March 8, 2012 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:49:50
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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*meow* is that it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you start? | ||
| Did you launch? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that was the meow. | |
| Guess what? | ||
| No sponsors. | ||
| Just fucking cue the music. | ||
|
unidentified
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Can I give you a dollar at least? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Give me a book. | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright, cool. | |
| Hit it. | ||
| The Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day Yeah, we have music It's ridiculous, but it makes me feel like something's actually happening. | ||
| Sam Harris, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thanks for joining me, man. | ||
| This is really cool. | ||
| It's an excellent opportunity. | ||
| The internets are abuzz. | ||
| I've gotten more response for this as far as questions for you than, I think, any guests we've ever had. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Well, I'm very happy to be here. | ||
| I'm happy you're here too, man. | ||
| I've watched a lot of your videos online. | ||
| I've enjoyed every one of them. | ||
| And I liken some of those debates that you get into with those old Gracie in Action videos. | ||
| Have you ever seen those old Gracie in Action videos? | ||
| I'm not entirely sure, though. | ||
| I know the ones you're talking about. | ||
| I've seen a lot of Gracie material. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the Gracie in Action videos were really the first videos that Horry and Gracie... | ||
| Horry and Gracie, who's Hitlio's son, you know, Hoyce's brother, is a brilliant businessman. | ||
| And he realized that all he needed to do was put together a series of real-life encounters. | ||
| Between a trained jiu-jitsu practitioner and some guy who thinks he knows how to fight, he's sure he knows how to fight. | ||
| And then he just gets mangled every time. | ||
| Every single fight. | ||
| This wasn't the Gracie Challenge at all? | ||
| Well, they've got a bunch of them. | ||
| There's Gracie in Action 1 and 2. It's basically just compilations of home videos that they have. | ||
| Of really, for martial artists, really brilliant stuff to watch. | ||
| Because, you know, until the Gracies came along, nobody really knew that there was one guy out there that could just sort of manhandle people like that and just strangle them and choke them. | ||
| That there was one martial art that was so superior when it came to a grappling situation that you would watch those and you'd almost feel bad for the guy getting strangled, but not really. | ||
| That's how I feel when I watch a lot of your debates. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was. | |
| That's very high praise. | ||
| I can tell you it's not as satisfying in the debate format as it is on the mat. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| Because no one ever taps. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's like you're fighting an army of zombies that they've lost, but they can't be forced to admit that they've lost. | ||
| It must be a very bizarre thing for you, because as far as people who have spent hours and hours debating publicly, debating the merits of the idea of religion, you might be top ten on YouTube of all the different information that's available. | ||
| Have you ever seen anybody in all these different debates you've been in where you knock something into their head and you see a light go off? | ||
| Like, holy shit. | ||
| What if you're right? | ||
| Do you ever get that? | ||
| It's hard to see in real time. | ||
| People are pretty good about not having epiphanies in real time in front of you. | ||
| You can see people get uncomfortable and you can see them want to make a lateral move to a new subject. | ||
| One of the great strategies or one of the less noble but effective strategies of debate is to If you've lost a point, you don't concede it. | ||
| You just kind of move on to something else and hope no one notices. | ||
| And in a formal debate format, there's often no mechanism for your opponent to score that as conquered ground because you can't address each other in real time. | ||
| So it's like I talk for 10 minutes. | ||
| Someone else talks for 10 minutes. | ||
| The moderator doesn't necessarily interrupt us. | ||
| And the two discussants can't actually address one another. | ||
| Formal debates are actually, ironically, the worst format to actually prove who's right because it's like fighting someone. | ||
| You're separated. | ||
| It's like boxing. | ||
| You get a clinch and the ref separates you. | ||
| And so you can't really test every tool in that context. | ||
| So you can just kind of talk past each other and not address the thing that was brought up ten minutes ago and it never really gets scored. | ||
| So it's amazingly unsatisfying even when you feel like you have said exactly what you should have said. | ||
| Because they just won't buy it. | ||
| It's just like fighting with fog. | ||
| No one ever falls down. | ||
| Occasionally you score a blow that you know The audience has noticed. | ||
| But even then, the audience is partitioned into your side and the other side. | ||
| It's amazing how invulnerable people's prejudices and biases are to argument. | ||
| It also becomes a team. | ||
| It becomes something that defines you. | ||
| A lot of people are defined by their ideas, especially when it comes to their religion or their politics. | ||
| They're defined by them to the point where they act within certain parameters because they think that's what you're supposed to do if you're on this team. | ||
| People like that. | ||
| It's a weird, creepy desire that we have to become part of a team and defend that team. | ||
| And I think that happens when it gets into religious arguments. | ||
| It's like you're not just Attacking an idea that someone planted in their head. | ||
| You're attacking how they define themselves. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's people's extended identity. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a Windows user. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like, I'm a Christian. | ||
| I'm a Catholic. | ||
| And it really becomes a big part of how they view. | ||
| And if you want to take that away from them, it's like, you know... | ||
| Yeah, so you can see that when you're having the discussion, it's especially obvious in a debate format because basically nobody has any hope that either side is going to change their mind in the context of the debate. | ||
| I mean, they've come there to represent their views, and they've got so much invested in doing that as well as they can that even if their mind was changed, they're not going to admit it. | ||
| So it's not really an honest discussion. | ||
| When you are having an honest discussion, let's say one-on-one with somebody of deep conviction about faith, you can see the emotional hijacking of the conversation on their side very quickly. | ||
| It's basically like debating whether their wife is attractive or something. | ||
| It goes to something at the core. | ||
| And it's no longer about the ideas or evidence. | ||
| And so it's one skill, which admittedly I don't have such a firm grasp on, but one skill to acquire just as a person is to figure out how to have these conversations where you're being as rational and intellectually honest as possible, but you're actually making the right jujitsu moves around people's emotional response. | ||
| Well, you do it with comedy. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's what's brilliant about comedy. | ||
| You do it with comedy. | ||
| I've seen you do it. | ||
| You compared Elvis being alive and knowing that Elvis is alive, feeling that he's alive. | ||
| It was really very funny how you did it. | ||
| It was the perfect way to do it because you did it very politely. | ||
| There was no name-calling. | ||
| You didn't get all shouty. | ||
| Yeah, but that is what is brilliant about pure comedy. | ||
| Because if you make someone laugh at themself or at the idea that they would otherwise defend, that actually is a visible sign that you have made contact. | ||
| And you don't get that when you're playing it totally straight. | ||
| And so comedy is very powerful. | ||
| Yeah, and also, obviously, you're restricted in the language that you can use in these things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right. | |
| It is a fascinating sort of exchange. | ||
| It's fascinating to watch the psychological wheels spin, you know, when people really get behind an idea, whether it's religion or whatever the fuck it is, when they really get behind it to the point where, you know, they're not budging at all. | ||
| They're not thinking at all. | ||
| They're attached and married to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very dangerous, right? | ||
| I mean, isn't it? | ||
| Well, yeah, insofar as someone really believes something and the beliefs have any point of contact with behavior and the rest of physical reality, I think it's the most consequential thing. | ||
| I think what people believe is that is the The lever that moves most things in our world. | ||
| It's politics. | ||
| It's public policy. | ||
| It's the laws we write and the laws we choose to truly defend. | ||
| They're all just ideas that have a certain number of subscribers. | ||
| Is it possible that religion in its form is useful for some people because they're just, whether it's psychologically, they need some scaffolding, whether it's, you know, to use it as a tool, not to use it to control anyone, but to use it as like a personal growth tool. | ||
| Do you ever look at it like that? | ||
| Well, insofar as it can be taken Out of the belief space. | ||
| There's the doctrinal belief-based part of religion, which is where people are making claims about reality on bad evidence. | ||
| That's just a problem. | ||
| So far as you're pretending to be certain about something you shouldn't be certain about, And then teaching your kids to do that, that's just a problem for our conversation with one another as human beings. | ||
| There's all this other stuff that people are attached to that isn't inherently problematic. | ||
| So they like the music. | ||
| They like the buildings. | ||
| They like the style. | ||
| They like the artwork. | ||
| They like to think about certain historic figures who they have this sort of emotional bonding with. | ||
| They love the stories about Jesus in the New Testament. | ||
| All of that is—some of that could be intrinsically good. | ||
| I mean, if you get the right—you get beautiful buildings and beautiful music and a reason to come together and holidays. | ||
| So I think we actually want something very much like that in secular culture. | ||
| And we, I think, are suffering from— The fact that we don't have an obvious alternative, a secular, reasonable alternative to that, that we can just point religious people to and say, you know, how come you're not doing that? | ||
| You know, this has everything you want without the bullshit. | ||
| That's very important. | ||
| And, you know, if someone tried to form some sort of a secular group like that, it would quickly devolve into being a cult, most likely. | ||
| Yeah, depending on... | ||
| It would become someone trying to fuck everybody's wife. | ||
| Well, that comes when someone's at the top who has the eternal wisdom and is imparting it to you, and part of that process of dispensation is to fuck your wife. | ||
| There's actually a story I think I had told in an end note of the end of faith. | ||
| I knew some guys who brought out a guru from India. | ||
| Who they just thought was just the, quite literally, the messiah. | ||
| He was a kind of naked yogi. | ||
| I mean, yogi who just wore this little speedo, like a speedo, yeah. | ||
| And long jetta, you know, long dreadlocks. | ||
| And he was kind of this gorgeous 25-year-old Indian sadhu who was silent. | ||
| So he would never speak. | ||
| So the only wisdom is very kind of low-bandwidth teaching. | ||
| The only wisdom you're going to get from him is What he could write out on an 8x10 chalkboard. | ||
| So he'd write these gnomic little sentences in response to your questions. | ||
| And he was a really good drummer. | ||
| So he would lead these kirtans, these devotional chanting sessions where he would drum and people would get quite out of their minds and happy. | ||
| So they were just worshipping this guy. | ||
| They brought him out. | ||
| And at a certain point, he... | ||
| I don't know how he must have communicated this on his chalkboard. | ||
| He said he needed to start sleeping with the various, you know, as luck would have it, the most beautiful wives of his devotees. | ||
| And so he was doing that. | ||
| But the breaking point came when the one guy who was his host, whose wife was sleeping with him... | ||
| The sadhu wanted to eat Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream with cashews for breakfast. | ||
| Someone gave him Haagen-Dazs and it blew his mind and so he needed this for breakfast. | ||
| This guy was walking through the Ralph's freezer aisle in the morning getting a resupply of vanilla ice cream and that was the moment. | ||
| That was the final straw where he realized, okay, this guy is We're just this guy's tool, and they just sent him back to India. | ||
| You know, he's like, put the ice cream back on the shelf. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That would be the tipping point. | ||
| After fucking everybody's wife. | ||
| It wasn't the wife, it was the Haagen-Dazs. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| So what, did the Haagen-Dazs just represent something so silly that it couldn't be argued? | ||
| It was just too obviously carnal. | ||
| You know, like there's no tantra. | ||
| You might be doing tantra with my wife, but you're not doing tantra with the Haagen-Dazs for breakfast. | ||
| It's obviously carnal. | ||
| Ice cream being carnal, that's very funny. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I mean, I think it's just the primate instinct when any man is in any position where he's got ultimate power over a group of people. | ||
| That's a terrible idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why everybody's afraid of what's going on right now in terms of government and new laws that are being passed every day. | ||
| It gets kind of spooky. | ||
| How much control do you really need over people? | ||
| I understand that we're in trouble sometimes. | ||
| I understand that we're at war. | ||
| How much control does the government really deserve over people? | ||
| Do we really need to be in the situation we're in right now? | ||
| Well, for the most part, I'm kind of a libertarian on this subject. | ||
| I get a lot of flack from libertarians based on the 5% where I depart from classic libertarianism. | ||
| Like national defense authorization? | ||
| Well, I just think the principle is that Peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone. | ||
| If you're not harming other people and you're not stealing from them, and you're honoring your contracts, we can define what all that means. | ||
| But if you are not infringing on other people's happiness, then you should have the right to be left alone. | ||
| And what that means is we as a society shouldn't want The police to kick in the door of a peaceful, honest person to stop him from doing whatever it is he's doing. | ||
| Smoking pot or whatever victimless crime is currently illegal. | ||
| And if you draw the line there, I think you get a very sane Response or a very sane idea of the limits of state power. | ||
| It's all about mitigating harm and keeping people safe. | ||
| There's a trade-off between freedom and risk. | ||
| There's a tension between, let's say, the right to privacy and finding actual terrorists. | ||
| You know, so it's like if we wanted to maximize, we're going to find everyone who's a terrorist, well then we would just, there'd be no such thing as privacy, and the government could read all our email and look in our windows, etc. | ||
| So there's a tension there, and we have to keep finding the sweet spot. | ||
| But it's a tension that everyone should recognize. | ||
| So do you think that these new laws that are being passed, like the NDAA, do you think that that's, the idea is that as the population increases, as Is crime going to keep up or pick up to a point where they're going to need something like this? | ||
| When you think of someone being able to detain people without warrants and not even have to inform their family, that could be an American citizen. | ||
| At what point in time would that be effective? | ||
| Yeah, I don't see—and again, this is not really my area to have a very strong opinion, so I would be open to any counterargument on this, but I've never seen the wisdom or necessity of infringing on our existing laws to fight the war on terror. | ||
| So the idea that the people at Guantanamo—I understand that different things apply— On a battlefield and in a crime-fighting scenario in the States. | ||
| But why people don't have the right to counsel or the right to see the evidence against them, it seems like if they're guilty, they'll let the truth shine on the data. | ||
| Well, what always hurt is that growing up, there was always a problem with Russia and there was always this idea that we could go to war with Russia. | ||
| But there was a really strong belief amongst people that we were the good guys. | ||
| That we did all good guy stuff only. | ||
| You know, that America was making sure the rest of the world didn't start speaking German or Japanese or any crazy... | ||
| It doesn't feel like that anymore. | ||
| Now it seems like as the age of information has gotten us to this 2012 date, like where we're at right now, it's so easy to get information. | ||
| People are just so much more cynical about their intentions. | ||
| So if you see laws like this, what's the motivation to crack down more on civil liberties? | ||
| Is it just to make it easier for them? | ||
| Is it to create bigger government? | ||
| What is the motivation for that? | ||
| Well, it is fear and some perception of the necessity of taking the friction out of the system, the system that would keep us safe or respond to an attack or detect an attack. | ||
| And it's understandable. | ||
| When you think about what the president's daily briefing must look like, it's got to be absolutely terrifying. | ||
| The reality of the prospect of nuclear terrorism, once you actually just put those goggles on and say, yes, nuclear nonproliferation is more or less a lost cause. | ||
| I mean, the technology is spreading, the material is spreading. | ||
| You've got 30,000 out-of-work scientists in the former Soviet Union who are not taken care of, who have every economic incentive to not be entirely ethical. | ||
| So if you feel, as many people do, that it's just a matter of time, A nuke in some form gets into the hands of terrorists, and we have a massively porous border. | ||
| The joke is if you want to get nukes into the U.S., you just hide it in a bale of marijuana. | ||
| We can't fight the war on drugs, so the idea that we can keep everything out is pretty much a pipe dream. | ||
| When you start thinking about the idea of a nuke going off in a major American city, and forget about the loss of life, just what would that do to the world economy? | ||
| It's easy to see how the paranoia ramps up. | ||
| These are obviously hard calls to make for anyone. | ||
| Just imagine the day after an act of terrorism, orders of magnitude bigger than September 11th. | ||
| To have to talk about the reasons why we didn't do all these things that we could have done to keep us safe. | ||
| I share your concerns about infringing on civil liberties, but it's just... | ||
| The way you look at it, it's scarier on the other side. | ||
| The threat is scarier. | ||
| I think the threat of nuclear terrorism is quite real. | ||
| And anyone who thinks that it's not, or that's just fear-mongering, I just think it's not reading the books or papers of experts whose job it is to actually worry about this. | ||
| It's just not a... | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| The question is, in the face of that, what do you do? | ||
| I'm as annoyed as... | ||
| The thing you don't do is force everyone to take their shoes off in airports until the end of time. | ||
| We're so inefficient in how we filter. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a big problem. | ||
| It's a problem, actually, I don't know that much about. | ||
| I mean, my file on what we should do is pretty thin, but it's pretty clear that, you know, every time I'm in an airport and I see some old Norwegian lady who obviously is not a terrorist submitting to the same search as somebody who looks like Osama bin Laden, it seems like a misallocation of attentional resources. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it seems ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| The idea behind it... | ||
| And you know what else freaks me out is all the fucking radiation. | ||
| How much radiation are those big body scanners? | ||
| Is that something to be concerned about? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I would be concerned that the manufacturers are not entirely candid about... | ||
| Or even cognizant of the health effects of them. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I haven't seen the data on them. | ||
| But yeah, you want to minimize the amount of x-rays you get. | ||
| But every time you go on a plane, you're getting dosed. | ||
| So it's not... | ||
| I don't know how it compares to the actual plane flight. | ||
| How much time of your day do you think about nuclear terrorism? | ||
| Because if I was as convinced as you are... | ||
| No, it's not even every day. | ||
| I put it out of my mind like anyone else. | ||
| Well, no, it's just... | ||
| It's... | ||
| The truth is, I believe, if you ask me rationally how big a risk do I think it is, I think it's a big risk. | ||
| It's not a 1 in 100 risk. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| 50-50? | ||
| Well, that's what experts like Graham Allison think in this next decade. | ||
| He wrote his book about... | ||
| Five years ago, but he thought the next 10 or 20 year period, the chance of a nuke going off in a major American city was like 50-50. | ||
| Not 1 in 100. And no one really criticized him for that. | ||
| A panel of experts, I think, came up with 30%, right? | ||
| But again, you're not hearing the people say, no, it's one in a thousand. | ||
| Yeah, 30% is terrifying. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| And yet, I don't feel that I have... | ||
| I don't really live with that piece of software humming on the hard drive very much. | ||
| I haven't integrated that into my sense of daily risk. | ||
| So it's not entirely... | ||
| I haven't responded entirely rationally to that information. | ||
| Well, with all the different books that you've written about religion and all the different debates that you've gotten into with people about it, I mean, you can't have a rosy view of how this is gonna turn out. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that the human race can pull out of this crazy dilemma we're in right now and move to the next level? | ||
| The truth is I actually don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism very much. | ||
| I think by default I'm slightly pessimistic, but you've got to live life. | ||
| We all are just trying to find our way toward the high points of of well-being and I think I think culture can change quickly. | ||
| It's easy to deny how risky our situation is, and I think that we shouldn't do that. | ||
| But it's also easy to overlook how quickly we can get our act together. | ||
| And so when you look at just how... | ||
| I mean, the example for me is the change in views of race in the United States. | ||
| When you roll back the clock, Even 70 years, the level of racism in this country was just unrecognizable. | ||
| It's not that racism isn't still a problem, but people were being lynched. | ||
| Senators would come out and get their photo taken in front of the dangling body. | ||
| It was just insanity. | ||
| It's amazing when you think of how little time has passed since then and now. | ||
| That is a very good point. | ||
| Racism probably is the one thing that we've made the biggest amount of progress. | ||
| As far as culturally, yeah. | ||
| And it's undeniable progress. | ||
| And it's progress of a sort that It's very hard to picture what would cause us to sort of roll that back. | ||
| I mean, it feels like those are gains, kind of just gains in terms of... | ||
| Understanding. | ||
| Yeah, that we can't lose. | ||
| I don't think we've fully felt the impact of the internet on culture either, because the first couple generations who grew up exclusively with full access to information like that, they haven't really reached adulthood yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And once these kids that grew up With the internet their entire life and constantly having access to new ideas that aren't, you know, not regional people that they have to talk to, people in their neighborhood, people in their state, but instead being able to talk to people all over the world and get, watch a lot of your shit online, watch a lot of different lectures online. | ||
| I mean, that kind of, there was nothing like that when we were kids. | ||
| The impact of that generation, I think that's going to be pretty substantial. | ||
| When the kids now, I think that's going to be the next big leap of cultural evolution, the internet kids, when they become adults and start running shit. | ||
| I think it's just the attitude online, it does not mirror the attitude that's expressed in laws and the ideas that people have about our society. | ||
| I'm a little worried. | ||
| I think it can go either way there. | ||
| I think the Internet enables two very different antagonistic processes. | ||
| On the one hand, it allows you to Cancel bad ideas very quickly. | ||
| It's very hard to lie about yourself or about anything given access to information. | ||
| So that's very good and it connects people and people can see how other people live and so all of that breaks down barriers between people. | ||
| It also amplifies certain voices in a way that never would have happened before, and they're just terrible voices. | ||
| So, for instance, global jihad, the phenomenon of exporting al-Qaeda-style Islam to the rest of the world more or less without friction, It's entirely an internet phenomenon. | ||
| It's very hard to see that happening the way it has in the last 10 years without the internet. | ||
| Any crazy person with his crazy idea can create a little subculture on the internet and you have this walled garden where People can just talk endlessly in a very self-confirming way, whether it's certain conspiracy theories or just racist subgroups, whatever, and that you just get in there and you never get out. | ||
| And you find enough people who are echoing back your bad ideas that you And the other problem is you never meet these people. | ||
| And then also the role of anonymity online, I think, is pretty destructive. | ||
| I mean, if you've ever read a YouTube comment thread, which I'm sure you have, it's just the most poisonous lunacy. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| If you ran into people like that in real life, you'd want to have a sword. | ||
| You'd want to just be hacking through them everywhere you went. | ||
| Yeah, I see your point. | ||
| The anonymity makes a big difference. | ||
| Having a lack of any sort of repercussions for shitty behavior, that's not natural for humans. | ||
| It's not natural for humans to be able to affect each other with ideas, without social cues, without feeling the emotions of someone whose feelings you're hurting. | ||
| To be able to do it like this is just so cunty, is what it is. | ||
| And it's not even just internet comment threads or even anonymity. | ||
| I find it with email. | ||
| This is now trivial to point out, but everyone has sent the email that they shouldn't have sent. | ||
| Watch this, even a very good relationship, unravel based on the fact that you're not being modulated by facial cues when you're dropping these bombs on your friend or your brother or whatever. | ||
| It escalates. | ||
| On the other hand, it's a good way to tell someone they're fucking up. | ||
| To get all the information in one place. | ||
| Be in a room with them and have them argue with you about it. | ||
| In that sense, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So, when you look at the possibility of nuclear terrorism, and you're a fairly young guy, and you look at all this This insanity and chaos in the world. | ||
| What way do you think is going to be the way out of this? | ||
| Is it a technological solution? | ||
| What's going to elevate people or make people's ideas evolve to the point where they realize that, you know, this idea is completely ridiculous. | ||
| Nuclear war is absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| It can't even be on the table. | ||
| It can't be an option for anyone in the world. | ||
| What's going to get us to that? | ||
| That's a big question. | ||
| I think one piece of it is, so actually this connects back with something you said, this idea that we are the good guys and that our enemies aren't. | ||
| There's not actually moral parity between the two sides in these conflicts. | ||
| I think that's still true. | ||
| You know, Guantanamo Bay can make it as bad as you want it. | ||
| It's still true that we're the good guys in this particular conflict. | ||
| And now, I wish we were better than we are. | ||
| And there's obviously some bad guys on our side in any given moment. | ||
| But I think the one thing we have to get past is this The kind of moral relativism that you tend to hear from the left, and I'm very much on the left in almost every respect, but this disempowering idea that we... | ||
| So, for instance, to talk about nuclear bombs, what gives us the right to have nuclear bombs? | ||
| If we are going to have them, Iran should have them. | ||
| We have no argument to keep Iran nuclear-free if we keep bombs ourselves. | ||
| Well, We're very different from Iran at this moment. | ||
| We're not, you know, our president doesn't get in front of the microphone and say that he's going to wipe out, turn a country into a lake of fire. | ||
| And he's not waiting for the messiah to come back and rapture everybody. | ||
| Now if we had a sufficiently crazy president, well then all of a sudden we would have a similar liability. | ||
| We're not prone to use nuclear bombs in a flagrantly crazy, apocalyptic way. | ||
| And from everything Iran says, they certainly seem capable of being just as crazy as we could fear. | ||
| And so that's a difference that we have to just acknowledge. | ||
| And so it matters who gets the bombs. | ||
| And if people who are quite zealous to die People who are literally happy to set off the bomb in their laps just for the pleasure of setting it off. | ||
| That's a very different kind of mind to be engaged with. | ||
| And it raises the stakes. | ||
| These people are not rational. | ||
| I'm not saying the entire Muslim world fits this description, but there are people who are not rational actors based on their ideology. | ||
| I mean, they want to get to paradise. | ||
| They think you win if you blow the place up at the right moment. | ||
| And the moment you take on board that certain people actually believe that, then you have to play a different game with respect to the risk they pose. | ||
| So what we should do, I think we need to, one, acknowledge that there are very different There are moments of tension in this world, those where we're dealing with rational actors and those where we're dealing with either completely irrational actors or actors where they have an ideology that's motivating them to do things that should be unthinkable. | ||
| Well, I completely agree with you that we have to be aware of religious zealots and we have to be aware of crazy people willing to blow themselves up, but you gotta wonder why they're mad at us in the first place. | ||
| And I agree that for the most part, I mean, I think our idea still sort of holds that we're the good guy in comparison to the rest of the world. | ||
| Does that mean you have to Be a certain amount of evil just to keep up? | ||
| You know, just to compete? | ||
| I mean, is that what's fucked up with our foreign policy? | ||
| Is that why we go into places like Iraq with false information about weapons of mass destruction, where there's a clear motivation to get in there? | ||
| Well, I think Iraq, I mean, I'm not going to defend Iraq. | ||
| That, I think, was a stupid war to fight. | ||
|
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But that's... | |
| But going into Afghanistan... | ||
| That just ended, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I mean, that still is us. | ||
| But look at Afghanistan as the clearer case, because we really... | ||
| I think, had to go in after September 11th. | ||
| So you think we had to go in to control Al-Qaeda? | ||
| Well, it was rational to go in and try to kill Osama bin Laden and the rest of the people who brought us September 11th. | ||
| September 11th, to some degree, was a price paid for never having dealt with these people in the first place. | ||
| When you listen to the chatter on their side about how we were a paper tiger, that they could blow up the coal, they could blow up embassies in Kenya, we got bombed in Lebanon and we just left. | ||
| So we were scared of conflict after Vietnam. | ||
| That was noticeable to everyone on their side. | ||
| So to some degree, this problem was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. | ||
| So do you think it's possible September 11th happened because we didn't invade Iraq earlier? | ||
| Because we didn't go into Afghanistan earlier? | ||
| Well, no, we didn't deal with the threat of jihadi terrorism earlier. | ||
| Weren't they upset in the first place because we have troops on their land? | ||
| Well, you've got to be precise about exactly why that's offensive. | ||
| When you look at why Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda were upset, It was because, it was not because, it was not a nationalistic concern of, you know, we're proud Saudis and our... | ||
| It was Holy Land, right? | ||
| This was a theological grievance. | ||
| I mean, they were, Osama bin Laden was already out of sorts with the Saudi government at that point, and he's... | ||
| Osama and anyone else enamored of this whole notion of global jihad want a global caliphate. | ||
| I mean, this is the idea that we're living in a perverse time where Islam has been derogated and subjugated and has not yet triumphed, and it has a mandate to triumph in this world. | ||
| And so if you really believe that, if you believe that you have to fight to spread the true faith For the glory of God in this life and win the game, you know, Genghis Khan style or more relevantly Muhammad style in this life. | ||
| That dictates a certain kind of grandiosity and arrogance and expansionism. | ||
| And people like Osam bin Laden I really believe that. | ||
| He was free to live a very different life than he lived. | ||
| He didn't have to spend his time in caves scheming to defeat the great Satan. | ||
| He could have just been chilling in Paris. | ||
| He had a lot of money. | ||
| A lot of opportunity. | ||
| Do you buy the official story? | ||
| How they killed him and threw him in the ocean? | ||
| I haven't thought about what might not be true in it, but I buy the official story that we went in and killed him and what happened to his body. | ||
| Or why, I'm not sure. | ||
| I think we didn't... | ||
| I think it would be amazing if he was dead a long time ago and they just concocted a crazy hero rescue story, Jessica Lynch-style. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think that would be... | ||
| I think the... | ||
| No, I mean, because there would have been so many other... | ||
| If you were going to fake something like that... | ||
| First of all, it's just so hard to fake anything. | ||
| We couldn't fake Jessica Lynch. | ||
| You know, it's like people's... | ||
| This is what's wrong with most... | ||
| Why fake it with helicopters, right? | ||
| Why do it like that? | ||
| And it's... | ||
| There's just too... | ||
| These things, operations like that go wrong spectacularly, and everyone knows about it, and they go right sometimes, and it's very difficult to fake it. | ||
| The Pakistanis aren't acting like we faked it. | ||
| They're just pissed that we actually successfully got in there, SEAL Team 6 style, and got out. | ||
| But the problem with any... | ||
| Conspiracy of that sort and especially a bigger one like a 9-11 truth style conspiracy is that it just takes so much perfect collaboration to bring it off and we know that people are so bad at that. | ||
| We know that interests don't align so perfectly. | ||
| We know that there's always somebody who just wants to sell their story to a tabloid or feels guilty about their the part they played or Most likely. | ||
| They're getting divorced and they just can't stop talking. | ||
| And Bill Clinton couldn't keep a semen-stained dress off of the news. | ||
| It's like that's the simplest thing. | ||
| He's just like the President of the United States with a terrified intern. | ||
| And this is going to wreck his presidency. | ||
| And he still couldn't keep the dress a secret. | ||
| Well, he couldn't keep that dress. | ||
| But how many freaks do you think he banged while he was president? | ||
| That guy was just whipping out his dick left and right and getting away with it. | ||
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What if it was thousands? | |
| I think there usually could have been. | ||
| That's probably why he isn't talking about it. | ||
| Once you're a freak, you're a freak. | ||
| And when you're a freak of the highest order where you want to be the king of the world and you're whipping your dick out in meetings, he would meet with women and just whip his dick out and run out of the room screaming. | ||
| That guy did that shit a lot. | ||
| But again, we happen to know about that. | ||
| We know about one. | ||
| No, we know that. | ||
| They did September 11th every other month. | ||
| Yeah, but you read... | ||
| Well, you know, he got a few girls who got mad at him. | ||
| Hitch wrote a great book, No One Left to Lie To, The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. | ||
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Really? | |
| He just took him down hard. | ||
| You say Hitch, Christopher Hitch. | ||
| Yeah, for about short books, like 150 pages. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| You'll never quite think about Clinton the same way. | ||
| It just puts a fine point on everything you just said. | ||
| It's pretty brutal. | ||
| He has a tinge of ego when he talks. | ||
| It always makes me wonder what he's really like. | ||
| They have these big political speeches. | ||
| They didn't do this. | ||
| We did this. | ||
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The Democrats, we did this and we did that. | |
| Sort of bragging about stuff. | ||
| It's very unleader-like at this stage of the game. | ||
| When you go and look into his past dealings, I read The Strange Death of Vince Foster. | ||
| That's a creepy goddamn book. | ||
| I'd like to go back and reread that. | ||
| He's a guy who was somehow involved in that crazy real estate deal that they were with, and they found him. | ||
| He shot himself, but there was no blood at the scene, so it was clear that his body had been moved. | ||
| Yeah, see, that's the kind of... | ||
| Again, I'm not saying no one has ever murdered, no one ever conspires, but it's just so easy to manufacture details like that that are then impossible to debunk. | ||
| Like, so how do we know there was no blood at the scene? | ||
| How do we know that some 18-year-old didn't just say that on his website, and now that's the meme that gets spread, and now you have it in your head that there was no blood at the scene? | ||
| Right, it's true. | ||
| So many conspiracies seem to be engineered by that kind of chatter. | ||
| But if you and I wanted to say, okay, we're going to devote the next month of our lives To just knocking down each one of those points, how would we do it? | ||
| So you're going to have to travel to find out whether there was blood at the scene and talk to the local cops. | ||
| Even then you wouldn't know, right? | ||
| You wouldn't know. | ||
| It's an endless sinkhole of energy, and yet it just takes a second to set that fire. | ||
| And that's what actually happens in debate, too. | ||
| There are certain people who you debate on the subject of religion. | ||
| Who know that they can start many small fires. | ||
| They're given eight minutes for their side, and they can set 30 small fires, half-truths, untruths, stuff that you really should respond to because it's just false. | ||
| But it takes you so long to put the fires out that you can basically put half of them out, and then you haven't said any of what you came to say, and then they just come back and say, well, he didn't put out fires three, four, eight, and nine, and so he's clearly conceded my points. | ||
| And it's just a debating game. | ||
| Dinesh D'Souza is an egregious example of that technique. | ||
| It's just, if you ever see he did a debate with Daniel Dennett, which really didn't serve Dan very well because it was a technique that was quite effective. | ||
| He's a fast talker and he can just make a mess and it would take you an hour and a half to clean it up. | ||
| But I absolutely agree with you on everything you've said, but do you think that there are real conspiracies? | ||
| Do you think that every one of these things is bullshit? | ||
| I mean, people clearly do conspire, right? | ||
| Enron was clearly a conspiracy. | ||
| It might have been a conspiracy that we entered into the Iraq war under false pretenses. | ||
| I mean, it might have been a conspiracy. | ||
| The Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, that might have been a big conspiracy. | ||
| Yeah, there's no question that from time to time, powerful people get into some star chamber and twirl their mustaches and conspire. | ||
| I think that probably happens. | ||
| But it's just hard. | ||
| It's hard to bring it off and you should never Assume that's the case. | ||
| And there's an adage on this subject that you never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence or something like that. | ||
| And it's just so obvious. | ||
| The incompetence factor in many of these situations is so high and so obvious. | ||
| As it is almost everywhere. | ||
| Especially in government. | ||
| With September 11th, it's just the crushing variable. | ||
| We're not prepared to deal with that kind of problem. | ||
| Anyone who thinks this was a conspiracy thinks that At least hundreds, probably thousands of people woke up one day, perfectly normal people, people in the FAA, people in the military, people in government, woke up Perfect psychopaths willing, with a clear conscience, to murder 3,000 of their innocent neighbors. | ||
| This wasn't Tuskegee. | ||
| This wasn't the poor and disenfranchised of a race that you're not so fond of. | ||
| These are some of those powerful people in our society just blown up one day. | ||
| And all of this was perfectly attuned to leave The person at the top of the conspiracy, presumably, George Bush sitting reading My Pet Goat when the whole thing kicked off. | ||
| I mean, it's just ridiculous. | ||
| And then as a pretext to go into Iraq, first of all, it would have been so much easier to think of a pretext to go into Iraq, but why make it look like that we got bombed or attacked by Saudis and Yemenis and Egyptians, which in fact... | ||
| So you're saying as a motivation to do it? | ||
| Yeah, the general idea is... | ||
| We did it on purpose so that we could go to war with Iraq. | ||
| Yeah, if you're thinking about sort of the false flag operation thesis, that we wanted to go to Iraq and steal their oil, and we're perfectly evil and perfectly Machiavellian and could bring this whole thing off without any leaks to this day. | ||
| Ten years hence, no one has come forward and said, this is the part I played in and I feel terrible about it. | ||
| And yet, we botched it in these huge ways where we had to go to Afghanistan before Iraq, and we really didn't want to go to Afghanistan. | ||
| No one suggests we actually wanted to be running around Tora Bora fighting the Taliban. | ||
| And we go to Iraq, that worked out well. | ||
| I mean, the idea that that was the easiest way to get their oil is crazy. | ||
| It would have been far cheaper to buy it. | ||
| But isn't the argument, though, that we wanted to control Iraq? | ||
| I mean, that we wanted to take over and control their oil, which we kind of do now, right? | ||
| So if we just wanted to go into Iraq, let's buy the oil. | ||
| The idea that people conspire and that actually certain people in our government are willing to run a false flag operation so that we can go into Iraq. | ||
| What would you have done? | ||
| You would have shot down one of our planes over Iraq. | ||
| We wouldn't even have needed that because Saddam was shooting in our planes. | ||
| We had a no-fly zone in force for 10 years. | ||
| The war wasn't over as far as he was concerned. | ||
| He just kept shooting at planes. | ||
| He didn't hit any. | ||
| So let him hit one. | ||
| And then we would go in. | ||
| But killing 3,000 people in downtown Manhattan, people who are well-connected and send the global economy into a tailspin, it just doesn't have the right shape of it. | ||
| I completely agree with you that it would take way too many people to plan it out, most likely. | ||
| And when I look at it, I just see that someone's going to tell. | ||
| There's just too many things that have to be coordinated. | ||
| Too many people are going to start talking. | ||
| I agree with you that it's much more likely incompetence. | ||
| But there was definitely a motivation to go into Iraq. | ||
| They wanted to go into Iraq already. | ||
| That's something they had been planning on even before September 11th, like looking for motivation. | ||
| So it's possible, right, that this incompetent government allowed this attack to take place and then they capitalized on it. | ||
| But what was their motivation to go to Iraq in the first place? | ||
| If they weren't going over there to try to control the oil, then why were they so desperate to go to Iraq? | ||
| Because it was pretty clear that they wanted to. | ||
| Well, I think... | ||
| And again, to some degree I'm talking out of my depth here because I'm not really a policy guy, but the argument which was made publicly at the time by many so-called neocons is that Iraq was the perfect test case to create a A vibrant democracy in the heart of the Arab world. | ||
| I mean, this is a basically educated population. | ||
| We completely underestimated the level of sectarianism there. | ||
| But again, that is easily ascribed to incompetence. | ||
| I mean, we were sending in 23-year-old You know, friends of Bush with no expertise at all just because they were the nephew of somebody who had donated to the campaign, and all of a sudden these people are in charge of some major piece of the machine of how to create a democracy in Iraq. | ||
| I mean, to read any of those books about what we did in Iraq is to just, above everything else, just to come face to face with a shocking degree of incompetence. | ||
| So we're the good guys, we're just incompetent. | ||
| Well, look who he had in the Oval Office at that moment. | ||
| A lot of words come to mind when you think about Bush, and competence is not one of them. | ||
| Well, you know, Bush is a strange case. | ||
| Obviously, he's not the smartest guy in the world, but when you look at the policies that he put into place, it's really similar to what Obama's doing. | ||
| It's not much difference at all. | ||
| Right, but I think there are crucial differences, but Two important things. | ||
| One is that Obama has inherited the world that Bush helped make. | ||
| So Obama's got the hardest job on planet Earth at the moment. | ||
| So you blame Bush for the whole Iraq mess, or his administration at least? | ||
| Yeah, well, we didn't have to go into Iraq. | ||
| And we could have... | ||
| Arguably, we had to go into Afghanistan. | ||
| I think our approach to fighting the war on terror is fundamentally ill-conceived. | ||
| I don't see why we need to be fighting wars and taking credit for fighting wars. | ||
| This should, from my point of view, be all covert, all... | ||
| Navy SEALs and stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, insofar as all that, I mean, there may be situations where that's not possible, but I don't see why we need to be, we should fight the war on terror as an international crime problem and that has occasional military solutions, but from my point of view, people, you know, jihadis in Al-Qaeda should just have been disappearing and no one takes credit for it. | ||
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I see what you're saying. | |
| Why should we ever say, we did it, you know, yes, we did it, and now there's a possible blowback to that. | ||
| And the reality is, you know, whenever you put Navy SEALs on the ground and let them shoot, or drop bombs from, you know, Predator drones, you're going to be killing some number of innocent people, and that's terrible. | ||
| And the terrible truth is there's no alternative to that. | ||
| I mean, unless you're going to be a pacifist, You're going to run the risk of killing innocent people when you have to fight certain conflicts. | ||
| And so that's... | ||
| I just don't see any... | ||
| Do you ever look at it from their point of view? | ||
| Do you ever look at it from... | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
| You try to look at it from the Al-Qaeda's point of view, the Taliban's point of view, the point of view of someone who is watching this giant military machine coming in and raping their country's national resources and stealing minerals and what's going on in Afghanistan? | ||
| Think about Afghanistan for a moment. | ||
| What's the point of view of a woman in a burqa in Afghanistan? | ||
| Now, from my point of view, it's very likely, whether she knows it or not, there is a much better life she could be living. | ||
| The average life expectancy in Afghanistan for women is 44 years. | ||
| It's got almost the highest maternal mortality and infant mortality in the world. | ||
| Most women are illiterate. | ||
| It's a terrible life for women. | ||
| When we think of having to leave Afghanistan, one of the real ethical problems, from my point of view, is we're just abandoning them to the Taliban. | ||
| We're abandoning the women to the Taliban. | ||
| And if there was a way to actually help them, We would have a moral obligation to do it. | ||
| The problem is it's so costly to do, it's so intrusive to do, and so many people shoot at you or blow themselves up while you do it that it's completely impractical to do. | ||
| I think we have a real problem, ethically, to just abandon women to getting their noses cut off because they decided not to marry the octogenarian that their father sold them to. | ||
| Well, you know, obviously I don't agree with any of that stuff or any of those social restrictions that they put on, but do you really think that we should have troops overseas to try to reinforce our moral standards on this country that's a mess? | ||
| I mean, should we really do that? | ||
| I think we... | ||
| Is that what we're doing, though? | ||
| No, but I think we need... | ||
| Well, we are attempting to do that, but it's just not doable. | ||
| Do you really think that's our motivation, though? | ||
| To some degree. | ||
| But what about the amount of money that they're pulling out of there? | ||
| What about the amount of money that they're making just in minerals? | ||
| Let me sidestep that for a second and just talk about what I think the endgame is. | ||
| The endgame is to have a global civilization that actually works. | ||
| And what would that look like? | ||
| More or less what it looks like in any country. | ||
| Now, whether you have a world government that achieves this or some federation of states that works better certainly than the UN, you need to have... | ||
| If girls were getting their noses cut off and being forced to live in burkas in Florida, It would be a crime problem. | ||
| And we would send in police to force people to treat their daughters better or treat their wives better. | ||
| And that's necessary and appropriate. | ||
| It's just there's no mechanism that allows us to do that as a matter of international law. | ||
| And so we clearly have to get to a time where when You have a hostage crisis where an entire country is held hostage by some lunatic or a group of lunatics in the government. | ||
| The matter of national sovereignty is not an issue. | ||
| Who cares about the national sovereignty of North Korea? | ||
| That's a hostage situation. | ||
| Well, that's a really interesting point because we negotiate with North Korea and we give them money and we're not even thinking about going over there. | ||
| We give them money out of compassion to alleviate starvation. | ||
| Why aren't we going over there? | ||
| Because they have nukes. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| And they have so much artillery pointed at South Korea, and the distance is so small that nukes aside, it would just be a disaster. | ||
| But again, that's an argument for not letting these... | ||
| Failed states and deranged states get too strong. | ||
| We need a way to... | ||
| We need a way to convince the entire civilized world of functional democracies to apply quasi-global pressure to any one of these regions demanding that they get their act together. | ||
| And Afghanistan is definitely a place where it would be compassionate. | ||
| If we could come in, if Russia and China and everyone else could get on the same page with us, And we could all agree, alright, the women of Afghanistan, We actually need to help you. | ||
| So how are we going to do this? | ||
| The first pass, any guy who's throwing battery acid in the face of little girls because they want to go to school, we're going to deal with that guy as the sociopath that he is. | ||
| And if it just so happens that there's a culture of those guys and they call themselves the Taliban, we're going to deal with the Taliban as a gang of sociopaths. | ||
| But, again, we tried it on our own, more or less on our own, and the results have been terrible. | ||
| And the results have been terrible largely because of the role that religious thinking plays there. | ||
| I mean, you burn a Koran by accident and basically... | ||
| The war is almost over and well lost because everyone takes to the streets and begins killing people. | ||
| There's nothing more inflammatory than trespassing on their religious sensitivities. | ||
| If you accidentally bomb a wedding and kill 50 children, You don't get the response we recently got with, you know, this Quran incident. | ||
| And so it's just, it's not, we're not dealing with a culture that can have a sane discussion about the proper goals of human life and how to, you know, how to safeguard human happiness and... | ||
| So in your mind, we need to be the police of the world. | ||
| We're the only ones who know what's right. | ||
| We're the only ones who are going to enforce it. | ||
| We're the good guys. | ||
| And so we need to go over there. | ||
| America, I guess? | ||
| The military industrial complex that runs America? | ||
| I mean, what is it? | ||
| Who's we? | ||
| We is—well, just look at—again, take one piece that you agreed on are the gains we've made socially and culturally and morally around racism. | ||
| So we have—we're at least seeing the daylight on the subject of race in this country. | ||
| Now, so then we have the benefit of a kind of a running start ahead of South Africa, and we see they've got their apartheid thing going on, and we begin, it takes us a while, but we begin to apply pressure to them, you know, boycotting trade with South Africa or blocking trade, and that has an effect. | ||
| Now, that's If you could get the entire world on the same page on each of these questions, I mean, so the treatment of women is even a bigger variable than notions of race. | ||
| Because here you're talking about fully half of the human population. | ||
| So wherever they're treating women terribly, And systematically, not just by accident, but because there's some ideology that women can be treated terribly, that's a human rights problem that every society that has a robust conception of human rights can figure out how to apply pressure to. | ||
| Stopping trade may not be enough. | ||
| And then you have all of these other secondary effects of when you apply sanctions to a country, then women and kids and everyone else suffer. | ||
| And so it's such a blunt instrument. | ||
| We don't have... | ||
| We don't have good tools to deal with these problems. | ||
| I could see it as a justification, one of many, as to why a part of the world was run by bad people with bad ideas. | ||
| But I don't think that's the motivation to go there. | ||
| I don't think that's the main motivation to go there. | ||
| I don't believe that the army would act that way, that they would spend so much money to go somewhere to save some women. | ||
| I don't buy it. | ||
| Well, I'm not saying it's the only motivation, but it's... | ||
| But it's one that you think is being a primary one. | ||
| Well, again, I just would have to focus on any specific conflict we're talking about. | ||
| But when you ask yourself, why... | ||
| They're soldiers who've done multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and feel committed to the project and feel reasonably good about what they've done. | ||
| Why do they feel that way? | ||
| Why don't they get up every morning feeling like they're completely wasting their life and taking massive risks for no reason at all? | ||
| Well, you know, I'd have to interview each individual one to find out what their motivation was, but I look at Afghanistan as a giant money-making effort. | ||
| I look at how much money they're making in minerals. | ||
| I don't think they send tanks to save women. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| It's not a money. | ||
| Afghanistan and Iraq have been the most costly things. | ||
| Sure, for the taxpayers and for the American people, but aren't huge military companies like Halberton and people that rebuild these places and contractors. | ||
| There's a lot of money being spent, right? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Companies make money in times of war. | ||
| Yeah, so the people who make bullets make money when they get to sell bullets. | ||
| But in terms of the... | ||
| The cost to our economy in general and the cost in the lives of the men and women in our military serving over there. | ||
| None of the soldiers are extracting wealth from the ground in Afghanistan or extracting oil. | ||
| And yet, when you hear them talk about Their experience, what you don't hear is a litany of, we never should have done that, that was a complete waste of time, I can't believe that our government has done this. | ||
| Wow, that's not true at all. | ||
| I hear a lot of people online that are soldiers, former soldiers, that have a lot of those stories. | ||
| No, there's some of that. | ||
| You can't say you never hear, because you do. | ||
| No, I'm not saying, but it's not all of what you hear. | ||
| What you also hear is an experience of... | ||
| Really trying to, you know, building schools or building infrastructure and really trying to help a democracy grow in these places. | ||
| Now, it is such a thankless job. | ||
| And, I mean, again, don't mistake me for being optimistic or at all sanguine about what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| I think it's been a disaster. | ||
| But you think ultimately it's a good idea? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, Iraq, no. | ||
| Afghanistan, I think it was absolutely essential that we do something. | ||
| Now, we clearly, we did it badly from day one, committing far too few troops and letting our proxies do it for us and do it badly, and Osama bin Laden got away. | ||
| But you see it as a war of culture. | ||
| You see it to get bad people out of control of a country. | ||
| That they could potentially be dangerous to us that was worth the preemptive strike. | ||
| Well, again, let's just sort of talk about the big picture. | ||
| If you're a pacifist, you think we should never do anything like this. | ||
| You never pull out a gun and start shooting or threaten to shoot because nothing is worth killing for. | ||
| Now, I'm not a pacifist. | ||
| I think if we all took a Gandhian response to these problems and just got on our Facebook page and made a lot of noise, That there are certain enemies we could have and do have who will just inherit the earth. | ||
| I mean, so the thugs will win in that case. | ||
| Gandhi's non-violence worked against the British because the British were the British and they had enough of a conscience not to just kill everybody. | ||
| It wouldn't have worked against Hitler. | ||
| And Gandhi actually knew that. | ||
| So if you're not going to be a pacifist, then the question is just when do you pull out the guns? | ||
| And we can then have an intelligent discussion about whether it made any sense to pull out the guns vis-a-vis Iraq or Afghanistan. | ||
| Then it's just a pragmatic question of when you do it and how it's best to do it. | ||
| So I can agree with that. | ||
| I can agree that we need guns because there are bad people in the world. | ||
| We need an army. | ||
| We need a military because there are bad people in the world. | ||
| But then when you look about our actions that define What our purpose is with this army. | ||
| Look at our two main campaigns, Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| You've admitted they're both complete fuck-ups and disasters. | ||
| So if that's the case, how do you think the rest of the world will look at us? | ||
| Why wouldn't they be upset with us? | ||
| It seems to me that these campaigns have done far more to hurt the way the rest of the world wants to treat us than anything else we could have ever done. | ||
| Going to these places and blowing up Buildings and killing. | ||
| How many hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in Iraq? | ||
| And how many people are dying every day in Afghanistan? | ||
| Do you think about the numbers that have been piled up, just the actual raw statistics as motivation for these people? | ||
| Well, I think it's had, paradoxically, it's had both effects. | ||
| It has, because you look at, if we didn't go into certain situations, so it's like when Libya was kicking off, The resistance was desperate for us to come in, and we looked at the mealy-mouthed approach we took, just sort of letting our allies to take the lead. | ||
| That looked a little bit like cowardice, and we got a lot of grief for not actually being active enough to help prop up the Libyan resistance. | ||
| Right, but that's a pretty extreme case. | ||
| You've got a guy who's been a dictator forever, and the people literally are rioting in the streets. | ||
| But Saddam Hussein was the same case. | ||
| But the people were not rioting in the streets. | ||
| Because he was a better dictator. | ||
| It was arguably worse in Iraq. | ||
| There were more reasons to go in. | ||
| There was every expectation that enough of the people were ready to be rid of Saddam that we could have been greeted as friends. | ||
| And yeah, it was a disaster. | ||
| Mainly because we underestimated the level of sectarian violence that was going to begin the moment we took the lid off. | ||
| And again, that's just incompetence. | ||
| But it's not... | ||
| So when you have... | ||
| Sunni Muslims who are going to blow up a Shia mosque. | ||
| People didn't even know about that before they went in, did they? | ||
| Well, a lot of people didn't know. | ||
| We didn't even know the difference between Sunni and Shia. | ||
| I mean, you had bloopers of our White House press conferences where they're getting people's affiliation wrong and not even thinking they're interchangeable. | ||
| Do you think that these debates that you've had with all these Like, fiercely religious people. | ||
| Have they given you more of a pessimistic Thought or idea on how we need to handle people in other parts of the world where their entire cultures are run by religion? | ||
| I mean, do you lose a bit of hope for rational conversations to the point where you're like, you know what? | ||
| You have to engage militarily. | ||
| There's no other options. | ||
| You're never going to get by with debate. | ||
| You're never going to get by with rational thought. | ||
| You're never going to get by with reason. | ||
| You're talking about cultures that want to murder you for burning some pages accidentally. | ||
| You're talking about a culture that wants to murder you for drawing their guy. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think it's not partitioned so easily by state, but I think I view it as kind of concentric circles. | ||
| So again, we're talking about Islam here for the moment. | ||
| You have this sort of the center of the bullseye of doctrinal, crazy, global jihadist Islam, where, yeah, I think, you know, Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like thinking, that's just a deal breaker. | ||
| I mean, so we're at war with that subset of the Muslim world. | ||
| And they are—I mean, it's not our idea that we're at war with them. | ||
| They're at war with us. | ||
| They'd endlessly talk about it. | ||
| So we're innocent? | ||
| We've done nothing? | ||
| They are running a very different game in their heads. | ||
| It's not about land. | ||
| It's not about the Palestinians. | ||
| They've got these 7th century or 14th century goggles that they're looking at the world through. | ||
| If we pipe Baywatch over on the satellite dish, That's an offense that they're willing to die for. | ||
| It's a very different game they're playing. | ||
| You've got to imagine what it's like to really believe in paradise. | ||
| To really want to get there, to know that if you blow yourself up killing infidels, you're going to get there and you're going to get everyone you love there. | ||
| There's just this velvet rope in front of paradise and you're going to walk right past because the angel is going to lift it up for you and the way to get there is to be a jihadi. | ||
| It's like being James Bond who's going to get 72 virgins in paradise. | ||
| And you have got no other problems in life you need to worry about. | ||
| You don't have to worry about getting an education or getting a job or making it work in this world or building a civil society. | ||
| You just have to play your side of the game right and die in the right circumstances. | ||
| But how many of those are there? | ||
| I think there are tens of thousands of people who went to training camps in Afghanistan. | ||
| So again, so... | ||
| Concentric circles. | ||
| So the center of the bullseye, let's say that's just... | ||
| Let's say that's half of a percent of the Muslim world. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Which is a time... | ||
| So whenever you... | ||
| Half a percent is a... | ||
| You know, one percent of humanity is schizophrenic. | ||
| I mean, so half a percent is a tiny segment of any population. | ||
| There's... | ||
| There's no idea so crazy that only half a percent of Americans believe in it. | ||
| You know, if you ask people... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Flat Earth. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you're going to get more than half a percent. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| So... | ||
| But even half a percent... | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You know, it's millions of people who are just the diehard of the diehard. | ||
| Now, there's 1.4 billion Muslims. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you think it's possible that half a percent of them are willing to blow themselves up for virgins? | ||
| Well, it's worse. | ||
| So let's say there's potentially a million jihadis, right? | ||
| I think it's probably worse than that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But when you say just define it, you mean guys who are willing to become suicide bombers? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| More than a million. | ||
| Well, I think that wouldn't be a crazy guess. | ||
| I mean, I have no way of knowing apart from the fact that in every Muslim country, it's 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, depending on the country, up to 70% who think suicide bombing is a good thing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| When you run the poll, which has been done by Pew and other organizations, and you start asking people, do you think suicide bombing in defense of Islam is ever justifiable? | ||
| Yes, sometimes, rarely, and never are the possible responses. | ||
| The number of yeses and sometimes It gives you, if not a majority, a significant minority of every Muslim country. | ||
| Even in the UK, you would get something like 20-25% of young Muslims thinking that it's justifiable. | ||
| And you'd get that immediately after the suicide bombings in London. | ||
| These polls have been run. | ||
| Do you want to live under Sharia law? | ||
| You get like 30% in the UK among Muslims, 18 to 24. Now, so one question is, do people actually believe what they say they believe when you are taking a poll? | ||
| And what does it actually mean to say yes to that? | ||
| How does that inform your life? | ||
| So let's just dial it all the way down to half a percent, okay? | ||
| Everyone else is just bluffing. | ||
| Half a percent is still, with the spread of weapons of high yield, whether it's nuclear weapons or biological weapons, Half a percent of any significant population can do a lot of damage. | ||
| We have to win a war of ideas, ultimately, and we have to discredit these ideas so that the next generation Doesn't find it so easy to believe these things, but... | ||
| But how do they accept us? | ||
| How do they accept anything, any real solution coming from us when they know what we did in Iraq, when they know what we did in Afghanistan, when they know what a fuckery we've made out of the whole thing, when they know how much rampant corruption there is, when they know how much missing money there is? | ||
| How do they ever look at this as anything other than a money grab? | ||
| How do they ever look at it as like, oh, these are the Americans, they're going to teach us how to live? | ||
| How could anybody accept that? | ||
| Well, it's not, but when you look at, again... | ||
| It's just necessary? | ||
| It doesn't matter how they accept it? | ||
| We just have to do it anyway? | ||
| When you're talking about the center of the bullseye, these people are truly unpersuadable. | ||
| There was nothing we were going to do that was going to get Osama bin Laden to say, you know, I had you guys all wrong. | ||
| This is, you know, we're friends now. | ||
| And, I mean, so I think... | ||
| A certain percentage of people are unpersuadable, and the force or the threat of force is the only game to play. | ||
| And then what we have to do is win a war of ideas around that first circle where they become marginalized, sufficiently marginalized, and not supported within their society. | ||
| Arguably, that has happened To some degree, even with how chaotic Afghanistan and Iraq look. | ||
| Well, there's certainly been more penetration than there was like 50 or 60 years ago, but the majority of the population is still like really deep into their culture, right? | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, they have a weird setup. | ||
| They only have one city. | ||
| Kabul's the only real city, right? | ||
| And Afghanistan is just filled with like tribes, right? | ||
| Essentially, Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I haven't been there, so I'm, again, speaking... | ||
| Yeah, I've only read... | ||
| Third hand, but... | ||
| Yeah, and heard McCain talk about it, where he... | ||
| I believe one of his quotes was that it's run the same way as it was when Alexander the Great was around. | ||
| Right, and some of that tribalism isn't strictly a religious problem. | ||
| I mean, so tribalism is a problem, and religious tribalism is a problem, and these are, you know, these are... | ||
| Any ideology that fundamentally divides one group from another and prevents them from recognizing their common humanity is a problem, and so not all of that's religious. | ||
| Some of it's racist, some of it's tribal, but the role that religion plays in confounding this Our best intentions, even if we only had our best intentions and they were not mingled with our worst intentions, | ||
| even if we were just going to Rwanda to help people, even though they don't have oil and we got no national security interest, but they take out the machetes and start killing their neighbors, and we're going to put our lives on the line to just stop the violence. | ||
| The problem is there's no elegant way to do it. | ||
| You wind up killing innocent people. | ||
| You can't commit enough resources to build a civil society. | ||
| It takes too long to teach people what they should want. | ||
| It's a hard problem. | ||
| You sort of reconcile our military actions. | ||
| You reconcile the corruption, all the fuck-ups. | ||
| They are what they are, and there's nothing we can do about them now. | ||
| But what's important is we keep these crazy people from developing nuclear bombs and from... | ||
| Because the very real possibility of nuclear terrorism to you is far more important than whatever mistakes or corruption that we've put out as a country that have gotten these people to have this sort of a perception of us. | ||
| I think, well... | ||
| We have to be pragmatic. | ||
| Yeah, I can't sign on to all of that because I think our screw-ups have been huge. | ||
| And I think we have a huge moral debt to all the people we have accidentally blown up. | ||
| I mean, obviously collateral damage is a huge problem. | ||
| And I think we are... | ||
| And it's been a problem in every war we've ever fought. | ||
| One of the things we've now, which is an advantage on the one hand, but also a disadvantage, is that there's so much more transparency. | ||
| We know so much more about the bad stuff we do, whether inadvertent or not, that if we didn't know this in World War II, and we're bombing Dresden and incinerating hundreds of thousands of people, innocent bystanders for the most part, Non-military targets. | ||
| Arguably, we should never have done that, but we arguably couldn't do that now, given what the images would do to us on the nightly news. | ||
| And I think that's all to the good. | ||
| I think we should understand the cost of war more than we do, and we should understand how horrible collateral damage is more than we do. | ||
| How do you feel about WikiLeaks? | ||
| Well, I think Assange is just, he's a creepy bastard. | ||
| I like transparency. | ||
| I think the journalistic aspect of it to some degree was legitimate. | ||
| But I think it's also, if you're going to release Certain secrets shouldn't be released. | ||
| Certain secrets are there because they're keeping people safe. | ||
| And to release those secrets irresponsibly is to put people in harm's way. | ||
| And so it's a very mixed thing. | ||
| How did you feel about the initial video that he released? | ||
| Collateral murder, the one that showed the guys in the helicopters shooting the people on the ground and a car full of children and them saying, well, they shouldn't have brought their kids. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, the thing that's horrible about that is that we're just not wired to understand the consequences of our actions once we can fight war remotely. | ||
| If we were just fighting, if it was all just bayonets, there's the inescapability of the horror of war. | ||
| But the moment you can fly something, you're sitting in your office park outside of Las Vegas and you're flying a Predator drone 13,000 miles away, I'm not suggesting those guys don't have a hard time sleeping at night, | ||
| some of them, but it's a very different kind of violence and one of the scariest things about Technology is that it uncouples us from our emotions from The reality of the consequences of our actions so that the most harmful things aren't actually the most disturbing things you know, | ||
| so this is so if you This is an example actually I used in I think the end of faith You know if you hear that you're Grandfather fought in World War II and he dropped bombs. | ||
| He was a bomber pilot and he dropped bombs over Dresden. | ||
| That's one kind of level of abstraction of his actions that doesn't really disturb you about him. | ||
| And it needn't have disturbed him. | ||
| He's at 30,000 feet dropping bombs, not really getting what he's doing. | ||
| But if you hear Granddad killed a woman and her kids with a shovel, All of a sudden, he's the scariest guy I've ever heard of, and probably he couldn't sleep for the rest of his life either, because it takes a very different kind of person to do that. | ||
| But the guy dropping bombs killed far many more women and children than the guy with the shovel. | ||
| And so that... | ||
| It's fascinating, isn't it? | ||
| And now we're moving into drones, which moves even more. | ||
| So we need... | ||
| The burden is to... | ||
| Figure out how to have an appropriate emotional response to reality and to be guided by... | ||
| It's not to say that our emotions are always the perfect guide. | ||
| I mean, there may be ways in which we are wired to have a strong response to something that We should just get over and we're not wired to have an appropriately emotional response to something that really is a massive danger. | ||
| And so our perception of risk and our perception of harm is not what it needs to be for us to make intelligent decisions and compassionate decisions in these kinds of conflicts. | ||
| Did you agree with the video being released? | ||
| Did you think it was a bad idea? | ||
| For morale, for the cause. | ||
| Well, it's hard to separate that from everything else that has happened. | ||
| As far as WikiLeaks, you mean? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I think WikiLeaks... | ||
| Truth is, I don't even know the ultimate consequences of WikiLeaks. | ||
| It would just matter what the consequences actually are. | ||
| But isn't transparency good? | ||
| Yeah, but up to a certain point. | ||
| But do I think Obama should be forced at his next press conference to just share his White House briefing with the world? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think I think he there are certain things that I understand that he and people like him need to know that I don't need to know, and if I knew and blogged about it, I would be harming our national security. | ||
| So, yeah, no, I'm not for the just unlimited... | ||
| Distribution of secrets. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you allow them to have certain secrets just for national security? | ||
| Well, it's just, clearly we... | ||
| They need that. | ||
| Yeah, they absolutely need that. | ||
| To what level? | ||
| I agree with that 100%. | ||
| To what? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Absolutely, right? | ||
| If there's bad guys. | ||
| But to what level? | ||
| Like, at what point? | ||
| How do you... | ||
| You know, that's where... | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| How do you make the distinction? | ||
| How do you decide that, you know, they shouldn't be able to have... | ||
| You know, certain secrets that may, in fact, be damaging to American civilians or we might, you know, disagree with it. | ||
| It might change the way we feel about a president or our policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's probably not that complicated, though. | |
| I don't think so? | ||
| No, it's probably pretty basic. | ||
| It's probably like, all right, we should definitely not tell them about where nuclear warheads throughout the United States are located everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, you would think so, but I think it's a lot more complicated than that. | ||
| Yeah, well, again, there are trade-offs between some of these things where it's just hard to really be satisfied that you've hit the right answer because it's the... | ||
| So, for instance, going through security in the airport, there's this issue of fairness, and there's this issue of intelligent use of attentional resources. | ||
| So the fairness would say, yes... | ||
| Frisk the 75-year-old woman who looks like she just got out of her evangelical church just as much as you frisk the guy who just prayed on his knees to Mecca before passing through security. | ||
| It's only fair to be blind to those otherwise salient differences between them. | ||
| But it's stupid, too, when you know that the person who's gonna blow himself up on the plane is a jihadi and not an ordinary-looking old woman. | ||
| So, again, what are the consequences of being starkly unfair, where you just profile nakedly and say, yes, without apology, we profile. | ||
| If you're Muslim, we are going to subject you to a harrowing search at the airport because we're worried about your brothers. | ||
| We have to find a balance. | ||
| We're struggling to find a balance between those two things. | ||
| In the current environment, I think we're wise to err on the side of being fair. | ||
| And I think you would want us to err in that direction, to be fair and to be transparent. | ||
| But that's what's so scary about something like nuclear terrorism. | ||
| One thing has to happen. | ||
| And all of a sudden, we'll all be desperate for a level of security that will radically transform our lives. | ||
| And it'll be, again, it could be completely out of scale with the actual damage. | ||
| So if a nuke went off in Los Angeles and killed 100,000 people, so a small nuke, killed 100,000 people and rendered some area uninhabitable for a while, That would be such a rattling event that we would all be demanding huge changes and we would be forfeiting our civil liberties happily with both hands. | ||
| As was clearly evident after 9-11. | ||
| Right, but this would be orders of magnitude worse and yet It would be rational to say, well, listen, 400,000 people died of heart disease last year. | ||
| No one is forfeiting their civil liberties or going nuts over that figure. | ||
| We're talking about 100,000 people. | ||
| What is the real risk we're talking about? | ||
| Well, there's a sudden death over a long, slow, self-administered death. | ||
| Even if that would be... | ||
| Even if we... | ||
| I'm not saying that's the right way to look at it, but even if you could show a commensurate body count from some other source... | ||
| Actually, Bill Maher once made this point where... | ||
| I think he was talking about Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| He said, look at what happened with Hurricane Katrina and the billions of dollars in cost and a thousand lives lost. | ||
| If a terrorist had done this... | ||
| We would completely freak out as a nation because it's the weather, we basically can't get our act together and don't really worry about it. | ||
| That difference in response is... | ||
| Something we have to be cognizant of. | ||
| And so one reason, one rational reason to want to protect against certain especially salient events like nuclear terrorism is because we are guaranteed to overreact in such a way that the consequences will be... | ||
| Horrendous. | ||
| I mean, just economic consequences. | ||
| That's a very good point. | ||
| So your point is cut back on civil liberties so that we don't have to cut back on them in the future when the shit hits the fan. | ||
| Well, to some degree... | ||
| It's an argument. | ||
| You're not committed to it, but it's an argument. | ||
| Yeah, no, but cut back on them... | ||
| And again, I wouldn't phrase it in terms of cutting back on civil liberties, but I... It comes back to moments like airport security for me. | ||
| It's like, how much security do I want when I get on an airplane? | ||
| I want intelligent security. | ||
| And I also want fairness. | ||
| And I'm willing to put up with a certain level of inconvenience to know that basically this is being done sanely. | ||
| Now, do I want huge inconvenience? | ||
| Do I want to be bombarded with x-rays? | ||
| Do I want to, you know, do I want to have to take my clothes off every time I get on a plane? | ||
| No, but it's just... | ||
| We have, as a society, we... | ||
| There's something very corrosive about the signs that these efforts are ineffectual and not being done intelligently. | ||
| If we could all just see an airport security protocol that just looked right, then I think everyone would understand why we had to do it. | ||
| But it looks so wrong and it feels so wrong. | ||
| It doesn't feel like it's improving. | ||
| It's not like they're figuring out the system better and this is an easier way to do it, less intrusive. | ||
| There's no easier way to do it. | ||
| And I'm not even putting myself... | ||
| It's like I'm not... | ||
| You know, I don't actually look, I don't think I look like I'm Al Qaeda, but I don't look, I'm not as benign. | ||
| I once saw a little girl when we first got the shoe bomber effect and we were all having to take off our shoes. | ||
| I saw, you know, I saw a three-year-old girl in her, you know, whatever those black and white shoes that little girls wear are called. | ||
|
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|
Jellies? | |
| Uggs? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's some older school name. | ||
| Anyway, she was like holding up a line. | ||
| She was being forced to take her shoes off. | ||
| She was terrified. | ||
| It was like her first flight, you know, and like the parents were being traumatized. | ||
| And it was just the most insane misapplication of human resources. | ||
| And meanwhile, that was a flight where I had accidentally taken a bag that I used to keep a gun in, and I went through security with a double handful of bullets, just inadvertently, right? | ||
| So I'm getting through with bullets, and they're looking at this girl like she's, you know, she's Al Qaeda. | ||
| Al Gore got frisked. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| No, but... | ||
| Yeah, Al Gore made a big deal out of it because he was flying commercial on one of these flights and he got frisked. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| How ridiculous is that? | ||
| That's a symbolic demonstration of fairness. | ||
| Yeah, it is, I guess. | ||
| At a certain point in time, you go, come on, you think the ex-vice president is going to become a suicide bomber? | ||
| Is that what we're looking at here? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it's that kind of thing that I think is corrosive. | ||
| And the... | ||
| The missteps and failures we've had at the level of foreign policy and in fighting wars have been corrosive for the same reason. | ||
| It's just the ineptitude and the unacknowledged and unanticipated costs. | ||
| It's all just, yeah, it's very hard to be idealistic or feel like anything is being done right. | ||
| But again, think of just what That's what Obama's got to deal with when he drinks his first cup of coffee in the morning. | ||
| They're getting information from a world of intelligence which is struggling to quantify certain risks, and there is no question that there are people who are Desperate to blow up whole cities in this country, not because they have said they have a long list of rational grievances against our foreign policy, but because they're fighting a cosmic war. | ||
| And that's just something we have to absorb, as bizarre a fact as it is. | ||
| So you think for most people it's almost impossible to sort of understand their mindset, to really put yourself into their shoes. | ||
| It's virtually impossible to really have that kind of a crazed, deep belief. | ||
| I don't find it actually. | ||
| I feel like I can put myself in their shoes. | ||
| If I read the Koran and I read the Hadith and I read what people like Osama bin Laden say about their intentions and why they're doing what they're doing, you watch a few Suicide videos, you know, Last Testament videos of suicide bombers. | ||
| You just have to imagine what it would be like if you really believed that this was the structure of the universe, where this human life that people like us really value is just this This irredeemable, | ||
| fallen, really revolting circumstance of separation from God, and it's just this anteroom to the better place that you get into if you live this way and die in the right way at the right time. | ||
| Eternity awaits. | ||
| Eternity, where all the good people get to be happy forever, awaits. | ||
| Now, why would you want to stick around here? | ||
| I have to talk about this more, but I also have to pee. | ||
| So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my headphones down, and I'm going to ask you a question when we get back, though. | ||
| How the fuck does anything get fixed? | ||
| How do we fix this? | ||
| If you were the grand social engineer of the universe, think about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will follow you. | |
| So now, what do we do while you pee? | ||
| Brian? | ||
|
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Hey, how's it going? | |
| Sorry, I'm just readjusting everything. | ||
| Is this something that you fell into? | ||
|
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Did you think like this growing up? | |
| Or did you have somebody that inspired your beliefs in the way that you think? | ||
| I guess your stance on everything? | ||
| Have you always been interested in it? | ||
| Well, I've always been interested in... | ||
| Religious experience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just what it means for people personally and just what the possibilities are. | ||
| As a teenager, I was as interested in just what are the limits of reality as anyone else. | ||
| And so to some degree, my research there has been scientific and now increasingly scientific. | ||
| But early on, I was interested in religion as a possible account of what's true. | ||
| And I was also interested in the kinds of experiences that the founders of the world's religions have had or seem to have had. | ||
| So I'm interested in the kind of experience that would get Jesus talking like Jesus or Buddha talking like Buddha and I've sought those experiences with drugs and meditation and it's absolutely clear to me that there is a range of experience there that is hugely motivating and real and accessible and has been traditionally described only in religious language and seems to | ||
| cash out the crazy claims of of the various religions. | ||
| So if you're a devout Muslim, And you start having the kinds of experiences that we've had on acid or that people have had in intensive meditation retreats, they get framed in very much in doctrinal ways. | ||
| So it seems to justify your infatuation with this one revelation, a revelation which is intrinsically divisive, which argues that you should hate everyone who's not In the fold. | ||
| So clearly we need a way of talking about these kinds of experiences and valuing them, which is just as generalizable and scalable as the larger conversation of reason and science-based thinking about the nature of reality, and therefore is not in principle divisive. | ||
| One of the things that McKenna always said in describing the difference between religion and the psychedelic experience is that in the psychedelic experience you don't have to believe anything. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Just go on in and you're going to experience it whether you like it or not. | ||
| You're going to get hit by it. | ||
| How you interpret it and how you disseminate it inside your own head is one thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's not like a religious experience in that you don't have to believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Which is probably the beauty of it because, you know, the ego wants you to hold back to all and retain all control of your faculties at any given time. | ||
| You don't want to relinquish control to some sort of a foreign substance, some sort of a drug, some sort of a thing that, you know, you're going to give up your whole body and your mind for three hours? | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| That's too long. | ||
| That freaks people out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it freaks me. | ||
| You know, I... It freaks people out with good reason because there is a chaos factor to psychedelics which you don't get doing yoga. | ||
| Now, that's their power and their peril because the other thing that McKenna said, which is obviously quite true, which is that if you teach someone to meditate or you teach them to do yoga or you tell them to do whatever spiritual discipline you think is so potent, Based on their talents or based on their happenstance, nothing might happen. | ||
| They just might get bored. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they do it for an hour or a week. | ||
| It's not necessarily going to move them, but if you give them 100 micrograms of LSD or a sufficient dose of anything in that family, There is just no question something's going to happen. | ||
| Now, it could be very pleasant. | ||
| It could be very unpleasant. | ||
| It could be mixed. | ||
| But there's going to be a break with their ordinary consensus trance of egoity. | ||
| And that's huge. | ||
| So it's a huge shortcut. | ||
| But the problem is it does just sort of just puts you in a slingshot and you're not quite sure where it's pointed. | ||
| And then it's... | ||
| You're going there. | ||
| So it's a method, but you think that meditation is probably an equally effective method if you really follow it through. | ||
| I mean, I think of meditation the same way I think of martial arts. | ||
| You know, I could teach you a spinning wheel kick. | ||
| I could show you it. | ||
| And you might not ever be able to do it right. | ||
| You might not have the flexibility, the coordination, whether it's mental flexibility. | ||
| You might not be able to focus on it enough or be intense enough or be disciplined enough to stretch yourself enough to pull something off. | ||
| But you can't say that Another person can't pull it off. | ||
| It is possible to pull it off. | ||
| It's possible to be an expert at it. | ||
| But out of all the people that you teach this, you know, like Kundalini or some intense form of meditation where you achieve altered states of consciousness, how many people are going to have the focus, the drive, the discipline? | ||
| How many people are going to put in the time and the numbers to actually pull off an altered state? | ||
| I have never done it. | ||
| I completely agree with that, except there's one caveat, which is I think the center of the bullseye of altered states of meditation is not so altered. | ||
| It's actually the thing that you want to realize from a contemplative point of view. | ||
| It's not actually the same as the full kaleidoscope of effects you get from psychedelics. | ||
| It's not just, and this is a distinction I made, I think again in The End of Faith, between the content of consciousness and realizing a specific property of the nature of consciousness. | ||
| There's no question that in our ordinary waking consciousness that the content, the spectrum of content is trimmed down. | ||
| I mean, we have, you know, there's just kind of a feeling of it's all solid and it's just me here in my body. | ||
| I'm kind of locked in my head and it's you over there and there's no, the energy of the situation is quite limited. | ||
| Yeah, and There are not too many surprises. | ||
| We have all kind of been taught neurologically to just perceive ourselves in the world. | ||
| You give someone LSD or psilocybin or mescaline and that begins to change radically and it changes for everyone and it can be terrifying, it can be incredibly blissful. | ||
| But what happens is people are flooded with new content and new feelings of meaning and just the energetics change. | ||
| So you put your hand on a tree and you feel like the buzz of kind of living contact with a tree, which you have never felt in your life. | ||
| All of that kind of the more aspect that you get with psychedelics isn't really what isn't the point of meditation and it comes with meditation so if you go on you know a three-month retreat where you're just meditating 18 hours a day and every time your mind gets lost in thought you come back to the practice whether it's you know mindfulness like Vipassana meditation or whatever it is it could be yoga That, | ||
| you know, being in a pressure cooker of intensive retreat can give you that some experience of more. | ||
| I've never quite had it like what you get in a psychedelic experience. | ||
| How close have you come? | ||
| Well, it's not the... | ||
| You can certainly get what you get with MDMA. I mean, the full-blown, empathic, unconditional love thing. | ||
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unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You've had that? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they're actually, within Buddhism, there are practices that are just tuned to that. | ||
| So the practice of loving-kindness, called metta in Pali, It's just, you're just trying to stoke that emotion. | ||
| And you're just thinking, it's a very simple practice. | ||
| You bring to mind people you love. | ||
| Not romantic love, but people who you just, you know, your best friend, say. | ||
| And you just meditate on that person and you just think, you know, thoughts of well-wishing for them. | ||
| May you be happy. | ||
| May you be free from suffering. | ||
| And just connect with your wish for that person's happiness. | ||
| And you just train that up. | ||
| The crucial piece is once you get concentrated, once your mind is no longer wandering into the chatter of just distraction, and you can actually focus You get the feeling going and you can focus on the actual practice. | ||
| Then you can do it. | ||
| Then it gets kindled and then you're feeling very much what you feel on ecstasy where there's just this... | ||
| It becomes like ecstasy the moment you move it off. | ||
| You start with someone who's very easy to love, like your best friend, and then... | ||
| Then the practice evolves, and then you move it to a neutral person, and then you even move it to an enemy. | ||
| And so then you get it, then it's just broad spectrum, you know, 360, I love, I wish everyone happiness. | ||
| That's the goal of the practice. | ||
| But wishing with a totally focused mind that is not lost in thought. | ||
| I mean, the truth is, just having a concentrated mind that's not getting lost in thought It's just intrinsically pleasurable. | ||
| It's intrinsically blissful. | ||
| It's like the emotional base note of all the good drug experiences. | ||
| It's like the opiate happy feeling comes just with concentration. | ||
| It doesn't matter what you're concentrated on. | ||
| If you're just concentrated on a I mean Buddhists do practices where they'll just focus on a colored disc and they reach levels of concentration. | ||
| So you're just focusing on a piece of, a swatch of red and you're reaching states of consciousness that are just extraordinarily blissful. | ||
| But again, that's not the ultimate point of meditation. | ||
| Concentration is just a tool to use to actually glimpse something about the nature of consciousness. | ||
| And so this comes back to what I was saying before, that the actual goal, and this is a difference between just getting more content and getting the wisdom that comes with recognizing something about consciousness. | ||
| The goal is to recognize that ordinary consciousness, without anything getting psychedelic, is a circumstance of genuine freedom. | ||
| That the sense of being a neurotic self, locked in the head, worried about what other people are thinking, that can be cut through Fully, so that it's just gone. | ||
| So that you can recognize the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness. | ||
| And that can happen without any of the pyrotechnics. | ||
| It can happen without the rush of energy in the body. | ||
| It can happen without the colors changing. | ||
| It can happen without any luminosity of any kind. | ||
| You don't feel like you've taken a drug. | ||
| Your awareness is crystal clear. | ||
| It's compatible with ordinary behavior. | ||
| You can drive a car. | ||
| If someone says, can you pass the salt? | ||
| You're not this dazzled, stoned person who can't find the salt. | ||
| You're fully here. | ||
| And integrated and yet the center has dropped out of experience and you can just... | ||
| only the world remains in some sense. | ||
| You're no longer on this side of it. | ||
| Obsessing personally. | ||
| Or even just... | ||
| even the sense of subject-object perception. | ||
| Even just... | ||
| it's like there's a way of looking... | ||
| you take any object And there's a way of looking at it as an object, where I feel like I'm over here looking at it. | ||
| And then there's also a way of still seeing it, but Seeing it so clearly that you're no longer the seer. | ||
| You're no longer on the outside or on the inside looking out. | ||
| There's just seeing. | ||
| There's just a totality. | ||
| This is some karate kid type shit. | ||
| You're like, become the cap. | ||
| That's what you're saying. | ||
| No, but it's not becoming the cap. | ||
| It's just become the world. | ||
| Become the whole world. | ||
| Become whatever you focus on. | ||
| Most of us feel like we are... | ||
| Having an experience like there's there's our experience There's the world of our experience and then there's us over here having the experience You know like we're on the outside looking in or we're looking over our own shoulder There's a distance there's a subject and then there's all the objects and it's possible to collapse that distance You know in a way that is doesn't require any psychedelic explosion and From a meditational | ||
| point of view, that's the center of the bullseye. | ||
| You want to find that intrinsic property of consciousness, and then you meditate on that. | ||
| Then you drop your distraction, and you fall back into that space of just being open. | ||
| And aware and then it doesn't matter what happens then it doesn't matter whether you feel bliss or you don't You're not waiting for the meditation to get good. | ||
| You're not trying to have an experience that you had yesterday that you That you lost and you're trying to get back to it. | ||
| I mean that's all of the seeking That tends to come in people's spiritual lives where they're just trying to get someplace that's The irony is that the seeking is your problem. | ||
| Trying to become happy, positing a goal. | ||
| And then seeking it from a contemplative point of view is the trap that you want to avoid. | ||
| You mean as far as behavior is concerned? | ||
| You don't mean that as far as goal setting in life, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's certainly a place for goal setting. | ||
| I was going to say, how do you have this attitude and still write your books? | ||
| How is it possible? | ||
| I'm not nullifying all purpose-based behavior, obviously. | ||
| But from a contemplative point of view, so the question is, What is available to realize now, in the present moment, that is liberating? | ||
| So it's just me, neurotic me, unhappy me, me who's disappointed with yesterday. | ||
| What can I do right now to be free? | ||
| Is that even possible? | ||
| Does the question even make any sense? | ||
| Now, some people would say, well, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| You are just a monkey, or you're just an ape with various needs and desires, and you can be as happy as you can be, but there's nothing really profound to be realized about the nature of consciousness in the present. | ||
| There's just you believing in certain things, wanting certain things, etc. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| Now, it's completely rational that many people think it's true because they haven't had certain kinds of experiences, but the truth is, and this is a truth that, inconveniently for our sake, is only really ever acknowledged in the context of religion, The truth is there actually is something more profound to realize about the present moment. | ||
| And you get one look at that truth through the psychedelic experience because It's just you being neurotic and someone hands you a tab of acid and all of a sudden you are awash in an ocean of new content that is completely profound and you've had no idea life could be so rich. | ||
| Now, if you have a bad experience, you have a bad experience and that's something else. | ||
| But if you have a good psychedelic experience where you feel like Jesus, That proves to you that it's possible to be much, much deeper and happier and fulfilled than you realized. | ||
| I read that you had a very similar experience to me the first time you did MDMA. And that was a real behavior-changing experience for me. | ||
| And I remember when I did it, I really couldn't stop thinking after it was over, like, why can't people be like that all the time? | ||
| What an incredible world it would be if people thought like that all the time. | ||
| Would anything ever get done? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But, you know, boy, human interaction would be blissful all the time. | ||
| Yeah, and again, I keep feeling just a civic responsibility to bracket all of my There's enthusiasm for psychedelics with the warning that I think some of them are just biochemically more riskier than others, and some are just psychologically risky, and it's possible to have a bad experience and to really regret taking any of these drugs. | ||
| Well, if you have a hard time with reality, I say stay the fuck away from psychedelics. | ||
| But even if you've had nothing but good experiences, you can suddenly start having bad experiences. | ||
| I mean, that was my course. | ||
| I took... | ||
| MDMA a few times. | ||
| I took psilocybin a few times. | ||
| I took acid a dozen times or so. | ||
| And I had, for the most part, especially with LSD, I had 10 perfect experiences where Afterwards, it was unthinkable to me that anyone ever had a bad trip. | ||
| I didn't even know what that... | ||
| I couldn't even see the direction you would head to have a bad trip. | ||
| Did anything change in your life before you had the bad trip? | ||
| I don't know what the process was. | ||
| Relationship? | ||
| Insecurities? | ||
| No, I mean, but it's just... | ||
| But then... | ||
| I think this is... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have any science to go on here, but anecdotally, I think this is a reasonably common experience where... | ||
| Once you've had a bad trip, then the door is slightly ajar there, and you can find your way there in a way, kind of reliably. | ||
| So I approach psychedelics with more caution now, and it's been years since I've done anything. | ||
| But it's not that I wouldn't do it again. | ||
| I probably would, but I would just pick my moment. | ||
| Wisely, because as good as the good trips were, the bad trips were just as bad. | ||
| The legal situation is very unfortunate, because if it was legal, then we could have people that were experts on it, that were professionals, and they could distribute it, and they could do it properly in the right environment, and we'd have I agree with | ||
| you that you should be really careful about anything you do. | ||
| I know people that they just, you know, they get on Xanax and they lose their mind. | ||
| You know, I know people that just, things that seem to be mild and acceptable. | ||
| I know people who can't drink. | ||
| You know, everyone's mind is very different biochemically the way it reacts to different substances, you know. | ||
| Some people can't smoke. | ||
| We were talking about this before. | ||
| I know people that have given them pot and they swear there's something in it. | ||
| They swear this is not pot. | ||
| You're drugging me. | ||
| No, it's just pot, man. | ||
| Your setup's different. | ||
| There's a certain amount of immunity that I've developed. | ||
| That you don't have. | ||
| Tolerance, rather. | ||
| I think it's really unfortunate, though, that we can't experiment with these things. | ||
| They aren't at a university level, that this isn't normal. | ||
| People are quietly doing research on basically everything now. | ||
| I don't know if there's anything that you can't do research with at the moment, but it all is pretty quiet. | ||
| But they're doing MDMA research, and actually the... | ||
| I was at TED, and someone who's somewhat close to this research told me that they've been having such success with two sessions of MDMA therapy for PTSD that the military is now looking at using MDMA for... | ||
| Yeah, I'd heard about that. | ||
| Two or three session protocol, which sort of... | ||
| I think the jury's still out on the neurotoxicity of MDMA. I think it's... | ||
| I mean, there have been studies on both sides, but if it's just two sessions and you get some huge response rate for PTSD, that sort of gets around the neurotoxicity question because it's not so toxic that you can't do it a few times or... | ||
| Even a few more times than that. | ||
| But yeah, so anyway, I'm not a... | ||
| Psychedelics were truly indispensable for me at a certain time in my life in terms of just... | ||
| I was so... | ||
| I was a hard enough case and skeptical enough that there was anything worth realizing through introspection that it took just getting hurled over... | ||
| The wall for me to realize that there was any any more to the world and and and so and then that gave me a basis from which to Practice meditation and kind of look into these things. | ||
| What do you think is happening in the psychedelic experience? | ||
| I've heard the broad spectrum of you know, you're just changing the brain chemistry or adding in a different element it creates hallucinations and I Because of those hallucinations, you know, you get these profound feelings, and you can learn and grow from those feelings. | ||
| Two, it's a radio, and you're tuning into another life form that only communicates with you through eating it. | ||
| It's from another planet, and that's why there's a logos. | ||
| That's why when you take especially high doses of mushrooms, you'll have a language. | ||
| Whether it's internal or not, you don't really know. | ||
| I mean, it could all be... | ||
| If you can see any of that stuff, how much of that is just firing against the different parts of your brain that causes visions? | ||
| What do you think is happening in a psychedelic experience? | ||
| I blogged about this. | ||
| I wrote an article titled Drugs and the Meaning of Life. | ||
| In a footnote, I differentiated those two Kinds of psychedelic experience because there is the one experience which is Again, personal, even if it's trans-personal, it doesn't put you in dialogue with anything else, or doesn't seem to put you in dialogue with anything else. | ||
| And that's the only kind I've ever had. | ||
| I've never had the experience where you're the Terrence McKenna style, I'm now in the presence of the other talking and receiving information that I couldn't have had any other way, or I don't think I could have had any other way. | ||
| So So for people who have had that experience, it seems rational to say that it's putting you in touch with another in some sense. | ||
| It's not just an expanded you or just the universe without your ego involved. | ||
| It's actually... | ||
| Putting somebody else's attention on you and now you're in dialogue. | ||
| Now that's an experience I haven't had and so I can't really... | ||
| But the thing is that the test of the validity of that experience is pretty straightforward. | ||
| I mean, if you're getting information that you couldn't have any other way, that should be provable. | ||
| And one of the fishy things about Terrence's account of these states is that At many moments, he really did claim to have a compelling experience of being in dialogue with a kind of omniscient other. | ||
| I don't know if you read his book, True Hallucination. | ||
| He's in the Amazon, he's walking around, and he's had more mushrooms than any person in human history. | ||
| He is in dialogue with, it's a very readable book, very fun read, some very out there ideas in there. | ||
| And so I'm going to falsify by summarizing what he was claiming to be in dialogue with. | ||
| But he's in dialogue with some omniscient other. | ||
| So he's pointing to a species of plant that he doesn't know the name of. | ||
| Terence had a lot of botanical knowledge, but he's pointing to plants that he doesn't know the name of. | ||
| And he claimed he's just getting the Latin name in his head beamed to him by the other. | ||
| Right now, that would be a he he it's been a little while since I looked at the book, but it. | ||
| If you're of a scientific frame of mind and you actually want to establish whether this is more than just your experience, that's the kind of thing that's very testable. | ||
| You could say, listen, I didn't know any of these plants, and I've never taken a course in botany, or I'm going to give the same dose to someone who I really know doesn't know a damn thing about botany, and we're going to see how many of these species of plants he can name. | ||
| And that's just, I mean, that would be, it's as easy as testing psychic phenomenon in an ordinary sense. | ||
| Sure, if you could attach it scientifically. | ||
| If you could just get information. | ||
| One unique experience, though. | ||
| Did you remember any of those names? | ||
| Well, yeah, he didn't. | ||
| So, Terrence was so smart, but... | ||
| He was not the most rigorous at the margins of his rap on what is real. | ||
| He was more poet than scientist when he would get to some of these crucial moments. | ||
| I haven't seen in his work any effort to be really rigorous and say, Okay, I had this experience where I was getting information that I know was not my own content. | ||
| It was not based on prior learning and it was not just merely imagined. | ||
| It was real information. | ||
| And here is how I went about trying to authenticate that it was real information. | ||
| Because he talks about just being able to close his eyes and see Alien civilizations, obviously that's hard to authenticate, but see historical periods and see... | ||
| He used to say that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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What book is that in? | |
| It was in some of his talks. | ||
| Oh, he's probably high as fuck. | ||
| Yeah, so obviously it's possible to be completely stoned and have these wild experiences that are basically just dreams or hypnagogic images. | ||
| Unless you can bring back those Latin names. | ||
| Yeah, if you can't bring back something that's clearly information... | ||
| Then my feeling is there's no reason to claim that it is. | ||
| You can claim that this is... | ||
| The one thing that... | ||
| What's indisputable is that people can have a range of experience that is incredibly beautiful and life-changing. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Certain percentage of people feel the need to tell a metaphysical story about the significance of those experiences and in religion is in the business of Enshrining specific metaphysical stories as the ultimate truth We know they can't all be true because they're all mutually canceling Which is to say if Christianity is true Islam is false and vice versa but The psychedelic experience falls under the same rubric. | ||
| I mean, you can have all of these experiences and not know what they mean and be very humble about what you don't know and still value the experiences. | ||
| Or you can say, oh no, I'm in contact with the Pleiadians and they live in a star system and they're sending messages, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then you're just part of the cacophony of New Age claims that are Unsubstantiated. | ||
| Yeah, unsubstantiated. | ||
| So, I didn't know that he had claimed that. | ||
| That's really pretty funny. | ||
| But one of the things that he did claim was that he was high on mushrooms, and they were communicating with him, telling him to create a map of time out of the I Ching. | ||
| That's something he worked on. | ||
| Yeah, that was the whole time wave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's another thing that just, you know, he... | ||
| He played some mathematical game with the... | ||
| The end date, right? | ||
| The King Wen sequence and the I Ching. | ||
| And I don't think he did it. | ||
| I don't think he was alone for this. | ||
| I think he found some mathematically talented or crazy grad student to help him with this game. | ||
| But he got some pattern of novelty. | ||
| Innovation, yeah. | ||
| But again, how you define novelty is so sketchy and... | ||
| I never wanted to go down that particular rabbit hole with him. | ||
| But yeah, if the world ends in eight months or whatever it is, as he predicted, or the singularity happened or something huge, what he predicted is the asymptotic achievement of novelty on December 21st, 2012. Whatever that means, it's going to be the most novel day in the history of the universe, and nothing will be the same. | ||
| So if December 22nd dawns, and basically we've just had another news cycle, and it's just Fox News versus CNN, we'll know that that novelty theory was wrong, and then there'll be the percentage of devotees who just think it's kind of time-shifted in some, you know, Crucial way, giving us a few more years. | ||
| He's fun to follow, because he was such an entertaining speaker, and I think that was part of the problem. | ||
| The problem was that he was so entertaining and engaging that he sort of was a prisoner to his gift, and his gift was to tell these compelling stories, and if the story wasn't so compelling, well, move things around and make it compelling. | ||
| Unfortunately, I really found out recently, because the people on my message board kind of illuminated this to me, he changed the end date. | ||
| The December 21st, 2012 end date that he always said was... | ||
| That he magically arrived at with his mathematical program, which was to the day, the same end date of the mind calendar. | ||
| Brian, you gotta throw that fucking stupid clock away, man. | ||
| That shit's annoying. | ||
| Ridiculous meow clock. | ||
| You're a grown man. | ||
| But apparently it was really in November. | ||
| It wasn't... | ||
| His original calculations were in November. | ||
| And then when he found out about the end date of the Mayan calendar, then he just shifted in a month. | ||
| Which is so convenient. | ||
| But it's ridiculous. | ||
| Because he used to say to the day. | ||
| So he was a great speaker. | ||
| It was a really cool idea. | ||
| It was a lot of fun to follow. | ||
|
unidentified
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But when you do that much mushrooms... | |
| You know, reality must become like a slippery fish in your hand. | ||
| You know, really, really difficult to constantly have control of. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it is a bit of a liability. | ||
| When you say it so well, you can get carried away with just the experience of saying it that well. | ||
| And to some degree it's true with writing. | ||
| I mean, you can have... | ||
| I think Freud's influence... | ||
| His outside influence, which is kind of inexplicable given how crazy some of his ideas were, is born of just the quality of his writing. | ||
| I mean, Freud was a great writer, and it's just, I mean, the whole mythology he created for what's going on in our heads. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating, but it's like, you know, so much of it is... | ||
| Cocaine-based. | ||
| Should have been obviously bogus, but... | ||
| He's a damn good writer. | ||
| Yeah, well, to this day, people talk about Freudian slips. | ||
| Somehow there's dick going on in the back of your mind all day. | ||
| Well, it's not that it is. | ||
| There's a lot of unconscious processing going on. | ||
| And this is actually the subject of my current book, a very short book on free will, speaks to that, that it's just... | ||
| The sense that we have of being the conscious authors of our thoughts and actions we know is false. | ||
| Now, it's not false in the Freudian sense that we've got the id and the superego and the ego at war and it's all being driven from behind by a kind of Intelligence that's consciously editing what we can consciously know. | ||
| But most of what's going on in the brain is unconscious. | ||
| And most of it's not even potentially conscious. | ||
| And that actually explains a lot of the change you get with psychedelics because you change the biochemistry enough You're playing with the margin of what's conscious and what's potentially conscious, and we are potentially conscious of a lot of things we don't tend to be conscious of, and that it completely transforms our experience. | ||
| But there's a lot that we're not just potentially conscious of, that the brain is doing, and everything we are conscious of is dependent upon all of that work. | ||
| So, for instance, the fact that you are Hearing my words as words right now because you speak English and I'm speaking in English and you're parsing this I'm making sounds and you're just you're not making any special effort to hear words You're just hearing words. | ||
| In fact, you couldn't not hear words if you tried and they're just the words are coming and you're understanding them and I'm gonna get to the end of this sentence sometime and we'll both recognize that it was more or less grammatically correct all of that is It's happening unconsciously and you're not... | ||
| You're just conscious of understanding what I'm saying or not, based on whether I'm following the rules of English grammar or not. | ||
| But I'm not aware of what's allowing me to follow the rules. | ||
| You're not aware of what's allowing you to detect my errors. | ||
| And the truth is, from a conscious perspective, I don't know how I get to the end of the sentence. | ||
| This is really, like, all of this experience of talking is riding atop a machinery That I can't inspect. | ||
| And when it fails, it's a surprise, and I don't know why it failed. | ||
| So that's just talking about parsing speech, but all of our thinking and behaving and wanting and doing, all of our inner life is made of unconscious processing of that sort. | ||
| And so there are experiments where you can show that people When you think you have consciously decided to do something, your brain is actually committed to doing it a half a second or some seconds while you still think you're making up your mind. | ||
| So this really nullifies a conventional notion of free will because if you give me two buttons to push and I can push either one I want and I can push them when I want and you just tell me to make up my mind and I go back and forth and back and forth and say, I'm going to push the left one. | ||
| It's a completely free choice. | ||
| I did it. | ||
| No one forced me to do it. | ||
| The truth is, if you were recording from my scalp with EEG or looking with fMRI at brain function, you could detect that before I thought I was committed, because in these experiments, subjects watch a clock. | ||
| So I'm like watching the hands of a clock or watching random numbers appear on a screen. | ||
| My only goal is to just look at when I've decided, when I'm committed. | ||
| I go back and forth between left and right, left and right, and then I say, okay, that's the hand to the six, I'm going to go left. | ||
| All the experiments show that for some decisions, several seconds before, we could tell from the brain whether the subject was going to go left or right. | ||
| So your subjective sense of being truly upstream of your decision-making process is a false one. | ||
| The only problem I have with that is two-fold. | ||
| One is that if you're gonna study something like that, and you make a clear study where there's a red and a green, and you have to make a choice as to which one, and you monitor the subject's brain, is that real? | ||
| Is that real life? | ||
| I mean, it's a fucking test, you know? | ||
| I mean, how do we know what's going on in a real-life scenario? | ||
| How do we know that there's not a lot of overthinking going on? | ||
| How do we know there's not a lot of shit going on behind the scenes? | ||
| Like, in this sort of a situation because you're setting up this test. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Could psychedelics change free will? | ||
| If a psychedelic experience changes your whole tune, could it literally change what decisions you would automatically make? | ||
| I mean, if there is no free will, a free will is just your mind for whatever reason goes left or right based on morals or ethics or what feels right or what feels wrong. | ||
| In that sense, wouldn't psychedelics be able to change free will? | ||
| Well, I think free will is a truly incoherent concept. | ||
| Right, it's a crazy word. | ||
| It just doesn't make any... | ||
| It's a placeholder. | ||
| We have causality, and no one has ever described a way in which mental or physical events can arise that make sense of this idea of free will, of being the true locus of the causes of your thoughts and actions. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| Most people think that we have this... | ||
| There's a mystery here that we have this subjective experience of free will, but we can't map it on to a notion of physical cause and effect. | ||
| But I think if you look closely, you realize you don't even have this subjective experience of free will. | ||
| So if I ask you, think of an MMA fighter. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Did you get one? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who did you think of? | ||
| George St. Pierre. | ||
| Why didn't you think of Matt Hughes? | ||
| Whatever story you're going to tell now is meaningless. | ||
| The truth is, you're not in a position to know why you thought of George St. Pierre. | ||
| So, okay, there are all these MMA fighters whose names you know, and you know them as well as you know George St. Pierre's name. | ||
| You could have thought of Overeem, or I mean, there's hundreds you could have thought of, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And let's say you thought of a few, and then you settled on one for the purposes of telling me. | ||
| So you thought of, so you got Hughes, and you got Overeem, you got St. Pierre, and then I said, well, who was it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you say, well, St. Pierre, right? | ||
| You can't explain why you... | ||
| Fixated on him as opposed to Hughes or whoever the other candidates were in your mind all of that's being driven from behind Unconsciously and there's no way to ever even if it wasn't even if there was no time lag even if we knew that then the neurophysiology and the and the conscious thought were truly simultaneous So there was no part of your brain that was going George St. Pierre before you were aware of it, right? | ||
| It's still a mystery as to why it is what it is Right, but that's sort of an answer to a question with no consequence. | ||
| When it comes to something with consequences, isn't there free will then when someone contemplates the results of their actions? | ||
| I mean, isn't that what we really truly consider to be free will? | ||
| You look at something and you say, should I hit this old lady with my car? | ||
| No, I should not because I have free will. | ||
| I mean, even if there's some sort of a decision that had greenlit in your brain seconds earlier than that, no, we're not going to run over this old lady, Sort of that's free will, right? | ||
| I mean, what leads someone to murder someone? | ||
| Is every murderer innocent because they don't have free will? | ||
| Are they an accumulation of their past histories and their emotional responses to various stimuli, good or bad, in their environment that's led them down this road, and here they are in this moment in time, in this physical altercation, and they murder somebody? | ||
| Do they not have free will? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, so all good concerns. | ||
| Clearly, there's a difference between voluntary and involuntary action, and so we can talk about that difference without ever invoking free will. | ||
| So they're the things I choose to do, and I'm reaching for the water because I want to pick it up, and that's different from me accidentally knocking it over, and those differences matter. | ||
| So if you intentionally Shot me. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| You're a murderer, an attempted murderer. | ||
| If you accidentally shot me because you were cleaning your gun, there was no intent, and that says a lot of—you're a very different person in the world. | ||
| You're not the person who intentionally shot me. | ||
| So we don't have to worry about you in the same way. | ||
| So for the purposes of our legal system, the difference between intent and lack of intent is huge. | ||
| But it's huge because it says a lot about what someone's likely to do in the future. | ||
| The payoff is that there are, one, I think, understanding that the incoherence of free will does subtly change your morality and would change our legal system in small but crucial ways because it changes your morality because you have to acknowledge that There's a huge role for luck in this world | ||
| that is morally relevant that we don't acknowledge. | ||
| So you are not responsible for the fact That you have your genes, that you were born into this society, that you've had your life experience. | ||
| You didn't make your brain. | ||
| Your brain isn't exactly the state it's in. | ||
| It's not an accomplishment of yours. | ||
| You can't take credit for the fact that you're not a psychopath. | ||
| You are lucky that you're not a psychopath. | ||
| On some basic level, you would be unlucky to have the genes and the life experience that would make you want to get up tomorrow morning and kill kids. | ||
| Do you think that sort of a pathology is inherently genetic? | ||
| Do you think that's environmental? | ||
| It's significantly genetic, but it's a combination of environment, but you didn't pick your environment either. | ||
| But it's not something that someone can avoid based on a bunch of different circumstances. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm not negating the role of human effort and human intention and we can change ourselves, we can get in shape, we can learn new skills, we can improve relationships. | ||
| Everything about what people want to do with their lives can be conserved. | ||
| The truth is, some people are much luckier than others. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And no one can take credit for the fact that they're intelligent, that they're good looking. | ||
| You say this, but what about the secret? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Talk about dangerous nonsense. | ||
| Did that drive you crazy when that was all coming out? | ||
| That was the most irresponsible thing in the world. | ||
| Oprah's boosting of that book was journalistically irresponsible in a way that few things... | ||
| It was amazing watching people run with it though. | ||
| People that were convinced that all of a sudden they were going to create their life with their imagination. | ||
| But there is some sort of an impact that your thoughts and mind have on the real world. | ||
| Positive energy, psychic energy, there's something there. | ||
| Yeah, if you're a nice person and you're thinking nice thoughts about people, they're going to notice that and like you. | ||
| And that becomes a self-fulfilling loop. | ||
| If you are an angry person who's always noticing what's wrong with the people around you, That's very hard to keep to yourself. | ||
| And people begin to treat you a certain way and it becomes self-fulfilling. | ||
| So you think it's entirely social as far as the consequences of thought? | ||
| Well, I wouldn't attribute any spooky level to it. | ||
| It's all understandable. | ||
| Have you ever seen, like, mass prayers where they work on a certain, you know, thing and, you know, everybody together try to pool up their energy? | ||
| Well, that would be so easy to demonstrate that. | ||
| And there's been so much prayer. | ||
| I mean, this is what the great... | ||
| The website, why does God hate amputees? | ||
| You have all these people who believe they've been healed through intercessory prayer of their cancer and all these other diseases that are self-limiting. | ||
| You never hear of somebody who's prayed to grow back an arm and said, look, here's a picture of me without an arm and now they're both back. | ||
| I'm like the human salamander. | ||
| If prayer worked, you'd be able to pray for lost arms. | ||
| Well, you say that, but what if prayer only works a really tiny bit, and you've got to get a lot of people involved? | ||
| So it just boosts your immune system? | ||
| Oh, no, I mean, it's just not perfect. | ||
| It's not magic. | ||
| Is there power in thought? | ||
| But it is billed as magic. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Build his magic, but we're assuming... | ||
| God can do whatever he wants. | ||
| Okay, God. | ||
| If we're talking about God, I'm talking about groups of people praying for things. | ||
| I'm talking about using their energy of their thoughts. | ||
| I'm not really talking about invoking a higher power. | ||
| I'm just talking about... | ||
| Okay, but they think they are. | ||
| Sometimes maybe... | ||
| But with Art Bell, you remember that show? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Art Bell, Coast to Coast, werewolves at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're driving on AM radio. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I believe he did some sort of a test where he tried to... | ||
| They tried to influence something, whether it's weather or something, with a gigantic mind meld. | ||
| But it wasn't a religious thing. | ||
| I think the idea was, can you get a bunch of people to concentrate on something, and do we have the most minute ability to influence things, and together we could do something measurable. | ||
| But I don't know if anybody ever did anything that was actually measurable. | ||
| Well, there are a lot of people who have done research of that kind, and what they claim is just that these micro-departures These micro-effects that, when you aggregate them over many, many trials, represent huge statistical departures from chance. | ||
| And most people in the skeptic community find that completely unpersuasive. | ||
| Have you looked into it at all? | ||
| Like random number generator influence? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Apart from just reading a couple of books, like Dean Radin's book on the conscious universe, What you come down to there are just meta-analyses of someone's statistics and the concern on the part of skeptics that there are frauds involved or there's just a file drawer effect where people are not reporting their failures and they are reporting the The positive results. | ||
| What you should be able to find is if these are real abilities that really matter in terms of... | ||
| Tangible results. | ||
| You should find someone who can come into the lab and demonstrate telepathy or clairvoyance or whatever the thing is you're interested in. | ||
| So that it's really... | ||
| It should survive the presence of a skeptic like James Randi, who's a professional magician who knows how to fake these mentalist games. | ||
| You should be able to test it. | ||
| I spoke to Rupert Sheldrake about this once. | ||
| Do you know Rupert? | ||
| Morphic Resonance. | ||
| He's a big advocate of the scientific... | ||
| Testing of these phenomenon, but he's very... | ||
| He's a believer. | ||
| He's a real believer, and he's published essays or articles on pets that know when their owners are going to come home, and so he's got the camera on the dog, and the owner's headed home, and he's got them time synced and showing the effect of the dog getting up at the right time. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| He's very into the idea of democratizing science where you can get thousands of people doing these tests on their own and showing some effect. | ||
| But what he hasn't wanted to do is just actually submit to James Randi's challenge of showing up and doing an experiment that will survive the The scrutiny of professional magicians, and I'll just allow this thing to be done. | ||
| It's just, you know, people find James Randi's skepticism so unpleasant that they think that that would nullify the experiment somehow, or they're not going to submit to it. | ||
| But, I mean, James Randi has put up a million dollars to anyone who can show some positive result. | ||
| Now, no doubt he's not the easiest guy to deal with. | ||
| If you are committed to the reality of psychic phenomenon and you have to go in and meet with James Randi and design an experiment, I'm sure he's going to make you jump through hoops that you feel like you don't have to jump through. | ||
| But it would be trivially easy to design a valid experiment that could demonstrate these effects. | ||
| And so I'm open-minded that This stuff is possible, but it's fishy that... | ||
| He hasn't taken the challenge. | ||
| People should just come forward and demonstrate the effect. | ||
| Well, what is Rupert's claims? | ||
| I mean, is it that every single time a dog knows? | ||
| Rupert's claim was that... | ||
| He doesn't think science should be decided by Contest essentially it's like it's not that's not how you do science you don't do science to answer a million dollar challenge put up by a magician and That's a okay. | ||
| I understand this kind of the his aesthetic objection or his interpersonal objection to working with with a cranky person like Randy but Cranky not in the flaky sense, but Cranky just in the, you know, he's a... | ||
| Confrontational. | ||
| Yeah, he's confrontational. | ||
| But given how the whole field of parapsychology and, you know, psi studies is treated like intellectual pornography, given how discredited it is in the view of mainstream science, If there's an effect there and you've got a protocol that has demonstrated it, just come forward and do it in every context where you can shine light on it and just prove it. | ||
| And Sheldrake has never done this? | ||
| Well, not to anyone's satisfaction that can move the conversation forward. | ||
| There's many people who say they've done it, but when you actually look at what they... | ||
| What hasn't happened is... | ||
| You haven't discovered people where there's a really strong effect, where you get one person who's like the Tiger Woods of mind reading, where they can actually show a departure from chance that is huge. | ||
| In their own trial, what you get is if you get 6,000 people staring at a random number generator trying to make it depart, you know, to the high side as opposed to the low side, you get people saying that there was this tiny effect. | ||
| So it should have been 50-50. | ||
| It was actually 51 percent over all those trials. | ||
| And that, when you do the stats on it, is, you know, you would expect a one in 10 billion due to chance. | ||
| That's subject to many kind of experimenter problems that people are right to worry about, which is one, people have been caught not reporting their failed experiments. | ||
| There's kind of a true believer syndrome that happens even in certain wings. | ||
| There's a phenomenon of scientific fraud across science, which is a problem we guard against, but it's also been true of parapsychology as well. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that people have these certain senses that have not evolved yet? | ||
| And that that's why, like, sometimes, you know, you know someone's gonna call you and you pick up the phone and it's them? | ||
| You know, there's weird non-duplicatable, that's not a word. | ||
| There's weird experiences that you can't duplicate. | ||
| There's random weird things that can't be controlled, but sometimes the right frequency kicks in and you catch a radio station from San Diego when you're in San Francisco and it doesn't make any sense and it only lasts for a little while. | ||
| Is it possible? | ||
| Have you ever had personal experiences? | ||
| Where, you know, you knew someone was staring at you, and you looked, and they were. | ||
| You knew the phone was going to ring, and it did. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Is that all bullshit? | ||
| Well, no, it's not bullshit, but... | ||
| A huge component, and perhaps the component that explains all of those experiences, is what's called sampling bias, where you notice all the hits and you don't notice the non-hits. | ||
| You don't notice all the time you pick up the phone and you had no idea who was calling you, which is most of the time. | ||
| This is before caller ID, obviously. | ||
| Caller ID has ruled out this sort of psychic phenomenon. | ||
| So we know we don't keep track. | ||
| The hits are salient to us and the failures aren't. | ||
| And religious people do this all the time. | ||
| God always gets credit for the good things he does, but he doesn't get scored for all the disasters he fails to prevent. | ||
| So, you know, a bus crashes and everyone's dead except one little girl. | ||
| And it's God's miracle that she walked away, but what about all the dead people? | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| And so the non-hits always outweigh the hits. | ||
| And if you actually do... | ||
| And the classic demonstration of this, which is still shocking to people, is the... | ||
| It's called the hot hand fallacy in basketball. | ||
| The idea that people get on a shooting streak. | ||
| You know, Michael Jordan, he would shoot two outside jumpers. | ||
| And when he goes up for his third... | ||
| There's this sense both in him and in the audience that he's actually more likely to make that third shot having made those prior to because he's just on a roll. | ||
| So that whole feeling of being on a roll in basketball has been studied because What's amazing about professional sports like basketball is the statistics are every single game that has ever been played is completely broken down. | ||
| We know every shot and every basket and every rebound. | ||
| Statisticians could just sit down and analyze, is there such a thing as the hot hand? | ||
| Is it actually true that if a guy has made three jumpers in a row, he's more likely to make the fourth? | ||
| Or is the fourth truly independent of everything that's gone before? | ||
| And they found that despite the personal experience of being on a roll and despite the fact that we feel like we've all seen someone on a roll, there's really no such thing as being on a roll in basketball. | ||
| Now, there may be other sports where it's different, but there's so much chaos and so much uncertainty. | ||
| And once that ball leaves your hand, it's a low percentage enough phenomenon that it is actually insensitive to statistical analysis. | ||
| No, it's insensitive to the fact that you feel great and everything's going well for you and you just sank two baskets and you go up to sink a third. | ||
| That third is, you're no more likely to sink that third than you were if it was your first one. | ||
| Or you just failed to... | ||
| You just miss two, and then you go up for the third. | ||
| So do you completely discount the player's comfort? | ||
| Like when they feel like they're in the zone, that doesn't exist? | ||
| I mean, what is the zone? | ||
| I mean, isn't it just a state of mind created by confidence? | ||
| They're having an experience. | ||
| So what's amazing about this is this is... | ||
| So no one's ever more likely to make a basket? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Even though they're confident and they make the basket knowing that they're going to make the basket? | ||
| Statistically, you say that that doesn't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| There's no sign of... | ||
| So it's a myth. | ||
| This research is probably... | ||
| He's probably 10 years old or so, so maybe something's happened in the last decade. | ||
| Jeremy Lin just fucked up the whole thing. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| But my understanding is there is zero evidence of what's called the hot hand in basketball. | ||
| So that literally it is a subjective error that everyone feels powerfully. | ||
| And so given that, just map that on to all of our so-called psychic experiences where you feel like you knew who was going to call. | ||
| Someone was going to call. | ||
| We're just... | ||
| It's just luck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| There's going to be some... | ||
| How do you know, though? | ||
| How do you know it's just luck? | ||
| How do you know it's not either or? | ||
| How do you know it's not... | ||
| Well, it's testable. | ||
| Sometimes there's a brief... | ||
| It shouldn't be testable. | ||
| But when you're testing it, you're... | ||
| By placing an experiment on anything, don't you automatically alter the results of it, especially when you're talking about something so ethereal as an idea of a friend, and then, boom, there's an email in your box, you haven't talked to them in years. | ||
| I'm just playing devil's advocate here, because I don't believe in it. | ||
| Listen, I've had an experience... | ||
| But I don't know that I don't believe in it either. | ||
| So here's one weird experience like that that I've had, which, I mean, statistically, it seems... | ||
| Completely beyond the pale, but it's, again, there are going to be low probability events that happen every day. | ||
| And so, you know, I know a guy who went, for instance, his college girlfriend broke up with him and went to Europe And he was convinced the relationship wasn't over, and he decided he was going to go to Europe to find her. | ||
| So he was like 18, right? | ||
| Not a crazy guy, just a really romantic guy, and it was not a scary breakup. | ||
| So anyway, nice story. | ||
| They got back together. | ||
| But what happened is Only an 18 year old could get it into his head to do this. | ||
| He gets on a plane and he doesn't even know which country she went to. | ||
| So he just goes to Europe. | ||
| He goes to Spain because he speaks Spanish and he's like 10 days into his trip and so he's in Barcelona and some tourists hand him a camera and said will you take our picture? | ||
| And he picks up the camera and he's taking their picture and into frame walks his ex-girlfriend. | ||
| So within 10 days he just found her. | ||
| So what are the chances of that happening? | ||
| Well, it's pretty small. | ||
| But that stuff happens to people. | ||
| It would be a miracle if low probability events never happened. | ||
| It would be a miracle if no one in human history ever had a story like that to tell. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We're in a system where there's bound to be very low probability events. | ||
| Or it's just not fully evolved and this kid went on his instincts and he tapped into the information in the universe and he knew instinctively where to go. | ||
| And he met his sweetheart like a goddamn Sandra Bullock movie. | ||
| If it's an ability that anyone should care about, it should be testable. | ||
| It should be strong enough that we can test it. | ||
| But how can you test something when it's an unique event that very rarely takes place, completely uncontrollable, and it's something that's just almost like a natural phenomenon that rarely occurs? | ||
| I mean, how are you going to put something in a testing environment, in the environment of a laboratory, and see if it really does make sense that you think about someone else? | ||
| It might be Sheldrake who's doing this. | ||
| There's a test of the phone call phenomenon where you get, people can subscribe to get their, they get a call at, they enlist like their five closest people in their lives and to call them at random intervals, you know, I guess they disable their caller ID or whatever, and you can just set this up so that, you know. | ||
| It's still not a true moment because they're acting on an experiment. | ||
| How do you know that someone calling you might not just be calling you because they tapped into this idea of loving you and this idea of missing you, and that is the tune that breaks through all the way to you and causes you to look at your phone right when they tune in? | ||
| That's not replicatable. | ||
| Replicatable? | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it's for. | ||
| Replicable. | ||
| Replicable, yeah. | ||
| It's not, I mean, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I mean, it's the idea of unique events isn't disproven by experimenting with it. | ||
| Look, I don't know that it's true that sometimes you know when someone is calling, but I've had the experience myself, but I haven't had in years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's been years and years since I knew who was going to call me and I looked at it. | ||
| But I do remember it having it happen in my life several times. | ||
| What if it's something that just, you know, on a fucking summer solstice, the planets are aligned, your own biology, you have a certain amount of water in your system, and boom, there's a certain amount of love and the thought gets through. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Sure, it's possible, but the question is, even if it's true, given this description, it doesn't really seem to matter. | ||
| Because then they're all... | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| No, but it doesn't... | ||
| It's not a matter of just... | ||
| It's not a sign of how connected you are with the person because sometimes you know it's somebody you don't even like, right? | ||
| It's not a measure of how crucial it is that they reach you at that moment because sometimes it's completely trivial and then other times when someone really had to get a hold of you because your dad was sick They couldn't find you, and you were just blissfully ignorant of the fact that the closest person in your life is having a medical emergency, right? | ||
| Well, no one's saying that it works all the time, and that because it works on a blue moon that it can't, you know... | ||
| But then that's not working. | ||
| Well, it's not that it's not working. | ||
| It just doesn't work all the time. | ||
| It's a rare event. | ||
| Is it possible that there are rare events like that? | ||
| Or do you think it's all just much more likely scientifically to be just... | ||
| Well, given what we're talking about now, this is all much more likely to be... | ||
| Coincidence. | ||
| You don't have that many people in your life you think about. | ||
| You think about them, and you don't have that many people in your life who call you. | ||
| I mean, we just actually run the numbers on this. | ||
| One problem is that we have very bad intuitions of probability. | ||
| So, have you heard of the birthday party problem? | ||
| No. | ||
| So, if I got a room, put you in a room of just random strangers, right? | ||
| How many would I have to have in the room for you to be confident that two people in the room had the same birthday? | ||
| So you'd be willing to bet. | ||
| I'll bet you... | ||
| It would have to be thousands for me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And that would just be a guess. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that's basically everyone's guess. | ||
| That it's just... | ||
| There's 365 days in the year. | ||
| We've got to get two people on the same day. | ||
| That's going to be a lot of people, right? | ||
| The truth is... | ||
| And this is just a fact, that if you get 23 people in the room, you have crossed the 50% threshold so that it's more likely than not that two of them have the same birthday. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| 23 people. | ||
| Now, what's crucial to understand is that it's... | ||
| The crucial piece, and this actually goes to, this deflates so many conspiracy theories and other bad ideas, is that it's absolutely crucial that we didn't specify which birthday, right? | ||
| So it's any two birthdays. | ||
| It's any single birthday. | ||
| Any two people and any single birthday. | ||
| 23 people, that's amazing. | ||
| And that makes it, that changes the game entirely. | ||
| But if I said, how many people do I need in a room to find one with my birthday, that changes it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But any two people on any given birthday, it's... | ||
| Yeah, if you go with just your birthday, that's thousands. | ||
| That would have to be thousands. | ||
| I don't know what that would be. | ||
| But anyway, that's... | ||
| So anyway, our intuitions... | ||
| Our intuitions are bad about probability. | ||
| And so when you look at 9-11 truth stuff... | ||
| It's so much about finding these little anomalies that strike people as intuitively highly unlikely and in desperate need of explanation. | ||
| Whereas you can always look at... | ||
| Anything you look at after the fact can be described as a miracle. | ||
| So like I could say to you... | ||
| What are the chances that all of the wires and objects on this desk would be exactly in this position on this day? | ||
| Well, isn't that a creationist argument for the evolution of the eyeball? | ||
| Like, how is it possible? | ||
| Yeah, well, at least there's actually more to talk about there. | ||
| I mean, you have to... | ||
| You know, it is kind of inscrutable how this stuff happens through genetic... | ||
| Mutation and environmental pressure, but we can tell that story. | ||
| But this is just post hoc, after the fact, I say, this is just inexplicable that the wires are tangled in exactly this way. | ||
| If you were going to kind of randomly do this again, you'd never get them in this position. | ||
| But of course, it's completely meaningless. | ||
| The wires have to be some way. | ||
| They just happen to be this way. | ||
| And I'm putting a completely gratuitous burden on you to explain the fact that they're just this way. | ||
| And so in any situation, certainly any situation as complicated as September 11th, you're going to see all these anomalies. | ||
| How do you explain the fact that On that day, the Navy was running a fighter jet test and we had F-16s that were out over the ocean. | ||
| Whatever the thing is, they only run that test two days a year and they were running it that day. | ||
| If it wasn't that anomaly, you'd find some other anomaly. | ||
| As long as you're picking after the fact, you can always find something weird that is in desperate need of explanation. | ||
| Have there been statistical... | ||
| Have there been studies that have proven statistics on people knowing that people are watching them? | ||
| I've heard there's been studies done... | ||
| People say... | ||
| If you had Rupert Sheldrake on here, he would say yes. | ||
| But you would say no? | ||
| I'm not close enough to the research to have any sense... | ||
| To some degree... | ||
| It's unsubstantiated, though? | ||
| Well, you just have to take people at their word. | ||
| So, I've talked to Rupert. | ||
| I don't think Rupert... | ||
| I don't think he's a conscious fraud. | ||
| I think he's a smart guy. | ||
| He's a very earnest guy. | ||
| Is he lying about what he thinks he knows? | ||
| Or is he self-deceived? | ||
| Or has he been deceived by unscrupulous people? | ||
| Confirmation bias. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The problem is that it's so... | ||
| It's a fringe, and so many people want to believe it's true, that it's easy to worry that it hasn't really been fully—the bushes haven't been beaten hard enough to find all the errors and the biases and the frauds. | ||
| But if there's a real phenomenon there, it should be testable, and it shouldn't be vulnerable to the slightest quirk of, That experimenter had a bad vibe or was too skeptical and therefore killed the effect. | ||
| Especially when you're talking about people who actually claim... | ||
| So that's not real. | ||
| Is it possible that someone could be the experimenter that could have a bad vibe and be too skeptical and that is negative energy? | ||
| You could set up an experiment where... | ||
| The experimenter was 5,000 miles away or had really good vibes. | ||
| You could put the true believers in, you know, kind of the coach. | ||
| You could put a completely friendly coach who was, you know, Sylvia Brown, you know, crazy, fraudulent, psychic Sylvia Brown. | ||
| She could be there working her magic, you know, and just helping every... | ||
| You could surround them with only true believers if you wanted to. | ||
| You could design the experiment in such a way. | ||
| So you can make the vibes as nice as you want. | ||
| There's a fundamentally unscientific attitude you get from many, many people in this area of the human conversation, which is science is reductionistic. | ||
| It's hypercritical. | ||
| It's life-destroying. | ||
| There's this whole area of truth that science in principle can't touch. | ||
| And that's just not true. | ||
| It's like, if it's a real phenomenon, science is the best way to touch it. | ||
| There's certain things that it's hard to figure out how you would do the experiments, hard to figure out how to get it in the lab. | ||
| And how to get it to where the person who's doing the experiment is not being influenced by the fact you're experimenting on them. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So there's certain, you know, the scientific research I've done is with functional magnetic resonance imaging where you have to put people in an MRI scanner And it hugely limits what you can study because people can't move. | ||
| If you move, you destroy the image. | ||
| So you've got to lie in a clattering machine, motionless, and do some cognitive task That you can do looking at computer goggles or looking at a mirror across your feet out into the room. | ||
| A brain scanning experiment is hugely limited. | ||
| You can't put somebody on their bike and have them ride off into the distance while scanning their brain. | ||
| Those things aside, and here we're not talking about experiments with those kinds of limitations. | ||
| If people have an ability to know who's calling on the phone, if there's even one guy on planet Earth who has this ability... | ||
| It should be... | ||
| We could easily design an experiment that would demonstrate that. | ||
| And the people who claim... | ||
| There are people who really claim these abilities. | ||
| They claim it on a repeatable basis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are people who... | ||
| Well, they're the sort of kind of shyster Western New Age psychics who, I'm not sure, but I imagine they just never submit to being tested for obvious reasons. | ||
| And then there's the... | ||
| Buddhist, Hindu, Yogi, contemplative world where people imagine that great meditators have developed these abilities. | ||
| And even some of the meditators will, you know, wink-wink, suggest that they probably have these abilities but are just too humble to demonstrate them. | ||
| And there's sort of a kind of religious taboo against demonstrating them or challenging them or submitting them to tests. | ||
| Yeah, in the contemplative world, among Buddhists and Indian yogis, there's actually a straightforward path to developing these skills. | ||
| I mean, there's just a recipe. | ||
| You could go ask the Dalai Lama, how could I learn to read people's minds? | ||
| He has an answer to that question. | ||
| I mean, it's not like, well, it's just a matter of whether you're gifted or not. | ||
| You can basically get a PhD in reading people's minds among Buddhists and Hindus. | ||
| So the people who've done that, why don't they get tested? | ||
| Because what they're claiming is not an ability to make a random number generator jump slightly if they've got 5,000 people sitting next to them also doing it. | ||
| They claim just huge abilities are possible for meditators who've reached certain levels of concentration. | ||
| I mean, there are people who... | ||
| The stories are as crazy as anything you've heard. | ||
| What about remote viewing? | ||
| That's probably the craziest shit of all time, right? | ||
| Has that ever been disproven? | ||
| That's clearly disproven? | ||
| Well, it's just vague enough. | ||
| Well, first of all, there are magicians, like the British magician, Darren Brown. | ||
| I've got to pee again. | ||
| I forgot to pee. | ||
| I'm drinking these gigantic drinks. | ||
| I'm so non-psychic that I forgot I had to pee. | ||
| That's how in touch I am with... | ||
| My physical reality. | ||
| This has been a really fascinating conversation, man. | ||
| We could go on for hours and hours. | ||
| How long was that? | ||
| Almost three hours. | ||
| No, really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We're five minutes away from three hours. | ||
| Well, I hope we didn't kill our audience. | ||
| No, are you kidding, man? | ||
| People love this shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I think you're... | |
| Your devotion to the scientific method and exploring everything is very admirable. | ||
| It's very interesting and unique, and we've never had anybody on the show that breaks things down in that way before. | ||
| It's really been really cool. | ||
| Follow him on Twitter, SamHarrisOrg, and check out all of his books, from Letter to a Christian Nation was the first one that I ever read, to End of Faith, and what is the most recent one? | ||
| The Moral Landscape and Free Will is the most recent one. | ||
| And Free Will is the PDF. It's a downloadable, small... | ||
| No, that line was a short... | ||
| A book on the ethics of Lyons. | ||
| Is it samharris.org? | ||
| Is that the best place to go to for everything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Dude, we've got to do this again, man. | ||
| We didn't even touch jujitsu. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a real pleasure. | |
| We didn't talk about martial arts. | ||
| We got all up in jihad and a little bit of drugs. | ||
| It was great, man. | ||
| Awesome, awesome time. | ||
| We can do this over and over again. | ||
| So, ladies and gentlemen, that's it. | ||
| Follow him, buy his stuff. | ||
| Sam Harris is the fucking man, and this show's over. | ||
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
| See you soon. | ||
| See you this week. | ||
| We've got a lot of people coming up. | ||
| Who the fuck do we got, Brian? | ||
|
unidentified
|
At the Ice House. | |
| Yeah, we got Joey Diaz doing a podcast on Friday. | ||
| Jason Silva's coming back on Tuesday. | ||
| Aubrey Marcus is coming back next week. | ||
| We got a lot of people, too. | ||
| We got a lot of people. | ||
| Alright, we love you, bitches. | ||
| Thanks for everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye-bye. |
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