Transcript for #410 - Sam Harris

Yeah. It's a very dangerous irony and double standard. It's one of the most disturbing phenomenon, I think. to be found on the landscape now.

Yeah, it's a combination of very understandable fears of racism and xenophobia. So we have this, we're obviously trailing a legacy that we should be mortified by this legacy of slavery and colonialism. And all of that is something we should, we should have a critical distance from and not want to recapitulate in any form. And so it's important to be mindful of that, obviously, but there's this, combination of white guilt and political correctness and just sheer stock homes syndrome and 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 just leading directly to the emiseration 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 set handed down from Muhammad, you're accused of a bigotry and you're put right next to Michelle Bachman and anyone else on the right who obviously you can't, you can't ally with in any sense. So it's very troubling because you have the whole websites and magazines like salon and and alternate and even the nation that just reflexively demonize anyone who said anything about Islam the religion that's negative and that's it's a double standard we're going to have to overcome salon goes hard

Yeah, and I wrote a blog post about Malala, Josef Sae, the 16-year-old girl who was at 15 shot by the Taliban was up for the Nobel Prize, which she didn't win. But my blog post was totally praiseworthy of her. I said she is the best thing that come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She should have won the Nobel Prize. She's elegant, eloquent, and brave. And the headline in Sloan was Sam Harris Slur's Malawa. 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 obviously wasn't doing. So it's just it's incredibly frustrating because so many smart people or otherwise smart people are taken in by this because people really want to believe that all religions are the same. and that people everywhere the same and want the same things. And if we just gone our act together on the world stage, if we just cease to exploit people, and we cease to be selfish, and we just pull back all the drones, everyone would behave the same way. We would have rational actors everywhere. And there's just no evidence for that. And there's just as much evidence as you could possibly want to find for the antithesis, which is there are some people who are in a death cult who are a certain of paradise and are very eager to get there. And there's no talking to them. And then there's a much vaster number of people around them who support them, who are not jihadists, but who are basically aligned with them in terms of the worldview. So we have to win a war of ideas, and we have to win a war, and we have to be honest about it.

And it's incredibly edgy and risky to do. It's just amazing. If you're a woman to get behind the wheel of a car in Saudi Arabia is a life disorienting risk to make that kind of social protest. And so if at best they're behind us by whatever 50 years, 75 years in certain social epiphanys. So if you roll back the clock in the US and look at racism, we don't really have the same analogous religious brainwashing, but if you look at racism in the US, What was going on in the teens and 20s and 30s? It's just unthinkable now, just lynchings and newspaper editorials that were starkly racist. They're in 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, just mind boggling. 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 profit Muhammad and people start burning embassies, the move on our side can't be to apologize for cartooning and to become self-critical and massacistic about why is it that we had these cartoonists that did this terrible thing. And that's essentially what we did. And we pulled all, no magazine with the exception of one, free inquiry in the U.S. published those cartoons. They were totally benign cartoons. You probably saw that they were available online. But we practiced a self-sensorship to a degree that it's just astonishing. And really just harmful to this It's conflict, both of the hot and cold conflict that we're having.

Well, probably hundreds, but the big handful of main ones we care about, the main ones we care about.

Yeah, well, the dispute is that the link that I'm drawing and that many other people draw between that behavior and the religion is being challenged. So the people who would brand me as Islamists, Islamists would say that This behavior has nothing to do with Islam in principle. One, you have extremists in every religion, and they all misbehaved, 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. The quarterback of the football team can become a ge hottest 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 defensive 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 it's perfect and unchallengable 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. fighting the infidel and subjugating the infidel and killing apostates. If you convert to Islam now on this show and then by the end of the show say I thought better about 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 dog mode by saying, you're dead to me. Or no, you can't go that far unfortunately. Not dead, but you're dead to me. You can say, well, the person has to speak out against the faith. He did lease, he has to beat him, noxious apostate. But what you don't get are millions and millions of Muslims who belong to some bonified tradition of Islam who say, oh no, apostasy is fine, you should be free to change your mind about the faith. And we don't care if you were once a Muslim and now you become a Hindu or you were once a Muslim and now you become a Christian or an atheist. That is fine with us. If that existed, well, then you could just point to that brand of Islam and say, well, go over there, guys. That's the Islam we should be encouraging. But we have to, and clearly we have to figure out some way to massage the faith into conformity with that kind of pluralism and secularism. But it's just not there. And for magazines like Salon to pretend that killing apostates has no connection to the real religion of Islam is just a pure delusion and it's a dangerous one.

You know, those are, and we know they were conmen. Well, not just conmen. No way too much about 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 that kind of those kinds of ideas. They have first century and ironage platitudes and strictures that have now been canonized in these books. And there's just 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. And that's, you know, that's not satisfying.

Well, it's a long book. Unfortunately, the Quran is not as long a book. You can read the Quran in a weekend. It's a much shorter book. You read the Bible, covered a 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 a little bit, but you can't cherry pick it in quite the same way. You can't just take Jesus in half as 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. And that's why this fusion of the religion and the politics is so difficult to break because it's explicit and there's just no, there's no render unto Caesar, those things that are Caesar's in the Quran as there is in the Bible.

Yeah, ex-mormons are awesome because there's no group of people that are more energetic in their atheism. I've met them in ex-mormons because they are coming out of this thing that is just so obviously made up. I mean, he's like, you got Joseph Smith as a dancer and a con man and 14 and just getting it on with everyone's wife and just making up principles. He gets new revelations to appease his jealous wife. And he goes into the closet and God tells him that he's got to have more hot girls. So it's just, and it's just there in the floodlights of history to be inspected. And so once they get out of it and they see just that they're trailing all this nonsense, they're very, they're very fun to talk to.

Well, I wouldn't be the first to observe the 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 of belief and paradise, it's 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. I mean, so the closest person to you in your life has died or your child has died. And so what are you going to say to yourself, or to the people around you, or what can they say to you, that it's 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 that is, there is no secular or atheist or rational alternative to that. And that's a bullet I think we just have to bite. So there's not, you know, at the grave side of a child, The atheist doesn't have something to say that says this is not a problem. You know, this is 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 tradeoff is not worth it. I mean, if even if we grant that certain kind of suffering is relieved there, There's other kinds of suffering that spring up and people are not learning how to grieve. They're not learning how to teach their children to grieve. They're not learning intellectual honesty. They're not and they're mired in a way of thinking that it's constantly causing them constantly to collide with reality in unfortunate ways that they actually don't get what they want in life because they're believing things that just don't line up with how the world works. And so I think it is, if you look closely, you can see that even that the best thing in the baby in the bath water of faith is still dysfunctional.

Yeah, I actually don't view it that way. I think there are people who think that religion paid evolutionary dividends because it allowed large groups of people, large groups of, of, kind of dimly related people, you know, not just family, but larger tribes to cohere in a way that they couldn't otherwise. So it's a 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 we're going to end outsiders who come into our world who don't understand our taboos and our precepts are going to be easily recognizable as outsiders. There's a long list of things that people think religion may have given our ancestors. That may be true. I happen to think that religion, most of what explains religion is just more fundamental cognitive and emotional mechanisms that have nothing in principle to do with religion and which have also given us science and reason and everything else that is recognizable as human cognition. I think the most rudimentary piece here is belief formation. You and I, and every other human being who is neurologically intact, has learned that 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 degrees. So you tell me where this studio is, I believe you, I, it's just language, right? And the language got me here. My belief in the language got me here. Um, if I thought that I had transcribed the address wrong, um, that belief would have caused me to call you and get and make sure I got the, I said, I mean, this is all just, these are all just, you know, ones and zeros in our, in our computer at the moment. But, um, uh, virtually the totality of our, uh, 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 part of, it's the set of beliefs people form for which they have very loose evidentiary criteria and which govern all these no-go areas for science. What happens after death? What is the meaning of life? What's the most important thing to live for? And I think I think actually reason can capture all of those conversations as well as in the process of doing it. But it really is just a matter of believing certain propositions and the rules by which we vet those beliefs when we are in conversation with one another. And the problem with faith is that it really operates as the permission people give one another to believe things strongly without evidence. And we don't give that permission in any other area of our lives. We don't give that permission in science. We don't give it in politics, say, in so far 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. It's just, insofar as you actually believe something, it can't help but show up in the public sphere. And people think beliefs are private. They're only private if there's nothing in your life or in the environment that is calling them out. But the moment that they are relevant to your behavior, they can't help but inform your behavior insofar as you actually believe them. And that's just, I mean, this is an example I gave And one of my books by is a belief, 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. I mean, imagine if you had a pilot who's trying to land the plane with prayer, 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 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 of variables. So if that doctrine were different, behavior would be different. But for the most part, what you see is just people being people trying to get what they want out of life. They're building bridges and they're learning about disease and they're trying to develop scientific principles. And it just so happens, they're all Christians doing this. And Christianity doesn't really get credit for the birth of science. It shouldn't get credit for the birth of science. It shouldn't get credit for all the bridges we built or the roads we paved. It's just, there was no one else to do the job in Europe. Everyone was a Christian. Everyone came into this world and was indoctrinated into a worldview that they got on Mother's knee. And there was no other worldview on offer. So, I mean, it's just as true to say that everyone, virtually everyone who ever fought a war or saved a life or built a bridge, did it in complete ignorance of Darwinian evolution. That doesn't mean that ignorance of Darwinian evolution was the crucial variable there, or is a good thing, or is something we should want to promote, or something we should safeguard. It's just so happens that prior to 1859, This notion of evolution was not it was not an idea that had had appeared and anyone's head and so there was no alternative but to not know anything about evolution. And now we could have gotten if you could draw a line from the ancient Greece. and give us a civilization with a very rich dialogue about ethics and about social norms that would not have needed to invoke the war God of Abraham. I mean, like Plato could have given us the basis to think rationally about the good life, and you know, Plato and everyone like him in ancient Greece. And that is a stream of ideas that is unencumbered by this notion of maybe there's an invisible monster out in the desert who wants a human sacrifice from time to time. And maybe had a son who died for our sins. So I don't think it's actually Even if religion has seemed to do it in certain circumstances, I don't think it was actually necessary peace. 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.

Well, that's our default. Yes, our default is the guy is over in the next valley. We don't know them. It's a 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 happened out, number them. And that is a behavior that clearly, you know, tribalistic, xenophobic violence is clearly something we are good at and do reflexively in a state of nature. So yeah, that's where we start. So we overcome that by extending the circle of our morality and extending our relationships with our economic relationships, our cultural relationships, our peaceful collaboration with Stranger. And that's what civilization is. Civilization is a machine to get us to peacefully collaborate with Stranger. And the frontal cortex of every human brain is a machine that allows for that collaboration. 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 So there's 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 and making them suffer. 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, and that's essentially what happened. The Taliban, just 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 are in is far more sinister than that. 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. Why would you think that? Because you just have to look at the kinds of atrocities that normal people perpetrate in mass movements that are for want of a better word evil. So you let me look at Nazi Germany. How is the 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 prominent, 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's some people who were racked by guilt and some people who refused to collaborate. But, I mean, this is one of the scary features of the human mind. It's possible to be an otherwise good person. and do horrible things in the right situation. That's not to say that there aren't psychopaths who are evil and essentially monsters, but normal people are capable of terrible things. And in the context of certain religious ideas, I think it becomes quite rational for them to perpetrate evil.

Well, let me just say, I know nothing about this particular person, right? I'm just guessing. But I think there's no reason to believe that every member of the Taliban or every member of Al-Qaeda is a psychopath. Or is a person who would otherwise do terrible things to innocent strangers? There's no reason to believe that, and there are many reasons to believe otherwise. And you can just look at how people get radicalized. And it's not, you don't have to round up all the Jeffrey Dombers of the world and brainwashed them and turn them loose. They're far more functional people than that.

Well, we do it. You can even go into a more... a stranger direction in 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 a shutting down of empathy than the 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 We're not used to it and we just we can't you know we see someone in tears with you know a major wound or a broken arm and all of our empathy circuits kick in and we're not very useful in that circumstance and if leave aside for the moment that we actually don't know what to do even if we did know what to do the an e-flux of empathy in that moment is not especially useful. And to be a great trauma surgeon, you want to be somebody who is not distracted by the tears and the obvious signs of human suffering and who can just deal with this like a machine that has to be fixed. And there's even a point of contact between that ability, just to kind of shut out the other human stuff and deal with the machine that is is on a continuum with this this cognitive emotional gesture of dehumanizing. the other. And just seeing no moral implication in just blowing up bodies.

the conditioning we have around sexuality has religious norms hammered into it. And yeah, it's always been strange to think that very explicit violence is just acceptable entertainment and any kind of sexuality, whether it's objectifying or obviously romantic and and viewed with love is so charged that we have to protect people from it in very careful ways. I don't know that story, but the Marine, I don't know whether that's true. I think it's close to something that must be true. What do you mean what parts true? Well, just whether you can't get one without the other. I don't know. Clearly, in order to function in that mode of defending yourself and your buddies against the threat of the enemy and killing the enemy wherever you find them. That is a that's a mode in which you can't be thinking about how the enemy has kids just like you and is eager to get home to his wife and that's that's just not that's not helps and it's easy to see why that would start to get drummed out of you so and it's it's a huge problem that we can dehumanize other people. It's also a huge problem that we can be part of systems and collaborate in ways which effectively destroy other people's lives. And we don't even notice it. We don't even have the mechanism by which we would notice it. And we don't see, which don't see that there is a kind of a zero-sum game here in the background, which we can't help but participate in. which leaves people trying to eke out their survival from trash heaps in developing nations. And you and I wondering whether we should get the iPad air. And there's no way to really square in a moral ethical sense the way we use our attention in that space. So 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, that's a good thing to do. It's sort of telescopic philanthropy where it's not a real connection. It's not a real imperative. So when I get a mailing from a charity, help another person who's near starvation in East Africa, My failure to do it, my disinclination to do it, my sense that I've got better things to do than open this junk mail. Never shows up in my mind or in my conversation with anyone else as a shocking misuse of my resources. 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 really blisteringly clear ways where we all seem to justify to ourselves by default is living in a way where we We care about our own happiness to a much, much greater degree than we could possibly justify in the presence of someone else's abject suffering. And because we're not in the presence, if after this podcast, you and I walk out onto this sidewalk and see someone starving to death in front of us, see a child starving to death. we wouldn't be able to ignore it. There's just no, it's just a clearly as our responsibility to figure out, we have to call the authorities, we have to get some food, we have to get a blanket, we have to do something. But because it's happening in another society and the only evidence of it that is being thrust in our face, at this moment is an appeal by email or a letter, just hitting delete doesn't strike us as analogous to stepping over the body of a child on the sidewalk and say, saying it's not our problem. And really, in a global society, it is analogous. And yet we don't have the mechanisms in place to make it friction-free for us to feel the imperative and care about suffering elsewhere. And we have to, clearly, we have to figure out how to do that as a species.

Well, actually, to segue to questions of self-defense, I think that diffusion of responsibility idea has been oversold because I think more of what's going on for people is They don't want to be the first one to get stabbed. 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 that case, the original case, the Kitty Genovies 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 a knife is very likely going to get stabbed and terribly injured or killed. And maybe the second guy is too. But if five people rushed him at the same time, if there was some sort of tactical intelligence in the group, very likely he could be taken down and neutralized and that would and 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 and that's uh... it's just a problem we have in that people are frozen in people freeze and no one wants to be we don't have this 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 380 people, 180-pound guy is hitting him. We're going to bring him down. Obviously, we have training, that's all the more likely. 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.

But the truth is you don't even, the 10 people don't really know what they have to do. What they have to do is long as they're going to all rush in at the same moment. Right. Just warm the guy.

Yeah. Yeah.

But he's going to run it after you. I'll tell you whether the rules have changed or people's intuitions have changed. It's at 30,000 feet on airplane. That's true. And we haven't really, 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. where all going to rush the guy and this is going to be no hesitation because we know how bad that can turn out. 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 by in principle. If everyone rush the guy It was some people would get shot, but you're not talking about a half hour or 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's rational to be the first person to run away. It's not that that's bad advice for the person. And it's probably advice that we should all take if our only concern is to avoid violence wherever it appears. And there are situations where you're going to want to do that no matter who you are. So if you're out in public with your six-year-old daughter, that's probably not the moment for you to try to be a hero. That's the moment for you to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. And that may be true even if you're a cop. You have to rank order your priorities and do it very quickly. I just think that there's an ethic that we could have much more of in this society. They could be tuned up by, I mean, it would certainly be tuned up by martial arts training in many more people, but it could just be tuned up even without the training that things are a lot worse when you give the bad guy, the 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 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.

Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. I think we'd want to distinguish between or among the martial arts, because I think they're martial arts that tune up the wrong part of the ego because you're actually not ever having your skills confirmed or disconfirmed because it's all in this domain of fantasy and pantomimes of violence and just very quiet. We have this cooperative exchange of attacks and replies to the attacks where you're not actually fighting. You're not actually poking the person in the eye and seeing what happens or getting poked in the eye. So this sort of the cut between What are either the fantasy based martial arts or the or the so called realistic self defense martial arts and something like Brazilian jujitsu where where you're really you're your pressure testing at 100%. Now I think I think there 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. And especially as a teenage male, The feeling that you might have something to prove and the fear of being someone who couldn't actually prove it, and that whole paranoia that happens in a school where you have teachers who skills are by definition never tested. Like the black belt, Sensei never is going to roll with his students in these arts. He's doing his walking around teaching his fantasy techniques. And you never, in the students, wouldn't be comfortable wrestling him with a ground and sweating and tapping him out. So you have this hierarchy that is never It's you just imagine that the guy's got mad skills, but they're never they're never demonstrated in a way that is other than you know, yeah, maybe he can do some very pretty kicks, but he's not actually fighting anyone.

Yeah, it's such an astonishing epiphany. It's probably true for anyone, but it's especially true if you've come from a background in martial arts, what do you think you have some skills? Did you? Yeah. What was your background? Well, so I studied with a guy as a teenager through maybe, I think I stopped when I was 22. And so as a guy who's who's background, I never totally believed. I mean, he was like, he had real skills. And he taught something that was very analogous to Krav Maga or something. It's like a street oriented self defense where you're learning. You're basically taking the boxing, the striking from boxing and the kicking from Muay Thai and just a smidgen of grappling, but I basically did not have a 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 Houder. 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, maybe an inch shorter. It was just this most surreal experience of being of making 100% effort to survive and failing every 30 seconds or minute and a half and just then being resurrected, we'd buy just the sheer fact that he decided not to kill me. And then doing it again and just gap. It's nothing like gasing under that kind of pressure when you have no idea you have no idea what to do and you have no idea to relax. Yeah, because like you can't it is.

I think they're called the dirty dozen. I think the first 12 American black belt. He's one of the first 12.

It's also the one art where It has what a keto claims it has. It really is at least potentially the peaceful art. It's just a negotiation. You control someone's position. You control someone's ability to harm you. And then you can just start talking. How far do you want to take this? Exactly. And it's, I mean, in principle, all grappling is that and all, you know, joint locks added to grappling, I guess, is that. But Brazilian jujitsu is, I think, if you're just going to take the off the shelf solution to that suite of problems where you've got two people trying to dominate one another physically and you want to do it in a way where the violence is truly incremental where you do you can just you can turn it up as slowly as as the laws of physics allow uh... Brazilian jujitsu is is that and 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 you 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 control for and you and and you can't you can apply a punch

Oh yeah, I posted a bunch of those on my YouTube page. They're so sad. Well, they're the sad one with a guy offers the challenge, and then gets punched in the nose by this very ordinary looking martial artist. That one's sad, but the, I mean, they're just mesmerizing to watch the ones where there is no disconformation. They're just the cult in full splendor, and you just have everyone complying with this magic touch. I mean, either the distances of 20 feet, you've got people arrive 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 there's a kind of induction there's a sort of there's a hypnotic component to it and a suggestibility but and also social pressure and self deception and and just many things get get conspired to make people participate in this thing that it is seemingly the most delusional thing that has ever happened.

Good place to see it. We have a video on on on on my if you go to my YouTube page there's a there's a fake martial art stream and Sam Harris or or G is is my is my YouTube page but there's and also I wrote a blog post the pleasures of drowning where I talk about Brazilian traditions and In that blog post, I think it's in that blog list, I'm pretty sure it's in that blog post, I link to one of these videos where. The. He builds himself as some a keto master. I can't imagine he's actually an a keto guy, but this is the guy who. is causing people to fly over the room at a distance of 20 feet. And then he issues this challenge and I think it was a $5,000 challenge to any martial artist who had the courage to test his powers. And you see the challenge match where, you know, these guys are awesome. These guys are amazing. Yeah. It just throws him off. So there are so many, there are so many videos out there that are just priceless and they should be impossible. And this is really, this is not, because this is just, it has all the features of religion except the thing that, that's the guy. Oh, yeah, because this is the guy who's got a, so you see his skills, this is where his skills work. But then you see his challenge match, and he clearly did not know that he couldn't do this, because otherwise he would never would have issued that challenge. Right. He really believed it. This is working. This is working. But you can imagine what if you open a school, and for the next 30 years, everyone cooperates with you. So you've never met someone who wouldn't fall down. to your magic touch. You could see how he would believe this. He's basically run a psychological experiment on himself and brainwashed himself in the presence of all these compliance students. But anyways, challenge matches is somewhat depressing, but also It's also pretty satisfying to see a mass delusion disconfirmed that emphatically. I mean, this is what you want to see go down with religion. The problem is the religion really is tennis without the net. I mean, there's just, there is no, there's no disconformation that is so clear that the religious person is going to accept it. What is this guy? getting repeatedly punched in the face, he has to accept that he's lost the fight. I mean, one imagines, maybe he still has a school somewhere, but it's just, it's clear that his martial art doesn't work.

I mean, just imagine if he got in there with Anderson Silva or someone who really wanted to prove a point. I mean, the guy he's with here is just Joe Karate.

But also you see the in the other video you see that this guy really doesn't want to hurt him. He's worried about hurting him. And so after the first blow land, that's it right there.

He had some for the first time and he stops. Right. There's there's another angle on this. There's a video shot from the other side where you can see

But it's amazing. I mean, this is this is the the perfect look, the perfect window at what the human mind is capable of. So if the fact that human minds can do this proves that religion can be every bit as delusional as atheist 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 can, it's It's so much easier to deceive yourself about that than it is to deceive yourself that you can knock 20 opponents down with your magic touch. And yet this is possible.

That's real, right? It is real. There's a frontier between what's real and what and just what I don't know where fraud starts and genuine demonstrations of hypnosis and so But clearly some people, and there's a spectrum of suggestability. Some people are not hypnotizable. It's not something everyone can be, you know, the Manchurian candidate. But there is clearly a phenomenon where you can be given a, you can be inducted into a state where you're given suggestions, which then are operative at the level of your behavior and emotion. and about which you may have no recollection. So I think hypnosis is real. And there's also, there's other features to this. So there's the social pressure. I mean, so it just meant, and then just the sunk cost. I mean, imagine devoting years of your life to something which does not work. But pay, you have the belongingness to the group, you have all of the, 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 the the emotional pressure not to realize its bullshit is it can be excruciating and and when you meet people I mean what one of the one of my favorite conversations with a 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, you know, 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, just like the sunk cost of, because she had spent decades fixating on this stuff. And it had completely distorted her relationships and had been the center for life and she finally admitted to herself that day that in this case with Catholicism that none of it was true you know this is she just been you know brainwashed and but but the regret the level of regret over the time wasted And all the things she could have done with that time. And all the, it's just, it's, that is a wall that that many people just can't clear because it's, it's just too painful to acknowledge.

Well actually, she, she credited one of my books in that, she maybe something else had had helped her along, but no, the last thing she had been reading where she finally realized, oh my God, I've been deceived about this. It was one of my books. hood-winked.

I don't know, it was either that or the end of it.

almost all of them. All the ones that are avoidable. When you just look at how people screw up their lives, line 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. This has many features to it. One is just, they're all the things you can do based on the cover that lies provide that you shouldn't be doing, because they're not good for you. And everyone would hate you if they knew you were doing them or your wife would leave you or whatever it is. And so the lies create a space in which you can let your life run off the rails, whether it's becoming an addict or perpetrating financial fraud or whatever it is. But there's also this component where you don't actually, you never actually discover who you are. in social space, if you always leave yourself this out of line. So it's like, you never discover that if you keep canceling plans with people and just tell this white lie that you're too busy or you're not feeling well or you never have to confront the fact that these are people you actually don't want to see. You know, you're like, you know, people in your life who want to go out to dinner with you, you don't want to see them and you're never having to confront that because you have this out that you're just going to lie, you know. And there's, it's just If you want, I mean, 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, no, you can... That's not good. That I think well you can fake you can fake something until you make it which is you can fake a positive attitude toward uncertainty. I mean you can so you can 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 you are going that people are going to like you. But have a positive attitude and and I mean, it's sort of a good will toward the future that you can develop. And that is a kind of fake, I mean, it's fake in confidence and faking comfort, maybe. But that's not lying. That's not lying is is when you are intentionally In planting false beliefs and others, when they expect the truth. So it's not, I mean, so being a card magician or being a poker player, I mean, this is not, this is not lying. This is not the, the deception I'm talking about is when someone has every reason to expect the truth. And you are reporting to give the truth, but you're not. And you're actually deceiving them. What I focus on in the book, because it virtually everyone recognizes that some subset of deceptions are a problem. I mean, the egregious lies that, you know, the frauds that really harm people and the lies that, you know, when a pharmaceutical company says the drug works and their line, 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 are often lied to us. But the line that there's another set of lies that people think are actually unavoidable or good. And this is usually called white lies. And I think that, I think the price we pay for white lies is also excruciating. And it's not something that people are quick to see. Actually, I didn't see it until I went to, when I was a freshman at Stanford, I took a course with a professor who I actually interviewed in the back of the book, Ronald Howard, who is a 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 line or honesty, but he's a a professor in the Engineering Economic Systems Department of Stanford. And he, as kind of a sideline to his academic work, was teaching these courses on ethics. And one course was just on the question whether it's ever ethical to lie. And so as a freshman, I was just sort of put in the machine of this course and came out the other side convinced that in virtually any situation apart from like a self-defense situation where you would or things have really broken down and you're not in the presence of someone who you're going to collaborate with. Line 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.

Yeah, it's not worth it. And then there's the question of whether you want to have a different ethical code for your friends and for strangers. 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 just it's not tenable to live this way and it's what I'm interested in are the 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 her girlfriend and she wasn't like her best friend but they were very close friends and the girlfriend was supposed to head plans later that night with another friend and didn't want to have that plan And so this, you know, friend A watches her friend call up the third friend and lie about why she can't have plans. And she lied so convincingly and effortlessly. And just it was just, you know, something with her kid being sick, whatever it was. And then you got off the phone and then went back to the conversation with friend A. What friend day experience in that moment was just a subtle but absolutely obvious erosion of trust, a permanent erosion of trust, but it was something that could never be rectified because it was not, they were not so close. that she was going to perform an intervention there and say, well, why are you lying and why do you do this and have you ever done this to me? She was just left with his 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 people who are telling these little lies are just, they're never, 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.

Oh, to go back to the rabbi though. I think in that case, he wasn't lying. I don't think most religious people believe what they say they believe.

Yeah, but that's the scary thing about. I mean, so this is not, this certainly doesn't apply to rabbi wallpaper, but This applies to the jihadist who thinks he's going to get 72 virgins and paradise. You can be smart and believe that. And that's the scary thing. You can be the engineer who could have had everything, but decides to be a jihadist because he believes that the afterlife conforms to the Quran and the Hadith. And that is a So I mean, deception is part of the game and self-deception is part of the game, but in many cases, I think you have people who have been indoctrinated from birth or get a message from their culture that or get emotionally hijacked in ways that allow them to believe the unbelievable. And then they're being perfectly honest when they when they spread those ideas. They're not they're not for odds. And that's that I think is it's a different problem. A deception is is self deception is certainly a component in many of these cases.

Yeah, well, there's that component. 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 line 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. I think that's it. We're certainly not there yet, but I think that It would really surprise me if we don't get there.

I believe that was what was.

Right, yes, another. I mean, I think that strikes almost any neuroscience, this is a premature use of the technology. And in that case, you're talking about a, I mean, that I think that, I think that mode of inquiry is problematic because you're talking about just familiarity with the crime scene or with the evidence. And there are clearly, other sources of familiarity. And 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, I don't know that they've operationalized this in the way that they 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 that clearly enough to to base those kinds of decisions on on a judgment that the person is is lying or not we don't understand that the the neural correlates of of honesty and deception enough to know, but it's, I think it would be very surprising if we never get there. And so, and again, I'll go, now I'm just speculating, if it was Pam on your blusher. She actually took, she was a, what's her name again? Pamela Douglas is the woman I'm thinking of. She was a graduate student in the lab I was in at UCLA, and she, after I did a, after I did a study of belief, where I compared belief and disbelief and uncertainty with FMI. 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 we 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 can 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 was believed or disbelief, a proposition. And so if you had any, 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 TNA evidence, I think we would, you know, 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. Those person is 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, they're people in prison for the rest of the people who've gone to death row and been executed, who we know were innocent. Not just one. Oh, yeah. I mean, and in the most horrific, There was this one guy whose name is now escaping me, but there was a new order profile on him where his house burned down. And he was charged with the crime of having set the fire and killing his two kids. Now imagine being someone whose house burned down and your two kids die in the fire and the world thinks you did it. And not only do they think you did it, they prosecute you your defense fails, you go to death row, and you're executed. For the crime of having murdered your children. Now, if we could just tell whether someone was telling the truth, that problem goes away, and 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 it. If, if there was transparency at the level of all of, for all of those conversations, it would, it would really be a game changer.

We'd also have to find out what women think.

Yeah, there are a few wrinkles to it because if you were self to see if you actually believed what you were saying, but what you're saying is not true, then you could sort of game the system. Right. Like a lie detector test. Yeah, I mean, so so well, you know, if we had if we totally understood. the neural, neural correlates of deception, we wouldn't necessarily be able to detect someone who believed their own lives. And there may be some way to be confused enough or conphabilistic enough about reality that you can just bullshit or spitball or say what you want to be true or kind of hypnotize yourself, but 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 could 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 his line, and is hoping not to get caught, and is picking his words carefully, so is not to get caught, and keeping track of the things he said, and is consciously calculating against the expectations of coagency 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, it's going to be detectable with great reliability at some point.

But people will hate this. Because the you are welling in fears of the misuse of this, or the fears about the you are welling in 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. I mean, so if you didn't have a fundamental right to privacy, that could be safeguarded by lies, something crucial to our humanity has been lost. I think many people will feel that. And it won't matter how high you pile of 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 he multiplied that guy by 100,000. And you talk about treaties and deceptions at the level of nation states where millions of lives hang in the balance. There are people who are going to say, no, no. This is not acceptable. And I think they'll have a few points on their side, but I think the cost to us personally and economically and socially for consequential lives. I'm not imagining a world where we would have a 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 of red lights going to go off on your sweater turkey test. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing, 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, I mean, 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 owes of honesty. Let's have this conversation under in a framework where we know that lies will be detected. I think I think any sane person is going to sign up for that.

But yeah, I mean, they thought that was something crucial to our happiness would be lost by by literacy.

Yeah, although it's interesting, I don't know. And clearly, there's some form of progress that is harmful and you could be only dimly aware or just surely oblivious to the harms until after it's too late. And I'm not sure how I mean, just speaking personally, my own use of the internet and my use of the way in which my day gets segmented by the checking of email and just the way I can disappear online in the middle of a conversation. I think we all have to be mindful of what that's doing to us. It's a very good point. I mean, just to be on the phone with someone and also be checking your email, I mean, that's something that that you can, in a very lazy way, just do more times than not. And it's a, I mean, there are now 1,000 moments like that that we all confront. And if we're not aware of how it's playing with the fabric of our lives, you can just wake up one day with a very fragmented kind of attention. It's just a, it's a less satisfying. There's something about multitasking that is, I think, intrinsically stressful and not rewarding.

Yeah.

No, you're just, you're just segmenting your experience.

No. I mean, we have this history of espionage, which in which that is just clearly something you would do. One problem here is just that this is one of the consequences of increasing transparency. One certain facts are acknowledged. people have to respond to them. There's, there's a, you know, I know you know, and you know that I know that you know, and now this is now this, what was a, essentially an open secret has to be explicitly talked about and reacted to. And so everyone knew for, for decades that we would make every effort we could to spy on everyone we cared about spy on and that is that is allies and enemies and everyone did it in so far as their resources allow and that is just what has always happened but the moment you actually put to find a point on it and declare Angela Merkel's cell phone has has been bugged by the the NSA or the CIA that is intolerable And it's just, it's not, it's a little bit like what would happen to us if we saw a photo of everyone we killed in war. If it was just all transparent, what kind of war is would we actually emotionally tolerate? This might be a good thing. It might be a bad thing. It might be, we might be defenseless because we would find the, 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 just have a this is a big question mark there how much there are cases in which true information is prevents you from being able to do something that you actually would want to do, or 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 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 an information that relates to the most consequential things that could possibly happen. A nuclear terrorism. I mean, we want to know if someone is trying to get loose nukes in the former Soviet Union and blow up an American city, they're not going to tell us. And if there's any way to find out, so as to interdict that process, That's what's called that espionage. And that's going to be a matter of tapping people's phones or watching their email. And so, and if you just have to imagine how you would feel if a new 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, you know, we actually, we had the technology to detect all of those machinations that led to that catastrophe, but we decided not to use it. We decided not to use it because Glenn Greenwald made enough noise that it, it just became politically inconvenient for us to use it, or we were respecting the rights of of people to have private evil thoughts that we weren't good. We just didn't, it was something unsavory about reading email. We didn't want to tap anyone cell phone. I think we would, clearly the price, 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, you've dropped in on certain people. And then the question is, where do you draw the line?

But the only way your exempt is to invite that intrusion into your life in the first place. Sure. You have to be willing to to part with some kind of private.

To some degree that's true, most of that is based on their religious perception of the world in the first place. So many of these grievances are liberals tend to describe them as political, but they're actually religious grievances. So if the Saudis invite us in to help secure the oil wells that Saddam Hussein is threatening, right? Someone like Osama bin Laden perceives that as the sacrilege of having infidel boots on the ground in the holy land, right? And then someone like Glenn Greenwald will describe that as a political grievance. That's a religious grievance. That is, we were invited in by a government, in that case, to protect oil wells. We're not stealing the oil, we're buying the oil, man.

I don't know. He was not religious, but he was using him. He won. He was tamping down the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people, which, you know, with a moment we removed him. Ten chaos exploded. But so who gets the blame for all of that? We've got Sunni and Shia killing each other based on, is that politics? We can call politics, but that is religious sectarianism.

But we're not paying attention to it. It shows up on page 8 of the New York Times sometimes, but this is one thing you have to keep in mind whenever you hear people rail against US 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 context that have absolutely nothing to do with with our overreaching our colonialism are stealing of resources. You can make us as bad as you want. But go to Pakistan and ask yourself why are they, why are Sunnis blowing up Shia or Amadi mosques? Some guy is willing to lay down his life tomorrow morning and become a bomb and kill 75 people. And it's got nothing to do with us. We call it politics. We're talking about, in many cases, the victimization of a religious minority that has no political power. It's not politics, but it's not like this is 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.

But I actually don't, I don't support occupation anywhere, actually. I never, I supported our going into Afghanistan because we had to do it. We had to strike a blow against Al Qaeda.

Yeah, I think we had to. Oh, what does that mean? Well, because you look at the consequences of our never having done it before that. I mean, there was this slow bleed of attacks on us without any real reprisal for decades. I mean, you know, since the early 80s. We were, you know, the hostages in Lebanon, and they were, they were, you know, the marine barracks got blown up and, and the, the, the lesson drawn among the jihadist 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. And that is, 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 geodist. 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 towards geodist, which is a policy of hot war. I don't think we should be occupying countries to do this. I think I think it should be largely covert.

I think, well, we can just buy it if we want it. Do you think that that's going on?

I have no idea. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's totally, it's possible. It's not something I've thought about. It just seems like Most things are for sale. I mean, certainly heroin is for sale. It's not, like, what is the margin of, you know, for stealing it and fighting a war to steal it? And clearly, whatever, if we had ulterior, profit-seeking motives in any of these wars, they didn't turn out, they didn't pan out. I mean, these wars are so much more costly than anything else we could have gotten from them. But the, uh, I think the, but sort of to us, my draw from these wars is that we, 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. 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 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 crime problem. But a crime problem that is going to be remedied with covert covert acts of violence. So, you know, I think we should assassinate jihadists. And we shouldn't make a big thing about doing this. We shouldn't own it every time it happens. It just should become clear in a hundred countries. that if you're a jihadist who opens, sets up shop is the jihadist who's now going to install the global caliphate and kill infittals, your life just got very dangerous. And but the end game for us and for a global civilization is to get moderate Muslims to do that job. I mean, 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 Gehodism is not their problem, or has no, 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 Gehodists, but in the minds of normal Muslims who would never think of wage in Gehod, but they just find it intolerable to see Western, you know, guys sitting in office parks in Vegas flying drones over Pakistan, which are pretty precise, and they're kill a lot of bad people, but they also kill some innocent bystanders. you don't have to be someone who was going to be a jihadist to find that objectionable if you are a devout Muslim who just feels you a person with conscience. No, but there's a solid, 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 is a nimical to their hopes for this world. As we do, it's an untenable situation. We can't keep doing this.

But all part of that could be, again, it's not something I know anything about, but there are other explanations for that. One is just that you have people have no other livelihood but to grow crops and the most valuable crop they can grow is heroin. That's true. And so what are they going to do? They're just coming out of the Civil War obviously as an over but they came out of a period of of just wall to wall violence and we just we dump billions and billions of dollars in there we we pay a few roads and now you know if you're an Afghan Afghan farmer what are you going to grow Um, you know, it's, it seems like it, that would be the right, the right, show me those. If you're, if you're, we've got the buyers on our side, that's the problem.

Yeah, well, which is a perfectly reasonable explanation for me. So you just tell me that there are Marines guarding a poppy field. There are many interpretations of that, but one is just what you gave. They have to win hearts and minds. They have to figure out some way to get the non-radicalized people to rat out the very scary radicalized people who may come to kill them. And how are we going to, the item number one in engineering that cooperation can't be, let's force all these people to destroy the most profitable crop they could grow. because of our drug laws.

Yeah, but that's the that's the issue. Is there someone controlling the game and are there interests aligned enough so that they really have control over it? So and that I think is in most cases I'm not saying that people never can spy or that It's not possible to have a sufficient number of people in power who have selfish and short-sighted interests. They can get them to do terrible things on the world stage. And 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. There's not Haliburton is not that powerful, so that it could decide to launch a war. And one way you can see this or one thing I would get you to reflect on is, you take someone like President Obama when he was Senator Obama, he was against the Iraq War, he was allegedly. Yeah, but he spoke on this board. He was a critic.

Yeah, but I'm asking, 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 what all the stuff they did or proctors he would he would have a And this all this came on I'm not just speculating he said many of these things, but he had a very clear critique based on on liberal principles that that almost any liberal who was enthusiastic about his election would recognize that the Iraq war was unnecessary. We went in there on false pretenses. This was a terrible idea. The consequences now there's a mess that has to be cleaned up. But now he's become to the eyes of many liberals, just a neoconshill. Someone who's, who's, you know, more secretive and more agile in his prosecution of a covert war than Bush and Cheney everywhere. And what 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 was he, is there some nefarious process where, you know, some star chamber where the really, the people who are really empowered got to him and scared him. Like he's, he's president of the United States, but he had a meeting with Haliburton and a bunch of powerful guys, some billionaires who, who, who scared him straight and now he's just doing their bidding. Or you don't believe that's possible. No, I don't think, I think that's, no, I don't think that's possible. But, or, and this is the, obviously, the interpretation I favor, or it 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. I mean, imagine having the responsibility to protect whole cities from massive acts of terror, just how squeamish are you going to be about bugging people's cell phones? I think it's very easy to see that through no evil hand behind the scenes you could have somebody like Obama who was a genuine liberal you know you mean he's not he's not as far left as as many people want him to be but there's no reason to doubt that he objected to the Iraq war and and he's basically straight down the middle of the fairway liberal who's now essentially functioning like a neocon I think I think the details have to be terrifying and I think it's I think it's just it's an immense responsibility

I don't know about it. It's convinced a guy like Obama. I don't doubt that Haliburton 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 anyone person have? For every billionaire, like the yet of the Koch brothers, who is 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.

Everyone, when Colin Powell delivered that presentation at the UN, virtually everyone, with a few exceptions, virtually everyone believed that that was true. It was not, it was uncontroversial. The premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was uncontroversial. And all the people who were against are going in there. were against it, for reasons that did not entailed doubting whether there were weapons of mass destruction, there were other reasons, not to go in there.

All right, so it's, well, because of the anti-Snow Money in North Korea, Well, no, there's that, but no, because he didn't have nukes. He was trying to get nukes, or we thought he was trying to get a nukes. So we could deal with a chemical weapon to attack, and he gave everyone a gas mask and a hasmat suit, and we can still fight a war. The nukes changed the game, and that's why it's one reason why Pakistan is so terrifying.

No, I do. I just know that This is an adage, I don't know where it comes from, but never ascribed to conspiracy, what can be explained by incompetence.

Right, right. Yeah, I see in every conspiracy, and again, I'm not doubting whether anyone ever conspires. It's just that there's so many constraints on people doing what they want, especially when they're nefarious things. The constraints largely being everyone else is opposing once, that it's hard for people to bring these big plans off.

I think somebody said it was a different scale of conspiracy. I mean, so you look at the 19 high trackers. Okay. It's just 19 guys with box cutters.

Someone said this, the $3 billion in war. It's not, it's not half a million guys in Tang.

But something like 35% of Americans believe that the U.S. had some hand in that conspiracy. That we let it happen. And 16% think that we engineered it.

So that we demoed the buildings. It's someone in the dead of night had to fill the twin towers with with thermite and that we hit You know, we hit the plunger at the right moment just just after that the planes went in, or maybe they weren't even planes, maybe they were holograms. And once you get deep into this, the 911 conspiracy, you get, you know, the CIA faking voices of all the passengers on the flight seats, explaining the, the answering machine messages. of the relatives of the dead passengers by CIA voice-faking technology. 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 coincidences in it, which if you try to engineer beforehand would seem like the odds against them were astronomical but in the aftermath something had to happen so it's like the people sold stock in american airlines that day right so how is it that you sold your stock in american airlines the very the day before American Airlines jet flew into a building right how how do you know that is that's fishy right well the real problem is you find other people buy and sell those stocks every yeah exactly so but so that there there are uncountable number of things like that but if you're only looking for anomalies and you're and and you're not constrained by by any overall thesis You can find them in any situation, but it may just be honest about what this picture of reality actually is. This is the most diabolical plot in human history that entailed thousands of conspiracies and conspirators, and they, none of them have cracked. No one has 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 just the marriage of perfectly competent, diabolical intelligence with the most inept I mean, so all these people conspired perfectly and yet the Iraq war was launched as ineptly, as it could possibly have been.

Right. So if you wanted to run a false flag operation and get us into a war with Iraq under false pretenses. So we've got a no-fly zone over Iraq for years that we've been policing with our F-16s. You just shoot down one of our planes. And then you tell the world that Iraq, though we told them they couldn't shoot it 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. Yeah, we're in agreement. We're in agreement. And destroy our economy.

So when you say it's 13% 13% of the people that you pulled. Right, but there are ways of correcting for that. So for instance, you could just pull college students. You know, you could literally be in a polycy class and ask people who got into college and are attending, I mean, that, that wouldn't be, that would be an elite sample. But you get weird. Sure. You get weird opinions even among elite samples.

And that's because it's a religious doctrine, of course.

Yeah, I think there is, it hijacks some of the same features of the human mind or of certain human minds, because many people are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure. They're very not knowing why something happened is destabilizing to people to different degrees. And whereas one person can just feel no emotional cost, to living with the mystery of why something happened, or freely admitting whether they have no idea, or merely having a bunch, 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 is 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 fallacy intuition, but it's some people have a have certain schemas that through which they view human events, which make conspiracy thinking very attractive. Very plausible. And you'll notice that, and there's been actually researched 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 there's read the 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, you know, I tried to say actually is interesting. You mentioned what you asked me what I thought about the NSA thing and to some degree my perception of this news event has been polluted by my relationship with Glenn Greenwald who we don't like that guy. No, no. But I actually started, it was interesting as I started out liking him, not liking him in that I aligned with all of his views or even many of his views. But we had a a brief personal exchange by email where he actually did me a favor, which was great and actually links up with this conspiracy thing. So I have someone in my life who's very close to me, who is a 9-11 conspiracy. Very close to you? Yeah. Yeah. Member of mine's dad or something? A member of my family who is a, who is a, who is a, and a very bright guy who is a 9-11 conspiracy guy. And so I fought with him about this for now for years. So like every six months, just it blows up and we'll write the you know that we'll have the two-hour email exchange um and I've tried to debunk this and uh and one idea I had about how to debunk it is as I I noticed that he had a few liberal writers who he really admired and Glenn Greenwald was 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 ever met Glenn and I said I said well you do me a favor and just tell me in a short a little essay, why you don't believe any of this stuff? Why is it that you seem to align with a lot of these concerns, the overreach of power and NSA wire tapping, and why is someone in your position not at all attracted by this 9, 11 truth nonsense? And he wrote the perfect email. And I told him why I needed this. I 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 like, you know, grateful for the 9-11 truth people. And he was, it was, it was perfect email. And I imagine that I was going to send this into my, um, my relative's brain. And it was going to, 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 the 10-foot pull. And it did not have that effect at all. All he wanted to do was to get in touch with Glenn Greenwalls to show him all of his stuff that he hadn't seen. So anyway, but I started in this place with Glenn feeling very positive toward him. And then he just basically, in a very unethical way, misrepresented my views in a series of articles. And when I call them on it privately, he just doubled down. And basically, he just said, fuck you, this is what I, even if you don't think this is what you were saying, this is what I think you were saying. Oh, wow.

Whoa, is this whole Islamophobia business? He basically branded me a racist who hates Muslims and there's an animus against people. I'm not talking about ideas. This is just by you asking him to write something. No, no, no, this was unrelated. Oh, this is why the NSA thing, this is why the NSA thing was sort of hit me in the wrong part of my brain because when Glenn was the quarterback for the, for the Snowden revelations, Basically, I saw a guy who's just blogging in his underpants and 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 with someone who snowed and liked and thought would be a very sympathetic year for the story and he just handed him the story I mean so tomorrow night someone could email you the next big decades shaking story based on your interests and how they align with his and you 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 was wrong, got something wrong that most journalists have drummed into them. So I find him a very unreliable witness.

Well, we have a long change of experience. Just a bit of an image.

Yeah. No, it's true, but in a lot, and this is another way of technology is screwing us up because we're able to things run off the rails when you're riding in a way that they wouldn't face to face.

And that's what he did, but he makes it, he considers it a virtue. I mean, 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 checks and tries to prove that they're lying. And so, I mean, in a personally, this is a highly dysfunctional and obnoxious way to be. And so, when I'm representing my ideas, he's assuming I'm lying. And he goes to try to prove that I'm lying. And then he quote mines, or he gets readers to quote mine, my work, where he can pull sentences out of context, which see, yes, out of context, I can see how someone would see 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 is applies every bit as much to John Walker-Lind or Adam Gaudon or any white guy who woke up in Marin or Orange County and decided to join the G-Hod. 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 the view Greenwald has just the least scrupulous and among the most consequential people who have been just flogging this Islamophobia thing and it's been very ugly and so insofar as the NSA story has been his story I've had to do a lot of kind of parsing of what what is what said because his his intuitions about what is important and factual I I just fundamentally don't trust so it because of his philosophy on just how he operates But that's not to say that the Edward Snowden story isn't a huge story. It's absolutely huge.

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

It's not a lie. Well, it's not a lie. If the NSA, if the job of the NSA is to spy on people, but everybody? Well, no, I don't know where. So the government lied. I mean, no question Obama lied. There's this larger question on. Yeah, there's this larger question about what do you want the NSA to do? Right. What do you want our intelligence or organizations to do? That is, I don't feel like I'm, it's given a menu of things to check off. You and I may check different boxes in what we want them to do. And frankly, I don't know where I draw the line on some of these questions, because I'm just a conversation away from someone who has more information than me about top secret information. from being convinced that, oh yeah, we really do want that information. Yeah, yeah, I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where nukes are going off in our cities. So yeah, 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, it'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.

Where do you put those? That's the consequence of having a government that lies on issues like that over and over and over and over again since the beginning of time. It's the most toxic thing.

But 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 gonna need to lie. Now the way I think about that is, I think that is necessary. I think it is, it is someone, it is a life that I don't want. I couldn't be, I couldn't work for the NSA.

Yeah, yeah, I couldn't, 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 where 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 suck this data, but we're looking for jihadists. That's something I can sign on to. And we may want to read the fine print there. I was never under the illusion that the NSA was doing anything other than that. So it's not, that's not a surprise to me. And I don't think it's a surprise to anyone. And so, and keeping, you know, lying and keeping secrets are different things. We need people to keep secrets. And you can honestly keep a secret. You can, the president could say, I can't tell you that. That's top secret. Our national security depends on why not telling you that. That's an honest statement. If I ask you how much money you have in your bank account, tell me, tell our listeners now, you can say, I don't want to say. That's an honest statement.

Well, again, this comes to That's the larger question of human nature. So what do you think is going on in the world? Do you think that there are most people most of the time are psychopaths or ruthlessly mercenary and out to just screw everyone or do you think those are the anomalies and what do you think of government do you think government is so corrupting of otherwise good people that they're just gonna just just gonna run riot with their power all the time and everywhere or do you think basically it's a lot of good people inefficiently trying to get stuff done that we need done and if you're on the I think the more realistic side of that of those questions I think I think you have to admit that that it's 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 so to conspire to just grab all the strings of the military and wage a war on false pretenses or, you know, divert our fighter jets so that this hijack plane can fly into the World Trade Center. How many people in the Air Force had to conspire to decide to run war games elsewhere so that we wouldn't be able to respond? I mean, then you're what you're attributing to people are conscious motives to kill massive numbers of innocent people that I just think just could not form in the minds of most people most of the time.

I mean, so we do this all, we kill Americans all the time.

No, I'm not saying it's a good thing, and I'm saying the consequence of finding out that one such event has occurred. Not just one. There's been many. No, but the consequence of even one is this very conversation, right? These vary doubts in the minds of millions of people.

Well, what I would say is that In the case of 911, 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 geod. which much of which is much of this violence is directed at the rest of the Muslim world. It's not just us, but we have a clear enemy that thinks it's our enemy that is taking credit for these goals that mean to call them an own goal when you have someone who's who's seem to be the kicker and who's taking credit for being the kicker and it just seems like a it's a misapplication of the principle even if we were going to agree that that that that we you know, every few years draw our own blood for some perverse reason of trying to to motivate ourselves to do something we wouldn't otherwise want to do.

Let's throw that into the dimension Gulf of Tongue in the book and there are many other more easily understood big lies that should worry. So for instance, I mentioned pharmaceutical companies. I mean 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. You have when you have people, there's no one who knows more about whether drugs or efficacious than the people who are designing drugs.

No, I'm not saying it's evil. I'm saying that the principle that is, well, one is two principles. One is just a willingness to lie. That's right. That is the thing that enables all of this. But there's also just, and 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. And 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. So if you just follow the incentives, and so they're very simple, kind of, you know, petri-dish examples of this. I mean, one example I use is to talk about what it's like to be thrown into a maximum security prison. Imagine you get sent to, you know, full some prison, and you're an innocent person, you're not a violent person, you won't, and you have this nightmare experience. If now you're thrown in prison for a crime, you didn't commit. All you want to do is get through that this experience here you're 10 years say all you want to do is do your decade of 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 are, 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 psycho renal racist psychopaths in order to not be screwed over by everyone. I mean, so for instance, you'd have to, so in most maximum security prisons, they exist in a perpetual state of race war. So it's, you know, the whites against the blacks against the Mexicans, they get you. 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, 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 Well, conflicts of interest are the classic examples. You have CEOs who can run the global economy off a cliff because their incentives are totally perverse. They have 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, there's the problem in moral hazard where it's like there's no consequence to being repatiously selfish you're going to get people being repatiously selfish to the detriment of everyone and so and so the point of making is that sort of two levels at which you can you can try to improve human life you can you can argue that each person needs to have a more more refined ethical code you have you have to be more honest I have to be more honest or or in addition, you can have systems where interests are aligned so that the penalties for the rewards for honesty are more obvious. And you'd have a system where people I mean, another classic example is the job market where people, everyone's padding their resumes, because they know everyone else pads their resumes. So you're trying to get a job, you're desperate to get a job, you're family won't eat unless you get a job, and you know that everyone else applying for this job has padded his resume, has lied about his background.

No, no, I'm saying that we need, there's two levels at which we address these problems. And one problem you're pointing to is system level, in this case, government level, misaligned incentives that have great consequence, which don't require evil people all the time to pull the strings.

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 to hatch the idea and say do it in all fairness.

Okay, no, I'm just thinking of a prototypical situation where it seems. as bad as possible. Yes, that would require, I mean, the reason why I don't believe September 11th conspiracy theory is that it would require too many evil people.

Well, I mean, there are many false, I don't know which, which are true. I mean, I believe the Gulf of Tonkin, Tonkin was a false flag. And what about Northwoods? I don't know enough about it.

No. No. But so Francis, 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, what do you think? I don't know. I mean, I think it's very likely that the, I mean, the war on commission seemed, I haven't read this book, but from what I know, the war on commission seems to have been a ridiculously inept effort to get to the truth. And with many perverse obstacles to getting to the truth, one being that Warren didn't want to inconvenience Jacqueline Kennedy at all. So I mean, she's grieving. He didn't want to interview her. He wouldn't let her be interviewed on the record. He interviewed her himself, I think, and just sort of summarized what she said. So there's just kind of weird ways in which this thing was never about really getting to the bottom of what happened. The the point is that when you look at all the way so but like that is a that's an all too human made that you can you can look at it some nefarious interpretation of that like you know he knew that this was a mob hit that was enabled by the CIA or whatever the story is And this is his way of hiding the truth. Or he's just a guy who's embarrassed to ask the grieving widow who is a friend of his about what it was like to see her husband's face get blown off. So 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 it rarely is true. Certainly in a society where political power is not as concentrated as it is under the third right.

But usually what's going on, again, I'm not discounting the fact that there are situations in which evil people brilliantly bring off their evil, or evil conspirators conspire. But most of the time, it's people rather like us afraid for their jobs, covering their asses, afraid of getting sued, doing things which when incentives are aligned in such a way as to make it effortless for them to do them, create a huge mess for everybody else. When you look at what people do because they're afraid to get sued. Just look at all of the stupid decisions people make on our society because they just want to hide the problem. There's a book on what it's like to become a neurosurgeon called when the air hits your brain. pretty entertaining and somewhat harrowing look at just the training of a neurosurgeon and there was 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 is performing his first prepping his first surgery which entails drilling into a person's skull and and cutting them you know a large hole and prepping the the persons head for the chief neurosurgeon to come in and perform surgery. And what he did is he drove the drill in way too deep. Just supposed to do skull, but he just went into pure pink oatmeal of the person's brain. 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 isn't all to 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. And that's what comes as natural human instinct. And if you had a system in which he would be massively rewarded in some way for showing, exposing that problem, It's hard to see how you would design that, but that would be a much better system. If incentives were aligned in a way that his guilty conscience would win as opposed to his effort to preserve his career, so he could stay free. So he could stay free, so you wouldn't get jailed, or just no longer have a career in medicine. But there are uncountable numbers of situations like that, where massive suffering occurs, and it's not because it was an evil person. intent upon causing that suffering.

No doubt. At least at least 1% of us are psychopaths.

It's just hitting bookstores. Do you have an audiobook? Yeah. Audible. Audible. Yeah.

I think it's free if you join audible. Yes. For that. Yeah.