned incentives and bad ideas, and they essentially act like psychopaths.

The guy who got on the bus and shot Malala in the head for wanting to go to school, that's essentially what happened. A Taliban gunman tried to assassinate a 15-year-old girl for the crime of wanting to get an education. Most people look at that and think, well, he must have been a psychopath or he must have been crazy. And I think the situation we're in is far more sinister than that. he very likely was a perfectly normal person and very likely a father who thought he was doing a good thing and in every other moment in his life it was probably a nice guy probably a compassionate guy probably a guy who's capable of empathy jump why would you know that well because you just have to look at the kinds of atrocities that normal people perpetrate in mass movements that are, for want of a better word, evil.

So, I mean, look at Nazi Germany. How did the Holocaust occur? It was not that there were hundreds of thousands of psychopaths eager to collaborate in the destruction of a people. There were a lot of normal people who, given the requisite ideas and the requisite incentives, and the ability, as you described, to dehumanize the other, just saw no problem. They could burn people in gas chambers by day and go home and shed a tear over Wagner at night and play with their own kids. And that disjunction morally never had to be inspected. Now, obviously, there are some people who were racked by guilt and some people who

refused to collaborate. But I mean, this is one of the scary features of the human mind. It's possible to be an otherwise good person and do horrible things in the right situation. That's not to say that there aren't psychopaths who are evil and essentially monsters, but normal people are capable of terrible things. And in the context of certain religious ideas, I think it becomes quite rational for them to perpetrate evil. I agree with you, but I don't think there's any evidence that this guy was like a normal, nice guy in everyday life. And I just don't understand why you would assume he was.

I don't want to assume that if everyone knew that she was going to school and there were so many people that knew, it would take an extreme version of that ideology in order to get on a bus and shoot a 15-year-old girl. Essentially a little kid. Well, so let me just say,

I know nothing about this particular person. Right. I'm just guessing. But I think there's no reason to believe that every member of the Taliban or every member of al-Qaeda is a psychopath or is a person who would otherwise do terrible things to innocent strangers. There's no reason to believe that, and there are many reasons to believe otherwise. And you can just look at how people get radicalized, and you don't have to round up all the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world and brainwash them and turn them loose.

They're far more functional people than that. Isn't that what we do when we train troops? Well, yeah, we do it. You can even go into a more stranger direction than that. When you look at what a surgeon has to do just to cut into a human body, a surgeon has to do just to cut into a human body. There's a kind of desensitization and a shutting down of empathy, the kind of normal circuits of empathy and compassion to do that. So you and I, in the presence of the suffering we would see in an ER, say, would probably be physiologically and emotionally really amped up because we're not used to it. And we just we can't, you know, we see someone in tears with, you know, a major wound or a broken arm and all of our empathy circuits kick in.

And we're not very useful in that circumstance. I mean, leave aside for the moment that we actually don't know what to do. Even if we did know what to do, an efflux of empathy in that moment is not especially useful. And to be a great trauma surgeon, you want to be somebody who is not distracted by the tears and the obvious signs of human suffering and who can just deal with this like a machine that has to be fixed. And there's even a point of contact between that ability, just to kind of shut out the other human stuff and deal with the machine, that is on a continuum with this cognitive, emotional gesture of dehumanizing the other and just seeing no moral implication in just blowing up bodies.

I see what you're saying. So it's essentially you're talking about a broad spectrum of possibilities of the way the mind operates. And there's some people that can learn how to shut things off. And that's what you're doing when you're a soldier. You just learn out of this is your new reality. There was an article recently where they interviewed that guy who was a soldier who got in trouble

because he was urinating on a dead insurgent. And they interviewed him. And it was really interesting because he was very honest about how he felt about the situation. He said that people have this idea of what they want out of a Marine. They want a guy who's on the commercial, who slides the sword into the holster or the scabbard and stands up straight and is wearing a perfectly trimmed suit. You don't want a guy who's going to piss on a dead guy.

But you don't get one without the other. You don't get a killer. You don't get a guy who doesn't have total disdain for the enemy and that's what develops You see your friends die you see those around you die you see these people shoot at you you develop total disdain That it's okay to kill people, but it's not okay to pee on them It's real weird, and I'm not saying that it's okay to pee on people I'm certainly not saying that's okay to kill people either But I'm saying it is weird that we get mad at one and not the other. It's almost like

there's a thing about sexuality that I always found really odd. You can't watch sex, but you can watch graphic violence. You can put a movie and if it's sex, it's everything. There's legs covering, there's angles and you don't ever see genitals except it's very brief and there's no actual intercourse. We're not allowed to show intercourse intercourse is somehow or another ridiculously taboo but we can watch people's heads explode on regular television the walking dead is just every episode is just boom slash fucking swords cut heads off and guns blow people up and we're weird yeah yeah and some of that weirdness can be laid at the feet of religion. I mean, there's obviously the conditioning we have around sexuality has

religious norms hammered into it. And yeah, it's always been strange to think that very explicit violence is just acceptable entertainment. And any kind of sexuality, whether it's objectifying or obviously romantic and imbued with love, is so charged that we have to protect people from it in very careful ways. I think the – I mean, I don't know that story about the Marine. I don't know whether that's true. I think it's close to something that must be true. What do you mean? What part is true?

Well, just whether you can't get one without the other. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Whether you need – clearly, in order to function in that mode of defending yourself and your buddies against the threat of the enemy and killing the enemy wherever you find him. That is a that's a mode in which you can't be thinking about how the enemy has kids just like you and is eager to get home to his wife. And I mean, that's just not helpful. And it's easy to see why that would start to get drummed out of you. And it's a huge problem that we can dehumanize other people. It's also a huge problem that we can be part of systems and collaborate in ways which effectively destroy other people's lives, and we don't even notice it. We don't even have the mechanism by which we would notice it.

And we don't see – we just don't see that the – there is kind of a zero-sum game here operating in the background, game here operating in the background, which we are all, we can't help but participate in, which leaves people trying to eke out their survival from trash heaps in developing nations, and you and I wondering whether we should get the iPad Air. And there's no way to really square, in a moral, ethical sense, the way we use our attention in that space. So it's like there's no clear way for me to help the person on the trash heap in wherever, Nairobi, because just cutting another check to the Red Cross or UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders, while that's a good thing to do, it's this sort of telescopic philanthropy where there's not a real connection.

It's not a real imperative. So when I get a mailing from a charity, help another person who's near starvation in East Africa, other person who's near starvation in East Africa, my failure to do it, my disinclination to do it, my sense that I've got better things to do than open this junk mail, never shows up in my mind or in my conversation with anyone else as a shocking misuse of my resources. And this is not, this is a, what I'm in a very loose way. I'm sketching a series of thought experiments that people like the philosopher Peter Singer and Peter Unger have put in really blisteringly clear ways

where what we all seem to justify to ourselves by default is living in a way where we, we, we care about our own happiness to a much, much greater degree than we could possibly justify in the presence of someone else's abject suffering. And because we're not in the presence, I mean, so if after this podcast, you and I walk out onto the sidewalk and see someone starving to death in front of us, you know, a child starving to death, we wouldn't be able to ignore it. There's just no, it's just clearly it's our responsibility to figure out, you know, we have to call the authorities, we have to get some food,

Clearly, it's our responsibility to figure out. We have to call the authorities. We have to get some food. We have to get a blanket. We have to do something. But because it's happening in another society and the only evidence of it that is being thrust in our face at this moment is an appeal by email or a letter, just hitting delete doesn't strike us as analogous to stepping over the body of a child on the sidewalk and saying it's not our problem. And really, in a global society, it is analogous.

And yet we don't have the mechanisms in place to make it friction-free for us to feel the imperative and care about suffering elsewhere. And we have to, clearly, we have to figure out how to do that as a species. Yeah, it's almost overwhelming. Well, it's not almost overwhelming. It's totally overwhelming. The sheer numbers, you look at the amount of people in Africa that have AIDS, you look at, you know, the amount of people in third world countries that are struggling to find food every day. It's the sheer numbers. When you look at india there's a billion people in india it doesn't like i think 500 million or something live in total poverty something crazy like that i mean i just made

that number up totally yeah it's probably right it's not not far off it's probably right um but that that seems like oh yeah i'm just gonna go to the fucking store i don't know i have time to do this i gotta take care of my kids i gotta go to dance class you know it's like there's at a certain point in time it it seems like it's not your responsibility there's this diffusion of responsibility that comes in large numbers that allows people to ignore a rape if there's 100 people around and not if there's one right you know they've talked about that before like people can watch people get robbed in time Square and not do anything about it because they're surrounded by other people and they're waiting for someone else to make a move.

It's okay to be a coward. But if you're alone in the woods and you saw some man beating some woman to death, you would feel compelled to try to do something. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, to segue to questions of self-defense, I think that that diffusion of responsibility idea has been oversold. self-defense. I think that diffusion of responsibility idea has been oversold because I think more of what's going on for people is they don't want to be the first one to get stabbed. In many of those situations, you've got somebody with a weapon. It's not just a guy. It's

a guy with a knife. And especially in the original case, the Kitty Genovese case, where that notion of diffusion of responsibility was coined, you had a guy with a knife stabbing a woman to death on a sidewalk over the course of many minutes, and there were many witnesses. The problem from the point of view of the herd is the first guy to rush the guy with the knife is very likely going to get stabbed and terribly injured or killed. And maybe the second guy is too. But if five people rushed him at the same time, if there was some sort of tactical intelligence in the group, very likely he could be taken down and neutralized, and maybe someone would still get hurt, but it's not going to be like one guy after the other getting a fatal stabbing. And it's just a problem we have in that people are frozen in, I mean, people freeze, and no one wants to be, I mean, we don't have the knowledge tactically among untrained people that if you all go in at once, you have a very who he is. You know, if he's got three 180-pound guys hitting him, we're going to bring him down. And, you know, obviously if we have training, that's all the more likely. But what we need in situations like that are people who are going to take responsibility for the safety of others.

You know, the innocent bystander, whether you're talking about bullying in schools among 10-year-olds or you're talking about crime in public, the fact that we're so willing to be just bystanders, that's a problem that creates a lot of suffering. Well, in this soft society that we have, our society is so soft and nice and it's the easiest society that's ever existed. There's not a lot of conflict in people's lives and new things like conflict are terrifying, especially physical conflict

with another human being who wants to hurt you. It's absolutely horrifying. I've told this story on the podcast, but I'll tell it again for you. I was watching a guy, he was at the comedy store and there was two guys arguing, and they were in the middle of the street across from the House of Blues.

And they started arguing. I don't know what happened. I just saw it in the middle of it, and they started swinging at each other. And it was a white guy and a black guy, and the white guy just went into full panic mode and was literally standing square and just flailing, closing his eyes with his open hands flailing. And then a bus pulled in front and I couldn't see him anymore.

And then as soon as the bus moved, he was unconscious. I didn't see what happened to him. That's very cinematic. Yeah, it was. It was. It really was. But I've never forgot that because I saw, I knew what it was because I've seen people fall apart before. I've seen it in much

lower levels in fights but to see it in that, the street fight, I've seen in competition, I've seen people be intimidated and not perform to their ability or be paralyzed by the moment. A lot of people don't know what to do and the shit hits the fan. We never have to. We don't have any character.

But the truth is you don't even, ten people don't really know what they have to. We don't have any character. But the truth is you don't even – 10 people don't really know what they have to do as long as they're going to all rush in at the same moment and just swarm the guy. That's a good idea on paper. Try getting 10 people together. Hey, who's with me? We're going to attack this guy. Bitch, you come after me. I'm going to stab you.

I'm not going to go near that guy. He's going to stab me. He's not going to stab us if we all go together. And then he comes running after you. I'll tell you where the rules have changed or people's intuitions have changed. It's at 30,000 feet on an airplane. That's true. And we haven't decided this. This hasn't come about from the top. This has come about organically. But I think we all have the sense that if something starts going down on an

airplane, we're all going to rush the guy. And there's just going to be no hesitation because we know how bad that can turn out. Yeah. And that is a, I think that attitude could be brought down to ground level. And so when you're talking about an active shooter situation in a movie theater, the fact that everyone is running away from the guy and he basically has as much time as he wants to just pick targets and reload, that is what makes it a circumstance of just a massacre in principle.

If everyone rushed the guy, some people would get shot, but you're not talking about a half hour with a guy stalking the halls, assassinating people. You're talking about someone who got off a few shots and then was covered with bodies. Yeah, you always wonder what you would do in that scenario everybody has listen bro they're happening to me if i see that shit i'm going after that dude but real conflict seen it many many times you know i've seen thousands of guys get beat up like real up close

you're talking about in competition yeah yeah in competition and competition. And conflict is fucking terrifying for people. I've seen plenty of people get beat up on the street too. But there's something about the potential for things to happen badly to you that are absolutely horrifying for people. Yeah, yeah. And it's not that it is rational to be the first person to run away. It's not that that's bad advice for the person. And it's probably advice that we should all take if our only concern is to avoid violence wherever it appears. And there are situations where you're going to want to do that no matter who you are. So if you're out in public with your six-year-old daughter, that's probably not the moment for you to try to be a hero.

That's the moment for you to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. And that may be true even if you're a cop. You have to rank order your priorities and do it very quickly. priorities and do it very quickly. But I just think that there's an ethic that we could have much more of in this society that could be tuned up by, I mean, it would certainly be tuned up by martial arts training in many more people, but it could just be tuned up even without the training that things are a lot worse when you give the bad guy endless freedom to move. And there are very few bad guys, even armed bad guys, who can deal with a crowd. And so when these things go down in public and you have a natural crowd,

if everyone's just running away or clinging to the exits, it's very different than if we all took the responsibility of being the first to take them down. I think that martial arts should be taught in school the same way we teach writing, the same way we teach math. I really do. I think if you wanted to avoid bullies, avoid people becoming bullies, teach people how to fight.

Teach people to compete. All that bully stuff will go away. Bulliness is mostly born out of insecurity, mostly. Born out of insecurity and born out of this desire that animals have to assert their dominance. You see it in the animal world. You see it constantly in people. It's almost like a natural reaction to try to gain some security by making others feel weak. It's a terrible answer to this conundrum of,

you know, of insecurity. I think a far better one is not being insecure, learning that the actual martial arts techniques and learning what your character is all about, learning how to do something that's really difficult, learning how to push your body when you want to quit, learning how to escape a situation that looked hopeless those things are regular lessons in a martial arts class i can't tell you how many times i've almost tapped and then gotten out of something and like whoo and then you learn you learn how to not tap you learn how to get you know and tap when you have to don't get injured but you learn how to keep calm and not freak out whereas um i've been in class before with new guys and it's really it doesn't i don't it doesn't happen very often I don't really roll with white belts very

often but I would roll them and you would feel them panicking you'd feel them going a full panic attack you could feel them like hyperventilating you know and yeah I'm always I'm the guy who's always like just chill out relax dude this is what you need to do and I'll try to talk them through it but it's a weird thing to see this this natural animal reaction simply because a person's not trained. Or I'll be in that same position with a guy who's like a blue belt or something like that, and they just stay calm. They know how to do it. They've been there, done that.

They know how to do it. And they might get tapped still, but at least they're going to do what they have to do to try their best to get out of that situation. I think that martial arts, for men especially, and I think for women too, I shouldn't even say men especially, I obviously don't know what it's like to be a woman, but I think for men, it's a critical part of developing your personality. Not because you should be fighting people, not because you should be, I think people need to do difficult things to explore their character. I think it's important for human beings. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree. I think we'd want to distinguish between or among the martial arts because I think there are martial arts that tune up the wrong part of the ego because

you're actually not ever having your skills confirmed or disconfirmed because it's all in this domain of fantasy and pantomimes of violence and just very – we have this cooperative exchange of attacks and replies to the attacks where you're not actually fighting. You're not actually poking the person in the eye and seeing what happens or getting poked in the eye. So this is sort of the cut between either the fantasy-based martial arts or the so-called realistic self-defense martial arts and something like Brazilian jiu-jitsu where you're really – you're pressure testing it 100 percent. where you're pressure testing at 100%. Now, I think there are pathologies to the sport pressure testing as well. I think you have to have a very clear view of what works in the world. You have to be an intelligent consumer of all these things.

But there is something toxic about training in an art where you're always left wondering whether it works. Yes. You know, and especially as a teenage male, the feeling that you might have something to prove and the fear of being someone who couldn't actually prove it and that whole paranoia that happens in a school where you have teachers whose skills are by definition never tested, like the black belt sensei never is going to roll with his students in these arts. I mean, all he's doing is walking around teaching his fantasy techniques. And you're never – I mean, the students wouldn't be comfortable wrestling him to the ground and sweating.

And tapping him out. So you have this hierarchy that is never – you just imagine that the guy's got mad skills, but they're never demonstrated in a way that is other than, yeah, maybe he can do some very pretty kicks, but he's not actually fighting anyone. It's very cult-like. When I was doing Taekwondo when I was a kid, it was very cult-like. I mean, we showed that it was effective against Taekwondo in training,

but they didn't take advantage of the cult. It was a very good school, and it was just about discipline. And for me, it was hugely important to have that discipline as a young man, the bowing and all that stuff. There's rules that you just don't cross. I remember when I was 15, I had a crazy girlfriend. And she used to want to do it all the time. She was crazy.

And she wanted to do it at the school because I was teaching at the time. I used to have the keys to the school. And I wouldn't. I wouldn't let her. I mean, that's the only time ever. The only rule that could have prevented you from doing that. Especially as a horny 15, 16-year-old, whatever I was. That's ridiculous.

You know, I mean, I had a locked key to a building yeah and no one was there and we could just bang it out no problem there's couches there was no problems i was like nope we can't do it here you know and i'd never had any discipline whatsoever as a young man but i remember when i started learning the taekwondo was like very. There was a lot of holes in it as a style, especially when it comes to punching. Taekwondo is all about kicking. There's benefits to that because you learn really incredible leg dexterity. Some of the best kickers ever are Taekwondo guys who eventually learn Muay Thai, kickboxing, boxing, and wrestling. There's a lot of guys in the UFC now that are super effective with those techniques. UFC now that are super effective with those techniques. But when you start training with kickboxing, you just get beat up. It's a really humbling revelation. I realized, oh, fuck,

you know, I've been wasting time. Like I'm doing something, like I had to revamp my whole style, like completely. And then I started kickboxing and then I thought, well, at least I've got, you know, that whole patched up. And then I went to a jiu-jitsu class. Yeah. And I got fucking mangled. Yeah. And I was like, oh, no, I'm helpless. At least I thought in a street fight with striking,

even if I wasn't the best kicker or puncher, I would be able to keep somebody off me. Yeah. But there's this kid that was a purple belt, this Brazilian kid, who just raped me. He just run through me just smash me every time we trained i had never had a chance and he wasn't trying to let me survive he was getting great delight he was about my age getting great delight and straying the shit out of me and

it was uh very important because i could quit oh yeah i could quit then i could have said you know what fuck this i'll just go to a kickboxing gym where I'm proficient and I look good. I'm not doing this where I just get humiliated. Anybody's watching. I look like a bitch. But I decided I want to do what he's doing. I want to be able to do that. That's incredible.

This guy just manhandled me. We're the same size. And he could do anything he wants to me. He could tap me. He was mounting me, arm bar me, triangling me. He was just running through drills on me. I was like, this is ridiculous. Yeah, it's such an astonishing epiphany.

It's probably true for anyone, but it's especially true if you've come from a background in martial arts where you think you have some skills. Did you? Yeah. What was your background? I studied with a guy as a teenager through maybe, I think I stopped when I was 22.

It's a guy whose background I never totally believed. I mean, he had real skills, and he taught something that was very analogous to Krav Maga or something. It's like a street-oriented self-defense where you're learning, you're basically taking the boxing, the striking from boxing and the kicking from Muay Thai and just a smidgen of grappling. But I basically did not know how to grapple.

But I felt like I knew a lot about how to defend myself. But I hadn't done martial arts for 20 years. And I get back into it and start doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu and got on the mat with Chris Howder. And it was like wrestling with a Martian. It was just like the rules of physics did not apply to him. He's probably 10 pounds lighter than me. He's maybe an inch shorter. And it was just this most surreal experience of making 100% effort to survive and failing every 30 seconds or minute and a half and just then being resurrected by just the sheer fact that he decided not to kill me and then doing it again.

There's nothing like gassing under that kind of pressure when you have no idea what to do and you have no idea to relax. It's like you can't relax. You can't relax. It's awesome. And Chris Howder's old school Machado black belt. He's been around for a long time. I think he was one of John Chalk or Higgins.

I don't know who he's under. Is he under Higgins? Higgins, yeah. One of Higgins' first black belts. He's got some skills. He's one of the, I think they're called the Dirty Dozen. I think the first 12 American black belts. He's one of the first 12.

That's one of the, without a doubt, one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. Yeah. When I got my black belt. No doubt. Yeah, that's awesome. It's like, wow. Whoa. And it's hard to believe.

You know, it's like, whoa. You know, when I can do that to people, that's the weirdest thing ever ever when i can do what that purple belt did to me i don't do it i'm not mean like that but that when i can just just play with somebody it's so funny yeah it's so strange it's like and then people can play with me like if i roll with jake shields or marcello garcia or eddie bravo they just maul me i mean there's no i'm doing a surviving if i roll with eddie bravo it's just survival. John Jock, same thing. Survival. Try to survive.

Try to hang on. Survival. Try to use defense. And John Jock goes easy on you. He's like, my friend, look out for your arm. You know, he jokes around with you as he's rolling with you. Right. But the technical aspect of jiu-jitsu is very overlooked to people who don't participate in it because it's weird when you're looking at it.

It's just a bunch of guys swimming around the ground like they don't understand it i remember watching the original um ufcs before i started jiu-jitsu like what is he doing i gotta understand what he's doing i didn't understand the movement so all i was seeing was the end right where i take great pride in when i do commentary explaining the various steps that a guy has to do like this is what he's got to do and this is what he's got to avoid. Like there's two things going on right now. There's a battle of position. And I've had so many people come up to me that said they started jiu-jitsu

based on listening to the commentary. They're like, I've got to learn this. This is so cool. It's so weird. And it's one of the few martial arts where the little man really can defeat the bigger, stronger man easily. And there's a lot of that fantasy martial arts that you were talking about where there's people that have the death touch and they can,

you know, you see those videos online where guys throw their hand at people and they fall to the ground. And you've got to wonder what's going on, whether the person's helping out and they're falling to the ground on purpose or whether they really believe they get zapped with some chi. But when you see a guy like hoist gracie defeat a guy like ken shamrock or defeat a guy like um like the old school dance ever yeah when he caught him in that triangle off his back he taps him i mean madness like how does this happen how is this possible

this guy's 250 fucking pounds the other guy's 170 soaking wet built like a popsicle stick and he just he just tapped that guy he He gave up. It's so technical. It's really the one martial art that actually has that whole Bruce Lee thing going on where the one small guy can defeat the large guy. It's also the one art where it has what Aikido claims it has. It really is, at least potentially, the peaceful art. It's just a negotiation. I mean, you control someone's position.

You control someone's ability to harm you. Yeah. And then you can just start talking. Like, how far do you want to take this? Exactly. And it's, I mean, in principle, all grappling is that and all joint locks added to grappling, I guess, is that. But Brazilian jiu-jitsu is, I think, if you're just going to take the off-the-shelf solution to that suite of problems where you've got two people trying to dominate one another physically

and you want to do it in a way where the violence is truly incremental, where you can turn it up as slowly as the laws of physics allow. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that. Whereas a striking-based solution is not that. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen when you punch someone in the face. You may break your hand. You may knock them out. You may knock them out and have them hit their head on the curb and die.

You may knock them out. You may knock them out and have them hit their head on the curb and die. There's a lot you can't control for, and you can't apply a punch incrementally to solve the problem. And they can hit you, too. When you're grappling with a guy, if I get a guy down and I mount him and he's a white belt, he's not choking me. It's not going to happen. But if you're swinging with some guy out in a parking lot, you could easily get knocked out. I've seen fights in the UFC where a high-level striker gets KO'd by a guy who has no business in the ring with him. It just happens.

The guy swings a punch, he connects on the jaw, and that's a wrap. There's not a lot of luck in grappling. Zero. There's zero luck, and that's what's amazing about it. No one ever says you've got a lucky triangle. You can't get a lucky triangle. That's a fucking complex move to set up. You have to cut angles.

You have to secure it. You have to make sure it's not over the foot. It's over the ankle. There's a lot of variables involved. Right. You were talking about your instructor not quite believing in him. Eddie Bravo has a great story of a guy

that he was training under before he found jiu-jitsu that was doing one of those sort of multiple art-based systems. He had like five black belts and different arts right and he told everyone he was going to china to train you know he had a great master in china that he was going to train and eddie went to the supermarket and he recognized the guy's car and so he goes inside and the guy was shopping right he was pretending he was in china he just took the week off and was just hanging out and shopping. That's awesome.

And he was going to come back and tell everybody he went to China and learned some qigong. Have you seen those videos online where they have those old masters that think that they can actually fight? Oh, yeah. No, I've posted a bunch of those on my YouTube page. They're so sad. Well, the sad one where the guy offers the challenge and then gets punched in the nose by this very ordinary-looking martial artist, that one's sad. But they're just mesmerizing to watch, the ones where there is no disconfirmation. There's just the cult in full splendor, and you just have everyone complying with this magic touch.

I mean, even at distances of 20 feet, you've got people writhing in pain and flopping around. And I don't know what explains it. I don't think it is conscious fraud on the part of most of these people. I think there's a kind of induction. There's a sort of hypnotic component to it and a suggestibility and also social pressure and self-deception and just many things get conspired to make people participate in this thing that is seemingly the most delusional thing that has ever happened. Explain it to people who have no idea what we're talking about. Okay. So you can actually – a good place to see it –

Do we have a video? Yeah. On my – if you go to my YouTube page, there's a fake martial art stream. And Sam Harris Org, O-R-G, is my YouTube page. And also I wrote a blog post, The Pleasures of Drowning, where I talk about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And in that blog post, I think it's in that blog post, I linked to one of these videos where he bills himself as some Aikido master. I can't imagine he's actually an Aikido guy. But this is the guy who is causing people to fly all over the room

at a distance of 20 feet, and then he issues this challenge, and I think it was a $5,000 challenge to any martial artist who had the courage to test his powers, and you see the challenge match where oh no, this is these guys are also awesome. These guys are amazing.

It just throws them off. So there's so many videos out there that are just priceless, and they should be impossible. Yeah. Really, this is not, because this has all the features of religion except the thing that- That's the guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's amazing.

Because this is the guy who's got a, so you see his skills. This is where his skills work. But then you see his challenge match, and he clearly did not know that he couldn't do this because otherwise he never would have issued that challenge. Right. He really believed that this was working. He thought this was working. But you can imagine, what if you open a school and for the next 30 years, everyone cooperates with you. So you've never met someone who wouldn't fall down to your magic touch.

You could see how he would believe this. I mean, he's basically run a psychological experiment on himself and brainwashed himself in the presence of all these compliant students. But anyways, challenge matches is somewhat depressing, but also it's also pretty satisfying to see a mass delusion disconfirmed that emphatically. I mean, this is what you want to see go down with religion. The problem is the religion really is tennis without the net. I mean, there's just there is no there's no disconfirmation that is so clear that the religious person is going to accept it. Whereas this guy getting repeatedly punched in the face, he has to accept that he's lost the fight. I mean, one imagines maybe he still has a school somewhere, but it's just, it's clear that his martial art doesn't work.

He gets so confused when he gets hit. you can see the look on his face. Play it through the part where he gets beat up. He gets so confused. Pull it like it's way ahead, where he looks like a Kyokushin guy who's wearing a pair of shorts. Yeah, this is the guy. Some sort of karate.

Just imagine if he got in there with... Anderson Silva. Anderson Silva, someone who really wanted to prove a point. I mean, the guy he's with here is just Joe Karate. The guy's skilled, though. And he did a really smart thing. He grabbed his gi.

He grabbed his gi and just started wailing on him in the face. He punched him three or four times, and then he kicked him in the face. And he's an old man. But also, in the other video, you see that this guy really doesn't want to hurt him. He's worried about hurting him, and so after the first blow lands...

That's it right there. That's post-first blow. Right before that, he hits him for the first time, and he stops. Right. There's another angle on this. There's a video shot from the other side where you can see... Oh, it's horrible. That kick while he's holding onto his arm.

Yeah. Oof, he can't even move. He just holds him in there and punts him in the face. Yeah, yeah. But it's amazing. I mean, this is the perfect look, the perfect window at what the human mind is capable of. So the fact that human minds can do this proves that religion can be every bit as delusional as atheists say it is, or at least the doctrines about the afterlife and all the garish stuff that we think of in terms of religion. It's so much easier to deceive yourself about that than it is to deceive yourself that you can knock 20 opponents down with your magic touch.

And yet this is possible. What's the mechanism? What's going on there? You're a neuroscientist. Tell me what's happening in a person's mind that allows them to just accept, like, hypnotism. That's real, right? It is real. There's a frontier between what's real and just what – I don't know where fraud starts and genuine demonstrations of hypnosis end. And so – but clearly some people – and there's a spectrum of suggestibility.

Some people are not hypnotizable. It's not something everyone can be, you know, the Manchurian candidate. But there's clearly a phenomenon where you can be given a – you can be inducted into a state where you're given suggestions which then are operative at the level of your behavior and emotion and about which you may have no recollection. So I think hypnosis is real. And there are other features to this. There's the social pressure and just the sunk cost. I mean, imagine devoting years of your life to something which does not work, but pays all – you have the belongingness to the group. You have all of the rituals and just the sunk cost of how much time you've spent doing this thing, whether it's religion or a fake martial art, the pressure, the emotional pressure not to realize it's bullshit can be excruciating. And when you

meet people, I mean, one of my favorite conversations with a former person of faith that I've ever had was I met someone at dinner who had lost her faith that day. Literally, I got her just fresh. Just when the thought bubble had burst, she just showed up at this dinner, and her overriding feeling was just of depression over how much time she had wasted. The sunk cost of it, because she had spent decades fixating

on this stuff, and it had completely distorted her relationships, and it had been the center of her life, and she finally admitted to herself that day that, in this case with Catholicism, that none of it was true. She had just been brainwashed. But the regret, the level of regret over the time wasted and all the things she could have done with that time and all the – it's just – that is a wall that many

people just can't clear because it's just too painful to acknowledge. It's very painful. What was the mechanism for her? What was the reason? Well, actually, she credited one of my books in that. Maybe something else had helped her along. But, no, the last thing she had been reading where she finally realized, oh, my God, I've been deceived about this, was one of my books. Hoodwinked. Was it Letters to a Christian Nation? I don't this. It was one of my books. Hoodwinked.

Was it Letters to a Christian Nation? I don't know. It was either that or The End of Faith. Lying is your new book. There's a really important thing that you bring up, and it's not on the front part of this. I read it online somewhere that you can avoid a lot of problems in your life. Yeah, yeah.

Simply by not lying. Almost all of them. Of all the ones that are avoidable, when you just look at how people screw up their lives, lying is, if it's not the reason, it's the thing that enabled the other reason. reason. It's the thing that enabled the other reason. I mean, it's people complicate their lives massively by a willingness to deceive others. And this has many features to it. One is just there are all the things you can do based on the cover that lies provide that you shouldn't be doing because they're not good for you and everyone would hate you if they knew you were doing them or your wife would leave you or whatever it is.

And so the lies create a space in which you can let your life run off the rails, whether it's becoming an addict or perpetrating financial frauds or whatever it is. But there's also this component where you don't actually – you never actually discover who you are in social space if you always leave yourself this out of line. So it's like you never discover – if you keep canceling plans with people and just tell this white lie that you're too busy or you're not feeling well.

You never have to confront the fact that these are people you actually don't want to see. You know, like you have people in your life who want to go out to dinner with you. You don't want to see them. And you're never having to confront that because you have this out that you're just going to lie, you know? And change in a person's life that I think is more important in terms of getting your life straight, your relationship straight. You're just getting into the future without screwing it up for yourself. There's no more important change than a commitment to being honest in whatever the situation is that presents itself. So you don't fake it till you make it?

That's not good? Have you ever heard that? Yeah. Fake it till you make it? Well, no. You can – No, it's not good. That I think – well, you can fake something till you make it, which is you can fake a positive attitude toward uncertainty. So you can go into a situation without any guarantee that it's going to work out or that you're going to develop the skills that you need or that people are going to like you, but have a positive attitude.

And, I mean, it's sort of a goodwill toward the future that you can develop. And that is a kind of – I mean, it's faking confidence and faking comfort maybe. But that's not lying. Lying is when you are intentionally implanting false beliefs in others when they expect the truth. So it's not – I mean so being a card magician or being a poker player, this is not lying. The deception I'm talking about is when someone has every reason to expect the truth and you are purporting to give the truth, but you everyone recognizes that some subset of deceptions are a problem. I mean, the egregious lies that, you know, the frauds that really harm people and the lies that, you know, when a pharmaceutical company says the drug works and they're lying, I mean, everyone recognizes that that's a problem.

they're lying. Everyone recognizes that that's a problem, that we've all paid a huge price for the skepticism we now have about governments and corporations because whenever we catch them in a lie, we just now for the next 10 years can't forget that these people in power often lie to us. But the lying that people... There's another set of lies that people think are actually unavoidable or good, and they're usually called white lies. And I think that – I think the price we pay for white lies is also excruciating, and it's not something that people are quick to see. Actually, I didn't see it until I went to... When I was a freshman at Stanford, I took a course with a professor who I actually interview in the back of the book, Ronald Howard, who was really a brilliant guy who started a whole academic field called decision analysis in the 60s. And it's a mechanism which allows someone to make as rational a decision as possible by putting all of their information

about a topic into essentially a calculation. It's got nothing to do with lying or honesty, but he's a professor in the engineering economic systems department at Stanford. And he, as kind of a sideline to his academic work, was teaching these courses on ethics. And one course was just on the question whether it's ever ethical to lie. And so as a freshman, I was just sort of put in the machine of this course and came out the other side convinced that in virtually any situation apart from like a self-defense situation where things have really broken down and you're not in the presence of someone who you're going to collaborate with, lying is just unacceptable. It's just not how I want to live. It's not how anyone should want to live if they look at it closely enough. And it's really one of the huge problems that we have as a race is we know how to communicate. We know how to, like when you were talking to that rabbi that we were talking about earlier,

and he has this like very eloquent and, you know, very theatrical way of communicating. And, you know, it's kind of tricky because when someone's really good at that, you want to believe that they're telling the truth. You want to believe that someone who is lying to you in a very charismatic way is telling you the truth. Until we actually can read each other's minds, there's a lot of confusion that goes on in human interaction, just bumping into each other, just not getting anything done done not figuring out what's really going on not figuring out the real relationship that you have to other people in your life you know i know people that lie constantly and they never get their shit together they just have like these little lies here and there like why didn't

you call me back oh this thing came up and it's always they just they and they're always in a mess there's just a mess and i think you're 100 100% dead on. I think that that part, the be honest part, that's one of the most critical aspects of human behavior. We make an agreement with each other. If you're going to be in my life, we're going to be friends. We have to be 100% honest with each other. And as soon as someone's not 100% honest, well then, what percentage are you honest? Is it 90? Is it 80? Is it 70? What do I got to do? I got to throw everything through a filter? It's not worth it. Yeah.

It's not worth it. And then there's the question of whether you want to have a different ethical code for your friends and for strangers. Right. And then you run into situations where the stranger suddenly is a friend, and you're now confronted with having had a different ethical code, or you discover that this person is somebody's brother and you just lied to them. It's not tenable to live this way. And what I'm interested in are the subtle ways that it erodes trust between people. Because there's one example I use in the book where a friend was out with her girlfriend and she wasn't like her best friend,

A friend was out with her girlfriend, and she wasn't like her best friend, but they were very close friends. And the girlfriend had plans later that night with another friend and didn't want to have that plan. And so this friend A watches her friend call up the third friend and lie about why she can't have plans. And she lied so convincingly and effortlessly. And it was just, you know, there's something with her kid being sick, whatever it was. And then you got off the phone and went back to the conversation with Friend A. And what Friend A experienced in that moment was just a subtle but absolutely obvious erosion of trust, like a permanent erosion of trust, but it was something that could never be rectified because they were not so close that she was going to perform

an intervention there and say, why are you lying and why do you do this and have you ever done this to me? She was just left with this vague sense that probably this woman had lied to her in the past and would lie to her in the future. And we go through life like this with people. And the people who are telling these little lies are just – so the liar in that case never knew that she had subtly degraded her friendship with the first friend. And these things just don't get discovered. And it's very toxic.

with the first friend. And these things just don't get discovered, and it's very toxic. I find also that people that lie are very difficult at seeing lies in others, or very bad, rather, at seeing lies in others. I think that people who are bullshitters can be bullshitted. People who are con artists can be conned.

There's some sort of a disconnect that people have that don't live in, especially an introspective, really objective version of themselves, like really looking hard at all their issues. If you're lying, you're not doing that. So if you're not, you know, you might have some walls up

that you might not know about and they could lead to you getting lied to. It's very possible. Right, right. To go back to the rabbi, though, I think in that case, he wasn't lying. I don't think, I think most religious people believe what they say they believe.

He's so smart, though. I kind of think that he knows. Yeah, but that's the scary thing about – so this is not – this certainly doesn't apply to Rabbi Wolpe. But this applies to the jihadist who thinks he's going to get 72 virgins in paradise. You can be smart and believe that. And that's the scary thing. You can be the engineer who could have had everything but decides to be a jihadist because he believes that the afterlife conforms to the Quran and the Hadith.

And that is a – so I don't – deception is part of the game and self-deception is part of the game. But in many cases, I think you have people who have been indoctrinated from birth or get a message from their culture that – or get emotionally hijacked in ways that allow them to believe the unbelievable. And then they're being perfectly honest when they spread those ideas. They're not frauds. And that, I think, is a different problem. Self-deception is certainly a component in many of these cases. Do you think it's possible that technology will eventually make lying obsolete? What we're seeing right now with this invasion of privacy thing with the NSA, What we're seeing right now with this invasion of privacy thing with the NSA, we're seeing it's a one-sided trip, obviously. And then you have WikiLeaks and Eric Snowden. Eric? Is that his name?

Edward. Edward Snowden are the other side, releasing, you know, scratch bits of information that they can scratch together and smuggle out. But it seems to me like that's where the trend is ultimately going. The trend is ultimately going to, you're not going to, like if you send someone a picture of your dick online, it's going to be out there. Someone's going to get that. If you send a blank, if this happens, if that happens,

it's all going to be recorded. You're going to know where you were. You have a GPS chip on your phone or your Google Glass. It knows exactly where you were. It records you all the time. I think this NSA thing is fucking terrible. I think it's terrible mostly because it's the government that has all the power in this situation. It's these people that are not using it to prevent terrorism? I guess maybe, but there's so much evidence that points to the fact they were spying on other world leaders that they didn't think were terrorists. It's essentially using it as a vehicle for control. But it brings up a fascinating new area of technology, and that is this new era that we're entering into

where everything's getting closer and closer and closer to the point where one day we're going to have this one database that we all draw from all the time. If we have the internet, we're going to have something that it's like a pair of glasses or like something that you wear inside your skin or something that's going to allow everybody to be connected all over the place. I don't know how we're going to manage it, but all that information, we're going to be able to get to it. I'm going to be able to know what you had for lunch today. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's, there's, so there's that component. There's just the sheer transparency based on having so much data. Yeah. But there's this other technological fix for deception, which is just actual lie detection. And I think that is coming. I think there's no question that at some point we are going to have lie detection that may not be perfect, but it will be valid enough and reliable enough that we will rely on it

in the way that we rely on DNA evidence. So if it was your DNA at the scene, we think you're involved. If you are caught lying as measured by this machine, we're going to think you're lying, and that's going to be forensically actionable. We're certainly not there yet, but I think that it would really surprise me if we don't get there. I wanted to talk to you about this because I had one of your colleagues on my show,

Joe Rogan Questions Everything. I can't remember her name right now. Blonde woman. Was it Pam? Pam Douglas? I believe so. I believe that was who it was. And she was talking about fMRI results and how a woman was actually convicted of a murder.

I believe it was in India because of fMRI that she had what they called functional knowledge of the crime scene. Right. Somehow or another. I think that strikes almost any neuroscientist as a premature use of the technology. And in that case, you're talking about that, I think that mode of inquiry is problematic because you're talking about just familiarity with the crime scene or with the evidence. And there are clearly other sources of familiarity. And, you know, if the dead girl is wearing a dress that you just bought out of the J.Crew catalog, you're familiar with the dress,

and I don't know that they've operationalized this in a way that will protect you from just accidentally being familiar with some features of the crime scene. To say nothing of the fact that we just cannot resolve brain function clearly enough to base those kinds of decisions on a judgment that the person is lying or not. We don't understand the neural correlates of honesty and deception enough to know. But I think it would be very surprising if we never get there. And so, again, now I'm just speculating, if it was Pam on your show, she actually took, she was a- What's her name again? Pamela? Pamela Douglas is the woman I'm thinking of. She was a graduate student in the lab I was in at UCLA. And she, after I did a- Yeah, that's her.

After I did a study of belief, where I compared belief and disbelief and uncertainty with fMRI, she came back and used all of my data to see if she could discriminate what subjects believed at the single trial level, which is on each question. What I did is I put subjects in a scanner and I gave them propositions to read that were either clearly true or clearly false or clearly undecidable and just compared belief versus disbelief versus uncertainty. And that is, if you could do that at the single trial level, you essentially have a lie detector because if you believe that you were the person who committed the crime and we have an understanding of the neural correlates of belief versus disbelief, then we could easily ask you whether you were involved in a way that would tease that out.

So she wanted to see whether we could see the difference between belief and disbelief and uncertainty at the micro level, just on the single question level. And her classifiers were over 90% accurate. So she was over 90% in guessing, essentially, whether someone believed or disbelieved a proposition. essentially whether someone was believed or disbelieved a proposition. And so it's easy to see how we would now, with available technology, have a lie detector that was 90% accurate. Now, that's not accurate enough to put people away for misstatements in court,

but if we could get it to the level of accuracy that we now rely on for DNA evidence, I think we would – it's an interesting question philosophically and experimentally how we'd ever bridge that gap and how we'd ever be truly confident that no matter what sort of histrionics and protestations, this person is lying. Though this person claims on his mother's life that he's telling the truth, the brain scan evidence says otherwise. Somehow, I feel like that is going to be harder to achieve than him saying, it's not my blood, it's not my blood, it's not my blood, but the DNA evidence says otherwise. But in principle, I don't see any reason why we couldn't

get there. And that, I think, would change things a lot. Because when you look at the price we pay for not being able to determine whether someone is lying, it is huge. I mean, it is. I mean, we were talking about there are people in prison for the rest of the people have gone to death row and been executed who we know were innocent. Not just one. Thoreau and been executed who we know were innocent. Not just one. Oh, yeah. Many.

And the most horrific, there was this one guy whose name is now escaping me, but there was a New Yorker profile on him where his house burned down and he was charged with the crime of having set the fire and killing his two kids. Now, imagine being someone whose house burned down and your two kids die in the fire and the world thinks you did it. And not only do they think you did it, they prosecute you, your defense fails, you go to death row, and you're executed for the crime of having murdered your children. Now, if we could just tell whether someone was telling the truth, that problem goes away.

Think of the implications of negotiation among leaders of countries where you don't know whether people are telling the truth. We do or do not have nuclear weapons. You don't know whether people are telling the truth. And we do or do not have nuclear weapons. You don't know whether they're telling the truth. If there was transparency at the level for all of those conversations, it would really be a game changer. Not only that, women will have to finally accept what men actually think. We could stop bullshitting. We could stop sex in the city and notebooking our way through this life.

That would be nice. We'd also have to find out what women think. It would be fucking terrible. It would be awful. Well, it would be great, but for a while it would be awful. Do you think that that ultimately is going to lead to the change that we need in world governments? Is that what the big one is going to be, the ability to discern whether or not people are telling the truth? Because it seems like just that alone would change everything. If you could see clearly motivations, you could see clearly benefits to certain actions, you could clearly see deceptive tactics based on, you know, well, you know,

really what they're trying to do is this, you know, read it out. You know, what they're actually trying to do is make money for X corporation. They're pretending that they're trying to save the country from an evil dictator. But really what they're trying to do is extract resources. Here's the clear data. Like what do we do if we have everything out on the table? What a weird world we would live in. That could be the total 100% game changer, even bigger in fact than the internet, if we could find out what everybody actually thinks.

Yeah. There are a few wrinkles to it because if you were self-deceived, if you actually believed what you were saying but what you're saying is not true, then you could sort of game the system. Right. Like a lie detector test? the neural correlates of deception, we wouldn't necessarily be able to detect someone who believed their own lies. And there may be some way to be confused enough or confabulistic enough about reality that you can just bullshit or spitball or say what you want to be true or kind of hypnotize yourself.

I mean, we just don't actually know what's true at the level of the mind's cognitive elasticity. So it's possible that you could have people who are not good subjects of lie detection in some sense, and that's something we would understand if we understood all this. But I think in the general case, That's something we would understand if we understood all this. keeping track of the things he said and is consciously calculating against the expectations of cogency and plausibility in his audience. I mean, there's a massive calculation going on, virtually all of which is conscious in

a liar. And it seems to me that that is going to be detectable with great reliability at some point. It just seems like it's inevitable. Everything progresses. Everything gets better. And that's something they're working on on a constant basis, whether it's 100 years from now or 200 years from now. But people, they'll hate this. Oh, yeah. Because the Orwellian fears of the misuse of this or the fears about the Orwellian misuse of this are pretty easy to get a hold of.

And I think people feel like there's the last and most critical loss of cognitive liberty. So if you didn't have a fundamental right to privacy that could be safeguarded by lies, something crucial to our humanity has been lost. I think many people will feel that. And it won't matter how high you pile the benefits. I mean, you talk about the guy who was in prison and killed, and he didn't kill his daughters, but we thought he did, and we killed him. And you multiply that guy by 100,000. And you talk about treaties and deceptions at the level of nation states where millions of lives

hang in the balance, there are people who are going to say, no, no, this is not acceptable. And I think they'll have a few points on their side. But I think the cost to us personally and economically and socially for consequential lives, I'm not imagining a world where we would have lie detection technology running all the time so that every time someone says, how are you?

And you say, I'm fine, but you're actually not fine and a red light's going to go off on your sweater. Turkey tester. I mean, there's not... I don't think any of us would want to live in that world,

but when the stakes are high and conversations matter, even just in court, say, the conversation is important enough and consequential enough that it has now moved into a court. And we've got lawyers on both sides. And now we've got people swearing oaths of honesty. Let's have this conversation in a framework where we know that lies will be detected. I think any sane person is going to sign up for that. Isn't that the progression, though, that's always existed?

Like, people were resisting books, you know, when books were first printed. Yeah, because it was going to erode our memory, which it probably did. But, yeah, I mean, they thought that was something crucial to our happiness would be lost by literacy. Well, there's a lot of people that also believe going online is bad. I've talked to a lot of people that take pride in not going online. I think it's hilarious. It's like, dude, you know, you're just the guy that doesn't like books. You're the same guy.

Right. You're the guy who doesn't want a cell phone. You don't want people to know where you are. You want to be free. Yeah. Those days are gone, man. Those days are gone. There's a new world going on.

By the way, if you're driving around your car, everybody knows where you are. They can find you. It's super easy. You have a GPS in there. It's very unique. If the police need to find you, they trace it. They find you instantly. You're not hiding.

There's no hiding anymore. Yeah. Although, it's interesting. I don't know. Clearly, there's some form of progress that is harmful, and you could be only dimly aware or just surely oblivious to the harms until after it's too late. And I'm not sure how, I mean, just speaking personally,

after it's too late. And I'm not sure how, I mean, just speaking personally, my own use of the internet and my use of the way in which my day gets segmented by the checking of email and just the way I can disappear online in the middle of a conversation. I think we all have to be mindful of what that's doing to us. It's a very good point. And it's, I mean, just to be on the phone with someone and also be checking your email, I mean, that's something that you can, in a very lazy way, just do more times than not. And it's a, I mean, there are now a thousand moments like that that we all confront. And if we're not aware of how it's playing with the fabric of our lives, you can just wake up one day with a very fragmented kind of attention. And

it's just a less satisfying. There's something about multitasking that is, I think, intrinsically stressful and not rewarding. But you know what the real issue is? It's not really multitasking. If you're sitting there at dinner with someone and someone's checking their phone, they're not really talking to you. No, you're just segmenting the experience.

I was at a dinner the other day, and there was four dudes, and they were all on their phone. I was like, this is the craziest shit ever. No one's talking to anybody. We're all just looking at our phones. This is bananas. Let's make an agreement. Shut these bitches off

for an hour. My kids, I don't want it. What if someone calls? Work is in the middle of a deal. Nobody wants to just detune. Vacation. Do it on vacation.

I didn't check my email for five days. It was like a big deal. You disconnected from the fucking hive. You're crazy. What do you make of this whole NSA privacy thing do you think that can be rectified it seems like when the genie's out of the bottle with something like that like once they can do that and then once they justify doing that

like you know and not all that Obama's been lying about it like and right. It's fascinating when you find out that he oversaw a lot of these decisions to spy on people. And there's a lot of things that were done during the Bush administration before him. Would that go way back to 2002? Yeah, a German chancellor confronts Obama about U.S. spying on her cell phone. Why would you spy on the German chancellor? Do you think she's a terrorist? Is she evil? Why would you spy on the German chancellor? Do you think she's a terrorist?

Is she evil? Well, no, but we have this history of espionage in which that is just clearly something you would do. One problem here is just that, and this is one of the consequences of increasing transparency, once certain facts are acknowledged, people have to respond to them. There's a, you know, I know you know, and you know that I know that you know. And now this is, now this, what was essentially an open secret has to be explicitly talked about and reacted to. And so everyone knew for decades that we would make every effort we could to spy on everyone we cared about spying on, and that is allies and enemies. And everyone did it insofar as their resources allow. And that is just what has always happened. But the moment you actually put too fine a point on it and declare Angela Merkel's cell phone has been bugged by the NSA or the CIA, that is intolerable. And it's just – it's not – it's a little bit like what would happen to us if we saw a photo of everyone we killed in war.

If it was just all transparent, what kind of wars would we actually emotionally tolerate? This might be a good thing. It might be aeless because we would find the act of waging war so unconscionable that we wouldn't do it or we'd be slow enough to do it that we would be sitting ducks. And so I don't know. I just have a big question mark there. There are cases in which true information prevents you from being able to do something that you actually would want to do and perhaps should want to do to protect people who need to be protected.

Protect people from the realities of the world that they're not necessarily aware of, that they haven't come to grips with, like that some people aren't looking for your best interest some people will shoot a 15 year old girl on a bus because she wants to read these people are real people and you're not going to change them you're not going to enlighten them instantaneously unless you know that's the next invention and until then you're gonna have to deal with the realities of the world you live in yeah so either we should have espionage or we shouldn't. Now,

a lot of people think there shouldn't be a CIA, there shouldn't be an NSA. There's something- Including JFK. Yeah. So it's just, if you're one of those people, if you think we shouldn't be spying on anyone, then obviously anything we do in that sphere is unethical and problematic. But I'm not one of those people. It's obvious that we want information that people don't want to give us. And this is information that relates to the most consequential things that could possibly happen, nuclear terrorism. I mean, we want to know if someone is trying to get loose nukes in the former Soviet Union and blow up an American city, they're not going to tell us. And if there's any

way to find out so as to interdict that process, let's call that espionage. And that's going to be a matter of tapping people's phones or watching their email. And so, you just have to imagine how you would feel if a nuke goes off in the port of Los Angeles, killing 150,000 people and making a region of Los Angeles uninhabitable for decades, if not more. decades, if not more. How would you feel if the NSA said, yeah, you know, we actually, we had the technology to detect all of those machinations that led to that catastrophe, but we decided not to use it. We decided not to use it because Glenn Greenwald made enough noise that it just became politically inconvenient for us to use it, or we were respecting the rights of people to have private evil thoughts that we weren't good.

We just didn't. It was something unsavory about reading email. We didn't want to tap anyone's cell phone. I think we would. Clearly, the price for that kind of delicacy is too high in the aftermath of that kind of event. So if you live in a world where you think that, or if you think we live in a world where those events are not only possible, but there are people waking up tomorrow morning trying to do that, then I think you want some level of very energetic eavesdropping on certain people. And then the question is just, where do you draw the line?

Can you get like a TSA pre-exemption? Like one of those things? You know how you could do TSA pre? They know you're not a terrorist. Oh, you're Sam Harris, the writer. You can just go right through. But the only way you're exempt is to invite that intrusion into your life in the first place. It's true.

So you have to be willing to part with some kind of privacy. But isn't the devil's advocate position would be that there's a reason why these people are upset at us. We're occupying holy land. We're doing terrible things. We're stealing their resources. There's a lot of things that the United States is doing that actually promotes this radical jihad thinking.

Well, to some degree, that's true. Most of that is based on their religious perception of the world in the first place. So many of these grievances are, liberals tend to describe them as political, but they're actually religious grievances. So if the Saudis invite us in to help secure the oil wells that Saddam Hussein is threatening, right? Someone like Osama bin Laden perceives that as the sacrilege of having infidel boots on the ground in the Holy Land, right? And then someone like Glenn Greenwald will describe that as a political grievance. That's a religious grievance. We were invited in by a government, in that case, to protect

oil wells. We're not stealing the oil. We're buying the oil. But isn't it a bit disingenuous? Because Saddam wasn't really a religious guy. Oh, no. He was not religious, but he was using – one, he was tamping down the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people, which the moment we removed him, it just exploded. But who gets the blame for all of that? We've got Sunni and Shia killing each other based on,

is that politics? We can call it politics, but that is religious sectarianism. No question. In that way, it can actually be argued that it was better for the people that have that ruthless dictator in power than it is to have the United States sort of loosely helping them govern themselves. I don't agree with that, obviously. I think, you know, ultimately the best thing for everybody would be some sort of a compromise. But when you look at the fact that these people are both Muslims, they just have a different sect of Muslim of Islam and they kill each other like on a regular basis, like the amount of slaughter involved. Most people don't even know that that's going on. We're not paying attention to it. It shows up on page 8 of the New York

Times sometimes. That's one thing you have to keep in mind. Whenever you hear people rail against U.S. foreign policy being the engine that's driving this global jihad and Muslim violence. You just have to look at what Muslims are doing to other Muslims in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with our overreaching, our colonialism, our stealing of resources. I mean, you can make us as bad as you want, but go to Pakistan and ask yourself, why are Sunnis blowing up Shia or Ahmadi mosques? Some guy is willing to lay down his life tomorrow

morning and become a bomb and kill 75 people, and it's got nothing to do with us. We call it politics. We're talking about, in many cases, the victimization of a religious minority that has no political power. It's not politics. It's not the Tea Party really trying to get something. This is someone waking up, you know, really trying to get something. This is someone waking up willing to die for the pleasure of killing men, women, and children. And it's to no end, apart from the imagined end, that he's going to wind up in paradise and get everyone he loves in there after they die. Do you think that it's possible to turn that around? Is there a way? Or do you think that the reason why you support the United States occupying these countries is because they're so chaotic that you need to keep an eye on them? You need to keep the area settled? I actually don't support occupation anywhere, actually.

I supported our going into Afghanistan because we had to do it. We had to strike a blow against Al-Qaeda and- Did we have to? Yeah. Did we think we had to? Oh, yeah. What is the main- Well, because you look at the consequences of our never having done it before that. There

was this slow bleed of attacks on us without any real reprisal for decades, since the early 80s. And there were hostages in Lebanon, and the Marine barracks got blown up, and the lesson drawn among the jihadists of the world was this is – the West is a paper tiger. America is a paper tiger. They're just going to run away and we can keep taking it to them. And that is a – that's not the lesson we want jihadists to draw. I think the lesson we want them to draw is that it is very dangerous to be a jihadist. And if you are desperate to get to paradise and you're going to tell all your friends and neighbors in your suicide video that you want to get to paradise, we'll help you get to paradise.

I think we have to have a policy toward jihadists, which is a policy of hot war. But I don't think we should be occupying countries to do this. I think it should be largely covert. Well, then how are we going to control the heroin? How do we control the heroin then? If we don't occupy, how are we going to be able to put a lockdown on all that Afghani sweet heroin? I think, well, we can just buy it if we want it. Do you think that that's going on? Do you think that the United States, like some secret factions in the United States, have some sort of involvement in profiteering off of drug use? I have no idea.

Did you ever see – I'm sorry. No, I mean it's totally – it's possible. It's not something I've thought about. It just seems like most things are for sale. I mean certainly heroin is for sale. What is the margin for stealing it and fighting a war to steal it? Clearly, if we had ulterior profit-seeking motives in any of these wars, they didn't pan out. These mean, these wars are so much more costly than anything else we could have gotten from them. But I think the lesson I draw from these wars is that there is a consequence to having boots on the ground, and it's a bad one, which is there's this perception that we, based on our own desire for conflict and conquest, are at war with the Muslim world.

There's a perception in the Muslim world, some of it is fraudulent and they don't really believe this. Some of it is genuinely believed by many, many millions of people that the West is just trying to conquer the Muslim world and destroy the one true religion, that's not a perception that we can just keep humming for a century. We have to deflate that. And one way to deflate it is to treat this all like a, in some sense like a crime problem, like a crime problem, but a crime problem that is going to be remedied with covert acts of violence. So, you know, I think we should assassinate jihadists. And we shouldn't make a big thing about doing this.

We shouldn't own it every time it happens. You shouldn't own it every time it happens. It just should become clear in 100 countries that if you're a jihadist who opens – sets up shop as the jihadist who's now going to install the global caliphate and kill infidels, your life just got very dangerous. But the end game for us and for a global civilization is to get moderate Muslims to do that job. The moderate Muslims have to realize that they need to win a civil war with not jihadists think that jihadism is not their problem or they're just scared of their own extremists, there's going to be no one else to prosecute this war. And there's something intrinsically inflammatory about us doing this job,

not only in the minds of jihadists, but in the minds of normal Muslims who would never think of waging jihad, but they just find it intolerable to see Western guys sitting in office parks in Vegas flying drones over Pakistan, which are pretty precise and they kill a lot of bad people, but they also kill some innocent bystanders. You don't have to be someone who was going to be a jihadist to find that objectionable if you are a devout Muslim who just feels- Or if you're a person with conscience. No, but there's a religious solidarity that is working against us, which the only remedy for which I think is to have moderate Muslims, wherever they can be found, to rise up and own this thing. Muslims find Al-Qaeda and the Taliban every bit as inimical to their hopes for this world as we do, it's an untenable situation. We can't keep doing this.

I want to go back to what you said about the war being so expensive in the first place that it wouldn't be a war for selling drugs for profit. I'm not saying that it's entirely involved or that it's based on selling drugs for profit, I'm not saying that it's entirely involved or it's based on selling drugs for profit, but there's no denying that the heroin production has increased radically since NATO opulence. Excuse me. I have a cold, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know if you can tell. NATO occupation. I mean, there's an article here that says it's 40 times higher production of heroin since NATO occupied. Well, part of that could be. Again, this is not something I know anything about,

but clearly there are other explanations for that. One is just that you have people who have no other livelihood but to grow crops, and the most valuable crop they can grow is heroin. That's true. So what are they going to do? It's like they're just coming out of the Civil War obviously isn't over, valuable crop they can grow is heroin. That's true. So what are they going to do? They're just coming out of the Civil War, obviously isn't over, but they came out of a period of just wall-to-wall violence,

and we dumped billions and billions of dollars in there. We paved a few roads, and now if you're an Afghani farmer, what are you going to grow? It seems like that would be the right choice. Tomatoes? We've got the buyers on our side. That's the problem. Right, but isn't also the problem when they have United States Army troops guarding poppy fields. There's a video of it, Geraldo Rivera interviewing. I mean, it's clearly that there's some military involvement,

the United States military involved in the heroin production in Afghanistan. It's pretty transparent. And the idea is that they're saying that the reason why they do it is because they need to help these people grow their crops so that they'll ride on the Taliban. Yeah. Well, which is a perfectly reasonable explanation for me. So you just tell me that there are Marines guarding a poppy field. There are many interpretations of that, but one is just what you gave. They have to win hearts and minds. They have to figure out some way to get the non-radicalized people to rat out the very scary radicalized people who may come to kill them. And how are we going to... Item number one in engineering that cooperation can't be,

let's force all these people to destroy the most profitable crop they could grow because of our drug laws. That's an interesting way of looking at it. The unfortunate thing for me though is that there's a ton of evidence that the United States government has been involved in drug smuggling. There was a CIA jet that had been to Guantanamo Bay twice that crashed with several tons of cocaine in Mexico. Pull that up. It's kind of hilarious. You see this jet and inside of it is just stacked with cocaine. I think obviously this is probably

not the entire organization, but there's some factions that are profiting off of it. They have forever. There's a guy named Barry Sealale who was involved in, back during the Pablo Escobar days, he was, according to him, he was selling drugs for the CIA. There's also what happened with Freeway Ricky and the whole Oliver North Contras in Nicaragua situation. The United States was clearly involved in drug trafficking to promote a hidden war. This is the plane, trafficking, to promote a hidden war. This is the plane crashed with several tons of cocaine. Look at all that cocaine.

That's hilarious. And that's a jet that had been to Guantanamo Bay twice. I mean, I don't want to go too far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole with you, but you have to take that into consideration that there's a lot of evidence that some fuckery is afoot and has been for a long time, whether it was in Southeast Asia, heroin in the Vietnam War, or whether it's this right now. There's something. And when you say that it costs so much money anyway, but to who? It doesn't cost so much money to Halliburton. It doesn't cost so much money to all these different things that they're doing over there.

We're not talking about what's profitable or not profitable for the United States taxpayer. We're talking about the people that are actually controlling the game in the first place. Yeah, but that's the issue. controlling the game in the first place. Yeah, but that's the issue. Is there someone controlling the game, and are their interests aligned enough so that they really have control over it? And that, I think, is, in most cases,

I'm not saying that people never conspire or that it's not possible to have a sufficient number of people in power who have selfish and short-sighted interests that can get them to do terrible things on the world stage. That clearly could happen, at least in principle. But for the most part, there's just people's interests are not aligned all that well. Halliburton is not that powerful so that it could decide to launch a war. And one way you can see this, or one thing I would get you to reflect on,

is you take someone like President Obama. When he was Senator Obama, he was against the Iraq War. Allegedly. Yeah, but he spoke on this point. He was certainly a critic. It means nothing if you base it on what he's told us since he's got an office and what turns out to be true. Yeah, but I'm asking how you account for that transformation in him. So he's someone who was a critic of the former administration. Before he was elected, if you had asked him, what do you think about Bush and what do you think

about Cheney and what do you think about Rumsfeld and all the stuff they did. War profiteers. He would have a, and all this came, I'm not just speculating, he said many of these things, but he had a very clear critique based on liberal principles that almost any liberal who was enthusiastic about his election would recognize that the Iraq war was unnecessary. We went in there on false pretenses. This was a terrible idea. The consequences, now there's a mess that has to be cleaned up. But now he's become, to the eyes of many liberals, just a neocon shill, someone who's more secretive and more agile in his prosecution of a covert war than Bush and Cheney ever were. How do you explain that transformation?

Is he someone who was always that way and was just lying, but lying for some reason that doesn't make much political sense? Or is there some nefarious process, some star chamber where the people who are really in power got to him and scared him? Like he's President of the United States, but he had a meeting with Halliburton and a bunch of powerful guys, some billionaires who scared him straight and now he's just doing their bidding? You don't believe that's possible?

No, I don't think that's possible. But or, and this is obviously the interpretation I favor, or are the facts of the world so scary and is governance so messy and is it so fucking hard to get anything done that this process of apparent transformation just happens? You know, so he got in office. He's a senator who's not really privy to all the facts. So he got in office. He's a senator who's not really privy to all the facts. Now he's president who every morning wakes up and is told the scariest intelligence we've got.

What does that do to you? And how eager does that make you to make sure that a terrorist incident of an order of magnitude larger than September 11th doesn't happen on your watch. I mean, imagine having the responsibility to protect whole cities from massive acts of terror. Just how squeamish are you going to be about bugging people's cell phones? I think it's very easy to see that through no evil hand behind the scenes, you could have somebody like Obama, who was a genuine liberal. He's not as far left as many people want him to be,

but there's no reason to doubt that he objected to the Iraq War, and he's basically a straight-down-the-middle-of-the-fairway liberal who's now essentially functioning like a neocon. I think the details have to be terrifying. And I think it's just an immense responsibility. I don't think it's either or. I think it's very possible that both things are going on. It's very possible that there are people that are absolutely profiting and want to get involved in wars for profit. And I think also the world is scary. And I think also the world is scary,

and I think it's easy to convince a guy like Obama. I don't doubt that Halliburton sees an upside to a war because they make all the stuff and they provide the services. So, yeah, the next war is part of their business plan. But the question is, how much power does any one person have? For every billionaire like the Koch brothers who's twirling his mustache and doing the nefarious right-wing thing, there are billionaires who do not align with them politically who can do the left-wing thing. Right, but that's just a microcosm of human beings in general. There's evil people and there's nice people. That doesn't necessarily preclude the idea that someone not just profits off war but engineers war for profit. It seems if you're talking about something like billions and billions of dollars, and you can justify to yourself this is inevitable anyway because these people are cave people. They're going to fuck up. Look what they do to women. Look what they do to their people. Look what they do to each other. Look what they do to fellow Muslims. Look what they do to their people.

Look what they do to each other. Look what they do to fellow Muslims. You're also maybe not making the best humanitarian choices because you're making choices based on profit. And the profit is absolutely enormous. I mean, it's massive. And there's pretty clear evidence the United States basically lied to get into the Iraq War. I mean, I know that there was a lot of people that genuinely believed that there was something going on in Iraq and genuinely believe that Saddam Hussein was a threat. There's also people that believe it was a whole lot of fuckery, including Colin Powell.

Well, when Colin Powell delivered that presentation at the UN, virtually everyone, with a few exceptions, virtually everyone believed that that was true. It was uncontroversial. The premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was uncontroversial. And all the people who were against our going in there were against it for reasons that did not entail doubting whether there were weapons of mass destruction. There were other reasons not to go in there. It was a hornet's nest. It was a quagmire. What specifically are the weapons of mass destruction that would motivate us going there and not going into North Korea? Oh, right.

So it's, well, because of the ambience. There's no money in North Korea. Well, no, there's that. But no, because he didn't have nukes. He was trying to get nukes, or we thought he was trying to get nukes. So we could deal with a chemical weapons attack. You give everyone a gas mask and a hazmat suit, and we can still fight a war. Nukes change the game, and that's one reason why Pakistan is so terrifying.

So you don't open yourself up to the possibility of conspiracy? No, I do. I just know that this is an adage. I don't know where it comes from, but never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. Or the tragedy of wasted opportunity. The idea that just because a tragedy gets capitalized on doesn't mean that the people who capitalize on it cause the tragedy, but that's a standard operational procedure for warriors to find something wrong and say, look, this is what

happened. We got attacked. We're going into Iraq. Right, right. Yeah, I see in every conspiracy. And again, I'm not doubting whether anyone ever conspires. It's just that there are so many constraints on people doing what they want, especially when they're nefarious things. The constraints largely being everyone else's opposing wants, that it's hard for people to bring these big plans off. But isn't that your argument for eavesdropping on people in the first place, that they're

planning big plans? Somebody said this. I forget who it was. I think somebody said it on the podcast. But it's a different scale of conspiracy. I mean, so you look at the 19 hijackers. Okay. It's just 19 guys with box cutters.

Yeah, but it's a big organization. I mean, that's not just 19 guys. Those guys planned it out. They had help. They learned how to fly. They pulled it off. Someone said this. But it's not launching a war.

It's not, you know, half a million guys and tanks. Right, because it's 19 guys and not Halliburton, not a multi-billion dollar operation that the CEO, the former CEO just happens to be the vice president of the United States and gets multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to go and rebuild shit we blow up. I mean, it's pretty connect the dots. If you wanted to argue for a war for profit, that's about as cut and dry as it ever gets. Someone said on the podcast, I forget who it was. I don't know who it was.

Maybe I read it online. Someone said, do you believe in 9-11? Ask people if they believe in conspiracies. Do you believe in 9-11? What do you mean? Do you believe 9-11 was done as a conspiracy by the government? No. Do you believe it happened? And everyone says yes. Well, then you believe in conspiracies because it was a conspiracy. Someone conspired to fly planes into buildings and whether or not the United States government was involved or whether or not it was these 19 guys from Saudi Arabia, they pulled that off. Conspiracies exist. But something like 35% of Americans believe that the U.S. had some hand in that conspiracy.

Is it really that high? That we let it happen. And 16% think that we engineered it. I hate those things, though. So that we demoed the buildings, that someone in the dead of night had to fill the Twin Towers with thermite, and that we hit the plunger at the right moment just after the planes went in,

or maybe they weren't even planes, maybe they were holograms. And once you get deep into the 9-11 conspiracy, you get the CIA faking voices of all the passengers on the flight, explaining the answering machine messages of the relatives of the dead passengers by CIA voice faking technology. And it's just completely insane. saying, and the problem with it is it's totally unconstrained by any overall explanation or plausible hypothesis about what could have happened. What it is, is you look at every

anomaly, any event you could possibly describe, it's going to have a million what looked like coincidences in it, and which if you tried to engineer beforehand, would seem like the odds against them were astronomical. But in the aftermath, something had to happen. So it's like people sold stock in American Airlines that day, right? So how is it that you sold your stock in American Airlines the day before an American Airlines jet flew into a building? That's fishy. Well, the real problem is you find other people buy and sell those stocks every day. So there are an uncountable number of things like that.

like that. But if you're only looking for anomalies and you're not constrained by any overall thesis, you can find them in any situation. But just be honest about what this picture of reality actually is. This is the most diabolical plot in human history that entailed thousands of conspirators, and none of them have cracked. No one woke up feeling so guilty that they had to tell their story to 60 Minutes. And yet this whole thing was designed to leave George Bush reading My Pet Goat at the moment it all kicked off. It's the marriage of perfectly competent diabolical intelligence with the most inept. So all these people conspired perfectly, and yet the Iraq War was launched as ineptly as it could possibly have been. Well, I certainly don't believe that the United States was involved in conspiring. I think there's some question that maybe some people might have known about it. The real issue comes when you find out about actual real false flags,

actual real false flag events that the United States has engineered, that they've pulled off, that they haven't pulled off, that they were planning, that they didn't go through. The real problem is that that's a genuine ideology. That's a genuine thought process. The idea of, look, we have to make this happen. This is what we're going to do. We're going to blow up a ship. We're going to blow up a jet airliner and blame it on the Cubans. The operation's northwards. Right. So if you wanted to run a false flag operation and get us into a

war with Iraq under false pretenses. So we've got a no-fly zone over Iraq for years that we've been policing with our F-16s. You just shoot down one of our planes, and then you tell the world that Iraq, though we told them they couldn't shoot at us, shot down one of our planes. This is an act of war. We're going in. That would have been totally justifiable. What you don't do is send mostly Saudis to come kill 3,000 of the most connected people on Earth and destroy our economy. We're in agreement. I don't think that the United States engineered it. Not in any way, shape, or form.

I know some people do in a percentage. Many, many people do, yeah. But you know what? 46% of Americans think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. And the problem with those polls are, those are 100% idiots that answer the polls. Who fucking answers polls? I don't answer a poll. Nobody I know answers polls.

People call you up randomly in the middle of the day and ask you to answer a poll, most likely you're busy. Most likely you're going to hang up. The amount of people that actually answer polls, I don't think they represent the real population of the United States. So when you say it's 13%, it's 13% of the people that you polled. Right, but there are ways of correcting for that. So, for instance, you could just poll college students. You could literally be in a poli-sci class and ask people who got into college and are attending college. That would be an elite sample, but you get weird opinions even among elite samples.

Well, that number, the 46% of Americans believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, that's a real one. That's a Gallup poll. That alone throws polls like, oh, 13% think the United States engineered 9-11. Okay. That's nothing compared to the idea that the Earth is 10,000 years old. The amount of evidence that the Earth is more than 10,000 years old is staggering. And yet a way higher percentage believe in that than believe in – But that's because it's a religious doctrine, of course.

And that has been stable. Isn't conspiracies – aren't they religious? Isn't a belief that the government engineered 9-11 or isn't a million different conspiracies – don't they have sort of a religious aspect to them? The pure belief, the confirmation bias, the ignoring anything contradictory. People want to have an answer for sure, definitely. Whether it's pro or con,

there's that real thing that people want to wrap something up tight with a bow. Either the government is full of evil criminals that are trying to kill your baby, or it's all just a part of life and the real issue is there's boogeymen out there. Yeah, yeah. I think there is. It hijacks some of the same features of the human mind or of certain human minds because

many people are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure. They're very not knowing why something happened is destabilizing to people to different degrees. destabilizing to people to different degrees. And whereas one person can just feel no emotional cost to living with the mystery of why something happened or freely admitting whether they have no idea or merely having a hunch, other people crave certainty. And there are other features to it. So people have an intuition that something huge couldn't have been kicked off by something trivial. So if something huge happened, if this thing, this 3,000 people dead and the biggest buildings coming down and the world in chaos, that couldn't have been just 19 guys with box cutters. That had to be the cause had to be bigger. And that, I think, is an intuition that some people have more than others.

And it's a faulty intuition. But some people have certain schemas through which they view human events which make conspiracy thinking very plausible. conspiracy thinking very plausible. And you'll notice that, and there's been actually research done on this, that if you're someone who believes one conspiracy theory, you're very likely to be someone who believes all of them. You're someone who's read the JFK books and who's read the Roswell incident. I mean, you're talking about extraterrestrials and CIA misadventures in many places. There's a whole esoteric literature out there that I'm not so familiar with, but I know that people who go down one rabbit hole tend to go down many of the others. And it's kind of a personal – it's a personality type that I think you can become – I tried to – it's actually – it's interesting.

So you mentioned – you asked me what I thought about the NSA thing. And to some degree, my perception of this news event has been polluted by my relationship with Glenn Greenwald, who – You don't like that guy. No, no. relationship with Glenn Greenwald, who- You don't like that guy. No, no. But I actually started, it was interesting as I started out liking him, not liking him in that I aligned with all of his views or even many of his views, but we had a brief personal exchange by email where he actually did me a favor, which was great and actually links up with this conspiracy thing. So I have someone in my life who is very close to me who is a 9-11 conspiracy.

Very close to you? Yeah. Someone's dad or something? A member of my family and a very bright guy who is a 9-11 conspiracy guy. And so I fought with him about this now for years. So like every six months, it blows up and we'll have the two-hour email exchange. And I've tried to debunk this. And one idea I had about how to debunk it is I noticed that he had a few liberal writers who he really admired.

And Glenn Greenwald was the top of the list. And I knew that Glenn Greenwald couldn't be a 9-11 conspiracy guy. So I reached out to Glenn. I'd never met Glenn. And I said, will you do me a favor and just tell me in a short little essay, why you don't believe any of this stuff? Why is it that you seem to align with a lot of these concerns, the overreach of power and NSA wiretapping? And why is someone in your position not at all attracted by this 9-11 truth nonsense? And he wrote the perfect email. And I told him why I needed this. I mean, it's basically an intervention for a family member. He wrote the perfect email, which was

just crazy enough to give him perfect credibility. I mean, he was like grateful for the 9-11 truth people, and it was a perfect email. And I imagined that I was going to send this into my relative's brain, and he was going to have the epiphany that I was expecting, which was here's someone he trusts as an authority on all of these points, and this is why this guy who's got much more time to look at this than my relative does, this is why he won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. And it did not have that effect at all.

All he wanted to do was to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald to show him all this- To educate him? Yeah, to educate him, show him all the stuff that he hadn't seen, right? Yeah. So anyway, but I started in this place with Glenn, feeling very positive toward him, and then he just basically, in a very unethical way, misrepresented my views in a series of articles. And when I called him on it privately, he just doubled down. Basically, he just said, fuck you.

Even if you don't think this is what you were saying, this is what I think you were saying. Oh, wow. And- What was his argument? What was his point? What was he trying to paint? But even if you don't think this is what you were saying, this is what I think you were saying. Oh, wow. What was his argument? What was his point? Like what was he trying to paint? Well, it was this whole Islamophobia business. He basically branded me a racist who hates Muslims and there's an animus against people.

I'm not talking about ideas. Just by you asking him to write something? No, no, no. This was unrelated. This is why I – this is why the NSA thing sort of hit me in the wrong part of my brain. Because when Glenn was the quarterback for the Snowden revelations, basically I saw a guy who was just blogging in his underpants in Brazil with his 10 dogs and his boyfriend who was handed this story, which is in fact true. I mean, he's not this great investigative journalist who found this. He was based on his ideological bias and his track record was someone who Snowden liked and thought would be a very sympathetic ear for this story. And he just handed him the story. I mean, so tomorrow night, someone could email you the next big decade's shaking story

based on your interests and how they align with his. And that wouldn't make you the greatest investigative journalist. So anyway, so Greenwald was someone who really was not functioning like a journalist. And he certainly does not have

the principles of honesty and fact-checking and admitting when he got something wrong that most journalists have drummed into them. So I find him a very unreliable witness. Have you spoken to him in person? Well, we have a long exchange. But email, just email.

I fucking hate email. I mean, I love it, but I hate it for clarifying something as important as this. Yeah, no, it's true. But I hate it for clarifying something as important as this. Yeah, no, it's true. And this is another way technology is screwing us up because we're able to – things run off the rails when you're writing in a way that they wouldn't face-to-face. Yeah, like a blog about someone. You could write some horrible things.

Whereas if you were sitting in front of that person talking to them and you said that, they'd be like, well, I don't think that. No, you've misinterpreted my position. I think this and I respect your – and then you could have a nice exchange and someone can just spew out their nonsense in a blog with no one checking them. And then it gets really squirrely when you're allowed to do that unchecked with no social cues. And that's what he did, but he considers it a virtue. He said this in the New York Times when he was just becoming famous for the Snowden story.

They asked him about his approach to journalism. He said that he approaches it as a litigator. He assumes people are lying and then he goes and tries to prove that they're lying. So interpersonally, this is a highly dysfunctional and obnoxious way to be. And so when I'm representing my ideas, he's assuming I'm lying, and he goes to try to prove that I'm lying. And then he quote mines or he gets readers to quote mine my work where he can pull sentences out of context, which seem – out of context, I can see how someone would see it as an inflammatory thing to say about Islam. But I have not been, it's impossible to catch me saying something extreme about Islam that I didn't mean to say. Everything I've ever said about Islam is incredibly well thought out. I know exactly what I think. And it has absolutely no logical relationship to racism because everything I say applies every bit as

much to John Walker Lind or Adam Gadon or any white guy who woke up in Marin or Orange County and decided to join the jihad. In fact, it applies even more to them because they weren't indoctrinated from birth by any kind of Middle Eastern cultural upbringing. from birth by any kind of Middle Eastern cultural upbringing. And so I view Greenwald as just the least scrupulous and among the most consequential people who have been just flogging this Islamophobia thing. And it's been very ugly. And so insofar as the NSA story has been his story, I've had to do a lot of parsing of what's said because his intuitions about what is important and factual,

I just fundamentally don't trust. Because of his philosophy on... And just how he operates. But that's not to say that the Edward Snowden story isn't a huge story. It's absolutely huge. How do you... I think it is, too. So for you, it's just a very bittersweet thing because you don't like that guy personally. But also, I'm uncertain about where the line is between facts we

genuinely want to know and a public service rendered by journalists and whistleblowers who leak those facts and treason that is really consequential that we should have laws against and prosecute people for. And I don't know where Snowden falls on that continuum. I'm just agnostic as to what... I mean, 10 years from now, are we going to think he was a hero or someone who did our country more harm than anyone in the last 100 years? I don't know the answer to that question. I really think he's the guy who got the ball rolling. I think that's what it is. I

think he let people know what was going on behind the scenes for quite a long time, and I think that's good. It's lying. It's what you were talking about in your book. It's lying. The government lies, and we caught them on a lie, and now we know. It's not a lie. Well, it's not a lie if the NSA, if the job of the NSA is to spy on people. But everybody? Well, no, I don't know where, so...

The government lied. I mean, no question Obama lied about what was going on. Yeah, there's this larger question about what do you want the NSA to do? What do you want our intelligence organizations to do? That is – I don't feel like I'm – I mean, if given a menu of things to check off, you and I may check different boxes in what we want them to do. different boxes in what we want them to do. And frankly, I don't know where I draw the line on some of these questions because I'm just a conversation away from someone who has more information than me about top secret information from being convinced that, oh yeah, we really do

want that information. Yeah, yeah. I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where nukes are going off in our cities. So, yeah, if you're telling me that tapping that phone or reading all email, if only retrospectively, is a way to stop that and here's why, here's why you think that, I could be sold on all of these points. There's nothing about my email that I feel like needs to be private if you keep raising the stakes on the side of arguing why it shouldn't be private. But isn't the argument always that the United States has shown a long history of deception? When you put this into your box, where do you put false flags? Where do you put those? Well, yeah.

So the consequence of having a government that lies on issues like that- Over and over and over and over again since the beginning of time. No, it's the most toxic thing. Right. But you're giving them opportunity to have ultimate power. I talk about this briefly in my book, about espionage being something that if you grant that undercover operations are sometimes necessary, then what you're saying is there is some space in which otherwise good and ethical people are going to need to lie. Now, the way I think about that is I think that is necessary. I think it is someone – it is a life that I don't want. I couldn't be – I couldn't work for the NSA.

But it's an unfortunate fact in the world we live in. Yeah, yeah. So I couldn't be the guy who comes home to his wife and lies about what he did all day because that's part of the career. I don't want to be that person. I view it as a kind of moral self-immolation where you just – you have to take a hit for the team in this spectacular way in order to function in that space. But I think it's probably necessary. But within that frame, it's not actually deceptive. If the NSA says, listen, we're going to suck up a ton of data and we're going to abide by laws. We're not going to imprison you for

growing pot based on having sucked this data up, but we're looking for jihadists. That's something I can sign on to. And we may want to read the fine print there, but I was never under the illusion that the NSA was doing anything other than that. So that's not a surprise to me. And I don't think it's a surprise to anyone. And so, and keeping, lying and keeping secrets are different things. We need people to keep secrets. We need, and you can honestly keep a secret. The president could say, I can't tell you that. That's top secret. Our national security depends on my not telling you that.

That's an honest statement. If I ask you how much money you have in your bank account, tell me, tell our listeners now, you can say, I don't want to say. That's an honest statement. When you talked earlier about your friend, the story about the woman who lied in front of her friend and immediately damaged the relationship. Right. Why would you ever, knowing that the government has planned and possibly executed false flags, why would you ever give them the benefit of the doubt? Well, again, this comes to the larger question of human nature.

So, like, what do you think is going on in the world? The larger question of human nature. What do you think is going on in the world? Do you think that most people most of the time are psychopaths or ruthlessly mercenary and out to just screw everyone? Or do you think those are the anomalies? And what do you think of government? anomalies? And what do you think of government? Do you think government is so corrupting of otherwise good people that they're just going to run riot with their power all the time and everywhere? Or do you think basically it's a lot of good people inefficiently trying to get stuff done that we need done? And if you're on the, I think, the more realistic side of those questions, I think you have to admit

that it's, for the most part, they're people just like us in a vast bureaucracy trying to get stuff done. And their influence, I mean, there's so many competing interests that the bad people don't have as much power as you fear they have. And the good people don't have as much power as you fear they have, and the good people don't have as much power as you want them to have. And so to conspire to just grab all the strings of the military and wage a war on false pretenses or divert our fighter jets so that this hijacked plane can fly into the World Trade Center. How many people in the Air Force had to conspire to decide to run war games elsewhere so that we wouldn't be able to respond? I mean, then what you're attributing to people are conscious motives to kill massive numbers of innocent people that I think just could not form in the minds of most people most

of the time. Well, if that's the case then, how did false flags ever get planned out? How was the Northwoods document ever signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy? When they were planning on arming Cuban friendlies and bombing Guantanamo Bay, where they were going to have a drone jetliner, they were going to have a jet and blow it up, and they were going to blame it on the Cubans. They were going to kill Americans. They were going to kill Americans in Guantanamo Bay. How could that possibly fall into what you're saying?

Well, no, there are... I mean, but we do this all... We kill Americans all the time. Right, but like that? Well, no, no. Like us pull the trigger in order to... How could you possibly justify... That's the only way to do it? The only way to do it is to have a false flag event where we kill Americans and lie and blame none of the people. I mean, that goes against the very doctrine of the lying book. That goes against the very idea that human interaction should be at all times honest, especially at the highest levels of government. It should in fact be even more important. No, I'm not saying it's a good thing.

And I'm saying the consequence of finding out that one such event has occurred. Not just one. There's been many. No, but the consequence of even one is this very conversation. Right. These very doubts in the minds of millions of people. But wouldn't you assume when there's been several that it's probably a method of operating, that that's how they do it? If you find out about the Gulf of Tonkin, you find out what Bush and Cheney were planning on Iran before they left office, or allegedly, what do I know? When you find out about the Northwoods document, where do you put all that? That's clear. That's people that are on our side killing our people

in order to get us into a war where we kill other people and profit like crazy. It seems pretty cut and dry. And I think there might be, I mean, looking at it the way you're looking at it, I see what you're saying, but not with all the evidence, not with all the evidence that it's actually happened. I see what you're saying. If there wasn't any evidence, if it was just 9-11 and everybody was using that as an example, I agree with you. I think it's probably most likely a series of coincidences. And most likely we just had lax security and most likely 19 people planned this out and pulled it off. However, when you look at the Gulf of Tonkin, when you look at the Northwoods incident, when you look at all these different things that we have planned, it's not one, it's several.

And it's several over the course of several different administrations. The Bush administration, I mean, the Kennedy administration. I mean, during Kennedy's day, they were doing this. The Kennedy administration? I mean, during Kennedy's day, they were doing this. Well, what I would say is that in the case of 9-11, you have on the other side a very obvious conspiracy that's taking credit for it, that has taken credit for it. I mean, you have this phenomenon of al-Qaeda and global jihad, much of this violence is directed at the rest of the Muslim world. It's not just us. But we have a clear enemy that thinks it's our enemy that is taking credit for these goals,

to call them an own goal, when you have someone who's seemed to be the kicker and who's taking credit for being the kicker. And it just seems like a it's a misapplication of the principle, even if we were going to agree that that that that we, you know, every few years draw our own blood for some perverse reason of trying to to to motivate ourselves to do something we wouldn't otherwise want to do. Well, I would assume that if there's a series of events that have taken place that have absolutely either been planned or absolutely... I mean, the Northwoods document is pretty straightforward. There's really no denying it. Gulf of Tonkin basically reported in history classes today that that was a false flag event. Right. So those are real.

Forget about 9-11. Let's throw that in... I mentioned- Forget about 9-11. Let's throw that in the- I mentioned Gulf of Tonkin in the book. And there are many other more easily understood big lies that should worry us. So for instance, I mentioned pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies seem to clearly rig their data. And this puts people in a state of chronic doubt

about whether you can trust anyone in a position of authority. When you have people, there's no one who knows more about whether drugs are efficacious than the people who are designing drugs. Right, but isn't that kind of disingenuous? You're dealing with an entirely different group of people that you're saying are also evil. This has nothing to do with the government. No, I'm not saying it's evil.

I'm saying that the principle that is – well, one – there's two principles. One is just a willingness to lie. That is the thing that enables all of this. the most important change we could make in our society is to notice the ways in which systems of incentives cause otherwise good people to behave like bad people. And there are endless numbers of examples of this, but you don't have to be a bad person to behave in evil ways. If you're part of a system, the entire tendency of which is to incline toward evil. So if you are, and if you just follow the incentives, and so the very simple kind of

petri dish examples of this, and then one example I use is to talk about what it's like to be thrown into a maximum security prison. Imagine you get sent to Folsom Prison and you're an innocent person. You're not a violent person. And you have this nightmare experience of now you're thrown in prison for a crime you didn't commit. And all you want to do is get through this experience, your 10 years, say. All you want to do is do your decade of time in peace, unmolested by all these other people. And you're terrified that you're going to be victimized by people. The reality is

that you're coming into a situation where the incentives are so perversely misaligned that even a good person like you who just wants to be a nice guy is going to have to align himself with racist psychopaths in order to not be screwed over by everyone. I mean, so for instance, you'd have to – so in most maximum security prisons, they exist in a perpetual state of race war. So it's the whites against the blacks against the the Mexicans, and certain Mexicans against other Mexicans, but it's just like you have, it's shattered into racial gangs, and a white guy like you would have to join a white supremacist gang.

Now, you might not have a racist bone in your body, but the only way for you not to be fucked over by everyone is to align yourself with a gang. But isn't what you're saying another reason to not trust the government? You're saying that the government's evil. You're saying that good people do evil things because they get involved with evil psychopaths, meaning the government. No, no, no. Which is why false flags occur. aware of the way incentives can be perverse, where your natural selfishness and your natural fear and your natural desire just to survive can be channeled in ways that make you, as an otherwise

good person, collaborate to do terrible things. And there are many ways in which... So conflicts of interest are the classic example. You have CEOs who can run the global economy off a cliff because their incentives are totally perverse. There's no economic incentive for them not to just leverage their company out of existence if they can benefit from this windfall pop of the stock and they have a golden parachute. So there's the problem of moral hazard, where it's like,

if there's no consequence to being rapaciously selfish, you're going to get people being rapaciously selfish to the detriment of everyone. And so the point I'm making is that there are two levels at which you can try to improve human life. You can argue that each person needs to have a more refined ethical code. You have to be more honest. I have to be more honest. Or in addition, you can have systems

where interests are aligned so that the penalties, the rewards for honesty are more obvious. And you'd have a system where people – another classic example is like the job market where people – everyone's padding their resumes because they know everyone else pads their resumes. So it's like you're trying to get a job. You're desperate to get a job. Your family won't eat unless you get a job. And you know that everyone else applying for this job has padded his resume, has lied about his background. So everyone else does false flags so Obama gets in office and does exactly the same thing. Is that what you're saying?

No, no. I'm saying that we need – there's two levels at which we address these problems. And one problem you're pointing to is system level, in this case, government level, misaligned incentives that have great consequence, which don't require evil people all the time to pull the strings. You don't think that requires evil people to do a false flag where Americans are killed? But in a false... If you're saying we're going to blow up a jet and fake and pretend that another country did it, yeah, that would require evil people to hatch the idea and say, do it.

In all fairness, I think there was an empty jet. I think they were going to have a drone jet. Okay. No, no. Just think of a prototypical situation where it seems as bad as possible. Yes, that would require... I mean, the reason why I don't believe the September 11th conspiracy theory is that it would require too many evil people. It just makes no sense. I still don't understand how you rectify the idea of false flags. Where do you put that? There are many false... I don't know which are true. I mean, I believe the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag.

And what about Northwoods? I don't know enough about it. Okay. What about the... Did you pay any attention to the plan, allegedly, that Bush and Cheney were concocting to get us into Iran before he left office? I don't know if that's true at all. No, no. So for instance, there's a new book about the Kennedy assassination, which

brings... I don't think the guy is a conspiracy theorist at all here, but I think he thinks Oswald did it. But there's a new book which shows- What do you think? I don't know. I think it's very likely that the – I mean the Warren Commission seems – I haven't read this book, but from what I know, the Warren Commission seems to have been a ridiculously inept effort to getting to the truth, one being that Warren didn't want to inconvenience Jacqueline Kennedy at all. So I mean, she's grieving. He didn't want to interview her. He wouldn't let her be interviewed on the record. He interviewed her himself, I think, and just sort of summarized what she said. So there's just kind of weird ways in which this thing was never about really getting to the bottom of what happened.

But the point is that when you look at all the ways, but that's an all-too-human, you can look at it as some nefarious interpretation of that, like he knew that this was a mob hit that was enabled by the CIA or whatever the story is, and this is his way of hiding the truth. Or he's just a guy who's embarrassed to ask the grieving widow who is a friend of his about what it was like to see her husband's face get blown off. So it's like there are alternate explanations for these things, and yet the conspiracy side is always the nefarious, mustache-twirling, perfect genius of evil interpretation. And I think that rarely is true,

certainly in a society where political power is not as concentrated as it is under the Third Reich. I think there's probably a little bit of both in there. I think there's definitely some inept qualities of the Warren Commission, but there's also this search for a predetermined outcome. That's why the whole reason why the magic bullet theory was invented was because there was a bullet that hit a curb stone underneath the overpass. They had to account for that.

That's why they accounted for one bullet doing all this damage to two different people. Instead of making a more obvious conclusion, there was more than one shooter. I mean, that seems much more likely. I mean, if one person was shooting, why would you just assume that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't have a cohort? Why would you just assume that? I mean, they wanted to wrap it up nice and tidy. The same reason why Jack Ruby got to Lee Harvey Oswald in front of all those cops, no security, shoots him, puts it to end. You know, he had all these obvious mob ties. I mean, it's so obvious. It's so silly, in fact, to think that there wasn't something going on. I think the truth, like many things,

lies somewhere in the middle. It's not an either or situation. But I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He might have been a part of it. It's very possible he was a part of it. But I don't think he acted alone. But usually what's going on... Again, I'm not discounting the fact that there are situations in which evil people brilliantly bring off their evil or evil conspirators conspire. But most of the time, it's people rather like us, afraid for their jobs, covering their asses, afraid of getting sued, doing things which when incentives are aligned in such a way as to make it effortless for them to do them, create a huge mess for everybody else.

And so when you look at what people do because they're afraid to get sued, just look at all of the stupid decisions people make in our society because they just want to hide the problem. There's a book on what it's like to become a neurosurgeon called When the Air Hits Your Brain. And it's a pretty entertaining and somewhat harrowing look at just the training of a neurosurgeon. And so he talks about what it was like to be a chief neurosurgeon to come in and perform surgery. And what he did is he drove the drill in way too deep. Like, you know, it's just supposed to do skull, but he just went into, you know, pure pink oatmeal of the person's brain.

And his only concern at that moment was not how the patient was doing. It was to hide the evidence that he had screwed up. Now, that is an all-too-human and, in the aggregate, completely evil outcome. And yet he doesn't have to be a psychopath to be worried about covering his ass in that circumstance. It's a natural human instinct. If you had a system in which he would be massively rewarded in some way for showing, exposing that problem, it's hard to see how you would design that. But that would be a much better system if the incentives were aligned in a way that his guilty conscience would win as opposed to his effort to preserve his career. So he could stay free.

So what? So he could stay free. So he wouldn't get jailed or sued. Yeah, or just no longer have a career in medicine. But there are uncountable numbers of situations like that where massive suffering accrues, and it's not because it was an evil person intent upon causing that suffering. I agree 100%.

I think there's an either-or. I think you've got to be able to look at both sides. There's an either-or. But there's a lot of evil fuckers out there that are doing some creepy shit. No doubt. At least 1% of us are psychopaths. So three hours just flew by.

Wow. That was three hours. That was fun. That's a fast three hours, yeah. wow that was three hours that was fun that's a fast three hours yeah it was really enjoyable so your book is Lying

you can get it at Sam Harris org is it on Amazon and bookstores it's just hitting bookstores

do you have an audiobook yeah Audible yeah oh beautiful Audible is one of our sponsors

so perfect go to audible.com forward slash Joe and get it for free do they pay you still if the book gets they must yeah they have to even if it forward slash Joe and get it for free. Do they pay you still? The book gets, they must have to, even if it's for free, it's not for free to you. I think it's free if you join audible. Yes. Okay. Beautiful. Thanks man. Appreciate it. Sam Harris org on Twitter. Um, uh, follow him and read some books and, uh, thank you very much.

Very enjoyable. Thank you. Always a pleasure. All right. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in to the podcast. Thanks to LegalZoom.com. Use the, enter the code ROGAN in the referral box and save yourself some money. Thanks also to Hulu Plus. Go to Hulu Plus forward slash ROGAN and get a special offer where you can try Hulu Plus free for two weeks. Check it out. And thanks also to Onnit.com. O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements.

We will be back next week. We got a lot of podcasts coming up, ladies and gentlemen. We got next week, who do we got here? We got Dave Asprey. We got Maynard from Tool. We got Dan Carlin on Friday. We got a lot of things happening, folks. A lot of good stuff.

Sam Harris, thank you, brother. Appreciate it very much. Thank you.