Sam Harris and Joe Rogan expose Islam’s uniquely protected critique, contrasting its rigid scripture—like the Quran’s unchallenged justification of violence (e.g., Taliban’s Malala attack)—with Christianity or Mormonism’s selective reinterpretations. Harris links religious delusion to martial arts fraud, where "supernatural" claims collapse under real-world testing, like a failed "death touch" challenge. They debate conspiracies—9/11 theories vs. systemic incentives (e.g., Gulf of Tonkin)—and media dishonesty, like Greenwald’s racist mislabeling of Harris despite his measured arguments. Ultimately, the episode argues that cognitive honesty, not just skepticism, is needed to dismantle both religious and conspiratorial illusions. [Automatically generated summary]
Very understandable fears of racism and xenophobia.
So we're obviously trailing a legacy that we should be mortified by, a legacy of slavery and colonialism.
And all of that is something we should have a critical distance from and not want to recapitulate in any form.
And so it's important to be mindful of that, obviously.
But there's this...
This combination of white guilt and political correctness and just sheer Stockholm Syndrome in some people that has made it impossible to criticize Islam without being branded a racist.
And Islam, if you're not going to buy traditional, then conservative.
If you're not going to buy conservative, then extremist.
There's some version of Islam that is the most odious ideology operative now.
It is leading directly to the immiseration of millions of people.
And the moment you try to really draw a straight line and Myriad straight lines exist between that phenomenon and the actual doctrine of Islam.
The actual idea said, handed down from Muhammad, you're accused of bigotry and you're put right next to Michelle Bachman and anyone else on the right who obviously you can't ally with in any sense.
So it's very troubling because you have...
Those whole websites and magazines like Salon and Alternet and even The Nation, they just reflexively demonize anyone who has said anything about Islam, the religion, that's negative.
And it's a double standard we're going to have to overcome.
And my slur was not basically accepting her view of Islam as the canonical Islam, because she's not an atheist.
And they thought I was sort of co-opting her as an atheist, which I obviously wasn't doing.
So it's just incredibly frustrating because so many smart people, or otherwise smart people, are taken in by this.
Because people really want to believe that all religions are the same, and that people everywhere are the same and want the same things, And if we just got our act together on the world stage, if we just ceased to exploit people and we ceased to be selfish and we just pulled back all the drones, everyone would behave the same way.
We would have rational actors everywhere.
And there's just no evidence for that.
And there's just as much evidence as you could possibly want to find for the antithesis, which is there are some people who are in a death cult We have to win a war of ideas and we have to win a
If you're a woman, to get behind the wheel of a car in Saudi Arabia is a life-disorienting risk to make that kind of social protest.
So if, at best, they're behind us by whatever, 50 years, 75 years in certain social epiphanies.
So if you roll back the clock in the U.S. and look at racism, we don't really have the same analogous religious brainwashing, but if you look at racism in the U.S., I mean, what was going on in the teens and 20s and 30s is just unthinkable now.
I mean, just lynchings and newspaper editorials that were starkly racist.
I mean, there are newspaper editorials, not op-eds, but actually the editorial of the New York Times and the LA Times in 1910, 1915, that read exactly like a KKK pamphlet.
I mean, just mind-boggling.
Wow.
At the very least we have societies that have to catch up in their attitudes towards women and homosexuals and pluralism and atheism and we have to facilitate that process by not Caving in when free speech issues come up.
So when someone draws a cartoon in the Prophet Muhammad and people start burning embassies, the move on our side can't be to apologize for cartooning and to become self-critical and masochistic about, you know, why is it that we had these cartoonists that did this terrible thing?
And that's essentially what we did.
No magazine, with the exception of one, Free Inquiry, in the U.S., published those cartoons.
They're totally benign cartoons.
You probably saw them.
They're available online.
We practice self-censorship to a degree that is just astonishing and really just harmful to this conflict, both the hot and cold conflict that we're having.
It's a caricature of overblown reaction that you get from someone that maybe is put in a situation where they want to always use this as an excuse for why things are.
Like, it's racism, man.
This is racism.
Or, you just hate women.
Like, there's a bunch of these.
Like, oh, you're Islamophobic.
It's like, boom, they throw that on you, this wet blanket.
And It's a weird thing because you call it a cult, and I agree with you, but that's a very controversial thing to say.
If you say that, people get very upset with you.
But the reality is, somebody's in a cult, okay?
If you've got 20 different, whatever, how many different religions that are practiced worldwide?
And no one's willing to admit that, of course, everyone believes the other people are in a cult.
But just the cognitive dissonance involved in picking some ancient ideology and thinking at some point in time, Somebody actually had a conversation with the divine, wrote it down verbatim, and it's perfect, and it's never been touched by the hand of man or distorted.
It's weird that you get that from something like Salon.
And that's essentially what they're doing by calling you Islamophobic.
They're endorsing this idea that this wacky cult that makes you kill people, they draw a picture of their guy.
Well, the dispute is that the link that I'm drawing and that many other people draw between that behavior and the religion is being challenged.
So the people who would brand me as an Islamophobe would say that This behavior has nothing to do with Islam, in principle.
One, you have extremists in every religion and they all misbehave, or bad people will do bad things anyway, and religion is always a pretext.
And that is just not true.
The scary phenomenon I think the most scary phenomenon really to be witnessed anywhere is that you can have psychologically healthy, rational, otherwise competent and capable and charismatic people who have other opportunities in life.
You know, the quarterback of the football team can become a jihadist given the right ideas.
And if you just admit to yourself that certain people actually believe in paradise, And believe that there's a specific way to get there that entails violent defense of the faith, then it becomes totally rational to behave this way.
Then you and I would be flying planes into buildings if we actually believe this.
It doesn't matter what other opportunities you have in life.
And the thing that most secular liberals can't get their minds around is that people actually believe in paradise.
People actually believe that a certain book was dictated by the creator of the universe, and it has provided a blueprint and a moral framework that many, many people, millions of people believe is perfect and unchallengeable for all time.
And then once you admit that, you just have to look at the blueprint, and this particular blueprint says a lot about a holy war and fighting the infidel and subjugating the infidel and killing apostates.
So if you convert to Islam now on this show and then by the end of the show say, I thought better of it.
I don't feel like being a Muslim anymore.
I'm unconverting.
That is a crime punishable by death.
And that's just—that's not extremist Islam.
That's not—I was in a training camp in Afghanistan with 10,000 other lunatics, Islam.
That is plain vanilla Islam.
Now, you can sort of dicker around the edges of that dogma by saying— You're dead to me?
It's also dangerous just to have a very strict ideology, to have a thing that not just you're supposed to do because the culture wants you to do it, but because God wants you to.
That's weird.
It's dumb.
It's weird.
It's insane.
If you think that in 2013, with the kind of access to information we have, that we really believe that someone actually wrote this stuff down from the divine...
It's craziness.
With Christianity, whether it's Mormonism...
Mormonism is hilarious.
Mormonism and Scientology are my two favorites because we know the guy who made them.
That you acknowledge the difference between the various ideologies on offer because just believing that your worldview has come from God is not necessarily a deal breaker in terms of living in a global civil society if that worldview prescribes lots of benign things.
So if you think God told you to be a vegetarian And never harm anyone and learn everything you can about science and mathematics and economics and become a really energetic contributor to civil society.
If that's your religion, well then you're never going to show up on anyone's radar as a dangerous person.
It's just the main religions on offer don't have those kinds of ideas.
You know, they have first century and Iron Age platitudes and strictures that have now been canonized in these books and there's no way to rewrite the books.
You can't edit the books.
People effectively edit the books by ignoring the most barbarous stuff in there, but there's no way to say we're going to, we as Muslims or as Christians, are going to craft a new scripture that's in line with all that we've come to learn about the universe And follow that as though it were the Word of God because they would know they were making it up.
You read the Bible cover to cover, it takes you a month and a half.
But you read the Quran, it's a much more unified document.
And you can't cherry pick it.
You can cherry pick it a little bit, but you can't cherry pick it in quite the same way.
You can't just take Jesus and half his moods the way you can as a Christian and say, well, it's all about turning the other cheek and I've got I don't care about hell.
I don't care about any of these culture war issues.
You just can't, you really can't do that with Islam.
Like every time I've had a Mormon neighbor or meet Mormons, they're the nicest people.
They're almost like childlike in their belief, like childlike in their approach to religion.
Like, my wife has a friend who's a Mormon.
I went out to dinner with her and her husband, and somewhere along the line, the subject of higher power came up, and she was grilling me, like, do you believe in a higher power?
And, you know, basically I said, well, I don't not believe.
I don't know.
I mean, who the fuck knows?
She's like, you don't know.
If you don't know, how do you sleep at night?
For her, someone had to tell her so she could tuck herself in the bed.
Like a little kid, like my five-year-old.
Like, sweetie, God's watching over you and everything's going to be okay.
Okay.
Now I can go to sleep.
For her, it was very childish.
She's a fucking 40-year-old woman.
She had this childlike, narrow tunnel of thinking that she prescribed to.
There's no group of people that are more energetic in their atheism that I've met than ex-Mormons because they're coming out of this thing that is just so obviously made up.
It's like you got Joseph Smith as a dowser and a con man and just getting it on with everyone's wife and making up the principles.
He gets new revelations to appease his jealous wife.
He goes into the closet and God tells him that he's got to have more hot girls.
It's just there in the floodlights of history to be inspected.
Once they get out of it and they see that they're trailing all this nonsense, they're very fun to talk to.
Well, I wouldn't be the first to observe that death has something to do with it.
This anxiety about...
What it all means in light of the fact that it all apparently ends is really a defense against grief.
These beliefs, a belief in paradise, is really the only thing you can tell yourself or tell another person or tell your child in the presence of death that makes death fundamentally unproblematic.
The closest person to you in your life has died or your child has died.
So what are you going to say to yourself or to the people around you?
What can they say to you that is just not only takes the sting out slightly, but it's just perfectly consoling, if you could believe it.
It's this proposition that you're going to meet again in some perfect place and you're going to spend eternity there and be perfectly happy.
And all you have to do is believe the right things in the meantime.
And not screw up too badly as a homosexual or whatever else is on the checklist of don'ts.
And you will get there and you'll be reunited with everyone you care about.
And there is no secular or atheist or rational alternative to that.
And that's a bullet I think we just have to bite.
At the graveside of a child The atheist doesn't have something to say that says, this is not a problem.
Your tears are wasted.
And Christians and Muslims and Mormons and basically everyone who posits a heaven that is assured based on the right beliefs, they do have something to say that the The crowd buys into, and there's no question that it relieves that suffering.
Now, I think it comes with a host of other problems that even that trade-off is not worth it.
Even if we grant that a certain kind of suffering is relieved there, There's other kinds of suffering that spring up.
People are not learning how to grieve.
They're not learning how to teach their children to grieve.
They're not learning intellectual honesty.
And they're mired in a way of thinking that is causing them constantly to collide with reality.
In unfortunate ways, they actually don't get what they want in life because they're believing things that just don't line up with how the world works.
If you look closely, you can see that even that, the baby in the bathwater of faith, is still dysfunctional.
The Mormon friend, she applied for a real estate license?
And didn't get it.
She failed the test.
She was upset.
She's like, I'm a good person.
Why didn't I get it?
I'm doing all the right things and I'm a good person.
That's what she kept saying.
It's like being around a crazy person.
She just believes that if you do God's word, good things are going to happen to you.
I'm a good person.
Why didn't I get this?
Meanwhile, not looking at the fact that she's rich as fuck, lives in a great house, has healthy kids.
There's all this wonderful stuff going on in your life.
Maybe you just didn't apply yourself enough to this whole real estate thing.
It's nothing to do with God failing you.
Do you think that religion is something that's allowing human beings to make this jump from animals to enlightened, connected beings?
It seems to me that with the connection that we're enjoying through technology, through the internet, and through the access of information, It seems to me that we're slowly but surely dissolving all the boundaries between people and information.
And we're gonna have much more truth about life and death and the very origins of the universe in a hundred years or a thousand years than we had a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago.
And I always wonder if, like, religion is something that's allowed us to keep our shit together just long enough for some really fucking smart dudes to figure out the internet.
Keep our shit together.
Keep together morally.
Give these fucking crazy apes some sort of an excuse or a reason to live so they don't just go marauding and jump off clips out of despair and give them something that allows them to continue the work and that work being society ultimately Moving towards some sort of technological innovation zero point.
You know, like everything we do, whether it's cell phones or laptops or cars, every year it's better.
No one ever goes, we're good.
This cell phone I have, this Galaxy Note, no one's ever going to look at this and go, this thing's perfect.
Okay, we're done.
We don't ever have to make another cell phone again.
We're going to continue to move forward, faster speeds, more connections, more apps, more things that they can do, holograms, time travel, whatever the fuck it's going to be.
We're never going to stop.
Sometimes I wonder if what religion is is just like some sort of a scaffolding that lets us build society on.
There are people who think that religion paid evolutionary dividends because it allowed large groups of people, large groups of dimly related people, not just family, but larger tribes, to cohere in a way that they couldn't otherwise.
So the way to get a bunch of strangers to cohere is to put a big idol in the corner and say, you know, anyone who trespasses the god is going to be killed.
And we're going to commit a sacrifice of a few kids every month or so and keep everyone in line.
And outsiders who come into our world who don't understand our taboos and our precepts are going to be easily recognizable as outsiders.
And so there's a long list of things that people think religion may have given our ancestors.
That may be true.
I happen to think that most of what explains religion is just more fundamental cognitive and emotional mechanisms that have nothing in principle to do with religion and which have also given us science and reason and everything else that is recognizable as human cognition.
I think the most rudimentary piece here is belief formation.
You and I and every other human being who is neurologically intact has learned, comes into this world equipped to represent reality in language and to trade in those representations and to give them credence to one or another degree.
So you tell me where this studio is.
I believe you.
It's just language, right?
And the language got me here.
My belief in the language got me here.
If I thought that I had transcribed the address wrong, that belief would have caused me to call you and make sure I got the address.
These are all just ones and zeros in our computer at the moment, but virtually the totality of our worldview is linguistically mediated in this way.
Everything is not a matter of direct sensory perception in each moment.
Religion is just part of that.
It's the set of beliefs people form for which they have very loose evidentiary criteria and which govern all these no-go areas for science.
What happens after death?
What is the meaning of life?
What's the most important thing to live for?
I think actually reason can capture all of those conversations as well as in the process of doing it.
It really is just a matter of believing certain propositions and the rules by which we vet those beliefs when we are in conversation with one another.
And the problem with faith is that it really operates as the permission people give one another to believe things strongly without evidence.
And we don't give that permission in any other area of our lives.
We don't give that permission in science.
In politics, insofar as we're practicing politics that anyone can tolerate.
And it's a...
That permission, the taboo around criticizing that faith is something we're hopefully getting over.
We're going to have to get over it because it is the reason why people oppose gay marriage.
It is the reason why people want laws that make Blasphemy, a criminal offense.
Insofar as you actually believe something, it can't help but show up in the public sphere.
People think beliefs are private.
They're only private if there's nothing in your life or in the environment that is calling them out.
But the moment that they are relevant to your behavior, they can't help but inform your behavior insofar as you actually believe them.
This is an example I gave in In one of my books, a true belief in the efficacy of prayer is dangerous.
Insofar as you really believe it, you're going to be tempted to rely on prayer.
You're going to be tempted to rely on prayer for your children.
You've got these people who won't take their children to doctors because they think prayer is going to work.
Imagine if you had a pilot who's trying to land the plane with prayer.
I mean, it's clear that – I mean, it's a ridiculous example because we think no one would ever do that.
But in some sense, people do that in situations where the stakes are just as high.
And certainly everyone who's waging jihad thinks that their belief in paradise is true.
And it's the credence they give to that – It's just pure language in the mind that is so dangerous.
Well, yeah, you can say that it did, but I look at it from the other side.
So, for instance, when you say that when you look at all the good things Christians have done under the ages of Christianity, occasionally you can point to something in the doctrine of Christianity that seems to be the operative variable.
So if that doctrine were different, behavior would be different.
But for the most part, What you see is just people being people trying to get what they want out of life.
They're building bridges and they're learning about disease and they're trying to develop scientific principles.
And it just so happens they're all Christians doing this.
Christianity doesn't really get credit for the birth of science.
It shouldn't get credit for the birth of science.
It shouldn't get credit for all the bridges we built or the roads we paved.
It's just there was no one else to do the job in Europe.
Everyone was a Christian.
Everyone came into this world and was indoctrinated into a worldview that they got on mother's knee, and there was no other worldview on offer.
I mean, it's just as true to say that virtually everyone who ever fought a war or saved a life or built a bridge did it in complete ignorance of Darwinian evolution, right?
That doesn't mean that ignorance of Darwinian evolution was the crucial variable there or was a good thing or something we should want to promote or something we should safeguard.
It just so happens that prior to 1859, this notion of evolution was not an idea that had appeared in anyone's head.
There was no alternative but to not know anything about evolution.
You could draw a line from ancient Greece.
And give us a civilization with a very rich dialogue about ethics and about social norms that would not have needed to invoke the war god of Abraham.
Plato could have given us the basis to think rationally about the good life and Plato and everyone like him in ancient Greece.
And that is a stream of ideas that is unencumbered by this notion of maybe there's an invisible monster out in the desert who wants a human sacrifice from time to time and maybe had a son who died for our sins.
So I don't think it's actually – even if religion has seemed to do it in certain circumstances, I don't think it was actually a necessary piece.
I think we are so deeply wired as social creatures to care about ethics that ethics was going to show up anyway.
So Christian ethics was not – just Christian and Jewish and Muslim ethics were not a necessary scaffold for us.
But there's also examples of dehumanization of the other, really common examples, the way societies are allowed to look at their enemy as not being human and commit horrible atrocities because of that.
Our default is the guys over in the next valley, we don't know them.
So chimps have that, right?
So chimps will band together in war parties and kill other chimps who are not part of their tribe if they happen to outnumber them.
And that is a behavior that clearly – tribalistic, xenophobic violence is clearly something we are good at and do reflexively in a state of nature.
Um...
Yeah, that's where we start.
We overcome that by extending the circle of our morality and extending our relationships, our economic relationships, our cultural relationships, our peaceful collaboration with strangers.
That's what civilization is.
Civilization is a machine to get us to peacefully collaborate with strangers.
And the frontal cortex of every human brain is a machine that allows for that collaboration.
And if you damage that in an individual, there's many different pathologies there, but one is psychopathy.
If you have the right damage to your brain, you are someone who...
Sees no basis for collaboration.
You don't feel empathy for other people.
You either don't care that you make them suffer or you actually take sadistic pleasure in making them suffer.
And the very basis for trust breaks down in relation to such a person.
And what I would argue is that there are actually cultures that are, for all intents and purposes, psychopathic, in which you can put perfectly normal individuals, people who are neurologically intact, who don't have any of the The anatomical problems of psychopaths, but put them into a system of poorly aligned incentives and bad ideas, and they essentially act like psychopaths.
The guy who got on the bus and shot Malala in the head for wanting to go to school, that's essentially what happened.
A Taliban gunman Tried to assassinate a 15-year-old girl for the crime of wanting to get an education.
Most people look at that and think, well, he must have been a psychopath or he must have been crazy.
And I think the situation we're in is far more sinister than that.
He very likely was a perfectly normal person and very likely a father who thought he was doing a good thing.
And in every other moment in his life, it was probably a nice guy, probably a compassionate guy, probably a guy who's capable of empathy.
No, because you just have to look at the kinds of atrocities that normal people...
Perpetrate in mass movements that are, for want of a better word, evil.
Look at Nazi Germany.
How did the Holocaust occur?
It was not that there were hundreds of thousands of psychopaths eager to collaborate in the destruction of a people.
There were a lot of normal people who, given the requisite ideas and the requisite incentives, And the ability, as you described, to dehumanize the other just saw no problem.
They could burn people in gas chambers by day and go home and shed a tear over Wagner at night and play with their own kids, and that disjunction morally Never had to be inspected.
Now, obviously, there are some people who were racked by guilt and some people who refused to collaborate, but this is one of the scary features of the human mind.
It's possible to be an otherwise good person and do horrible things in the right situation.
That's not to say that there aren't psychopaths who are evil and essentially monsters, but normal people are capable of terrible things, and in the context of certain religious ideas, I think It becomes quite rational for them to perpetrate evil.
I agree with you, but I don't think there's any evidence that this guy was like a normal, nice guy in everyday life.
I just don't understand why you would assume he was.
I would assume that if everyone knew that she was going to school and there were so many people that knew, it would take an extreme version of that ideology in order to get on a bus and shoot a 15-year-old girl.
Let me just say, I know nothing about this particular person.
I'm just guessing.
I think there's no reason to believe that Every member of the Taliban or every member of al-Qaeda is a psychopath or is a person who would otherwise do terrible things to innocent strangers.
There's no reason to believe that and there are many reasons to believe otherwise.
And you can just look at how people get radicalized and it's not...
You don't have to round up all the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world and brainwash them and turn them loose.
You can even go into a stranger direction than that.
When you look at what a surgeon has to do just to cut into a human body, there's a kind of desensitization and a shutting down of empathy, the kind of normal circuits of empathy and compassion to do that.
So you and I, in the presence of the suffering we would see in an ER, say, would probably be physiologically and emotionally really… Overwhelmed.
Amped up because we're not used to it and we see someone in tears with a major wound or a broken arm and all of our empathy circuits kick in and we're not very useful in that circumstance.
I mean, leave aside for the moment that we actually don't know what to do.
Even if we did know what to do, the An efflux of empathy in that moment is not especially useful.
To be a great trauma surgeon, you want to be somebody who is not distracted by the tears and the obvious signs of human suffering and who can just deal with this like a machine that has to be fixed.
There's even a point of contact between that ability just to shut out the other human stuff and deal with the machine That is on a continuum with this cognitive, emotional gesture of dehumanizing The other.
And just seeing no moral implication in just blowing up bodies.
So it's essentially you're talking about a broad spectrum of possibilities of the way the mine operates.
And there's some people that can learn how to shut things off.
And that's what you're doing when you're a soldier.
You just learn how to, this is your new reality.
There was an article recently where they interviewed that guy who was a soldier who got in trouble because he was urinating on a dead insurgent.
And they interviewed him, and it was really interesting because he was very honest about how he felt about the situation.
He said that people have this idea of what they want out of a Marine.
They want a guy who's on the commercial, who slides the sword into the holster or the scabbard and stands up straight and is wearing a perfectly trimmed suit.
You don't want a guy who's going to piss on a dead guy.
But you don't get one without the other.
You don't get a killer.
You don't get a guy who doesn't have total disdain for the enemy.
And that's what develops.
You see your friends die.
You see those around you die.
You see these people shoot at you.
You develop total disdain.
That it's okay to kill people, but it's not okay to pee on them.
It's real weird.
And I'm not saying that it's okay to pee on people.
I'm certainly not saying that it's okay to kill people either.
But I'm saying it is weird that we get mad at one and not the other.
It's almost like...
There's a thing about sexuality that I always found really odd.
You can't watch sex, but you can watch graphic violence.
You can put a movie, and if it's sex, there's legs covering, there's angles, and you don't ever see genitals, except it's very brief, and there's no actual intercourse.
We're not allowed to show intercourse.
Intercourse is somehow or another ridiculously taboo.
But we can watch people's heads explode on regular television.
The Walking Dead is just...
Every episode is just boom, slash, fucking swords cut heads off and guns blow people up.
Defending yourself and your buddies against the threat of the enemy and killing the enemy wherever you find him, that is a...
That's a mode in which you can't be thinking about how the enemy has kids just like you and is eager to get home to his wife.
That's just not helpful.
It's easy to see why that would start to get drummed out of you.
It's a huge problem that we can dehumanize other people.
It's also a huge problem that we can be part of systems and collaborate in ways which effectively We don't even have the mechanism by which we would notice it.
And we don't see...
We just don't see that there is kind of a zero-sum game here operating in the background, which we are all, we can't help but participate in, which leaves people trying to eke out their survival from trash heaps in developing nations, and you and I wondering whether we should get the iPad Air.
And there's no way to really square, in a moral, ethical sense, The way we use our attention in that space.
There's no clear way for me to help the person on the trash heap in wherever, Nairobi, because just cutting another check to the Red Cross or UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders, while that's a good thing to do, It's this sort of telescopic philanthropy where there's not a real connection.
It's not a real imperative.
When I get a mailing from a charity, help another person who's near starvation in East Africa, my failure to do it, my disinclination to do it, my sense that I've got better things to do than open this junk mail, It never shows up in my mind or in my conversation with anyone else as a shocking misuse of my resources.
This is what I'm in a very loose way.
I'm sketching a series of thought experiments that people like the philosopher Peter Singer and Peter Unger have put in What we all seem to justify to ourselves by default is living in a way where we care about our own happiness to a much,
much greater degree than we could possibly justify in the presence of someone else's abject suffering.
And because we're not in the presence, I mean, if after this podcast you and I walk out onto the sidewalk and see someone starving to death in front of us, a child starving to death, we wouldn't be able to ignore it.
Clearly, it's our responsibility to figure out, you know, we have to call the authorities, we have to get some food, we have to get a blanket, we have to do something.
But because it's happening in another society and the only evidence of it that is being thrust in our face at this moment is an appeal by email or a letter, just hitting delete doesn't strike us as analogous to stepping over the body of a child on the sidewalk and saying it's not our problem.
And really, in a global It is analogous, and yet we don't have the mechanisms in place to make it friction-free for us to feel the imperative and care about suffering elsewhere.
Clearly, we have to figure out how to do that as a species.
You look at the amount of people in Africa that have AIDS. You look at the amount of people in third world countries that are struggling to find food every day.
It's the sheer numbers.
When you look at India, there's a billion people in India.
I think 500 million or something live in total poverty.
But that seems like, I'm just going to go to the fucking store.
I don't have time to do this.
I've got to take care of my kids.
I've got to go to dance class.
At a certain point in time, it seems like...
It's not your responsibility.
There's this diffusion of responsibility that comes in large numbers that allows people to ignore a rape if there's a hundred people around and not if there's one.
They've talked about that before.
Watch people get robbed in Times Square and not do anything about it because they're surrounded by other people and they're waiting for someone else to make a move.
It's okay to be a coward.
But if you were alone in the woods and you saw some man beating some woman to death, you would feel compelled to try to do something.
Well, actually, to segue to questions of self-defense, I think that that diffusion of responsibility idea has been oversold because I think more of what's going on for people is they don't want to be the first one to get stabbed.
In many of those situations, you've got somebody with a weapon.
It's not just a guy.
It's a guy with a knife.
And especially in the original case, the Kitty Genovese case, where that notion of diffusion of responsibility was coined, you had a guy with a knife stabbing a woman to death on a sidewalk over the course of many minutes, and there were many witnesses.
But the problem from the point of view of the herd is the first guy to rush The guy with the knife is very likely going to get stabbed and terribly injured or killed.
And maybe the second guy is too.
But if five people rushed him at the same time, if there was some sort of, you know, tactical intelligence in the group, very likely he could be taken down and neutralized and that would, you know, Maybe someone would still get hurt, but it's not going to be like one guy after the other getting a fatal stabbing.
It's a problem we have in that people are frozen.
People freeze.
I mean, we don't have the knowledge tactically among untrained people that if you all go in at once, you have a very good shot at bringing down even a very scary-looking guy.
If you hit him low and I hit him high and another person hits him in the middle...
It doesn't matter who he is.
If he's got three 180-pound guys hitting him, we're going to bring him down.
Obviously, if we have training, that's all the more likely, but what we need in situations like that are people who Are going to take responsibility for the safety of others.
The innocent bystander, whether you're talking about bullying in schools among ten-year-olds or you're talking about crime in public, the fact that we're so willing to be just bystanders, that's a problem that creates a lot of suffering.
Well, in this soft society that we have, our society is so soft and nice, and it's the easiest society that's ever existed.
There's not a lot of conflict in people's lives, and new things like conflict are terrifying, especially physical conflict with another human being who wants to hurt you.
It's absolutely horrifying.
I've told this story on the podcast, but I'll tell it again for you.
I was watching a guy who was at the comedy store, and there was two guys arguing, and they were in the middle of the street across from the House of Blues, and They started arguing.
I don't know what happened.
I just saw it in the middle of it.
And they started swinging at each other.
And it was a white guy and a black guy.
And the white guy just went into full panic mode and was literally standing square and just flailing, closing his eyes with his open hands flailing.
And then a bus pulled in front and I couldn't see him anymore.
And then as soon as the bus moved, he was unconscious.
I'll tell you where the rules have changed or people's intuitions have changed.
It's at 30,000 feet on an airplane.
That's true.
And we haven't decided this.
This hasn't come about from the top.
This has come about organically.
But I think we all have the sense that if something starts going down on an airplane, We're all going to rush the guy and there's just going to be no hesitation because we know how bad that can turn out.
Yeah.
And that is a...
I think that attitude could be brought down to ground level.
And so when you're talking about an active shooter situation in a movie theater, the fact that everyone is just running away from the guy and it's just – he basically has as much time as he wants to just pick targets and reload.
That is what makes it a circumstance of just a massacre in principle.
If everyone rushed the guy, some people would get shot.
But you're not talking about a half hour with a guy stalking the halls, assassinating people.
You're talking about someone who got off a few shots and then was covered with bodies.
And it's not that it is rational to be the first person to run away.
It's not that that's bad advice for the person.
It's probably advice that we should all take if our only concern is to avoid violence wherever it appears.
There are situations where you're going to want to do that no matter who you are.
If you're out in public with your six-year-old daughter, That's probably not the moment for you to try to be a hero.
That's the moment for you to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
And that may be true even if you're a cop.
You have to rank order your priorities and do it very quickly.
I just think that there's an ethic that we could have much more of in this society.
It would certainly be tuned up by martial arts training in many more people, but it could just be tuned up even without the training, that things are a lot worse when you give the bad guy endless freedom to move.
And there are very few bad guys, even armed bad guys, who can deal with a crowd And so when these things go down in public and you have a natural crowd, if everyone's just running away or clinging to the exits, it's very different than if we all took the responsibility of being the first to take them down.
I think that martial arts should be taught in school the same way we teach writing, the same way we teach math.
I really do.
I think if you wanted to avoid bullies, avoid people becoming bullies, teach people how to fight.
Teach people to compete.
All that bully stuff will go away.
Bulliness is mostly born out of insecurity.
Mostly.
Born out of insecurity and born out of this desire that animals have.
To assert their dominance.
You see it in the animal world.
You see it constantly in people.
It's almost like a natural reaction to try to gain some security by making others feel weak.
It's a terrible answer to this conundrum of insecurity.
I think a far better one is not being insecure.
Learning the actual martial arts techniques and learning what your character is all about.
Learning how to do something that's really difficult.
Learning how to push your body when you want to quit.
Learning how to escape a situation that looked hopeless.
Those things are regular lessons in a martial arts class.
I can't tell you how many times I've almost tapped and then gotten out of something.
And then you learn.
You learn how to not tap.
You learn how to get...
And tap when you have to.
Don't get injured.
But you learn how to keep calm and not freak out.
Whereas I've been in class before with new guys.
And it's really...
It doesn't...
I don't...
It doesn't happen very often.
I don't really roll with white belts very often.
But I would roll with them, and you would feel them panicking.
You'd feel them going to full panic attack.
You could feel them hyperventilating.
I'm the guy who's always like, just chill out, relax, dude.
This is what you need to do.
And I'll try to talk them through it.
But it's a weird thing to see this natural animal reaction simply because a person's not trained.
Or I'll be in that same position with a guy who's...
Like a blue belt or something like that?
And they just stay calm.
They know how to do it.
They've been there, done that.
They know how to do it.
And they might get tapped still, but at least they're going to do what they have to do to try their best to get out of that situation.
I think that martial arts, for men especially, and I think for women too, I shouldn't even say men especially, I obviously don't know what it's like to be a woman, but...
I think for men, it's a critical part of developing your personality.
Not because you should be fighting people, not because you should be...
I think people need to do difficult things to explore their character.
I think we'd want to distinguish between or among the martial arts because I think there are martial arts that tune up the wrong part of the ego because you're actually not ever...
Having your skills confirmed or disconfirmed because it's all in this domain of fantasy and pantomimes of violence.
We have this cooperative exchange of attacks and replies to the attacks where you're not actually fighting.
You're not actually poking the person in the eye and seeing what happens or getting poked in the eye.
This is sort of the cut between You know, what are either the fantasy-based martial arts or the so-called realistic, you know, self-defense martial arts and something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu where you're really – you're pressure testing it 100%.
Now, I think there are – Pathologies to the sport pressure testing as well.
I think you have to get a very clear view of what works in the world.
You have to be an intelligent consumer of all these things.
But there is something toxic about training in an art where you're always left wondering whether it works.
Yes.
Especially as a teenage male.
The feeling that you might have something to prove and the fear of being someone who couldn't actually prove it and that whole paranoia that happens in a school where you have teachers whose skills are by definition never tested.
The black belt sensei never is going to roll with his students in these arts.
All he's doing is walking around teaching his fantasy techniques.
The students wouldn't be comfortable wrestling him to the ground and sweating.
You have this hierarchy that is never You just imagine that the guy's got mad skills, but they're never demonstrated in a way that is other than maybe he can do some very pretty kicks, but he's not actually fighting anyone.
Especially as a horny 15, 16-year-old, whatever I was.
That's ridiculous.
You know, I mean, I had a locked key to a building.
And no one was there.
And we could just bang it out.
No problem.
There was couches.
There was no problems.
I was like, nope, we can't do it here.
And I've never had any discipline whatsoever as a young man.
But I remember when I started learning that Taekwondo was very limited.
There was a lot of holes in it as a style, especially when it comes to punching.
Taekwondo is all about kicking.
There's benefits to that because you learn really incredible leg dexterity and some of the best kickers ever are Taekwondo guys who eventually learn Muay Thai, kickboxing, boxing, and wrestling.
There's a lot of guys in the UFC now that are super effective with those techniques.
But when you start training with kickboxers, you just get beat up.
It's a really humbling revelation.
I realized, oh, fuck.
I've been wasting time.
I'm doing something.
I had to revamp my whole style completely.
And then I started kickboxing.
And then I thought, well, at least I've got that hole patched up.
I studied with a guy as a teenager through maybe, I think I stopped when I was 22. It's a guy whose background I never totally believed.
He had real skills and he taught something that was very analogous to Krav Maga.
It's like a street-oriented self-defense where you're basically taking the striking from boxing and the kicking from Muay Thai.
Just a smidgen of grappling, but I basically did not know how to grapple.
But I felt like I knew a lot about how to defend myself, right?
But I hadn't done martial arts for 20 years, and I get back into it and start doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
And got on the mat with Chris Howder.
And it was like wrestling with a Martian.
It was just like the rules of physics did not apply to him.
He's probably 10 pounds lighter than me.
He's maybe an inch shorter.
And it was just this most surreal experience of making a 100% effort to survive and failing every 30 seconds or minute and a half and just then being resurrected by just the sheer fact that he decided not to kill me.
And then doing it again.
There's nothing like gassing under that kind of pressure when you have no idea what to do and you have no idea to relax.
Where I take great pride in, when I do commentary, explaining the various steps that a guy has to do.
Like, this is what he's got to do, and this is what he's got to avoid.
Like, there's two things going on right now.
There's a battle of position.
And I've had so many people come up to me that said they started Jiu Jitsu based on listening to the commentary.
They're like, I've got to learn this.
This is so cool.
It's so weird.
And it's one of the few martial arts where the little man really can defeat the bigger, stronger man easily.
And there's a lot of that fantasy martial arts that you were talking about, where there's people that have the death touch and they can...
You see those videos online where guys throw their hand at people and they fall to the ground.
And you've got to wonder what's going on, whether the person's helping out and they're falling to the ground on purpose, or whether they really believe they get zapped with some chi.
But when you see a guy like Hoist Gracie defeat a guy like Ken Shamrock or defeat a guy like the old school Dan Severin, when he caught him in that triangle, off his back he taps him.
I mean, madness!
Like, how does this happen?
How is this possible?
This guy's 250 fucking pounds, the other guy's 170, soaking wet, built like a popsicle stick, and he just tapped that guy.
He gave up.
It's so technical.
It's really the one martial art that actually has that whole Bruce Lee thing going on, where the one small guy can defeat the large guy.
In principle, all grappling is that, and all joint locks added to grappling, I guess, is that.
But Brazilian jiu-jitsu is, I think, if you're just going to take the off-the-shelf solution to that suite of problems where you've got two people trying to dominate one another physically, and you want to do it in a way where The violence is truly incremental.
You can turn it up as slowly as the laws of physics allow.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that.
Whereas a striking-based solution is not that.
You don't know what's going to happen when you punch someone in the face.
You may break your hand.
You may knock them out.
You may knock them out and have them hit their head on the curb and die.
There's a lot you can't control for, and you can't apply a punch Incrementally to solve the problem.
You were talking about your instructor not quite believing in him.
Eddie Bravo has a great story of a guy that he was training under before he found jiu-jitsu that was doing one of those sort of multiple art-based systems.
He had like, you know, five black belts in different arts.
And he told everyone he was going to China to train.
You know, he had a great master in China that he was going to train.
And Eddie went to the supermarket, and he recognized the guy's car.
And so he goes inside, and the guy was shopping.
He was pretending he was in China.
He just took the week off and was just hanging out and shopping.
He was going to come back and tell everybody he went to China and learned some Qigong.
Have you seen those videos online where they have those old masters that think that they can actually fight?
Offers the challenge and then gets punched in the nose by this very ordinary-looking martial artist.
That one's sad, but they're just mesmerizing to watch.
The ones where there is no disconfirmation, there's just the cult in full splendor, and you just have everyone complying with this magic touch.
I mean, even at distances of 20 feet, you've got people writhing in pain and flopping around.
And I don't know what explains it.
I don't think it is...
Conscious fraud on the part of most of these people.
I think there's a kind of induction.
There's a sort of hypnotic component to it and a suggestibility and also social pressure and self-deception and just many things get conspired to make people participate in this thing.
Seemingly the most delusional thing that has ever happened.
The perfect look, the perfect window at what the human mind is capable of.
The fact that human minds can do this proves that religion can be every bit as delusional as atheists say it is, or at least the doctrines about the afterlife and all the garish stuff that we think of in terms of religion.
It's so much easier to deceive yourself about that than it is to deceive yourself that you can knock 20 opponents down with your magic touch.
There's a frontier between what's real and what...
I don't know where fraud starts and genuine demonstrations of hypnosis end.
But clearly, some people, and there's a spectrum of suggestibility.
Some people are not hypnotizable.
It's not something everyone can be the Manchurian candidate.
There's clearly a phenomenon where you can be inducted into a state where you're given suggestions which then are operative at the level of your behavior and emotion and about which you may have no recollection.
So I think hypnosis is real.
And it's a...
There's also...
There are other features to this.
There's the social pressure and just the sunk cost.
Imagine devoting years of your life to something which does not work but pays all...
You have the belongingness to the group.
You have all of the rituals and...
Just the sunk cost of how much time you've spent doing this thing, whether it's religion or a fake martial art, the pressure, the emotional pressure not to realize it's bullshit can be excruciating.
And when you meet people...
One of my favorite conversations with a former person of faith that I've ever had was I met someone at dinner who had lost her faith that day.
Literally, I got her just fresh.
Just when the thought bubble had burst, she just showed up at this dinner, and her overriding feeling was just of depression over how much time she had wasted.
It's just like the sunk cost of – because she had spent decades fixating on this stuff and it had completely distorted her relationships and it had been the center of her life.
And she finally admitted to herself that day that – in this case with Catholicism, that none of it was true.
She had just been brainwashed.
But the regret, the level of regret over the time wasted and all the things she could have done with that time and all the – That is a wall that many people just can't clear because it's just too painful to acknowledge.
Of all the ones that are avoidable, when you just look at how people screw up their lives, lying is, if it's not the reason, it's the thing that enabled the other reason.
People complicate their lives massively by A willingness to deceive others.
And this has many features to it.
One is just there are all the things you can do based on The cover that lies provide that you shouldn't be doing because they're not good for you and everyone would hate you if they knew you were doing them or your wife would leave you or whatever it is.
The lies create a space in which you can let your life run off the rails, whether it's becoming an addict or Or perpetrating financial frauds or whatever it is.
But there's also this component where you never actually discover who you are in social space if you always leave yourself this out of line.
So it's like you never discover.
If you keep canceling plans with people and just tell this white lie that you're too busy or you're not feeling well, you never have to confront the fact that These are people you actually don't want to see.
You've got people in your life who want to go out to dinner with you.
You don't want to see them, and you're never having to confront that because you have this out that you're just going to lie.
And it's just...
If you want...
There's actually no change in a person's life that I think is more important in terms of getting your life straight, your relationship straight.
You're just getting into the future without screwing it up for yourself.
There's no more important change than a commitment to being honest in whatever the situation is that presents itself.
Well, you can fake something until you make it, which is you can fake a positive attitude toward uncertainty.
So you can go into a situation without any guarantee that it's going to work out or that you're going to develop the skills that you need or that people are going to like you, but have a positive attitude.
I mean, it's sort of a goodwill toward the future that you can develop, and that is a kind of...
I mean, it's faking confidence and faking comfort, maybe.
But that's not lying.
Lying is when you are intentionally...
It's planting false beliefs in others when they expect the truth.
Being a card magician or being a poker player, this is not lying.
The deception I'm talking about is when someone has every reason to expect the truth, and you are purporting to give the truth, but you're not, and you're actually deceiving them.
What I focus on in the book, because virtually everyone recognizes that some subset of deceptions are a problem.
The egregious lies, the frauds that really harm people, and the lies that when a pharmaceutical company says the drug works and they're lying, everyone recognizes that that's a problem, that we've all paid a huge price for The skepticism we now have about governments and corporations, because whenever we catch them in a lie, we just now for the next 10 years can't forget that these people in power often lie to us.
But the line that people – there's another set of lies that people think are actually unavoidable or good, and they're usually called white lies.
I think the price we pay for white lies is also excruciating, and it's not something that people are quick to see.
Actually, I didn't see it until I went to When I was a freshman at Stanford, I took a course with a professor who I actually interview in the back of the book, Ronald Howard, who was really a brilliant guy who started a whole academic field called decision analysis in the 60s,
and it's a mechanism which allows someone to Make as rational a decision as possible by putting all of their information about a topic into essentially a calculation.
It's got nothing to do with lying or honesty, but he's a professor in the Engineering Economic Systems Department at Stanford, and he, as kind of a sideline to his academic work, was teaching these Courses on ethics and one course was just on the question whether it's ever ethical to lie.
And so as a freshman I was sort of put in the machine of this course and came out the other side convinced that in virtually any situation apart from like a self-defense situation where things have really broken down and you're not in the presence of someone who you're going to collaborate with, lying is just unacceptable.
It's just not how I want to live.
It's not how Anyone should want to live if they look at it closely enough.
And then you run to situations where the stranger suddenly is a friend and you're now confronted with having had a different ethical code or you discover that this person is somebody's brother and you just lied to them.
It's not tenable to live this way.
What I'm interested in are the subtle ways that it erodes trust between people because there's one example I use in the book where a friend was out with her girlfriend and she wasn't like her best friend but they were very close friends and the girlfriend had plans later that night with another friend and didn't want to have that plan.
And so this friend A watches her friend call up the third friend and lie about why she can't have plans.
And she lied so convincingly and effortlessly.
It was just something with her kid being sick, whatever it was.
and then went back to the conversation with Friend Day.
And what Friend Day experienced in that moment was just a subtle but absolutely obvious erosion of trust, like a permanent erosion of trust, but it was something that could never be rectified because they were not so close that she was going to perform an intervention but it was something that could never be rectified because they were not so close that she That she was going to perform an intervention there and say, why are you lying?
And why do you do this?
And have you ever done this to me?
She was just left with this vague sense that probably this woman had lied to her in the past and would lie to her in the future.
And we go through life like this with people.
And the people who are telling these little lies are just...
So the liar in that case never knew That she had subtly degraded her friendship with the first friend.
And these things just don't get discovered and it's very toxic.
I find also that people that lie are very difficult at seeing lies in others.
Or very bad, rather, at seeing lies in others.
I think that people who are bullshitters can be bullshitted.
People who are con artists can be conned.
There's a There's some sort of a disconnect that people have that don't live in, especially an introspective, really objective version of themselves, like really looking hard at all their issues.
If you're lying, you're not doing that.
You might have some walls up that you might not know about, and they could lead to you getting lied to.
So this certainly doesn't apply to Rabbi Wolpe, but...
This applies to the jihadist who thinks he's going to get 72 virgins in paradise.
You can be smart and believe that.
And that's the scary thing.
You can be the engineer who could have had everything but decides to be a jihadist because he believes that the afterlife conforms to the Quran and the Hadith.
And that is a...
Deception is part of the game and self-deception is part of the game, but in many cases I think you have people who have been They're indoctrinated from birth or get a message from their culture or get emotionally hijacked in ways that allow them to believe the unbelievable.
And then they're being perfectly honest when they spread those ideas.
They're not frauds.
And that, I think, is a different problem.
Self-deception is certainly a component in many of these cases.
Do you think it's possible that technology will eventually make lying obsolete?
What we're seeing right now with this invasion of privacy thing with the NSA, we're seeing it's a one-sided trip, obviously, and then you have WikiLeaks and Eric Snowden.
Edward Snowden on the other side releasing scratch bits of information that they can scratch together and smuggle out.
But it seems to me like that's where the trend is ultimately going.
The trend is ultimately going...
If you send someone a picture of your dick online, it's going to be out there.
Someone's going to get that.
If you send a blank, if this happens, if that happens, it's all going to be recorded.
You're going to know where you were.
You have a GPS chip on your phone or your Google Glass.
It knows exactly where you were.
It records you all the time.
I think this NSA thing is fucking terrible.
I think it's terrible mostly because it's the government that has all the power in this situation.
It's these people that are not using it.
I mean, the idea is that they're using it to prevent terrorism.
I guess maybe, but there's so much evidence that points to the fact they were spying on other world leaders that they didn't think were terrorists.
It's essentially using it as a vehicle for control.
But it brings up a fascinating new area of technology, and that is this new era that we're entering into where everything's getting closer and closer and closer to the point where One day, we're going to have this one database that we all draw from all the time.
If we have the internet, we're going to have something that's like a pair of glasses or something that you wear inside your skin or something that's going to allow everybody to be connected all over the place.
I don't know how we're going to manage it, but all that information, we're going to be able to get to it.
I'm going to be able to know what you had for lunch today.
There's just the sheer transparency based on having so much data.
But there's this other technological fix for deception, which is just actual lie detection.
And I think that is coming.
I think there's no question that at some point we are going to have lie detection that may not be perfect, but it will be valid enough and reliable enough that we will rely on it In the way that we rely on DNA evidence.
So if it was your DNA at the scene, we think you're involved.
If you are caught lying as measured by this machine, we're going to think you're lying, and that's going to be forensically actionable.
We're certainly not there yet, but I think that It would really surprise me if we don't get there.
And she was talking about fMRI results and how a woman was actually convicted of a murder, I believe it was in India, because of fMRI that she had what they called functional knowledge of the crime scene.
I think that strikes almost any neuroscientist as a premature use of the technology.
And in that case, you're talking about a...
I think that mode of inquiry is problematic because you're talking about just familiarity with the crime scene or with the evidence.
And there are Clearly, other sources of familiarity.
And, you know, if the dead girl is wearing a dress that you just bought out of the J. Crew catalog, you're familiar with the dress.
And I don't know that they have a...
I don't know that they've operationalized this in a way that will protect you from just accidentally being familiar with the...
Some features of the crime scene.
To say nothing of the fact that we just cannot resolve brain function clearly enough to base those kinds of decisions on a judgment that the person is lying or not.
We don't understand the neural correlates of Of honesty and deception enough to know.
But I think it would be very surprising if we never get there.
She was a graduate student in the lab I was in at UCLA, and after I did a study of belief, where I compared belief and disbelief and uncertainty with fMRI, She came back and used all of my data to see if she could discriminate what subjects believed at the single trial level, which is on each question.
So what I did is I put subjects in a scanner and I gave them propositions to read that were either clearly true or clearly false or clearly undecidable.
Just compared belief versus disbelief versus uncertainty.
And that is, if you could do that at the single trial level, you essentially have a lie detector.
Because if you believe that you were the person who committed the crime, and we have a Understanding of the neural correlates of belief versus disbelief, then we could easily ask you whether you were involved in a way that would tease that out.
So she wanted to see whether we could see the difference between belief and disbelief and uncertainty at the micro level, just on the single question level.
And her classifiers were over 90% accurate.
So she was over 90% in In guessing, essentially, whether someone believed or disbelieved a proposition.
It's easy to see how we would now, with available technology, have a lie detector that was 90% accurate.
Now, that's not accurate enough to put people away for misstatements in court, but if we could get it to the level of accuracy that we now rely on for DNA evidence, It's an interesting question philosophically and experimentally how we'd ever bridge that gap and how we'd ever be truly confident that no matter what sort of histrionics and protestations, this person is lying.
Though this person claims on his mother's life that he's telling the truth, the brain scan evidence says otherwise.
Somehow I feel like that is going to be harder to achieve than Him saying, it's not my blood, it's not my blood, it's not my blood, but the DNA evidence says otherwise.
But in principle, I don't see any reason why we couldn't get there.
And that, I think, would change things a lot.
Because when you look at the price we pay for not being able to determine whether someone is lying, it is huge.
I mean, it is.
I mean, there are people in prison for the rest of the...
I mean, people have gone to death row and been executed who we know were innocent.
There was this one guy whose name is now escaping me, but there was a New Yorker profile on him where his house burned down, and he was charged with the crime of having set the fire and killing his two kids.
Now, imagine being someone whose house burned down and your two kids die in the fire and the world thinks you did it.
And not only do they think you did it, they prosecute you Your defense fails, you go to death row, and you're executed for the crime of having murdered your children.
If we could just tell whether someone was telling the truth, that problem goes away.
Think of the implications of You know, negotiation among, you know, leaders of countries where you don't know whether people are telling the truth.
And, you know, we do or do not have nuclear weapons.
You don't know whether they're telling—if there was transparency at the level of all—for all of those conversations, It would really be a game changer.
Because if you were self-deceived, if you actually believed what you were saying, but what you're saying is not true, then you could sort of game the system.
The neural correlates of deception, we wouldn't necessarily be able to detect someone who believed their own lies.
There may be some way to be confused enough or confabulistic enough about reality that you can just bullshit or spitball or say what you want to be true or kind of hypnotize yourself.
We just don't actually know what's true At the level of the mind's cognitive elasticity.
So it's possible that you could have people who are not good subjects of lie detection in some sense.
And that's something we would understand if we understood all this.
But I think in the general case, and certainly in the case of big lies, virtually all the time the liar knows he's lying.
And is hoping not to get caught and is picking his words carefully so as not to get caught and keeping track of the things he said and is consciously calculating against the expectations of cogency and plausibility in his audience.
I mean, there's a massive calculation going on.
Virtually all of which is conscious in a liar, and it seems to me that that is going to be detectable with great reliability at some point.
The fears of the misuse of this or the fears about the Orwellian misuse of this are pretty easy to get a hold of.
And I think people feel like there's the last and most critical loss of cognitive liberty.
If you didn't have the A fundamental right to privacy that could be safeguarded by lies.
Something crucial to our humanity has been lost.
I think many people will feel that, and it won't matter how high you pile the benefits.
You talk about the guy who was in prison and killed, and he didn't kill his daughters, but we thought he did and we killed him, and you multiply that guy by 100,000, and you talk about treaties and deceptions at the level of nation states where millions of lives hang in the balance.
There are people who are going to say, no, no, this is not acceptable.
And I think they'll have a few points on their side.
But I think the cost to us personally and economically and socially for consequential lies, I'm not imagining a world where we would have lie detection technology running all the time so that every time you You know, someone says, how are you?
And you say, I'm fine, but you're actually not fine, and some red light's going to go off on your sweater.
I mean, there's not—I don't think any of us would want to live in that world, but when the stakes are high and conversations matter, even just in court, say, you know, the conversation is important enough and consequential enough that it has now moved into a court, and we've got lawyers on both sides, and now we've got people swearing oaths of honesty— Let's have this conversation in a framework where we know that lies will be detected.
I think any sane person is going to sign up for that.
I was at a dinner the other day, and there was four dudes, and they were all on their phone.
I was like, this is the craziest shit ever.
Like, no one's talking to anybody.
We're all just looking at our phones.
Like, this is bananas.
Like, let's make an agreement.
Shut these bitches off for an hour.
Oh, my kids, you know, I don't want to, what if someone calls, you know, work is in the middle of a deal.
Nobody wants to just detune, you know?
Vacation.
Dude on vacation.
I didn't check my email for five days.
It was like a big deal.
Ooh, you disconnected from the fucking hive.
You're crazy.
What do you make of this whole NSA privacy thing?
Do you think that can be rectified?
It seems like when the genie's out of the bottle or something like that, once they can do that, and then once they justify doing that, and not all that...
Obama's been lying about it, like, left and right.
It's fascinating when you find out that he oversaw a lot of these decisions to spy on people.
And there's a lot of things that were done during the Bush administration before him that go way back to 2002. Yeah, a German Chancellor confronts Obama about U.S. spying on her cell phone.
Well, no, but we have this history of espionage which In which that is just clearly something you would do.
One problem here is just that, and this is one of the consequences of increasing transparency, once certain facts are acknowledged People have to respond to them.
There's a, you know, I know you know, and you know that I know that you know, and now what was essentially an open secret has to be explicitly talked about and reacted to.
And so everyone knew for decades that we would make every effort we could to spy on everyone we cared about spying on, and that is allies and enemies.
And everyone did it insofar as their resources allow.
And that is just what has always happened.
But the moment you actually put too fine a point on it and declare Angela Merkel's cell phone has been bugged by the NSA or the CIA, that is intolerable.
And it's a little bit like...
What would happen to us if we saw a photo of everyone we killed in war?
If it was just all transparent, what kind of wars would we actually emotionally tolerate?
This might be a good thing.
It might be a bad thing.
We might be defenseless because we would find the act of waging war so unconscionable That we wouldn't do it or we'd be slow enough to do it that we would be, you know, sitting ducks.
And so I don't know.
I mean, I just have a big question mark there.
There are cases in which true information prevents you from being able to do something.
That you actually would want to do, and perhaps should want to do, to protect people who need to be protected.
Yeah, so either we should have espionage or we shouldn't.
Now, a lot of people think there shouldn't be a CIA, there shouldn't be an NSA, there's something...
Including JFK. Yeah, so it's just, if you're one of those people, if you think we shouldn't be spying on anyone, then obviously anything we do in that sphere is unethical and problematic.
But I'm not one of those people.
It's obvious that we want information that people don't want to give us.
And this is information that relates to the most consequential things that could possibly happen, nuclear terrorism.
We want to know, if someone is trying to get loose nukes in the former Soviet Union and blow up an American city, they're not going to tell us.
And if there's any way to find out so as to interdict that process, Let's call that espionage, and that's going to be a matter of tapping people's phones or watching their email.
You just have to imagine how you would feel if a nuke goes off in the port of Los Angeles, killing 150,000 people and making a region of Los Angeles uninhabitable for decades, if not more.
How would you feel if the NSA said, yeah, we actually had the technology to detect all of those machinations that led to that catastrophe, but we decided not to use it?
We decided not to use it because Glenn Greenwald made enough noise that it just became politically inconvenient for us to use it, or we were respecting the rights of Of people to, you know, to have private evil thoughts that we weren't good.
We just didn't...
It was something unsavory about reading email.
We didn't want to tap anyone's cell phone.
I think we would...
Clearly, the price for that kind of delicacy is too high in the aftermath of that kind of event.
So if you live in a world where you think that...
Or if you think we live in a world where those events are not only possible, but there are people waking up tomorrow morning trying to do that...
Then I think you want some level of very energetic eavesdropping on certain people.
And then the question is just where do you draw the line?
In that way, it can actually be argued that it was better for the people to have that ruthless dictator in power than it is to have the United States sort of loosely helping them govern themselves.
I don't agree with that, obviously.
I think, you know, ultimately the best thing for everybody would be some sort of a compromise.
But when you look at the fact that these people are both Muslims, they just have a different sect of Muslim, of Islam, and they kill each other, like on a regular basis.
People rail against U.S. foreign policy being the engine that's driving this global jihad and Muslim violence.
You just have to look at what Muslims are doing to other Muslims in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with our overreaching, our colonialism, our stealing of resources.
You can make us as bad as you want.
But go to Pakistan and ask yourself, why are Sunnis blowing up Shia or Ahmadi mosques?
Some guy is willing to lay down his life tomorrow morning and become a bomb and kill 75 people.
And it's got nothing to do with us.
We call it politics.
We're talking about, in many cases, the victimization of a religious minority that has no political power.
It's not the Tea Party really trying to get something.
This is someone waking up willing to die for the pleasure of killing men, women, and children And it's to no end, apart from the imagined end, that he's going to wind up in paradise and get everyone he loves in there after they die.
Do you think that it's possible to turn that around?
Is there a way?
Or do you think that the reason why you support the United States occupying these countries is because they're so chaotic that you need to keep an eye on them?
Well, because you look at the consequences of our never having done it before that.
There was this slow bleed of attacks on us without any real reprisal for decades, since the early 80s.
And we were, you know, there were hostages in Lebanon and there were, you know, the marine barracks got blown up and the lesson drawn among the jihadists of the world was this is, you know, the West is a paper tiger.
America is a paper tiger.
They're just going to run away and we can keep taking it to them.
That's not the lesson we want jihadists to draw.
I think the lesson we want them to draw is that It is very dangerous to be a jihadist.
If you are desperate to get to paradise, and you're going to tell all your friends and neighbors in your suicide video that you want to get to paradise, we'll help you get to paradise.
I think we have to have a policy toward jihadists, which is a policy of hot war.
I don't think we should be occupying countries to do this.
What is the margin for stealing it and fighting a war to steal?
Clearly, if we had ulterior profit-seeking motives in any of these wars, They didn't pan out.
These wars are so much more costly than anything else we could have gotten from them.
The lesson I draw from these wars is that there is a consequence to having boots on the ground.
And it's a bad one, which is there's this perception that we, based on our own desire for conflict and conquest, are at war with the Muslim world.
There's a perception in the Muslim world, some of it is fraudulent and they don't really believe this.
Some of it is genuinely believed by many, many millions of people that the West is just trying to conquer the Muslim world and destroy this The one true religion.
That's not a perception that we can just keep humming for a century.
We have to deflate that.
And one way to deflate it is to treat this all like a, in some sense, like a crime problem, but a crime problem that is going to be remedied with covert I think we should assassinate jihadists.
And we shouldn't make a big thing about doing this.
We shouldn't own it every time it happens.
It just should become clear in 100 countries.
That if you're a jihadist who sets up shop as the jihadist who's now going to install the global caliphate and kill infidels, your life just got very dangerous.
But the endgame for us and for a global civilization is to get moderate Muslims to do that job.
The moderate Muslims have to realize That they need to win a civil war with their jihadists.
As long as moderate Muslims and conservative Muslims who are not jihadists think that If jihadism is not their problem or they're just scared of their own extremists, there's going to be no one else to prosecute this war.
And there's something intrinsically inflammatory about us doing this job, not only in the minds of jihadists, but in the minds of normal Muslims who would never think of waging jihad, but they just find it...
It's intolerable to see Western guys sitting in office parks in Vegas flying drones over Pakistan, which are pretty precise, and they kill a lot of bad people, but they also kill some innocent bystanders.
That is...
You don't have to be someone who was going to be a jihadist to find that objectionable if you are a devout Muslim who just feels...
No, but there's a religious solidarity that is working against us, which the only remedy for which I think is to have moderate Muslims, wherever they can be found, to rise up and own this thing.
Until moderate Muslims find Al-Qaeda and the Taliban every bit as inimical to their hopes for this world as we do.
I want to go back to what you said about the war being so expensive in the first place that it wouldn't be a war for selling drugs for profit.
I'm not saying that it's entirely involved or it's based on selling drugs for profit, but there's no denying that the heroin production has increased radical since NATO opened up.
Excuse me.
I have a cold, ladies and gentlemen.
I don't know if you can tell.
NATO occupation.
I mean, there's an article here that says it's 40 times higher production of heroin since NATO occupied.
Right, but isn't it also the problem when they have United States Army troops guarding poppy fields?
There's a video of it, Geraldo Rivera interviewing.
I mean, it's clearly that there's some military involvement.
The United States military involved in the heroin production in Afghanistan.
It's pretty transparent.
And the idea is that they're saying that the reason why they do it is because they need to help these people grow their crops so that they'll ride on the Taliban.
The unfortunate thing for me, though, is that there's a ton of evidence that the United States government has been involved in drug smuggling.
There was a CIA jet that had been to Guantanamo Bay twice that crashed with several tons of cocaine in Mexico.
Pull that up.
It's kind of hilarious.
You see this jet and inside of it is just stacked with cocaine.
I think, obviously, this is probably not the entire organization, but there's some factions that are profiting.
They have forever.
There's a guy named Barry Seal who was involved in, back during the Pablo Escobar days, he was, according to him, he was selling drugs for the CIA. There's also what happened with Freeway Ricci and the whole Oliver North, Contras, and Nicaragua situation.
The United States was clearly involved in drug trafficking.
To promote a hidden war.
This is the plane.
Crashed with several tons of cocaine.
Look at all that cocaine!
That's hilarious!
And that's a jet that had been to Guantanamo Bay twice.
I mean, I don't want to go too far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole with you, but you have to take that into consideration.
That there's a lot of evidence that some fuckery is afoot.
And has been for a long time.
Whether it was in Southeast Asia, heroin in the Vietnam War, or whether it's this right now.
There's something...
And when you say...
That it costs so much money anyway.
But to who?
It doesn't cost so much money to Halliburton.
It doesn't cost so much money to all these companies that are profiting off of war.
The idea is that war is very profitable for the people who get the government contracts and go over there and build...
Airplane hangers and all these different things that they're doing over there.
We're not talking about what's profitable or not profitable for the United States taxpayer.
We're talking about the people that are actually controlling the game in the first place.
Is there someone controlling the game and are their interests aligned enough so that they really have control over it?
In most cases, I'm not saying that people never conspire or that It's not possible to have a sufficient number of people in power who have selfish and short-sighted interests that can get them to do terrible things on the world stage.
That clearly could happen, at least in principle, but for the most part, There's just people's interests are not aligned all that well.
Halliburton is not that powerful so that it could decide to launch a war.
And one way you can see this, or one thing I would get you to reflect on, is you take someone like President Obama.
When he was Senator Obama, he was against Yeah, but I'm asking how you account for that transformation in him.
So he's someone who was a critic of the former administration.
Before he was elected, if you had asked him What do you think about Bush and what do you think about Cheney and what do you think about Rumsfeld and all the stuff they did?
He would have a...
And all of this came...
I'm not just speculating.
He said many of these things, but he had a...
A very clear critique based on liberal principles that almost any liberal who was enthusiastic about his election would recognize that the Iraq war was unnecessary.
We went in there on false pretenses.
This was a terrible idea.
Now there's a mess that has to be cleaned up.
But now he's become To the eyes of many liberals, just a neocon shill, someone who's more secretive and more agile in his prosecution of a covert war than Bush and Cheney ever were.
So how do you explain that transformation?
Is he someone who was always that way and was just lying, but lying for some reason that doesn't make much political sense?
Or is there...
Some nefarious process, some star chamber where the people who are really in power got to him and scared him.
He's president of the United States, but he had a meeting with Halliburton and a bunch of powerful guys, some billionaires who scared him straight, and now he's just doing their bidding.
Or, are the facts of the world so scary, and is governance so messy, and is it so fucking hard to get anything done that This process of apparent transformation just happens.
So he got in office.
He's a senator who's not really privy to all the facts.
Now he's president who every morning wakes up and is told the scariest intelligence we've got.
What does that do to you?
And how eager does that make you to make sure that a terrorist incident of an order of magnitude larger than September 11th doesn't happen on your watch?
Imagine having the responsibility to protect whole cities from massive acts of terror.
Just how squeamish are you going to be about bugging people's cell phones?
I think it's very easy to see that through no evil hand behind the scenes, you could have somebody like Obama, who was a genuine liberal.
As far left as many people want him to be, but there's no reason to doubt that he objected to the Iraq war and he's basically a straight down the middle of the fairway liberal who's now essentially functioning like a neocon.
I think the details have to be terrifying and I think it's just an immense responsibility.
I don't doubt that Halliburton sees an upside to a war because they make all the stuff and they provide the services.
So yeah, the next war is part of their business plan.
But the question is, how much power does any one person have?
For every billionaire like the Koch brothers who's twirling his mustache and doing the nefarious right-wing thing, there are billionaires who do not align with them politically who can do the left-wing thing.
Right, but that's a microcosm of human beings in general.
There's evil people and there's nice people.
That doesn't necessarily preclude the idea that someone, not just profits off war, but engineers war for profit.
It seems if you're talking about something like billions and billions of dollars, and you can justify to yourself this inevitable anyway because these people are cave people, and they're going to fuck up, and you've got all these, look what they do to women, look what they do to their people, look what they do to each other, look what they do to fellow Muslims.
You're also maybe not making the best humanitarian choices because you're making choices based on profit.
And there's pretty clear evidence the United States basically lied to get into the Iraq War.
I mean, I know that there was a lot of people that genuinely believed that there was something going on in Iraq and genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein was a threat.
But there's also people that believe it was a whole lot of fuckery, including Colin Powell.
Well, when Colin Powell delivered that presentation at the UN, virtually everyone, with a few exceptions, virtually everyone believed that that was true.
It was uncontroversial.
The premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was uncontroversial, and all the people who were against our going in there We're against it for reasons that did not entail doubting whether there were weapons of mass destruction.
There were other reasons not to go in there.
It's just it was going to – it was a hornet's nest.
Or the tragedy of wasted opportunity, the idea that just because a tragedy gets capitalized on doesn't mean that the people who capitalize on it cause the tragedy, but that's a standard operational procedure for warriors to find something wrong and say, look, this is what happened, we got attacked, we're going into Iraq.
Right, because it's 19 guys and not Halliburton, not a multi-billion dollar operation that the former CEO just happens to be the vice president of the United States and gets multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to go and rebuild shit we blow up.
I mean, it's pretty connect the dots.
If you wanted to argue for a war for profit, that's about as cut and dry as it ever gets.
Someone said on the podcast, I forget who it was.
I don't know who it was.
Maybe I read it online.
Someone said, do you believe in 9-11?
Ask people if they believe in conspiracies.
Do you believe in 9-11?
Like, what do you mean?
Do you believe 9-11 was done as a conspiracy by the government?
Someone conspired to fly planes into buildings and whether or not the United States government was involved or whether or not it was these 19 guys from Saudi Arabia.
That someone in the dead of night had to fill the Twin Towers with thermite.
And that we hit the plunger at the right moment, just after the planes went in.
Or maybe they weren't even planes.
Maybe they were holograms.
And once you get deep into the 9-11 conspiracy, you get the CIA faking voices of all the passengers on the flight, explaining the answering machine messages of the relatives of the dead passengers by CIA voice-faking technology. explaining the answering machine messages of the relatives of the And it's just – it's completely insane.
And the problem with it is it's totally unconstrained by any overall explanation or plausible hypothesis about what could have happened.
What it is is you look at every anomaly – any event you could possibly describe is going to have a million – what look like coincidences in it, and which if you tried to engineer beforehand – it would seem like the odds against them were astronomical.
But in the aftermath, something had to happen.
So it's like people sold stock in American Airlines that day, right?
So how is it that you sold your stock in American Airlines the day before?
There are an uncountable number of things like that, but if you're only looking for anomalies and you're not constrained by any overall thesis, You can find them in any situation.
But just be honest about what this picture of reality actually is.
This is the most diabolical plot in human history that entailed thousands of conspiracists or conspiracists.
They're conspirators.
And none of them have cracked.
No one woke up feeling so guilty that they had to tell their story to 60 Minutes.
And yet this whole thing was designed to leave George Bush reading My Pet Goat at the moment it all kicked off.
It's just not.
It's like this marriage of Perfectly competent diabolical intelligence with the most inept...
So all these people conspired perfectly and yet the Iraq war was launched as ineptly as it could possibly have been.
Well, I certainly don't believe that the United States was involved in conspiring.
I think there's some question that maybe some people might have known about it.
The real issue comes when you find out about actual real false flags.
Actual real false flag events that the United States has engineered, that they've pulled off, that they haven't pulled off, that they were planning, that they didn't go through.
The real problem is that that's a genuine ideology.
That's a genuine thought process.
The idea of, look, we have to make this happen.
This is what we're going to do.
We're going to blow up a ship.
We're going to blow up a jet airliner and blame it on the Cubans and the Operations Northwoods.
So if you wanted to run a false flag operation and get us into a war with Iraq under false pretenses, so we've got a no-fly zone over Iraq for years that we've been policing with our F-16s.
You just shoot down one of our planes, and then you tell the world that Iraq, though we told them they couldn't shoot at us, shot down one of our planes.
This is an act of war.
We're going in.
That would have been totally justifiable.
What you don't do is send mostly Saudis to come kill 3,000 of the most connected people on Earth and destroy our economy.
Isn't a belief that the government engineered 9-11, or isn't a million different conspiracies, don't they have sort of a religious aspect to them?
The pure belief, the confirmation bias, the ignoring anything contradictory.
People want to have an answer for sure, definitely.
Whether it's pro or con.
There's that real thing that people want to wrap something up tight with a bow.
Either the government is full of evil criminals that are trying to kill your baby, or it's all just a part of life and the real issue is there's boogeyman out there.
Yeah, I think it hijacks some of the same features of the human mind or of certain human minds because many people are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure.
Not knowing why something happened is destabilizing to people to different degrees.
Whereas one person can just feel no emotional cost To living with the mystery of why something happened or freely admitting that they have no idea or merely having a hunch, other people crave certainty and there are other features to it.
So people have an intuition that something huge couldn't have been kicked off by something trivial.
So if something huge happened, if this thing, this 3,000 people dead and the biggest buildings coming down and the world in chaos, that couldn't have been just 19 guys with box cutters.
That had to be—the cause had to be bigger.
And that, I think, is an intuition that some people have more than others, and it's a faulty intuition, but some people— Have certain schemas through which they view human events which make conspiracy thinking very plausible.
And you'll notice that, and there's been actually research done on this, that if you're someone who believes one conspiracy theory, you're very likely to be someone who believes all of them.
You're someone who's read the JFK books and who's read the...
The Roswell incident, you're talking about extraterrestrials and CIA misadventures in many places.
There's a whole esoteric literature out there that I'm not so familiar with, but I know that people who go down one rabbit hole tend to go down many of the others.
It's kind of a personality type that...
I think you can become...
I tried to...
It's interesting.
You asked me what I thought about the NSA thing.
To some degree, my perception of this news event has been polluted by my relationship with Glenn Greenwald.
A member of my family, and a very bright guy, who is a 9-11 conspiracy guy.
And so I've fought with him about this now for years.
So every six months, it blows up, and we'll have the two-hour email exchange.
And I've tried to debunk this.
And one idea I had about how to debunk it is I noticed that he had a few liberal writers who he really admired, and Glenn Greenwald was the top of the list.
And I knew that Glenn Greenwald couldn't be a 9-11 conspiracy guy.
So I reached out to Glenn.
I'd never met Glenn.
And I said, will you do me a favor and just tell me in a short little essay why you don't I don't believe any of this stuff.
Why is it that you seem to align with a lot of these concerns, the overreach of power and NSA wiretapping, and why is someone in your position not at all attracted by this 9-11 truth nonsense?
He wrote the perfect email, and I told him why I needed this.
It was basically an intervention for a family member.
He wrote the perfect email, which was just crazy enough to give him perfect credibility.
He was grateful for the 9-11 truth people, and it was a perfect email.
I imagined that I was going to send this into my relative's brain, and he was going to have the epiphany that I was expecting, which was Here's someone he trusts as an authority on all of these points, and this is why this guy, who's got much more time to look at this than my relative does, this is why he won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
And it did not have that effect at all.
All he wanted to do was to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald, to educate him, show him all the stuff that he hadn't seen, right?
But I started in this place with Glenn, feeling very positive toward him, and then he just basically, in a very unethical way, misrepresented my views in a series of articles.
And when I called him on it privately, he just doubled down.
Basically, he just said, fuck you.
Even if you don't think this is what you were saying, this is what I think you were saying.
This is why the NSA thing sort of hit me in the wrong part of my brain because when Glenn was the quarterback for the Snowden revelations, Basically, I saw a guy who was just blogging in his underpants in Brazil with his 10 dogs and his boyfriend who was handed this story, which is in fact true.
I mean, he's not this great investigative journalist who found this.
He was, based on his ideological bias and his track record, was someone who Snowden...
Liked and thought would be a very sympathetic ear for this story.
And he just handed him this story.
So tomorrow night, someone could email you the next big decades-shaking story based on your interests and how they align with his.
And that wouldn't make you the greatest investigative journalist.
So anyway, so Greenwald was someone who really was not functioning like a journalist.
And he certainly does not have the principles of Of honesty and fact-checking and admitting when he got something wrong that most journalists have drummed into them.
And that's what he did, but he considers it a virtue.
He said this in the New York Times when he was just becoming famous for the Snowden story.
They asked him about his approach to journalism.
He said that he approaches it as a litigator.
He assumes people are lying, and then he goes and tries to prove that they're lying.
Interpersonally, this is a highly dysfunctional and obnoxious way to be.
When I'm representing my ideas, he's assuming I'm lying, and he goes to try to prove that I'm lying.
Then he quote mines, or he gets readers to quote mine my work, Where he can pull sentences out of context, which seems – out of context, I can see how someone would see it as an inflammatory thing to say about Islam.
But I have not been – it's impossible to catch me saying something extreme about Islam that I didn't mean to say.
Everything I've ever said about Islam is incredibly – Well thought out.
I know exactly what I think, and it has absolutely no logical relationship to racism because everything I say applies every bit as much to John Walker Lind or Adam Gadon or any white guy who woke up in Marin or Orange County and decided to join the jihad.
In fact, it applies even more to them because they weren't indoctrinated from birth by any kind of Middle Eastern cultural upbringing.
And so I view Greenwald as just the least scrupulous and among the most consequential people who have been flogging this Islamophobia thing.
And it's been very ugly.
And so insofar as the NSA story has been his story, I've had to do a lot of It's a parsing of what's said because his intuitions about what is important and factual I just fundamentally don't trust.
But also I'm uncertain about where the line is between...
Facts we genuinely want to know and a public service rendered by journalists and whistleblowers who leak those facts and treason that is really consequential that we should have laws against and prosecute people for.
And I don't know where Snowden falls on that continuum.
I'm just agnostic as to what Ten years from now, are we going to think he was a hero or someone who did our country more harm than anyone in the last hundred years?
Yeah, there's this larger question about what do you want the NSA to do?
What do you want our intelligence organizations to do?
I don't feel like I'm...
If given a menu of things to check off, you and I may check different boxes in what we want them to do.
Frankly, I don't know where I draw the line on some of these questions because I'm just a conversation away from someone who has more information than me about top secret information.
From being convinced that, oh yeah, we really do want that information.
Yeah, yeah, I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where nukes are going off in our cities.
So yeah, if you're telling me that tapping that phone or reading all email, if only retrospectively, is a way to stop that, and here's why, here's why you think that, I could be sold on all of these points.
I mean, there's nothing about my email That I feel like needs to be private if you keep raising the stakes on the side of arguing why it shouldn't be private.
I talk about this briefly in my book, about espionage being something that if you grant that undercover operations are sometimes necessary...
Then what you're saying is there is some space in which otherwise good and ethical people are going to need to lie.
Now, the way I think about that is I think that is necessary.
I think it is someone – it is a life that I don't want.
I couldn't be – I couldn't work for the NSA. But it's an unfortunate fact in the world we live in.
It's a fact, yeah.
So I couldn't be the guy who comes home to his wife and lies about what he did all day because that's part of the career.
I don't want to be that person.
I view it as a kind of – Moral self-immolation, where you have to take a hit for the team in this spectacular way in order to function in that space, but I think it's probably necessary.
But within that frame, it's not actually deceptive.
If the NSA says, listen, we're going to suck up a ton of data, And we're going to abide by laws.
We're not going to imprison you for growing pot based on having sucked this data up, but we're looking for jihadists.
That's something I can sign on to.
And we may want to read the fine print there, but...
I was never under the illusion that the NSA was doing anything other than that.
So that's not a surprise to me.
And I don't think it's a surprise to anyone.
Lying and keeping secrets are different things.
We need people to keep secrets.
And you can honestly keep a secret.
The president could say, I can't tell you that.
That's top secret.
Our national security depends on my not telling you that.
That's an honest statement.
If I ask you how much money you have in your bank account, tell me, tell our listeners now, you can say, I don't want to say.
When you talked earlier about your friend, the story about the woman who lied in front of her friend and immediately damaged the relationship, why would you ever, knowing that the government has planned and possibly executed false flags, why would you ever give them the benefit of the doubt?
Well, again, this comes to the larger question of human nature.
What do you think is going on in the world?
Do you think that most people most of the time are psychopaths or...
Are they ruthlessly mercenary and out to just screw everyone?
Or do you think those are the anomalies?
And what do you think of government?
Do you think government is so corrupting of otherwise good people that they're just going to run riot with their power all the time and everywhere?
Or do you think basically it's a lot of good people We're inefficiently trying to get stuff done that we need done.
And if you're on the more realistic side of those questions, I think you have to admit that for the most part There are people just like us in a vast bureaucracy trying to get stuff done, and there are so many competing interests that the bad people don't have as much power as you fear they have, and the good people don't have as much power as you want them to have.
And so to conspire to just grab all the strings of The military and wage a war on false pretenses or divert our fighter jets so that this hijacked plane can fly into the World Trade Center.
How many people in the Air Force had to conspire to decide to run war games elsewhere so that we wouldn't be able to respond?
Then what you're attributing to people are conscious motives to kill Massive numbers of innocent people that I think just could not form in the minds of most people most of the time.
But wouldn't you assume when there's been several that it's probably a method of operating, that that's how they do it?
If you find out about the Gulf of Tonkin, you find out what Bush and Cheney were planning on Iran before they left office, or allegedly, what do I know?
You know, when you find out about the Northwoods document, where do you put all that?
That's clear.
That's people that are on our side killing our people in order to get us into a war where we kill other people and profit like crazy.
It seems pretty cut and dry.
And I think there might be, I mean, looking at it the way you're looking at it, I see what you're saying, but not with all the evidence.
Not with all the evidence that it's actually happened.
I see what you're saying.
If there wasn't any evidence, if it was just 9-11 and everybody was using that as an example, I agree with you.
I think it's probably most likely a series of coincidences and most likely we just had lax security and most likely 19 people planned this out and pulled it off.
However, when you look at the Gulf of Tonkin, when you look at the Northwoods incident, when you look at all these different things that we have planned, it's not one, it's several.
And it's several over the course of several different administrations.
The Bush administration?
I mean, the Kennedy administration?
I mean, during Kennedy's day, they were doing this.
Well, what I would say is that in the case of 9-11, you have on the other side a very obvious conspiracy that's taking credit for it, that has taken credit for it.
I mean, you have this phenomenon of al-Qaeda and global jihad.
Much of this violence is directed at the rest of the Muslim world.
It's not just us.
But we have a clear enemy that thinks it's our enemy that is taking credit for these I mean, to call them an own goal when you have someone who's seemed to be the kicker and who's taking credit for being the kicker, and it just seems like it's a misapplication of the principle, even if we were going to agree that we...
You know, every few years, draw our own blood for some perverse reason of trying to motivate ourselves to do something we wouldn't otherwise want to do.
I mentioned Gulf of Tonkin in the book, and there are many other...
More easily understood big lies that should worry us.
For instance, I mentioned pharmaceutical companies.
Pharmaceutical companies seem to clearly rig their data, and this puts people in a state of chronic doubt about whether you can trust anyone in a position of authority.
When you have people, there's no one who knows more about Whether drugs are efficacious than the people who are designing drugs.
I think this is the most important change we could make in our society, is to notice the ways in which systems of incentives cause otherwise good people to behave like bad people.
There are endless numbers of examples of this.
You don't have to be a bad person to behave in evil ways.
If you're part of a system, the entire tendency of which is to incline toward evil.
If you just follow the incentives, and so they're very simple petri dish examples of this.
One example I use is We talk about what it's like to be thrown into a maximum security prison.
Imagine you get sent to Folsom Prison and you're an innocent person, you're not a violent person, and you have this nightmare experience of now you're thrown in prison for a crime you didn't commit.
All you want to do is get through this experience, your tenure, say.
All you want to do is do your decade of time in peace, unmolested by all these other people.
And you're terrified that you're going to be victimized by people.
The reality is that you're coming into a situation where the incentives are so perversely misaligned that even a good person like you who just wants to be a nice guy is going to have to align himself With racist psychopaths in order to not be screwed over by everyone.
So for instance, in most maximum security prisons, they exist in a perpetual state of race war.
So it's the whites against the blacks, against the Mexicans, and certain Mexicans against other Mexicans, but it's just like you have It's shattered into racial gangs, and a white guy like you would have to join a white supremacist gang.
Now, you might not have a racist bone in your body, but the only way for you not to be fucked over by everyone is to align yourself with a gang.
The way incentives can be perverse, where your natural selfishness and your natural fear and your natural desire just to survive can be channeled in ways that make you, as an otherwise good person, collaborate to do terrible things.
There are many ways in which Conflicts of interest are the classic example.
You have CEOs who can run the global economy off a cliff because their incentives are totally perverse.
They have no ...
There's no economic incentive for them not to just leverage their company out of existence if they can benefit from this windfall pop of the stock and they have a golden parachute.
I mean, so there's the problem of moral hazard where it's like if there's no consequence to being rapaciously selfish, you're going to get people being rapaciously selfish to the detriment of everyone.
And so the point I'm making is that there are two levels at which you can try to improve human life.
You can argue that each person needs to have a more refined ethical code.
You have to be more honest.
I have to be more honest.
Or in addition, you can have systems where interests are aligned so that the penalties, the rewards for honesty are more obvious.
And you'd have a system where people ...
I mean, another classic example is like the job market where everyone's padding their resumes because they know everyone else pads their You're trying to get a job.
You're desperate to get a job.
Your family won't eat unless you get a job.
And you know that everyone else applying for this job has padded his resume.
I'm saying that we need – there's two levels at which we address these problems.
And one problem you're pointing to is system level, in this case government level, misaligned incentives that have great consequence, which don't require evil people all the time to pull the strings.
But in a false flag, if you're saying we're going to blow up a jet and fake and pretend that another country did it, yeah, that would require evil people to hatch the idea and say do it.
So for instance, there's a new book about the Kennedy assassination, which brings – and I don't know if – I don't think the guy is a conspiracy theorist at all here, but I think he thinks Oswald did it.
But there's a new book which shows – What do you think?
I don't know.
I think it's very likely that the...
I mean, the Warren Commission seems...
I haven't read this book, but from what I know, the Warren Commission seems to have been a ridiculously inept effort to get to the truth.
And with many...
There are some perverse obstacles to getting to the truth, one being that Warren didn't want to inconvenience Jacqueline Kennedy at all.
She's grieving.
He didn't want to interview her.
He wouldn't let her be interviewed on the record.
He interviewed her himself, I think, and just sort of summarized what she said.
So there's just kind of weird ways in which this thing was never about really getting to the bottom of what happened.
The point is that when you look at all the ways...
That's an all-too-human...
You can look at some nefarious interpretation of that.
He knew that this was a mob hit that was enabled by the CIA or whatever the story is, and this is his way of hiding the truth.
Or he's just a guy who's embarrassed to ask the grieving widow who was a friend of his about what it was like to see her husband's face get blown off.
There are alternate explanations for these things, and yet the conspiracy side is always the nefarious, mustache-twirling, perfect genius of evil interpretation.
I think that rarely is true, certainly in a society where I think there's probably a little bit of both in there.
Again, I'm not discounting the fact that there are situations in which evil people brilliantly bring off their evil.
Or evil conspirators conspire.
But Most of the time, it's people rather like us, afraid for their jobs, covering their asses, afraid of getting sued, doing things which, when incentives are aligned in such a way as to make it effortless for them to do them, It's going to create a huge mess for everybody else.
When you look at what people do because they're afraid to get sued, just look at all of the stupid decisions people make in our society because they just want to hide the problem.
On what it's like to become a neurosurgeon called When the Air Hits Your Brain.
And it's a pretty entertaining and somewhat harrowing look at just the training of a neurosurgeon.
So he talks about what it was like to be a resident neurosurgeon.
And at one point there's a scene where a resident is a...
He's prepping his first surgery, which entails drilling into a person's skull and cutting a large hole and prepping the person's head for the chief neurosurgeon to come in and perform surgery.
And what he did is he drove the drill in way too deep.
It's just supposed to do skull, but he just went into pure pink oatmeal.
Of the person's brain.
And his only concern at that moment was not how the patient was doing.
It was to hide the evidence that he had screwed up.
Now, that is an all-too-human and, in the aggregate, completely evil outcome.
And yet, he doesn't have to be a psychopath to be worried about covering his ass in that circumstance.
If you had a system in which he would be massively rewarded in some way for exposing that problem, I mean, it's hard to see how you would design that, but that would be a much better system.
If the incentives were aligned in a way that his guilty conscience would win as opposed to his effort to preserve his career.